Introduction
Women and girls hardly ever literally fight the world's wars, but they often suffer the most as both
primary and secondary victims. It is the case that men too suffer, but women carry the differential
burden of rape. In both ancient and modern times, rape has been used as a collective punishment for
the defeated, but it has increasingly been used by countries not at war to cause terror and
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humiliation amongst the political dissenters; Zimbabwe is one of these countries.
In the last twenty years, from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo, rape has been used as a
politico-military strategy designed to humiliate and destroy the opposition. Here, two different forms
of rape need to be distinguished: the first, rape that occurs during actual war, and the second,
politically motivated rape, which can occur outside of war situations, but is used a political tactic
against a particular ethnic or political grouping. This report is concerned with the latter since it is
evident that a state of war does not exist in Zimbabwe, although it could rightly be described as a
“complex emergency”2.
As a result of the recognition about the increasing use of rape in war and complex emergencies, the
United Nations (UN) Security Council promulgated Resolution 1325 in 2000, and followed this up with
Resolutions 1820, 1880 and 1960 in 2008 2009 and 2010, respectively. Although Resolution 1325 has
been in place for more than ten years, its implementation has been slow; only a small number of
perpetrators of sexual violence against women have been convicted and jailed by international
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criminal tribunals for committing or commanding widespread sexual violence as a war crime. Since
early 2010, the UN Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict has
set down a five-point agenda to reduce or eradicate gender-based violence. The agenda calls for an
end to impunity for sexual crimes; the protection and empowerment of women and girls to enable
them to contribute to peace initiatives; the strengthening of political commitments to ensure that
violence against women is "not pigeon-holed as 'just a women‟s issue'"; and the realisation that
"peace negotiations must address sexual violence early and fully to prevent war-time rape from
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becoming peacetime reality."
Internationally, rape is recognised both as a crime against humanity and a war crime, and it has been
said to be a crime of genocide when it is committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
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targeted group . The distinction between these three classifications of rape depends on the
circumstances pertaining at the time: rape as a war crime would require a state of war, whilst rape as
a crime against humanity or genocide could occur outside a state of obvious war. Politically motivated
rape could occur short of any of these three situations, but this does not imply that it is any less
serious.
The phenomenon of violations against women is not a new thing in Zimbabwean politics; it has been
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reported in the majority of human rights reports produced both locally and internationally since 2000
when the political landscape changed with the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) posing a serious threat to the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF)‟s
power-base in the June 2000 parliamentary elections. Before 2000 there were reports of rape
1
Moore J „Confronting Rape as a War Crime‟ .CQ Global Researcher. 2010 Vol 4 page 1
A complex emergency is a social catastrophe marked by the destruction of the affected population‟s political, economic, sociocultural, and health care infrastructures. See Mollica ,R F, Lopes Cardozo, B, Osofsky, H J, Raphael, B, Ager,A, & Salama,
P(2004), Mental health in complex emergencies, LANCET, 364: 2058–67.
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Prosecutor v. Anto Furundzija - Trial Chamber II - Judgment - IT-95-17/1 [1998] ICTY 3 (10 December 1998); and The
Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu. Judgment - ICTR-96-4-T [1998] ICTR 2 (2 September 1998)
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http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=90853 (Accessed on 27th October 2010).
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Rome Statute International Criminal Court: UN Doc. A/CONF. 183/9; 37 ILM 1002 (1998); 2187 UNTS 90. Available
http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/EA9AEFF7-5752-4F84-BE94-0A655EB30E16/0/Rome_Statute_English.pdf
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Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum A Woman‟s Place is in the Home? Gender Based Violence and Opposition Politics in
Zimbabwe. (2006) page 3 Also see CSVR (2006), Women on the run: Women survivors of torture amongst refugees in
South Africa. Report produced for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and the Crisis in Zimbabwe
Coalition page 8.
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