UN’s Corrosive Neglect of Women

Most people seemed to be suitably impressed when, on June 19, the US got its ducks in a row and convinced all the members of the UN Security Council to pass a resolution aimed at doing “something” about women who are raped and otherwise abused during armed conflict.  I expressed scepticism, given at least in part because the US, the UN and the world have sat idly by for years while atrocities were committed against women and girls in Darfur and Congo.

At The Nation, Barbara Crossette expresses similar scepticism, pointing out that, while the UN resolution has been widely touted as establishing the principle that rape is a tactical war crime, this is not so. 

War crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkans have convicted men for rape. Sexual abuse is enshrined as a war crime in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

This new resolution, as I think could be expected, has no teeth.  It sets out no sanctions for countries which ignore it, saying only that the UN may

“adopt appropriate steps to address widespread or systematic sexual violence.” But only “where necessary,” whatever that means.

And as Stephen Lewis has pointed out, the UN resolution that renewed its peacekeeping mandate with the Democratic Republic of Congo

… contained some of the strongest language condemning rape and sexual violence ever to appear in a Security Council resolution, and obliged MONUC, in no uncertain terms, to protect the women of the Congo. The resolution was passed at the end of December last year.

In January of this year, scarce one month later, there was an “Act of Engagement”–a so-called peace commitment signed amongst the warring parties. I use “so-called” advisedly because evidence of peace is hard to find. But that’s not the point: the point is much more revelatory and much more damning.

The peace commitment is a fairly lengthy document. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the word “rape” never appears. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the phrase “sexual violence” never appears. Unbelievably, “women” are mentioned but once, lumped in with children, the elderly and the disabled. It’s as if the organizers of the peace conference had never heard of the Security Council resolution.

But it gets worse. The peace document actually grants amnesty–I repeat, amnesty–to those who have participated in the fighting. To be sure, it makes a deliberate legal distinction, stating that war crimes or crimes against humanity will not be excused. But who’s kidding whom? This arcane legal dancing on the head of a pin is not likely to weigh heavily on the troops in the field, who have now been given every reason to believe that since the rapes they committed up to now have been officially forgiven and forgotten, they can rape with impunity again. And indeed, as Dr. Mukwege testified before Congress just last week, the raping and sexual violence continues.

The war may stutter; the raping is unabated.

I pointed out in my previous post that, if the UN was serious, it would at least include women in the debate, since the women of Congo and Darfur and Rwanda and the Balkans are, unfortunately, the experts.  However, even when it has committed itself to doing so, the UN seems happy to ignore its committments to including women in these kinds of processes.  The “peace process” in Congo was essentially orchestrated by the UN.  Despite its own Resolution 1325, passed nearly eight years ago, which called for the active participation of women in all stages of peace negotiations, Lewis points out

… there was no one at that peace table directly representing the women, the more than 200,000 women, whose lives and anatomies were torn to shreds by the very war that the peace talks were meant to resolve.

Thus does the United Nations violate its own principles.

From a bureaucratic point of view, and the UN might stun Kafka for the complexity and irrationality of its bureacracy, it is the UN’s Population Fund which provides money to care for women and girls who have been physically and sexually violated.  Of course, the Population Fund is chronically underfunded and “pathetically weak on the ground.” [Lewis]  Crossette points out that

… the administration in Washington … has cut off aid – now totaling nearly $300 million over seven years, with the latest installment axed on June 27 – to the United Nations Population Fund, which tries to help sexually violated women meet their most urgent and intimate needs, including safe abortions and “morning after” contraceptives. A woman in a besieged refugee camp is not terribly interested in lectures about abstinence, either.

[emphasis mine]

Further, rather than upsetting everyone by resolving to impose any form of sanction against countries in violation of the various resolutions,

… the resolution calls for another report by the Secretary General, due next June. The mandate for the report is peppered with words such as analysis, benchmarks and proposals. In the intervening year, countless women will die, and girls will become sex slaves to brutal armies and pick-up militias – the Burmese military and the warlords of Congo come to mind.

