MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Kelly Askin discusses the increasing attention paid to gender-based violence in genocidal situations. Askin is the Senior legal officer with the International Justice program at Open Society Justice Initiative.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is Kelly Askin who’s the Senior Legal Officer in the International Justice Program in Open Society’s Justice Initiative. Kelly, thank you for joining me today.
KELLY ASKIN: My pleasure. Thank you.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: In addition to speaking with us today, Kelly will also be at the Museum on February 11 at 8 p.m. for a program we’re hosting called One Night One Voice: Spotlighting Rape as a War Crime. So anyone in the D.C. area, we’d like to welcome you to come down to the museum, please RSVP to genocideprevention@ushmm.org. For those of you who cannot make it to the Museum, we will also be live webcasting the program. For more information visit www.ushmm.org/conscience.
Kelly, to start us off what is gender based violence? What does the term mean?
KELLY ASKIN: Well, gender based violence is essentially a range of different forms of physical, mental, or sexual harm directed at a person or a group of people, most typically females, largely based on socially constructed stereotypes or imbalances such as unequal power relationships or discriminatory practices. More simply put it is often violence inflicted on a woman simply because she is female.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Often it’s used almost synonymously with rape. From your description that’s clearly only one component of what the violence includes.
KELLY ASKIN: Oh, well that’s right. It’s a huge range of different forms of violence: sexual slavery; it can be domestic violence; it can be economic violence; it’s a huge range of not just physical violence but mental violence as well inflicted on a person.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: How does gender based violence, which clearly can happen in a wide number of circumstances whether it’s in the case conflict or not and throughout societies around the world, how has it intersected in genocidal situations?
KELLY ASKIN: Well, we’re seeing it certainly more clearly in the last ten years. During periods of armed conflict or mass violence women are often subjected to additional abuses for many reasons, both opportunistically and strategically. Some women are abused perhaps because the atmosphere of violence and the breakdown of law and order create the opportunity, but many women and girls are intentionally and ruthlessly targeted for abuse, specifically because of their gender. Increasingly, and maybe it hasn’t been increasingly but we know it because it’s now being prosecuted, rape and other forms of sexual violence such as sexual slavery are used as weapons of war. Essentially women and girls are intentionally targeted for attack because an attack against them has been calculated to inflict vast terror and destruction on far more than just the women. It also arms their families, their communities, a much broader group than just the targeted victims.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You mentioned that increasingly because of legal decision people are learning, I hope, to pay more attention to gender based violence in genocidal situations. When did that turn? When did that change start happening?
KELLY ASKIN: Well, the first and the most groundbreaking decision, was in 1998 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This was a tribunal set up after the Rwandan genocide in 1994 in which over 700,000 people were systematically slaughtered in a hundred day period. The first judgment before this court was handed down against Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998. In that case, for the first time in history, Akayesu was convicted of not only rape as a crime against humanity with a Trial Chamber finding that rape was committed on both a widespread and a systematic basis throughout Rwanda, and this is groundbreaking in itself, but also it was the first time ever that a person was convicted of genocide acts which included sexual violence. The Trial Chamber found that huge numbers of Tutsi women and girls were raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence such as forced nudity with the intent to destroy members of the Tutsi group through inflicting serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, which is one of the criteria for genocide.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: That charge was not part of the initial indictment against Akayesu, and you and a range of international women’s rights groups were critical in getting it added. Can you talk a little bit about what happened? How did that change come about?
KELLY ASKIN: Well, you’re absolutely right. It’s clear that without women’s groups, and individuals, and the presence of a female judge on the case this conviction would not have taken place. First, because the historical practice of ignoring gender based crimes, treating them as inevitable byproducts of war or minor incidents instead of crimes of serious violence. Women’s human rights organizations and scholars put pressure on the Rwanda Tribunal, and at that time also the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to take gender crimes seriously and to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and they did so through a range of efforts including letters to the judges and prosecutors and an amicus brief.
In this particular case, Akayesu, as you mentioned, was not originally charged with any forms of sexual violence. He was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes for nonsexual crimes. But on the stand in the midst of trail one woman spontaneously testified about the gang rape of her six-year-old daughter and a subsequent witness testified that she had been raped and she had witnessed many other rapes. And Judge Pillay from South Africa, who was one of the three judges on that trial, and incidentally at the time the sole female judge sitting on the Rwanda Tribunal, she started asking the witnesses some questions. And when it became clear that rape was widespread and systematic she invited the prosecutor to consider investigating the crime, and if found to have occurred and attributable to Akayesu, the defendant on trial, to amend the indictment, to bring the charges. That’s exactly what happened. They did go back and finally investigate sexual violence, found that it was extremely prevalent and prosecuted. Otherwise we would not have this jurisprudence without the pressure from the women’s organizations and the presence of a female judge. They played an indispensable role.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I feel like I got stuck when you mentioned the witness who said the gang rape of her six-year-old daughter. I mean, obviously we’re talking about violence of extraordinary cruelty.
