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.”

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

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age, Alzheimer's, Cambodia, Genocide, healthcare, justice, Khmer Rouge, massacre, Torture, Tribunal, War Crimes

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal set free a former leader of the Khmer Rouge on Sunday, upholding a decision that has outraged survivors seeking an explanation of the mass killings committed more than 30 years ago.

Ieng Thirith, 80, who has been declared mentally unfit for trial, was driven out of the UN-backed tribunal’s compound by family members. She made no comment to reporters.

The Sorbonne-educated Shakespeare scholar served as social affairs minister during the Khmer Rouge’s rule from 1975-79, during which an estimated 1.7 million people died of execution, medical neglect, overwork and starvation.

The tribunal initially announced its decision to free Ieng Thirith on Thursday, saying medical experts had determined there was no prospect for her to be tried due to a degenerative mental illness that was probably Alzheimer’s disease.

Prosecutors then delayed her release by filing an appeal demanding that conditions be set to restrict her freedom.

On Sunday, the tribunal’s supreme court said it had accepted the appeal, which is expected to be heard later this month. In the meantime, it set three provisional conditions on her movement.

The tribunal said Ieng Thirith must inform the court of her address, must turn in her passport and cannot leave the country, and must report to the court whenever it summons her.

Ieng Thirith was the Khmer Rouge’s highest-ranking woman and also a sister-in-law of the group’s top leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

She is accused of involvement in the “planning, direction, co-ordination and ordering of widespread purges,” and was charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, homicide and torture.

Three other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are on trial, including her husband, 86-year-old Ieng Sary, the regime’s former foreign minister; 85-year-old Nuon Chea, its chief ideologist and second-in-command; and 80-year-old Khieu Samphan, a former head of state.

The tribunal said earlier that Ieng Thirith’s release did not mean the charges against her were being withdrawn and was not a finding of guilt or innocence. It plans to consult annually with experts to see whether future medical advances could render her fit for trial, although that is considered unlikely given her age and frailty.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge called Ieng Thirith’s release shocking and unjust. They said they had waited decades for justice and found it hard to feel compassion for her suffering.

“It is difficult for victims and indeed, all Cambodians, to accept the especially vigorous enforcement of Ieng Thirith’s rights taking place at the [tribunal],” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a group that researches Khmer Rouge atrocities.

In a statement on Sunday,, he noted the irony of Ieng Thirith receiving “world class health care.” As social affairs minister she was “personally and directly involved in denying Cambodians even the most basic health care during the regime’s years in power,” he said.

The tribunal began in 2006 – nearly three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge – following years of wrangling between Cambodia and the UN. The lengthy delays have been costly and raised fears that the former leaders could die before their verdicts come.

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

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Child Soldiers, Teens, war, War Crimes

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

Militias loyal to the former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo are recruiting child soldiers in Liberia to launch attacks similar to that which caused the death last week of 15 people, including seven UN peacekeepers.

Child soldiers as young as 14 are being groomed in training camps and used as scouts in increasingly deadly attacks in the volatile west of Ivory Coast, witnesses said. Human Rights Watch said that youths aged between 14 and 17 were being trained.

“They call us ‘small boys unit,’ and we are always safe when we go to the war zones in Ivory Coast. I don’t know the total that we have killed,” a child soldier told the campaigning group.

Ivory Coast’s rugged western region is a stronghold of Gbagbo, whose refusal to leave power landed him in the international criminal court last May after five months of post-electoral conflict dislodged him.

But neighbouring Liberia has been reluctant to clamp down on mercenaries notorious for recruiting child soldiers, while high-profile members of the regime’s inner circle live unhindered in upmarket villas in Ghana despite international arrest warrants.

“There are training camps in Liberia, you can walk there in 20 minutes. They send boys over several hours before attacks, then they join in later,” said Traore Adama, an Ivorian soldier who fled to Abidjan after attacks in recent months. “Youths can make up to a third of the attacking groups. Some of them are older teenagers but others are waifs you’d never imagine carrying guns.”

On Friday, UN “blue helmets”, deployed to a suspected raid in a remote western village, were ambushed and killed by a large group of Liberian-based “militias or mercenaries,” Paul Koffi Koffi, Ivory Coast’s deputy defence minister, said. Eight civilians also died in the attack.

