Settling Battles With Rape By Jean-Marie Nsambu

Cries Of A Woman Held In Conflict

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly. Rapes were often performed in public during the day, sometimes in front of spouses or family members that were tied up and forced to watch. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were then killed immediately after the rape, often through mutilation, including breasts being cut off; or stabbing by bamboo (usually very long sticks), butcher’s knives and other objects into their private parts. According to some testimonies, other women were forced into military prostitution as comfort women. Any resistance would be met with summary executions.

SHE was skipping the rope, in a remote village of China, when a car pulled by her home’s courtyard. "I had never seen a car before in my village.” Kim Yoon Shim lamented. The driver of the vehicle offered the curious 14-year-old a ride, and she and a friend, jumped in. That was the last the girls saw of their Manchuria home, for the car drove Kim and the friend off to become "comfort women" for the Japanese Imperial Army that invaded China in 1937.

Comfort women, ‘military sex slaves (MSS)’, or ‘military comfort women (MCW)’, was a systematic programme said to have been passed by the Japanese Imperial Conference, to provide [often forced] sexual intercourse to the invading soldiers. The conference, comprising the emperor, army representatives and some cabinet ministers, was formed following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. (Left: Japanese soldiers entering Nanjing. The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing (Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. During the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians)

It is estimated that between 100,000 and 400,000 female slaves, delivered sexual comfort to Japanese soldiers, both before and during World War II. A later editorial, ‘What are Comfort Women’, in an international magazine, suggests that the system resulted in the largest, most methodical and most deadly mass rape of women in history.

“Japan's Kem pei tai political police and their collaborators tricked or abducted females as young as eleven years old and imprisoned them in military rape camps known as 'comfort stations’, situated throughout Asia. These 'comfort women' were forced to service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. They were often beaten, starved, and made to endure abortions or injections with sterilizing drugs. Only a few of the women survived, and those that did suffered permanent physical and emotional damage."

In a rebuttal on March 2, 2007, Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, said "comfort women" were not coerced into becoming sexual slaves. “There was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested. That largely changes what constitutes the definition of coercion, and we have to take it from there," he contended. But, whether Japan avidly denies these stories, rape of women, has been a weapon of war or its spoils, a fact that weighs down the refutation. (Right: Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe)

And the ‘comfort women’ case is not isolated. From of old, war has often been taken to the bodies of women, as secondary battlefields. Whether to spite their men or just for the sadistic fun of it, any imbalance in power, has often made physical and sexual assault more probable on women, during any wartimes, analysts argue.

Indeed a former UN peacekeeping commander Major General Patrick Cammaert says, “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.” And to paint a grimmer picture, victims of large-scale sexual atrocities range from female babies to elderly women.

Rape, in biblical times, was encouraged as a reward to the victors. Hebrew scriptures in the Old Testament, for instance, tell of rape of women of conquered tribes. Taken for spoils of war, women would be rounded off and forced to marry their captors or rapists. This was usually to cause offense to the fathers, brothers or husbands of the women, whosoever “owned her” at the time of the war. (In the picture left: Former UN peacekeeping commander Major General Patrick Cammaert- It has become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict)

With soldiers lacking discipline, rape during conflict becomes random, today. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Peru and Rwanda, girls and women have been torturously raped, imprisoned and often times, executed thereafter. Psychologists hold that rape is the most “intrusive of traumatic events,” where it has been reported in conflicts in other parts of the world like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, Somalia and Uganda.

Regrettably, it has become so systematic a tool, that all cases seem organized as a tactic of war. According to author Maria B. Olujic, rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War I. “Gang rape was part of the orchestrated riots of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of Nazi campaigns against the Jews.

“It was a weapon of revenge as the Russian Army marched to Berlin in World War II; it was used when the Japanese raped Chinese women in the city of Nanking; when the Pakistani Army battled Bangladesh; and when the American GIS made rape in Vietnam a 'standard operating procedure aimed at terrorizing the population into submission'.”

More recently, physical assault on the feminine sexual privacy has turned up in religiously motivated wars. For example, in 1991-1994, Serbian paramilitary troops are said to have used systematic rape on Bosnian Muslim women, to intimidate them into fleeing from their land. Rwanda, in 1994, would also have Hutu troops take to raping Tutsi women ‘as an integral part of their genocidal’ move.

In 1997, ‘secular women’ were targeted by Muslim revolutionaries in Algeria and reduced to sex slaves. Then, Indonesian security forces allegedly raped ethnic Chinese women during a spate of major rioting, in 1998. The late 1990s, it is reported, saw Serbian military and paramilitary units selectively rape ethnic Albanian Muslim women during the unrest in Kosovo.

Near home, in the Sudan’s Darfur region, Janjaweed militiamen, in one case, descended on a 12-year-old girl, who they gang raped over a week. So intense was the impact, her legs have been left crippled for life, according to a doctor, who treated her. Worse still, for her and many other female victims, the possibility of ever getting married has been erased, due to rape. (Above right: Janjaweed militiamen, in Sudan’s Darfur region descended on a 12-year-old girl, who they gang raped over a week)

Sharia law, to which that community subscribes, demonizes raped women. Actually, it is they – instead of the rapists – that are supposed to be put to prosecution, found guilty for adultery and fornication, and if not shown clemency, put to a slow death by stoning!  But, they have not only already been robbed of their most intimate honour, they have also lost their most treasured chastity. To a girl or woman raped, stigma almost always sets in, that the physically and emotionally wounded, will just coil away in agony of never getting a loving husband. (Left: John Holmes, a UN under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs)

According to the Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times online, the savaging wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo have had rape victims take most of the blame. “After being raped, Congolese women are banished by their husbands and ostracized by their communities. Often, they are genitally mutilated by a gunshot or tossed on a fire, naked.”

In October 2007, the New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman reported that the sexual violence against women in Congo, was the worst in the world. He interviewed a gynecologist Denis Mukwege in Bukavu, who could no longer bear to listen to stories his patients were telling him, of incidents of rape on them. Daily, ten victims on average would go to him with sad attack tales of them.

“Some have been raped from inside out; butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. We do not know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear, they are done to destroy women.” Dr. Mukwege reveals.

To John Holmes, a UN under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, it is also lamentable, the ‘sheer numbers’, the wholesale brutality and the culture of impunity surrounding rape incidents.(Right: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been tasked by the Security Council, under an unsponsored resolution, to submit a special report on the issue of sexual violence meted on women, by UN peacekeepers)

Gettleman wrote that the justice system and the military barely functioned, with Congolese government troops among the worst sexual offenders. “Civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups, who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.”

Gettleman says, while rape has always been a weapon of war, Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon. In Congo, the brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

Findings on rape at the battlefields show that assailants often attack women and girls engaged in the usual activities necessary for the livelihoods of their families. These include activities like cultivating, collecting firewood, or going to market. It is one way of plundering the economic well being of an area and instilling fear in the population.

The move of rape from a largely random event into a premeditated, organized act of terrorism during warfare has motivated international action to punish, and thus to hopefully prevent, such activity in the future, says a security council statement. Late last month, the UN veto body categorized rape as a war tactic, according to a report by Reuters. (In the picture: Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State)

Demanding that warring parties immediately take steps to stop violence on women, the UN Security Council concluded that rape was no just a by-product of war, but strategy of it. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State says the world is cognizant of sexual violence at war going beyond individual victims, to affect the nations' security and stability.

Similarly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expresses that it has reached unspeakable and pandemic proportions in some countries. However, he has been tasked by the Security Council, under an unsponsored resolution, to submit a special report on the issue of sexual violence meted on women, by UN peacekeepers.

A few years back the UN came under attack on allegations of sexual misconduct by its personnel purportedly keeping peace in Burundi, Haiti, Liberia and Congo, among other conflict riddled countries. The claims defeat recent actions the UN took to curb sexual exploitation and abuse its own peacekeepers. (Right: Mr Taylor faces 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly backing the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group that killed, maimed and raped thousands of Sierra Leoneans during a war that lasted 11 years and ended in 2002 after British military intervention)

The allegations were bolstered by a UK children’s charity, Save the Children, which claimed last month that children as young as six were being sexually abused by peacekeepers and aid workers in post-conflict areas. It followed research in Haiti, South Sudan and Ivory Coast, where they point out a case of a 13-year-old girl, gang raped by ten UN peacekeepers, who walked scot-free, leaving her irreparably bleeding.

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