Kosalir bango
In two decades of adult life inside or around the military, I’m constantly surprised by how cloistered many of our uniformed leaders and thinkers can be.
While we like to tout the services as meritocracies, in reality the defense bureaucracies often push to the top uncreative beadles, most often middle aged men tone-deaf to the world, especially the changing face of warfare.
Despite being blindsided by the guerrilla warfare they encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of our defense intellectuals continue to inflict dated work upon us. Perhaps what has most mystified me is their collective inability to understand the contemporary uses of dismemberment, torture, ethnic cleansing and, most especially, rape as instruments of wars amongst the people.
My woman chums often shrug and say it’s because these analysts and generals are men, and guys don’t often bother themselves with fathoming sexual violence, except when they’re watching “Deliverance.”
But I don’t think that’s wholly true. Beyond mere sexism, I suggest that it’s mostly because they’re intellectually incurious and don’t read up much on third world conflicts.
So, today we’re going to talk about rape as a tactic of war.
And I’m going to keep talking about it.
*****
The First and Second Congo Wars consumed the heart of Africa between 1996 and 2003. They still simmer in the impoverished eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
These ongoing hostilities put some lie to the DRC’s very name: It’s neither much of a democracy nor a functioning republic and the Congo for years has been split between a number of belligerents.
Almost none represents the people who fall under their martial control.
These foes initially comprised mostly neighboring states drawn into the fray for all sorts of motives (genocide, mass evictions from their nations, plundering DRC’s mineral wealth), but today a large part of Congo is a stew of parasitical militias, ethnic bands and the nation’s own ill-trained, poorly equipped but nevertheless predatory army and police.
The groups compete with feral gangs to loot Congo’s spoils and exterminate those least able to fight back.
On Wednesday, the corrupt, incompetent, feckless DRC government asked the U.N. Security Council to begin removing 19,000 peacekeeping soldiers so that Kinshasa’s corrupt, incompetent and feckless forces could replace them.
Although they’ve been dogged by their own scandals, UN troops have served as a buffer between DRC’s neighbors, preventing a resumption of the cross-border carnage that killed millions of innocent people.
The hardest hit provinces are those along the eastern cusp of Congo — Nord Kivu, South Kivu and Orientale and their nearly 1.7 million displaced refugees.
In perhaps the most understated sitrep I’ve heard in quite awhile, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last week blamed foreign and Congolese forces in the provinces for “murders, sexual violence, and the looting and burning of villages” that “continue to have large-scale humanitarian consequences.”
His colleague Margot Wallstrom has put it more bluntly, condemning Congo as the “rape capital of the world.”
*****
In order to determine just how bad Congo’s rape crisis is, a trio of researchers – Amber Peterman, Tia Palermo and Caryn Bredenkamp – crunched the numbers for the June edition of the American Journal of Public Health.
Last week, I got a peek at the data ($15): 1,150 women raped every day; 48 every hour.
And that made news because these figures are considerably higher than previous surveys have reported, especially for women and girls assaulted by loved ones and not marauding militiamen.
The survey nevertheless confirmed what I suspected: The eastern provinces closest to the seams of violence – Orientale, Nord-Kivu, Equateur and Sud-Kivu – also confronted the biggest problem with rape.
Previous studies had tackled the same issue. The UN estimated that in 2005 probably about 4,500 women were raped in Sud-Kivu alone.
The Harvard Humanitarian Study that tracked sexual violence against Sud-Kivu women between 1991–2008 found that half the rapes were committed by two or more armed intruders. The assaults mostly occurred in a woman’s own home.
Experts I admire have attacked some of the APHS study’s methodology, saying that it might have failed to fully consider the number of extremely poor women who fib about being raped simply to receive U.N.- sponsored medical aid.
Even if we strip out those numbers, however, we’re still dealing with an extremely high number of women who are subjected to sexual violence by three types of men identified in these surveys:
- Those who serve in armed militias, foreign armies or criminal gangs at war with each other;
- Civilians who join on these “rape raids” to assault women; and,
- Those who now exploit the chaos created by the war to wantonly assault women without fear of reprisal by a state that doesn’t exist in any meaningful way.
*****
Rape of women likely has been a condition of war since men began to conquer each other, often as one of the spoils given to marauding victors.
But a generation of scholars, reporters and advocates – mostly women — outside the military has contributed greatly to our wider understanding of how modern armies use rape as a tactical weapon of war.
