Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/war/)
Victoire Mukambanda was one of the instrumental witnesses who testified to bring about the first conviction of rape as a war crime in Rwanda. That historic trial is the focus of the new documentary “The Uncondemned.”
“They are experiencing multiple levels of trauma,” says the medical chief of this special quota project. “There is the individual trauma, of course. And the collective trauma; because the genocide was directed at their entire community.”
Zahra used to live in Afghanistan before she came to the U.S. She’d like to go back some day, but doesn’t know if that will be possible.
The struggle for female representation at any talks that might resume in Geneva is all too familiar. “You could just delete ‘Syria’ from this discussion and put in Northern Ireland, Liberia, Northern Mali or South Africa,” says one U.N. observer.
Most survivors who applied for compensation, including legal aid, medical insurance and rehabilitation, are still waiting for the decision. Implementation of the new law is slower than many would like and will determine how many more survivors will come forward.
Pakistan, which hosts one of the world’s largest refugee populations, has been trying for years to repatriate Afghans driven out by the Taliban. For Afghan women in this U.N. refugee settlement, life is bleak but not as dangerous as going home.
Speed is the name of the game for refugees going through Croatia and heading to the Hungarian or Slovenian border. But as winter nears, that’s particularly hard on women and children coping with inadequate food, sanitation and safety.
“It is catastrophic,” says one Muslim women’s leader, referring to the Nov. 13 attacks. “If we do not act on the causes of why they committed such horrors, we are not going to find the tools to stop them and to offer other alternatives.”
An Iraqi women’s rights advocate is asking the U.N. Security Council to pressure her government to change its laws about women in the civil-war torn state, including removing obstacles for those operating shelters for women fleeing ISIS.
A long-overdue law guaranteeing reparations for wartime rape that passed on May 29 is cause for celebration. But the challenges in drafting and passing it could portend difficulty in widespread implementation, set to begin this fall.