Mick Hartley

As we learn more of the horrors inflicted on Ukraine by Russian troops, here's an important article by Christina Lamb – Rape is the weapon of war we don’t want to talk about:

When a female activist in Lviv contacted me a couple of weeks ago to say Russian soldiers were raping Ukrainian women and posting videos on porn sites, my heart sank, but sadly I wasn’t surprised. As a woman reporting on conflict, I have always focused on what happens to women in war, seeing them as the real heroes for somehow feeding, educating and sheltering their children as all hell breaks loose around them. Yet there is also a dark side: over the past few years I have seen more sexual violence inflicted on women by soldiers and militias than at any time in my three-decade career….

There has always been rape in conflict, from the ancient Greeks to the “comfort women” of the imperial Japanese army in the Second World War. Indeed the reports from Ukraine bear horrific echoes of the liberation of Berlin in 1945. As many as two million German women are believed to have been raped by Red Army soldiers — so many that the Soviet memorial in Berlin is known as the “Tomb of the Unknown Rapist”.

The fact is, it’s hard to find a conflict in which it hasn’t happened. In recent years ethnic and sectarian groups have used rape as a weapon, not just to humiliate and terrorise but to wipe out what they see as rival groups.

When it happened in Bosnia in the 1990s, political leaders were so horrified by the idea of rape camps in Europe, they vowed, “Never again.” Yet here we are in 2022, and not only is it still happening, but it’s on the rise. It’s too early to say if what is happening in Ukraine is men being “caught up” in the adrenaline of war and taking advantage of the chaos, or something systematic. A Ukrainian who is setting up a treatment centre described it to me as “a wave”, saying Russian soldiers were taking out their anger over the war not going well. One woman in Mariupol was apparently gang-raped so violently that she died.

The problem is, no one pays a price. After 20 years of operation the International Criminal Court has secured only one conviction for war rape. In 2000 every member country of the UN, including Russia, voted to pass Resolution 1325, which calls on them to protect women and girls from sexual violence in conflict. Since then the problem has only grown. I can’t help thinking it would be different if men were being sexually assaulted by women on a mass scale.

Ukraine is a chance to change this. We are all watching the war in real time, and already one woman has come forward to tell Catherine Philp of The Times of being raped as her four-year-old son sobbed in the next room and her husband’s body lay outside.

The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has described war rape as a red line akin to chemical weapons, and the Foreign Office will host a global summit in November. It’s time to do more than talk and to stop treating this as a side issue.