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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Gender and Violence in the Market and Beyond
During my first year as a student at the University of Zambia, when I was seventeen, I left campus one Friday for a weekend with my family. It was not yet dark, and the Lusaka Central Market was busy. The lines for the minibus to Kabulonga were extremely long, but I waited patiently for my turn to board. I actually enjoyed the commotion all around.
Then two young men approached me. I recognized one as Chitumba, a friend of my cousin Natasha. They joined me in the line, and we chatted briefly before they invited me to join them in a taxi ride home, at their expense, as they lived beyond my parents’ home anyway. I agreed readily, and we walked together, one on either side of me, stepping over vegetables and past vendors until we got into a parked taxi. As we did so, an old woman shouted after my young men, “You’ve done well. Take her away from here. They were going to strip her naked!”
I remember my shock at realizing that the commotion—whistling and shouting from the young men loitering around the market—had been directed at my legs and thighs. My cotton floral summer dress, a gift from my mother, was apparently attracting mob justice. It is an infrequent occurrence, but an occurrence nonetheless, that an “indecently attired” young woman in Lusaka is pursued by a gang of vigilante youths ostensibly trying to preserve the dignity of Mother Zambia and traditional African values. If she is captured, the woman is normally stripped naked, groped, and roughed up as an appreciative crowd gathers to witness the spectacle. The woman might escape the mob if she is rescued by a shopkeeper and his workers, who will barricade her in their shop until the police arrive to disperse the party.
My two young rescuers were better acclimated than I was to the body and gender politics on the streets of Lusaka and foresaw that I was on the verge of falling victim to a sexual assault. Chitumba admitted that the taxi invitation was a ruse to get me away from danger. I recounted this story to my parents that evening, choking on tears of rage. My father tried to rationalize: “You should understand our culture, mama; those people are grassroots people.” I shouted in response: “They’re not grassroots! They don’t know anything about our culture! They’re just thugs!”
In the southern African society of my youth, sexual violence was the bogeyman of morality tales, articulated through commentary or narratives that attached to and sexualized specific body parts and conduct. The shape and tone of these narratives was often censorious of women and girls irrespective of the sex of the narrator. Girls who showed their thighs, girls who stayed out after dark, girls who did not respect themselves—these girls attracted aggressive sexual attention from men, name calling, and ostracism from women’s peer groups. If they really pushed the boundaries, they would get the punishment of rape.1 However, rape was not the ultimate punishment. The ultimate punishment would be that nobody would believe it was rape, or, if they believed it was rape, the conclusion would be that it was well earned by the victim and perhaps even overdue. The social narratives I grew up on often married gender with violence: for example, they easily attached such adjectives as “drunken,” “careless,” “wild,” “provocative,” or “stupid” to women victims of sexual violence.2 These narratives made words such as “no,” “consent,” “force,” and “coercion” ambiguous on my university campus. If I believed in the narratives, I would have had to accept that it was the shapeliness of my bare legs that threatened public morality and order as well as my own dignity and physical integrity in the Lusaka market. However, this acceptance would require submitting to the narratives of gender and violence and their objective of privileging men by policing women’s autonomy.
In the almost twenty years since that early evening in the market, my sense of humiliation and rage has passed. What remains with me both intellectually and emotionally is a lasting desire to investigate narratives of gender and their narrators. I am ever watchful to see why and how men and women are influenced and/or bound by the narratives that dictate safe and unsafe expressions of masculinity and femininity. I have found powerful, often coercive expressions of gender wherever my research has taken me over the past decade. In Dutch law faculties, I have been struck by the traditional gender expectations surrounding motherhood versus career progression; to my surprise it is perfectly acceptable to publicly grill expectant Dutch coworkers on personal choices concerning child care and their obligation to “raise their own children.” In Bradford in northern England, the gender narratives of “acceptable” dress and behavior for British-born university female students from Pakistani families intrigued me. I was especially amused by a white British librarian who said of a rowdy group of female, British-Pakistani students, “Such a pity, they’re just as foul-mouthed as our girls now, sometimes worse. We don’t dare to hush them.” In Washington, D.C., in the buildup to the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, I overheard many gendered sentiments about the candidates as well as their spouses: “Sarah Palin should focus on her five children and not politics”; “Hillary Clinton lost because of the pantsuits, she should have worn more skirt suits”; “Michelle [Obama] is great because she stands behind her husband, she lets him be the man”; “McCain is an old man, he will make America look weak.” I presuppose the existence of narratives about gender in every sociopolitical regime, be it in democratic countries, secular states, war-torn countries, developing nations, or liberal or conservative states.
In this book, my geographical focus is sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. My decision to focus on these two African countries, best known in the international community for decades of political violence and armed conflict, was not intended to highlight the most extreme or egregious manifestations of unequal gender hegemonies in wartime. Rather, I chose this focus because postwar reconstruction processes in these two countries provide rich case studies of the many responses to societal gender inequality and discrimination. These responses have taken many shapes, including human rights advocacy, affirmative action, repeal of discriminatory legislation, security-sector reform, demobilization of fighters, civil society activism, education and community sensitization, constitutional amendments, and criminalization.
