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.”

Tens of thousands flee ‘extreme violence’ in Congo

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Child Soldiers, Congo, Genocide, internally displaced people, massacre, mutilation, rape, Rwanda, Torture, war

Tens of thousands flee ‘extreme violence’ in Congo

Villagers and townspeople in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are facing “extreme violence” with atrocities including mass executions, abductions, mutilations and rapes being committed almost daily, according to aid workers in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

Fighting between the government army, the FARDC, and a group of mutineers led by a fugitive UN war crimes indictee, Bosco Ntaganda, has escalated since April. Armed militias including the notorious FDLR, a Rwandan rebel group based in Congo, have joined the fray in a multi-fronted battle for territory, money and power. But the violence has received relatively little international attention so far.

“The crisis in Congo is the worst it has been for years. The activity of armed groups has exploded, with militias making the most of the chaos to prey on the local population,” Samuel Dixon, Oxfam’s policy adviser in Goma, said on Wednesday. “Large areas of [North and South] Kivu are under the control of different armed groups – some villages are being terrorised from all sides, with up to five groups battling for power.

“Local people are bearing the brunt of extreme violence, facing the risk of massacre, rape, retaliation, abduction, mutilation, forced labour or extortion … In less than two months, more than 100,000 people in North Kivu have been forced to flee,” Dixon said.

Expressing alarm at the deteriorating situation, the UN refugee agency said the violence had sent tens of thousands of refugees spilling over the border into Rwanda and Uganda, while many more people were internally displaced.

Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said UN agencies and the Red Cross would soon begin to distribute relief supplies. “Some of the displaced report cases of extortion, forced labour, forced recruitment of minors and beatings by armed men,” Fleming said.

Aid workers said heightened instability was making it difficult to establish the true extent of the violence and to get supplies to those most in need, who had often taken refuge in remote, inaccessible areas.

“The mutiny in North Kivu is part of a broader picture of insecurity caused by multiple armed groups and by elements of the Congolese forces. Since the FARDC has been fighting the mutiny, other armed groups active in eastern Congo have opportunistically moved into areas left vacant by the army,” an internal NGO field report seen by the Guardian stated.

“In South Kivu in early May 2012, 30 people were killed in Lumenje zone by the FDLR … During the night of 13 May, at least another 40 civilians lost their lives and 35 were injured following a brutal FDLR attack on Kamananga. This incident took place only 2kms from a Monusco base [Monusco is the name of the UN’s 20,000-strong stabilisation force in Congo].”

The report went on: “A letter left by the FDLR at the scene warned of a series of revenge attacks if the opposing group, the Raia [militia], did not stop attacking them. In the last two massacres the FDLR mutilated the dead to discourage further actions against them …

“In Mambas territory, a mai mai [militia] group reportedly raped over 70 women in the second week of May and armed clashes around Itembo allegedly led to the death of 17 civilians.”

Overall, the total number of internally displaced people in Congo is believed to be at its highest level in three years: up from 1.7 million to 2 million.

The latest upheavals follow warnings, first reported in the Guardian on 16 March, that the army’s offensive against the FDLR, launched in February, could destabilise the Kivus and have disastrous consequences. Controversially, the UN supported the offensive, arguing it was the best way to end chronic instability in the region.

The army’s plan went awry last month after President Joseph Kabila of Congo called for the arrest of Bosco Ntaganda, an ex-rebel general whose forces were supposedly integrated into the FARDC in 2009.

Ntaganda is wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes, including the recruitment of child soldiers, but had appeared to be enjoying to official protection. His response to Kabila’s call for his arrest was to lead a mutiny of former officers and hundreds of their men, who have formed a new rebel group called M23.

“Civilian safety has to be the number one priority for the UN and the government army,” Dixon said. “Military action against rebels must not put local people at further risk. It is unacceptable that such widespread violence in Congo goes unstopped and under-reported. More must be done to tackle the political and underlying drivers of the conflict.”

Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict

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Bosnia, Genocide, rape, Rwanda, Sexual Violence, Torture, War Crimes

William Hague: Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict

When we think of armed conflicts, we think of battlefields, of soldiers in arms, of trenches and tanks. But wars tragically are also about civilians, particularly women and children, caught on the margins of the battlefield yet at the centre of warfare.

The grave and regrettable reality is that rape and other forms of sexual violence have been inflicted upon women as weapons of war in battlefields the world over. In Rwanda alone, it is estimated that over 300,000 women were raped during the 100 day Genocide. In Darfur, Liberia and the DRC levels of sexual violence have been extremely high too, and horrific reports are emerging of abuses in Syria.

The human cost of these crimes was brought home to me most starkly when I met women in refugee camps in Darfur who had been raped when collecting firewood to cook for their children, and survivors of Srebrenica – the worst atrocity on European soil since the end of the Second World War.

Such crimes, especially if they are not addressed or punished, affect the victims and their families as well as their communities for years to come. This feeds anger, distrust and continuous cycles of conflict. It creates long lasting enmity between peoples, and makes it hard to bring peace. Degrading the dignity of women in such a way reduces their essential role and crucial ability to help build peace and holds back development.

