Ethnic Uighur women take part in a protest against China, in Istanbul
by Maria Khanam 22 March 2021
“Women’s lives and their bodies have been the unacknowledged casualties of war for too long (Amnesty’s Lives Blown Apart report).” [i]
Rape is a tactic and a strategy of war that poses a threat to international security (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commission). For centuries, rape is used as a strategic weapon in the tribal, traditional, and genocidal states (Jones 2013). It is a crime against humanity and has impacted millions of women all over the world including minorities (Amnesty International, 2011). Understanding rape as a strategy of war is not enough rather looking in the purview of socio-political phenomenon (Brown, 2012).
The question has been raised on the advocacy of the use of rape in warfare by the educated military and contemporary governmental strategies. Why does rape valued as a weapon in the modern-day?
Multiple responses and deliberations tend to highlight that the military has supported these crimes to achieve the end goals or complete the goals (Jones, 2013). To facilitate their goals resulted in mass rape. These tactics symbolically highlight a message of dominance. Women’s sexuality is not only responsible for rape rather an expression of control (Buss and Malamuth, 1996). Sometimes, rape is used to morale the enemy with an intention to diminishing the particular ethnic population through ethnic cleansing and genocide. A sadist pragmatism innovation of rape legitimization in the boundaries of the nation-state as a national interest poses a question on the limits and boundaries of national security with human rights. The state-sponsored genocide operations particularly targeted the population to keep them in the ghetto of spiritual annihilation.
In warfare, rape is called psychological warfare aimed to perpetrate atrocities to teach a lesson to the enemy, reducing the cohesion of family units and community (Psychology wikia.org, 2009, Jones, 2013). As we already know, family unit and community involvement are very important in the formation of society as a social institution (Chaudhuri, n.d.). To disrupt the harmony of one community leads to polluting the family units through gang rapes and sexual violence. Rape as warfare, has an old history of oppression, and gender-based violence is not a rare phenomenon. In the modern era, it has been supported and appreciated by the government due to the sexual deprivation of mobilized troops, a lack of military discipline, and biological drive to produce offspring (Jones, 2013). United Nations Security Council highlighted in a resolution passed on 19th June that rape and other forms of sexual violence are war crimes, a crime against humanity, and constituted for genocide. It has constituted rape as a war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, and disperse the community or ethnic group (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commission). Major General Patrick Cammaert was a former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in the eastern congo said, rape has been used as a weapon of war because it destroys communities. He further added, “You destroy communities. You punish the men, and you punish the women, doing it in front of the men. It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.” Slavenka Drakulic said, that “rape is a kind of slow murder.”
Cultural pathologies theory argues that men prefer to rape in a war-like situation, and some historical and cultural environments become likely to rape. It rests in the western assumption of civilized and uncivilized nations, where some nations are more developed. This point of view tends to focus on the inherently barbarism or savageness in some cultures that would be improved with the intervention of western values.
Feminist theory of rape exhibits proclamations that in wartimes men do rape to emphasize their desire for control and dominance over women. It extends the arena of the power theory of rape in wartime. According to this theory rape is not derived from the sexual passion of an individual rather a motivation of a desire to control women by force, coercion, and abusive practices (Barstow, 2000; contributors to Sajor, 1998; contributors to Stiglmayer, 1994). Feminists’ theory was in opposition to the “pressure cooker” theory of rape (Siefert, 1994). It counters the pressure cooker theory as it suggests that in wartime, the chaos of war milieu encourages men to get engaged in rape urges terrible effects. Feminist rape theory also highlights the socialization practices particular to specific societies that increased rape culture (Gottschall, 2004). The intense misogyny in the patriarchal societies thrives power through sexual violence to subjugate women in a larger context. In war times, men took advantage of the conflict and surroundings to exert their dominance, force, power on women and perpetuate inequalities in the society (Gottschall 130-131). War is a “fundamentally gendered phenomenon,” said Nordstorm because men are the perpetrators who rape women as opposed to this gender. Feminist theory neglects social causes of war rapes rather more emphasizes individual drives. It also highlights feminine and masculine roles that are also responsible for causing wartime rape.
