Margot Wallstrom and the Security Council

Margot Wallstrom, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict informed the United Nations Security Council this week regarding the mass rape of men, women, and children in Kampal, Democratic Republic of the Congo that occurred this summer in areas patrolled by United Nations peacekeepers. Wallstrom has spent much of the last month touring the DRC taking testimony from victims. Wallstrom and others have found fault with the lack of resources devoted to the U.N. DRC Mission and response of the peacekeepers involved in it. While it seems like, a far away problem the Congo is becoming an increasingly important supplier of rare earth minerals to the United States.

Gang Rape in the Congo

Two weeks ago it was reported that several hundred women were gang raped, sometimes in front of their families by rebel militia groups in an area patrolled by the United Nations. This came at a time when Margot Wallstrom was touring the region. It is just another sad chapter in the history of this conflict. Today the U.N. Undersecretary for Peace Keeping apologized for the incident. I have spoken about the appalling lack of resources devoted to the problem in the past and their is current little indication that the United Nations will be able to change the situation in the future.

Margot Wallstrom is putting focus on the Problem of Rape in Combat

Margot Wallstrom, U.N. Special Representative on Sexual violence in Conflict has been touring Africa this summer to uncover the level of rape occurring in five conflict zones. In a CNN article she discusses important issues such as the socialization process that child soldiers are forced to endure that makes them more easily molded into a rapist. Wallstrom has been documenting the use of rape in combat as it has been supplanting other methods of violence on the battlefield.It is incredibly important work that will pave the way towards war crimes trials and assistance for the victims of these crimes.

PTSD and Rape in the Military

New regulations were announced for diagnosing U.S. veterans with PTSD that are supposed to make it easier for veterans to receive benefits however they pose a "Catch 22" for survivors of rape and other sexual trauma as detailed here. And what if the wounds did not include rape as in this case ? New regulations need to be developed in order to put sexual trauma on equal footing with other combat injuries.

Rape and Genocide: Not Just Perpetrated by Men.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents allege that a women now residing in New Hampshire committed acts of rape and murder while living in her native Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Although these charges are highly controversial, the fact that women can be party to such acts of cruelty on the battlefield should not be surprising given that female soldiers/combatants are often socialized in the same manner as their male counter parts. Whether it is during the Balkan conflict, wars in sub-Saharan Africa, or Abu Ghraib female soldiers have utilized sexual violence. Noted psychologist Brett Kahr was not surprised by the actions committed by the men or women stationed at Abu Ghraib as in his estimation after thousands of interviews conducted regarding sexual fantasy "The crimes of Lynndie England may be regarded as concretization - an explicitization- of the very same acts the one can find as a mainstay of ordinary American and British sexual fantasy life". The war, in conjunction with reinforcement of the behavior as being normative gave them license to do that which they had only previously thought about.

Jessica Stern on her own rape.

Last week, terrorism/violence expert Jessica Stern released book regarding her own rape which she says helps explain her own interest in extreme violence. Read the article here.

The Children of Rape in Rwanda

This striking project from photo journalist Johnathan Torgovnick chronicles the aftermath of the genocidal campaign of rape in Rwanda in 1994. It follows the story of several mothers and the children that they conceived as a result of being sexually assaulted by Hutu militiamen. There stories are remarkably similar to those of women that were victimized in the former Yugoslav Republic, the Congo, and Sierra Leon. The strategy employed by the militiamen was simple, any children conceived out of their criminal act would be at least in part Hutu and most of Africa only the "male" lineage counts, thus negating an entire generation of children that would have otherwise been born Tutsi.

I wrote this in 2006 regarding a piece of literature regarding the genocidal rape situation in Bosnia which has striking parallels to the Rwandan situation:

Serbia would become the most prolific executer of this genocidal ideal during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. They resurrected the concentration camp for use in ethnic cleansing operations on European soil for the first time since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. The most disturbing element of their plan to exact genocide upon the Bosnian and Croatian populations was their use of rape camps. S is the fictional composite sketch of one such camp, as seen through the eyes of a young Bosnian Muslim school teacher named S. In these camps, Bosnian women were subjected to humiliation that was in many ways worse than death. This type of denegation was used to augment the killing and cultural destruction that was occurring both within and outside their walls. S was first raped by three soldiers in the camp and she was utterly dehumanized even before the violation occurs and Drakulic states “Now she is standing naked in the office, learning against the wall. She is surrounded by hunters. She can feel them crawl all over her. They are wet, slimy, hot, as they touch her nipples and descend her belly into her loins. This is perhaps the worst thing that will engrave itself on her memory: the eyes of the strange men reveling in their trophy just before the attack”. [21] The strategy that was being pursued within the camps was even more diabolical than state sanctioned rape centers in and of themselves. Beverly Allen in her book Rape Warfare coined the term “genocidal rape” to describe the Serbian policy that was conducted within the rape centers. Serbian leaders not only wished to totally dominate Bosnian Muslim women but wish to use their bodies as incubators for Serbian babies.[22]Allen sums up the absurdity of the idea when she states that “Initially the idea that Serbs could kill off the Bosnian- Herzegovina and Croatian peoples by producing more of them, by fathering babies was utterly ludicrous…I finally understood that to its perpetrators such a equation was possible on the condition that they cancel every aspect of the mother’s identity….other than that as sexual container.” [23] S is subjected to this grim fate, and is forced to carry the baby to term. She views the being inside of her as “a tumor which will grow and spread and become increasingly visible and her body as mere receptacle, like a rent a womb” [24] This was not the first time that rape was used in an attempt to form the foundation of nation state. The rape of the Sarbines women by the army of Romulus is central to the creation story of Rome, for the children born of these unholy unions would go on to become its first citizens. Allen argues that the rape of the Sarbines Women was essentially an act of creation and not one of destruction, as is the case with the rape of the women of Serbia[25]. Serbian leaders, however, most likely missed this philosophical distinction and might have used this myth as a blue print towards their genocidal aims.