The Justice Process and Its Dominant Narrative
I concentrate specifically on the justice sector’s responses to gross human rights violations and war crimes. This sector interprets human rights norms in order to determine accountability, producing compelling legal narratives that detail and help make sense of the infliction of political violence on men and women. These legal narratives arise from legal as well as factual findings based on evidence that prosecutors, witnesses, and others submit before such mechanisms of accountability as truth commissions and military or international criminal tribunals. The narratives have the power to legitimate victims and condemn perpetrators of human rights abuses. They can produce categories of victims, perpetrators, collaborators, martyrs, traitors, and heroes—all as expressions of “good” and “bad” gender models. For example, a pattern of acquittals or sentences of light community service might affirm the integrity of men who killed their daughters rather than let them be kidnapped and raped by invading armies.
These decision-making processes are not free from bias as the words law and fact might suggest. Hegemonic power relations contribute to the collation of fact and law, which in turn affect the formulation of the legal narrative. Various stakeholders, including prosecutors, victor states, former colonial masters, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international donors take part in the political negotiation of law, fact, and human rights standards. Political circumstances can constrain the investigative reach of prosecutors and defense counsel, expedite extradition processes, and moderate sentencing practices. Political narratives about the interests of the victor, the needs of victims, and the reckoning with the vanquished are expertly woven by transitional governments; and they color the justice process, which is ultimately the product of a political edict, for example, a peace accord, Security Council vote, or agreement between the state and the secretary general of the United Nations.
Thus, in justice processes, there are a variety of narratives: legal and political, as well as social. By social narratives I mean narratives arising from tales, myths, anecdotes, proverbs, and stories that emerge from within a society on any given subject. Scholars, researchers, writers, journalists, human rights defenders, and others codify these usually oral testimonies through a process of interviews, observations, and analysis. These codifiers ultimately produce a social narrative that can become a vehicle for political activism and advocacy. Thus, although I will refer to the narratives of Rwandan and Sierra Leonean men and women on gender and violence, I am really referring to my own appropriation (as scholar, researcher, and writer) of stories I heard during my encounters in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and my arbitrary interpretation and codification of these stories. In sharing these stories with an international and elite audience, the social narrative I tell will have the potential to serve different political purposes.
The narratives of Rwandans and Sierra Leoneans I have selected are by and large not the type that would fall into the category of baleful testimonies about atrocity. Rather, the testimonies I present throughout this book, whether they were collected by me or by other researchers, are contributions not to our collective outrage about war’s victims but to a gender analysis of the laws and justice processes that seek to promote human rights. I include them not merely to show that gender is part of the narrative of modern-day postwar reconstruction processes or to add nuance to our understanding of the experiences, both shared and divergent, of men and women in armed conflict. I use narratives to pose a challenge to assumptions and easy conclusions that legal scholars can only draw when relying solely on the case law and transcripts as sources of fact and law. These legal texts have created new crimes against humanity, such as sexual slavery, and in doing so have inscribed femininity and masculinity into our understanding of war’s victims and perpetrators. I argue that this inscription has created an essentializing and gendered binary of male abusers and female victims. Further, this binary does not include men and women who do not, cannot, or will not fit neatly into either of these categories. My selection of narratives in this book is motivated by a desire to disrupt the legal text by identifying masculinities and femininities that emphasize other experiences of war yet still warrant inclusion in the process of transitional justice.
I have placed narratives of gender and violence at the center of my research for a number of reasons. Narratives occur within all sectors of society and, because of their authoritative potential, can have an impact on gender roles and relations in periods of violent political transition. And violence ultimately generates and transforms social hierarchies and perceptions within and between groups.3 An example of a violent transformation of social hierarchies is the image of an armed child soldier arresting or facilitating the passage through a checkpoint of frightened adult civilians in their vehicles. And in the aftermath of violence, communities shape collective narratives that can represent a cultural remembrance of the violence and its significance for the group identity, including gendered identities. However, narratives can be contested and may be a source of conflict between members of a society. I can illustrate this by recounting conversations with two Sierra Leoneans I encountered on a field visit in February 2007.
I was the guest of Paramount Chief Sesay.4 He told me that he had survived the war because, as rebels advanced, he was able to escape to a rebel-free zone where he stayed during the years that the rebels occupied his chiefdom. On his return to his chiefdom, he held several meetings with his people. Apparently, the men of the village asked the chief to thank the rebels for their benevolent rule during the occupation. According to the village representatives, apart from a few killings at the start of the occupation, life under the rebels had been peaceful and secure.
The chief later introduced me to Bintu, a mother, wife, and grandmother who had recently been elected the first woman local representative in the area’s political history. She had been supported in her campaign with leadership training and funding by several local women’s NGOs. In a private conversation with her, I mentioned that “some men” had told me that apart from killings in the early days, rebel occupation had been secure. As I anticipated, Bintu exploded in anger: “Who told you that? It’s a lie! We women were slaves! Wake up in the morning to farm for them, collect their water, we had to feed them! Those rebels! They raped us in front of our husbands, and our husbands did nothing.”
