WUNRN
SEXUAL VIOLENCE STILL STALKS HALF
THE WORLD'S POPULATION, ESPECIALLY IN WARTIME
By Sally Armstrong – October 21, 2014
“You can only die once. If I stayed on the truck they would kill me. So
I jumped.” — A kidnapped 14-year-old girl from <ä>
The first headlines came in April: 276 school girls kidnapped in
The second headlines followed soon after in June: Thousands of
Yazidi women captured in northern
The kidnappings and rapes stirred shock and anger around the world. How
is it possible, people asked, that women and girls are still being used as
tools of war in a era with high-tech weaponry so sophisticated a missile can be
sent through an office window?
Suaad Allami, an Iraqi human rights activist and director of the
non-governmental organization Women for Progress, says that while the
mistreatment of women is nothing new in warfare, the manner in which Yazidi
women are being used signals a shift.
“Women are seen as the source of honour in our conservative societies,”
she says from
American Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams agrees, and while she
believes that growing awareness of how women are being used as weapons of war
is shifting attitudes, that in turn has triggered a desperate response from
Islamic militants.
“What we’re seeing today in
Wazhma Frogh, founder of the Research Institute for Peace and Security
in
So while the wider world continues to shift for the better for women’s
rights — major corporations are starting to seek women for their boards, women
now outnumber men on many university campuses, the women of the Arab Spring
flexed their might in overthrowing dictators, the women of Afghanistan and
beyond have been to the barricades to alter their status — sexual violence
still stalks half the planet’s population, especially in wartime.
And it always has.
In
These are the well-known cases. But historically, rape has mostly been a
secret kept by the victims, their shame giving the perpetrators impunity.
It was only recently, for example, that extensive work conducted by
American researchers Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel uncovered shocking
truths about the sexual assault of Jewish women who were used as tools of the
Second World War and referred to this kind of shame as the most effective of
all social weapons. What’s more, they found, the rapes were known by the judges
during the war crimes trials at Nuremburg but not mentioned because the judges
“didn’t want their courtrooms full of bawling women.”
Seventy years later, women the world over, including in Nigeria and
Iraq, are reforming justice systems, opening schools and establishing health
care. They’re taking leadership roles and acting as mentors and role models.
But rape continues to be the ugly foundation of women’s story of change.
Rape as punishment or as a means of control still lurks in that narrative. And
the impunity of the rapists constitutes a centuries-old record of disgrace that
continues today.
Now, though, amid the horrid headlines, something new has begun to
appear on the horizon. Although history is replete with stories of soldiers
raping and pillaging and society has tolerated the modern version of behaviour
known as “boys will be boys,” those reprehensible actions are starting to be
seen through a revised lens.
In May, when President Barack Obama dispatched strategic advisers and
soldiers to
Governments have presented the pretence of rescuing women and children
before, but no effort was as focused as Obama’s.
When the
The soldiers happened to trip over burka-clad women along the way and
the human rights catastrophe those women and girls were enduring became flash
points to the world. But the women of
In 2012, there was the online campaign to stop the murderous Joseph Kony
in
In that light, it is possible to see Obama’s decision to rescue 276
girls from the clutches of a religious crackpot as akin to putting Vladimir
Putin on notice for his interference in
For a time, the action seemed to gobble up the sensibilities of the
whole world. Michelle Obama tweeted, #Bring Back Our Girls. So did Malala
Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who catapulted to international fame in 2012
after she survived an attack by a Taliban gunman on a school bus. Hillary
Clinton called the kidnapping an act of terrorism. Even Pope Francis made a
plea for the girls.
Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), the juggernaut for women’s
issues in Asia and
And like a gathering storm, civil society and government leaders were blown into action on behalf of adolescent girls. Kidnapping, extortion and sexual assault were seen as the horrendous crimes they are. The thugs claiming the mistreatment of girls as a cultural or religious matter and none of our business learned that the world thinks it is criminal behaviour and everyone’s business. The notion that culture and religion are sacrosanct had begun to collapse.
And then there are the courageous accounts of women and girls rescuing themselves.
In
When Maryam Uwais, a Nigerian activist lawyer and founder of the #Bring Back Our Girls movement, met the girl and asked where she got the nerve to jump off a fast-moving truck, she replied: “I figured you can only die once. If I stayed on the truck they would kill me so I jumped.” She rolled into the underbrush and stayed as still as death until the soldiers finally abandoned the search and left with the bounty of now-bound girls in the truck.
The teenager, who did not want to be identified, also met later with Malala
Yousafzai, who travelled to
In northern
“The girls had been raped repeatedly by different commanders as they were
sold from one group to another,” Sinjari said in an email. “The
As if to underscore the impunity of the rapists in the eyes of a conservative community, the Yazidi religious leaders and tribal elders promised the escaped women could live safely in their community because the rape had taken place under threat by ISIL.
“That’s why the use of women as tools of war is psychological warfare against the men in the community,” says rights activist Allami.
Such cases are not uncommon.
Research done by the Denmark-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network shows that in countries in transition — particularly in the last three years in the Mediterranean region — violence against women, including sexual violence, is often used as a weapon of war or as a means to intimidate and stigmatize.
