Rape as an Instrument of Total War

Louise Arbour, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, recently announced her decision to resign her position and not seek a second term. Reading behind the formal language of a well-respected diplomat, its clean the Arbour quit out of disgust with the UN's failure to seriously address the international moral crises precipitated by the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Arbour had a now-famous dust-up with the U.S.'s former UN representative, John Bolton, in 2006 over Israel's invasion of Lebanon. She suggested that Israeli leaders could be charged with war crimes. "You know, in America," Bolton retorted, "prosecutors are not supposed to threaten people in public based on press reports." Contemptuously, he added, "I would just say as one lawyer to another, that to Mrs. Arbour, that she should consider her professional ethics and responsibilities very carefully here before threatening criminal charges based on press accounts."

Arbour, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (responsible for the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic) and former Justice on Canada's Supreme Court, knows war crimes when she sees them. Clearly, she had enough of the double-speak masquerading as justice. Traditional prohibitions against war crimes, torture and, most scandalously, sexual terror against girls and women have seriously eroded over the last seven years. She had enough.

* * *

The rape of female (and occasionally male) non-combatants by male soldiers during a war is a feature of human social relations since the earliest times. The Old Testament is replete with stories of the rape of women by conquering tribes. They have long been raped and kidnapped as "spoils of war" and often forced to marry their captors to survive. The abduction of Helen of Troy remains, after two-and-a-half centuries, a testament to the consequences of male conquest.

Reported rapes of female non-combatants by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to be limited. However, given the U.S. military's inherent secrecy and repeated cover-ups, the true story of war rape will likely not be revealed until well-after the occupation ends.

Charges of rapes of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers were made by Susan Brownmiller and others during the war (e.g., "Against Our Will," 1975). It wasn't until only quite recently that the full scale of confirmed atrocities by American forces in Vietnam was revealed to be more extensive than previously known. Reports in the Toledo Blade [October 19, 2003] and the Los Angeles Times [August 6, 2006] discuss more than three hundred atrocities (including rapes) that were finally substantiated by Army investigators, and this does not include the most notorious U.S. war crime, the 1968 My Lai massacre.

While incidents of rape by today's U.S. male soldiers appear relatively few in number, one cannot say the same for other military forces operating throughout the world. Conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Darfur, like earlier ones in Rwanda as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Myanmar and Somalia, were scarred by innumerable documented incidents of rape. Rape as an instrument of war was also reported in recent conflicts in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, East Timor, Haiti, Liberia, Peru and Uganda.

Rape is the most traumatic invasion one person can inflict on another. It has long been misconceived as a sex act. Although one of the most forceful physical engagements, often involving the genitals and other body parts, rape is not erotic, not sensual, not pleasurable. It is violence and terror masquerading as passion.

The inherent violence and terror of rape finds its most barbaric realization during war, especially under conditions of modern total war. The Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, pioneered total war during his infamous "march to the sea" in 1864. His campaign effectively destroyed his enemy in both physical and spiritual senses; it ended America's most consequential military engagement.