/ 17 June 2011

Defending the halal hymen

Defending The Halal Hymen

The “charge” seems almost cartoonish. A wild-haired, loony old eccentric with a penchant for buxom female bodyguards dishing out handfuls of blue pills to his troops with their morning orange juice. Their task: to pillage, plunder and rape. The evidence? Well, none so far — that’s if one doesn’t count the three little bottles of Viagra (price tags still affixed) being paraded on television, supposedly taken off a stiff (ahem).

The victims? Well, none of those either, really. But there are some witnesses who have seen containers of “Viagra-type drugs” being offloaded on the docks.

They’re presumably not for general consumption but to be sent to the barracks “to enhance the possibility of rape”.

And who wouldn’t believe so august a personality as the International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) chief prosecutor? And all in the same week that Nato announced it was stepping up its campaign against not only Libya’s army but its head of state as well.

The charge of war crimes couldn’t have come at a more convenient time. After all, Muammar Gaddafi’s reputation for bloodthirstiness is well known.

There is little public sympathy for a government that has systematically jailed, tortured and killed political opponents for nearly three decades. Then there was all that business with Lockerbie.

But, as the conflict between the rebels and the Libyan army enters its third month, questions are being asked about motives behind Nato’s involvement and about the true extent of civilian casualties of the bombing campaign.

Some have even suggested the Libya Contact Groups activities may be far less altruistic than were being led to believe.

But throw in the mass rapes claim — allegedly ordered by Gaddafi himself — and you have a sure-fire way to drown out voices of objection.

Predictably, the story has gone viral, giving sub-editors the time of their lives coming up with suitably sensational headlines. The crime that dare not speak its name was one; another newspaper called the claims “a horrific first” in the long list of Gaddafi’s war crimes.

After all, everyone knows how hard “they” have it “over there”: burqaed, banished, killed for burning the curry, genitals slashed the list is endless. When there’s the veiled women’s honour to defend, it would be churlish, surely, to drone on about minutiae such as overstepping ones mandate. And so yet another illegal war may be started in defence of the Muslim punani.

At least in Afghanistan, the ruse was believable, given the Taliban’s non-existent record of treating women as human beings. But the nature and timing of the Libya rape charges makes it appear that the rape of women during war is being trivialised and used as a brickbat to turn world opinion against a tyrant who, some say, has long had it coming to him.

The preliminary investigation has proceeded with astonishing speed. It took the ICC nearly a decade to collect evidence and testimony on the “rape camps” in the former Yugoslavia, where an estimated 20 000 Muslim women were enslaved and systematically violated during the 1992 to 1995 war (even then, the tribunal prosecuted a mere three Bosnian Serb commanders), but the Libya case has been prioritised, it seems.

The ICCs Luis Moreno-Ocampo claims that 70 000 questionnaires were sent out to establish the rape claims, sent out at the height of the conflict, note, and through a non-functioning postal system. An estimated 60 000 women responded — extraordinary feedback by anyone’s standards. Close to 300 of the respondents said they were sexually assaulted. This forms the backbone of the ICCs case against Gaddafi himself and not a band of Libyan soldiers.

And that’s not even to mention the selective morality at work here. After all, it would be nice if a few rockets were aimed at the presidential palace in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect the hundreds of thousands raped there every year. Or even Durban, maybe.

Nobody doubts women have been raped during this conflict. Or that the rapists should be brought to justice.

But these faceless and voiceless women may yet end up in mere supporting roles in the theatre of war. The star act is the “Libyan rebels” — bolstered and bankrolled by Nato and some Western and Arab nations.

And now there is this thinly disguised plot, an illegal strategy for regime change — camouflaged by the petticoats of women’s rights.

Khadija Magardie is a journalist based in the Middle East