Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege on Wednesday warned that the scourge of sexual violence and rape in all conflicts is now “a real pandemic,” and without sanctions and justice for the victims, the horrific acts will not stop.
The Congolese doctor told the UN Security Council in a video briefing that “we are still far away from being able to draw a red line against the use of rape and sexual violence as a strategy of war domination and terror.”
Mukwege appealed to the international community “to draw a red line against the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war.”
Photo: AFP
The “red line” must mean “blacklists with economic, financial and political sanctions, as well as judicial prosecutions against the perpetrators and instigators of these egregious crimes,” he said.
Mukwege founded the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and for more than 20 years has treated countless women who were raped amid fighting between armed groups seeking control of some the central African nation’s vast mineral wealth.
He said that sexual violence and impunity continue.
He shared the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize with rights avocate Nadia Murad, who in 2014 was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery by Islamic State militants along with an estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women.
Mukwege said that there has been progress in international law, and the greatest challenge today is to transform commitments into obligations and council resolutions into results.
Accountability and justice “are the best tools of prevention,” he said.
Without punishment and sanctions, rapes and sexual violence in conflicts will continue, he added.
Mukwege spoke at a council meeting on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ latest report on sexual violence in conflict, which said that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a spike in gender-based violence last year.
It focused on 18 countries where the UN said it has verified information that 52 warring parties are “credibly suspected” of patterns of “rape and other forms of sexual violence” in conflicts on the council agenda.
The majority of the parties are opposition, rebel and terrorist groups — so-called “non-state actors” — and more than 70 percent “are persistent perpetrators,” the report said.
In the latest example, UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten told the council that in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where fighting continues between the government and the region’s fugitive leaders, “women and girls are being subjected to sexual violence with a level of cruelty beyond comprehension.”
“Healthcare workers are documenting new cases of rape and gang-rape daily, despite their fear of reprisals and attacks on the limited shelters and clinics in operation,” Patten said, adding that the report records allegations of more than 100 rape cases since fighting began in November last year, but it might take months to determine the full scale and magnitude of the atrocities.
The report documents “over 2,500 UN-verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence committed in the course of 2020,” she said.
“Each of these cases cries out for justice,” Patten said.
“It is time to write a new social contract in which no military or political leader is above the law, and no woman or girl is beneath the scope of its protection,” she added.
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