Rape and genocide

This is such an important book to read, but it hardly needs any warning that it is not bedtime reading. Christina Lamb is a British investigative journalist who travels to many parts of the conflict-ridden world we live in, recording war rapes and the stories of women in twelve countries.  She interviews the victims and hears their stories first-hand. Individually, the stories are horrific enough, of gang-rape, massacre, mutilations, abuse of all sorts; collectively though, it is beyond horror; one no longer can comprehend the cruelty and dastardliness that is the human species. Be warned, this book is full of endless variations of how women are abducted, raped, enslaved, kept captive, bought and sold, tortured, maimed, and killed, with incredible brutality and impunity. And of course, what we know is always only the very tip of the iceberg.  

The prologue is already hard hitting – beginning with ISIS men putting names of girls into a bowl and drawing them out, a lucky dip, while the girls watch on. And they are just girls, not women, just teenagers. Our protagonist, Naima, is a Yazidi girl, of the group whom ISIS regard as slaves, and treat as such. She was abducted, along with thousands of others. Naima is at first relieved when the sixty year old man she knows to be cruel, did not draw her name. But then, he buys her for $200 from the man who did draw her name. Naima is taken by her owner, an Iraqi mullah, to his house.

“He did everything to me,’ she later recounted. “‘Hitting, sex, pulling my hair, sex, everything…I was refusing so he forced me and hit me., He said, ‘You are my sabiya” – my slave”

p2

The mullah’s two wives and daughters did not help Naima. Naima also had to do the housework. After a month, she was sold for $4500 to another Iraqi man who had two wives and nine children, and he treated her like her first captor. Then he sold her to his friend for $8000; this friend was a bomb maker in Mosul,

“he kept me for twenty days of raping then sold me to Abdr”

p2

In 4 years, Naima is sold to twelve men, she tried to kill herself several times without success. These are the stories, and far worse too, which Lamb collects and presents.  

“Rape is as much a weapon of war as the machete, club or Kalashnikov. In recent years, ethnic and sectarian groups from Bosnia to Rwanda, Iraq to Nigeria, Columbia to Central African Republic, have used rape as a deliberate strategy, almost a weapon of mass destruction, not just to destroy dignity and terrorise communities but to wipe out what they see as rival ethnicities or non-believers”

p7

Moreover, as Lamb hears, many women are raped in all kinds of ways – orally, anally, vaginally, and with all sorts of implements, sharpened sticks, clubs, weapons of all kinds, as well as with penises. The rapes are seldom in singular; gang rapes seem the norm as well as repeated raping over days, weeks, months, and years. And rape usually is meted out alongside all kinds of other violences: beatings, abuses, tortures, intimidations, humiliations, starvation, mistreatments beyond the normal imagination.  

Lamb first tells us of the Yazidi victims of the ISIS, then goes onto the Boko Haram abduction of the Chibok school girls. The following chapter is of the treatment of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. By this time, the reader is getting terrifyingly accustomed to reading accounts of girls and women being gang raped, repeatedly, tied up, beaten, starved, terrorised in all ways, while having just lost their family, their homes, everything. They are not permitted to retain dignity or humanity. The rape and suffering is inflicted over and over, unrelentingly, and with incredible violence. The lucky ones die of the sexual violence; the ones who survive live broken and damaged forever, mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, even if they rebuild and are strong. The numbers involved are also mind-boggling.   

Just when the reader thinks, how much worse can it get anyway, we come to the chapter on Bangladesh, the chapter about the war between East and West Pakistan that led to the founding of Bangladesh. The 200,000-400,000 women (estimates are extremely conservative) thought to have been raped by Pakistani soldiers in 1971 are called birangonas, which means war heroines or brave, conferred by Bangladeshi founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to bestow recognition and respect. Unfortunately, this caused ostracization of the women instead. The women suffered ‘spot rape’ – rape immediately when they are found, in their own homes, in front of their families. Or else girls and women are abducted from streets, fields bus stations, schools, while collecting water. Porn movies are shown to men to work them up before turning them loose on women. Women are strapped to trees and gang-raped. Some are bayoneted through the vagina after that, and left to bleed to death. Babies are shot or bayoneted or trampled in front of mothers before they are raped. Many survivors had mutilated breasts. It baffles understanding of why this amount of violence was inflicted on those who cannot fight back. Lamb interviews people who tell her this was deliberate policy and ideological: “Rape was their ‘duty’ to purify the heathens” (P97) even though this was killing of Muslims by Muslins. They aimed to change the ethnicity of the Bengalis, and create a whole generation of women in East Pakistan with blood from the West.   

Doctors brought in to set up clinics found almost every woman had some form of venereal diseases, which is unsurprising as the women were reporting being raped by up to 50 men. One doctor said abortions had to be carried out on an industrial scale and he was doing a hundred a day. Rich and pretty women were kept for officers as usual, and the rest distributed among the other ranks, raped over and over and also starved in camps. Perhaps the most horrifying part is how survivors were driven from home by their own families and villages, killed by their own husbands, made to kill their children, because they were regarded as dishonoured by having ‘let’ the enemy ‘touch them’. Worse,

