Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Bangkok Post - July 22, 2003
Atiya Achakulwisut
"Wombs punctured with guns. Women raped and tortured in front of their husbands and children. Rifles forced into vaginas. Pregnant women beaten to induce miscarriages. Women kidnapped, blindfolded and beaten on their way to work or school ...We saw the scars of brutality so extreme that survival seemed for some a worse fate than death."
The report is part of the book, Women, War, Peace - Progress of the World's Women 2002, launched last week at the United Nations.
"The nature of warfare has changed," said Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (Unifem), which commissioned the work.
"It is fought in homes and communities. Over the century, civilian casaulties have risen, mainly women and children," she said.
According to the book, civilian casaulties in war climbed from five percent at the turn of the century to 15 percent during World War One, to 65 percent at the end of World War Two to more than 75 percent in the wars of the 1990s.
"The use of the woman's body to humiliate men from the other side and to destroy the future has become systematic," Heyzer said.
The study was started when women NGO leaders approached Heyzer personally to ask for international action on the situation facing women in war.
After winning support from the Secretary General to support the study of the impact of war on women, Unifem commissioned two independent experts, Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to conduct the assessment.
From 2001 to 2002, Rehn and Sirleaf visited 14 areas affected by armed conflicts including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Israel and East Timor.
"In all of these areas, we saw how the militarisation of society breeds new levels of violence and how impunity for these crimes becomes endemic. We saw a continuum of violence that shatters women's lives before, during and after conflict," the authors noted in their preface.
Apart from recording the violence against women, the report also discusses the impact of war on women's health and the link between conflicts and HIV/Aids. It highlights women organising and the need to involve women in the peace and reconciliation process as part of the solution.
"Some people asked me what difference will it make if women are present at the peace table? By rights, they should be there. They will make sure that the issues that they want to be addressed get put on the table. Also, they prefer to stay longer than to allow the peace process to disintegrate," Heyzer said.
Ivete Oliveira, officer of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, in East Timor confirmed that the woman's bodies have become a part of the battleground.
"In 1999, rape was used systematically as a message to husbands that they could not protect their wives. It was seen as a way to destroy communities. Women therefore faced the double burden of physical violence and having their status destroyed," she said during a panel discussion held during the launch.
Another panelist Kelly Askin, director of the International Criminal Justice Institute in New York, said that rape was not considered a war crime 10 years ago. There was evidence of sexual violence in many conflicts and wars during the past century but it was subsumed under other issues.
"Gender justice was greatly expanded by the Yugoslav and Rwanda war crimes tribunals," Askin said.
She attributed the change to the fact that in these tribunals, unlike the Nuremberg or Tokyo ones, women were represented, not just as judges but at all levels, including the investigators and translators.
Social thinker Sulak Sivaraksa who was also on the panel hailed the book as good work because these experts listened to the voices of the women - how they are deprived and abused. He cautioned, however, that the experts' recommendations including the setting up of an international truth and reconciliation commission on violence against women in armed conflicts and a sanction against trafficking of women, may sound good on paper but they are not likely to be followed up or implemented.
"There was a truth and reconciliation in South Africa, which is a commendable effort but it didn't go far. I don't think a sanction would yield much tangible results either."
Sulak emphasised that we must find the uniqueness of women if we are to seek an end to the suffering.
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