Observatoire international des violences sexuelles dans les conflits armés
Rhetoric without results: United Nations Security Council Resolutions Concerning Rape During Armed Conflicts
SCHRECK, Rachel
Penn State International Law Review, Eté 2009
Despite repeated promises in United Nations Security Council Resolutions, the United Nations ("U.N.") has failed to implement prevention and rectification measures to address the crime of rape during armed conflict. This failure prolongs a global and historical tendency to ignore or dismiss the prevalent sexual violence against women during war. 3 Historically, women’s voices were unheard, rendering the rape and torture of women during armed conflict a seemingly unimportant matter. 4 For example,
When the issue of sexual violence arose at Nuremberg after the Second World War, the prosecutor said simply: "the Tribunal will forgive me if I avoid citing the atrocious details." With these words, women’s suffering was silenced, obscured and stricken from the historical record. In today’s war-zones, mass rape remains "atrocious," but it can no longer be dismissed as a "detail." 5
Over the last decade there has been an increase in data documenting what happens to women during and after armed conflict. 6 This data "finally bring[s] to light "one of history’s great silences’: the sexual violation and torture of civilian women and girls during periods of armed conflict." 7 According to the 2002 Report on Women, Peace and Security by the United Nations Secretary-General ("Secretary-General"), women are disproportionately targeted during armed conflict and comprise the majority of all victims. 8 A seasoned peacekeeper recently observed that "it is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflicts."
Sexual War Violence: From Reactive to Proactive Measures
BRINGEDAL HOUGE Anette
Norvegian Peacebuilding Center, 4 mai 2009
By defining sexual war violence as a weapon of war and a threat to international peace and security, UN SC Resolution 1820 challenges the international community’s responses to sexual war violence, advocating a shift of focus from reactive to proactive measures. In addition to the important work of victims’ support and empowerment, it is crucial to address impunity issues, chauvinist attitudes in military institutions and de facto protection of civilians in current and future conflicts.
This article argues that we are not left without possibilities to prevent sexual war violence, and a number of measures could be introduced through which the Norwegian government and other actors can respond to the obligations set forth in SC Resolution 1820.
Becoming Abject : Rape as a Weapon of War
DIKEN Bülent
Body and Society, vol 11 n°1, mars 2005
Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape.
In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. _ This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide.
This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.
War Rape: new conceptualizations and Responses
FARWELL, Nancy
Affiilia, vol 19, n°4, Hiver 2004
This article presents new conceptualizations of war rape in international law and defines rape as a weapon and strategy of war. It also outlines the intersections of gender, patriarchy, militarism, and ethnic, religious, and political identities that fuel war rape as part of a continuum of violence against women.
Local and transnational examples of women’s responses to war rape demonstrate their importance to survivors, practitioners, and policy makers who seek to address its causes and effects. Finally, the article challenges feminist social workers to address the dynamics of war rape within the complex nexus of policies that fuel conflict.
Other Inhumane Acts’: Forced Marriage, Girl Soldiers and the Special Court of Sierra Leone
PARK, Augustine
Social and Legal Justice, vol 15, n°3? 2006
The decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone gained international notoriety for the widespread use of child soldiers, and the sexual abuse and ‘forced’ marriage of girl soldiers.
For the first time in international legal history, ‘forced marriage’ is being prosecuted as a ‘crime against humanity’ in Sierra Leone’s post-conflict ‘Special Court’. This represents an important step in advancing the human rights of girls, and follows a growing trend in international criminal prosecution of gender offences. Notwithstanding the significance of this indictment, international law is no panacea for the deeper inequalities and vulnerabilities that girls experience in peacetime and in wartime.
This article advocates a specific focus on girls, who are often ‘disappeared’
under discourses of children and women. Moreover, using recommendations from Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this article attempts to point to social and economic inequalities that must be addressed alongside criminal prosecution of gendered crimes against humanity.
Remembering Partition. Violence, Nationalism and History in India
Gyanendra Pandey
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001
Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of
British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to ensure the unity of the collective subject – community or nation.
Stressing the continuous entanglement of ‘event’ and ‘interpretation’, the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are constituted and reconstituted by the experience and representation of violent events.
It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political
community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and
events like it.
GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of Anthropology and History at Johns Hopkins University. He was a founder member of the Subaltern Studies group and is the author of many publications including The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and, as editor, Hindus and Others: the Question of Identity in India Today (1993).
The Rape of Nanking
Iris Chang
Editions Basic Books, New York, 1997
The events in this book are horribly off-putting, which, paradoxically, is why they must be remembered. Chang tells of the Sino-Japanese War atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in Nanking in December 1937, in which roughly 350,000 soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in an eight-week period, many of them having been raped and/or tortured first.
Not only are readers given many of the gory details?with pictures?but they are also told of the heroism of some members of a small foreign contingent, particularly of a Nazi businessman who resided in China for 30 years.
The story of his bravery lends the ironic touch of someone with evil credentials doing good. Once the author finishes with the atrocities, she proceeds with the equally absorbing and much easier-to-take story of what happened to the Nazi businessman when he returned to Germany and the war ended. This by itself is material for a movie. _ The author tells why the Japanese government not only allowed the atrocities to occur but also refused, and continues to refuse, to acknowledge that they happened. She is quite evenhanded in reminding readers that every culture has some episode like this in its history; what makes this one important is the number of people killed and tortured, the sadism, and the ongoing Japanese denial of responsibility.
Mature readers will look beyond the sensational acts of cruelty to ponder the horror of man’s inhumanity to man and the examples of heroism in the midst of savagery.
Violence, gender and the nation state in Africa : legitimizations and resistances
Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence : The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR
Anne-Marie DE BROUWER
Intersentia, 2005. Volume 20, School of Human Rights Research
The 1996 report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Rwanda stated that during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda ‘rape was the rule and its absence the exception’. Indeed, rape and other forms of sexual violence as constituting genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, directed in particular against women, have taken place on a massive scale since time immemorial and are still rampant.
This study assesses the supranational criminal prosecution of sexual violence, notably whether supranational criminal law (sexual violence as genocide, a crime against humanity and a war crime) and supranational criminal procedure (protective and special measures for and participation of victims of sexual violence) are adequate from the perspective of victims of sexual violence. In addition, the legal consequences of the supranational criminal law system (sentencing and reparation) are examined with the situation of victims of sexual violence in mind. The adequacy of supranational criminal prosecution of sexual violence is primarily examined from the point of view of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the benchmark for supranational criminal prosecutions, with clear reference to the practice of the Yugoslav-Tribunal (ICTY) and the Rwanda-Tribunal (ICTR) in the field of sexual violence prosecutions. The study concludes with some recommendations for a more comprehensive framework of supranational criminal prosecution of sexual violence.
Anne-Marie de Brouwer, PhD (Tilburg University), LLM (University of Essex and Tilburg University).
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