Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is one of two books that I checked out of the library, forgot that I returned them and then purchased on Amazon to replace what I thought was a lost library copy. What can I say?  I guess people like me have helped to make Jeff Bezos a billionaire. But enough about me.  This is an important book.  It's about women's experiences of war worldwide.  The author is journalist Christina Lamb, who also co-authored I Am Malala .

                               

The abduction and rape of women has always been at the root of war.  Lamb mentions that the first history by Herodotus opens with abductions of women by Phoenicians, Greeks and Trojans.   In the modern world we have Boko Haram which actually means that  Western education is forbidden.  Is a conspiracy that is nothing but organized rape superior?  Lamb thinks that Boko Haram is a real life version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  

 ISIS believes rape is justified if the women aren't Muslims.  So they raped Yazidi women.  The Yazidi are a Kurdish people who believe in God and a Peacock Angel that came down to earth to share its colors.   Their core religion is about beauty.   It seems to me that this is a benevolent faith, and that Yazidi definitely don't deserve to be persecuted.   The Yazidi call the Peacock Angel Melek Tawoos.  This implies to me that the Yazidi language has Semitic vocabulary.  Melech is King in Hebrew.  ISIS thinks that the Peacock Angel is Iblis, who is a Satanic figure in their religion.

Pari Ibrahim is a Yazidi lawyer in the U.S. who founded the Free Yazidi Foundation.  She said she lost 40 relatives to suicide who had been abducted by ISIS.  She also reported that ten Yazidis committed suicide every week.     

It doesn't surprise me that some Yazidi survivors of ISIS abduction were helped to recover by art therapy.  They would probably consider art as  an activity blessed by the Peacock Angel.  Fundamentalists of all stripes tend to hate art as an attempt to rival God as a creator.   I think that any deity worthy of worship would prefer humans to be creative instead of destroyers through war.   

I really like the fictional Yazidistan flag I found on a site called Alternate History uncredited. (See Source of Fictional Flag) If anyone knows who created this flag, please let me know and I will credit the creator.  There is not, and never has been a Yazidistan, but I think it would be wonderful for a nation to love the peacock and focus on beauty.  Here is that image of the fictional Yazidistan flag.

                                  

 Back to the subject of  Our Bodies, Our Battlefields--In Rwanda, during the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu, there was also massive rape.   According to the UN report on this genocide, almost all Tutsi women who survived had been raped.  Rwanda has made an effort to change since the genocide.  They want the world to know that the membership of the Rwandan Parliament is more than 60% female.  Yet the Rwanda head of state is a male dictator named Paul Kagame.  A Tutsi woman named Diane Rwigara was imprisoned when she tried to run against him, but she was released. Possibly as a result of  U.S. politicians who included Dick Durbin in the Senate and Barbara Lee in the House, calling for Rwigara 's release.  

Rwanda wanted the U.N. to track down and arrest those who committed genocide.  The U.N. has a police force, but its mission is to support member states in ending wars.  The international police force is called Interpol.  (See https://www.interpol.int/ .)  A Rwanda Tribunal was established to prosecute those who committed genocide in Rwanda, but most surviving Tutsis were afraid they would be killed, if they testified.  Ten witnesses were killed.  One woman named Godelieve told Lamb that the person across the street from her was a killer.  She was afraid to testify.  Her husband had testified and was killed.  Godelieve herself had been severely beaten.  There was resistance to adding rape to the charges prosecuted by the Rwanda Tribunal, but it eventually was.  The judge wanted to send a message that rape is a war crime.  

The book moves on to Bosnia.  It's noteworthy that Bosnia has no memorial for rape victims considering that women were held in rape camps. There was a memorial to Russian volunteers who were pro-Serb.  Also, many of the Russian volunteers were rapists. 

I read an article about the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia by Serbs  that appeared in a British newspaper called The Independent.  You can read it here. 

Lamb's Bosnian informant, Bakira, established the Association of Woman Victims. She has 35,000 members with a database that includes date and place of rape, age of girl and ethnic background.  There are Muslim, Croat and Serbian women in the database.  Men who were raped also provided reports to the database.

There was a Bosnia Tribunal established in the Hague.  Judge Mumba told the accused rapists that they had sexually attacked Muslim women because of their religion. He considered this aggravated rape and thought it was more severe than rapes that had happened in previous wars.

Bakira's first rapist was never charged with rape even though 50-60 women testified that he had raped them.  The prosecutor said that he could be convicted more easily for other crimes that he had committed.  Admittedly, these were terrible crimes involving mass killings.  Yet Bakira didn't feel that she had gotten justice.   Was rape regarded as trivial?    Bakira and other woman victims protested outside of the Bosnia Tribunal's offices. Ten women who were raped in the Bosnian war committed suicide.  Others left the country.

It's mentioned that there is a huge bronze statue in Berlin of a Soviet soldier  crushing a swastika with a sword in one hand, and cradling a German girl child in the other.  Many German women call this statue the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist.  The Red Army in WWII raped thousands of women during their march to Berlin.  In Berlin itself, historian Anthony Beever estimated in his book Berlin The Downfall, 1945 that 100,000 women were raped in that city.  Among the World War II rape survivors were Jewish women in concentration camps who had believed that the Soviet army were liberators.

I would like to add that in 2014 Vladimir Putin signed a law that anyone who denigrates the Red Army in WWII can be fined or imprisoned for five years. I think this speaks for itself.

There is a mention of war crimes in Nanjing.  I read The Nanjing Massacre by Honda Katsuichi which didn't focus on rape. See  my review on Goodreads if you're interested at The Nanjing Massacre . 

I wasn't aware of the rapes during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.  There was an inquiry about the My Lai Massacre that uncovered 20 eyewitness accounts of rape.  Many were gang rape.  None of these rapes were prosecuted.  

It seems likely that any war or other type of conflict was probably used by male soldiers to take advantage of vulnerable civilian women. They probably didn't know or care that this was a war crime.  Nor did they give a thought to the trauma of the women in the aftermath of their heinous acts.  

Christina Lamb did a service for woman survivors by obtaining their stories and letting the world know about these war crimes.  This book was published three years ago.  I wonder if it has had any impact in regard to the prosecution of wartime rape.