When women are the spoils of war - includes related article on the counseling of torture victims who have been raped - rape as a war crime

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.

RELATED ARTICLE: 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."

Even years later, "the suffering never goes away," says Boggino. It manifests itself as a "deep breakdown of the individual and feelings of shame and humiliation that are especially strong since the crime was committed in front of witnesses, the family, the village. Young women who were virgins at the time of the rape say no one will ever want them. It is impossible for them to imagine having a normal relationship with a man." Horror gives way to the absurd. These women feel guilty rather than victimized. They cannot accept that "their torturers were the inhuman ones. They wonder why they survived while others died. They tell themselves their lives were spared because they let themselves be raped."

Nightmares, amenorrhoea, repeated illnesses, fear of physical contact and frigidity are the most common symptoms of their emotional suffering. For these women, silence is suffocating while speech is golden. It allows them to talk about what happened, to cry, to express their feelings and their anger. Speaking lets them separate themselves from the torture they went through, explains Kolnikoff. It allows them to live "with" rape rather than "in" it. After psychotherapy, some of them manage to feel comfortable with their bodies again, to give and receive pleasure and even to love the children "born of bad memories," provided they accept them as their own.

Talking about the rape also makes victims feel they have a right to point a finger of blame at the culprit, which allows them to shed feelings of guilt and shame. "But these women need to be believed. That's where the law and the courts have a decisive role to play." No cure is possible unless the rapists are named and brought to trial. S. Bou

COPYRIGHT 1998 UNESCO
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