In Congo, the brutalizing of women and girls has been going on for eight years and has been all too well documented.  It’s very difficult to see what another report could contribute in any case and quite unbearable to know that so many more women will be added to the already mindnumbing numbers of the maimed and permanently injured.

In his cry of outrage about the “criminal international misogyny” currently ignored by the world and dealt with completely ineffectually by the UN, Stephen Lewis set out exactly what needed to happen.  And it wasn’t yet another resolution and another report:

 The Secretary-General should summon the heads of the twelve UN agencies allegedly involved in “UN Action” on violence against women and read the riot act. He should explain to them that press releases do not prevent rape, and he should demand a plan of action on the ground, with dollars and deadlines. He should equally summon the heads of the ten agencies that comprise UNAIDS and demand a plan of implementation for testing, treatment, prevention and care for women who have been sexually assaulted, again with deadlines. I’m prepared to bet that UNAIDS has never convened such a meeting, despite the fact that the violence of the sexual assaults in the Congo creates avenues in the reproductive tract through which the AIDS virus passes. Dr. Mukwege talks of increased numbers of HIV-positive women turning up at Panzi.

The Secretary-General, taking a leaf from Eve Ensler, should insist on a network of rape crisis centers, rape clinics in all hospitals, sexual violence counsellors, and Cities of Joy right across the Eastern Congo… indeed, across the entire country. The Secretary-General should demand a roll call, an accounting of which countries have contributed financially to ending the violence, and in what amounts, plus those who have not, and then publish the results for the world to see so that the recalcitrants can be brought to the bar of public opinion (How’s this for a juxtaposition by way of example: over the course of over a decade? The UN Trust Fund to end Violence Against Women has triumphantly reached $130 million. The United States spends more than $3 billion/week on the war in Iraq).

But there’s more. The Secretary-General should launch a personal crusade to double the troop complement–that is, MONUC–in the Congo. The protection provisions in the new so-called peace accord, for women, cannot be implemented with the current troop numbers, large though they may seem.

And finally, the Secretary-General should pull out all the stops in getting the United Nations to agree that the Congo is the best test case for the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect.” This principle was universally endorsed by heads of state at the United Nations in September of 2005. It’s the first major contemporary international challenge to the sanctity of sovereignty. It simply asserts that where a government is unable or unwilling to protect its own people from gross violations of human rights, then the international community has the responsibility to intervene. That responsibility can be diplomatic negotiation, or economic sanctions, or political pressure or military intervention–whatever it takes to restore justice to the oppressed. Responsibility to Protect was originally drafted with Darfur in mind–it’s equally applicable to the Congo. We have to start somewhere.

But the UN hasn’t.  It hasn’t started.  We are less than naive if we settle for what the UN has offered.  One more resolution, lots of media attention, a visit from Condoleeza Rice and then all falls quiet for a year until a silly report tells us what we have known for far too long.  I’m not sure who, now, will take responsibility for the women of Congo and Darfur and Burma.  It’s unlikely to be the UN.  And we truly can’t blame countries other than our own:

.. there is an underlying, more corrosive reluctance among member nations of the UN to confront the issue of abuses against women generally. UN documents, mission statements, guidelines, how-not-to books and years of speeches have paid lip service to ending the routine abasement of women in many places, in peace as well as war. In the UN there are slogans about how “women’s rights are human rights” and commitments to gender mainstreaming and statements about the empowerment of women as the key to ending poverty. Yet UN statistics on the lives of the majority of the world’s women, particularly in Africa and South Asia, tell a different story–a story of absent rights, the denial of schooling, the lack of control over their own bodies. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is lining up a hoped-for 1 million signers of a petition against violence, to add to the archive of ringing declarations from international conferences and exhortations by UN officials. Governments are asked to make a public pledge: “Say no to violence against women.”

Pledges? Why not just do something.