UN takes on sexual violence in war zones

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Wednesday condemning sexual violence in war zones, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presiding and appealing for global action to end the scourge.

The U.S.-sponsored measure, passed by a 15-0 vote, creates a special United Nations envoy to coordinate efforts to combat the use of rape as a weapon of war and directs U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to dispatch a team of experts to advise governments on how best to prosecute offenders.

“It is time for all of us to assume our responsibility to go beyond condemning this behavior to taking concrete steps to end it, to make it socially unacceptable, to recognize it is not cultural, it is criminal,” Clinton told the council. “We must act now to end this crisis.”

Drawing on her experiences from a trip last month to the wartorn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where she met numerous victims of rape and other sexual abuse, Clinton said the United Nations had a special obligation to protect women and children who she said are “war’s most vulnerable and violated victims.”

“The dehumanizing nature of sexual violence doesn’t just harm a single individual or a single family or even a single village or a single group,” she said. “It shreds the fabric that weaves us together as human beings.”

President Barack Obama applauded the U.N. and its member states “for standing together to confront these despicable acts.”

“Today, the United States joins with the international community in sending a simple and unequivocal message: violence against women and children will not be tolerated and must be stopped,” he said in a statement issued by the White House.

Obama pledged that his administration “will continue to support the right of all women and girls to live free from fear, and to realize their full potential.”

Although the situation is now perhaps most acute in Congo, where an epidemic of rape and other abuses claim an average of 36 women and girl victims a day, rampant sexual violence has also been seen in other conflict zones in Africa, Asia and Europe — from Bosnia to Myanmar.

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, up to half a million women were raped. Some 60,000 victims were reported during the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s and in Sierra Leone, incidents of war-related sexual violence from 1991 to 2001 numbered about 64,000.

Many of the perpetrators remain unpunished.

The resolution adopted Wednesday says that “ending impunity is essential if a society in conflict or recovering from conflict is to come to terms with past abuses committed against civilians affected by armed conflict and to prevent future such abuses.”

In addition to the appointment of a special representative and team of experts, the U.N. resolution calls for the inclusion of women’s protection advisers within U.N. peacekeeping missions and the deployment of large numbers of women police and military personnel.