In the same way that I extracted conflicting social narratives of gender and violence from the incident in the Lusaka market and a father and daughter’s struggle to draw meaning from it, I extracted from conversations with Bintu and Chief Sesay social narratives of gender and violence. Bintu’s outburst and the chief’s claim present views that are different yet similar. Both assert that gender shaped the way they experienced insecurity within armed conflict, and indeed gender continues to shape the way they experience the peace process and nascent democracy. Bintu speaks of herself and other women as slaves. The chief, however, describes men and women going about their everyday business. Bintu describes not only rape but also rape as theater, as husbands were forced to watch the rape of their wives. The chief refers to “some killings” and his probable assassination had he remained in a rebel stronghold. The absence of sexual violence in the chief’s account is in itself a valuable narrative of masculinity and patriarchy that demands a gender analysis (though far from the only point to raise the gender flag).5
The juxtaposition of Bintu and Chief Sesay’s responses raises a number of questions about gender and violence. Some of the questions are too simple and too obvious to build a thesis upon. For example, one might conclude that Bintu leads us to a narrative on suffering that is asking rhetorically, “Who suffers the most in war, men or women?” This contest can be observed between victims, victim organizations, humanitarian organizations, the media, and human rights advocates, depending on their specific political agendas. Some argue that men suffer the worst human rights abuses; after all, they are killed, unlike women, who are only raped.6 The image of Srebrenica, for example, where thousands of men and boys were led to an execution ground while their women were only put on buses and exiled from their village, bolsters this view.7 Others torment the public with images of abandoned or orphaned children, conveying the message that children suffer the most, that they are the most vulnerable to exploitation.8 Still others tell us that actually women suffer the most atrocious violence, often in the form of rape. They are raped because it is a fate worse than death; perpetrators of rape tell women they will die from sadness, and there is no need to waste bullets on them. Women, especially widows, are left to head households and rebuild shattered families and lives.9
This is not the contest Bintu’s outburst drew me toward. Bintu’s and the chief’s separate yet related accounts raise the key questions that concern me throughout this book: How did men and women experience violence and human rights violations? Which men and women have their narratives privileged by the prosecutor’s investigation? Who is representing or giving voice to victims’ experiences, and how do they edit out “inconsequential” details from the formal processes of justice?
In responding to these questions, I will reveal a dominant narrative of gender and violence emerging from the legal and justice process, a dominant narrative that is wont to represent African women not only as victims of armed conflict but as rape victims of a militarized African masculinity. This narrative essentializes women as a monolithic victim group and gender as a unitary ground of discrimination. In essentializing women’s gender role thus, this dominant narrative fails to acknowledge variance within the group and ultimately variance in the experience and impact of gender-based violence on women and men.
While it is important for me to focus on the men and women excluded from the justice process, I also examine what I call the price of inclusion in an essentializing justice process for women victims of gender-based violence. The dominant narrative requires a “perfect” or “legitimate” victim who is allowed to gain access to justice but required to adjust their testimony of atrocity in war to fit the script provided by the dominant narrative. The legal narrative of the “perfect victim” is a well-known phenomenon in the domestic sphere; it varies from society to society and is dynamic. In the context of U.S. legal and justice narratives of the 1970s, Alice Sebold described herself as the perfect victim because of an important set of facts: “I was a virgin. He was a stranger. It happened outside. It was night. I wore loose clothes, and could not be proven to have acted provocatively. There were no drugs or alcohol in my system. I had no former involvement with the police of any kind, not even a traffic ticket. He was black and I was white. There was an obvious physical struggle. I had been injured internally.… I was a young student at a private university.… He had a record and had done time.”10
I am concerned with the impact of the “perfect victim” narrative on the experiences of women who are included as well as excluded: the wartime experience of both groups is never fully authenticated by a legal narrative. Even as I identify and distinguish between “perfect victims” and “imperfect victims,” I recognize the vacuity of the terms beyond their malleability as research tools. The women I met in Rwanda and Sierra Leone are survivors. These survivors live firmly in the present and look back at the upside-down world of war only when prodded by researchers such as myself to (against their better judgment) look backward and not forward. As I acknowledge this awkward transaction between scholar and survivor, I recall a vow made by Albie Sachs, a South African Constitutional Court justice and an iconic victim of apartheid. Sachs vowed that he would not make himself an exhibit, even when asked to speak subjectively of his victimization by the apartheid state (Sachs 1997: 20). And even as I place my body and the bodies of other African women and men into this book, I vow not to make myself or others exhibits. The exhibit in this book is law and its enforcement of human rights.
The ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda brought gender, violence, and armed conflict into the lexicon of international jurists. The initial response by legal scholars was to focus on the interpretation of the statute and rules of evidence and procedure. Literature flourished on landmark interpretations and definitions of sexual violence, and on admissible defenses for rape and the inclusion of evidence of rape trauma syndrome by medical experts.11 The scholarship then began to focus on the needs of victims and witnesses of gender-based violence, and scholars have discussed the support services provided by the victim and witness unit and the tone of examinations by prosecutors and defense counsel. They have raised the issue of reparations for victims and witnesses, invoking this as a form of social justice, for example, suggesting the provision of housing and medical treatment.12
There is a curious research gap between legal scholars at the domestic and international levels. In the case of gender-based violence at the domestic level, criminologists, in particular, have exposed how race, ethnicity, and class can limit or improve the prosecutor’s odds of securing a conviction on behalf of the victim. Facts such as the victim being Hispanic, the community being white, the accused being a surgeon, the jurors being working class, the police precinct being located in a black neighborhood, and the judge being a conservative can influence prosecutorial strategy and judicial processes and outcomes. At the level of international armed conflict, social scientists have led the way with studies of how the state, media, and propaganda include and exclude victims of gender-based violence from narratives of victimhood in the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, and other transitional societies (Zarkov 2007; Ross 2002 and 2005). However, legal scholars have lagged in producing a comparable body of work within their discipline that reveals those factors that disadvantage victims of gender-based violence from accessing effective justice. My research in this book responds to the apparent need for legal researchers, such as myself, to pose the gender questions surrounding victim participation in processes of international criminal law.
Factors such as stigma or ignorance of the workings of the legal system are regularly put forward as obstructing women from seeking justice at the international level. However, this view focuses on projecting fear or reluctance onto women as victims and witnesses, and placing the responsibility for accessing justice exclusively on them. Little energy is directed toward investigating the international tribunal and its unwillingness or inability to give an audience to women on discriminatory grounds. Few scholars have empirically investigated whether an international criminal tribunal is sexist, racist, or ageist, for example. As a legal scholar, I draw the jurist or legal scholar toward a serious self-examination that could reveal the reasons why women might shun the legal system. I have encountered the assumption that international processes of justice, in contrast to the domestic level, are immune from projecting gender, race, and other forms of bias on victims and witnesses. While there is an understanding that elderly, poor, and illiterate women may lack the means to access justice, there is no examination of whether prosecutors might arbitrarily deem poor, illiterate, and elderly women to be unreliable witnesses or simply implausible victims of rape. Bias emanating from the international justice process has yet to be thoroughly interrogated by legal scholars, and my objective with this book is to contribute to this interrogation.
Defining the Terms and the Structure of the Book
Mass violence and its avoidance have held central places in nations’ framing and ratification of international laws that supersede their own domestic laws and sovereignty. By the twentieth century, the international community unanimously agreed that crimes such as piracy and slavery violated international custom and the standards of civilized nations. Law students may take for granted that UN General Assembly declarations, UN Security Council resolutions, reports by truth commissions, and decisions of international criminal tribunals clearly state that sexual violence against women committed in armed conflict is a form of gender-based discrimination. However, the legal and political processes that brought gender into the framework of international law depended on the birth and maturity of a new body of international law, namely, international human rights law after World War II. This new law brought the rhetoric of universalism, nondiscrimination, and equality to all members of the human family. Over a span of more than sixty years, certain family members have called attention to unique challenges posed to their enjoyment of human rights as a result of their membership in subgroups. Disabled people, migrant workers and their families, refugees, children, domestic workers, women, and many other groups have advocated for the establishment of thematic human rights norms beyond an international bill of rights stating government’s responsibility to prevent actions that discriminate against them specifically.
The inclusion of gender into the international human rights law framework is a recent and ongoing process that I am contributing to with this work. By gender I refer broadly to the socially constructed roles ascribed to women and men, as opposed to biological and physical characteristics under the banner of sex. The social worth of men and women is closely tied to their ability to internalize, perform, and fulfill idealized gender roles. Gender expectations shape the ways in which men and women interact in every sphere of social activity, such as those that determine access to resources, security, power, and participation in political, cultural, and religious activities (Pankhurst 2003: 166). Although the details vary from society to society and change over time, gender relations always include a strong element of inequality between women and men and are influenced strongly by ideology (ibid.).
Gender groups are traditionally divided into two monolithic units: men and women. This division is erroneous as it tends to make invisible subgroups and cultures within a dominant gender group and also conceals the hierarchies and hegemonic power within a single gender group. Thus, within the supposedly monolithic group of men, there is an idealized man who fulfills the gender expectations dictated by society. Those men who aspire to conform to this model of masculinity would enjoy greater civil, political, economic, and social freedom than men who deviate too far from the idealized model. However, men may feel ambivalent and even oppressed by their conformity, even when it reaps rewards such as increased social standing and economic gain.
