The Weapon of Rape

Kristof: The weapon of rape
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Monday, June 16, 2008
World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.
This is a kind of terrorism that disproportionately targets children. It involves not WMD but simply AK-47s, machetes and pointed sticks. It is mass rape - and it will be elevated, belatedly, to a spot on the international agenda this week.
The UN Security Council will hold a special session on sexual violence this Thursday, with Condoleezza Rice coming to New York to lead the debate. This session, sponsored by the United States and backed by a Security Council resolution calling for regular follow-up reports, just may help mass rape graduate from an unmentionable to a serious foreign policy issue.
The world woke up to this phenomenon in 1993, after discovering that Serbian forces had set up a network of "rape camps" in which women and girls, some as young as 12, were enslaved. Since then, we've seen similar patterns of systematic rape in many countries, and it has become clear that mass rape is not just a byproduct of war but also sometimes a deliberate weapon.
"Rape in war has been going on since time immemorial," said Stephen Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador who was the UN's envoy for AIDS in Africa. "But it has taken a new twist as commanders have used it as a strategy of war."
There are two reasons for this. First, mass rape is very effective militarily. From the viewpoint of a militia, getting into a firefight is risky, so it's preferable to terrorize civilians sympathetic to a rival group and drive them away, depriving the rivals of support.
Second, mass rape attracts less international scrutiny than piles of bodies do, because the issue is indelicate and the victims are usually too ashamed to speak up.
In Sudan, the government has turned Darfur into a rape camp. The first person to alert me to this was Zahra Abdelkarim, who had been kidnapped, gang-raped, mutilated - slashed with a sword on her leg - and then left naked and bleeding to wander back to her Zaghawa tribe. In effect, she had become a message to her people: Flee, or else.
Since then, this practice of "marking" the Darfur rape victims has become widespread: typically, the women are scarred or branded, or occasionally have their ears cut off. This is often done by police officers or soldiers, in uniform, as part of a coordinated government policy.
When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan's positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?
The rape capital of the world is eastern Congo, where in some areas three-quarters of women have been raped. Sometimes the rapes are conducted with pointed sticks that leave the victims incontinent from internal injuries. A former UN force commander there, Patrick Cammaert, says it is "more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier."
The international community's response so far? Approximately: "Not our problem."
Yet such rapes also complicate post-conflict recovery, with sexual violence lingering even after peace has been restored. In Liberia, the civil war is over but rape is still epidemic.
Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs. Yet China and Russia are resisting any new reporting mechanism for sexual violence, seeing such rapes as tragic but simply a criminal matter.
On the contrary, systematic rape has properly been found by international tribunals to constitute a crime against humanity, and it thrives in part because the world shrugs. The UN could do far more to provide health services to victims of mass rape and to insist that peacekeepers at least try to stop it.
In Congo, the doctors at Heal Africa Hospital and Panzi Hospital (healafrica.org and panzihospitalbukavu.org) repair the internal injuries of rape victims with skill and humanity. But my most indelible memory from my most recent visit, last year, came as I was interviewing a woman who had been gang-raped.
I had taken her aside to protect her privacy, but a large group of women suddenly approached. I tried to shoo them away, and then the women explained that they had all been gang-raped and had decided that despite the stigma and risk of reprisal, they would all tell their stories.
So let's hope that this week the world's leaders and diplomats stop offering excuses for paralysis and begin emulating the courageous outspokenness of those Congolese women.

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From Ms. Kathleen Cravero, Assistant Administrator UNDP and Director Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery
On behalf of Stop Rape Now: UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict, I want to thank Wilton Park for hosting this important event and for giving me the opportunity to address this conference. (.DOC format)
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From UN Security Council website
Expressing its deepest concern that civilians continued to suffer the brunt of the violence during armed conflicts, the Security Council this afternoon condemned all violations of international law that threatened non-combatants and reaffirmed the responsibility of States and other parties of conflicts to protect them.
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(New York, May 27, 2008) – The United Nations Security Council has a unique opportunity to correct its historic failure to address sexual violence against women and girls in conflict, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 27, 2008, John Holmes, UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, is to address the council on the protection of civilians in conflict, and is expected to call for more consistent and better coordinated action to prevent sexual violence.
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From The Economist print edition
FROM Bosnia's rape camps and the horrors of Rwanda's genocide in the 1990s to the atrocities being perpetrated daily in northern Congo and Sudan's Darfur region, the tally of body bags runs alongside another grim body count: the numbers of women and girls, but in some places men and boys too, subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Hundreds of thousands of women raped for being on the wrong side
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, November 12, 2007
Rape has been used to terrorise and punish civilians in Congo who support the "wrong side", and it is perhaps no coincidence that it was also a tool of genocide in the mass murder of the Tutsis.
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UN News, November 06, 2007
UN member states were Tuesday urged to do more to protect women from pervasive sexual violence in armed conflict and to give them a greater voice in matters of war and peace.
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AFP in Turkish Press, October 23, 2007
UN member states were Tuesday urged to do more to protect women from pervasive sexual violence in armed conflict and to give them a greater voice in matters of war and peace.
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UN Press release (DPI), 23 October 2007
In a statement read out by Akwasi Ose-Adjei, Foreign Minister of Ghana, which holds the rotating presidency for October, the Council said such acts had become systematic in some situations, reaching “appalling levels of atrocity.
Congo's rape war
John Holmes, October 11, 2007
Despite many warnings, nothing quite prepared me for what I heard last month from survivors of a sexual violence so brutal it staggers the imagination and mocked my notions of human decency.
Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War
Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, October 7, 2007
Stephen Lewis calls for a new UN initiative to end sexual violence in the eastern region of the DRC
Press conference, September 13, 2007



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