When women are the spoils of war
Valerie Oosterveld, Canadian jurist
August 1992: young Bosnian Muslim women in a state of shock after
being raped by Serb militiamen.
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Life must go on Juan Boggino and Diane Kolnikoff are psychotherapists at
a counseling centre run by the Primo Levi organization in Paris, which helps refugees
who have been tortured. Some of them, like the Haitian woman who has just arrived
at the centre, are victims of rape. “She left her country after being raped in prison,”
says Kolnikoff. “She abandoned the child conceived during the rape and came to live
alone in France. Since then, she has given birth to another baby, but still has thoughts
of infanticide even though the second child has nothing to do with her past.” Hers
is one of many heart-rending stories, such as that of an African woman who is “always
dreaming she has a weight on top of her that keeps her from moving.” S. Bou |
In northern Uganda, 8,000 children have been forced to join the “Lord’s Resistance Army” and many girls have been raped.
Long a taboo
subject, sexual violence is only now coming to be recognized as a crime against humanity.
Will the proposed new International Criminal Court be able to bring the guilty to
book?
Violence against women during
armed conflict is nothing new. With other innocent victims—children and the elderly—they
have always been on the front lines of wars of all kinds—religious wars, civil wars
or world wars. Historians have described how soldiers have raped women to intimidate
civilian populations. But during this century the character of war has changed and
this practice has become even more widespread. Where soldiers used to target other
soldiers, the goal now is often to kill or terrorize civilians. Various forms of
sexual assault may occur during fighting or in conjunction with looting and other
crimes by armed forces overrunning an area. Soldiers may publicly rape women and
detain them in special camps or brothels, where they can be tortured, raped and made
pregnant.
Overwhelming
evidence
There have been many examples of this kind of violence in the last decade. After
Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was estimated that at least 5,000 Kuwaiti women were
raped by Iraqi soldiers during the occupation. Two years later, shocking reports
were published around the world about the use of rape and forced pregnancy as tools
of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. In 1994 and 1995, stories of sexual violence in
war again appeared in the world media, this time from Rwanda. One United Nations
report estimated that as many as 500,000 women and girls suffered brutal forms of
sexual violence, including gang-rape and sexual mutilation, after which many of them
were killed. In Algeria, the women of entire villages have been raped and killed.
The government estimates that about 1,600 girls and young women have been kidnapped
to become sexual slaves by roving bands from armed Islamic groups.
While men may also be victims of rape and sexual mutilation during armed conflict,
it is widely recognized that sexual violence is usually targeted specifically at
women. But women are often reluctant to report rape, either because they fear the
social stigma or because they feel that it is useless to report the crime in conditions
of chaos and societal breakdown. The extent of sexual violence often becomes evident
long after the world knows the extent of other crimes. Stories of sexual violence
in Rwanda emerged approximately nine months after the genocide had ended, as women
began bearing babies conceived as a result of rape. According to estimates of the
Rwandan National Population Office, women who survived the genocide gave birth to
between 2,000 and 5,000 children, who are often known as “enfants des mauvais souvenirs”(children
of bad memories). The same pattern is true of the former Yugoslavia, where women
were raped until they were pregnant and then held until they were close to term.
In 1993, it was estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 women became pregnant as a
result of rape.
Reports of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia led women’s and human rights groups
and then governments around the world to condemn these acts and call for an international
tribunal to hold the perpetrators accountable. Following several Security Council
resolutions condemning the massive, organized and systematic detention and rape of
women, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was founded
in 1993. From the beginning, one of the purposes of setting up this court was to
prosecute crimes of sexual violence. The tribunal was the first to recognize crimes
of sexual violence as war crimes and as “grave breaches” imposing on states the duty
to search for the allegedly guilty persons and bring them to court or extradite them
for prosecution elsewhere. This is something new. Sexual violence is not explicitly
called a grave breach in the main law of war documents—the 1949 Geneva Conventions
and their 1977 Additional Protocols. However, it is generally accepted that these
crimes meet the criteria of “willfully causing great suffering or serious injury
to body or health” and “torture or inhuman treatment”.
Sexual violence can also be regarded as a crime against humanity, like murder, extermination,
enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture or persecution, depending on the
surrounding circumstances. Historically however, crimes of sexual violence have rarely
been prosecuted under any of these headings. One exception was the Tokyo World War
II trial, where several Japanese officers were charged and held liable for the rape
of 20,000 women during the occupation of Nanking (China) in 1937.
During the prosecutions of top-ranking World War II criminals at Nuremberg, rape
was not listed as a crime against humanity. However, it was prosecuted in the national
trials that followed Nuremberg, and it is now accepted as belonging on the list.
Both the Yugoslav and Rwandan Tribunals explicitly include it in the definition of
crimes against humanity.
The experience of these two tribunals has demonstrated both the progress that has
been made and the difficulties that have arisen in prosecuting crimes of sexual violence.
To date, twenty-six people have been charged with committing sexual atrocities; however,
many of them are still at large. In June 1996, the first indictment dealing solely
with sexual violence and enslavement crimes was issued. It alleges that, in 1992
when the city of Foca (south-east of Sarajevo) was overrun by Serb forces, Muslim
and Croat women were detained and repeatedly beaten and raped. Only one of the eight
men accused in this indictment turned himself in to the tribunal.
Few prosecutions
Unfortunately, the Rwanda Tribunal has publicly charged only two people with crimes
of sexual violence, both in 1997—three years after it was founded. The first was
Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba commune. Even though there had been reports
of widespread sexual abuse in Taba, he was not initially charged with these crimes,
and it was not until witnesses testified about rape, and a coalition of human rights
and women’s organizations submitted a brief, that the prosecutor amended the indictment
to add sexual violence to charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
This is the first case before the Rwandan Tribunal in which someone is specifically
charged with crimes of sexual violence, and the first to address the issue of a leader’s
responsibility for encouraging or allowing others to commit rape.
Governments are now in the process of finalizing the statute of a permanent International
Criminal Court. This court will be able to build on the advances of the Yugoslav
and Rwandan Tribunals and will hopefully reverse the historical trend.