There is no universal model of the idealized male. In one society he could be Muslim, heterosexual, a father, self-employed, married, and faithful to his wife; in another, he may be Protestant, educated to college level, heterosexual, a father, married, and casually but discreetly involved with multiple sexual partners. And those women who complement and enable men’s performance of an idealized masculinity are promised greater security and bargaining power in a patriarchal universe and privileged access to contested or scarce resources. Equality requires that the gender roles of both women and men who do not fulfill and/or complement the idealized male gender role model are awarded comparable status as those of the idealized male and entitled to equal access to rights and resources.
Many inequalities in the enjoyment of human rights arise from gender-based discrimination, which is an umbrella term for any harm that is the result of power imbalances that exploit distinctions between men and women and among men and women. Gender-based discrimination or the threat of gender-based discrimination can press “deviant” men and women to conform to acceptable gender roles. Thus, a woman may conceal that she is gay in order not to jeopardize her appointment as a partner in a law firm, or an unmarried woman may wear a wedding band in order to gain the respect of colleagues in an office. Gender-based discrimination often occurs as a combination of both sex and gender bias. For example, a company may refuse to employ young women because of an expectation that they will get pregnant and prove a liability. This form of discrimination is based on women’s sexual reproductive potential, that is, their biological sex. It is also based on the common belief that professional women (rather than professional men) should take primary responsibility for child rearing, household chores, and other domestic roles perceived to be natural and gender appropriate but incompatible with the pursuit of a career outside of the home.13
Discrimination can manifest itself as violence against men and women. Gender-based violence takes many forms, including sex-selective abortions, gay bashing, honor killings, and sexual harassment. There is often a continuum of harm and magnification of scale with regard to violent forms of discrimination. Thus, discriminatory hiring practices against “girls,” “gays,” “pregnant ladies,” and others can foster a hostile work environment where sexual harassment is not only prevalent but condoned by management.
The international community has recently accepted unanimously that sexual violence in armed conflict is a weapon or strategy of war14 and, further, that the egregious nature of gender-based violence, particularly sexual violence, is aggravated by the prima facie coercive nature of armed conflict.15 The judicial processes of accountability in postconflict societies that I describe in this book are responding in part to widespread acts of sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence. According to the case law, gender-based violence characterizes abuses such as the conscription of child soldiers, disappearances, detention, torture, genocide, and enslavement.
My study of gender and violence in Rwanda and Sierra Leone takes place in peacetime, but I bear in mind the popular truism that war is not over with the last bullet. This truism has come to signify the ongoing gender impact of conflict on women’s insecurity and vulnerability to violence and exploitation.16 In Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and indeed in many countries that have experienced widespread and systematic violations of human rights, women’s security remained—long after demilitarization—precarious and marginalized from the core peace processes and reconstruction projects.
Human rights instruments have played an important role in blurring the dichotomous peace-war framework. This traditional framework allocated abuses committed in peacetime to the jurisdiction of the human rights law framework and wartime abuses to the jurisdiction of international humanitarian law. This delineation between war and peace allowed states to summarily “suspend” fundamental rights of civilians in times of emergency or conflict and to put civilians under the less humane protection of the laws of war. Until the early 1990s, at the international level, little recognition was made of the scale of the insecurity women experienced in the various gray zones that mark the continuum of violent economic, social, and political up-heavals caused by armed conflict.
The term wartime rape is very revealing of the gray zones. It suggests that there is something called “normal rape” that happens only occasionally in peaceful societies. “Normal rape” suggests an apolitical offense that does not traumatize or offend the sensibilities of civilized peoples and its victims in the same way that wartime rape does. And indeed, the distinction between peace and wartime rape is often emphasized by observers, such as scholars and the media, by the attachment of adjectives such as “heinous,” “egregious,” “atrocious,” and “brutal” to rapes occurring in armed conflict. Differentiating between rape in war and peace carries the danger of prioritizing sexual assaults so that rape that is used as a tactic of ethnic cleansing evokes moral outrage but forced sex in the privacy of family life is accepted (Nordstrom 1991, quoted by Sideris 2001b: 146). Tina Sideris points out that ultimately this view allows lawmakers, the police, and communities to explain ordinary rape in terms of dysfunctional and pathological relations and attitudes between men and women. The idea of “ordinary rapes” in peacetime separates violent sexual relations and the construction of masculinities and femininities from an analysis of power relations. Deprived of such an analysis, the task of transforming social relations becomes more difficult (2001a: 61).
The idea of something called ordinary rape is propagated at the highest levels of international influence. In what was then a leading report on sexual violence in armed conflict, the Council of Europe described wartime rape as “worse than ‘ordinary’ rape because it is accompanied by other war-related trauma: loss or death of husbands, children, parents or friends, loss of property, etc.” The report emphasizes that “wartime rape differs from sexual assault in peacetime in that it is committed in a political context which often engenders organized violence,” and, further, peacetime rape is isolated and frequently punished.17 These claims do not take into account the organized nature of trafficking in women and girls in peacetime, domestic courts’ systemic discrimination against victims of domestic violence, wardens’ sexual exploitation of female detainees, or police ambivalence about following correct forensic and investigative procedures when women report sexual violence. I do not need to name a specific country or region where such phenomena occur simply because they are pervasive in developed and developing countries. Rape and other forms of gender-based violence in peacetime are also committed in a political context of hegemonic power, which has serious repercussions for gender equality and nondiscrimination in women’s enjoyment of fundamental human rights.
Undertakings to establish accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity have become a feature of negotiated peace. Mechanisms of accountability, such as truth commissions in South Africa and Liberia and ad hoc criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, operate at the official close of armed conflict but often during a state of insecurity for civilians, particularly displaced persons. Bearing this in mind, I choose to collapse the temporal zones of peace, the immediate aftermath of armed conflict, the postconflict, into a zone broadly referred to as conflict. Conflict may precede armed conflict or it may follow the signing of a peace treaty. It is often the site of continuing violence by covert means; however, it is violence tempered by a wide range of developments having an impact on security, such as a partial demilitarization and demobilization process or the wholesale exporting of armed conflict to a third territory or a border region.
Throughout the escalation or transition of conflict to armed conflict; rumors or threats of violence; pockets of violence; arbitrary curfews; shortages of such basic amenities as electricity and water; disruption to daily rituals such as attending school, community meetings, or prayer groups; and battle-rousing propaganda and images destabilize the daily life of the civilian population. Propaganda easily coopts gender into its narrative. Even as masculinity and the male body are aggressively militarized, femininity and women’s bodies are transposed onto the identity of the nation: the vulnerable mother nation must be protected from violation, and the enemy nation must be violated (raped even) and conquered.18
Throughout the deescalation and demilitarization of armed conflict into conflict, the situation of the civilian population can be as dramatic and precarious as during the period of armed conflict, and in some cases worse. The risk of renewed hostilities is high so that the application of the term peace-time is no more than a fleeting fiction. The crime rate goes up, infrastructure (water, health, education, justice, security) has been destroyed, homes lie in ruins, problems of a humanitarian nature are rife, the economy is paralyzed, and the international aid is often woefully inadequate.19
Women’s living conditions in conflict zones are very revealing of the gendered outcomes of violence and their impact on survivors of armed conflict. Violence in the conflict zone is often concealed in private women’s spaces and such acts as child bearing. Thus, women in a war zone experience the collapse of primary health-care services most cuttingly through high levels of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity (Jacobson 1999: 180, quoted by Cockburn 1999: 11). Domestic and community violence against women increases after armed conflict.20 Women, particularly those widowed by the conflict, are exposed to violent altercations over land with strangers as well as relatives, in-laws, children, and aggressive suitors. The adoption of often unfamiliar head-of-household roles for many women who have no sustainable livelihood opportunities and the burden of providing for war-affected dependents may increase vulnerability to exploitative relationships.
Humanitarian workers have gradually expanded their profile of internally displaced persons and refugees to include women with individual as well as gender-specific needs. This inclusion is a marked shift from an androcentric lens that viewed refugees primarily as men plus their dependents (children and wives). A sustained gender assessment of refugee policy has led to a deeper understanding of the ways in which displacement increases women’s vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.21 Women displaced by armed conflict are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation in camps and when they attempt to return and reclaim their homes.22
Advances in media technologies that facilitate live reporting of conflicts mean that we see just how the lives of civilians are marked by gross violations of human rights. The testimony from victims and witnesses before tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the Sierra Leone Special Court (Special Court) reveal that armed conflict takes place in the homes, classrooms, front gardens, fields, and churches of civilians as combatants occupy towns and villages and effectively hold their occupants hostage. These texts or transcripts complement the change in the research focus from battlefield casualties to civilian casualties on the home front. To call armed conflict “armed” conflict is actually misleading because the civilian hostages targeted for enslavement, amputation, mutilation, rape, torture, abduction, summary execution, forced labor, and other gross violations of human rights are for the most part unarmed.
Feminist scholars have led the way in displacing two powerful gendered narratives that undermined the development of relevant international law protection for women in armed conflict. The first narrative restricted women’s victimhood to the loss of husbands and sons on distant battlefields. Scholars do not deny that the loss of male heads of household is a devastating loss for women; however, they have provided the cultural, economic, and legal implications of such loss for individual women. The loss of social status is closely linked to the loss of civil status where, for example, women’s property rights or citizenship rights depend on a male guardian.
The second narrative dispelled is that rape is the only gender-based violation that distinguishes women’s experience of armed conflict from men’s. While research may reveal that rape predominantly targets women, there is a tendency to ignore that a gendered analysis of armed conflict requires an understanding of how cross-cutting issues, such as housing rights, food insecurity, health care, and the loss of one’s livelihood, shape gender-based violence but also exist independently as human rights concerns of women separate from rape or the threat of rape (Pankhurst 2007; Enloe 2007). Further, rape is one of many forms of sexual violence that women as a gender group experience. Feminist legal scholarship increasingly calls on the legal recognition of acts such as forced nudity and separation from infants to be recognized as egregious forms of sexual violence and, more broadly, gender-based violence (Ní Aoláin 2000b). Like most studies on gender and armed conflict, mine focuses on women. Even as I caution against losing men’s stories, I acknowledge that the recent and drastic changes in the understanding of the impact of war on civilians but particularly on women civilians intensified my interest in civilians and particularly women survivors, such as Bintu, and their stories about war. And it is women’s relationship to law and justice that takes center stage in my overview of the international human rights law framework and the processes of transitional justice addressing, among other abuses, violence against women.