It’s an impressive story, though, how international women’s groups have stood up for the rights of women.
KELLY ASKIN: And when victims come and tell their stories, even judges who don’t believe that these are serious crimes, when they hear what has happened to young girls, they get it. They start to get it when they hear the details of the crimes. How this isn’t like in some judge’s mind domestic crimes where a woman is walking down the street in a short skirt and they have these stereotypes in their mind. In these situations it’s just mass violence inflicted upon some of most vulnerable and young children, and just as savagely and horribly as possible.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: After the Akayesu case there were also some cases in Bosnia that were held at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Did they also contribute to changing how the laws perceive this kind of violence?
KELLY ASKIN: Absolutely. There were a handful of cases in the Tribunals, the Čelebići case, the Furundžija, the Kunarac, the Kvočka case that joined with some of the cases coming out of the Rwanda Tribunal, and started changing mindsets. They became just powerful precedents shattering the notion that sex crimes are not serious crimes, and in fact insisting that they’re among the most heinous crimes committable. We now have ten years ago, 11 years ago there was debate whether rape was a war crime and now it’s accepted as a crime against humanity, a war crime. It has been prosecuted successfully as a form of torture, a means of enslavement, a form of persecution. They’ve prosecuted forced marriage, for instance in the Special Court of Sierra Leone. Sexual slavery, forced nudity just shattered the illusion that these aren’t serious crimes.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Have you seen a difference in how the international community, whatever that stands in for at any given moment, how it has responded to reports of gender based violence in Darfur?
KELLY ASKIN: Yes, there’s no longer as much need to just basically beg them to investigate these crimes. People are now starting to at least get it that these are serious crimes. It’s in the Rome Statute, and in fact in the Rome Statute, the statute that created the International Criminal Court, it’s not only rape but sexual slavery, and forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and forced sterilization and other forms of sexual violence of comparable gravity which can be prosecuted as war crimes, crimes again humanity and genocide. There is much more acceptance now that these are serious crimes and they deserve prosecution.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What is your sense today of what are the leading issues in trying to make sure that these kinds of crimes not only are accepted as law and as heinous crimes but are responded to adequately -- and ideally prevented -- but at least responded to adequately and that prosecutions continue to move forward?
KELLY ASKIN: Well, I guess I would point to two things, the presence of women as judges, as prosecutors, as investigators, as people at all levels in these courts and in decision making positions. That has been absolutely critical. You didn’t really have that at Nuremberg, or Tokyo, or many previous war crimes trial. But also absolutely important to address the stereotypes and root causes. Shame and stigmas of rape in particular are reasons that sexual violence are powerful weapons of destruction. When we reverse those shame and stigmas, when we take the shame off the woman and put it where it belongs on the perpetrator, and when we don’t treat women as spoiled goods, but instead treat the perpetrator as weak and cowardly, then we take away much of the power and prevent much of its occurrence. We have to have those, both women in positions of power and changing the stereotypes and addressing the root causes.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Finally, I know that you have been doing some work on the conflict that’s going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Can you talk at all about the work you’ve been doing there, where crimes against women are so extraordinarily heinous?
KELLY ASKIN: Right. Well, one of the things that we’re doing, and you’ll note that the first trial before the ICC, the Lubanga Trail, started on Monday of this week, but it wasn’t focused on sexual violence even though sexual violence is clearly, was even part of the prosecutors open statement, sexual violence, women and girls taken as sex slaves, that trail is mostly about conscripting child soldiers which of course includes women and girls. And there are other trials of Congolese warlords that are expected to come to trial sometime this year or next year.
But what we’re doing -- mainly because these courts are mostly set up to try the highest level perpetrators and not the thousands and thousands of other people responsible for these crimes including the physical perpetrators -- so we’re setting up, at least for the first year, a pilot project, mobile court project that will be based in South Kivu where many, many sex crimes have taken place. We’ll rove around to remote locations where women don’t typically have access to justice, and we’ll hold trials. It won’t be solely on rape and sexual violence. It’ll address other gender issues, but they will be essentially mobile gender courts that will hopefully by years two and three, there’ll be over a dozen of these mobile courts going to remote areas of the Congo.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Is that being done in conjunction with the Congolese justice system?
KELLY ASKIN: Yes. It’s Congolese judges who will sit on the case, but with assistance with some international experts including a lot more training on sexual violence and assisting local women’s organizations to bring these cases.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Kelly, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today.
KELLY ASKIN: Oh, I’m happy to do it.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Finally, I would like to remind everyone that they are invited to join us for a program on gender based violence that will be held on February 11th at the Museum, One Night, One Voice: Spotlighting Rape as a War Crime, please RSVP to genocideprevention@ushmm.org. For those of you who cannot make it to the Museum, we will also be live webcasting the program. For more information visit www.ushmm.org/conscience.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