It is the responsibility and duty of all states to take measures necessary to put an end to impunity and prosecute those responsible. There is a strong international consensus that more needs to be done. This has been reflected in the valiant work that the UN and its agencies numerous NGOs and frontline organisations have undertaken over the last decade. But more often than not, the perpetrators of sexual and gender based committed crime in conflict or post conflict situations still get away with it. Shockingly, they are neither held to account nor deterred.

As of today there have been only around 30 convictions for up to 50,000 rapes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This kind of record sends a clear message to the past and to would-be perpetrators to be: if you commit sexual crimes in conflict you are likely to get away with it.

As a community of nations we will not succeed in preventing conflict and building sustainable peace unless we give this issue the centrality it deserves; alongside the empowerment and participation of women at every level in all societies.

Our government is determined to bring new energy and leadership to this task. We want to use Britain’s influence and diplomatic capability to rally effective international action, to help find practical ways to ensure that survivors feel confident to speak out, and regain the dignity, rights, and restitution that is their due. Only a significant increase in the number of successful prosecutions will erode and eventually demolish the culture of impunity.

A key vehicle for prosecution is strengthening national and international capability to gather and preserve evidence, on a systematic basis, in a way that means such evidence is admissible in courts, and that allows victims to speak out and demonstrate the proof of their claims.

Above all, it is essential to ensure that the survivors have access to justice and are treated with dignity throughout the justice process.

We know that the problem is complex and that there is no single solution. We know that legal action to bring perpetrators to justice is only one avenue. That, however, should not discourage us. We are determined to act.

We will form a new team of UK experts to help deal with this problem by helping states, civil society and communities to build their capacity to prevent and respond to sexual and gender based violence, by increasing the ability of national governments, law enforcement agencies, judiciaries, human rights defenders and civil society to hold perpetrators to account.

We will seek to identify those countries and places at most risk of sexual and gender based violence. We want to strengthen our support for international efforts to build up a system of early warning indicators with the UN and other like-minded partners. We will draw on and seek to develop the UK’s own early warning analysis to support this.

And we will use Britain’s Presidency of the G8, starting on 1 January 2013, to highlight the need for stronger international action to deter and prevent sexual violence in conflict. We will use these crucial seven months before our Presidency to build real momentum around this initiative and to encourage other countries to work with us on this vital issue.

Rwanda genocide report exonerates Paul Kagame

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Genocide, Rwanda

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/11/rwanda-genocide-report-paul-kagame

A French investigation into the causes of the 1994 Rwandan genocide has exonerated the president, Paul Kagame, and his Tutsi allies after Paris had previously accused him of triggering the killings of 800,000 people in 100 days.

Diplomatic relations between Rwanda and France were broken off in 2006 when a French judge said that Kagame – the rebel leader at the time of the killings – had orchestrated the assassination of the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, to trigger the bloodshed.

After Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, Hutu extremists slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus in some of the fastest mass killings ever perpetrated.

Kagame’s Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power in the aftermath of the genocide.

Kagame has accused the former French president François Mitterrand’s administration of training and arming the Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter.

A team of French investigators, led by two judges, re-examined a dozen eyewitness testimonies to work out where the two missiles that brought down Habyarimana’s Dassault Falcon 50 plane were fired from in an effort to determine final responsibility. Both sides had bases near the airport.

On Tuesday, the judges presented their report to Kagame’s lawyers, who told the media they had concluded that the shots could not have come from a military base occupied by Kagame’s supporters. The findings did not specifically point the finger at the Hutus.

“Today’s findings constitute vindication for Rwanda’s long-held position on the circumstances surrounding events of April 1994”, the Rwandan foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, said in a statement.

“With this scientific truth, [the judges] have slammed shut the door on the 17-year campaign to deny the genocide or blame its victims.

“It is now clear to all that the downing of the plane was a coup d’état carried by extremist Hutu elements and their advisers who controlled Kanombe barracks.”

However, Jean-Yves Dupeux, a lawyer for Habyarimana’s children, said the findings did not support the Rwandan government’s account.

“The findings cannot point the finger at the Hutu camp,” he added. “What the experts are saying is that the shots could not have been fired from Paul Kagame’s camp. That doesn’t mean it is the other side.”

An investigation by the Rwandan government in January 2010 blamed extremists within Habyarimana’s inner circle for bringing down the plane, saying the murder was designed to scuttle a planned power-sharing deal and act as a pretext for the genocide.

According to the Rwandan inquiry set up by Kagame – known as the Mutsinzi report – Rwanda armed forces stationed in the Kanombe barracks near the airport fired the surface-to-air rockets, the culmination of months of planning.

A 2006 report by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere said Kagame was responsible, arranging for the plane to be shot down to trigger reprisal killings between ethnic Tutsi and Hutu and give his RPF rebels and allies grounds to take power by force.

Paris began to normalise its relations with Rwanda after Nicolas Sarkozy came to power in 2007. On a trip to Kigali in February 2010, the French president said Paris had made serious errors of judgment over the massacre and wanted to ensure that all those responsible for the slaughter were caught and punished.

On Kagame’s first state visit to France since the genocide in September, the Rwandan president emphasised that his trip was aimed at building economic and commercial ties, appearing to accept that an apology from Paris was no longer a prerequisite for restoring diplomatic ties.