By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Apr 8 2003 (IPS)

The worst and most horrific cases of violence against women occur in times of war, when existing discrimination is exacerbated, agreed United Nations experts and humanitarian activists gathered in this Swiss city.

The consequences of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, ”as in so many other wars, will fall heavily on women and children. It will fall heavily on the entire civilian population,” says Charlotte Bunch, of the U.S.-based Centre for Women’s Global Leadership.

So far in the Iraq war an estimated 1,200 civilians have died and 5,000 more have been wounded, according to figures released by Iraqi officials.

In war, violence is created through the use of bombs, cannons and antipersonnel landmines, but violence also increases in the form of homelessness, displacement, starvation and the disruption of normal life, Bunch said.

”Of course, it will include the sexual violence of rapes and forced prostitution,” she predicted.

Sexual violence constitutes a weapon of war and can even become a symbol of the conflict itself, says Radhika Coomaraswamy, special rapporteur of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the issue of violence against women.

She explained that the values that lead to the differentiated positions of women and men, their rights and privileges, become more rigid in pre-war conditions and continue through the post-conflict period.

Patricia Viseur-Sellers, legal adviser on gender issues for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, stressed that there is a link between the way women are treated during war and the way they were treated within the societies in which they lived prior to the conflict.

In practice, ”war clearly allows an escalation of every type of illegal violence and an exaggeration of violence that formerly may be illegal that now is made legal by the destruction.”

Coomaraswamy pointed to two phenomena manifest in that process. On the one hand are the effects of militarisation on society, impossible to quantify because they are not single acts or incidents.

On the other is the sexual violence during wartime, ”which is an act that can be identified and prosecuted in a court of law,” unlike the militarisation effects of war.

The UN special rapporteur cited the example of her home country, Sri Lanka, where the incidence of rape increased ten-fold during the era of conflict there.

There were ”dramatic increases in domestic violence and in all forms of crimes committed by a lot of men with a lot of guns available,” said Coomaraswamy.

Armed conflict affects women in different ways, whether they are victims of sexual or other forms of violence, but they also participate in war, as combatants or providing support services.

The special rapporteur highlighted the role of women survivors, citing the case of a woman from Rwanda, where ethnic conflict in 1994 claimed 500,000 to one million lives.

The woman was gang raped and spent a month living in the jungle, ”with an arm gangrened by woundsàeating berries and grass until she was finally rescued.”

Instead of becoming paralysed by what had happened to her, she formed a women’s group of survivors and became active in the movement seeking accountability and justice, said Coomaraswamy.

Activist Dairam underscored that women’s suffering continues even after armed conflicts have ended, ”because men disappear, men are killed” and women then confront ”war widow syndrome”.

She added that ”multilateral agencies, bilateral agencies and all other aid agencies privilege the role of men during conflict,” turning to the men of the community to lead peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction.

But Coomaraswamy pointed out that the UN Security Council approved Resolution 1325 on Oct 31, 2000, a mandate for the UN Secretariat to increase women’s participation in decision-making processes of conflict resolution and pacification.

Renate Bloem, president of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organisations (CONGO), agreed that Resolution 1325 reinforced women’s power, but issued an appeal for a strict monitoring system to ensure its application.

Coomaraswamy again mentioned the case of Sri Lanka, where women mounted a campaign based on the resolution and were able to insert themselves into the peace process under way.

Women’s leadership expert Bunch recalled the sexual assaults against women in the camps of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in West Africa.

Not only were they attacked by other refugees, ”but also by aid workers and sometimes by peacekeepers,” she lamented.

Such attitudes of impunity are ”tied to the notion that differences are settled by domination, that differences are settled by the most powerful one, as we’ve just seen in the UN Security Council,” said Bunch.

Sometimes, she added, a nation that is ”in shock”, because some aspect of its security has been breached, violent action is taken ”in order to feel that it has done something,” that the nation has responded.

She said there has been an ”ironic twist” in that more and more women are being incorporated into the phenomena of violence, whether as guerrillas or members of the armed forces.

”If we as women do not address empowerment in a different way, one that does not involve a connection to violenceà we will find that we will not only still have violence against women but we will have also women more engaged in violence,” warned Bunch.

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