“their own families raped them, saying they were already defiled”

p111

One old man says,

“When I die, like all the freedom fighters, government people will come, they will place a flag on my coffin and a bugler will play. When a birangona dies, there will be nothing”

p94

The next chapter on Rwanda’s genocide of Tutsis by Hutus (and revenge killing too, later on) tell of how women are treated when their enemies no longer consider them human, calling them cockroaches or snakes. Seeing women (or another race) as vermin is carte blanche for violence on a scale and to a degree that is hard to believe even when seen and witnessed. The survivors say the perpetrators are neighbours and friends they have known all their lives. So often, it seems the world has descended into madness and chaos in such situations. Then humans display their capacity for capricious cruelty, as Lamb puts it. The International tribunal, under pressure, sent a 32-year old American lawyer to investigate, who was disheartened to find the tribunal was not interested in crimes of sexual violence, focusing only on the genocide and even discrediting rape survivors. It took many brave survivors testifying and fighting, and it took until 1998, before the international law recognised rape as an instrument of genocide and which can be prosecuted as a war crime, rather than just spoils of war or collateral damage. Lamb continues the story of how rape victims struggle to secure any recourse to justice in her chapter on Sarajevo, outlining the stories of the women who have to fight to be heard and endure humiliations and hardships even to tell their stories, to try to get justice as well as prevent this happening further. So few perpetrators are ever brought to justice, so few serve sentences which are remotely commensurate with their crimes. This chapter also shows how even the strongest and most fortunate rape survivors have to contend with families falling apart as a result of their rapes, for generations, and their own endless nightmares, sleeping and waking.  

As so many of the women express, even those who survived, are walking dead. Even those who look like everything is fine on the outside, are hollowed out forever, suffering the rest of their lives; it is not something they can get over, or move past, or leave behind. This is known to the perpetrators, who explicitly say they sometimes do not kill rape victims because they will suffer more that way. Dr Mukwege (2018 Nobel Peace prize winner for his work on treating rape victims), who has talked to many women, says they can never recover; even those who speak out are not recovered, though they have the courage to be agents of change. 

Further chapters detail the struggle in various countries, such as Argentina, on the part of women for justice as victims of sexual violence. Sexual violence, as these chapters show, go beyond just rape, extending to forcing women to have children from rape, who are taken away from them and given away, abduction of women and children, the ripping apart of families; Lamb highlights how sexual violence is perpetrated by silence, the withholding of recognition of rape as a crime in the world justice system. She flags up the comfort women in China, the Philippines, South Korea, Burma, Malaya, kept by the Japanese imperial army ironically as a way to deter wide-spread sexual violence in war. These comfort women have been fighting for recognition and justice (mostly without success, except for South Korea), and also testify to unending nightmares all their lives as a result of being forced into being raped by dozens of men, daily, for months and years, and of living in subsequent fear of rejection of their families, husbands, societies, children.   

In a chapter on Congo, Dr Mukwege who set up and works in the marvellous Panzi Hospital, says increasingly his patients are those under ten, children and babies who have been raped. There seems no age which is safe from rape, very old women in their eighties get raped, little girls, toddlers, and even babies of only a few months old get raped – their anuses and vaginas are of course ripped and destroyed. And this damage is not just done by raping; there are accounts of how after rape, vaginas are stabbed with sticks and set on fire, or ripped apart with bayonets, slit with knives, or wrecked in other ways, subsequent to the rapes.   

Lamb does some excellent work reflecting on the need to consider the perpetrators’ reasons for rape, which are not (necessarily) fuelled by lust or sexual desire. There is of course just the possibility that rape is another form of violence that can be used, another weapon of war and destruction, conquerors humiliating the conquered. And sanctioned violence has long been used to boost morale and build camaraderie amongst troops, and as reward of course. But there is also the notion that it could be beliefs driving such atrocity, such as

“if they raped babies and small children, they would get supernatural protection so bullets could not wound them, and, if they mixed virgin blood with herbs, they would be rendered invisible”

p337

There is also brief consideration of male rape, which is even more of a dark secret, although also commonplace. Lamb talks of having examples of male sexual violence across Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, and in migrant detention centres and refugee camps too, in Libya, Syria, Iraq. Lamb contends that there is an early account, though disputed, in Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of being captured in 1917 and beaten and gang raped by soldiers, ”losing at twenty-eight, ‘the citadel of my integrity’ as he put it”( p374). (She also makes good reference to literature long enshrined of rape and mutilation, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, thought to be inspired by Ovid’s Philomela.) Lamb cites human rights groups reporting 90% of male detainees are sexually abused in Syrian custody and gives some brutal details of how they are sexually abused (along with beatings and other tortures), including being given electric shocks to genitals, having all manner of things inserted into their anuses, even electric drills, and tying the penis with string for days. Though much less well known, it does not appear the raping of men is any less violent than the raping of women. No one it appears is safe from sexual violence; from the very young to the very old, the pregnant, male and female, rich and poor, wide spread in across space and time. 

The telling of these stories is handled masterfully. Lamb neither shields the reader nor ratchets up the horrors for the sake of horrifying. She simply presents extremely complex narratives very clearly, clear-sightedly, even handedly, empathetically, ethically. It is strange to say this of such grim material, but this book is a joy too, to have such a set of accounts brought together, so compellingly, so elegantly, so beautifully paced and balanced. It is not a tear-jerker read; in fact, one is often too shocked for tears. One is often numbed by sheer disbelief. But Lamb does not pummel her reader with facts and stats and attempt to overwhelm. The facts are so stark that even this tiny slice of it, is enough to render most readers speechless anyway. It needs no highlighting. Such books need to be read, however difficult, because atrocities need to be witnessed and known, and awareness well and thoroughly raised. However painful a read, it cannot remotely compare with the suffering and pain of the millions of women who have been war victims of sexual violence amongst a host of other violences. And as one of the rape survivors pointed out, they who testify are those who survived – those who were raped to death, their stories are not heard, except when told sometimes by those who were raped alongside and watched them die.