When rape is used as a weapon of war, it must be prosecuted as a war crime – The Dallas Morning News

This op-ed is part of an occasional series published by The Dallas Morning News Opinion section on human rights and human freedom. Find the full series here.

Under a muted gray sunset, the last vestiges of fall turning to winter, dozens of Yazidi girls and women, with faces drained of light, moved like ghosts through the crude, ripped tents of the displacement camp they now call home.

They held each other close, clinging to each others thin bodies. They are all survivors of sexual violence under the brutal, yearslong campaign waged by ISIS insurgents across Iraq and Syria starting in 2014. They have all endured more torture and death than the human brain can process, targeted by the Islamic terrorist group because of their ancient faith devoted to the tenets of the Peacock Angel rather than Abrahamic texts.

But many of these brave souls emerged from the shadows to tell their stories for one reason, and one reason only: to stop this from happening to others.

I am alive, shuddered Gazal, 22, in Duhok, Iraq, hours after she was rescued from more than two years of captivity. Thanks to God.

The young woman with dun-colored eyes and a distant smile cowered alongside her two sisters-in-law, Nadifa, also 22, and Basima, just 17. They had also suffered through the hell of ISIS captivity and had been rescued months earlier. All the men in their family brothers, husbands, fathers and sons had also been apprehended by ISIS when the terrorist outfit overran their ancestral home of Iraqs Sinjar Mountain in the dwindling summer of 2014.

Some Yazidi men were executed in cold blood with bullets to the backs of their heads. The terrorists carted off others into the darkness, never to be seen or heard from again, believed to be rotting away in the many shallow mass graves that still permeate the vast plains of Iraq.

First, they put us in a school and held us for 20 days. They didnt let us eat or drink. Only the children were given a little bread, but we had to go to the bathrooms to share it. If they caught us sharing, we were tortured, Basima said, speaking about the early days of abduction as if she were a historian, recounting someone elses story.

The children were dying, starving. They wouldnt drink the little amount of dirty water. So, we found some toothpaste and put it in the water to pretend it was milk, so they would drink and not die from dehydration.

Clumps of the womens hair fell to the ground, and the Yazidi women, children and elderly were forced to drink urine to stay alive after ISIS ruptured the only water pipe. But the worst was yet to come.

In the middle of the night, the ISIS men were coming in and yelling to know who was still a virgin, Basima whispered. And from the age of eight, they were taking girls to the market to sell for a cigarette.

However, Basima and several of her siblings thought up a plan to avoid being attacked. They tried to look like ugly boys by using a piece of a broken plate to shave their heads and dressing in some mens clothes they found hidden away.

We thought that if they mistook us for boys, we would be taken out and killed rather than raped, she said. But instead, when they knew our trick, the men came in and stripped us in front of everybody. In front of everybody, hundreds, they touched us everywhere, sexually abused us. My father and brother had to watch. And that was the last I saw of them.

Basima did not shudder while she talked. She was telling her story, but she was also telling somebody elses story. She was telling the story of so many other women. Perhaps that is how she was able to get through it, by separating herself from the narrative.

As the dark days unfurled, Basima, Nadifa, Gazal and other relatives were transferred to another prison, stripped to expose every inch of their raw, bruised flesh and selected by various ISIS leaders for marriage.

Only it wasnt a real marriage. There was no contract, no real ceremony, Gazal continued, the last chinks of daylight falling across her crumpled face. It was just rape. I was forced to be a Muslim, to pray five times a day.

I wondered how such fragile women, with such delicate bones, could take such abuse. I wondered how they lived with the anguish without proper professional support or even a proper house to call home.

Most of all, I puzzled about whether their bravery would amount to any change. Despite the Yazidi communitys very closed and conservative nature, their religious leaders came forward soon after the Mount Sinjar invasion to insist that the returnees be welcomed home and not punished even honor-killed over what had happened to them.

We just want to see this stop, Basima said, opening her scarred hands in a gesture of desperation.

