Yesterday the UN declared that it deemed rape to be a war tactic, a deliberate weapon to humiliate and break the will of communities. Russia, China, Indonesia and Vietnam all expressed reservations over whether rape was a matter for the UN Security Council. In the end the vote was unanimous.
Two years ago I traveled to the town of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-scarred east. Once this town was the summer playground of the Congolese elite and their Belgian colonisers. It sits on the southern edge of Lake Kivu, nestled under steep, rugged and now deforested hills. Dilipadated boat-houses and diving platforms line the lake shore. In this volatile region Bukavu is now relatively peaceful but it hasn't always been. It is not difficult to find women with tales of untold horrors.
Honorata Zakumwilo was 54 years old when I met her. She looked at me through squinted eyes. All her front teeth were missing or broken and blackened - the result of endless beatings. Her story is horrendous. What is worse, she is just one of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women in the DRC alone to have suffered such an ordeal. Here are excerpts of her interview.
"In October 2001 the Interehamwe came to our village at 4am. They were dressed in military fatigues and heavily armed and they encircled the huts we were sleeping in. They killed many men and took about a dozen women with them. I was one of them.
"We walked for many hours until finally we arrived at a camp in the forest. The rape began immediately. Four men would hold a woman down be her hands and feet while a fifth would enter her. One by one they all had their turn. Sometimes they would chose a woman and hang her upside down from a wooden cross so that her head almost touched the ground. Up to twenty would rape her at a time. Everyone joined in.
"In the forest we were worth less than wild animals, less than objects. They would cry out 'A manger' [dinner time] but they weren't calling for food, they were calling for us".
It was fourteen months before Honorata summoned up the courage to escape her captors.
I am not sure the UN classifying rape as a weapon of war will changing anything. Automatic rifles, RPGs, land-mines all kill, mutilate and destroy the social fabric of communities....that is why they are used. An updated UN handbook will not end the rape of women caught up in wars. But at least it affords some recognition to the atrocities they endure.