360 Year Sentences in Landmark Guatemala Rape Trial

Justice in Guatemala;

who would have thought that possible?

Victims of sexual violence hide their faces during the trial against a former military officer and a former paramilitary fighter accused of sexual violence against indigenous women during Guatemala"s civil war, in Guatemala City, Thu, Feb. 25, 2016 Image copyright AP

The victims who attended the trial had covered their faces because of the discrimination and stigmatization they say they still experience

A court in Guatemala has sentenced two former members of the military to 360 years in jail for human rights abuses.

Francisco Reyes Giron, was the former commander of the Sepur Zarco military base and Heriberto Valdez Asij, a military commissioner.

They were charged with sexual enslavement, rape and murder of a group of indigenous women.

It is the first successful prosecution for sexual violence during Guatemala's armed conflict.

There were jubilant scenes in court with people cheering and applauding the victims when the judge finished reading out the sentence.

"This is historic, it is a great step for women and above all for the victims," said Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who attended the hearing.

The retired officer, Francisco Reyes Giron, was found guilty of holding 15 women in sexual and domestic slavery and for killing one woman and her two daughters.

Heriberto Valdez Asij, a paramilitary who carried out commissions for the army, was convicted for the same enslavement, as well as the forced disappearance of seven men.

The court had heard harrowing details about what went on at the former Sepur Zarco military base in the eastern highlands during the 1980s.

According to the prosecution, in 1982 armed forces repeatedly attacked the village of Sepur Zarco and killed or took away Mayan Quiche leaders who had been applying for land titles and had angered local landowners.

The men were accused of being associated with left-wing guerrillas.

Agustin Chen, one of the men who survived said the soldiers took him to a cell and beat him every day.

"They killed seven people, throwing two grenades into the pit where they had put them."

Former army officer Esteelmer Francisco Reyes Giron, right, listens to his lawyer Moises Galindo, Guatemala City, 25 Feb 2016 Image copyright AP

Former base commander, Esteelmer Francisco Reyes Giron (R) was sentened to 120 years in prison.

The court heard how military commanders considered Quiche women to be "available" without their men and had then taken them into sexual and domestic slavery.

They were required to report every third day to the base for "shifts" during which they were raped, sexually abused, and forced to cook and clean for the soldiers.

In a report to the court, anthropologist, Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj said "The military outposts were installed in the region to give security to the landowner's farms and to take possession of the lands. "

Former military commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asij listens to a Lawyer during the trial against him and a former army officer, accused of sexual violence against indigenous women Image copyright EPA

Heriberto Valdez Asij, a military commissioner, received a sentence of 240 years.

For women in the communities she said, "Racism and sexual violence had come hand in hand in the subduing and controlling of indigenous populations."

For some of the victims their ordeal lasted as long as six years until the base was closed in 1988.

The victims have been demanding accountability for the crimes at Sepur Zarco for decades.

"We were raped, all of this happened, if it wasn't like this, where are our husbands? We don't know where they are," said Demesia Yac, 70 years old, who acted as a representative for the women.

India's Women Maoists Face Grim Life on Front Line

India's Civil War is not well known in the west

Anjali Hembrom, pictured on August 5, 2015 during an interview with AFP,
was kidnapped four years ago after the Maoist rebels swooped on a
tribal village in the state of Jharkhand, looking for new recruits
(AFP Photo/Dibyangshu Sarkar)

AFP 

By Abhaya Srivastava

A shiver runs down her spine each time Anjali Hembrom recalls the abuse she endured during six months spent with heavily armed Maoist guerrillas in their "liberated zone" deep inside India's remote forests.

Hembrom, 20, was kidnapped four years ago after the rebels swooped on a tribal village in the state of Jharkhand, looking for new recruits.

Taken to their self-declared "liberated zone" inside the jungles where the Maoists reign supreme, Hembrom endured repeated rapes as a punishment for refusing to join their ranks before staging a daring escape.

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is a merger of 3 former communist rebel groups. They account for about 9000 troops and 38,000 people's militia, which is armed with bows and machetes. They are often referred to as Naxalites. Maoists make up less than 0.4% of the population of India.

 "I still wake up with cold sweats in the middle of the night," Hembrom told AFP in an on-camera interview in Giridih town, her face silhouetted for fear of being identified.

Before fleeing her captors, Hembrom witnessed women combatants being subdued into "cooking, cleaning and pleasuring their seniors" in a cult-like setup.

While Hembrom says she was press-ganged into joining the Maoists, hundreds of women have willingly joined up to fight, desperate to escape grinding poverty in their deeply patriarchal communities.

But as well as the risk of sexual abuse if captured by security forces, the women fighters are frequently raped by their "brothers in arms".

"They must have joined the cadres with lofty revolutionary ideas," said Hembrom. "It's not a life they would have imagined ever."

Girl captured by Maoists

- 'Horrifying abuse' -

The Maoists, who dominate thousands of square miles of the 'Red Corridor' stretching across central and eastern India, claim to be fighting for the land rights of marginalised tribal communities.

Their insurgency has claimed around 10,000 lives, and is considered India's most serious internal security threat.

