WUNRN
Direct Link to 2012 Article by Annie
Bunting in Canadian Journal of Human Rights: 'Forced Marriage' in Conflict Situations: Researching and
Prosecuting Old Harms and New Crimes - http://cjhr.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Bunting-Forced-Marriage-in-Conflict-Situations.pdf
WOMEN'S HIDDEN STORIES OF SEXUAL
VIOLENCE & ENSLAVEMENT DURING WAR
Trustlaw // Katy
Migiro – January 14, 2013
Mzanga Minani of the Red Cross (L) encourages victims of sexual
violence to get medical help at Mugunga camp near Goma, eastern
Annie Bunting, an associate
professor of law and society at
She spoke to TrustLaw about her
work.
What do you hope to
achieve in your research?
We hope to provide a more
complete picture of what people experience during those conflicts. There still
seems to be a push from our [local research] partners and the people they work
with to have their voices heard, to have their versions of their stories
included in history.
We are hoping to have an impact
on international criminal law, on how indictments are formed and on how those
charges are laid against commanders responsible for violence in war. We are
also hoping to have an impact on reparations for the harms experienced in
conflict.
We don’t hear much about sexual
slavery during the Rwandan genocide.
Forced marriage during the
genocide is very much a hidden history that was overlooked, in part because it
was all described as rape. It was usually a Hutu man or an Interahamwe [Hutu
militiaman] keeping a Tutsi woman alive, claiming her as his wife. She was then
basically his property because he had saved her.
My research partner Godeličve
Mukasarasi was working with a group last month – she said she met with 17
women, 12 of whom said they had experienced forced marriage. Now that’s not a
representative percentage, but I found that really surprising. I think this
kind of new knowledge will be among the most surprising to come out of the
research project.
Why do men sexually enslave
women in war?
There was a line of command
authority where this was not just random men taking spoils of war through rape.
This was actually a military strategy in order to support the rebels.
We are going to do interviews
with non-governmental organisations that are working with men because we feel
that there needs to be future research on men who were lower ranking rebels,
who were instructed to be violent, take ‘wives’, to rape and so on.
I think those interviews with
men are really important in that legal argument.
Why is it a strategy of war?
Some people have argued that
abducting women and girls and having sexual and domestic labour available to
rebels helps their morale.
As with historical cases of
slavery, this is free labour. Women, girls and men were doing a lot of labour
that the rebels couldn’t do because they were fighting. There was a lot of food
preparation. You also had women working as porters and as spies.
Living in fear of having
yourself or your daughter abducted, raped, kept by rebels for extended periods
of time is a tactic of terror as well.
Can you give an example?
The LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army
of Uganda] was the most organised about abduction.
Do you think international
criminal tribunals can stop conjugal enslavement?
I don’t think that if we have a
few high-profile International Criminal Court indictments and successful
sentences that that will end it. The ICC is quite far away for the average
person.
They want to know someone has
been held responsible and has gone to jail – there is no question. But they
need the average person – the demobilised guy who lives down the street – they
need to see they are safe in relation to that person.
I wasn’t a big fan of the
initiative for the International Criminal Court because that is a huge
infrastructure with millions of dollars being devoted to, as they say, getting
the ‘big fish’.
When you go and interview women
in small villages who are the survivors of conflict and war, they care more
about getting their kids through school and putting their lives back together
again.
Has there been sufficient
compensation, for example, for the tens of thousands of Sierra Leonean ‘bush
wives’?
Over 30,000 people made claims
for reparations [in
What type of compensation do
women want?
I think that skills training is
really important because one of the things that women have talked to me about
is that their education is cut short. So they want the opportunity to finish
school. If not, they want to train as taxi drivers or hairdressers or tailors.
Those are very concrete things that change people’s lives.
Where else should money go?
I’d also put money into
national justice systems and local customary justice systems. They tend to have
a much more effective deterrent impact on communities because they resonate
with the local communities in a much more direct way.
So long as we continue to control the agenda for ‘democratising’ or community ‘development’ or whatever our model of justice is, there is still going to be resentment. There is still not going to be ownership over the outcomes.