The United Nations Security Council should effectively address sexual violence in conflict as a weapon of war and its destabilizing impact on communities, Human Rights Watch and the International Women’s Tribune Center has said. On June 11, 2008, high-ranking military officials from countries involved in peacekeeping missions and women from war-torn countries will make recommendations to the UN Security Council on how to stop sexual violence in war.

In its battle against rebels in eastern Ethiopia’s Somali Region, Ethiopia's army has subjected civilians to executions, torture, and rape, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released on Thursday 12 June. The widespread violence, part of a vicious counterinsurgency campaign that amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity, has contributed to a looming humanitarian crisis, threatening the survival of thousands of ethnic Somali nomads.

The International Network of Genocide Scholars together with the Centre for the Study of Genocide and Mass Violence (SGMV) at The University of Sheffield/UK will dedicate the 1st Global Conference on Genocide, Sheffield, to sustainable genocide prevention for the 21st century. "Genocide: The Future of Prevention", the inaugural event in INOGS' biannual series of Global Genocide Conferences, will take stock of Genocide Studies and move on to develop new ideas about prevention.

The Juba Peace Process, the two-year negotiations aimed at ending the war in Uganda, has ended with rebel leader Joseph Kony refusing to sign the final agreement. Though we've made incredible progress in the past two years, It appears that we have reached the end of the road for this process.

It is now more important than ever that we keep up the pressure on our leaders to end this war. These peace talks produced a surge of helpful attention from our leaders, and they will be tempted to now turn their attention elsewhere. Returning to the neglect and indifference of the past would have catastrophic consequences for the people of northern Uganda.

We cannot afford to have that happen. The stakes are too high.

Even though they failed to achieve a signed final agreement, significant progress was still made. What had been been labeled as one of the worst and most neglected humanitarian crises in the world just a few years ago has seen transformation. Nearly a million people began to leave displacement camps and return home and children were no longer forced to commute at night to stay safe. These gains must be sustained and consolidated.

Despite this progress in northern Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army is now operating in the border regions between three countries: the Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic. Abductions of young children are once again occurring, and we have good reason to believe they will only increase in the coming weeks.

As the rebel group prepares to return to war, we must urge our leaders to fight harder than ever to achieve peace.

For those of you who have worked so hard to help achieve peace in Uganda, I know that this news is extremely discouraging. But with so much progress made and so much still hanging in the balance, now is not the time to give up hope. Successful peace processes require long-term vision and persistence. Together, we can be the factor that prevents history from repeating itself. We can keep the attention of our leaders on this issue and keep pushing them to do everything they can for peace.

There are no alternatives.

What happens when dreams are deferred and social movements all offer a neo-liberal vision? For Kola Ibrahim, South Africa is the answer.

For more than a week, a series of xenophobic attacks were launched against the foreigners by a desperate layer of the poor population of South Africa. According to reports, more than 50 persons were killed while hundreds were forced to flee their homes. Foreigners attacked included Nigerians, Zimbabweans, among others. But, the major rallying point of these desperate poor youth of Africa is that they need jobs, and the little jobs they have are being taken by the foreigners. These racist attacks in South Africa resemble the racist and far-right attacks on immigrants and other peoples in Europe and America. In as much as one cannot give any iota of support to this backward and reactionary act of a few, it is necessary to place the blame directly where it belongs.

In the first instance, it should be stated that the basis of the xenophobic attacks is to be found in the extreme poverty the South African poor population has been subjected to since the fall of apartheid. The clamour for jobs is just a reflection of growing poverty and privation. Xenophobia is the echo of a massive anger growing within the South African society. Despite the claim of increased investment and economic growth, more and more South Africans are being deprived of their daily needs while the white minority rule has been replaced by capital rule of the working majority. Following the end of apartheid, millions of poor South Africans expected a better living under their own, but the almost eight years of Mbeki rule has dashed these hopes. In the name of improvement foreign direct investment, neo-liberal economic policies were introduced vis-à-vis cut in social spending which has seen the budget for education and health care (in a country with one of the highest AIDS/HIV record), commercialization of social services (public houses, water, etc) privatization of public utilities like electricity, retrenchment among other things.

