It’s been a month since the Russia-Ukraine War. Officially this war started on 24 February. War is war again. And everyone suffers in war. The people of Ukraine are now getting hopeless. They are writing on social media that they are waiting for death.
Meanwhile, Russian soldiers are also being accused of raping women. According to reports, a 30-year-old woman from Brovia district, Anastasia Tarn, said that the situation in the Russian-occupied city of Irpin is like ‘hell’. He accused the Russian army of cruel treatment to the local people. Anastasia said,
“They rape women and the dead are thrown on the bus.”
Earlier, Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasilenko said that Russian soldiers sexually abused elderly women on the outskirts of Kyiv. It also claimed that many elderly women had committed suicide to escape the violence.
On the morning of March 23, Ukraine’s MP Inna Sovsun tweeted that the investigation into the rape case in Brovia has begun.
World War II: Japan’s excesses on Korean women
Remember the stories of World War II. Fire was raining on the earth. The whole world was shocked. Soldiers and soldiers, thousands of ordinary people were being killed. Germany in Europe and Germany’s ally Japan in Asia were constantly attacking other countries. Manchuria and Korea were in the possession of Japan and in the meantime something happened, which is called ‘war crime’ in the language of history. Whatever Japan did during that period, it shows that war brings tragedy to ordinary citizens, but women have to face its most frightening consequences.
The war crime of Japan we are talking about is the rape of millions of Korean women by Japanese soldiers. Japan named these women ‘Comfort Women’ to hide this plight. Meaning those women who bring comfort.
The victims of the brutality of Japanese soldiers are still alive. They live in houses built by the Korean government. These are called ‘House of Sharing’ in South Korea. According to the estimates of many historians, about two lakh women and girls of Korea were made sex slaves by Japan. Some were forcibly taken away. At the same time, many women and girls were forced to become sex slaves in return for paying off their debts.
‘If a culture has to be destroyed, women are the biggest target’
The UN Platform for Action (1995) describes how girls and women are particularly affected by gender during the Armed Struggle. Women of all ages face different effects of war. Displacement, loss of property, murder, rape, sexual abuse, torture, sex slavery, family separation and dissolution.
By the turn of the 20th century, more than 20 cases of rape have been documented in armed conflicts.
In the 1990s, women were raped and forcibly pregnant by soldiers on the lines of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in East Yugoslavia. The children born during this period were called War Children.
Similarly, during the time of Rwanda Genocide, the Hutu majority-led government organized HIV-infected men and got women of the Tutsi community to be raped. According to Human Rights Watch, about 2.5 million Tutsi women were raped by Hutu government soldiers and allied extremist militias.
Mass rapes have also been documented in recent conflicts in Bangladesh, Burma, Colombia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia.
She was an eminent psychiatrist from London. Ruth Seifert. Seifert did a research on the history of war crimes. The research paper is titled ‘The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars’. In her paper, Ruth wrote, “If a culture is to be destroyed, women are the biggest targets.” Ruth said so by arguing for the important role of women in the family structure.
Why is the tragedy of war always greater for women?
A famous coat of arms of former UN Peace Commander Major General Patrick Cammart is-
“It is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.”
We told you the story of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Even today the situation is the same. According to statistics from the Women for Women Organization, more than 80% of Syrian female refugees in Iraq live in fear of abuse every day. About 90% of Afghan women experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. 27% of women in the DRC are victims of sexual violence and 57% of domestic violence. But the question is still the same. Why? Why only woman?
At the time of war, efforts are made to defeat the other side with different strategic policies. One way is power display. straight way. Whoever has more power, he will win. But this is Matsya Nyay, the Law of the Land. Human beings made their new laws, then made new policies. He understood that rust is not just a loss of material. Or is not won by mere force. If the moral of the other side is broken, then despite all the force, the biggest army can be defeated. Under these policies, religious places were demolished in the medieval period. Any religious place is the locus point of a society. Scared, panicked people, even the army, goes to their own God, that whatever happens, they will save us. To break the religious place of the other side meant to break this hope. The damage of force can be recovered once, because there is a sense of vengeance in it. But the damage to Moral cannot be repaired.
It has been a common belief that sexual violence committed during war is a kind of ‘spoils of war’. Assume that any loot came out on winning a war or military activity. But there is a theory on the contrary as well. Indian writer, journalist, film director and women’s activist Geeta Sehgal said in a conversation with BBC News website that it is a mistake to think that such attacks are mainly done for sexual gratification. He had said that rape is used as a policy.
“Women are seen as the producers and caretakers of the community. So if one group wants to control another, they often do so by impregnating women from the other community because they see it as a way to destroy the opposing community.”
A report by Médecins Sans Frontieres says that rape was first seen as a weapon in the 1990s. The report states,
“Systematic rape was carried out in Bosnia as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing. The women were raped so that they could give birth to Serbian children.”
ask yourself some questions
In 1993, the UN Human Rights Commission classified systematic rape and armed sexual slavery as crimes against humanity. Declared punishable as a violation of the human rights of women. In 1995, the Fourth UN World Conference directed that rape by armed groups during war is a war crime. An international tribunal was established to prosecute crimes committed in the genocide of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In a landmark case in 1998, the Rwandan tribunal ruled that ‘rape and sexual violence would be called genocide.’
What is the meaning of war? War means forgetting the standards, scale, rules, laws that we have made in a long time, forgetting all of them and implementing the law of the jungle. And as poet Gaurav Tripathi puts it, “the only law of the forest is that there is no law in this place.”
As a society progresses and we become more ‘civilised’. Concepts like ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘liberty’ get importance. But in war all these concepts get postponed. Everyone loses, but women lose the most.
In the end, leaving a question. Question which was asked by Hindi feminist writer Kamla Bhasin. Kamala left this world in September 2021. But his question is still asking for answers-
“As we progressed as a civilized society, we made women the prestige of the society. However, we did not want to let him become human. I want to ask who put my reputation in my vagina?”
by-llt the scoop india
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