In
In provinces where the Taliban is active, she says, most girls’ schools are closed, female government workers are threatened and female doctors, journalists and police officers have been assassinated. Any woman or girl outside the home is an abomination to the Taliban, a danger to family honour.
Says Frogh: “In this country, attacking women means attacking the honour and
image of the family.” Like
Adds Massouda Jalal, founder of the Jalal Foundation, an NGO working for women’s
rights in Afghanistan, and a former Afghan minister of women’s affairs: “The
Taliban’s agenda … is not just oppression of women per se, but ensuring the
entrenchment of their mangled values that will make Talibanism sustainable.”
So how is it that the perpetrators are still getting away with a behaviour that’s as old as Methuselah but now condemned by most of the world?
When the international community arrived in
They probably were. But getting them out of the clutches of Boko Haram safely was another issue. Now all those rescuers have gone silent.
Says Perry John Calderwood,
That’s politicalspeak for the real reason the international
rescuers have nothing to report. As activist Maryam Uwais says: “I’ve had
meetings with
But, she says, everyone knows the government lacks the will to rescue the girls, which means the hands of the foreign advisers with their sophisticated surveillance equipment are tied: “The girls have become a bargaining chip in the ongoing combat between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram.”
The recent news of a ceasefire between Boko Haram and the Nigerian military
and the pending release of the school girls was welcome but so far unfounded,
and reports surfaced this week that about 60 more girls were
kidnapped in Garta, a village in a Boko Haram stronghold near
the border with
Esther Yakubu, whose 16-year-old daughter Dorcas is among the missing schoolgirls from Chibok, says she and other parents were told the government was aware of the locations where the girls are being kept and that negotiations were underway for their release. They were also told the government was wary of forcefully attacking Boko Haram’s hideouts, fearing the girls might be killed in the process.
“But then the government made a public announcement to the effect that negotiation with terrorists was not a feasible option,” Yakubu says. “We can only hope that the public announcement was just that — for public consumption — but in actual fact, negotiations are being held with the Boko Haram. We cannot fathom how the girls could be rescued alive without the option of negotiation.”
Says Dr. Allen Maamasseh, a veterinarian from Chibok who is assisting the families of the missing girls: “People try to make excuses for why the girls have not been found. It’s not about the north or the south or Christians or Muslims. The government soldiers are not motivated. If they were they could do away with Boko Haram in 24 hours.”
In
Canadians might remember Bruno Saccomani as the RCMP officer and prime ministerial security chief who was thrust into the spotlight in 2012 after an internal review suggested he was bullying his staff.
These days he’s waded into another kind of struggle. Onlookers were
apparently astonished when the envoy, a lone foreigner, walked into the middle
of the fray where Yazidi women were crossing to safety on a pontoon bridge from
“Everyone was overwhelmed,” says Saccomani. “It was heart-wrenching to see
these women, to hear their stories, to know some had committed suicide to avoid
being taken by
One witness to the ambassador’s surprising foray into the escape route,
Khidher Domle, a Yazidi man helping to coordinate the rescue, says Saccomani
stood on the bridge as the women crossed, asking them how
Saccomani uses the pejorative term Da’ish, an acronym for the Arabic words for ISIL, to describe their modus operandi. “It’s always the same when Da’ish takes over a town — the men are eliminated, the women are taken,” he says flatly.
Domle takes it a step farther: “These women are being used as tools of war.
They put them in areas where Iraqi and American armed forces are shooting at
Domle was on the bridge with Saccomani when two Yazidi teenagers told their terrifying story of being rounded up like cattle, crammed into trucks and driven to a town they didn’t know.
Over the telephone, Domle repeated their story: After being separated from the older women, girls were moved again to another strange town where they were denied food and water, made to cook and clean for the ISIL soldiers, he said. Then the commanders came and separated them again, this time the pretty girls were selected and driven away.
“At first they didn’t touch us,” the girls told Domle. “They said they would wait for the Sharia committee to decide what to do with us.” They were told if they converted to Islam they would be married to an ISIL commander and have a good life. If they refused they’d be sold as sex slaves. The girls soon learned that those who converted were passed around from one commander to another like sexual chattel.
Domle continues their story: “They watched a house beside them and decided
the occupants were not with ISIL. They took a chance — a huge chance — and ran
to the house. The family hid them for a while and then took them by car to the
border with
So, where are we now?
The Taliban is on the losing end of its insurgency. ISIL is being chased by an outraged international community. Goodluck Jonathan is quickly losing the smattering of credibility he started with.
But there needs to be an antidote so the next iteration of deranged actors is stopped before rounding up the women and girls.
First, observers agree, education needs to be delivered like a vaccine to wipe out ignorance. Second, the misogynist men who use genocide in the guise of a message from God need to be exposed by religious leaders as power-seeking thugs. And finally the gender wars have to stop.
Consider what women bring to the table: they’re more interested in policy than power; they want peace, not a piece of the turf. And women have long known that a sense of community is more valuable than a sense of control.
In the meantime, the lives of the Yazidi women in northern
Sally Armstrong is a Canadian human rights activist,
journalist and author. Her latest book is Ascent of Women: A New Age is
Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter.