Munaza Rashid - Do you remember Kunan Poshpora?

We knew that if we remained silent, they would do it again, if not in our village then somewhere else.

A survivor

Contents

Urvashi Butalia, Laxmi Murthy and Navsharan Singh

Afreen Faridi

Sahba Husain

1. 
   
2. Making Sense of the Kunan Poshpora Mass Rape:
   Sexual Violence and Impunity in Kashmir
   
3. 
   
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. 
   

Zubaan Series on Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia

An Introduction

Urvashi Butalia, Laxmi Murthy and Navsharan Singh

The Sexual Violence and Impunity project (SVI) is a three-year research project, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, and coordinated by Zubaan. Led by a group of nine advisors from five countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), and supported by groups and individuals on the ground, the SVI project started with the objectives of developing and deepening understanding on sexual violence and impunity in South Asia through workshops, discussions, interviews and commissioned research papers on the prevalence of sexual violence, and the structures that provide impunity to perpetrators in all five countries.

The project began with some key questions and concerns. We noted that recent histories and contemporary political developments in South Asia had shown an exponential increase in sexual violence, particularly mass violence. And yet, even as such violence had increased across the region, so had the ever-deepening silence around it.

Why, for example, had the end of 25 years of violent conflict in Sri Lanka in May 2009 not resulted in an open and frank discussion about sexual violence as a weapon of war? Why had the International Crimes Tribunal (Bangladesh) of 2009 set up to investigate and prosecute suspects for the genocide committed in 1971 by the Pakistan Army and their local collaborators, paid such little attention to the question of mass rape, despite it being widely acknowledged that it had happened and many women having spoken out about it. Why did discussions on Kashmir in India or Swat in Pakistan, simply ignore the question of sexual violence? Why was caste violence, violence against sex workers and men and transgender persons barely spoken about?

Nor was silence the only issue here. Crucial to maintaining the silence was and is the active collusion of States in providing impunity to perpetrators, sometimes under the guise of protective laws and special powers to the armed forces, at others under the guise of nationalism. So heavily were the odds stacked against women that, until recently, very few had dared to speak out. Backed by culture, and strengthened by the State, and often with the active collusion of non-state actors, impunity then, remained largely unchallenged.

We asked ourselves if these conditions were specific to the South Asian region. Elsewhere in many parts of the world, we noted, rape was increasingly being discussed and accepted, not only as a weapon of war, but also as a crime against humanity and as an instrument of genocide. The 1998 Akeyesu judgment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) provided a clear definition of rape and delineated its elements as a crime against humanity and as an instrument of genocide. In the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) jurisprudence pioneered the approach that used acts of rape and other forms of sexual violence to include elements of other international crimes such as torture, enslavement, and persecution, which previously had not been litigated in the context of gender violence.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) brought into jurisprudence on violations of international humanitarian law a particular form of sexual violence prevalent in the conflict in Sierra Leone forced marriages. In this case, forced marriage was distinguished from sexual slavery or sexual crimes and argued as a crime against humanity. Building on the progressive development of the case law for sexual and gender-based violence under ICTR, ICTY and SCSL, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) includes rape and forms of sexual violence as part of the crimes of Genocide, Crimes against Humanity, and War Crimes, and specifically enumerates rape, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization and prosecution on account of gender as specific crimes punishable under the statute.