Tears of the Desert

The book 'Tears of the Desert' http://www.amazon.com/Tears-Desert-Memoir-Survival-Darfur/dp/0345506251] by a survivor of the Darfur genocide, still in fear, using not her real name but 'Halima Bashir', Her ordeal is described as: "Bravery in a brutal land", It was Halima's introduction to the racist Arab Militias' policy of rape as a weapon of terror http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1048210/Bravery-brutal-land-TEARS-OF-THE-DESERT-Halima-Bashir.html August 2008] , it is one woman's true story of surviving the horrors of Darfur, When Bashir attends secondary school in the city, she comes up against traditional enmities between the black Africans of Darfur and the minority Arab elite and this group's subsequent discrimination against the black Africans ever since. She accounts; of a lack of support from teachers in physical fights stemming from schoolgirl prejudices that leads to expulsion – all of it an early lesson in helplessness.http://living.scotsman.com/books/Book-review-Tears-of-the.4364736.jp 7th September 2008] .

Damien Lewis, the author:

I suppose in a way, it was mine. I was in Darfur or a Darfur refugee camp in - at the end of 2006 is my first time in Darfur. And I interviewed a eight-year old girl who had been gang raped. And I said to the TV crew that I was there with, if we could get - tape that little girl and put her in Washington or New York or London in front of an international audience to tell her story, all these people who say Darfur is too complicated, I can't understand it, would finally see it's about the use of rape as a weapon of war against children. And that's not complicated. That's just horrific and unspeakable.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0809/05/i_c.01.html September 2008] .

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