In Chapter 1, I introduce violence against women as an extreme form of inequality and discrimination against women because of their gender. I outline the evolutionary process that put gender into the discourse of human rights law and subsequently within the jurisdiction of legal and judicial responses to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The laws of war are activated by armed conflict, and my case studies of Rwanda and Sierra Leone are decidedly conflict or postconflict societies. For this reason, I also present a brief overview of the feminist critique of international humanitarian law prohibitions against rape and other forms of sexual violence against women in wartime.23 My focus will, however, remain on human rights law instruments and not the laws of war because even as international humanitarian law seeks to minimize the civilian population’s vulnerability to the vagaries of war, it is in fact military expediency that lies at the heart of its objectives. This prioritization of military interests over civilians’ explains in part its limited relevance to my discussion in Chapter 1. Further, I demonstrate in Chapter 1 the unabashed and important trespass of human rights discourse into the jurisdiction of international humanitarian law. I argue that unlike the laws of war, human rights have responded substantively in the postwar period to the reality of belligerents that willfully target civilians as proxies for enemy combatants. This response has helped keep civilian women’s experiences of atrocity in war in the imagination of international humanitarians advocating for the rights of women in peace and war.
In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I describe the ways in which gender and violence have been included or excluded from the processes of the ad hoc criminal tribunals in Sierra Leone and Rwanda and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone (TRC). My selection of mechanisms of accountability privileges judicial or quasi-judicial processes. Although many other nonjudicial mechanisms have operated or are operating in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, I chose judicial processes because I am aware of their power to create a historical account of atrocity and justice. Even into the new millennium, apologists and revisionists attempt to rewrite or deny historical facts of the Holocaust and World War II.24 Most people would agree, however, that the prosecution and conviction of those most responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity as part of the Nuremberg Trials helped confirm the fact of German aggression.25 The Nuremberg process of justice establishing individual criminal accountability laid the foundation for the creation of the ad hoc criminal tribunals as well as the permanent International Criminal Court. The convictions have also provided a historical record of war crimes, war criminals, and their victims.26 Like the Nuremberg trials, justice processes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone are setting historical legal precedents and are contributing to a historical account of conflict and peace in their respective regions. I argue that women’s narratives belong in this historical account, and in these chapters I look at narratives and examine the extent to which they represent gender and violence.
My exercise is spurred on by the fact that Nuremberg’s judicial-historical narrative of gender-based violence is far from satisfactory. While historians and other social scientists have amply documented the widespread and systematic nature of gender-based violence in World War II and its aftermath, a binding legal narrative does not affirm it. While French and Soviet prosecutors wrote evidence of mass rape into the trial record, the Nuremberg Trials did not explicitly criminalize rape and other forms of sexual violence as either war crimes or crimes against humanity.
The absence of specific prosecutions for sexual violence from the Nuremberg Trials was a great omission and a poor precedent for the ad hoc criminal tribunals. The prosecutor and trial chambers of the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals were unable to rely on judicial precedent from international criminal process when trying to define and interpret rape and sexual violence as international crimes. The decisions of the ad hoc criminal tribunals have remedied this omission, and broadly defined elements of rape and other forms of sexual violence are now part of the emerging body of international criminal law.
Tribunals and national courts have begun to refer to the ICTR and ICTY statutes and decisions, and in particular their definitions of sexual violence and rape are being coopted into national and international justice processes. The case law of the Sierra Leone Special Court, the final report of the Sierra Leone Truth Commission, reports of the special rapporteurs, general comments of the treaty bodies, and Security Council resolutions all specifically refer to the case law of the ad hoc tribunals. The doctrinal achievements of these tribunals are contributing to a growing awareness of a gendered experience of war and other forms of political violence. I am joining the growing number of legal scholars in assessing our profession’s competence and consistency in doing justice to framing the intersection of gender and violence in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and other countries and regions that have granted jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity to ad hoc international tribunals.