Liberia has since closed its 435-mile border with Ivory Coast, whose dense forests and maze of creeks make policing difficult. Hundreds began fleeing the mineral-rich region, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded in the massacres during last year’s political conflict.

Alassane Ouattara, president of Ivory Coast since 2010, has struggled to unify a post-conflict army composed of quarrelling former rebels (who are also accused of war crimes) and government soldiers whom they once fought against.

One former rebel soldier, Aboubacar Souleymane, said” “It’s very visible when an attack is imminent. Last week I told my superiors that Liberian mercenaries were planning an attack with the help of pro-Gbagbo supporters in the area. He said there was not enough evidence, so I fled the area. I wasn’t prepared to stay there and get killed.

“There are too many cases of soldiers not being on their post when they should be, and disappearing from barracks at odd hours.”

Officials say arms funding for the cross-border raids comes from Ghana, where several wanted Gbagbo insiders fled after the regime fell last year. Among them is Charles Blé Goudé, leader of the Young Patriots militia, whose armed supporters helped crush dissenters of the Gbagbo regime. Goudé, whom sources say is under investigation by the ICC, has said he is willing to face trial.

An African diplomat said cooperation was unlikely to be forthcoming from either of Ivory Coast’s neighbours in the near future. “Liberia’s armed forces’ capability is limited by its small size and corruption because they’re highly underpaid. But there’s more than just a lack of capacity in both countries for failing to go after well-known criminals.”

Serbian president denies Srebrenica genocide

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Bosnia, Genocide, massacre, trauma, war, War Crimes

Serbian president denies Srebrenica genocide

Serbia‘s new president has denied genocide took place in Srebrencia, contradicting the international criminal prosecution of Serbian leaders from the Yugoslav wars and angering the Muslim co-president of Bosnia.

Tomislav Nikolic, the rightwinger elected as Serbian president last month, said on Montenegrin television: “There was no genocide in Srebrenica. In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs who should be found, prosecuted and punished.

“It is very difficult to indict someone and prove before a court that an event qualifies as genocide.”

The former Serbian general Ratko Mladic is on trial in The Hague accused of genocide in Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb forces under his command slaughtered around 8,000 Muslim men and boys after capturing the town, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, towards the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. It was Europe’s worst atrocity since the second world war.

The Bosnian Serbs’ wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic, is also on trial in The Hague accused of genocide.

Bakir Izetbegovic, who shares Bosnia’s presidency with a Croat and a Serb, said Nikolic’s comments were insulting to the survivors. “The denial of genocide in Srebrenica … will not pave the way for co-operation and reconciliation in the region, but on the contrary may cause fresh misunderstandings and tensions.

“By giving such statements Nikolic has clearly demonstrated that he is still not ready to face the truth about the events that took place in our recent past.”

Nikolic said he would not attend the annual commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre in July. “Don’t always ask the Serbian president if he is going to Srebrenica,” he said. “My predecessor was there and paid tribute. Why should every president do the same?”

Both the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the international court of justice (ICJ) have ruled that the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide.

Serbia wants to join the European Union. A spokeswoman for the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said her office would seek clarification of Nikolic’s statement but “would like to remind everyone that Srebrenica has been confirmed as genocide by both the ICTY and the ICJ. Srebrenica was the largest massacre in Europe since world war two, a crime against all of humankind. We should never forget and it should never be allowed to happen again.”

Nikolic’s win over the incumbent president, Boris Tadic, sent a chill through a region that still recalls his last spell in government – as deputy prime minister in a coalition with Serbia’s late strongman Slobodan Milosevic when Nato bombed Serbia to drive its forces out of Kosovo during a 1998-99 war.

Nikolic has split from ultra-nationalists, recasting himself as a pro-European conservative and saying he will pursue Serbia’s drive for EU membership.

Tadic oversaw the arrest and extradition of Karadzic and Mladic. He pushed an apology for the massacre through parliament and travelled to Srebrenica as part of a drive to foster reconciliation.

Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

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deportation, forced removal, rape, Sri Lanka, Torture, trauma, war, War Crimes

Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

Dozens of Tamil asylum-seekers will be forcibly removed from Britain on a secretive deportation flight today despite credible evidence that they face arrest and retribution on their return.