These policies tagged under Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme (the sister programme of Nigeria's NEEDS) have collectively meant joblessness, evictions and increased poverty. According to a 2002 report by Municipal Service Project, an estimated 10 million have had their electricity and water cut off for non-payment, two million have been evicted on this and other sundry reasons while 1.5 million have had their property seized for the same reason. In fact, fifty percent of those in arrears said they could not afford to pay no matter how much they try. Furthermore, only half of the 40 million population has access to flushing toilets while 10 percent have no access to any form of toilet at all. In 2002, through the privatization and commercialization policies of the ANC government, 200 lives were lost to cholera (the highest in the country’s history). And the introduction of water charges in Kwa Zulu Natal district has forced two thirds of the population to resort to rivers and dams for water, with the consequent health implications. Since the ANC government came to power more than a million jobs have been lost while job creation has simply dwindled.

The overall result of this is a growing poverty with over 30 percent of the population living on less than $0.9 a month while more than 70 percent live on less than $35 a month. Yet more public utilities have been handed over to private firms at rock bottom prices, a situation which has further increased the inequality level in the country. Already, more than 40 percent of the population is jobless. The situation has in fact worsened since these facts were collated.

In this kind of situation, one could only expect a growing frustration and anger. The question however is why were foreigners targeted by the angry and frustrated youth. The emergence of majority rule led to much expectation by the South African population. Unfortunately, more than ten years after, aside a few billionaires and an insignificant middle class, most of the South Africans have seen their living standards declining. Though, some foreigners usually make it in South Africa (as a result of the fact that some of them are qualified prefessionals), many foreigners are also poor especially those who left their countries due to political and social strife. As a result of this growing misery, many South Africans have been looking for a way out.

The ruling ANC has stifled dissenting views within the party. This coupled with the alliance of the major opposition groups - the central trade union, COSATU and the Communist Party (which has in the real sense turned to the right) has denied most South Africans a vehicle to demand for change. The central trade union has been diverting the mass anger to safe mode which has made many to lose hope in the possibility of the labour movement driving cahnge. Furthermore, more and more sectors of the economy are being handed over to the private sector all in a bid to weaken the mass movement. It is the summation of all this that led to the current crisis. As the legendary Polish revolutionary, Rosa Luxembourg once said that 'it is either socialism or capitalist barbarism".

It is also important to mention the contribution of he Mbeki/ANC government's foreign policy. It is a known fact that Mbeki government is giving silent support to the tyrannical Mugabe government in Zimbabwe, which has led to tens of thousands of political refugees fleeing to South African shanties. This has added further pressure on the dilapidating public service and utilities. Immigration, rather than generating brotherly support and affection ,will only generate xenophobia and the growth of racism.

It is noteworthy that the xenophobic attacks occur in the shanties areas of the country where stark poverty prevails. It is in this areas that most of the foreigners are residing as they attempt to escape from the neo-liberal misery they face in their countries. For instance in Nigeria, millions are still living in poverty while just one percent of the population is controls over 80 percent of the oil wealth. Education, health and other social infrastructure is in shambles. Nothing is working. In this situation, immigration becomes a solution. Even professionals (doctors, nurses, engineers, etc) are leaving the country to better their lots.

According to IFAD, "three fourths of poor people in Western and Middle Africa — an estimated 90 million people — live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. One in five lives in a country is affected by warfare." The common denominator in all these African countries is the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies such as privatization which lead to growing economic misery for the vast majority of the citizenry.

Growing economic misery in the absence of political alternatives for the masses can only fuel reactionary, backward ideas like racism. It is a reality that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinism - a grotesque caricature of genuine ideas of Marxism - has led to many worker organizations succumbing to the ideas of capitalist neo-liberalism, thus denying the poor masses an alternative to the capitalist policies. Most labour movement leaderships - from South Africa to Nigeria, Kenya, Botswana, etc - serve as a stabilizing force for capitalism.

But the masses are ready to struggle for change. The recent protests against food prices have confirmed this. However, the absence of a viable political structure that will translate the anger of the masses into a radical political change is frustrating the masses. Unless radical, democratic mass political parties with genuine socialist ideas are founded in every African country and coupled with a genuine working people's solidarity, xenophobia and ethnic violence will never stop. The current capitalist governments in Africa have shown that they cannot move Africa forward. They will not even use Africa’s enormous resources (human, material, monetary and natural) to fund social services. This is South Africa’s long-term lesson.

*Kola Ibrahim is a Member of the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

A disarmament pledge by two minor Rwandan Hutu rebel groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a welcome, if small, step to restoring peace in the devastated region, according to the government and analysts. Rwandan insurgents are one of the key elements in a complex web of armed groups in a region where violence, especially sexual violence against women, is still widespread five years after the official end of DRC's last civil war.

