http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/82231/Rape as an Instrument of Total War
By David Rosen, CounterPunch. Posted April 14, 2008.
Sexual assault has long been used as a tool of war. But as war tactics have changed, so have sex crimes in war-torn areas.
Louise Arbour, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, recently announced her decision to resign her position and not seek a second term. Reading behind the formal language of a well-respected diplomat, its clean the Arbour quit out of disgust with the UN's failure to seriously address the international moral crises precipitated by the Bush administration's "war on terror."
Arbour had a now-famous dust-up with the U.S.'s former UN representative, John Bolton, in 2006 over Israel's invasion of Lebanon. She suggested that Israeli leaders could be charged with war crimes. "You know, in America," Bolton retorted, "prosecutors are not supposed to threaten people in public based on press reports." Contemptuously, he added, "I would just say as one lawyer to another, that to Mrs. Arbour, that she should consider her professional ethics and responsibilities very carefully here before threatening criminal charges based on press accounts."
Arbour, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (responsible for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic) and former Justice on Canada's Supreme Court, knows war crimes when she sees them. Clearly, she had enough of the double-speak masquerading as justice. Traditional prohibitions against war crimes, torture and, most scandalously, sexual terror against girls and women have seriously eroded over the last seven years. She had enough.
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The rape of female (and occasionally male) non-combatants by male soldiers during a war is a feature of human social relations since the earliest times. The Old Testament is replete with stories of the rape of women by conquering tribes. They have long been raped and kidnapped as "spoils of war" and often forced to marry their captors to survive. The abduction of Helen of Troy remains, after two-and-a-half centuries, a testament to the consequences of male conquest.