While studies continue to find that men suffer most on the battlefield — death, wounds, torture, incarceration, execution and other abuses –the vast majority of sexual assaults are visited upon women. And the more organized the militia or army, the more likely that rape of women and girls becomes a systematic means to achieving strategic goals in wars amongst the people.
In Bangladesh during Pakistan’s war with India, for example, Islamabad’s troops organized rape prisons and other forms of sexual humiliation to turn Bengali women – mostly Muslim – into the “other.” Sexual domination was seen as a psychological weapon wielded against a subject people in rebellion.
The consequences of dishonoring, abducting and enslaving women rippled through the larger culture, but it didn’t stop the loss of Bangladesh to separatists.
As the former Yugoslavia devolved into civil war in the 1990s, Croats, Serbs and Muslims used rape as either as a form of collective punishment or a type of terror employed to ethnically cleanse regions of enemy peoples.
At its most extreme form, forced impregnation, soldiers saw rape as a means to force their ethnicity onto enemy communities forever. The legacy of those violations continues to affect the new nations, although pain falls disproportionately on the mothers, who often are ostracized by their own people.
*****
While some researchers still argue that rape is a military “strategy” (thereby confusing what “strategy” actually means), this view increasingly has fallen out of favor.
Not that analysts deny sexual violence is wielded as a means of terror to achieve strategic results, most often in murky insurgencies and counter-revolutionary conflicts. Rather, it’s because those who study the phenomenon (again, almost all women) have come to reject simplistic models of causation.
They tell us that there is no single reason why sexual violence is used by armies and militias on the battlefield. Gang rape, for example, might spur ethnic cleansing, serve as a form of torture to extract information, punish women and their families for failing to submit to government rule or help bond soldiers in hyper-masculine military cultures to each other.
It most often depends on how the soldiers, themselves, frame their actions.
Some of the most interesting research I’ve read read along these lines comes from Michele L. Leiby, Cynthia Enloe, Miranda Alison, Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović, and two Swedes who specialize in understanding the Congo, Maria Stern and Maria Eriksson Baaz.
Stern and Baaz are particularly fascinating to me because they spend a lot of time talking to soldiers in Les Forces Armees de la Republique Democratique du Congo – which along with the DRC’s police probably accounted for more than 60 percent of the rapes in the east in 2007.
The Swedes found that many men in uniform see rape as a means of satisfying natural heterosexual urges after battle.
Assaulting random women also ensures that soldiers don’t have complicated romances that entangle other members of the military team and ruin morale.
The corrupt and impoverished military prevents men from becoming providers, so Congolese soldiers felt forced to exert control and rage on women they consider weak and expendable.
It’s what young men armed with guns but offered no paychecks or wives will do if left unfettered by tradition, religion, the rule of law or good leadership.
Congolese soldiers have come to see sexual violence against women almost as they would stealing, a moral lapse that’s easier to achieve when high or drunk.
Perhaps what concerns researchers the most is that the frontline Congolese military culture has normalized the justifications for what they term the “good” rapes I listed above.
In the mind of the typical Congolese soldier, there are worse forms of sexual assault. Those “bad” attacks could be described easily by researchers who study the sexualized violence in the Balkans or Bangladesh: The urge to sully, “kosalir bango,” the soul of a woman and her people, which is why Congolese soldiers sometimes use sticks, rifles and knives to violate them.
A great deal of well-meaning reporting and advocacy on the issue is out there (also often done by women) , but it usually fails to show the complexity the researchers above have brought to the study of war.
My fear is that the policy prescriptions nations develop to combat the very real scourge of militarized rape won’t rely on the best scholarship. Instead, much of the debate probably will be informed by reporters.
I apologize in advance for that.
*****
A final note: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that every day in the U.S. military, eight women report being raped, pawed or otherwise sexually assaulted.
They likely represent a tenth of those who actually are assaulted because female personnel – like their civilian peers – don’t often report the crimes.
One out of three women in uniform eventually will be raped, and the vast majority of cases shall never be prosecuted.
Before some critics begin to cluck about Congo, or traffic in the banal and racist language that often appears in comment sections (and, yes, I’m going to erase it if you do), I suggest that we also take a hard look at what’s going wrong in our own house.
Happy Armed Forces Day.
Tags: American Journal of Public Health, Congo, Cynthia Enloe, Maria Eriksson Baaz., Maria Stern, Michele L. Leiby, Miranda Alison, Rape, Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović, War
