That the savagery of the Sudanese regime and its Janjaweed thugs in Darfur knows no bounds is a fact we have all been aware of for a long time - too long. Now, though, there is a new report which should shake the world out of its complacency, or “Darfur fatigue,” or whatever you want to call it.

A new report from the Darfur Consortium, which groups together more than 50 NGOs, says that thousands of civilians, many of them children, have been forcibly abducted by the army and the militias. The Daily Telegraph summarizes:

Many were kidnapped as mounted gunmen from the feared Janjaweed militia swept through their villages and were then marched to military camps where they were repeatedly raped, forced to prepare food, clean fighters’ homes or work in their fields.

The report claims that others were flown across the country, where women were sold into forced marriages with soldiers and children were made to carry out domestic duties with no chance of escape.

…

The report’s researchers documented the case of 16 teenage girls from Garsila in West Darfur who were kidnapped and then transported to the other side of the country and forced into marriage.

Their case only came to light when one was admitted to hospital for treatment to injuries brought on by repeated sexual assault. A lawyer took the case to court but it was thrown out because the judge ruled that the “marriage” had been “consensual”.

On another occasion, the Janjaweed abducted 14 men and seven women from a camp for people for displaced civilians.

“They used us like their wives in the night and during the day time we worked all the time - preparing food, collecting firewood and fetching water from nearby,” said one woman who managed to escape after three months.

“The men they abducted with us were used to look after their livestock. We worked all day, all week with no rest.”

One teenage boy who was taken from South Darfur to Khartoum described the work he had to do for a senior Sudanese army officer.

“I was the first to get up and the last to go bed,” he said. “Normally I woke up very early, about 5am, cleaned the house, washed the dishes, and then washed clothes and ironed them. I worked all day, I was so tired.”

Almost all of the victims were from Darfur’s non-Arabic speaking tribes, the Fur, Massaliet and Zagawa, and the Darfur Consortium claims that their enslavement was part of a determined government policy of ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

The BBC adds:

The study also calls for the mandate of the joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur (Unamid) to be beefed up so it can use force to protect civilians.

The Darfur Consortium also wants Khartoum to prosecute all those responsible for abductions and ban them from holding public office. It notes that no-one has ever been arrested over the wave of kidnappings.

Reports of slavery in Darfur are not new, though. In March last year, for example, a Sudanese lawyer spoke of numerous abductions in the region, which repeated a pattern first seen during the civil war in the south of the country that raged for more than twenty years.

This latest report on slavery comes at a time when there is a renewed debate, as the Obama Administration prepares to take office, about genocide prevention. In the last week, the Genocide Prevention Task Force, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Defense Secretary William Cohen, has issued a pathbreaking report which included these recommendations:

• Having the president himself demonstrate that preventing genocide is a national priority, for example by an early executive order, and continuing public statements on genocide prevention.
• Creating an interagency Atrocities Prevention Committee at the National Security Council to analyze threats of genocide and mass atrocities and consider appropriate preventive action.
• Making warning of genocide or mass atrocities an “automatic trigger” of policy review.
• Developing military guidance on genocide prevention and response and incorporating it into doctrine and training.
• Preparing interagency genocide prevention and response plans for high-risk situations.
• Investing $250 million in new funds for crisis prevention and response, with a portion of this available for urgent activities to prevent or halt emerging genocidal crises.
• Launching a major diplomatic initiative to create an international network for information-sharing and coordinated action to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.
• Providing assistance to build capacity of international partners—including the UN and regional organizations—to prevent genocide and mass atrocities.

The report concludes that “a core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others - in the US government, across the United States, and around the world, that preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration, but a national and global imperative.”

I won’t end this post with a crescendo of thundering rhetoric. All I will do is ask you to go here and see what you can do to help.