Rape breaks the spirit, and people are scared to death . . . . – Manal Omar (UNIP).
Muammar Gaddafi’S alleged use of rape as a weapon of war has reopened a raw wound in the military arena. The reports of soldiers bursting into homes, murdering the men, slaughtering parents and boys with the traditional military artillery and then gagging and beating young women before raping and ravaging them with the “gun” in their pants, is gory imagery that sends shivers down my spine.
In a BBC report, two captured Libyan soldiers said they burst through the front door of a home, shot each family member in the leg before tying them up, and then took four women upstairs and raped them repeatedly.
The soldiers said they were ordered and paid to rape the women. A clear case of “ordered erection”, not for the purpose of propagation but for subjugation and for suppression of the spirit of protest and the will of the opposition against a dictatorial regime as it struggles to hold on to power at all cost. (www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-Africa-13705854)
Libya is a socially conservative country and rape is a completely taboo phenomenon. Therefore, widespread rape over a prolonged period could create a large population of women who would probably never marry or produce offspring.
The opposition has continued its fight to free Libya from strongman Gaddafi, and its will is strong. But as Manal Omar of the United States Institute of Peace says: “It is a concerted effort to break the will of the people.” (www.the world.org/2009/09/rape-as-weapon-war)
He describes mass rape as having had a horrendous effect. It brings such shame to its victims within the Libyan culture that it can tear apart families and communities. More broadly, this trend could have the potential to “rape apart” the very social fabric that sustains the opposition in their fight for freedom for Libya.
While between 300 and 500 cases have been reported by women’s groups, it is very likely that many more have occurred. According to a Gordon Luboid report carried on a www.usip.org website, “. . . in some areas as many as 100 women have been raped. There is confirmation by the International Criminal Court that the Lybian government has bought containers of the anti-impotency drug Viagra to carry out a campaign of mass rape”.
The practice of using rape during wartime is not new. It is an act as old as war itself.
According to S. Heit (2009), it was not documented as a strategic military practice of warfare until World War I.
After World War I, these crimes were never prosecuted. This encouraged the use of mass rape as a strategic military operation in subsequent conflicts. Using case studies of documented rape warfare under the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, one is able to discern that rape was used as a weapon of terror during the World Wars. (Waging Sexual Warfare: Case Studies Of Rape Warfare Used By The Japanese Imperial Army During World War II; Heit S; 2009)
Not only women are raped in war. In an article carried in the Asia Times, the Chin people have seen sex violence against both men and females. It was used as a weapon of war by the Myanmar military.
The Chin region is situated near the Indian and Bangladeshi border. (http://unpo.org/article/1228). A report, entitled Life Under The Junta: Evidence Of Crimes Against Humanity In Burma’s Chin State, records that the male heads of five different households were among 17 people who claimed to have been raped by Myanmar troops during a 12-month period spanning 2009 and 2010.
In a Jeb Sharp interview with Anne-Marie Goetz of UNIFEM, a ten-year-old girl reflects on her “experience”. She recalls: “I’ve been raped by a Hutu soldier who came in my house. They first of all killed my parents and then they raped me; there were three.” Another young patient reports having been ambushed with six other women, all of whom were stripped naked and raped.
According to one of the women, “. . . one man raped me and another put his sex in my mouth”. (www.theworld.org/2009/09/rape . . .)
It seems ironic that in spite of the world’s technological and scientific advances, man’s inhumanity to man has become more depraved and debased. It appears that the context of war and conflict amplifies such animalistic inclinations.
When soldiers, themselves virgins, whose manhood is yet to be achieved, can be medicated and ordered to gang-rape innocent civilians, the world’s collective “womb” is scarred irreparably and one wonders whether “the penis is mightier than the gun”.
It is the raw rape of war that has converted human sexuality into nothing more than a militarized zone.