With such anecdotes and accounts, sexual violence in conflict is finally cleaving through the lingering layer of shame and silence that has left victims feeling as though they are to blame and the perpetrators living free with impunity.

Nonetheless, there is a long way to go when it comes to justice and accountability.

Despite the hundreds of Yazidi women who have come forward to tell their stories of survival including girls as young as 8 years old who were sold to fighters and carted between Iraq and Syria on dusty cattle trucks no ISIS member has explicitly been prosecuted or tried for the crime of sexual violence.

The courts in Iraq are overwhelmed with ISIS prosecutions and therefore are happy to just prosecute on basic terrorism crimes, said Anne Speckhard, director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism and a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. This is not very satisfactory to those who suffered genocidal rapes and killings.

Yet it is a distinction that makes a big difference. The mere mention of sexual violence has the power to turn the tide on this war crime.

Sadly, rape as a weapon of war is as old as humankind and for too long has been submerged in the shadows as either a lesser crime than slaughter or too taboo to talk about, especially in deeply guarded or staunchly religious societies where honor is inexplicably tied to a womans virginity.

Although the language in Article 27 of the 1949 Geneva Convention states that women are to be protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault, the crime has little presence in international justice efforts.

It was only in the late 1990s that rape was formally acknowledged in war crime tribunals. It has come to be a quiet stain on almost every conflict from antiquity through the modern battles of World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Syria and beyond.

The first landmark prosecution took place in 1998 at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. However, in its 20 years of existence, that court, the International Criminal Court, only achieved one conviction for rape and sexual slavery, and that was in a 2019 case of a Congolese warlord.

It was not until 2008 that the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1820, which officially recognized rape and other forms of sexual violence as a war crime, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.

One can take a life without killing, and that is what rape as a weapon of war all too often does. Sexual violence is an effective genocidal tool that is readily available and inexpensive, useful in not only devastating victims but strategically and for the long-term debilitating families and entire communities.

Rape wrapped inside combat comes with a mosaic of consequences. Victims on a large scale might be infected with HIV or other life-threatening diseases or injuries, ethnicities might be dramatically depleted through intentional impregnation, and husbands and families often shun victims. And jarringly, the pervasiveness of the atrocity then normalizes sexual violence in society and reinforces gender inequality long after a conflict concludes.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of such wartime sexual violence has continued because perpetrators have not historically faced retribution. According to human rights advocates, rape remains one of the most underreported and inadequately prosecuted of all war crimes.

The United Nations and world leaders continue to issue words of condemnation, but words are not enough. Activists also emphasize that governments still downplay or deny state-sanctioned crimes of the past, exacerbating the trauma survivors still suffer.

For one, the Japanese government only recently recognized with a thin apology the hundreds of thousands of so-called comfort women, typically Korean, Chinese, Filipina and Indonesian women and girls forcibly kept by Japanese soldiers as sex laborers and prostitutes during World War ll.

Sexual violence over the years has also had a permanent place in a multitude of smaller, paramilitary-style strifes. Pakistani soldiers scuffling to squash the post-1971 independence of Bangladesh became synonymous with raids to rape women. Molestation was additionally reported amid the Turkish invasion of Cyprus three years later. Human Rights Watch documented dozens of rape cases in the 1992 skirmish between anti-government and Communist Party loyalists in Peru.

Yet that is barely the tip of an overwhelming iceberg, or a thickening file, as they say in the diplomacy world.

Compounding the problem is the generational damage, which is as destructive as it is widespread. The ruthless attacks also harm the young, who are sometimes forced to watch their mothers or protectors endure sexual assaults or in some twisted cases, act as perpetrators themselves.

Burma, also referred to by its modern name Myanmar, has long been a hotbed for sexual assault as an instrument to demoralize and mutilate minorities. Tu Aung, a minority Kachin Christian activist, told me that what he remembers most about his early childhood amid the savage 1990s military clampdown is not the hail of bombs and bullets. It is watching the women he loved most in the world running.

