Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

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Bosnia, conflict, DRC, rape, Rwanda, Sexual Violence, shame, silence, soldiers, systematic rape, the UN, War Crimes, weapon of war

Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

Angelina Jolie has said she hopes a global summit on sexual violence she will co-host in London with the UK government will bring lasting change to global peacekeeping and war crimes prosecutions, deterring the use of mass rape as a weapon in future conflicts.

The four-day summit, beginning on 10 June, will bring together governments from 141 countries to discuss how to improve and standardise the investigation of large scale sexual violence in wartime, to bring an end a culture of impunity that has severely limited prosecutions up to now.

Speaking to The Guardian during a visit to Bosnia, Jolie said: “I would hope that years down the line when war breaks out, people who are considering raping a man, woman or child would be very aware of the consequences of their actions, and that a woman crossing a checkpoint would be aware there was someone collecting evidence and that evidence would have a … result for her.”

“When that begins to happen on masse, then things will change. That’s why its important that this effort isn’t just one single [approach]. We are working with everyone who has worked on this issue for years, with every NGO and every government, to assist these people on all fronts.”

Jolie visited Bosnia at the end of last week with Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, as part of a two-year partnership aimed at preventing sexual violence in conflict. In the course of the trip they spoke in private to several women survivors of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, where the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys has overshadowed another crime against humanity committed at the same time, the systematic rape of women and girls.

The meeting with the Srebrenica women took place in a disused battery factory where in July 1995, thousands of Bosnian Muslims sought the shelter of Dutch UN peacekeepers. The UN promise of protection proved hollow and the factory is now echoing and empty apart from a sombre memorial – two black boxes each as big as a house. In a cemetery outside a stone monument records the names of the 8,000 men and boys slaughtered by General Ratko Mladic’s Serb army.

One of the women, Edina Karic, was taken from her family by Serb soldiers and held at a nearby lead and zinc mine, where she was repeatedly raped.

“I was taken to the mine, where I was raped many times along with two other girls. Then we were eight days in an abandoned house where we were raped again,” Karic said. “When these things were happening to me, it was as if I wasn’t there in my body. I was looking at it from outside.”

None of Karic’s rapists has been prosecuted, even though she could definitively identify at least three of them, and has followed their lives, in a town a few miles away, through Facebook.

More than 20,000 Bosnian women and girls were raped. Over a decade in the Democratic Republic of Congo there are thought to have been 200,000 victims. There were up to half a million rapes in Rwanda in 1994, and there are widespread reports of systematic sexual violence in Syria.

The silence surrounding rape as a war crime is deepened because the victims are often shunned by their own communities. Edina Karic is a rarity in that she is prepared to speak openly about what happened to her.

“I realised I’m not the one who should feel shame. It’s for the perpetrators to feel ashamed,” she said.

In Sarajevo, Hague and Jolie spoke to a hall full of Bosnian army officers who have, with British assistance, developed a training course meant to equip peacekeeping contingents from around the world to detect and prevent the commission of mass rape. As part of the Hague-Jolie campaign, every UN peacekeeping mission is now supposed to provide for the protection of civilians against sexual violence in conflict.

“At times, you may be all that stands between a child and violence that will scar him or her forever,” Jolie told the soldiers in Sarajevo. You may sometimes be the first person outside their family that a survivor of rape encounters. Your actions may make the difference between a successful prosecution, or aggressors going unpunished.”

So far, for the 20,000-50,000 wartime rapes in Bosnia, there have been 30 convictions at the Hague war crimes tribunal and another 33 at the Bosnia state court. Thousands more perpetrators, like Edina Karic’s rapists, remain at liberty.

“There is no forensic evidence, often no medical reports. All you have usually are witness statements, and in a very conservative society, most victims don’t want people to know what happened to them, so most rapes are not reported,” said Dubravko Campara, a Bosnian war crimes prosecutor.

The Bosnian state court has hundreds of open investigations on its docket and just 17 prosecutors. But with the help of UK funding, another 15 are going to be added to the staff to ease the backlog. The court now has a witness support unit to ease the pressure on women witnesses.

The global Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative was launched two years ago after Hague saw Jolie’s 2012 film about the Bosnian rape camps, Land of Blood and Honey. The hardest part of the effort is likely to be translating goodwill at the summit into real change in future conflicts. When Hague and Jolie visited Goma in DRC last March, they heard that women fleeing the fighting with their families were being frequently raped when they ventured out of refugee camps to look for firewood, despite the proximity of thousands of UN peacekeepers nearby. Keeping the women safe was not part of the soldiers’ mandate.