A chartered plane, PTV030, is due to take off at 15.30 from an undisclosed London airport and fly direct to Colombo. Human-rights organisations have called on the UK Border Agency to halt the flight on the grounds that Tamils who are known to be critical of the Sri Lankan government have been brutally treated following their return.

The forced removals come as Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the architect of Sri Lanka’s final victorious push three years ago against the Tamil Tigers – a military offensive which defeated the brutal insurgency group but also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians – flies into the UK to join the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Human Rights Watch has documented 13 credible cases over the past two years in which failed Tamil asylum-seekers from Europe have been tortured after landing in Sri Lanka, and warns that those cases are likely to be “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Mr Rajapaksa’s government has been accused of committing war crimes during the military offensive and of continuing to preside over a culture of impunity in which kidnap, extra-judicial killings and torture are still commonplace, particularly in the heavily militarised Tamil areas in the north.

The Foreign Office’s latest report on human rights describes Sri Lanka as an area of “serious concern” when it came to abuses. But that has not stopped the UK Border Agency, which is under political pressure from the Government to ramp up deportations, from forcibly removing hundreds of Tamils in recent months.

The agency is notoriously secretive when it comes to forcible removals, rarely announcing them until the very last minute and providing few details about who is on board.

There have been at least four chartered planes in the last six months delivering Tamils back to Sri Lanka.

Some of those on board today’s flight include people who have overstayed their visa and immigrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence. But it also contains dozens of ethnic Tamils who have had asylum bids turned down and are at risk of political persecution.

The Independent yesterday spoke to one Tamil man in his mid-twenties who is currently being held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre and is due to be on today’s flight. He said there were six people on his wing who were failed asylum-seekers who thought they would be at risk of torture or worse if they were returned. “Everybody is crying,” he said. “We all know about cases where people have been tortured or killed after they were returned. Why is the UK government doing this?”

The man, who requested his identity remain anonymous for fear of reprisals if he is removed, said he travelled from Jaffna to Britain in 2006 to escape the violence that had plagued northern Sri Lanka for three decades. He added that both he and some of his fellow deportees played prominent roles in recent protests in London against the Sri Lankan government.

“Whenever there were demonstrations the Sri Lankans would send people down to photograph the protesters,” he said. “They know exactly who we are. That’s what scares us.”

The UK Government insists that those who are forcibly removed are individually assessed to make sure that they are not at risk of torture on their return. But Human Rights Watch says they have at least three cases of Tamils who had been forcibly removed from the UK and subsequently tortured.

“There are likely to be many more cases, because these are the people who have managed to find their way from Sri Lanka to the UK, and that we have managed to interview,” said David Mepham, director of HRW UK.

“The UK should suspend the forcible removal of Tamil asylum-seekers pending a review of its processes for assessing asylum claims by Tamils.”

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “The UK has a proud record of offering sanctuary to those who need it, but people who do not have a genuine need for our protection must return to their home country.

“We only undertake returns to Sri Lanka when we are satisfied that the individual has no international protection needs. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled not all Tamil asylum-seekers require protection.”

Tamil returnees are raped, whipped and burned

Suthan knows all too well how hollow assurances that Tamils deported back to Sri Lanka are safe can be. He first fled to the UK five years ago after the Sri Lankan Terrorist Investigations Department accused him of having links to the Tamil Tigers.

During his asylum application he presented medical evidence showing that he had been beaten with sticks and burned with cigarettes but his request was turned down.

Last year he was placed on a chartered flight and returned to Colombo. He was questioned on his arrival at the airport in the presence of an official from the British High Commission and was later released.

But the interrogations continued. After trying to return home he was picked up by security officials and claims he was tortured, including being whipped with electric flex, burned with cigarettes and having his head immersed in a bag filled with petrol.

After paying a bribe he escaped to the UK again and is now represented by Freedom from Torture, which has used medical evidence to document numerous instances of deportees being brutalised on their return to Sri Lanka.

“This situation has gone on long enough,” says Keith Best, Freedom from Torture’s chief executive. “Forcible returns of refused Tamil asylum-seekers must be halted until the UK Government is sure that they will not be delivering people into the hands of their torturers.”

