"It is perhaps more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict"
MAJ. GEN. (RET.) Patrick Cammaert, Wilton Park Conference, May 2008.
"I don’t know when I began to clearly see the evidence of another crime besides murder among the bodies in the ditches and the mass graves. I know that for a long time I sealed away from my mind all the signs of this crime, instructing myself not to recognize what was there in front of me. The crime was rape, on a scale that deeply affected me… For a long time I completely wiped the death masks of raped and sexually mutilated girls and women from my mind as if what had been done to them was the last thing that would send me over the edge. But if you looked, you could see the evidence, even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. Where the bodies were fresh, we saw what must have been semen pooled on and near the dead women and girls. There was always a lot of blood. Some male corpses had their genitals cut off, but many women and young girls had their breasts chopped off and their genitals crudely cut apart. They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and knees wide apart. It was the expressions on their dead faces that assaulted me the most, a frieze of shock, pain and humiliation."
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda LT. GEN. (RET.) Romeo Dallaire, former UNAMIR Force Commander, (Random House Canada, 2003, P.430)
"Long after the guns fall silent, the consequences of rape remain. For women and girls who walk to marketplaces, water-points or schools on roads still controlled by armed groups, and return home to communities teeming with ex-combatants, the war is not over. Sexual violence has been called a "war within a war", but often it continues as a "war within the peace". War lives on in the children born of rape and orphaned by violence, who line the roads in gangs, begging for money and food, aspiring to be soldiers. By attacking shared values, sexual violence destroys not only people, but their sense of being a people. We cannot bring justice to every victim throughout the history of war. But what we are here to do today, and from this moment on, is to ensure that conflict-related sexual violence no longer goes unreported, unaddressed or unpunished. That will be our collective measure of success."
Margot Wallström, The Special Representative to the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Statement at the Security Council's Open Meeting on Women, Peace, and Security: Sexual Violence in Situations of Armed Conflict,16 December 2010.
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda LT. GEN. (RET.) Romeo Dallaire, former UNAMIR Force Commander, (Random House Canada, 2003, P.430)
"Long after the guns fall silent, the consequences of rape remain. For women and girls who walk to marketplaces, water-points or schools on roads still controlled by armed groups, and return home to communities teeming with ex-combatants, the war is not over. Sexual violence has been called a "war within a war", but often it continues as a "war within the peace". War lives on in the children born of rape and orphaned by violence, who line the roads in gangs, begging for money and food, aspiring to be soldiers. By attacking shared values, sexual violence destroys not only people, but their sense of being a people. We cannot bring justice to every victim throughout the history of war. But what we are here to do today, and from this moment on, is to ensure that conflict-related sexual violence no longer goes unreported, unaddressed or unpunished. That will be our collective measure of success."
Margot Wallström, The Special Representative to the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Statement at the Security Council's Open Meeting on Women, Peace, and Security: Sexual Violence in Situations of Armed Conflict,16 December 2010.
