For the past 25 years or so, I’ve written a lot about wars, atrocities, genocides. All in a day’s work. Mass murder is pretty grim. But maybe you will understand me when I say . . . Well, let me quote from a piece I wrote about Sudan, in 2005:
Bestialities in the south included bombings, razings, concentration camps (called “peace villages”), and rape after rape after rape. That may be what is hardest about inquiring into Sudan: the constant rape, that great and ancient weapon of terror.
This is from a piece on Burma, in 2018:
Mass murder aside, the reports of rape are especially horrifying, perhaps. They are copious, seeming to be without end. One could go into revolting detail, but one line from one report may suffice: “The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar’s security forces has been sweeping and methodical.” . . . The U.N.’s leading official on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, described rape as “a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group.”
A piece on Ethiopia, last year:
Rape in Tigray is on a mass, horrific scale.
In 2016, I interviewed Denis Mukwege — as great a man as you will ever find.
Mukwege is a doctor in the country that calls itself “the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” (Informally, people say “Congo.”) He treats victims of rape, often of gang rape. A gynecologist, he tries to heal them physically and mentally. The second task is harder, but the first is hard enough. His patients range from infants to the elderly.
Congo is one of those countries described as “war-torn.” For years, it has been known as “the rape capital of the world.” Rape is a weapon of war, maybe the foremost weapon. It is systemic, even normal. Boys are trained to rape as child soldiers. The normality of rape has been transferred into the civilian world. In Congo, boys and men rape, and girls and women are raped. That’s the way it is.
In 2018, Mukwege was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Nadia Murad, a Yazidi human-rights activist. They were honored for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
Needless to say, Russian forces are raping their way through Ukraine. There are as many reports as you can bear (and a lot more where those came from). This is from an article headed “Bucha’s Month of Terror”:
The abuse of the woman was one case of many, said Ukraine’s official ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova. She said she had recorded horrific cases of sexual violence by Russian troops in Bucha and other places, including one in which a group of women and girls were kept in a basement of a house for 25 days. Nine of them are now pregnant, she said.
She speculated that the violence came out of revenge for the Ukrainian resistance, but also that the Russian soldiers used sexual violence as a weapon of war against Ukrainian women.
Another report, typical: “Ukraine conflict: ‘Russian soldiers raped me and killed my husband.’” That article is here. And these reports go on and on. Usually, they are accompanied by warnings: “Distressing Material Ahead,” that sort of thing.
Soldiers have raped children in front of their parents, tied up and forced to watch — as they have done in country after country, down the generations. It never changes, it never ends. Here is another report, about Ukraine.
I’ll stop now. If you’re like me, you won’t read these articles. We don’t need to. But it is important, I think, to be aware of this reality.