Even the asylum panels have recognised that torture continues despite the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. In late 2010 the Immigration and Asylum Chamber accepted that a Tamil woman who had been returned to Sri Lanka by the UK authorities was tortured and raped. A second 33-year-old man was also granted asylum last year after a tribunal accepted that he had been beaten and burned with hot metal sticks after his return.

Nonetheless the British Government has stepped up deportations.

Jerome Taylor

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Tamils deported to Sri Lanka from Britain being tortured, victim claims

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.

UK to deploy rape investigation squad to war zones

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rape, Sexual Violence, War Crimes

UK to deploy rape investigation squad to war zones

The UK is setting up a special rapid deployment unit to collect evidence on mass rape used as a weapon during global conflicts, as part of a broader initiative to be launched on Tuesday to combat sexual war crimes of the kind seen in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, central Africa, and now in Syria.

The team of experts being created by the Foreign Office will be drawn from a pool of British police, forensic experts, doctors, psychologists and lawyers and is expected to be in action by the end of this year, ready to be sent to war zones at short notice wherever there are signs of sexual abuse on a large scale. One of their first destinations could well be Syria where William Hague, the foreign secretary, said there were “horrifying reports” of rape beginning to emerge.

“Despite the valiant efforts of many individuals and organisations, the perpetrators of the worst sexual crimes generally go unpunished,” Hague will say at the launch of the initiative, according to early extracts of his speech released by the Foreign Office. “We want to use Britain’s influence and diplomatic capability to rally effective international action.”

The team will initially be funded out of a £20m urgent action fund, part of UK contingency spending set aside for helping mitigate the impact of global conflicts. The UK also intends to use its presidency of the G8 in 2013 to persuade other countries and organisations to put more resources into the fight against rape worldwide.

Angelina Jolie will be also be speaking at the launch at the Foreign Office, where there will be an advance UK screening of her film about the rape camps in the Bosnia war, In the Land of Blood and Honey. Up to 50,000 women are estimated to have been raped during the 1992-1995 conflict, but there have been only 30 prosecutions specifically for sex war crimes.

During the Rwanda genocide, the UN estimates that at least 250,000 women were raped. More than 50,000 were raped in the conflict in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, while almost half of all Liberian women have reported being the victim of at least one act of physical or sexual violence by a soldier or paramilitary fighter.

Two years ago the UN appointed a special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Margot Wallstrom, who named the worst offenders in her report to the security council in February, including the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, various militias in Ivory Coast, and the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Wallstrom also gave examples of how sexual violence had undermined peace-building efforts in post-war zones such as Chad, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste and Bosnia, and during elections or political strife in Egypt, Guinee Kenya and Syria.

“Conflict-related sexual violence is not specific to one country or continent: it is a global risk, Wallstrom said. “Wars have entered the marketplaces where women trade; they follow children en route to school; and haunt the prison cells where political activists are detained.”

British officials said the aim of the UK initiative was to support the work of Wallstrom’s offices and local law enforcement, while allowing the UK to act on its own where it believes it can offer specific expertise in collecting forensic evidence, victim testimonies and eye-witness statements of a standard that would be admissible in court.

“The UN do a good job on this, but the thing about these horrific crimes is that you can always do more,” a British official said.

Hague will say: “We want 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. And we want to see a significant increase in the number of successful prosecutions so that we erode and eventually demolish the culture of impunity.”

Shuna Kennedy, the head of a London-based advocacy group, Womankind Worldwide, gave the Hague initiative a guarded welcome last night, warning of the dangers of duplication of effort.

“While we’re pleased to see the foreign office taking steps to tackle the issue of sexual violence in conflict, an important link in the chain seems to be missing,” Kennedy said. “We are not starting from scratch, so the proposal for a squad of experts to gather evidence, provide training and support to human rights defenders in fragile states, whilst welcome, will waste resources if it fails to recognise and build on the expertise and experience already available in women’s rights organisations.”

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for Bosnia war crimes

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Bosnia, ethnic cleansing, massacre, Tribunal, War Crimes

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for Bosnia war crimes

Ratko Mladic, the Serb military commander in the Bosnian war, has gone on trial for the worst crimes against humanity that Europe has witnessed since the second world war.

