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Saturday, June 10, 2000
By Michael A. Fuoco, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Identified only as Witness No. 15, the young Muslim woman sat behind a screen and sobbed as she told the U.N.'s war crimes tribunal her wrenching, horrific story of torture and rape at a Bosnian Serb camp.
Eight years ago, when she was 15, she and other girls were passed from soldier to soldier to soldier, each of whom raped them for weeks in the summer of 1992.
"There are no words in this world that can describe my feeling," she told the U.N. judges. "It was the worst that could happen to me."
Her testimony at the trial of three former Bosnian Serb fighters was met with anguished, stunned silence. Yet, the very fact she was able to testify at all is viewed as tremendous progress for women's rights.
Hard as it may be to believe, the trial that opened in The Hague in March is the first sexual enslavement prosecution in an international court--this despite the fact that parties to armed conflict have for centuries raped women with impunity, sometimes using systematic rape as a tactic of war and terrorism.
Other forms of violence against women committed in armed conflict include murder, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and forced sterilization.
In Sierra Leone, for example, human rights workers report thousands of rapes by insurgent forces and other armed gangs during the West African nation's 8-year civil war. Statistics aren't available, but the rebels' rape campaign is reported to be as widespread and systematic as similar assaults in the 1992-95 Bosnian war but has received far less attention.
As significant a development as the war crimes tribunal in The Hague may be for women's rights, the United States can take no credit because it has refused to sign the International Criminal Court statute which criminalizes sexual and gender violence.
According to US Women Connect, a Washington-based group of grass-roots and national women's organizations, the refusal to sign the statute was one of four negative steps the United States has taken in the area of women and armed conflict since the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing in 1995.
The conference's Platform for Action identified the effects of armed conflict on women as one of 12 critical areas of concern requiring action by governments and the international community. Three thousand delegates and 7,000 representatives of nongovernmental organizations gathered this week in New York at a U.N. General Assembly special session to determine whether the conference five years ago has made a difference in those 12 areas of concern.
In giving the United States a grade of C+ in the area of women and armed conflict, US Women Connect found that there have been positive steps in the areas of increased recognition of women's roles and perspectives; better interagency/departmental coordination on trafficking in women and children; strong focus on the negative impact by the Taliban, the ultra-conservative religious group controlling Afghanistan that participates in female genital mutilation and harsh treatment of women; and increased gender sensitive aid programs in conflict areas.
In addition to the failure to sign the International Criminal Court statutes, other negative steps included failure of the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, increased defense expenditures and maintenance of U.S. primacy in arms sales.
"The U.S. should provide stronger international leadership to incorporate women's voices at all levels of decision making and implementation of conflict prevention, management, resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, peace-building and peacekeeping," US Women Connect concluded.
Molly Rush, staff organizer of the Thomas Merton Center in Garfield, said she agreed with the findings in the organization's report card.
"When you look at the international scene in terms of women, there have been some real gains, but many of those gains are the result of grass-roots, local work.
Governments, particularly our government, have played a negative role.
"If government would put 1 percent of what they put into armaments into conflict resolution and alternatives to violence, what could be achieved?" Rush said.
The United Nations estimates that close to 90 percent of current war casualties are civilians, with the majority being women and children. Compare that with a century ago, when 90 percent of those who lost their lives in armed conflict were military personnel.
Those figures don't surprise Anne Kuhn, a member of the Society of Friends and vice president of Pennsylvania Peace Links, who traveled to The Hague last year for a peace conference. Kuhn, who at the time was president of Peace Links, met with female refugees from Kosovo.
"They said, 'All I want to do is live in my country and sing my national anthem and be able to go to school,'" she said. "I came away from the Hague conference with the feeling that the violence that happens in a war-torn country used to affect soldiers the most, but today it affects women and children the most.
"They're the ones who suffer the most. They're the innocent victims no matter which side they're on, either the winners or the losers."
But women should not be viewed solely as victims of war, the U.N. said, because "they assume the key role of ensuring family livelihood in the midst of chaos and destruction, and are particularly active in the peace movement at the grass-roots level, cultivating peace within their communities.
"However, the absence of women at the peace negotiating table is undeniable."
Undeniable and unfortunate, said Kuhn.
"I don't want to sound sexist, but there's a certain gender difference between men and women in terms of solving a problem without retribution.
"One of the things that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said in closing the talks in The Hague was that we'll never have peace unless we approach our former enemy without retribution," she said.
"I think that in terms of gender, it may be easier for women than men. Women should be at the peace table, women should lead the way in mediation ... They're not as frequently put into aggressive situations, but when they are, they have a tendency to make peace and not war."
Paul Wahrhaftig of Conflict Resolution Center International in Lawrenceville agreed, noting that peace work is mostly undertaken by women but treaties are mostly negotiated by men. But when women aren't marginalized and are allowed to participate in the process of conflict resolution, it's easy to see how successful they can be, he said.
In the center's publication, "Conflict Resolution Notes," Wahrhaftig wrote about the Good Friday agreement of 1998 in Northern Ireland, noting the strong role of the Northern Irish Women's Coalition in it.
"They entered the negotiations with much more of an emphasis on process and more of a connection with civic organizations than their male counterparts," he wrote. "[Monica] McWilliams, [a women's coalition leader], observed, 'Negotiation is not about repositioning your certainties. It is about changing perspectives.'
"With their stress on building relationships, the women supported reaching out to the extremists to bring them in and change their realities. Now they have a reality of mutual dependence."
Women and Armed Conflict