Ban Ki-moon Lauds Recognition of Rape as a Form of Genocide

This guest post was written by Jocelyn Kelly and Will Cragin of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

As was reported on a number of internet sites last week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lauded the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for figuring out something that almost everyone in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda already knew – that rape is a form of genocide.

The fact that the ICTR noted rape and sexual assault can constitute acts of genocide if committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or part, a targeted group” nearly 10 years ago, in the 1998 trial against Jean Paul Akayesu, suggests that perhaps it is the recent noise made by the international community about the horrific level of sexual violence in eastern DRC that forced the Secretary-General speak up (or maybe it just shows the pace at which international institutions often operate).

In Rwanda, Bosnia, DRC and Darfur, it is clear that rape is one of the more destructive – and cheaper – ways to destabilize large areas. As an Amnesty International advertisement bluntly puts it “Rape is cheaper than Bullets.”

In focus groups in the DRC, men and women define rape as forcing someone to have sex against their will, but also much more broadly. As one man said, “The problem [of rape] is destroying our households and families, foreigners are coming and raping our wives, destroying them… That is why we say those people are destroying our communities."

Civilian testimony like this is often light-years ahead of official acknowledgment of atrocities. International recognition of problems long after the fact is often poor consolation for survivors of mass atrocities who have little left to build their lives on.

As one survivor of sexual violence in the DRC put it, “people in the community will hate you and wherever you go they will say that ‘this person has been raped.’” Despite the seemingly overwhelming gap between international policy and civilian’s experiences with sexual violence on the ground, statements like those made by the Secretary-General have the potential to set future norms for addressing wartime sexual violence.

One benefit of knowing that (albeit slow) mechanisms like criminal tribunals can recognize sexual violence as a form of genocide is that researchers and service providers can do a better job of documenting evidence of this in the future.

An interesting paper in the American Journal of Public Health this month by Hagan et al showed that women being sexually attacked by a combination of Sudanese and Janjaweed forces, as opposed to non-combined forces, were more likely to be called by racial epithets. As Hagan notes, this suggests “that the Sudanese government is participating in the use of sexual assault as a racially targeted weapon against ethnically African civilians.”

Ideally documentation like this showing systematic targeting of certain civilian groups will gain more traction as international actors increasingly recognize rape as a form of warfare. In an attempt to push this kind of recognition along, service providers and advocates working in the DRC are starting to call the sexual violence seen there “sexual terrorism.”

Ban Ki-moon certainly doesn’t go as far as this, but does recognize that “in a number of contemporary conflicts, sexual violence has taken on particularly brutal dimensions, sometimes as a means of pursuing military, political, social and economic objectives.”

The whole report, with the rather dry title “Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to Security Council resolution 1820,” is in fact very interesting and worth a read. For those of you who have not memorized every Security Council resolution, 1820 is the one that declares sexual violence can be used as a weapon of war. This newest report comes on the one-year anniversary of 1820 being voted into existence.

Perhaps most news-worthy about this story is the fact that it was news worthy. It is laudable that the UN secretary general is putting sexual violence at the fore, and is supporting a nearly 10-year old indictment acknowledging rape as a form of genocide. But the fact remains that the international community is decades behind in this area.

With any luck, future recognition of sexual violence as a form of group destruction and genocide will be quicker to come – but DRC and Darfur suggest otherwise.

[Women in Congo – Photo from fredogaza’s photostream on Flickr]