Activists Urge United Nations To Help Stop State-Sanctioned Rapes

USINFO United Nations Correspondent.

TUnited Nations -- The Commission on the Status of Women should be in the forefront of efforts to stop state-sanctioned mass rapes, especially in Burma and Sudan, human rights activists and scholars say.

The international community should equate rape with other banned practices such as the use of chemical weapons, says Jennifer Learning, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "Rape is the lowest technical weapon of war. It is the most prevalent weapon used." What is happening in intrastate wars in Africa "is not a pattern of regular war," Learning said. "I study regular war. This is something different and needs

to be condemned as not a pattern of regular war." Human rights activists from Burma and Darfur joined Learning February 27 on a panel entitled "State-Sanctioned Mass Rape in Burma and Sudan" organized by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations as part of the two-week annual meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women.

Omer Ismail, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy of Harvard University, discussed the rapes that took place three years ago in his village. Sudanese government troops and Jingaweit militia raped 110 students, some as young as 9 years old, and their teachers. "It speaks volumes of the atrocities that take place" in the Darfur region of Sudan, he said."

Attacks on women and girls continue today, said Ismail. "Only 4 percent of rapes are committed during initial attacks on villages while [women] are fleeing; 82 percent occur while women are going about the everyday business of people who want to live -- gathering firewood, getting water, collecting grass to thatch roofs."

THE BLACK ZONES OF BURMA

Maureen Aung-Thwin, director of the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative of the Open Society Institute, said that rape has been perpetrated by the Burmese army for years, but only within the past decade have ethnic groups living in relative freedom at the borders of Burma started documenting cases.

Tourists to Burma see tree-lined boulevards, fancy hotels and bustling markets, but "there is another reality for the ethnic populations who live in battle zones that are effectively closed off to scrutiny," she said.

In the "black zones of Burma," Aung-Thwin said, the Burmese military uses "a variety of scorched earth tactics that include the razing of villages, forced relocation of populations, forced labor and rape" to subdue the population and confiscate its land.

Cheery Zahau, coordinator of the Women's League of Chinland, left her Chin village for India in 1999 because she did not feel safe as an ethnic woman in her own country.

Zahau said that in six months in 2006 her organization documented 38 cases of sexual violence committed by Burmese military in Chin state. Of those cases, five were girls under 18; the youngest was 12 years old. The information was difficult to collect, she said, because the military keeps a tight grip on the area.

"Women and girls were raped in their homes, while working at farms, collecting firewood, walking back from church, traveling to market and to schools. They are also raped while doing forced labor for the Burmese army," she said.

"At the same time, the women dare not speak out because of their fear of the army and the social stigma of rape from the community. We believe that the rape cases we have been able to document represent only the tip of the iceberg," Zahau said.

Very few rapes are prosecuted, Aung-Thwin and Zahau said. In some cases, people reporting cases are threatened. In only a few cases some small punishment was meted out, while the women face stigma in their own communities.

"Whether or not the military government of Burma has a written official policy on rape is irrelevant," Aung-Thwin said. "The range of evidence produced by victims and eyewitnesses and the lack of redress clearly suggests an official condoned practice."

"The impunity with which rape is used as a weapon is made worse by the racism and state sanctioned ideology that allows the military in Burma to justify any action that is interpreted by the military as 'defending and unifying the country,'" she said.

Learning said that the international community should be concerned about the long-term effects of the mass rapes in those countries.

"We are seeing in front of our eyes entire societies that persisted for hundreds, if not thousands, of years collapsing and dying in front of our eyes because of the infliction of mass rape," she said.

"I can tell you, those of us who are human rights people, anthropologists, historians and scholars of war have very deep doubts about the kind of society that is going to come back after the horrors that have been inflicted on them," Learning said.

For more information on U.S. policy, see U.S. Support for Democracy in Burma and Darfur Humanitarian Emergency.

More information on the Commission on the Status of Women is available on the United Nations Web site.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

Omer Ismail, born in El Fashir, Western Sudan. After graduating from Khartoum University, he worked as research assistant to Dr. Mansour Khalid, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Sudan. His work with international relief and development organizations continued until 1988 when he became the Operations Manager for the United Nations Operation Life Line Sudan, the largest relief operation in the world at the time. He fled Sudan after the NIF (National Islamic Front) took power in 1989 and since lived as a refugee in the US. He returned to the United Nations to serve in Somalia between 1992-1994. In Washington, he helped found the Sudan Democratic Forum, a think tank of Sudanese intellectuals working for advancement of democracy in Sudan. He is the spokesperson for The Darfur Union an advocacy group and the co-founder of Darfur Peace and Development. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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