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Letter to the Editor, Irish Times, 26th June 2008
Madam,
The United Nations isn't famous for clarity or forcefulness. Its vast committees seldom deliver anything more than the most muffled and confused of signals.
But the systematic horrors being visited on women in Africa have finally stirred the UN Security Council to speak with real conviction.
One speaker who addressed the council on rape as a weapon of war, Maj-Gen Patrick Cammaert, put it best: "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict." The council demanded that warring governments must stop the violence, saying that rape is no longer a hideous by product of war, but a deliberate tactic.
According to Medecins Sans Frontières, 75 per cent of all rape cases that it deals with occur in the Congo. Darfur comes a distant second, but rape has also become commonplace in Zimbabwe, where Mugabe's henchmen are using it on a wide scale to terrorise and subdue the opposition.
The brutalisation of women in war is not new. But their targeting in such sustained and co-ordinated brutalisation campaigns, is becoming characteristic of conflicts in Africa. This is an overwhelming tragedy.
The full extent of the crime cannot be known, because so many of the women keep their ordeals silent, too ashamed to come forward. And apart from the emotional and physical agonies endured, there is the very real prospect of contracting Aids.
There is no doubt that sexual violence during conflicts goes beyond individuals affects entire nations. But preaching by the UN or finger-wagging by the West will do nothing to help.
Unless international commitments are met on providing real peacekeepers in sufficient numbers in places like Darfur and the Congo, and unless bullies such as Mugabe learn that they will be held to account, the women of Africa will be left to pay a terrible price.
Yours, etc,
JOHN O'SHEA,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin
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