Hembrom's account of life inside Maoist camps resonates with a former cadre who has talked about rampant sexual violence in her autobiography.

In "Diary of a Maoist", Shobha Mandi, who surrendered in 2010, says she was repeatedly raped by her commanders over seven years.

"Every woman is seen as an object for satisfying the lust of the male cadres. What I experienced over there was horrifying, worse than the oppression that the women of rural India face," she wrote.

The women fighters, believed to number around 4,000, are mainly used for cultural or support activities although many have had weapons training.

A video recently seized by police from a rebel camp and shared with AFP showed young women fighters in olive green fatigues with machine guns slung on their hips joining their male counterparts on assault courses.

- 'Robin Hood allure' -

Dayamani Barla, a 49-year-old woman tribal activist and political leader who was briefly jailed for aligning with the Maoist cause, said women are often driven to join the rebels for money and food.

"Also, the Maoists have a certain Robin Hood kind of allure. The whole idea of taking on the rich and mighty appeals to women who have experienced some kind of exploitation at the hands of either the police or the landlords," she told AFP.

"So it's a case of the devil and the deep sea for these women."

Tens of thousands of paramilitary troops and police are stationed in the
tribal areas of central and eastern India, fighting thousands
of armed insurgents (AFP Photo/Dibyangshu Sarkar)

Barla said tribal women had also been subjected to the most extreme forms of violence by the Salwa Judum, a civil militia created and funded by the state to counter the Maoists in 2005 but disbanded later.

Allegations about police brutality and custodial rape abound but very few cases are reported for fear of retribution and a culture of impunity for among the armed forces.

The murder in 2006 of a tribal man for being a Maoist and the subsequent gang-rape of his wife over several days inside a police station in Chhattisgarh state is one of the few documented cases.

Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy who has recounted the time she spent with the insurgents in her book "Walking with the Comrades", says women wronged by the state have no choice but to take up arms.

"When you have 800 CRPF (a paramilitary force)... marching three days into the forest, surrounding a forest village and burning it and raping women, what are the poor supposed to do?," she said in an interview to India's CNN-IBN news network in 2010.

Finding a place in Indian society where girls/women are relatively safe from rape is not an easy task. Jainism and Christianity are probably the safest demographics within themselves, but girls are still vulnerable to Hindu, Muslim, Maoist and Sikh men unable to control themselves.

Girls Raped, Boys Abducted as South Sudan Violence Rages

Simmering civil war has forced thousands from their homes

Humanitarian crisis looming

Residents displaced due to the recent fighting between government and rebel
forces in the Upper Nile capital Malakal wait at a World Food Program
 (WFP) outpost where thousands have taken shelter in Kuernyang Payam,
South Sudan, May 2, 2015   Reuters

Gulf News
AFP
Gunmen in South Sudan have raped girls, seized boys to become soldiers and torched towns in some of the heaviest fighting seen in the 17-month-long civil war, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Over 300,000 civilians have been left without “life-saving aid” in the northern battleground state of Unity, after the UN and aid agencies pulled out due to a surge in fighting, with over 100,000 forced to flee their homes.

The UN peacekeeping mission said it was “increasingly concerned” about reports from Guit and Koch counties in Unity state of “towns and villages being burnt, killings, abductions of males as young as 10 years of age, rape and abduction of girls and women, and the forced displacement of civilians.”

The violence is some of the worst in months, as government forces push south from the state capital Bentiu into an opposition zone around the town of Leer, home to some of the country’s once lucrative oil fields.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has also withdrawn staff from Leer and warned that escalating fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar was forcing thousands of civilians to flee for their lives yet again.

Unity state governor Joseph Monytuil told reporters late Monday that government troops aimed to take Leer from opposition forces within days. “Our forces ... are now pursuing them to where they came from,” said Monytuil.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Saturday it was forced to evacuate its foreign staff from Leer and halt all medical services amid fears the rebel-held town was about to come under “imminent attack” from government forces.

Leer, the birthplace of Machar, was ransacked by government forces in January 2014. Gunmen looted the MSF hospital and burnt some of the buildings.

MSF has since rebuilt the hospital, the only referral facility in opposition areas.

South Sudan’s civil war began in December 2013 and has been characterised by ethnically-driven massacres, rape and attacks on civilians and medical facilities.

In other words, absolutely no moral compass involved!

Refugee camp

Peace talks in neighbouring Ethiopia have so far failed to reach any lasting agreement, or even an effective ceasefire.

The violence, which has escalated into an ethnic conflict involving multiple armed groups, has killed tens of thousands of people in the world’s youngest nation, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011.

It has also left over half of the country’s 12 million people in need of aid, with 2.5 million people facing severe food insecurity, according to the UN.

The European Union late Monday condemned the fighting, saying that “South Sudan’s man-made crisis has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent years.”

EU aid chief Christos Stylianides said there “can be no military solution to this conflict” and that responsibility for striking a peace deal rests on the shoulders of the leaders.

“If they fail to make the necessary effort for peace, they will inevitably be held responsible also for the consequences,” he said in a statement.

Inevitably they will, but will it be in this life or later? If it's later, we may all have to answer for it.