On March 10th Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the United Nations
regarding the rights of women. It was Clinton, who in 2009 traveled to the Congo to discuss rape as a tool of war. She had this to say regarding rape in combat zones during an interview after her speech:
When you have women who are denied their rights, it’s often in cultures that are prone to extremism. We’ve seen that again and again. And generally, it is such a challenge to American values and American interests when you have half a population of a country denied the fundamental rights that we stand for.
And if you look across conflict zones, where we spend a lot of our time worrying, from Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Somalia to Yemen, every place that we worry about is a place where women are denied their rights...............QUESTION: You mentioned violence against women, rape as a tool of war. And how do you change that mindset, the culture of abusing women? Because after all, in some conflict zones, you’ve even had UN staff raping women.
SECRETARY CLINTON: Jill, this is one of the worst manifestations of the oppression and terrible abuse that women face around the world. I remember reading Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s autobiography. I admire her so much. She is the president of Liberia, the first woman elected to lead an African nation. And she went through this horrible period during the civil war in her country and, at one point really feared for her life and really feared that she was going to be attacked. And she tried to talk to these young men who were so menacing. And at one point, she said, “Well, think of your mothers.” She said to this day, she doesn't know why she wasn’t attacked.
And part of what I’m trying to figure out is how do we find the language that cuts across cultures, that tries to interrupt a rampage of violence, a sense of entitlement, of power that too often motivates the fighters in these various conflicts around the world so that they stop and think and they regain some sense of humanity.
So we have taken very seriously the whole issue of gender and sexual-based violence. I was privileged to chair the Security Council when they adopted a resolution condemning it and putting forth more United Nations efforts to try to combat it. But it’s gratuitous. You could go back in history and you can always find marauding armies that pillaged and raped along the way, but now it’s almost as though that’s the purpose of it. It is to subjugate women. It is to use women as a prize in armed conflict. And we just have to stand so strongly against that. It is just barbaric and inhuman.
