Argentina

I am going to take a different angle in relation to referring to how much we have done. I am going to focus not only on what how much we still have to do, but also to add a hint of optimism. First, the international governmental community has agreed that sexual and gender-based violence inarmed conflict constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity. It is worth mentioning it when we in the international community agree to say things in the same way and to work to the same end — in this instance towards the eradication of a problem.

Sexual crimes reported by victims in their testimony were not subject to punitive action until Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, until the initiatives undertaken in our own countries, because they remained invisible. They were part of war, the spoils that came with vengeance and hate that targeted women's bodies. But while gender-based violence, and sexual violence aimed at women and girls in particular, is not a new phenomenon in history, the adoption of measures to investigate and prosecute it nationally and internationally is very recent. For that reason, we had to continue to work patiently but collaboratively. As my dear Jordanian colleague said, gender-based crimes used to be considered collateral damage in war; their investigation in many cases was peripheral and often resulted in impunity for the perpetrators.

The Belém do Pará Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women says that it is not only an offence to human dignity but also a violation of human rights. Let me speak not just about what the justice system has said, the words I have just read out. Justice in fact now says that because the victims had begun to be heard. In one horrible case, a woman named Susana was raped in the hospital after just having been operated on. To this day I can hear her crying and saying that she had been a virgin. That was a crime against nature. For a woman, rape is an act of the worst possible humiliation. Another woman, Monica, said: “I asked them, when the Red Cross came to see us, I asked, ‘As a woman, how is it possible that I did not become pregnant after being raped so many times?' They explained to me that women's periods tended to stop. They said that in concentration camps, like here, we did not become pregnant, we were afraid to getting pregnant. We did not menstruate. We did not want to end up pregnant by a rapist.” Estela said: “They did not allow us to bathe. It was very hard not to be able to wash after being raped and to have to remain soiled. They would give me stale bread. I was able to wash in a bathroom only a couple of times. I have images in my mind of being raped in the bathroom. By the final rapes I was fainting; I do not have a recollection of those. They would blindfold me. I heard a girl screaming, ‘Mama, mama, mama'. We were in the same camp, and she was being raped.” A man named David said: “They would give us electric shocks to our gums, under our lips, to our genitals. In my case, I had an abscess on my penis the size of a peach. They also placed things in my rectum that would conduct electricity. We were humiliated. I could not bear the agony. How could we go back — to say that a boy had been raped?”