Hague conceded that progress in changing UN peacekeeping practices had been slow, but added: “The UN will be heavily involved in the summit. A big ally of ours is Zainab Bangura, the UN special representative on sexual violence. I think we are getting somewhere with that, but it means systematically building our objectives into all peacekeeping training.”

“There is a lot of goodwill,” Jolie said. There is a lot of understanding of what’s right and wrong, but there is a disconnect. So if we can try to put the pieces together and fill the holes, then maybe there can be a real change.”

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

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abuse, conflict, Congo, DRC, rape, sexual abuse, sexual assault, Sexual Violence, soldiers, taboo, training, war, War Crimes, weapon of war

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

When Beatrice was raped, by a gang of soldiers who sauntered by her home and saw her alone, she thought it was the end of world. She could not have imagined then that rape was only the start of a terrible downward spiral that would often seem to have no end.

“My husband came and said what happened? You can’t be telling me the truth. He no longer wanted to be with me and he left. I was alone with five children.”

Beatrice, not her real name, now has a sixth child, the result of the rape. The infant is strapped to her back, and sleeps while she sobs at the memories that stalk her, in a dark room in a hospital in Goma, in the violent south-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“My husband’s parents totally rejected my child. The village did. Everyone who sees me, curses me. They say I am a soldier’s mistress.”

Beatrice’s ever deepening tragedy is also a national nightmare. By the United Nations’ very conservative estimate, 200,000 women have been through a similar ordeal since 1998.

On a trip to Goma, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, launched the UK’s plan to help tackle the crisis, announcing £180m in new funding for the DRC health system, some of which will go to training medical staff to give proper care for rape victims.

Jonathan Lusi, a surgeon at the Goma hospital, both tends to the very serious injuries which accompany rape, and oversees his patients’ psychological recovery, training to give them independent livelihoods.

“We are in a war. It’s a legal vacuum. There is no government, no authority and no values. Rape is a warning sign something has gone very wrong.”

The DRC, after decades of conflict and turmoil is just one of the world’s battlefields where the routine sexual abuse of women and girls is a weapon of war. No one has any idea how many have been raped in Syria, for example. It is hard enough to count the bodies. It is a crime against humanity that often goes unmentioned because of the squeamishness of public officials and the many challenges to collecting evidence. Corpses are easier to count than rapes, while the victims of rape live in societies that enforce silence.

The tens of thousands of rapes during the Bosnian war, for example, have only led to 30 convictions.

The British government will attempt to break the official silence over the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war by taking the unusual step of using its presidency of the G8 this year to put it at the heart of the agenda of the rich nations’ club that has in recent years been preoccupied with economic woes.

“It’s time for the governments of the world to do something about this,” said Hague in an interview with the Guardian during a visit to Goma. “I will argue it has been taboo or ignored and taken for granted for too long … We can move the dial on something like this. We are big enough in the world to do something about this.”

As well as the money pledged to support the DRC health system, Hague also announced £850,000 in support for an advocacy group called Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice to help it document cases in eastern DRC and push the international criminal court (ICC) to take heed of sexual crimes in its deliberations. Other funding will go to Physicians for Human Rights, another NGO, for evidence collection equipment such as locked evidence cabinets for eventual prosecutions.

Such prosecutions are not necessarily a distant aspiration. One of the leaders of the rebel M23 militia, Bosco Ntaganda, handed himself in at the US embassy in Kigali, the capital of neighbouring Rwanda, last week and was flown to face war crimes charges at the ICC in the Netherlands, where he denied charges including murder, rape, pillaging and using child soldiers in his first appearance on Tuesday.

Hague was accompanied in Goma by Angelina Jolie, with whom he has forged an unorthodox partnership to campaign on the issue. He credits Jolie’s film last year about Bosnian rape camps, In the Land of Blood and Honey, with helping to inspire the British initiative.

“The hope and the dream is that next time this happens, it is known that if you abuse women, if you rape the women, you will be accountable for your actions,” Jolie told the Guardian. “This will be a crime of war and you won’t just get away with it.”

Hague and Jolie visited a camp on the shores on Lake Kivu which has sprung up as a result of an upsurge in fighting when the M23 advanced into Goma last November.

Set against a breathtaking backdrop of lake and volcanoes, the camp of 10,000 people is a huddle of meagre straw shelters half covered with tarpaulin.

The women here are forced to venture out of the camp to collect firewood or water. Both make them vulnerable to rape and many of the women and girls have been assaulted. All the International Rescue Committee, which runs the camp, can offer to mitigate the threat are “dignity kits” that contain efficient stoves that require less firewood and extra clothes so the women have to look for washing water less often.

