Widely committed and seldom denounced, rape and sexual assault of women in situations of conflict have been viewed more as the spoils of war than as illegitimate acts that violate humanitarian law. As a consequence, women, whether combatants or civilians, have been targeted for rape while their attackers go without punishment. Not until the international outcry rose in response to reports of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia did the international community confront rape as a war crime and begin to take steps to punish those responsible for such abuse. Rape, nonetheless, has long been mischaracterized and dismissed by military and political leaders—those in a position to stop it—as a private crime, a sexual act, the ignoble act of the occasional soldier; worse still, it has been accepted precisely because it is so commonplace.
Human Rights Watch investigations in the former Yugoslavia, Peru, Kashmir, and Somalia reveal that rape and sexual assault of women are an integral part of conflicts, whether international or internal in scope.1 We found that rape of women civilians has been deployed as a tactical weapon to terrorize civilian communities or to achieve "ethnic cleansing," a tool in enforcing hostile occupations, a means of conquering or seeking revenge against the enemy, and a means of payment for mercenary soldiers. Despite rape's prevalence in war, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, "[Rape] remains the least condemned war crime; throughout history, the rape of hundreds of thousands of women and children in all regions of the world has been a bitter reality."2
Our investigation of rape in Haiti under the former military regime led by Lt. Gen. Raoul Cédras revealed that rape may also serve as a tool of political repression much as it has a weapon of war. Women activists, members of the opposition or, in many instances, the female relatives of opposition members were the focus of such attacks. Individuals were attacked in their homes, on the streets, or in detention. As with rape in conflict, rape as a means of suppressing and rooting out political opposition has long been hidden—both because sexual attacks on women are not viewed as political and because such abuse often is carried out by the only authorities in a position to provide remedies.
Of all the abuses committed in war or by repressive regimes, rape in particular is inflicted predominantly against women. Although men also are raped, efforts to document human rights abuse reveal that women are overwhelmingly the targets. Despite its pervasiveness, rape has often been a hidden element of strife, whether political or military, a fact that is inextricably linked to its largely gender-specific character. That this abuse is committed by men against women has contributed to its being narrowly portrayed as sexual or personal in nature, a characterization that depoliticizes sexual abuse in conflict and results in its being ignored as a crime.
Yet rape in conflict or under repressive regimes is neither incidental nor private. It routinely serves a strategic function and acts as a tool for achieving specific military or political objectives. Like other human rights abuses, rape serves as a means of harming, intimidating and punishing individual women. Further, rape almost always occurs in connection with other forms of violence or abuse against women or their families. Under Haiti's brutal former regime, for example, police or paramilitary troops raided the homes of families accused of supporting then exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, killed or detained some family members, looted families' property, and raped one or more of the women they found. In the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, combatants have raped and beaten women while shooting or taking their family members away to concentration camps. Women who are raped are often murdered or left to die by their attackers; Peruvian soldiers who served in the security forces have recalled gang-raping and then murdering civilian women. Far from being an isolated sexual or private act unrelated to state agents' violent attacks on others, rape often occurs alongside other politically motivated acts of violence.
Human rights investigations demonstrate the different ways in which rape functions as a tactical weapon. In Kashmir, Indian security forces use the threat of rape to intimidate local civilians into carrying out their orders. Women in Kashmir have also been raped and killed after being abducted by rival militant groups and held as hostages for their male relatives. Similarly, in Somalia, rival clan members force women to choose between betraying their husbands by revealing their hiding places or being raped. Soldiers in Bosnia-Hercegovina rape women of particular ethnic identities as part of their campaigns to drive these women, their families and communities out of the country. Women have also been abducted from their homes and forced by the military into prostitution.
Rape also functions as a way to punish women suspected of being sympathetic to the opposition. Thus, in Peru's emergency zones, where the military has acted as the ultimate authority over civilian officials and where numerous civil and political rights have been suspended, security forces have punished female civilians with rape for their perceived sympathy with armed insurgents of the Shining Path. In Kashmir, when women considered allied with or known to be related to the militants are raped, authorities use the accusation that the women are associated with "terrorist" militants to discredit their testimony and, at least implicitly, to shirk responsibility for the abuse.
Rape may also serve strikingly sex-specific functions, as is the case when rapists attempt to impregnate their victims and compel them to carry the pregnancy to term as an added form of suffering and humiliation. In the former Yugoslavia, non-Serbian women report being taunted by their rapists that they will be forced to carry and give birth to Serbian babies.
Combatants and other state agents rape to subjugate and inflict shame upon their victims, and, by extension, their victims' families and communities. Rape, wherever it occurs, is considered a profound offense against individual and community honor. Soldiers or police can succeed in translating the attack upon individual women into an assault upon their communities because of the emphasis placed in every culture in the world on women's sexual purity. It is the premium placed upon protection and control of women's purity that renders them perfect targets for abuse. In other words, women are raped precisely because the violation of their "protected" status has the effect of shaming them and their communities.
The choice of particular women as targets of rape is almost inevitably determined by their identities, for example, as citizens of a particular country, adherents to a certain faith, or members of an ethnic group, a race or a class. Thus, in Somalia, rapists target women from rival clans, and in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslim women are raped by Serbian men.
1 Generally speaking, international conflicts are those between two or more recognized nations, whereas an internal conflict is between a recognized government and an armed insurgency. International humanitarian law prohibits rape in both international and internal conflicts but distinguishes between the two. When rape occurs in international conflict, universal jurisdiction exists to prosecute. In internal conflicts, the right and obligation to prosecute rape is placed only in the authorities of the country where it was committed and on the insurgent forces if they have a system of impartial justice.
2 Preliminary report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, Commission on Human Rights, Fiftieth session, November 1994, U.N. Document E/CN.41995/42, p. 64.
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