|
|
 Re: سنة يا الشُغُلْ :اللجنة الشعبية الاردنية لنصرة (السودان!!!) تبدأ تحركا لمنع محاكمة البشير (Re: فتحي البحيري)
|
SUDAN AND THE ICC
Rape as genocide
By David Scheffer Published: December 3, 2008
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
'In this society if you rape one woman, you have raped the entire tribe" - so said one observer of the mass rape occurring in Darfur.
People hear the word genocide and think of six million victims of the Holocaust or an estimated 800,000 dead in Rwanda. They do not imagine that mass rape can be so well planned and targeted that it wipes out a substantial part of an ethnic group as thoroughly, though more slowly, than widespread killings. Yet three judges sitting on the International Criminal Court will decide soon whether to confirm an arrest warrant against a head of state, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, on grounds that he masterminded rape as genocide against three ethnic groups in Darfur that have challenged his power.
The ICC's prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has filed war crimes and crimes against humanity charges against Bashir. But the centerpiece of Moreno-Ocampo's application is the charge of rape as genocide "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" and "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." Such acts of genocide arising from rape rather than from murder can be prosecuted as stand-alone crimes before the International Criminal Court.
Their complexity, despite helpful rulings from the Rwanda and Bosnia war crimes tribunals, may discourage the judges from affirming genocide charges while they opt for the more familiar terrain of other atrocity crimes charges. Hanging in the balance is whether the heinous strategy of mass rape in modern warfare will be condemned and prosecuted for what it truly is: genocide.
The judges have to find "reasonable grounds" to arrest Bashir on the rape-as-genocide charges. They need not establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt - that standard applies at trial. So far, the evidence presented by Moreno-Ocampo appears compelling under either standard
The prosecutor's investigation reveals that Bashir's forces and agents forcibly drove approximately 2.5 million Sudanese, including substantial numbers of the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups, into camps of internally displaced persons. They then inflicted rape and other forms of severe sexual violence upon thousands of women and girls, and continue to do so. A common tactic is for the Janjaweed tribal militia and Sudan's armed forces and security agents to roam outside the camps raping and often gang-raping women and girls who must leave the camps to collect firewood, grass or water in order to survive. One witness said: "Maybe around 20 men rape one woman. ... These things are normal for us here in Darfur. ... They rape women in front of their mothers and fathers."
Babies born following the rapes are called "Janjaweed babies" who rarely have a future in the mother's ethnic group. Infanticides and abandonment of such babies are common. One victim explained, "They kill our males and dilute our blood with rape. [They] ... want to finish us as a people, end our history."
Imagine the collective horror if men and boys in these ethnic groups were raped and then castrated. Would anyone doubt that genocidal impulses were at work by depriving men of their ability to father babies within their own ethnic group? Raped women and girls are similarly crippled.
In the 1990's I met scores of rape victims from atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and eastern Congo. In most cases their experiences were so devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their health that the logic of how mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide seemed clear. These women typically were ostracized from their communities, could not marry their ethnic men, or were physically incapable of rearing children.
The fairly unique circumstances in Darfur enable Bashir to inflict conditions of life that are destroying the three ethnic groups. Of the estimated 80,000 to 265,000 "slow deaths" in the camps to date, the targeted groups have suffered grievously. The evidence shows a highly sophisticated strategy at work combining scorched-earth assaults on ethnic villages followed by isolation in camps where starvation, illness, and rape are used to achieve genocidal aims.
The judges also must find reasonable grounds that Bashir has had the specific criminal intent to commit genocide through a strategy of mass rape. The rules on establishing the mens rea, or guilty mind, have been highly developed in genocide cases prosecuted before other war crimes tribunals. The genocidal intent can be inferred from the factual circumstances of the crime. In Darfur, there is no shortage of actions, including repeated mass rapes, from which to infer genocidal intent. The prosecutor argues that the only reasonable inference available on the evidence is that Bashir intended to destroy in part the ethnic groups.
The wild card remains the United Nations Security Council, which may yet cave into political pressure and prevent approval or execution of an arrest warrant against the Sudanese leader. But if the judges can continue their review and find reasonable grounds to charge rape as genocide, thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of decimating their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace.
David Scheffer, the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues (1997-2001), is a law professor and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law.
| |
 
|
|
|
|
فتحي البحيري
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست