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       #Post#: 1063--------------------------------------------------
       War Rape: Rwanda, Bosnia, and Now Syria
       By: I-Luv-Rashi Date: September 19, 2013, 3:27 am
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       War Rape: Rwanda, Bosnia, and Now Syria
  HTML http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_view/public/1024px-Srebrenica_Massacre_-_Reinterment_and_Memorial_Ceremony_-_July_2007_-_Women_Mourners_3_1.jpg
       The United Nations Security Council took an unprecedented step
       this summer. Pushed principally by the United Kingdom, the
       council passed its first resolution addressing what it calls
       “sexual violence in conflict.”
       That’s a euphemism for an all-too-common problem in many parts
       of the world: Using rape as a weapon of wartime intimidation. In
       the human-rights world, it’s called war rape.
       The Security Council resolution was a milestone because every
       other treaty and agreement under international human rights law
       refers to the rape problem only obliquely, if at all. And as a
       result, “despite the endemic use of rape as a weapon, no state
       has ever been held accountable for the use of rape as a
       prohibited weapon of war,” the Global Justice Center, an
       American human rights group, reported. The center added that
       global indexes of wartime injuries and deaths never mention
       rapes, even though military gang rapes often end up injuring or
       killing the victims.
       The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 535,000
       women were victims of war rape during the Rwanda Genocide in
       1994, and 67 percent of them contracted HIV as a result. That
       finding set off advocates who tried to bring biological-weapon
       bans into the debate since HIV is a virus—given that no other
       laws or treaties directly addressed the problem. That tactic did
       not accomplish much.
       Estimates of war-rape victims during the Bosnia war of the 1990s
       range from 20,000 to 50,000. After that became known, the
       International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
       declared that “systematic rape” in time of war is a “crime
       against humanity.”
       Nonetheless, Margot Wallström, the UN’s special representative
       on sexual violence in conflict, said only 12 individuals from
       that war have ever been brought to trial—even though judges from
       the criminal tribunal ruled that Bosnian Serb armed forces used
       rape as an “instrument of terror.” They declared that a “hellish
       orgy of persecution” occurred in various Bosnian camps.
       Now, reporting from Syria indicates that war rape is rampant
       there, too. For example, an Atlantic magazine reporter wrote
       earlier this year that Syrian government soldiers hauled a
       jailed rebel soldier’s fiancée, sisters, mother, and female
       neighbors to the prison and raped them, one by one—right in
       front of him. That, the report said, was not an uncommon
       occurrence.
       At the United Nations last year, Norwegian Foreign Minister
       Espen Barth Eide angrily declared that what happened during the
       Bosnian war “is repeating itself in Syria—tens of thousands of
       rapes.”
       
       Photo Credit: Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com
       Joel Brinkley's blog
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