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Here is an unassailable truth: if sexual violence is not addressed during
the course of a conflict, then sexual violence will haunt the post-conflict
period, and make of the ostensible peace a mockery for half the population.
Three days ago, I returned from Liberia. While in the country, I met with
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, with senior officials of the Ministry of
Health, with the Minister of Gender, with the leadership of the Clinton
Foundation, with the consultant who drafted the legislation for the special
court to try sexual offences, with the UNICEF Representative and significant
numbers of the UNICEF staff. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to
meet with UNMIL, but the UN Mission in Liberia and its peacekeeping forces were
inevitably a part of every conversation.
She was speaking about the contagion of sexual violence that currently engulfs
the country and causes such intense concern. The statistics are horrifying: a
recent study by UNICEF indicated that more than fifty per cent of all reported
rapes are brutal assaults on young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen.
The gender advisor in UNICEF felt that the percentage was probably on the rise,
and it’s feared that increases in the HIV rates among female youth will not be
far behind. The Minister of Gender showed me figures for March, 2008,
indicating that the majority of reported rapes in that month were committed
against girls under the age of twelve, some under the age of five, and she
narrated stories of gang rape so insensate and so depraved that it reminded me
of exhibits in a Holocaust museum. A further survey, of all fifteen counties in
the country, found that girls and boys were united in their conviction that
young girls were the most endangered group in Liberia, and incredibly enough,
that there was no place and no time of day or night where adolescent girls
could be considered safe.
The context of my discussions is encapsulated in the words of the Deputy UN
Envoy for the Rule of Law in Liberia when she said, as recently as May 20th: We
cannot expect the future leaders of Liberia, the doctors, nurses, and engineers
of Liberia to be brought up amongst men who are rapists and women who are
angry, degraded, frightened, depressed, embarrassed and confused.
Predictably, President Johnson-Sirleaf is thunderstruck by the force of the
sexual violence. In a very real sense she is staking the integrity of her
tenure on her ability to confront and subdue the war on women.
But how did it come to this? UNMIL has been in the country since 2003 it has a
large contingent of women peacekeepers: it has an Office of the Gender Advisor
and of the Advisor on HIV/AIDS; it has gender mainstreaming built into the
mandate; both the UN Envoy and the Deputy UN Envoy are women; and the
resolution of 2003 which constituted UNMIL incorporated Security Council
Resolution 1325 which --- you will agree --- was supposed to guarantee the
involvement of women in the peace-keeping processes, but more important,
guarantee women protection and security from gender-based violence and
violations of human rights. Clearly all that hasn’t worked in Liberia, where
things for women and girls are getting worse. Where did we go wrong?
My own view, and the view of the organization to which I belong --- AIDS-Free
World --- is that peacekeepers and force commanders alike have to take sexual
violence much more seriously. It is simply untenable to argue that the
responsibility to keep the warring parties at bay transcends every other human
imperative. It doesn’t. You may succeed in manufacturing a semblance of peace,
but for the women of the country, the conflict continues in the most painful
and eviscerating of ways.
In the case of Liberia, it isn’t a matter of a contentious mandate: as I said,
Resolution 1325 is built into the obligations of peacekeeping. Anyone would
argue that when a peacekeeper in the field knows of acts of sexual violence
having been committed, or has reason to believe that acts of sexual violence
have been or will be committed, then he or she has the obligation to intervene
or, to use the language of the day, the responsibility to protect. But let me
be even clearer about this. Peacekeepers aren’t mere passive observers of the
human family. Peacekeepers move into a country; they learn its social
architecture; they watch the roiling political terrain on a day-to-day basis.
They come to know the foibles, to know the extremes, to know the anomalies.
More often than not, they can tell when trouble is brewing. They can intuit
when men might hurtle out of control. They have the pulse of the culture. When
it unravels, they’re there to bear witness. I’m saying that when patterns of
sexual violence emerge, peacekeepers are rarely surprised. In some cases, they
alone have anticipated the atrocities in the offing. And with that knowledge
comes obligation. With that insight comes responsibility. It isn’t enough to
stop the shooting when the raping continues apace. The only worthwhile
armistice restores peace for the entire population, male and female. There can
be no satisfaction in claiming a truce or a peace treaty which is soaked in the
carnage of the women of the land.
Conventional wisdom says that it is the Security Councils job to set policy,
and the peacekeepers job to follow it. But that’s too easy. The Department of
Peacekeeping Operations, and its military contingents in-country, should be
hollering from the rooftops whenever they feel that their role is somehow
constrained. If you need more troops, ask for them. If you need more training,
ask for it. If you require a larger contingent of police officers, insist on
it. If, in the field, you see sexual mayhem in place, then after intervening,
take the names of individual soldiers and witnesses and seek investigation and
indictments from the International Criminal Court. If the UN’s Member States
wont comply, then call a press conference and tell the world that women are
being sacrificed on the altar of myopic parsimony, or perhaps more accurately,
on the altar of Pavlovian sexism.
