“Almost all the women and girls wanted to flee. The women who remained went into the woods at night to sleep there, together in a group. We spoke to countless people who told about Russian soldiers going door to door to see if they were women. and girls could find.”
It is just one of the many stories that Katrien Coppens has heard in Ukraine in recent days. She is director of the Mukwege Foundation, a human rights organization that focuses on victims of sexual violence in war and conflict situations. Last night, Coppens returned from Ukraine, where she spoke with victims, aid workers, NGOs and Ukrainian officials.
disrupt society
“Rape is a very cheap and effective way to completely disrupt a community,” says Coppens. “If a woman is raped, her husband feels guilty, children are shocked. Sexual violence leads to shame, it hits you, so in the very long term it works very badly.”
Official figures on rape in Ukraine by Russian soldiers are not yet available, and also in terms of anecdotal evidence, Coppens suspects that we only know the tip of the iceberg.
“The stories we hear are from areas where Russians have left again. Many soldiers have said: if you tell this, know: we will come back. Many women still think: I’m still alive, I’ll shut up and I’ll continue my life.”
When Russia invaded the Donbas in 2014, there were also stories of rapes by Russian soldiers. Iryna Dovhan was one of the victims. Warning: the actions described in this video can be experienced as violent.
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‘I am one of the few who survived’
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Still, it is very important that women make their statements, says Anne-Marie de Brouwer, researcher conflict-related sexual violence at IMPACT. In order to find out the motives and evidence, she is regularly sent to war zones to give training on how best to collect evidence in order to ultimately convict perpetrators.
“It is still far too little punished, while it is happening on a very large scale, all over the world where conflicts are going on,” she says.
Although rape has been labeled a war crime as early as 1919, it was not until the late 1990s that war criminals were first prosecuted for rape. That happened at the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals. Later, in 2001, the International Criminal Court was established, but in 20 years that court convicted only two war criminals for rape.
More evidence
“That’s very few things,” says De Brouwer. “But trials must also take place in countries themselves. The International Criminal Court only tries the high-ranking people. The people who on the ground who carry out the sexual violence must also be brought to justice.”
According to De Brouwer, it is often possible to prove that the sexual violence took place, but it is more difficult to connect the suspect to the sexual violent crime.
Yet she is also hopeful. “A lot more has come out during this conflict than what you normally see in conflicts, including interceptions of Russian rape conversations,” she says. “That means that there is already a lot more evidence than what you normally see.”
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