Punish rape as weapon of war
By Alix Rijckaert

December 11, 2007 - (The Times) Congolese activists have launched an appeal at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute those in their country who use rape as a weapon of war.

"Why does the ICC judge (militia chief) Thomas Lubanga for enrolment of child soldiers, but not for committing sexual crimes?" said Chouchou Namegabe, who represents 50 human rights groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

"This comes as a real shock for Congolese women," she said from the court’s home in The Hague on the occasion of Human Rights Day yesterday.

Lubanga is a Congolese militia chief from the troubled northern Ituri region who was the first DR Congo prisoner at the ICC. Another militia chief from the region, Germain Katanga, is also held by the court.

"The ICC defines rape as a crime of war and a crime against humanity," said lawyer Jolly Kamuntu, based in Bukavu in the eastern Sud-Kivu province.

"It has the jurisdiction to arrest the big fish...who are in power today. It is not the Congolese government that will arrest them.

"If they are punished, this would intimidate the militias on the ground and give relief to the whole community living through this trauma...we have testimony from victims which will enable us to blame Lubanga and Katanga."

The ICC is the first permanent court with the jurisdiction to judge genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed since 2002.
It began investigating violence committed in eastern DR Congo in June 2004.

Ituri has been wracked by inter-ethnic violence since 1999, in which more than 60,000 people have been killed, according to humanitarian agencies.

Army troops have been fighting rebels in Sud-Kivu and Nord-Kivu for years. In the latter, recent clashes between the army and rebels led by renegade general Laurent Nkunda have displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

Congolese NGOs accuse all sides of using "systematic rape" against women aged from three months to 90 as a war tactic to intimidate the enemy, and are demanding the ICC enlarge its investigations to include sexual violence.

Namegabe told the story of a woman living near Bukavu who was raped by seven Hutu militiamen in front of her five children and her husband.

They then killed her husband and forced her eldest son to rape her, before forcing her to eat the flesh of her dead children and using her as a sex slave.

"The women do not dare to go into the fields any more for fear of being raped, and those who are raped are thrown out by their husbands, and they cannot tend to the needs of their families any more," added Kamuntu.

"The consequences are terrible: rural exodus, poverty and an increase in sexually transmitted diseases," she warned.

"The trivialisation of rape is terrifying, as women represent 70 percent of the victims of conflict in the DR Congo," International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) President Souhayr Belhassen said in Paris.

"One hoped that after having affected Ituri this scourge would disappear with the democratic transition, but on the contrary, it flourishes in Nord-Kivu and Sud-Kivu."

The activists also called on the ICC to open an office in eastern DR Congo to bring investigators closer to where the crimes were committed.

The court has so far opened only one investigation centred on crimes of sexual violence, committed in the Central African Republic in 2002-2003 during the armed repression of a rebellion tied to former general and current President Francois Bozize.

 

From:http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=657980