“I didn’t rape because I am angry, but because it gave us a lot of pleasure,” a 22-year-old Congolese soldier told the Guardian. He admits to having raped 53 women, including children of five or six years old. There is something acutely disturbing about the precision of his count. If I didn’t want to see him medievaled, I’d cry for his lost soul.
How demoralized would you have to be not to appreciate the Hague/Jolie media-grabbing joint jaunt to DRC and subsequent press conference at the Summit of G8 Foreign Ministers? The storyline portrays a decisive moment. Pick your pet phrase.
The tide has turned. William Hague: “Governments finally confront this problem . . . historic agreement . . . pledging to work together to end sexual violence in conflict.”
Nowhere to hide. Zainab Hawa Bangura: “sexual violence will not be tolerated . . . pursued by any and all means at our collective disposal.”
We’ve turned a corner. Angelina Jolie: “many individuals and NGOs who have worked tirelessly to address these crimes for years, but the international political will has been sorely lacking”
The obvious question is this: Why now? It all sounds fine, laudable even. Like progress. Like an important change. Like the powerful nations who control the world are finally going to end this pox. But this is not a new issue. So why now? What does it really mean that the world is supposedly finally getting serious about rape in war?
The cynical answer is that the power relationships underpinning massive rape and massive impunity are pretty much identical to the power relationships underpinning the gender breakdown of the G8 meeting of foreign ministers. Put bluntly, if men’s fundamental human dignity, let alone genitalia, were being regularly violated on account of their gender, it wouldn’t require Brad Pitt’s wife to bring it to your attention.
Implication 1: If you don’t change the determinants of the gender imbalance in the G8 summit, you won’t stop conflict rape.
Implication 2: It takes the G8 Summit of Foreign Ministers to affect actual change. Which implies what for the myriad of other causes that do not blip loudly on their radar?
OK. #1 is a cheap shot, though probably true (perhaps a blog topic?). But #2?
Another answer is that Jolie has it wrong when she laments the lack of political will. At least since the war in Bosnia almost two decades ago, the world has done everything it knows how to do, if judged by how we typically address this sort of issue. There has been no shortage of reports, symposiums, declarations, news coverage, NGOs, celebrities etc etc. Even a few prosecutions. Rape in war was elevated to the status of a crime against humanity. Aside from not being the issue du jour of the G8 foreign ministers, what level of attention/action has rape in war not garnered?
How have years of effort been any different from attempts, say, to end modern slavery, protect the rhino, stop child labour or end poverty? Seems to me that this rather typical approach to ending conflict rape well resembles the work (and results) of Western-led efforts on any number of ills, especially those that tend to occur outside of the West. Seems to me we’ve been serious about stopping rape in war for a while now, it’s just that the champagne toasts of success have yet to materialize. Hence Hague and Jolie’s implying that it actually takes the G8.
Implication 3 (deduced from Implication 2): Then what the hell is the worth of all those individuals and groups working tirelessly? Our work (“our”: because I personally and my organization have been busy on this issue for years), one would have to conclude, has been rather ineffective.
Implication 2, reversed: Jolie and Hague have it wrong. Maybe the collective foot stamping “enough is enough” of the G8 Summit of Foreign Ministers will prove exactly as effective as the work of the foot stamping of the rest of us. Maybe all our professional hoopla is simply one more illusory exclamation of action to come, one more delusional expression of hope. Maybe, stripped bare, we are looking at the model for (Western) do-gooderism.
1. Talk about it.
2. Do a bunch of stuff.
3. Observe that actions do not live up to either our hopes or our publicity.
4. Praise the effort and proclaim to have learned valuable lessons.
5. Start over again at Step 1, with a ratcheted up version of the same recipe.
That may sound somewhat depressing. The truth may be worse. Maybe the Hague-Joliesque occasional trumpeting of All New! and Improved Efforts, Strategies & Conviction to Act™ functions as its own failure guarantee. Maybe it is the very act of the G8 press conference that takes the wind out of the sails of political urgency. We feel good that the horrible matter is being addressed. The fig-leaf of activity will hide the ineffectiveness of the model. When it comes to conflict rape, perhaps Jolie’s quote could be rewritten: “the international political will has been sorely lacking because so many individuals and NGOs have worked tirelessly to address these crimes for years”.
And that, my friends, is why I prefer the simple aspirations of humanitarian action.
I’ve been writing informally about rape “culture” here in the “Western” world lately and the way you opened this blog entry got my attention. I would say that capacity to enjoy rape, sadistic tendencies, are not unusual or peculiar to war combatants, low-intensity war combatants, or angry people.
