WUNRN
LIBYA - DECREE PASSED TO PAY
REPARATIONS TO VICTIMS OF RAPE AS A WAR CRIME
By Zoë Schlanger - 6/20/14
A decree
issued in Libya would recognize rape committed during that country’s revolution
as a war crime and pay rape survivors reparations, according to two sources who
have worked closely with the Libyan government in developing the policy.
An initial decree issued in February sought to recognize the mass
rapes perpetrated during the 2011 revolution as war crimes, but it required congressional approval to
move forward. The new decree, however, bypasses Libya's congress and
establishes a commission to begin evaluating who will be given the financial
and medical support, and the scope of the reparations to be provided, according
to war crimes lawyer Céline Bardet, who reviewed the policy drafted
by Libyan Justice Minister Salah al-Marghani.
The new decree also makes all rape victims under Qaddafi’s regime
eligible for the compensation, not just people who were raped during the 2011
uprising, Bardet tells Newsweek.
Following the uprising that toppled the regime, former fighters
who suffered war crimes became entitled to compensation. The International
Criminal Court says it gathered evidence that Qaddafi’s forces systematically
raped men and women during the uprising, and a U.S. envoy in Libya said that
soldiers in Qaddafi’s army were issued Viagra with
the express purpose of raping women. Yet rape was not classified as a war crime
for the purposes of reparations, until now.
Souad Wheidi, a Libyan and the head of the human rights
nongovernmental organization Observatory of Gender in Crisis,
says her group has been pushing for three years for this policy. She and her
colleagues have video testimony from women who were raped during the uprising.
She says the videos will help the women obtain reparations once the commission
is established and will prevent the women from having to be retraumatized by
telling their stories over and over for government officials.
“And it will
also be an archive, to preserve the memory of the suffering, like Shoah,”
Wheidi said, referring to the Shoah Foundation, which developed a vast archive
of interviews with Holocaust survivors. “Nobody can imagine what happened,
nobody. It was more horrible than anyone can believe.”
Wheidi says
that soldiers would film each other raping women and send the videos to
anti-Qaddafi forces. She recounted stories of women who were raped and then
sent to prison for protesting against Qaddafi, where they were raped again,
repeatedly. “Being a victim of rape in conflict is something so different. All
rape is of course horrible, but in war, it is something else. The [mass rapes]
were so new in our country—we were so shocked.”
Newsweek spoke with
Wheidi in London, where she was attending a global summit on sexual violence in
conflict.
“This
victory in Libya is a very big victory for humanity. But there has to be a
paradigm shift,” Wheidi says, near tears. “Why do we use the woman’s body as a
place to wage war? Humanity has to take this seriously.”