WUNRN
By Helda Martínez
|
BOGOTA,
Oct 21 (IPS) - Sexual violence is used as a weapon of war in Colombia by all
parties in the country’s longstanding armed conflict, and its main victims are
women and girls, states a report recently released by Intermón Oxfam, backing
up claims made repeatedly by national and international human rights groups.
At the
launch of the report, released simultaneously in Bogota and Madrid, Paula San
Pedro of Intermón Oxfam – the Spanish branch of the relief and development
organisation Oxfam International - stressed that all of the armed groups in
Colombia, including government security forces, far-right paramilitary forces
and leftist guerrilla rebels, use sexual violence as a weapon of war, "to
the extent that it has become an integral part of the conflict."
The report,
"Sexual Violence in Colombia: A Weapon of War", has served to shine
light on an issue that has been repeatedly raised over the past two decades by
women’s, human rights, Afro-Colombian and peasant farmers' organisations, as
well as some female legislators, yet has been largely ignored by both the
government and the general public.
In
Over four
million people have been forcibly displaced by the ongoing conflict since 1995,
according to figures from a number of non-governmental organisations, including
the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). This figure
represents roughly 10 percent of the country’s total population of 42 million.
The majority
of the displaced are peasant farmers and black or indigenous Colombians forced
off their land, often after witnessing the killing of family members or rape of
women from their communities.
This South
American country has been in the grip of civil war since 1964, when the leftist
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the much smaller National
Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas rose up in arms. The paramilitary groups that
emerged in the 1980s to combat the leftist insurgents alongside the government
forces remain active despite the reported demobilisation of tens of thousands
of their numbers between 2002 and 2006.
Permanent
scars
Intermón
Oxfam and other humanitarian groups maintain that 60 percent of the total
number of displaced Colombians are women, and that two of every 10 of them have
fled their homes to escape sexual violence.
Unfortunately,
there are no official figures to reflect this situation, because in many cases,
women do not report being raped "out of fear or shame," explained
Alexandra Quintero, the research coordinator at Sisma-Mujer, an NGO which
produces annual reports on violence against women in different spheres.
Some victims
of sexual violence suffer from temporary or permanent mental illness, as
reported by participants at the World Peace Summit. "Permanent scars"
was the term used by a 53-year-old Afro-Colombian woman from the northwestern
María told
IPS that before the armed conflict spread into Chocó, "we lived peacefully
on the banks of the
The
population of the
"They
dragged people out of their beds in the middle of the night. They killed the
men and raped the women," recalled María, with a mix of anger and
resignation.
María knows
a woman who was gang-raped by a group of guerrilla fighters, but she was also a
witness to the cruelty of the paramilitary forces and the atrocities committed
by government soldiers against women in the region.
"It’s a
trauma that you never recover from, no matter how much they talk about
reparations, because it’s something a woman feels in the flesh," she said.
Whether the victim is a young girl or a grown woman, "when she doesn’t
want something done to her body, it shouldn’t happen," she stressed.
This is what
led María to join a group of women from Chocó that organises protests, sit-ins
and other actions to raise awareness about the problem. "We need to
participate more actively and make ourselves visible, because we have been
badly beaten down," she said.
Machista
culture trumps modern laws
The
persistent struggle waged by women eventually had an impact in the judicial and
legislative arenas, leading to reforms of existing laws and the adoption of new
ones. Their achievements include the recognition of women as victims of sexual
violence and of their right to compensation.
Nevertheless,
"these legislative advances do not appear to have had any effect in actual
practice," Quintero told IPS.
This is
because the modernisation of the country’s laws has done nothing to change the
underlying culture or to curb acts of aggression against women "in a
particularly machista and patriarchal society," said San Pedro, the
coordinator of the Intermón Oxfam report, at its launch in
The report
estimates that "between 60 and 70 percent of Colombian women have suffered
some form of sexual, physical, emotional or political violence" -
statistics that show that violence against women is a phenomenon that goes
beyond the problem of the armed conflict.
Moreover, it
is a phenomenon that has actually worsened instead of diminishing in recent
years. Sources consulted by IPS concurred that the "democratic security
policy" implemented by the right-wing government of President Álvaro Uribe
has resulted in a rise in violence against women.
"This
policy has signified greater insecurity for women, because the so-called
demobilisation of the paramilitary groups, who continue to control many regions
of the country, has particularly affected women and girls," María Eugenia
Ramírez of the Bogota-based Latin American Institute for Alternative Rights
told IPS.
This
insecurity is reflected in "sexual violence, genital mutilation,
harassment and forced recruitment. Conclusion: the armed conflict has
exacerbated the violence that women have historically faced," said
Ramírez.
Quintero
said this conclusion is backed up by the findings of a report coordinated by
her organisation, Sisma-Mujer, which will be released in November by the
National Network of Women.
The upcoming
report reveals that the number of human rights violations in general, and those
committed by members of government security forces in particular, has tripled
since 2006.
The sources
consulted for the report include the non-governmental Colombian Commission of
Jurists (CCJ) and the forensic Legal Medicine Institute, noted Quintero, who
stressed that the report addresses the violation of human rights of the
population in general.
The report
confirms that there has been no improvement in terms of the vulnerability of
the population in general or of women and girls specifically as compared to
previous studies.
The 2007
edition of the report quoted an alarming figure provided by the CCJ:
"Between January 2002 and June 2006, an average of one woman a day died a
violent death in
The National
Trade Union School contributed some detailed statistics in 2005: "Women
trade unionists suffered 15 acts of femicide, 102 death threats, 10 arbitrary
detentions, 15 acts of harassment and persecution for their union activity, two
attempted murders, seven forced displacements and one kidnapping."
Meanwhile,
the
Of the total
number of cases, 58 percent were attributed to paramilitary forces, 23 percent
to government security forces, eight percent to insurgent groups, and the
remainder to unknown perpetrators.
While there
may be variations among the different reports compiled, they all concur in
highlighting an aggravating factor with regard to violence against women:
impunity. The report to be released by Sisma-Mujer in November maintains that
the perpetrators of this violence go unpunished in an astounding 97 percent of
cases, according to Quintero.
"There
is not a single region in the country where women can feel safe," said San
Pedro, before going on to stress that "Afro-Colombian and indigenous women
are the most vulnerable to sexual violence, given the triple discrimination
they suffer because of their gender, ethnicity and poverty."
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