“It’s a sad fact that when you ask how to reduce sexual violence the answer is to help them not have to go out,” Jolie said.

On the way out of the camp a woman who had earlier given Hague and Jolie a reserved factual account of her experiences ran up to them on a last minute impulse: “Please help us. We are being raped like animals.” Hague said: “The memory of meeting her will always stay with me.”

DRC: Thorny issue of reparations for Lubanga’s victims

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Child Soldiers, Children, DRC, ICC, Reparations, Sexual Violence, trauma, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/apr/12/congo-reparations-lubanga-child-soldiers

Motorcycles, school fees, counselling, cash: Thomas Lubanga’s kadogo (child soldiers) know what reparations they want from the international criminal court(ICC). Less clear is what a cash-strapped tribunal can offer damaged children taken from their families and forced to fight in a brutal ethnic conflict in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“They expect something that will really help them to heal, to help them to recover from the loss of their childhood, their education,” said Bukeni Waruzi, an expert on child soldiers and the programme manager for Africa and the Middle East at the NGO Witness. “When a child is recruited, the minute he gets in the camp, he is not the same as before. It doesn’t take 10 years for a child to become a child soldier, it takes two days maximum, and the mind is changed. How do you repair that?”

Lubanga was convicted in March on three charges of recruiting and using child soldiers in the military wing of his Union of Congolese Patriots in 2002 and 2003. His ICC trial heard that children as young as nine served as fighters and bodyguards.

It was the ICC’s first-ever verdict, and the court is now heading into unfamiliar legal territory as judges must decide on reparations for Lubanga’s victims.

No other international criminal tribunal has ever awarded reparations, but under ICC rules those who have suffered injury or harm from a crime for which someone is convicted could receive restitution, compensation or rehabilitation.

“The [judges] will decide on Lubanga’s sentence, this is first step,” said Paolina Massidda, principal counsel of the ICC’s office of the public counsel for victims, which provides support to victims, including legal representation. Under the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome statute, court-recognised victims are given lawyers and allowed to participate throughout a trial, including questioning witnesses.

“It is possible then for the court to start reparations proceedings, but there is no clear established procedure – which is the reason why the judges are asking participants [in the case] to provide observations, among other things, on whether reparations should be awarded collectively or on an individual basis, to whom, and how harm could be assessed.”

Luc Walleyn, who along with a Congolese lawyer represents 19 victims, doubts collective reparations would work for his clients – former child soldiers and their families. “Child soldiers are not a community,” he said. “It is not like a village that has been victimised. They are very often in conflict with their own families. I cannot see my clients as a group. They are really individuals.

“If today you asked my clients how they wish to have reparations, the answers would be quite different from one to another. One will say I would like to start my studies again. Another would say I would like to have a motorcycle so I can … run a taxi business. A lot of them say ‘give me money’.”

But experts warn that cash payouts are unlikely, and many will get nothing unless they can prove to the court that they were harmed by Lubanga’s crimes. Waruzi worries this will be disappointing to the former child soldiers, who are largely uneducated and untrained. Many suffer from drug addiction or diseases, including HIV. Others have been victims of sexual violence.

“The victims think that what they want will be provided,” he said. “A child thinks, ‘I have been a victim. I shall get reparations because I won the case. Will they give me money? Will they give me a car? Will they buy me a house? How much will I receive?’ I think that’s what’s in the mind of the child soldiers.”

He wants reparations that match the scale and scope of the crimes. “The ICC was initially thinking of symbolic reparations,” Waruzi said. “They were saying something like building a statue in the village that will really honour the victims. But reparations cannot be symbolic, because the crimes were not symbolic. It is now for the ICC to take full responsibility, to actually manage the expectations.”

On trial since January 2009 and in custody since 2005, Lubanga was declared indigent and given a legal aid lawyer. This will be reassessed by judges in the coming weeks. If he cannot pay for reparations himself, the court may turn to its Trust Fund for Victims, which supports reparations from the voluntary contributions it receives from ICC members and others. In 2011 the fund’s total annual income was €3.2m. It has ring-fenced €1.2m for court-ordered reparations.

Though his resources are “modest” and the number of ICC cases expanding fast, the executive director of the fund’s secretariat prefers to talk about meeting rather than managing expectations. But Pieter de Baan admits the fund has been keeping a deliberately low profile on reparations until the judges decide how the process will work.

“Our plan is that once we have more information coming from the chambers on which direction they would like to go we will tailor the messages we will be sending out to communities,” said De Baan.

