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Why doesn’t a Sudanese woman care about these things?

Sometimes a disaster is so large that it obscures its own details. Behind the number of dead and displaced in Darfur, for women and girls the conflict has been disproportionately grinding. In a “cruel inversion” of the history of this conflict, the head of UN Women told the Associated Press, women and children have borne the brunt of the war.

The details are unfathomable. There are about 50,000 pregnant women in Darfur and 40% of those pregnancies have been classed as high risk; 180 give birth daily. The healthcare infrastructure has been all but obliterated. According to the charity Care: “There is no doctor, midwife or nurse to support women during labour. There is no pain medication, anaesthesia or hygiene material when women give birth.” Babies are born on the ground in the wilderness, umbilical cords cut with whatever sharp object there is to hand, and tins filled with hot water keep the newborn warm. C-sections, painful in the aftermath even when drugs are plentiful, are being performed without any anaesthesia at all, by surgeons who do not have any water to wash their hands, let alone sterilise them, and no antibiotics for any resulting infections. In some cases, according to Washington Post reporting, C-sections were performed on women postmortem.

9 thoughts on “Why doesn’t a Sudanese woman care about these things?”

  1. ‘It is an argument that is a race to the bottom of humanity, giving licence to smear a whole population with the crimes of its worst, and abdicate the responsibility to think critically and empathetically about cultures and politics shaped by years of occupation, crisis and siege.’

    Your attack on the West is exactly that, Nesrine.

  2. Mothers giving birth with no medical help, babies without milk, one toilet between 500 people – but none of it evokes empathy

    It’s Allah’s will, innit?

  3. When plotted against each other, “Fuck Around” on X and “Find Out” on Y are generally thought to have a positive linear relationship.

    After ….decades… of sort-of-status quo back-and-forthing, Hamas chose to shift the “Fuck Around” all the way up the X-axis.
    And somehow some people are surprised, and even affronted, that the “Find Out” followed suit.

    Madame Malik is, naturally, entirely free to personally inform the leadership of Hamas of this correlation, and the fact that their method of agitation was .. not the wisest of choices.
    I think many of us here would actually encourage such a notion. It would be a highly …efficient.. way to rid the world of two problems at once.

  4. Palestinian women are seen as not sharing the sort of values that are called upon to come to their rescue

    Dancing in the streets to celebrate the surprise rape and murder of Jews will do that.

    But look at the taqiyaa in this slippery sentence: In addition to reports of sexual violence during Hamas’s attack

    See it’s just ‘reports’ innit. Like the grooming gangs.

    In another impulse, the entire value system in Gaza is brought into question by raising features such as the lack of LGBTQ+ rights.

    Dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of homosexuals will do that.

    The argument may as well simply say: they are not like us, and they started it.

    That’s true, and dancing in the streets to celebrate the torturing to death of little old Jewish grannies will do that.

    But the details coming out of Gaza are so graphic, so relentless, that now may be the time to think about what progressive values, feminist or otherwise, really mean if they stop at the threshold of what is familiar.

    Nah, fuck em. For she was right at the start.

  5. the head of UN Women told the Associated Press, women and children have borne the brunt of the war.

    Do the casualty figures support this assertion?

    No, I thought not.

  6. While on the subject of certain demographics not sharing western values I wonder who is aiding and sheltering the “good muslim” chemical chucker?

    Maybe I’m being unfair and he has actually requested and been granted sanctuary in the nearest church.

  7. While on the subject of certain demographics not sharing western values I wonder who is aiding and sheltering the “good muslim” chemical chucker?

    His Majesty’s Government

  8. Bloke in North Dorset

    Dancing in the streets to celebrate the surprise rape and murder of Jews and promising to rape and murder again given the chance will do that.

    FTFY

  9. Bloke in North Dorset

    While on the subject of certain demographics not sharing western values I wonder who is aiding and sheltering the “good muslim” chemical chucker?

    Maybe I’m being unfair and he has actually requested and been granted sanctuary in the nearest church.

    My guess is that they are awaiting for him to Tweet anonymously about women’s sex based rights, they’ll have in a flash then.

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