The government is absolutely within its rights to decide who gets its aid dollars, but decisions have consequences, and it is important to shine the spotlight on the kind of people our government has decided it is not in our interest to help.
These are essentially victims of sexual violence, and their numbers beggar belief. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2002 alone, 150 million girls and 73 million boys experienced “forced sexual intercourse” or other forms of sexual violence across the globe.
But immediately, those who would be most affected by Canada’s decision are largely women and children in conflict zones around the world.
They are the ones who are often kidnapped, captured, detained or abducted from their homes by assorted military bands, and used as sexual objects by cruel and brutal men. This obnoxious behaviour has become a weapon of war, used to terrorize, humiliate and subjugate opponents.
According to a 1996 UN Report, between 250,000 and 500,000 Rwandan women and girls were raped during the Hutu uprising, resulting in a lifetime of torment and about 20,000 pregnancies. During the Bosnian war, about 50,000 women were raped. In the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, now the heartland of war rape, international agencies estimate that there are about 200,000 surviving rape victims. About 30 per cent of the victims are women, but men and boys suffer as well. Victims range from one to 80 years old.
“Let us be clear what we are speaking of,” actress and UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie told the Security Council in June. “Young girls raped and impregnated before their bodies are able to carry a child, causing fistula; boys held at gunpoint and forced to sexually assault their mothers and sisters; women raped with bottles, wood branches and knives to cause as much damage as possible; toddlers, even babies dragged from their homes and violated.”
Here’s what Zainab Bangura, the UN envoy on sexual violence in conflict, told the Security Council this spring about eastern Congo: “I visited a community where last year, 11 babies between six and 12 months old were raped by elements of Mai Mai Morgan,” she said referring to one the rebel factions.
Bangura also revealed that in the same area, 59 children aged between one and three, and 182 children between five and 15 years old, were raped last year.
These victims are faceless people who suffer in silence because of the shame, but every so often, their heart-rending stories emerge in UN, and other international aid agency reports, and they make grim reading. And for these victims, the scars of rape never heal.
Listen to Fika, who was 15, when she and her 17-year-old sister were captured by Bosnian Serb soldiers during the war in the 1990s, and raped.
“We were forced to watch each other being raped, and I still feel the pain and the pain of my sister (who died at the hands of their captors),” she told Reuters 20 years later.
“For me, the war never ended, and it will never be.”
A young girl named Pamela told Save the Children how she was raped near a refugee camp in the DR Congo, after her village was attacked.
“I’d been in the camp for three days. I’d gone to collect water, and as I was leaving ... I met three boys. They grabbed me. One took my legs, and the other took my hands ... After the rape I wanted to leave the house and return home. But people told my mother and she said I had to stay there,” Pamela said.
Rejected by her family, she ended up with the attacker as his wife. Seven months into her pregnancy he abandoned her.
There’s also 18-year-old Marianne, who bore a war-rape child in eastern DR Congo, and was then left destitute.
“I have nothing to give the child. How can I return to school? I am a woman with a bad reputation. I am a woman without value, they look down on me, are disgusted with me,” she said.
“I cannot go to study anymore. I am a woman without future.”
Remember, she was the one who was raped.
And this is what a woman told Save the Children in December last year about a 14-year-old Somali girl.
“Two months ago, I saw a 14-year-old girl raped in front of my own eyes. She was so badly damaged that she could not hold her urine in.”
Here’s what a Mayan woman told Stanford University researcher Victoria Sanford about her ordeal at the hands of Guatemalan soldiers in the 1990s:
“The soldiers set fire to our villages. They shot our husbands and brothers, burned our houses. They stopped to wait for the sound of our babies crying. When they cried, the soldiers came toward the wailing. They killed our babies. They raped us.”
According to Save the Children, which has documented the atrocity across continents, the most vulnerable are adolescent girls, and pregnancy has become a leading cause of death among girls aged 15 to 19 because of unsafe abortions and complications from giving birth.
This is why safe abortions, which are recognized as a right by the Geneva Convention, are a necessary part of the range of services war rape victims need. It is not an ideological issue, but a life-and-death issue for many of the young girls, and clinics have been set up for those who need the service.
But this is what the Canadian government refuses to help fund. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in good company. President Barack Obama refuses to lift restrictions in U.S. law against the use of U.S. aid dollars to fund abortion services, and the only country that is championing the cause is the United Kingdom.
According to the Department for International Development, “the UK development budget can be used, without exception, to provide safe abortion care where necessary, and to the extent allowed by national laws.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague’s efforts have led to the adoption of a resolution banning war rape, which has now been signed by more than 100 countries.
“Sexual violence is to destroy lives, tear apart communities and achieve military objectives in just the same way that tanks are bullets are,” Hague told the Security Council. “It is time to say that rape and sexual violence used as a weapon of war is unacceptable, that we know it can be prevented, and that we will act now to eradicate it.”
I wish Canada were speaking the same language.
Mohammed Adam is a member of the Citizen’s editorial board.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Mohammed Adam
No comments:
Post a Comment