The Biosocial theory or Biology-based theories of wartime rape indicates the socio-cultural factors often responsible for soldiers’ decisions to rape and that the activity is wholly under genetic control (Gottschall, 2004). It is also related to the “pressure cooker” theory in which men possess an instinct for sexual aggression. Further explains the sexual desire motivation and sexual psychology as Thornhill and Palmer (2000) argued that sociocultural explanations for rape, including wartime rape, are incomplete.
Strategic rape theory defined rape as an instrument that can be used from one group to another and recognized as a tactic of modern warfare. In this context, it is one of the mass systematic rape theories but taken for granted by the international community. The purpose behind the strategic rape is to achieve certain goals or larger objectives. It provides a counter-narrative to the feminist rape theory of individual derives from the broader paradigm of domination in the larger context of destroying the enemy on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds. “Rape is a crime against a collectivity,” said Buss. This theory provides a multidimensional scenario of rape used to humiliate, oppress, terrorize, demoralize, and dehumanize the different groups of people who share political, social, and economic gain (Farwell, Gottschall, Mukwege, and Nordstrom).
War rape is usually committed in public, in front of family and community members, and taken seriously (Diken and Laustsen, Gottschall, Mukwege). The torture is not limited to the vagina and anus penetration but involves inhuman atrocities such as insert knives into the vagina, objects, etc (Mechanic 17). The traditional patriarchal values like female purity, virgin wife, men protector, honor, cleanliness, etc are the reasons due to which men in the war forced male family members to watch the rape of their wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers. It also led them to attack men of the enemy community and forced them to rape their family members. (Gottschall). Rape is used to destroy the “social fabric” of society, destroy family units, and communities (Mukwege). Inflicted rape to disrupt harmony is a basic tool to achieve the genocidal and ethnocidal ends. Hence, massive violent atrocities of rapes were carried out to attack the physical bodies of particular community’s women and hijacked their mind, needs, emotional and social relations. In the contemporary era, genocidal tactics are either used to sterilize women to stop the breed of a particular community or through multiple rapes to reproduce children of mixed descent. (Buss, Farwell, and Nordstrom).
Theorists also hypothesize the prevalence of HIV/AIDs and its impact on the rape victims. The sexually transmitted diseases are used as a tool to inject sexually by rapists to the victims causes the death of rape victims (Card, Mukwege). International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has concluded sexual violence as a method of warfare. It also elaborates a distinction between strategic rape and opportunist rape in the legal procedures of International and national government. (Benshoof, 2014) In the Guatemalan genocide, mass rape took place not just as a tactic of war, but to destroy the social fabric of society (Open Society Justice Initiative, 2013, p. 42).
A Case Study on Uyghur Muslims in China
“Rape and sexual abuse are not just a by-product of war but are used as a deliberate military strategy” (Spark, n.d.).[ii]
The Uyghurs are a Turkic minority, mostly Sunni-Muslim ethnic group in Xinjian in North-Western China. The Uyghur Muslim women are systematically raped, sexually abused, tortured in China’s re-education camps (Hill et al., 2021). Witnessing the strategic rape in China highlights the attitude of the international community, the division of the boundaries of the so-called nation-states, and their denial to obligate human rights. The world is silent on this genocide and ethnic cleansing of one’s community to attain the largest social and national objectives.
The history of mass rapes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing is not new but the patterns and larger national boundaries that personified the true ongoing humanitarian crisis into the developmental projects of the national interest seems unrealistic. The false developmental, globalized, and democratic paradigm of independent nation-states to liberate one’s community through their manipulation and interest has surpassed human rights claims. China’s atrocities are defended by the national interest and militarization who are rescuing Muslim Uyghur women from being, “baby-making machines” (Hui, 2021). China’s policy on birth control through anti-extremism programs and detentions of Uyghurs women highlights the massive ideological differences among the communities. It is impossible to give freedom to the Uyghurs as China has a history of coercive family planning (Hui, 2021). The accounts revealed in 2019 that china forced Uyghurs to have unwanted sterilization, forced abortions resulted in a drastic decrease in the birth rates among ethnic minorities in Xinjiang (Hui, 2021).
