6.2 Partner-Representative Factors
6.2.3 Management Stability
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greater danger on public roads.312 Abuse and torture of female members of a man's family in front of him is used to convey the message that he has failed in his role as protector.313 These forms of humiliation and violence take on powerful political and symbolic meanings.314
The specific impact of conflict on women calls for specific responses from the international community. Gender-based differences and inequalities need to be addressed in policies, planning and implementation in all peace operations, humanitarian activities and reconstruction efforts.
2.5.4 Rationale for the Protection of Women against Gender-based Violations in Armed
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In all armed conflicts, women have suffered from the grave breaches of human rights law and international humanitarian law. They were victims of all forms of sexual violence, in a sporadic and incontrollable manner because of the carelessness of commanders or chiefs of armed groups. However these acts of barbarism occur, also, in a continual and methodic manner.
In certain situations women become real targets for those seeking to humiliate and to destroy entire communities by using these atrocities. 318
Women are victims of sexual aggression becausethe assaulters aim to destroy their mental and physical integrity. Usually, women are aggressed in public in an inhuman attempt to exhibit the incapacity of the male part of a group to protect them. Women are, also, victims because they represent the future of the human resource of the group they belong to. That‘s why acts like mutilation of the genital organs or forced inseminations are widespread, the attackers pursuing partial or total destruction of a nation, ethnic or religious group. Perpetrated during an armed conflict or in time of peace these acts represent a crime of genocide.319
In the post-conflict period women continue to suffer because of sexual aggressions they endured, but, in some cultures, the assaults are coming from the members of the group they are belonging to. In time of armed conflict or shortly after its ending, with husbands involved in conflict or killed in action, the status of women is dramatically altered and they, usually, become the only support for their families or, on the contrary, they are cast out because of the sexual aggression they need to confront.320 Being the victim of a sexual aggression is equivalent to extreme consequences for the victim, consequences like ruling out from community public life,
318 I Zhianpour, AArashpour& M Shekarchizadeh, art. cit.
319 C Ivanciu, op.cit. p. 576.
320 Claire de Than, E Shorts, International criminal law and human rights (London: Thomson Sweet & Maxwell, 2003,) p. 347.
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oppressions or losing the marital status judging, in some cultures, that the victims dishonored the family and the group they reside in.321
The importance of drawing attention to the protection of women in situations of armed conflict is not without reason. Women experience war in a multitude of ways from taking an active part as combatants to being targeted as members of the civilian population or just because they are women.
Throughout the history, wars were accompanied by atrocities, enormous cruelty and violence, which from the contemporary legal perspective ought to be seen as mass violations of human rights.322 Although every armed conflict imprints cruel toll on all members of the society, regardless of their gender, age, skin color, nationality or ethnic origin, women were and still are particularly vulnerable to all forms of such violations, in particular - becoming victims of various forms of violence.323 Women were treated as spoils of war for the victorious armies, and rape was seen as a cruel, but also an unavoidable consequence of war, a kind of a collateral damage.324
International Humanitarian Law tries to protect the wounded, sick, prisoners of war and civilians in the hands of enemies. Though International Humanitarian Law instruments seem to be comprehensive, they do not cover the full range of human suffering caused by war. War is not just a man‘s business. In today‘s conflicts, the impact of war on women can be severe.
Irrespective of their capacity as civilians or combatants, women face systematic disadvantages that are the product of gender inequality, which generally intensify during armed conflict.325
321Ibid.
322 B Azizi, “The freed body of women in battleground‖(2014)http://bidarzani.com. Accessed 16 March 2017.
323Ibid.
324M Seyler, “Rape in conflict: Battling the impunity that stifles its recognition as a jus cogens human right”.J. Int'l L, 1 (2011-2012), pp. 66–86.
325 J Momtaz&A H Ranjbaran, International humanitarian law: The law of internal armed conflict (Tehran: Mizan Publication, 2008).
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Wars are no longer fought in secluded combat zones; the battlefield is in the midst of the civilian population. Civilians, not combatants, make up the largest number of casualties, and among civilians, women are particularly exposed and victimized. War disrupts food supplies, production, health facilities, transport, water and fuel. Parties to a conflict are required under International Human Law to protect the health, economic and physical security of the civilian population. When they fail, it is often women who have to deal with the consequences.326
Although ferocity and coercion were bound with wars for centuries, significantly for the contemporary armed conflicts, the methods and scale of perpetration of violence changed considerably. Violence against women, especially sexual violence, is no longer a side effect of hostilities or their inseparable consequence.327 The major change that has occurred during past decades, after the end of the WWII in terms of the use of sexual violence in the armed conflicts is that at present, it is used deliberately: as weapon of war, as a war tactic or also as a means of political repression328 The way the sexual violence is used in most contemporary conflicts involves deliberate, conscious and intended effort to humiliate and intimidate not women only, but all members of the community or ethnic group in order to dominate it and in extreme cases, to achieve ethnic cleansing and to exterminate.329 It is used to enforce hostile occupations, as a method of conquering or seeking revenge against the enemy, and a means of payment for mercenary soldiers. For instance Democratic Republic of Congo's civil war, which tolled over 5 million casualties since 1998, may serve as a horrendous example of an armed conflict, in which rape is used systematically, as a weapon of war, entailing enormous number of several hundreds
326Ibid.
327Ibid.
328 Human Rights Watch, Rape as a Weapon of War and a Tool of Political Repression, The Human Rights Watch GlobalReport On Women‟s Human Rights (New York - Washington - Los Angeles - London – Brussels, 1995)p.98.
329 T Meron, ‗Rape as a crime under international humanitarian law‘ (1993) American Journal of International Law Vol 87 (3), p. 424.
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of thousands of victims. Sexual assaults in that conflict included gang rape, which represents the majority of all cases, rape in public or in presence of family members, rape with instruments, genital mutilation, perpetrated on a daily basis.330
Similarly, during Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2000) thousands of women were brutally rapedand forced to become wives of rebel commanders and combatants, some of which did not consider it wrong to rape women and turn them into sex slaves.331 Cruelty and scale of outrages against women in that conflict were almost indescribable and sexual violence was followed by or accompanied by other human rights abuses like: beating, bodily injury, amputation, torture, killing, forced labor, sexual assault without rape, abduction, burned dwelling, looting.332