There is nothing facetious in this; I’m absolutely serious. The United Nations
cannot allow the terrible assault on women to continue, while crouching behind
the ambiguity of mandate. That, I remind you, is what the Department of
Peacekeeping Operations did between January and April of 1994, in the perverse
struggle with UN Force Commander General Romeo Dallaire over rules of
engagement. And there followed the deaths of eight hundred thousand Rwandans
and the start of the war in the Congo.
In the DR Congo, it is now estimated that 5.4 million people have died since
the end of the Rwandan genocide. That conflict was finally supposed to have
been resolved by a peace engagement of January last. To some extent, the
battles stopped. But as always, just as in Liberia, the war never ends for
women. In the case of DR Congo, the role of peacekeepers could not be clearer.
The words of the Security Council resolution of December 21st, 2007, extending
the mandate of the UN Mission in the Congo, MONUC, were absolutely unequivocal:
Paragraph 18 Requests MONUC, in view of the scale and severity of sexual
violence committed especially by armed elements in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, to undertake a thorough review of its efforts to prevent and respond
to sexual violence, and to pursue a mission-wide strategy, in close cooperation
with the United Nations Country Team and other partners, to strengthen
prevention, protection, and response to sexual violence, including through
training of Congolese security forces in accordance with its mandate, and to
regularly report, including in a separate annex if necessary, on actions taken
in this regard, including factual data and trend analyses of the problem . That
sounds very much to me as though the Security Council knew full well that
things were off the rails where sexual violence was concerned, and this was an
explicit instruction to MONUC to get its act together. In that regard, it’s
significant that the Security Council went even further: the final clause of
the resolution requires the Secretary-General himself to report on the issues
covered in Paragraph 18.
To be sure, I can’t pretend to know exactly what lay in the minds of the
Security Council members, but these things I do know: Dr. Denis Mukwege, who
heads the Panzi Hospital for survivors of rape and sexual violence in the
Eastern city of Bukavu, told me when we met in New Orleans three weeks ago,
that although the steady flow of raped women has slowed somewhat since the
January accord, it continues in shocking numbers; the UNICEF staff in the field
agree that things are still in the realm of nightmare for women, who live lives
haunted by the fear of being violated, tortured, mutilated, infected with HIV.
And who expected anything different, when the countless women who have suffered
such demonic sexual violence were not sitting at the peace table last January,
and were not signatories to the agreement a direct violation of Resolution
1325? Who can claim to be surprised by reports from Congolese NGOs on the
ground, who say that in the country’s so-called peacekeeping period, women are
still too frightened to leave their homes?
When Under Secretary-General John Holmes said the Congo was the worst place in
the world for women, he was right. When Eve Ensler, the noted author of the
Vagina Monologues wrote of the Congo that she had just returned from hell, she
was right. When my co-Director of AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan, visited in
November, and observed that the war being waged against women may well be the
most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone, she was
right.
Terrible, unspeakable things have been done to the women of DR Congo. I want
simply to argue that MONUC has it within its mandate to end the reign of
terror. If it so chooses, MONUC can also have it within its power to end the
reign of terror. Whatever MONUC feels it lacks to protect the women of the
Congo --- numbers, police, equipment, training, time, leadership, resources ---
let them demand it. And if those demands aren’t met, let them tell the world
that madness is at work and it knows no end.
Normally, one would turn to the Secretary-General of the United Nations for
help in this difficult situation. But how can we have trust?
The Secretary-General gets commendably engaged when it comes to Burma or the
price of food, but where is the same sense of throbbing agitation when it comes
to sexual violence? This is a Secretary-General who should be insisting on the
invocation of the Responsibility to Protect in the Congo, but fails to do so.
The defense and protection of the rights of women do not come instinctively to
him. This is, after all, a Secretary-General who granted immunity to the former
High Commissioner for Refugees, when a claim of sexual harassment against him
reached a New York court. I remember that when the Secretary-General was first
appointed, he told a group of NGOs that his learning curve on gender was
virtually vertical. A year and a half later, the upward climb appears to have
stalled at the bottom of the graph.
No, if we are to turn things around, with or without the help of the
Secretary-General, the peacekeepers must lie at the heart of the
transformation. How excellent that would be. Resolution 1325 would finally be
liberated from the dustbins of the Security Council, and women, without fear,
could take hold of their collective destiny. You can be sure there would be no
vacillation. If all the peacekeepers were women, and the men of a country were
under pervasive sexual assault, do you think the women would simply observe the
carnage? Not a chance. And they wouldn’t need a Security Council Resolution to
tell them what to do.
* These remarks were delivered at the Wilton Park Conference: Women targeted or
affected by armed conflict: What role for military peacekeepers? in May 27,
2008.
* Stephen Lewis, is the co-Director of AIDS-Free World - http://www.aids-freeworld.org
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