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NEWS & LETTERS, November 2002

Woman as Reason

Rape in war epidemic, intensified by AIDS

by Terry Moon  

"Wherever people are struggling against subjection, the specific subjection of women, through our location in a female body, from now on has to be addressed. The necessity to go on speaking of it, refusing to let the discussion go on as before, speaking where silence has been advised and enforced, not just about our subjection, but about our active presence and practice as women."

--Adrienne Rich, ARTS OF THE POSSIBLE

Starting before, but becoming organized and militant with the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the global Women's Liberation Movement has singled out and fought against the "specific subjection" that women experience in war--especially all experiences of sexual violence. In the Balkans war this included women within Serbia and Croatia who formed Women in Black chapters and challenged the war crimes of their own governments. It is only because of the persistence of this movement that any change has occurred. Nevertheless, mass rapes of women in war and "ethnic cleansing" situations continue, each with its own way of imposing this torture.

RAPE IN CONGO, INDIA, BURMA

• In Democratic Republic of Congo, while women and girls are routinely raped as part of attacks on the villages where they live, they are also kidnapped, used as beasts of burden to carry supplies or contraband through the bush, used as domestic labor, raped repeatedly, and kept in bases in the forest for months. A Congolese counselor who works with women said: "This [sexual violence] is a whole war within the war--another kind of attack on the Congolese people." When one raped woman asked her torturer why he made others suffer, he responded: "That is the job of a soldier."

• In Gujarat, India, during the riots in February and March where Hindus murdered Muslims as the state looked on, at least 250 women and girls were gang-raped and burned alive. Shabnam Hashmi, who fights for secularism in India, contends that: "These mobs were trained in rape. Why else would the same pattern of brutality be repeated everywhere? Groups of women were stripped naked and then made to run for miles, before being gang-raped and burned alive."

• As the Burmese army forcibly relocates--"ethnically cleanses"--states bordering Thailand, human rights activists report: "Rape and sexual assault have served as two of the Burmese army's key weapons against the civilian population of ethnic minority women in Burma." Rape is used as a weapon of war: 83% of the rapes are by military officers in front of their troops; women and girls are brutally beaten and often mutilated; 25% are killed; 61% are gang-raped.

AIDS brings another dimension of horror. In Rwanda, where the 1994 genocide and rapes--some 250,000--have been well documented, President Paul Kagame said, "We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists." Rwandan women will be dying from these rapes for decades.

The horror is spreading to Congo, where an estimated 60% of those fighting are infected with HIV/AIDS. The UN reported: "Armed conflicts increasingly serve as vectors for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which follows closely on the heels of armed troops."

While these rapes and murders of civilian women, children and men create ever deeper levels of abject misery, the UN congratulates itself because it finally in 1994--only after the genocide in Bosnia--identified "systematic rape" as a weapon of war. But only in 2000 did the war crimes tribunal open the first ever UN trial focused exclusively on widespread sexual crimes against women during wartime. The UN's glacial speed is seen in that the trial is for rapes done in Bosnia in 1992.

WOMEN FIGHT BACK

Women refused to wait for any such delayed and criminally insufficient action. It was the worldwide women's movement that brought the rapes in Bosnia to the world's attention and demanded action. In Congo, in the midst of war, every International Women's Day since 1999 women's groups there have fought against the raping of women and girls. Their leaflet last year read in part: "Women say NO to sexual violence used as a weapon of war....The rape of women and girls, without distinction of age, by armed men in our villages must be punished as a crime against humanity. We have never wished nor planned the war in our country....Why do we have to be the first victims?"

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