Facing 11 charges including two counts of genocide, the 70 year-old former general appeared unrepentant on Wednesday. When he entered the courtroom at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he gave a sarcastic thumbs-up and a slow handclap to the public gallery. At one point, he looked directly at a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre and drew his finger across his throat.

“We visited him before the trial and tried to persuade him to be quiet, not to say anything at all,” Branko Lukic, his defence lawyer said. “He told me he made that sign at a woman in the gallery who provoked him by showing him the middle finger. He is like that. He does the same to me.”

After the break, Mladic complained about gestures from the public gallery. The judge told him to focus on the trial while warning the gallery he would put up a screen up around the court if there was any further “interaction”.

For more than four hours, the prosecution at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, outlined its case. Dermot Groome, one of the two senior prosecutors, said that the evidence would show that Mladic, as the head of the Bosnian Serb general staff, was directly responsible for the atrocities committed. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, mostly Muslims and Croats, including tens of thousands of civilians.

“The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said. In his statement, he drew on the defendant’s published directives to his troops during the war, as well his wartime notebooks seized by Serbian police in a Belgrade flat where he had been hiding during his 16 years on the run.

Groome’s also highlighted the individual tragedies that lie beneath the statistics, like the 14 year-old boy whose father and uncle were among 150 men from the same community murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in November 1992. He also told the story of a seven-year-old boy in Sarajevo killed by a Serb sniper while out with his mother gathering firewood. The bullet passed through her stomach and into his head. Lying wounded on the street, she thought her boy was simply following her instructions to take cover. It was only when UN soldiers lifted up his limp body that she realised he was dead.

Groome said that by the time Mladic’s forces stormed the supposedly UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys, “they were well rehearsed in the craft of murder.”

He added that Srebrenica was “different in scale, but no different in intent” from other atrocities carried out by Bosnian Serb forces. “It was no different in its utter inhumanity.”

One of the survivors in the gallery, Zumra Sehomerovic, said: “I am proud when I see Mladic finally behind that glass, in front of the court. It has come after 16 years but there is no statute of limitations on the crimes he committed”.

Her husband and three other family members were killed at Srebrenica and she said she saw the general up close when he appeared at the scene to “reassure” the terrified captives.

“When I look at him today, I see the man I saw then in 1995. I was standing a metre from him,” Sehomerovic said. ” There he was with his sleeves rolled up, and he was telling us everything would be OK. He was giving chocolate to the children and said he said he just needed to keep some of the men for a prisoner exchange but that everybody would be together again soon. And then he killed them all.”

Groome said the documentary evidence pointed to an “overarching” plan, set out in a list of six war aims drawn up by Mladic, aimed at ethnic cleansing hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats and carving out an ethnically pure Serb homeland in western and eastern Bosnia.

The prosecution statement also focused on the 44-month siege of Sarajevo. Groome quoted Mladic from wartime documents and interviews in which he appeared to boast about “putting a ring around the dragon’s head of Sarajevo”.

At one point the general is quoted as saying: “I have blocked Sarajevo from all four sides. There is no exit. It is in a mousetrap.”

Lukic said that he intended to cross-examine prosecution witnesses carefully, but would let the prosecution present its entire case before making his own opening statement.

“Our strategy is not to reveal our strategy and to keep our cards close to our chest,” Lukic said, but pledged to present “new evidence” when his turn came. He predicted that the trial could take more than four years to complete.

In court, Mladic cut a much diminished figure from the bluff, stocky and ruddy-faced military commander he was in the war. He survived for 16 years on the run, at first with the help of the Serbian army and the Serbian government in Belgrade, but since the election of a reformist president, Boris Tadic, in 2004, the layers of protection fell away. Mladic was cut off from funds and had been reduced to hiding in the garden shed of a relative in a Serbian village when he was caught last year.

The Bosnian Serbs’ wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, was caught in 2008, living under a false name and posing a new-age healer. He is already midway through his trial at The Hague. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president who orchestrated the Balkan wars from Belgrade, died of a heart attack in his cell in 2006 before a verdict could be delivered in his case.

At the start of Wednesday’s hearing the presiding judge, Alphons Orie of theNetherlands, said the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start on 29 May, owing to material omitted by the prosecutors when it disclosed evidence to the defence. Groome said he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

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.”