The girl lay in a makeshift health clinic, her eyes glazed over and her mouth open, flies resting on her lips. Her chest barely moved. Drops of fevered sweat trickled down her forehead as medical workers hurried around her, attaching an IV drip.
It was the last moment to save her life, said Bethsabee Djoman Elidje, the women’s health manager, who led the clinic’s effort as the heart monitor beeped rapidly. The girl had an infection after a sexual assault, Elidje said, and had been in shock, untreated, for days.
Her family said the 14-year-old had been raped by Russian fighters who burst into their tent in Mali two weeks earlier. The Russians were members of Africa Corps, a new military unit under Russia’s defense ministry that replaced the Wagner mercenary group six months ago.
Men, women and children have been sexually assaulted by all sides during Mali’s decade-long conflict, the UN and aid workers say, with reports of gang rape and sexual slavery. But the real toll is hidden by a veil of shame that makes it difficult for women from conservative, patriarchal societies to seek help.
The silence that nearly killed the 14-year-old also hurts efforts to hold perpetrators accountable.
The AP learned of the alleged rape and four other alleged cases of sexual violence blamed on Africa Corps fighters, commonly described by Malians as the “white men,” while interviewing dozens of refugees at the border about other abuses such as beheadings and abductions.
Other combatants in Mali have been blamed for sexual assaults. The head of a women’s health clinic in the Mopti area told the AP it had treated 28 women in the last six months who said they had been assaulted by militants with the al-Qaida affiliated JNIM, the most powerful armed group in Mali.
The silence among Malian refugees has been striking.
In eastern Congo, which for decades has faced violence from dozens of armed groups, “we didn’t have to look for people,” said Mirjam Molenaar, the medical team leader in the border area for Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, who was stationed there last year. The women “came in huge numbers.”
It’s different here, she said: “People undergo these things and they live with it, and it shows in post-traumatic stress.”
The aunt of the 14-year-old girl said the Africa Corps fighters marched everyone outside at gunpoint. The family couldn’t understand what they wanted. The men made them watch as they tied up the girl’s uncle and cut off his head.
Then two of the men took the 14-year-old into the tent as she tried to defend herself, and raped her. The family waited outside, unable to move.
“We were so scared that we were not even able to scream anymore,” the aunt recalled, as her mother sobbed quietly next to her. She, like other women, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, and the AP does not name victims of rape unless they agree to be named.