INTERNATIONAL: World Citizen Pushing Back Against Rape as a Weapon of War

Some of the most distressing aspects of human behavior have endured stubbornly throughout history. To name just one example, human beings continue to inflict unspeakable horrors on other human beings in the course of combat. It is, indeed, a well-established fact that war is hell. But there is one feature of warfare, well-documented and generally accepted as unavoidable since biblical times, that is now coming under increasing scrutiny and facing a well-organized pushback: the use of rape as a weapon of war.

As David Axe just reported for WPR from Congo, a growing number of organizations are now focusing their efforts on helping victims of rape carried out by that country's armed groups and even its army. But Congo is just one battleground, if a prominent one, where sexual violence has been widely used. Around the world, the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of women who have endured rape during wars are now telling their stories and taking action with the help of legal specialists and women's rights groups.

The notion that rape inevitably accompanies armed conflict and war went unchallenged for thousands of years. The "spoils of war" always seemed to include "raping and pillaging." History's all-time best seller, the Bible, is full of stories of such rape. And across the centuries, mass rape was almost always a major feature of war, even if it usually did not receive much attention in the historical records.

On the surface, sexual violence might seem like a release for the pent-up drives of testosterone-fueled warriors. But rape has important tactical and strategic dimensions. Not only does it help to terrorize, intimidate and control an enemy population, but it can be used to change the ethnic makeup of an area in the process of being conquered. In the Bosnian war, where the term "ethnic cleansing" joined the international lexicon, "rape factories" or "rape camps" were used as a weapon by the Serbs trying to change the ethnic composition of mostly Muslim Bosnia. Systematic rape during the Rwandan genocide was part of the strategy to wipe out the Tutsi population by their rival Hutus.

A major turning point in attitudes toward sexual violence in conflict came after the Rwandan genocide, which shook the conscience of the world. Although the media focused almost all its attention on the horrific death toll, which approached 1 million, the number of rape victims -- estimated at 500,000 -- was also staggering. In the 1998 trial that followed the genocide, the U.N. tribunal held that "sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group," explicitly listing rape as one of the acts "manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide." After issuing the verdict, Judge Navenethem Pillay, now the U.N.'s human rights commissioner, noted that rape has always been regarded as a part of war. "Now, it will be considered a war crime," she noted. "We want to send out a strong message that rape is no longer a trophy of war."

The verdict set an important precedent, but it did not prevent rapes in other corners of the world. In Darfur, for example, another conflict with a strong ethnic component, rape devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of women. During the civil conflict in Colombia, paramilitary forces in Cauca Province deliberately impregnated women, creating a generation of children born between 1997 and 2005 that is now known as the "paraquitos," or "little paramilitaries." Similar horrors were witnessed during the brutal fighting in Chechnya, and the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The judicial aftermath of the 1990s war in Bosnia created another important precedent in the fight against war-related rape. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia held the first trial in history focusing on rape not only as a war crime but as a crime against humanity. The case became known as the Foca Rape Trial, named after a Bosnian town taken over by Serbian forces where some 50,000 women, among them young girls, were raped during the 1992-1995 conflict. Foca's "rape camps," became known as a principal site for sexual violence during that sordid chapter of the most-recent Balkan wars.

The Tribunal in the Hague convicted three Bosnian Serbs of mass rape as a weapon of terror, ruling against them on charges of raping girls as young as 12 years old. The court also found them guilty of several counts of crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war.

Years later, Iraqi women organized themselves to lobby that country's special tribunal on Saddam-era crimes to prosecute crimes against women, including rape.

In 2008 the United Nations Security Council approved the historic Resolution 1820, which notes that "women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war," and demands the "immediate and complete cessation" of the practice.

Even with the important progress, the obstacles to justice remain enormous and they vary from country to country. In some countries where Islamic law plays a major role, rapists can have the charges dropped if they marry their victim. In other places, rape victims themselves are considered guilty.

As women have strengthened their overall position in society, they have succeeded in drawing attention to the widespread use and the devastating consequences of sexual violence in armed conflict. But their ultimate goal is not to shine a light on the problem, or even to bring the perpetrators to justice. The real objective is to stop the use of rape as a weapon. Just how distant that goal remains was brought home by a recent report about women serving in the United States military. Not only are women the target of sexual violence by enemy forces. It turns out that female soldiers are also being attacked by the men with whom they serve in battle.

Progress has been made on this most distressing aspect of human behavior, but clearly much more remains to be achieved before it is relegated to our historical past.