Since last April, Sudan has been torn apart by a brutal war and a growing famine.
In the western part of the country – in the Darfur region – there is also concern that an ethnic cleansing, or a genocide, has once again begun and is going on in silence.
– They said they hate black men. They took them out and forced them to stand in a line. Then they killed them, one by one, says Abra, a 34-year-old refugee to TV4 Nyheternas’s dispatcher on the spot at the border with Sudan in Chad.
Abra tells us that all five of her brothers were killed that day last year. One was killed with a whip, another was forced to run while men beat him with sticks.
They were not allowed to retrieve the bodies. They lay out on the street, in their village, for two months.
They are accused of ethnic cleansing
It is difficult to get information out of Sudan. Journalists rarely enter the country and never into the worst affected areas.
But satellite images show that villages have been burned. And there are witness statements from the refugees.
Abra lived in Darfur in western Sudan, an area that has been taken over by the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, which is backed by the United Arab Emirates and is accused of trying to force out ethnic African people, with murder, torture and sexual violence.
– So many of our girls are missing. Boys too, says Abra, whose real name is something else, to TV4’s broadcaster.
Now she lives in a huge temporary refugee camp inside Chad, on the border with Sudan. Around 200,000 people live here. Most are women and children.
“Humiliated us”
Next to Abra’s small home, which consists of sticks and a plastic blind, lives Samira.
She is wounded in the shoulder, a bullet is still there. Rape and sexual humiliation is a taboo subject for many here, but Samira still talks about the “humiliation” she and other women in her village were subjected to.
– They came and took us out of our houses. They beat us and they shot me. They took off all our clothes and humiliated us. I was so humiliated that I could no longer see, she tells TV4’s broadcaster.