Mauritanian officials have emphasised they are not shifting sides towards Morocco in the conflict over Western Sahara, contrasting media reports originating in Morocco. Mauritania's relatively new government confirms it is to stay neutral in the conflict and maintain its recognition of the exiled Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

The government of Uganda has said peace talks to end a two decades of conflict with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have failed. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda's president, on Thursday announced an agreement with neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sudan to fight the rebel group, led by Joseph Kony.

Lansana Conte, Guinea's president, has met his troops in a bid to end an escalating crisis over unpaid wages that saw soldiers go on the rampage in the capital, a military source said. The meeting on Friday is the first since the start of the pay protest, which has since grown to include other demands, including the departure of senior generals.

Sudan will not surrender any individuals accused of war crimes in the country's Darfur region to the International Criminal Court, Sudan's UN ambassador has said. Abdalmahmood Mohamad said on Wednesday that Khartoum would not extradite any Sudanese to The Hague, a day after Sudan was accused of complicity in crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Five weeks after ENOUGH issued its report “Sounding the Alarm on Abyei” the town of Abyei has ceased to exist. Brigade 31 of the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, has displaced the entire civilian population and burned Abyei’s market and housing to the ground. These events were predicted, and absent effective word and action, they became inevitable.

Radio was used to incite hatred in the build up to the genocide in Rwanda. But today the medium promotes messages of reconciliation and peace to those still traumatized by the violence. The radio station Radio Mille Collines (RTLM) played a significant role in instigating and organizing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Its broadcasts followed the methods seen in almost every other genocide.

Can the media reduce prejudice and conflict? Understanding the mass media´s role in shaping prejudiced beliefs, norms and behaviours is very limited. A year-long field experiment in Rwanda tested the impact of a radio soap opera about two Rwandan communities in conflict, which featured messages about reducing intergroup prejudice, violence, and trauma.

The media needs to observe high professionalism standards that will pave way for balanced news that carries the truth to the public. Training of professional journalists should be a prerequisite in the media companies if the truth is to be told.

Chad has agreed to release all former child combatants held in detention, while armed rebel groups in the Central African Republic (CAR) have also committed to freeing any children in their ranks, a top United Nations envoy announced after a six day trip to the two countries. “I have been given assurances that parties involved in conflict have agreed to free children in both countries,” the UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy said in a statement. “The next challenge will be to reintegrate the children with their families and communities,” she added.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged Sudan to cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to ensure justice for the victims of crimes committed in the war-torn Darfur region after the Court’s Prosecutor reported that the country is “deliberately” attacking civilians. In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Mr. Ban said he was “deeply concerned about the reported lack of cooperation” of the Sudanese Government with prosecutors at the ICC, which is based in The Hague.

The UN refugee agency on Thursday condemned a rebel attack on a makeshift camp in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that left at least nine people dead, including two children, and scores wounded. UNHCR said it was evacuating staff and temporarily suspending operations in the Rutshuru area of North Kivu province after Wednesday's raid on Kinyandoni camp, which shelters some 5,000 internally displaced people (IDP).

In view of the meeting of the Sub-committee on political matters: human rights and democracy, international and regional issues between the EU and Egypt to be held on 2-3 June 2008, the Euro Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) are deeply concerned about the deterioration of the human rights situation since the adoption of the European Neighbourhood Policy action plan in March 2007.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48550art.jpgWhen my co-Director of AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan, visited in November, and observed that the war being waged against women “may well be the most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone”, she was right. Terrible, unspeakable things have been done to the women of DR Congo, writes Stephen Lewis. It isn’t enough to stop the shooting when the raping continues apace. The only worthwhile armistice restores peace for the entire population, male and female. There can be no satisfaction in claiming a truce or a peace treaty which is soaked in the carnage of the women of the land. If all the peacekeepers were women, and the men of a country were under pervasive sexual assault, do you think the women would simply observe the carnage?
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Three days ago, I returned from Liberia. While in the country, I met with President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, with senior officials of the Ministry of Health, with the Minister of Gender, with the leadership of the Clinton Foundation, with the consultant who drafted the legislation for the special court to try sexual offences, with the UNICEF Representative and significant numbers of the UNICEF staff. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to meet with UNMIL, but the UN Mission in Liberia and its peacekeeping forces were inevitably a part of every conversation.

