Comments on: Sexual Violence and the Risk of HIV Infection in Darfur http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2007/08/08/sexual-violence-and-the-risk-of-hiv-infection-in-darfur/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:55:48 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Alex de Waal http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2007/08/08/sexual-violence-and-the-risk-of-hiv-infection-in-darfur/#comment-382 Alex de Waal Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:20:25 +0000 http://www.ssrc.org/blog/2007/08/08/sexual-violence-and-the-risk-of-hiv-infection-in-darfur/#comment-382 Selma Scheewe's posting challenges us to think more precisely about the implications of sexual violence in conflict. To describe rape as a "weapon of war" is to use a metaphor—can sexual violence be more precisely located within the logic of war-fighting? Is it a strategy, a tactic, a corollary of war—or all of the above? Prior to the Darfur conflict, I have been involved in the study of rape and sexual violence in three different situations. The first was in north-east Kenya in 1992-3, where Somali refugees were exposed to an extraordinarily high risk of rape, primarily by ethnic Somali bandits and militiamen and also by Kenyan policemen and soldiers. The main focus of the study (African Rights, <em>The Nightmare Continues</em>) was to document the abuses, to push the Kenyan government and UNHCR into taking action to protect female refugees, punish police and army abusers, and provide care and support to rape survivors. In this regard we had some success. But why was there such an extraordinary explosion in sexual violence? The same was also happening inside Somalia as the state collapsed and the war spread. Was this a consequence of the breakdown of authority? Was it a tactic by militia to terrorize their adversaries? We didn't investigate. But, given the striking and growing parallels between Darfur and Somalia in the late 1980s, the similarities are worth investigating. The second case was Rwanda, most thoroughly investigated by my colleague Rakiya Omaar. To my knowledge this is the only documented case in which HIV infection was deliberately inflicted on a significant scale. Rape here was strategic in that it was part of the overall Hutu Power strategy of eliminating the Tutsis. The third case was the Nuba Mountains, where the Sudan government and its proxy militia mounted a campaign that was just as vicious as, and more ambitious than, any in Darfur. In documenting the human rights violations in the Nuba Mountains in 1995, we interviewed many survivors of rape. In this case, rape served multiple purposes. For the ideological agenda of eliminating the Nuba as a distinct group, rape bred a generation of children with Arab ancestry. We documented official exhortations to soldiers and militiamen to do precisely this, indicating that it was indeed a strategic goal. There is no comparable evidence for Darfur. When the <em>jihad </em>failed and as the eliminationist and transformationist agenda of the Sudan government faded after 1993, the Nuba war became more like Darfur today: a nasty fragmented counter-insurgency whose defining feature was lawlessness and the local frontier despotism of militia commanders with loyalties for sale. During this post-<em>jihad </em>period, the defining character of sexual violence was its instrumentality for the garrisons. The abduction of Nuba women by soldiers, who kept them as forced concubines and domestic servants in their garrisons, served the purpose of satisfying the sexual and household demands of those soldiers. Some women were raped dozens or hundreds of times under these circumstances. It is not clear to me whether we can identify patterns of sexual violence in Darfur today that allow for the imputation of purpose and motive. This needs investigation. Selma Scheewe’s posting challenges us to think more precisely about the implications of sexual violence in conflict. To describe rape as a "weapon of war" is to use a metaphor—can sexual violence be more precisely located within the logic of war-fighting? Is it a strategy, a tactic, a corollary of war—or all of the above?

Prior to the Darfur conflict, I have been involved in the study of rape and sexual violence in three different situations. The first was in north-east Kenya in 1992-3, where Somali refugees were exposed to an extraordinarily high risk of rape, primarily by ethnic Somali bandits and militiamen and also by Kenyan policemen and soldiers. The main focus of the study (African Rights, The Nightmare Continues) was to document the abuses, to push the Kenyan government and UNHCR into taking action to protect female refugees, punish police and army abusers, and provide care and support to rape survivors. In this regard we had some success. But why was there such an extraordinary explosion in sexual violence? The same was also happening inside Somalia as the state collapsed and the war spread. Was this a consequence of the breakdown of authority? Was it a tactic by militia to terrorize their adversaries? We didn’t investigate. But, given the striking and growing parallels between Darfur and Somalia in the late 1980s, the similarities are worth investigating.

The second case was Rwanda, most thoroughly investigated by my colleague Rakiya Omaar. To my knowledge this is the only documented case in which HIV infection was deliberately inflicted on a significant scale. Rape here was strategic in that it was part of the overall Hutu Power strategy of eliminating the Tutsis.

The third case was the Nuba Mountains, where the Sudan government and its proxy militia mounted a campaign that was just as vicious as, and more ambitious than, any in Darfur. In documenting the human rights violations in the Nuba Mountains in 1995, we interviewed many survivors of rape. In this case, rape served multiple purposes. For the ideological agenda of eliminating the Nuba as a distinct group, rape bred a generation of children with Arab ancestry. We documented official exhortations to soldiers and militiamen to do precisely this, indicating that it was indeed a strategic goal. There is no comparable evidence for Darfur. When the jihad failed and as the eliminationist and transformationist agenda of the Sudan government faded after 1993, the Nuba war became more like Darfur today: a nasty fragmented counter-insurgency whose defining feature was lawlessness and the local frontier despotism of militia commanders with loyalties for sale. During this post-jihad period, the defining character of sexual violence was its instrumentality for the garrisons. The abduction of Nuba women by soldiers, who kept them as forced concubines and domestic servants in their garrisons, served the purpose of satisfying the sexual and household demands of those soldiers. Some women were raped dozens or hundreds of times under these circumstances.

It is not clear to me whether we can identify patterns of sexual violence in Darfur today that allow for the imputation of purpose and motive. This needs investigation.

]]>