“The current message is that the trust fund is not a fund for all victims of all crimes in all places but is very much limited by the legal framework of the Rome statute. It also doesn’t take away any of the responsibilities that the national government may have, to look after victimised communities. That will be part of the message as well.”

Reparations are only one part of the fund’s work. Operating under its general assistance rather than reparations mandate it has been on the ground in eastern DRC and northern Uganda since 2008, offering vocational training, trauma counselling, reconciliation workshops and reconstructive surgery to more than 80,000 victims. This close contact has convinced De Baan that the best reparations are those that help people to get on with their lives.

“They might like to have some sort of reparation that would acknowledge their victimhood and their dignity as human beings that allows them to rebuild their lives in a way that is meaningful and sustainable,” he said.

Analysts agree that reparations are a legal and social minefield. The potential problems – and solutions – are already filling pages of legal submissions to the judges.

In its filing to the court, the ICC’s registry warns that because Lubanga recruited children from his own Hema community, which was in conflict with the Lendu people, “should reparations be awarded in the case, the majority of victims will be from one side of an ethnic conflict in which both sides suffered harm”.

The registry also cautions against “ill-advised reparation orders [which] may worsen the situation of former child soldiers by increasing the children’s stigmatisation within their own community”. It also questions how eligible victims will be found, as some have moved on from their villages.

Carla Ferstman, director of Redress, a human rights group working with war crimes victims, urges the judges to consider the many existing rulings on reparations. They come from truth commissions and regional courts, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

“It’s not like the ICC will have to start from scratch,” said Ferstman. “We hope that the court isn’t going to try and reinvent the wheel but that it is going to look at all of these different kinds of processes. There is a lot of experience out there.”

She said it is essential the ICC gets this right. “Ensuring there is some manner of reparations is part of this vital rebalancing of the criminal justice process to involve victims not only as observers and witnesses – [something] that makes it clear that what happened to them matters. It is like a humanisation of criminal justice.”

But with so many potential pitfalls, there are fears that the reparations process could drag on as long as the trial. Walleyn says the former child soldiers he represents have become disillusioned after years of waiting. “They have fewer expectations than six years ago,” he said. “However, they are still hoping to see something, because that was what was promised by the system of the court.”

International criminal court to deliver its first judgment

Tags

Child Soldiers, DRC, Genocide, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/mar/13/international-criminal-court-first-judgment

Nearly a decade after its inception, the international criminal court is due to deliver its first judgment on Wednesday.

Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese alleged warlord, stands accused of enlisting and conscripting child soldiers.

Prosecutors allege that Lubanga, 51, sought to maintain and expand his control over the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo‘s Ituri region, home to one of the world’s most lucrative gold reserves.

Children as young as 11 were allegedly recruited from their homes and schools to take part in brutal ethnic fighting in 2002-03. They were taken to military training camps and beaten and drugged, prosecutors claim, while girls were used as sex slaves.

Lubanga, the alleged founder of the rebel group the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) and chief commander of its military wing, went on trial in January 2009. Closing arguments were heard last August. Lubanga pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes.

Wednesday’s verdict will be closely watched by global rights groups. Géraldine Mattioli-Zeltner, the international justice advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Guilty or innocent, the ICC’s first verdict is a landmark moment for international justice. Leaders of countries and rebel groups should take note that crimes committed today may put them in the international dock tomorrow.”

The ICC, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, opened in July 2002 to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity.

But progress has been too slow in the eyes of critics. Lubanga, seen as a relatively “small fish” compared to the likes of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, was first transferred to the ICC headquarters at The Hague six years ago.

William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University, told Reuters: “The prosecutor is woefully behind schedule. We are all relieved we got to this point.

“But the big legal judgments, of the kind we had at the Yugoslav, Rwanda and Sierra Leone tribunals, we are still waiting for from the ICC right now. The ICC has not yet done that.”

Backed by 120 countries – but not China or the US – the ICC has launched investigations in seven conflict regions, all of them African, since it opened.

Schabas criticised the lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, for a narrow focus. “He avoided situations where he would be likely to step on the toes of permanent members of the UN security council, from Afghanistan to Gaza to Iraq to Colombia.”

The court has no police force and relies on the support of states to deliver suspects for trial. Last December Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo became the first former head of state to appear at the ICC.

The verdict due from a three-judge bench on Wednesday is also the first at an international trial focused exclusively on the use of child soldiers.

The case will set legal precedents that could be used if the likes of Joseph Kony, the elusive leader of the Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army, are captured and brought to justice.