According to the United Nations definition of genocide means the forced suppression of birth controls and imposing intentional measures to prevent the population of the minorities is an act of genocide (United Nations office of genocide prevention and responsibility to protect, n.d.). China constantly denies the allegations of forced labor and the establishment of detention for Uyghurs and ethnic minorities. Correspondingly, China said they are providing vocational training opportunities, reproductive health education about family planning, and state-subsidized contraceptives measures for their development and to counter-terrorism and extremism (Hui, 2021). Several detainees and a guard told the BBC about the systematic rape and torture they have witnessed (Times of India, 2021).
The narratives of Uyghur women explicitly or implicitly have revealed atrocities in the name of protection. A woman named Tursunay Ziawudun spent nine months in China’s detention camp in Xinjiang, revealed her horrible experiences of Chinese men, came to the cells, and selected the women whom they wanted (Hill et al., 2021). They took them in a dark room in the absence of surveillance cameras and raped them one by one. She was also tortured and gang-raped on three different occasions by two or three men (Hill et al., 2021). The Kazak woman named Gulzira Auelkhan from Xinjiang was detained for 18th months in a camp interviewed by BBC said she was forced by Chinese men to strip Uyghur women naked and handcuff them. She leaves women alone with Chinese men. Her work was to clean the rooms and took the woman for a shower. The Chinese men also paid her to pick the prettiest young inmates. The guards in these camps pulled off women’s headscarves and shouted at women who prefer to wear long dresses. The religious expressions of Muslims Uyghurs are the offense in their premises. They tortured women and young girls by inserting electric sticks in an anus. A woman explained that they are forcibly inside the electric stick inside the genital tract. Torture through these sticks is normal in these camps. The perpetrators raped women and also bit them all over the body like animals. The policy of re-education means to strip out Uyghurs’ culture, language, identity, and religion. Women are subjected to rapes and it becomes a culture.
In one account Sedik said there were mainly four types of electric shock – “the chair, the glove, the helmet, and anal rape with a stick”. The accounts revealed women who gave birth to many children were also detained and forced sterilized, raped, and tortured daily. Sadly, a woman said, “their goal is to destroy everyone and everybody knows it” (Hill et al., 2021). The international community and the US statement against China for committing a grave injustice of humanity, genocide is not enough to stop the ongoing human crisis committed in Xinjiang. The world’s silence on the systematic repression of Muslims in China is inevitable (Baynes, 2019). The US interventions demand independent investigations of rape in China.
The strategic rape of Uyghur Muslim women highlights China’s pre-planned, strategic objective to persecute one ethnic community under the garb of re-education settlements and development. Tactics of rape strategy and elimination on the mass level are not new but it has transformed in the multidimensional paradigm of surveillance[iii], coercion, and power. The detailed reports about Uyghur’s issued by the two leading human rights organizations namely, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in September 2018 on China’s re-education, internment, and surveillance. It had reported China’s campaign (Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism) that began in May 2014 and its departure to the actual strike. China had violated systematic human rights after exactly four years later the campaign. Witnessing a large scale of violations in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. The surveillance is a tool of power and control of intervention as a biometric technology on Uyghurs to monitor them for a large purpose to eliminate the existence of one ethnic community and a violation of “internationally guaranteed rights to privacy.” The importance of the international community in the globalized era highlights the prevalence of the application of human rights with the practical approaches or interventionist strategies that would sustain for a long time. To compromise with human rights on a large scale triggers the very basic foundational existence of international criminal court and international human rights organizations.
[i] Amnesty International. (2011). rape and sexual violence human rights law and standards in the international criminal court.
[ii] Spark, L. S. (n.d.). How did rape become a weapon of war? BBC News.
[iii] Foucault believed that modern society controls people’s bodies by focusing on their minds through the modern biometric weapon (surveillance). Surveillance is used in institutions like a prison, mental asylums, malls, homes, and everywhere.