When historians read the last battles of wars, armed conflicts and the social statues of defeated people under the authority of their occupiers tyranny they will be confronted by a singular social phenomenon – rape, Systematic rape.
In 1915 Ottoman forces were accused via reports of having committing rape against Armenian women. However, due to the small number of violated women it is safe to conclude that these were individual and not systematic actions.
In 1944 the US along with the British and Canadians dropped its troops along the Normandy Beach. But international reports said US soldiers raided the homes of hundreds of Frenchmen at gunpoint. And even killed them in cases of resistance.
In 1945, when the Soviets and the Allied forces invaded Germany and during the fall of Berlin, the largest collective rape in history occurred. Soviet forces raped more than 100,000 German women.
Contemporary hospital reports that included reports of high abortion rates suggest a half million would be closer to the true figure.
In November 1954 during the Algerian revolution, a French soldier wrote in his memoirs “When we were combing and raiding villages and houses in search of the Mujahideen, I was ashamed of myself, by the reaction of the Algerian women who were running away to the stables of animals and staining their bodies with dung in an effort to cause disgust amongst us potential rapists. That picture I have never forgotten. It forced me to bow as a sign of respect to those Algerians who had to wallow in dung in order to protect their honour.
In 1994 during THE Bosnian war it was estimated that the number of women and girls raped ranged from 12,000 to 50,000. The vast majority of whom were Bosnians raped by Bosnian Serbs. UNHCR experts have claimed 12,000 rapes. The European Union estimates a total of 20,000, while the Bosnian Interior Ministry claims 50,000. The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 cases of sexual violence.
Testimony from a klainovik camp survivor (where roughly 100 women had been detained and subjected to “Multiple perpetrator rape” said that the rapists continually told their victims “You are going to have our children. You are going to have our littke Chetniks.” And that the reason for their being raped was to ‘plant the seed of Serbs in Bosnia.” Women were forced to go full term with their pregnancies and give birth. Many of the reports of the abuses illustrated the ethnic dimension of the rapes. Detention camps were set up across the Serb-controlled town of Foca, WHILST WOMEN WERE kept at one of the town’s most notable (NOTORIOUS?) rape locations, ‘Karaman’s House,” Bosnian females , including minors as young as 12 were repeatedly raped. During the trial of Dragoljub Kunarac AND OTHERS, the condition of these camps was described as being ‘intolerably unhygienic.’ And the head of the police in Foca, Dragan Gagovic, was identified as being one of the men who would visit these camps, where he would select women, take them outside and then rape them.
” Karman’s house , a location where women were tortured and raped in Bosnia “
Women and girls Were selected by Kunarac or by his men and were THEN taken to the soldiers’ base and raped. At other times girls were removed from detention centres and kept in various locations for prologed periods of time. THIS WAS IN ESSENCE SEXUAL SLAVERY. Radomir Kovac, who was also convicted by the ICTY, personally kept four girls in his apartment, abusing and raping three of them many times, whilst also allowing acquaintances to rape one of the girls. Prior to selling three of the girls, Kovac appointed two of them to other Serb soldiers who abused them for more than three weeks.
In Doboj, Bosnian Serb forces separated the females from the men and then facilitated the rape of some women by their own male family members. Women were questioned as to male relatives in the city, and one woman’s fourteen-year-old son was forced to rape her.
Curiously, the Jewish minority in Bosnia had not been subjected to rape or sexual abuse during the war, suggesting that the rape was systematic and clearly against Bosnian Muslims .
In 2003, Abu Ghraib gained international attention in 2003 following the Invasion of Iraq, when a scandal involving the torture and abuse of detainees committed by guards in part of the complex operated by US-led Coalition occupation forces was exposed. A Report from unnamed source confirmed that the US forces raped hundreds of Iraqi detainees systematically and even killed them in the case of resistance under the pretext of trying to escape. Abeer Qassem Hamza A 14-year-old Iraqi girl from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, was gang raped and then killed by US soldiers who earlier killed her mother, father and five-year-old sister in March 2006.
In 2008, The Israeli army was actually permitted by the Chief Rabbi, through a decree, to rape Palestinian women. Nevertheless reports of sexual harassment and rape against Palestinian women were (so few?) that we can conclude that they remain individual acts and their scope is limited.
Note : All those suspended and accused of the crime of rape or responsible for it could skillfully make use of the gaps of the international law, so remain free at large.
All examples above are among many things.
Finally, those above mentioned acts of rape are sometimes personal but mostly systematic. This must end.
We can’t separate the Physical safety from inherent dignity which is proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This act of rape isn’t any less dangerous than Anti-Semitism and yet I ask:
“Will the people of the entire world vote for a Universal Anti-Rape in War Declaration?”
Leave a Reply