Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I am pleased that we are having this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on securing it, and on the way she introduced it by talking about the horrors of violence against women on 7 October in Israel, and the violence against women and children going on in the continuing conflict in Gaza and in other parts of the world.

As the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) quite correctly pointed out, the time to investigate, if possible, is while the conflict is going on. We should at least preserve evidence during a conflict so far as that is possible, but that is never particularly easy. In her opening lines, the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West pointed out the levels of conflict around the world and the prevalence of sexual violence, particularly against women and children, in all wars going on at the present time, including those in Yemen and Ukraine, and in other conflicts going back, such as Vietnam. It is sadly not a new situation, but it is one that we have to address and do everything we can about.

I will particularly refer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I have many constituents from there and they have often talked to me about it. In the few minutes I have, I will quote from the report on the DRC given by Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the Human Rights Council only a couple of months ago on 4 March. He said:

“I fear that the enjoyment of human rights in the country has come to a grinding halt...The absence of State authority over large swathes of territory has also cleared the way for brutal levels of violence and attacks. The insecurity is being fuelled by a seemingly impassable mountain of challenges: from large-scale corruption, to the unbridled race between multiple parties to take control and exploit the country’s wealth of natural resources, to ongoing violent land disputes...Between 1 October 2023 and 15 March 2024, the UN Joint Human Rights Office documented 2,110 human rights violations and abuses throughout DRC. Of these, 59 per cent were committed by armed groups…Almost half of these violations and abuses were committed in the North Kivu province…The UN Joint Human Rights Office has documented 156 people who were summarily executed at the hands of the M23. M23 was also found to have sexually abused 30 women and 12 children”.

Amnesty International goes on to report that 38,000 cases of sexual violence were reported in North Kivu during the first quarter of 2023—that is in the first three months of last year. In May 2023, Doctors Without Borders said that levels of sexual violence in internally displaced camps around Goma reached an unprecedented “catastrophic scale”. The UN Population Fund says that between 2021 and 2022, there was a 91% rise in reports of gender-based violence in North Kivu province, and its mobile clinic reports on the number of people it is trying to assist who are victims of that violence. The situation is unbelievably appalling.

A report by the TG Foundation in a study by the American Journal of Public Health, published in June 2011, stated that 48 women were raped per hour in the Congo, which would mean that since the start of the war with Rwanda, an estimated 12.5 million Congolese women have been raped. The report goes on to demand action by international Governments over the behaviour of the Congolese Government, armed forces and armed groups, and over the relationship between Rwanda, the Congolese Government and the mineral companies.

I want to put on record that, having on several occasions visited the DRC, I have never forgotten arriving in Goma after a very complicated journey by road from Kigali. It was almost dark, and we went to a women’s centre—by that time, it was completely dark—and the audience waiting for our small delegation were 300 or 400 women, all of whom had been victims of rape. They wanted some degree of closure on the horror of their experience, if that is possible, and some degree of international recognition of the horrors they were going through, where the armed groups routinely used rape as a weapon of war.

Behind the violence is the thirst for minerals in the Congo, the search for cobalt and coltan, and the use of child labour, as well as the exploitation of women, in doing that. The international mining companies wash their hands of this and pretend that they are buying the vital minerals from responsible sources. They are not; they are buying them second hand from the exploited children and others who have suffered in the Congo. We have to put this issue in the wider context of insecurity there.

We are very proud in Islington to have a councillor who comes from the Congo, Michelline Safi-Ngongo. She just sent me a message—it is quite long, so I will not read it all—saying,

“Loss of income and high food insecurity can lead to spiking violence, abuse”.

She goes on to say that the high incidence of abuse reflects the gender inequality and poverty of so many people in the DRC.

When the Minister replies, I hope he will say what we are also doing about the breakdown of any form of law or process in the Congo to try to protect women and children from the violence, and what demands we are making of the mineral companies—in this country, Switzerland, China and elsewhere—that are buying minerals knowing they have been produced in the most appalling circumstances. The victims are women who have no means of protecting themselves—no defence whatsoever—so rape has become a pandemic of violence against women in the DRC. I hope we can reflect that in the policies we pursue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve with you as our Chair, Sir Charles. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) for bringing forward this important debate. She made an absolutely excellent contribution, and it has been a good debate.

As we have heard, horrific sexual violence continues to be used as a weapon of war in conflicts around the world. Across the House, we are absolutely united in our opposition to that practice, no matter where it occurs and who the perpetrators are. I am therefore grateful to my hon. Friend for creating time for us to talk not just about this utter horror and the damage it does, but about how we can play our part in supporting solutions.

I hope hon. Members will forgive me if I focus on a few of the African contexts where we continue to see sexual violence used as a weapon on a truly appalling scale. I will start with the ongoing generals’ war against the people of Sudan—against the women and the girls of Sudan. There have been 5,000 reports of grave violations in Sudan, including sexual violence, but that is likely to be an underestimate, given that 60,000 survivors of sexual violence in conflict have been identified in Sudan as of June 2023, which is almost a year ago.