It can be framed as a hate crime, but this is probably propaganda on the part of those spewing hatespeech, not their enemies. In the sense that hatespeech (trumped up ethnic rivalries or the like) is an anthropologist-approved cover for material interests in participating in low-intensity conflict (high end loot, the support of a given group of bandits at least looting enough food and booze to stay alive, or impunity from a militia’s predations on its declared enemies).
Ethnic identities are fuzzy no matter where you look – in the bush or the city center – and one chooses sides no matter what the family tree looks like, by reading one’s own roots selectively. But as long as experts on conflict are content to naturalize violence waged in the name of ethnic rivalry, no more critical appraisal of the priorities of local stakeholders will come to light, and Westerners will at most hem and haw over whether or not the European and American foreign policy special interests are fomenting war for their own interests.
Prunier’s snarky tangent about the rhetorical character of Anglophone/Francophone rivalries for influence in Africa in “The Rwanda Crisis” made me laugh out loud. One thing I find thoroughly convincing about his assessment of the genocide was that if the ethnic identities at stake hadn’t already existed, they would have had to be invented, and the spiritual character of the “tribal” communities in Rwanda’s precolonial (i.e., pre-Christian) past was one of personality cults, not a coherent overarching religious system of strong institutions and regionally broad-based ethnic cohesion. Shamanic cults were remarked upon as a factor in the independence war that produced Zimbabwe, but even there the ethnographic literature points toward ad hoc use of ritual and an overlay of invented tradition owing to colonial influence before the end of that era, one that the rebels could co-opt more easily than they could turn back the clock.
To circle back to the topic of your post, I doubt taking conflict rape conceptually out of the context of ongoing “low-intensity” conflict is going to produce feasible measures to deter this kind of predation against civilians. Elevating the attention paid to a particular type of war crime might be hip right now because feminizing victimization could make humanitarian efforts sound more palatable to Westerners who are increasingly disaffected with their options when asked to take sides in an African war. The diminishing pool of foreign correspondents gives them little information to go on, and a superficial appraisal tells them only that taking an interest in governance is the exception to the rule among “freedom” fighters, yet the fighters defending existing regimes are often implicated in violence against civilians too.
And they’ve figured out that the Congo is a minerals rich region where everyone paying lip-service to humanitarian interest is theoretically suspect for having a conflict of interest, in terms of wanting access to the resources in question. Some hard-nosed reporting on the regional economic interests in question that sets aside the question of who looks more “neo-colonial” in favor of logistical resource flow discussion and who demonstrates a concrete conflict of interest might do more good.
Having an interest in minerals trading wouldn’t have to look morally compromising if the reporting were holistic and analytical enough in evaluating the relationship between the economic players and diplomacy initiatives in question. Special interest group lobbying in the arena of foreign policy is not monolithic by economic sector. And legitimate overtures from investors who could make governance in the region more economically viable (depending on how much local capture of extractive resource rents is permitted) wouldn’t be that hard to distinguish from the predatory investing one hears so much about in rants about globalization. The problem could just be that the more asshole-scale minerals-sector interest groups have invested more in mass media capture (especially the fossil fuels junkies), and given global markets for natural resources an exceptionally bad name.
I looked at one of the papers published by the think tank you cited, Insecurity Insight, on election-cycle organized rape as a terror tactic against the opposition party in Zimbabwe. This, I think, is another sign that “conflict rape” isn’t quite the issue, but it does legitimize attention to rape in particular – more effectively than “conflict rape” does. Because this isn’t the only country where election-cycle violence against opposition parties, including rape, is being reported.
“Rape, murder, and fraud were excluded [from a government amnesty for political crimes in 2000], but because the police ignored those crimes as well, it
was a de facto blanket amnesty ..”
Ironically, the U.S. justice system has entirely similar problems, with rape cases rarely prosecuted and exceedingly difficult to win, and police involvement in domestic violence cases largely considered a nuisance by victims, rather than a source of badly needed support. Local political cultural change would have to be deep and authentic, to reverse this tendency for rape victims to be so easily silenced that this type of assault is a preferred peacetime tactic for terrorizing the opposition. Harassing civilians in the community with intermittent acts of violence for which the perpetrators and political organizers alike enjoy impunity could, under present circumstances, be cheaper and more effective than locking up political prisoners and abusing them in custody.
Hello,
wow, I’m surprised that I started reading and realized what the flooring, 53 people are raped and children inluyendo, WOW!
Insurance must not have heart that soldier .. to do such a thing.
Very good post, it is so because from now on I will follow!
Greetings and a big hug!
Thanks for commenting.