Alerting the world to horrors of Darfur

For 11 months, 34-year-old human rights activist Adeeb Yousif said, he was tortured in Darfur.

Yousif, of the village of Juldo in JebilMarra region in western Darfur, said he was branded with a fire-hot iron until his flesh sizzled above his heart, groin, back and legs. He was beaten several times a day with sticks and bamboo rods and repeatedly shocked with what he called "an electric stick."

Twice, he said, he lost consciousness from electric shocks and was taken to the hospital. Kept in a tiny, dark, windowless cell 24 hours a day, he went on a hunger strike for seven days.

His crime? He says that it was merely documenting atrocities of genocide and human-rights violations for three years in his native land and trying to bring food, health care, clean water and basic needs to western Darfur villagers, who now number three million in 117 internal displaced-persons camps.

Yesterday, Yousif was one of nearly three dozen activists who who met in Philadelphia under the umbrella group, Darfur Leaders Network.

Each delegate at the two-day conference was the head of a Darfur human-rights organization, mostly in the U.S. Yousif was a founder of the Sudan Social Development Organization in 2001, and once headed its western Darfur region.

For two days, delegates discussed how to reorganize their group to better focus international attention on the need to bring 10 international and three local human rights agencies back to Sudan to provide basic services for those dying of starvation and in need of medical care.

Hamid, of Philadelphia-based Darfur Alert Coalition, said human-rights activists must pressure the U.S., United Nations, European Union, China, Russia and others to address the ongoing genocide and aftermath of the 2003-2005 war.

Sudanese officials blame the Darfur activists for persuading the International Criminal Court to issue the March 4 arrest warrant for Sudan president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for allegedly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, Hamid said.

Bashir has dismissed the ICC allegations.

For three years, Yousif documented the atrocities that he said he said he "saw with my naked eye."

"I saw [mercenaries] burning villagers alive. I saw men losing their dignity [as their] pregnant wives' bellies [were] cut open in front of them to kill their future child," said Yousif.

"I interviewed ladies who were raped and men who saw their mothers, sisters and daughters raped in front of them. I saw water resources poisoned, and dead bodies dumped in the wells," he added.

Yousif said that Sudanese officials give the land they stole from the villagers, of African ethnicity, to members of the Janjaweed militia, of Arab ethnicity, and to mercenaries from Mali, Chad and Niger. And then, government officials gave them citizenship.

Citing figures from what he said was a survey of displaced persons in camps, he said: 80 percent of the villages in the Darfur region have been destroyed; nearly 400,000 people have been killed; 16 percent of the women have been raped; one in three families has lost relatives.

After videotaping, recording and writing about the atrocities, he shared the documentation with human-rights organizations.

And thus, he became a target of the Sudanese National Security Force in 2004. Amnesty International and others mounted a campaign for his release, which occurred on April 19, 2005.

Yousif later fled and is on Sudan's "watch list."

Today, Yousif is studying for a master's degree in International Conflict Resolution at San Francisco University, in an effort to bring peace to his homeland. *