Sexual violence by armed men has been reported in areas across Sudan, with many different groups targeted. In Khartoum, Sudanese women, girls and whole families have been raped in their homes and in the street. In Darfur, targeted sexual violence against the Masalit people and other non-Arab Darfuris has formed a major component of the ethnic cleansing campaigns. The link between racism, misogyny and the political agenda of some armed groups in Darfur has been evidenced again and again. Women who are attacked are labelled “slaves”, using racist slurs. I would just like to quote from an Al-Jazeera report that sums up the utterly chilling mentality of these rapists:

“After [we] rape [you], you will carry our babies […] to change the non-Arab portion within the Sudanese blood”.

These patterns of targeted violence against women and girls in Khartoum and Darfur are mostly attributed to the Rapid Support Forces or their allied forces. The UN reported in February that one victim was held by the RSF and gang-raped repeatedly for 35 days. The sheer horror of it! As a woman, I honestly cannot comprehend how one might survive that. There are also continued reports of sexual violence being used to intimidate women’s rights activists, and that is often attributed to the Sudanese armed forces.

The healthcare system has almost entirely collapsed. Few of the women victimised through rape can access the immediate support needed to deal with physical and mental trauma, the risks of infection or the risks of pregnancy. The UN has reported that women who have tried to access abortion have been denied it because Sudan’s 90-day legal window to obtain an abortion in the case of rape had passed. We must continue to work together against the stigmatisation of children born following rape and to argue for universally accessible abortion for all women who face these terrible circumstances.

We need to redouble our efforts to stop the generals’ war in Sudan and to support forces for sustainable peace and justice, because right now in Darfur hundreds of thousands remain trapped in the city of El Fasher, under siege, in famine conditions and with the imminent threat of attack by the RSF. This is already an atrocity. How many more women and children will be targeted for rape and violence if El Fasher falls? The international community must surely act now to protect the civilians trapped in that city, and I hope the Minister will be able to say something about the Government’s plans for action and what immediate further steps the UK might take.

Sadly, the horrors I have described in Sudan are familiar from other recent and continued conflicts, as we have heard. I have spoken many times about the large-scale and often ethnically targeted sexual violence that was evidenced in Ethiopia during the Tigray war. UN experts have estimated that this conflict has left 10,000 survivors of sexual violence, mostly women and girls, with very limited support. If he is able to, will the Minister therefore update us on the Government’s engagement with Ethiopia over the process of accountability for these abuses? Sadly, the threat is far from over, because conflicts between ethnically organised armed groups continue in many areas of Ethiopia, including Amhara, Tigray, Haramaya and the south-west.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) mentioned in his contribution, the threat to women and girls is even greater in the Democratic Republic of Congo, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of civilians forcibly displaced by the M23’s advance—that is the M23 for which there is credible evidence of material Rwandan support.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am pleased that the hon. Lady mentioned that issue. The reality is that 7 million people in the Congo have been displaced. The world’s media barely recognise that—it barely registers on their scale—but it is probably the greatest abuse of human rights anywhere in the world at present.

[Ms Brown]

I understand where the right hon. Gentleman is coming from and I utterly agree.

Let me quote the heartbreaking words of a 15-year-old girl called Florence:

“One of them took me by force, strangled me, and”

they

“raped me one after another. He had strangled me so much that I no longer had the strength to scream.”

The rape survivors supported by Save the Children in the DRC are as young as nine years old. The impact on children, women, families and communities is enormous. We cannot be content with just raising our voices repeatedly against these atrocities; we need a clear strategy for how the UK can play its part. For me, preventing sexual violence must be integral to the wider approach to conflicts and violence.

These horrific cases, whether in Sudan, Ethiopia or the DRC, do not end at those countries’ borders; they spill over into the wider region and undermine security for many communities. To truly prevent that, we have to recognise how it works politically. The perpetrators are individual men—soldiers, commanders and politicians —but their violence can take hold only because the state fails to stop it. Ultimately, this will stop only when there are robust state institutions, justice systems to hold people to account, and security forces that protect communities, rather than bearing responsibility themselves for the violations.

In contexts such as Sudan, there are no trustworthy state authorities that play that part, so we have to be smarter in the way we act. We have to look beyond the easy options of international NGOs and expensive consultants and to be far more open to working directly with small local organisations. In Sudan, there are many women’s groups and other local organisations that are opposed to both military factions. They are a force for peace, democracy and justice, and at the same time they provide support to survivors of rape in their own communities. My main question to the Government today is, why are we not doing more to support them? Why are we not supporting the Sudanese women who challenge the power of the generals—the men who have plunged the country into this nightmare and put millions of sisters in such dire risk? Why do we not recognise that building the capacity of local organisations is a strategic intervention in the UK’s interests?

We cannot see this issue in terms of silos. It is a humanitarian and medical response. It is development. It is accountability and justice. It is diplomacy and sanctions. It is peacebuilding. It is all those things. Let’s face it, our resources are limited and the challenges in regions such as the horn of Africa are massively complex and interconnected. It is more important to break down the barriers and recognise that, unless our interventions help to solve many challenges simultaneously, they will not be effective. They will not support our efforts to build strong partnerships for mutual benefit in Africa, and they will not genuinely help to prevent this horrific form of abuse, which continues to blight our world.