The context of my discussions is encapsulated in the words of the Deputy UN Envoy for the Rule of Law in Liberia when she said, as recently as May 20th: “We cannot expect the future leaders of Liberia, the doctors, nurses, and engineers of Liberia to be brought up amongst men who are rapists and women who are angry, degraded, frightened, depressed, embarrassed and confused.”

She was speaking about the contagion of sexual violence that currently engulfs the country and causes such intense concern. The statistics are horrifying: a recent study by UNICEF indicated that more than fifty per cent of all reported rapes are brutal assaults on young girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. The gender advisor in UNICEF felt that the percentage was probably on the rise, and it’s feared that increases in the HIV rates among female youth will not be far behind. The Minister of Gender showed me figures for March, 2008, indicating that the majority of reported rapes in that month were committed against girls under the age of twelve, some under the age of five, and she narrated stories of gang rape so insensate and so depraved that it reminded me of exhibits in a Holocaust museum. A further survey, of all fifteen counties in the country, found that girls and boys were united in their conviction that young girls were the most endangered group in Liberia, and incredibly enough, that there was no place and no time of day or night where adolescent girls could be considered safe.

Predictably, President Johnson-Sirleaf is thunderstruck by the force of the sexual violence. In a very real sense she is staking the integrity of her tenure on her ability to confront and subdue the war on women.

But how did it come to this? UNMIL has been in the country since 2003 … it has a large contingent of women peacekeepers: it has an Office of the Gender Advisor and of the Advisor on HIV/AIDS; it has gender mainstreaming built into the mandate; both the UN Envoy and the Deputy UN Envoy are women; and the resolution of 2003 which constituted UNMIL incorporated Security Council Resolution 1325 which --- you will agree --- was supposed to guarantee the involvement of women in the peace-keeping processes, but more important, guarantee women protection and security from gender-based violence and violations of human rights.

Clearly all that hasn’t worked in Liberia, where things for women and girls are getting worse. Where did we go wrong?

My own view, and the view of the organization to which I belong --- AIDS-Free World --- is that peacekeepers and force commanders alike have to take sexual violence much more seriously. It is simply untenable to argue that the responsibility to keep the warring parties at bay transcends every other human imperative. It doesn’t. You may succeed in manufacturing a semblance of peace, but for the women of the country, the conflict continues in the most painful and eviscerating of ways.

In the case of Liberia, it isn’t a matter of a contentious mandate: as I said, Resolution 1325 is built into the obligations of peacekeeping. Anyone would argue that when a peacekeeper in the field knows of acts of sexual violence having been committed, or has reason to believe that acts of sexual violence have been or will be committed, then he or she has the obligation to intervene or, to use the language of the day, the ‘responsibility to protect’.

But let me be even clearer about this. Peacekeepers aren’t mere passive observers of the human family. Peacekeepers move into a country; they learn its social architecture; they watch the roiling political terrain on a day-to-day basis. They come to know the foibles, to know the extremes, to know the anomalies. More often than not, they can tell when trouble is brewing. They can intuit when men might hurtle out of control. They have the pulse of the culture. When it unravels, they’re there to bear witness. I’m saying that when patterns of sexual violence emerge, peacekeepers are rarely surprised. In some cases, they alone have anticipated the atrocities in the offing. And with that knowledge comes obligation. With that insight comes responsibility. It isn’t enough to stop the shooting when the raping continues apace. The only worthwhile armistice restores peace for the entire population, male and female. There can be no satisfaction in claiming a truce or a peace treaty which is soaked in the carnage of the women of the land.

Conventional wisdom says that it is the Security Council’s job to set policy, and the peacekeepers’ job to follow it. But that’s too easy. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and its military contingents in-country, should be hollering from the rooftops whenever they feel that their role is somehow constrained. If you need more troops, ask for them. If you need more training, ask for it. If you require a larger contingent of police officers, insist on it. If, in the field, you see sexual mayhem in place, then after intervening, take the names of individual soldiers and witnesses and seek investigation and indictments from the International Criminal Court. If the UN’s Member States won’t comply, then call a press conference and tell the world that women are being sacrificed on the altar of myopic parsimony, or perhaps more accurately, on the altar of Pavlovian sexism.

There is nothing facetious in this; I’m absolutely serious. The United Nations cannot allow the terrible assault on women to continue, while crouching behind the ambiguity of mandate. That, I remind you, is what the Department of Peacekeeping Operations did between January and April of 1994, in the perverse struggle with UN Force Commander General Romeo Dallaire over “rules of engagement”. And there followed the deaths of eight hundred thousand Rwandans and the start of the war in the Congo.

