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.”

Guatemalan war rape survivors: ‘We have no voice’

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femicide, Genocide, Guatemala, human rights abuses, international courts, Mayan, rape, Sexual Violence, soldiers, Spain, stigma, Torture

2011:

Guatemalan war rape survivors: ‘We have no voice’

“When the soldiers found me they grabbed me, took me to the river, and raped me. ” Teresa Sic recalls. “On the same day, they raped other women in the village. They burned everything. They tied me up, but I freed myself aided by my five-year-old daughter. I went to seek help. I was hungry and afraid, but nobody would take us in.”

Horrific as it sounds, the 58-year-old’s story is not a one-off. Between 1960 and 1996 more than 100,000 women were victims of mass rap in the Guatemalan civil war, between CIA-backed rightwing generals and leftwing insurgents, that evetually left 200,000 dead. After General Jose Efraín Ríos Montt grabbed power in a 1982 coup, it reached fresh peaks of brutality.

Many victims, such as Sic, were indigenous Mayans, who were caught in the crossfire, accused of collaborating with the guerrillas or targeted simply because their ethnic group became seen as the enemy. More than a decade ago Spain’s national high court, which has a long history of taking on international human rights cases – including pursuing Augusto Pinochet and jailing Argentine military officers involved in death squads – began investigating claims of genocide. Yet Guatemala not only refuses to try or extradite Ríos Montt, despite an international arrest warrant issued in Madrid, but he is now a congressman.

As for the rapes, the state refuses to acknowledge them – leaving the attackers to walk freely through the streets and live in the same villages as their victims. “We want the state to acknowledge the truth. We have no voice, and officially the rapes during the conflict never happened,” says Feliciana Macario, one of a group of women who have worked for 20 years to bring the rapes into the public arena. Patricia Yoj, a native Mayan lawyer, says that “even the representative of the National Indemnity Programme that was established to make reparations to victims of the conflict has said that he doesn’t believe in the rapes”.

But many of the women have refused to be silenced – giving evidence to the genocide trial in 2008, and now, for the first time, their voices will be heard; Spain’s national court has agreed to investigate the mass rapes and gender violence as part of the generals’ alleged strategy to wipe out a large part of the Mayan population. The investigating magistrate Santiago Pedraz said on Wednesday the rapes appeared to be part of a campaign of terror designed to destroy Mayan society – with soldiers instructed to carry them out.

Campaigning lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, of the US-based Center of Justice and Accountability, says rape, mutilation, sexual slavery and the killing of foetuses were all part of a plan to eliminate the Mayan people. “Gender violence has been used as a weapon to eliminate ethnic groups, and that’s genocide,” she says. The army and the members of the paramilitary “civil self-defence patrols” tortured the women they didn’t kill in order to stigmatise them. Teresa tells how days after she was raped, she was forcibly taken to a military barracks, raped for 15 days by countless soldiers and given bulls’ blood and raw meat to eat.

“To eliminate all the Mayans is a very difficult task, but if you destroy the women you make sure that the population is reduced and eventually disappears – it’s one of the cruellest ways of getting rid of an entire people,” says Paloma Soria, a lawyer working for the Women’s Link Worldwide NGO, which is backing Bernabeu.

Many of the women also endured being abandoned by their husbands as a result of the rapes. One of them was Maria Castro, now 59, who was with her two children – one just a baby when she was horrifically assaulted. “The soldiers ambushed me. My little girl was with me. She was very frightened and she cried, but the soldier threw me to the ground. I remember there were three of them who raped me, but I don’t know how many more because I lost consciousness. When I came to, I saw them pick up their guns and leave hurriedly for some other place. My daughter helped me by carrying her little brother, but she was still crying. She saw everything.” When Maria made it home and told her husband, he rejected her, saying that if she had come back alive, it was because she had let the soldiers rape her.

Others have faced horrific retributions from their attackers for their willingness to give evidence. “They point their fingers at us, they insult us, and some of the men who raped us now laugh at us,” one victim says. Castro breaks down as she tells how her son was murdered after she travelled to Spain to give evidence.

María Toj, 70, another victim, says the violence hasn’t stopped, but she is still determined to speak out. “They tortured me and my son. They burned everything, leaving me with nothing but my dead husband and my pain. I hope our efforts will stop this from ever happening again.”

Jacinta Guarcas, 65, lost seven of her eight children in the conflict, when they were forcibly displaced. One was killed by soldiers and the rest starved when they were forced to flee into the mountains after their crops were burnt: “First I buried my one-year-old son since I didn’t have enough milk for him because we had nothing to eat.”

The effect of the impunity for the rapes and killings can be seen in the deep scars on Guatemalan society. In 2010 alone, 685 women were killed. So far this year there have been 120 cases of rapes, torture and even dismemberment. “This trial will help open a debate about femicide, because the lack of justice actually contributes to increasing gender violence,” says Bernabeu. Only about 1% of these cases go to trial in Guatemala. “There are times when foreign or international courts are the only recourse for victims, since they can get no justice in their own country,” she says.

The lawyer will bring Patricia Sellers, the woman who succeeded in having rape defined as a weapon of war at the trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to be an expert witness.

While Spain may be unable to extradite the accused, international arrest warrants at least prevent them leaving Guatemala. Pressure from Madrid has forced Guatemalan courts to start trying human rights cases from the war. They may eventually be persuaded to investigate the rapes. In the meantime, the courage of these women, who face rejection for speaking the truth, will help others who suffer rape as a weapon of war to become more visible.

“This sets a precedent for national courts around the world. Hopefully we will now see how it spreads to other countries from Spain,” says Soria. “Society puts the rape and torture of woman on a par with stealing cattle or burning crops. This must change, and these women have to stop being invisible.”