The UN has declared rape to be a war crime that it may try to prosecute as such.
The UN Security Council on Thursday demanded an end to persistent sexual violence during armed conflict, calling it a war crime and a component of genocide. Approved by all 15 members, Council Resolution 1820 "demands the immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians with immediate effect". It also urged that "all parties to armed conflict immediately take appropriate measures to protect civilians, including women and girls, from all forms of sexual violence".
Chaired by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the council said "rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide".
It indirectly threatened suspected war-time rapists with prosecution before The Hague-based International Criminal Court....
Of course, the difficulty is going to be in locating both survivors willing to testify, and perpetrators who can be easily located and identified. There's also the additional complication that most war-time rapes that are coming to public attention are happening in the course of civil wars and internal conflict --during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and now Congo/Zaire, Sudan, Zimbabwe ...
In a report to the UN Security Council on 11 June, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: "The level of grave violations against children in Somalia has been increasing over the past year, particularly with regard to the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict; the killing, maiming and rape of children; and the denial of humanitarian access to children." [...] Ban's account noted that the number of cases of rape and other sexual assaults against children reported to UN and partner monitoring organizations rose from 115 in 2007 to 128 this year. However, these numbers are not reflective of the actual numbers of cases. "The vast majority of cases of sexual violence in Somalia are not reported," said Balslev-Olesen....
War Against Women (cbsnews.com/60 Minutes transcript)
Jan. 13, 2008
Right now there's a war taking place in the heart of Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and more people have died there than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur combined. You probably haven't heard much about it, but as CNN's Anderson Cooper reports, it's the deadliest conflict since World War II. Within the last ten years, more than four million people have died and the numbers keep rising. As Cooper and a 60 Minutes team found when they went there a few months ago, the most frequent targets of this hidden war are women. It is, in fact, a war against women, and the weapon used to destroy them, their families and whole communities, is rape.
Dr. Denis Mukwege is the director of Panzi Hospital in Eastern Congo. In this war against women, his hospital is the frontline. One of the latest victims he’s treating is Sifa M'Kitambala. She was raped just two days before the team arrived by soldiers who raided her village.
"They just cut her at many places," Dr. Mukwege explains. Sifa was pregnant, but that didn't stop her rapists. Armed with a machete, they even cut at her genitals.
In the last ten years in Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, most of them gang raped. Panzi Hospital is full of them.
"All these women have been raped?" Cooper asked Dr. Mukwege, standing near a very large group of women waiting.
All the women, the doctor says, have been patients of his. Within a week, Dr. Mukwege says this room will be filled with new faces, new victims. "You know, they're in deep pain. But it's not just physical pain. It's psychological pain that you can see. Here at the hospital, we've seen women who've stopped living," Dr. Mukwege explains.
And not all the people the hospital treats are adults. "There are children. I think the youngest was three years old," Mukwege says. "And the oldest was 75."
To understand what is happening here, you have to go back more than a decade, when the genocide that claimed nearly a million lives in neighboring Rwanda spilled over into Congo. Since then, the Congolese army, foreign-backed rebels, and home-grown militias have been fighting each other over power and this land, which has some of the world's biggest deposits of gold, copper, diamonds, and tin. The United Nations was called in and today their mission is the largest peacekeeping operation in history.
Since 2005, some 17,000 UN troops and personnel have cobbled together a fragile peace. Last year they oversaw the first democratic election in this country in 40 years. But now all they have accomplished is at risk. Fighting has broken out once again in Eastern Congo and the region threatens to slip into all out war.
Each new battle is followed by pillaging and rape; entire communities are terrorized. Forced to flee their homes, people take whatever they can, and walk for miles in the desperate hope of finding food and shelter. Over the last year, more than 500,000 people have been uprooted. A fraction of them make it to cramped camps, where they depend on UN aid to survive.
One camp Cooper visited sprang up just two months before. It was already overcrowded, but more people kept arriving. They would go there seeking refuge, a safe haven, but the truth is in Congo, for women, there’s no such thing. Even in these supposedly protected camps, women are raped every single day.
"Has rape almost become the norm here?" Cooper asks Anneka Van Woudenberg, who is the senior Congo researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"I think because of the widespread nature of the war, because there has been so much violence, rape is now on a daily basis - rape is the norm," Van Woudenberg replies.
"Women get raped in wars all the time. How is it different here?" Cooper asks.
[Van Woudenberg:] "I think what's different in Congo is the scale and the systematic nature of it, indeed, as well, the brutality. This is not rape because soldiers have got bored and have nothing to do. It is a way to ensure that communities accept the power and authority of that particular armed group. This is about showing terror. This is about using it as a weapon of war," she explains......
Asserting jurisdiction in such cases is difficult for the UN unless both sides use it to broker the peace, with specific conditions stating that this crime will be tried. After all, the UN would need to go after both sides, to be fair and civil wars tend not to have winners who want to expose their misdeeds to the world. These days, civil wars don't tend to have winners, only eternal losers and wars that go on and on and on and on...
Posted by iain at June 20, 2008 04:09 PM