In the DR Congo, it is now estimated that 5.4 million people have died since the end of the Rwandan genocide. That conflict was finally supposed to have been resolved by a peace engagement of January last. To some extent, the battles stopped. But as always, just as in Liberia, the war never ends for women.

In the case of DR Congo, the role of peacekeepers could not be clearer. The words of the Security Council resolution of December 21st, 2007, extending the mandate of the UN Mission in the Congo, MONUC, were absolutely unequivocal: Paragraph 18 “Requests MONUC, in view of the scale and severity of sexual violence committed especially by armed elements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to undertake a thorough review of its efforts to prevent and respond to sexual violence, and to pursue a mission-wide strategy, in close cooperation with the United Nations Country Team and other partners, to strengthen prevention, protection, and response to sexual violence, including through training of Congolese security forces in accordance with its mandate, and to regularly report, including in a separate annex if necessary, on actions taken in this regard, including factual data and trend analyses of the problem …”.

That sounds very much to me as though the Security Council knew full well that things were off the rails where sexual violence was concerned, and this was an explicit instruction to MONUC to get its act together. In that regard, it’s significant that the Security Council went even further: the final clause of the resolution requires the Secretary-General himself to report on the issues covered in Paragraph 18.

To be sure, I can’t pretend to know exactly what lay in the minds of the Security Council members, but these things I do know: Dr. Denis Mukwege, who heads the Panzi Hospital for survivors of rape and sexual violence in the Eastern city of Bukavu, told me when we met in New Orleans three weeks ago, that although the steady flow of raped women has slowed somewhat since the January accord, it continues in shocking numbers; the UNICEF staff in the field agree that things are still in the realm of nightmare for women, who live lives haunted by the fear of being violated, tortured, mutilated, infected with HIV. And who expected anything different, when the countless women who have suffered such demonic sexual violence were not sitting at the peace table last January, and were not signatories to the agreement … a direct violation of Resolution 1325? Who can claim to be surprised by reports from Congolese NGOs on the ground, who say that in the country’s so-called peacekeeping period, women are still too frightened to leave their homes?

When Under Secretary-General John Holmes said the Congo was the worst place in the world for women, he was right. When Eve Ensler, the noted author of the Vagina Monologues wrote of the Congo that she had just ‘returned from hell’, she was right. When my co-Director of AIDS-Free World, Paula Donovan, visited in November, and observed that the war being waged against women “may well be the most savage display of misogyny ever orchestrated in a conflict zone”, she was right.

Terrible, unspeakable things have been done to the women of DR Congo. I want simply to argue that MONUC has it within its mandate to end the reign of terror. If it so chooses, MONUC can also have it within its power to end the reign of terror. Whatever MONUC feels it lacks to protect the women of the Congo --- numbers, police, equipment, training, time, leadership, resources --- let them demand it. And if those demands aren’t met, let them tell the world that madness is at work and it knows no end.

Normally, one would turn to the Secretary-General of the United Nations for help in this difficult situation. But how can we have trust?

The Secretary-General gets commendably engaged when it comes to Burma or the price of food, but where is the same sense of throbbing agitation when it comes to sexual violence? This is a Secretary-General who should be insisting on the invocation of the “Responsibility to Protect” in the Congo, but fails to do so. The defense and protection of the rights of women do not come instinctively to him. This is, after all, a Secretary-General who granted immunity to the former High Commissioner for Refugees, when a claim of sexual harassment against him reached a New York court. I remember that when the Secretary-General was first appointed, he told a group of NGOs that his learning curve on gender was virtually vertical. A year and a half later, the upward climb appears to have stalled at the bottom of the graph.

No, if we are to turn things around, with or without the help of the Secretary-General, the peacekeepers must lie at the heart of the transformation. How excellent that would be. Resolution 1325 would finally be liberated from the dustbins of the Security Council, and women, without fear, could take hold of their collective destiny. You can be sure there would be no vacillation.

If all the peacekeepers were women, and the men of a country were under pervasive sexual assault, do you think the women would simply observe the carnage? Not a chance. And they wouldn’t need a Security Council Resolution to tell them what to do.

*Stephen Lewis,is the co-Director of AIDS-Free World. These remarks were delivered delivered at the May, 2008 Wilton Park Conference: Women targeted or affected by armed conflict: What role for military peacekeepers?

*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

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