If they got caught, we had to watch the soldiers rape them, he said. Then, sometimes after that, they were tied to the trees and set on fire.

Today, rape is inflicted by government troops in a bid to eliminate and drive out the Rohingya, a Muslim minority sect.

And in another interview I conducted several years ago in Iraq, a young Yazidi mother and ISIS sexual slavery survivor by the name of Seve revealed that her four children, all younger than 10, had not only been beaten blue, swung from ceiling fans and had their teeth smashed to pulp, but were made suffer through her own screams during rape.

The more the children cried and screamed, the more they hurt me in retaliation, Seve remembered, her face falling as she explained that her son continued the learned behavior of beating his three baby sisters.

However, there are a few small steps in the right direction that could signal some change for other groups still afraid to come forth in a public way. In March, Iraqi lawmakers voted to compensate Yazidi women and girls who had been enslaved. The compensation is in the form of land, housing and education.

Iraqi society and many others continue to wrestle with the notion of children born from rape. Children often fall between the cracks without reparation, support or equal opportunity, and can endure lifelong stigmatization.

Two years ago, I met a Congolese woman in a sprawling refugee camp inside Kenya. Her name was Nancy. Barefoot and broke, she brought to light the all-too-routine nightmare of three masked men bursting into her home and raping her. Her 14-year-old son was forced to watch the horror, and Nancy was subsequently banished from her family. After fleeing her homeland, she discovered she was pregnant, augmenting the already persistent ostracizing inside the refugee camp.

Sexual violence has become a defining factor of the protracted conflict plaguing the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ten years ago, U.N. officials termed the central African country the rape capital of the world, with conservative estimates indicating that at least 48 women are raped per hour by armed, lawless militiamen.

Victoria Nyanjura was just 14 years old when she was kidnapped from her Northern Uganda Catholic boarding school on an October night in 1996. With some 139 other terrified students, she was taken by insurgents belonging to infamous warlord Joseph Konys Lords Resistance Army.

Almost every day for eight years, Victorias childhood innocence was clawed away.

Every night, they are having their way with you, and there is nothing you can do. Everything about captivity is about survival. You either survive, or you perish; there is no in-between, Victoria said in a small, stern voice. Often, you would see someone fall to the ground and think they must be resting, but when you get closer, you realize they are gone.

She gave birth to two children inside that hellish captivity, teetering on the periphery of life and death, and the whole family has sustained the ever-present psychological ramifications and social imputations.

Kony remains a free man.

And women certainly arent the only victims. Sexual violence against men is only now acknowledged as one of the most far-reaching yet underreported war crimes. I have recently listened to countless testimonies from men who disappeared into the dungeonlike depths of Syrian gulags.

On a trip a couple of years ago to Afghanistan, I visited Taliban fighters who were arrested and held inside a windowless government prison outside Kabul.

One juvenile, his stoic face shattering, told me that a religious Taliban recruiter at the secret training camp had him drugged, raped and filmed threatening to release the footage if the boy declined to participate in a suicide attack against a Western consulate in Afghanistans north.

Adding to the complexities of confessing such an ordeal is that in countries where homosexuality is outlawed, survivors are at risk of being arrested by law enforcement.

Too often, ending impunity for sexual violence is not seen as a priority, despite the well-documented devastating impact on survivors, their families and communities, said Lauren Aarons, head of the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Team for Amnesty International.

Where do we go from here? Having laws that criminalize sexual violence on their own is not enough. We need states to do the work to prosecute these crimes, in line of course with fair trial standards, including if and when the perpetrator was from their own security forces.

Ultimately, impunity for rape during times of conflict must be abolished. Without this, there is little incentive for the genocidal transgression to stop. And there is little chance that survivors will have their dignity restored and heal from the tangle of nightmares that play on a loop in their heads, their lives forever in limbo.

Hollie McKay is a writer, war crimes investigator and author of Only Cry for the Living: Memos from Inside the ISIS Battlefield. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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When rape is used as a weapon of war, it must be prosecuted as a war crime - The Dallas Morning News