In Chapter 2, I focus on gender and violence in the context of an ethnic conflict. I use gender as a lens through which the dominant narrative of the authentic man and the authentic woman (his wife) are dethroned as the universal models of mankind to which human rights laws first tailored their protection mechanisms. I argue that one’s categorization as the authentic man and/or his wife is a dubious privilege. In the context of armed conflict, the authentic man and his powerful and inviolable body make acts such as castration and other sexualized forms of torture such a potent attack. Conversely, it is this inviolable body that conceals castration from the investigation and prosecution process. I argue further in this chapter that the narrative presents the wife of the authentic man as valuable yet infinitely vulnerable—the better to complement the authentic man’s power. This infinite vulnerability makes sexual violence such an incontestable and dominant narrative in peace and war. In peace, she must avoid public spaces such as the workplace and be indoors before dark in order to avoid the advances of predatory men. And in war, the enemy must rape her. In this narrative, the anticipation of sexual violence is a pervasive fear shared by the woman and her community. The legal framework’s privileging of her vulnerability over other less valuable women’s security guarantees that only her victimhood is acknowledged but not necessarily with an effective legal remedy. I will demonstrate that in fact such acknowledgment may result in more severe forms of self-cloistering and restricted movement. Using such categories as “small woman,” “big man,” and “big woman,” I will introduce those victims that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda could not accommodate in its narrative of genocide, which privileged ethnicity as a category of bias to the exclusion of gender and class.
In Chapter 3, I move from Rwanda’s tribunal to Sierra Leone’s TRC. Truth commissions do not produce judgments or case law. Rather, their legal and factual findings are presented in voluminous reports, and my discussion is based on the final report of the TRC. There is a great body of critical writing on the gendered processes and outcomes of truth commissions, largely produced by anthropologists, ethnographers, political scientists, and other social scientists.27 My focus on the report is an important contribution to legal scholarship because substantive research on the findings of commission reports is minimal compared to research on the case law of tribunals. This oversight by legal scholars is surprising considering that recommendations made by truth commissions are far-reaching and, some would say, inventive: they can include demands for apologies and reparations to victims, petitions for commemorative monuments, and curriculum changes that would bring subjects such as conflict and peace building into elementary and high-school classrooms. However, these recommendations often remain unenforced because they are vested with moral and not legal authority, and governments and identified perpetrators are not compelled to take any positive action to redress the rights of victims. The disproportionate attention paid by legal scholars to case law is influenced by a tribunal’s authority and stature in the hierarchy of mechanisms of accountability. For example, ad hoc criminal tribunals use their legal authority to convict and sentence public officials or other perpetrators for human rights abuses.
I argue in Chapter 3 that the TRC final report produces a human rights narrative of gender and violence that essentializes Sierra Leone’s culture as harmful and inherently violent toward women. Building on this argument, I pay attention to the government’s and the international community’s representation of the TRC as a restorative and indigenous model of justice and the impact this has had on the commission’s specific framing of gender and violence in Sierra Leone. In particular, I show how the report’s rights based emphasis on forced marriage and early marriage as forms of gender-based discrimination produces a problematic narrative of marriage as an oppressive institution for women. As in Chapter 2, I introduce narratives in contradistinction to the dominant narrative. I create such categories as “adulterous wives,” “cuckolds,” and “merry widows” to illustrate that women do exercise agency, even from within oppressive social structures. In this chapter, I borrow heavily from narratives produced by ethnographic researchers embedded in Sierra Leonean society whose work inadvertently but importantly disrupts the dominant legal narratives that I question.
In Chapter 4, I remain in Sierra Leone but move my focus to the Sierra Leone Special Court. A review of this court is important because its statute creates an extraordinary and broad gender mandate. The statute specifically calls for the Office of the Prosecutor to adopt measures that ensure the justice process realizes women’s and girls’ specific needs. In light of this mandate, I critique the decision-making process of the prosecutor, which I argue discriminated against female victims and witnesses and negatively affected their ability to participate in the justice process. I also critique the Special Court’s narratives around forced marriage and sexual slavery as crimes distinct from the customary international law crime of slavery. This distinction made by the court relies on reducing crimes, such as forced marriage and sex enslavement, to multiple incidents of the rape of women. In so doing, the law avoids a broader gender analysis that would reveal the complexity of the crime of enslavement and the ways in which an enslaved person, irrespective of gender, experiences the loss of sexual reproductive health and autonomy, sexual autonomy, physical integrity, and dignity. Using a historical perspective, I borrow from the gender analyses of scholars who have studied transatlantic slavery and colonial wars to support my critique of legal categorizations such as “sexual slavery.”
In Chapter 5, I provide a final roundup and review of my narratives and arguments. It is important for me to add at this stage that during my field work, I came to consider all Rwandans and Sierra Leoneans, who had lived in their respective countries or even the region during any period between the outset and the close of the armed conflict, as survivors of the conflict. I use the term survivor to convey that the civilian population was disproportionately targeted for and affected by human rights violations and war crimes committed by the conflict. Despite the targeting, they survived.28 This approach in the field allowed me to avoid categorizing individuals dichotomously as either victims (women) or perpetrators (men).
Finally, I am guided in my selection of narratives and alternative narratives by Poyi Soyinka-Airewele’s reminder that “in the narrative of African societies the invocation of the past is most intense when it is embodied within the discourses and memories of violent struggles, of communities emerging from and through collective traumas, of oppression, violent resistance and the continuity of pain on the minds of those who have suffered” (Soyinka-Airewele 2004: 7).
