HUMAN RIGHTS: Waking up the world - Rape: weapon of war
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Saved by 1 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-20
- Maizeroad on 2008-04-20 - Tags statistics , rape , violence , feminism , human rights , war , law , article
Public Sticky notes
The traditional human-rights image is of a male prisoner of conscience.
Yet the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia show that it’s often women
who suffer most.
Yet the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia show that it’s often women
who suffer most.
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Inside, the 22-year-old former textile
worker stood charged with 32 murders and 16 rapes, including the murder of 12 of his 16
rape victims. The date was Friday, 12 March 1993 and Herak was the first Serb to be put on
trial for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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No-one will ever know the exact number of women and girls raped during the
conflict in former Yugoslavia.
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Though all figures must be treated with caution in a
war so plagued by propaganda, these witnesses tell of the organized and systematic rape of
at least 20,000 women and girls by the Serbian military and the murder of many of the
victims. Muslim and Croatian – as well as some Serbian – women are being raped
in their homes, in schools, police stations and camps all over the country.
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The sexual abuse of women in war is nothing new. Rape has long
been tolerated as one of the spoils of war, an inevitable feature of military
conflict like pillage and looting.
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What is new about the situation in Bosnia
is the attention it is receiving – and the recognition that it is being
used as a deliberate military tactic to speed up the process of ‘ethnic
cleansing’.
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In many cases the intention is ‘deliberately to make women pregnant and
to detain them until pregnancy is far enough advanced to make termination
impossible’.
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Women and girls aged anything between 6 and 70 are being
held in camps throughout the country and raped repeatedly by gangs of soldiers.
Often brothers or fathers of these women are forced to rape them as well.
If they refuse, they are killed.
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‘Any rape is monstrously unacceptable,’says Semra Turkovic, who
works with survivors of rape in Zagreb. ‘But what is happening at this very moment in
these rape/death camps is even more horrific. This can only be considered as
genocide.’ She believes that the number of women raped in Bosnia exceeds even the
highest estimates recorded by human-rights investigators.
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To Mubera Zdralovic, who is developing a programme of assistance in Zagreb
for women left pregnant by rape, the torment endured by the thought of giving birth to a
child of mass rape is often too much to bear.
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Speaking of the Pope’s recent warning to these women that they must
not seek abortions, but learn to ‘accept the enemy into them’, she has only
quiet disbelief.
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Amnesty International has no firm evidence on whether rape is
being used as a strategic weapon but is clear that local leaders must have
condoned it.2
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Catherine MacKinnon, Professor
of Law at the University of Michigan, claims that rape is being used to help
make Bosnia a Serbian state by implanting Serb babies in Muslim mothers. The
international community, she says, is refusing to face up to the true nature
of the conflict there – that this is not just a campaign of Serbia against
non-Serbia but is a form of genocide directed specifically against women.
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Muslim and Croatian woman are facing
twice as many rapists with twice as many excuses and two layers of impunity
serving to justify the rapes. This is ethnic rape by official policy of war
– rape as ethnic liquidation.’ 3
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Yet these violations are not unique to Bosnia. In March this year
Nobel Peace Prize winners Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams testified to
the UN Human Rights Commission about the repeated rape of Karen women by government
soldiers in Burma.
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And during the night: ‘every woman must confront
the same problem. My ladies have been raped brutally by at least eight soldiers
of the SLORC (the ruling junta) every night. Some women couldn’t continue
to walk because of the hurtful raping and torture so they were shot and died.
Those who were able to walk have to face the same thing every day and night
until they’ve been raped to death.’
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To Zainab Jama, the Somali writer and former BBC broadcaster, the silence
surrounding such violence is a measure of its effectiveness. Her research on her own
country indicates that acts of unspeakable brutality are being carried out against women
in the civil war raging there.
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Rape is unlawful in both international conflicts and civil war. But,
according to Amnesty International, many governments do not uphold these norms and are
often complacent in the face of such abuses.
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On a visit to Peru’s Ayacucho department
in 1986
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What can be done to protect women from such violations? According to
Françoise Hampson, lecturer in international law at the UK’s Essex University, what
is lacking is the will to prosecute. ‘The act, rape, must be punished. Nothing should
be allowed to jeopardize the prosecution of those alleged to have committed rape.’
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To Catherine MacKinnon the issue goes even deeper than this.
‘Human-rights principles are based on experience, but the experiences have not been
those of women,’ she says. ‘What most often happens to women escapes the
human-rights net. Whether in war or in peacetime, at home or abroad, in private or in
public, by our side or by the other side, man’s inhumanity to woman is ignored.’
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Governments must face up to the fact that rape in war can no longer be
tolerated. Women’s groups from all over the world are campaigning vigorously for the
prosecution of rape as a war crime and, as the World Conference approaches, petitioning
the UN to recognize women’s rights as human rights.
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f human rights are to be
universally respected and protected, they say, then they must apply to the lives of over
half the human race – women.
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Angela Robson is a London-based freelance journalist specializing
in human-rights issues.
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Public Comment