In Colombia, rival groups rape, mutilate and kill women and girls in order to impose "punitive codes of conduct on entire towns and villages", so strengthening their control. Sexual violence is also used to destabilise communities and sow terror, Amnesty says in its Lives Blown Apart report. Such attacks cause women and children to flee their homes, lead to fragmentation of communities and bring the risk of infection with HIV/Aids. "They were saying 'we will make you breed Punjabi children'," she said, with the aim of weakening the integrity of the opposing ethnic group.Īmnesty this year accused the pro-government Janjaweed militias in Sudan's Darfur region of using mass rape in order to punish, humiliate and control non-Arab groups. "Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community," she said.Įx-"comfort women" in Korea hold a weekly rally demanding reparations
Rape is often used in ethnic conflicts as a way for attackers to perpetuate their social control and redraw ethnic boundaries, she said. Gita Sahgal, of Amnesty International, told the BBC News website it was a mistake to think such assaults were primarily about the age-old "spoils of war", or sexual gratification. So what motivates armed forces, whether state-backed troops or irregular militia, to attack civilian women and children? The opportunistic rape and pillage of previous centuries has been replaced in modern conflict by rape used as an orchestrated combat tool.Īnd while Amnesty cites ongoing conflicts in Colombia, Iraq, Sudan, Chechnya, Nepal and Afghanistan, the use of rape as a weapon of war goes back much further.įrom the systematic rape of women in Bosnia, to an estimated 200,000 women raped during the battle for Bangladeshi independence in 1971, to Japanese rapes during the 1937 occupation of Nanking - the past century offers too many examples. Rape and sexual abuse are not just a by-product of war but are used as a deliberate military strategy, it says.
Women's bodies have become part of the terrain of conflict, according to a new report by Amnesty International. The UN has accused the Janjaweed militia in Sudan of using mass rape
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