EU: Orla Clinton in Stockholm examines a new report on women and war, shortly to be presented to the EU parliament.
One wonders which century we are living in when women and young girls in the year 2002 can be stripped, paraded on a platform and auctioned off to brothel-owners like livestock at a cattle mart?
This was but one among many disturbing details exposed in the recently released UN report Women War Peace - The Independent Experts' Assessment on the impact of armed conflict on Women and Women's role in Peace-Building.
Surely this cannot be one of the peace dividends in the Balkans?
The report exposes how violence becomes a norm even in peacetime and where the will to end it seems impotent. The trafficking of women and girls in the Balkans graphically illustrates the problem, but more depressing is the involvement of those whose duty it is to protect such women. When peacekeeping operations and international aid bear a direct link to an increase in prostitution, sexual exploitation and HIV/AIDS, hope quickly turns to despair.
Women bear the absolute brunt of violence despite all the legal conventions in place to protect them. During any conflict, women and their children are specifically targeted for appalling acts of brutality. Worse, if they survive at all, they endure the fact that their perpetrators act with impunity.
The Women War Peace report presents a challenge to change the horrifying impact of violence deliberately aimed at women. It describes "unconscionable acts of depravity" legitimised by increased militarisation.
"In today's conflicts, women's bodies have become part of the battlefield," Elisabeth Rehn tells The Irish Times.
The former Defence Minister of Finland was appointed by the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, to investigate women's experiences of conflict. With Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former Liberian Minister of Finance, she travelled to 14 areas of conflict including East Timor and Cambodia, the Balkans, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, Colombia, Africa's Great Lakes region, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
They met generations of women who have known nothing other than war, their bodies used as "envelopes", deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS or pregnant through rape to send a message to a perceived enemy.
Gender-based violence, the report emphasises, is used as a weapon of humiliation. Women are deliberately targeted through rape, sexual assault, torture and sexual slavery. Growing numbers of women are being trafficked out of war zones and forced to become sex workers or labourers.
Lest we forget: at least 250 000 women, perhaps up to 500,000, were raped during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, many deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, forced pregnancy was used as a form of ethnic cleansing. Many women were imprisoned to ensure they gave birth. In Kosovo, up to 20,000 women are thought to have been raped, many bearing children. and in East Timor in 1999, there was mass rape of women at the time of the independence vote by pro-Indonesian militia. These are but some of the systematic atrocities committed against women.
Rehn says nothing prepared her for the horror which individual women described themselves.
Wombs punctured by rifles; pregnant women beaten to induce miscarriage; women raped and tortured in front of their husbands and children; women abducted and held for years and forced to be sexual slaves and porters for militia groups; women mutilated and destroyed for all time.
"I did not meet one girl in the DRC who had not been raped," recounts Rehn. "I listened to the harrowing stories of countless women. The woman who was repeatedly raped after her father and son had been murdered in front of her and then brutally punctured by a gun to her vagina; the woman who had her stomach slit open because rebel soldiers fancied a bet to see whether the baby in her womb was a boy or a girl. She's dead but that baby survived."
Disappointingly, the report observes that women fare little better in peace time. They are generally excluded from peace processes, their contribution is ignored, their analysis is often devalued and their solutions judged irrelevant, often by the promoters and perpetrators of the violence against them. Yet, the report notes, women are often the main forces building peace and resolving conflicts.
The report proves that protection and support for women in the 21st century is woefully inadequate. There are too few in top positions to effect real change.
Rehn hopes the 70 recommendations will help. They include a leading role for women in the peace process, the setting up of a truth commission to investigate violence against women during war and the criminalisation of UN peacekeepers and aid workers who abuse prostituted women and girls.
Referring to an impending war in Iraq, Rehn cautions leaders to think it through. "I thought I was so clever as a defence minister, I thought I knew so much, until I was appointed special rapporteur on human rights in the Balkans. No war is totally antiseptically clean from blood and disaster. We must always think of whom this is really concerning."
The report will be presented to the EU parliament on January 20th