Interview with Savita Pawnday, Executive Director of the Global Centre for R2P

Interview

24 Oct

Following her panel discussion at the June 6th seminar on “Gender, Accountability, and Atrocity Prevention” by HL-senteret, PRIO, and STK, the Executive Director of the Global Centre for R2P Savita Pawnday agreed to carry out an interview with HL-senteret researcher Ingvill Thorson Plesner. Ms. Pawnday addressed the ways gender influences mass atrocities and their prevention (mentioning the cases of Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Yazidi women), what obstacles lie between gender-sensitive atrocity prevention, and the similarity between the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and the Atrocity Prevention agenda.

Here is her full transcribed interview (disclaimer: minor edits), which you may also watch here:

Gender & Genocide: interviewing Savita Pawnday

Gender & Atrocity Prevention: interviewing Savita Pawnday

- Could you give some examples from recent times, recent decades, on how violence, gender-based violence has played a role in Mass atrocities and not least genocides?

Traditionally, sexual- and gender-based violence against women and girls has been a hidden crime, and there is no war, there is no conflict in the history of the world, where gender and sexual violence against women and girls has not been used. In modern history and in today's time – and this has happened in the past too – it's not just a byproduct of war, it's actually a tactic of war.

By committing sexual- and gender-based violence against communities, what perpetrators do is that they try to control that community. It's about power, it's about control, in some cases it's about creating ethnically homogeneous spaces, it's about punishing a community and truly attacking the heart of it. So that is what has been the essence of sexual- and gender-based violence, and how it is such a dangerous tool which has been consistently used by perpetrators to attack the basic fabric of any society.

And in Rwanda, in Srebrenica, in the Yazidi case we saw, again, women's bodies were used as examples of showing domination. So in Rwanda we have seen that Tutsi women were impregnated, were infected with HIV, because they were considered as being expendable or being sort of the carriers of future generation of more Tutsi men, so attack them so that there are no more Tutsi men.

In the same way, in Srebrenica or in former Yugoslavia - the entire atrocity commission in former Yugoslavia - again sexual- and gender-based violence and rape was such an important part of how perpetrators committed atrocities against certain communities.

In the Yazidi case it's very, very stark where you see that girls, above the age of 12 or even younger than that, were kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. So, it was literally destroying the entire community. You had boys who were sometimes recruited or just killed out outright, whereas women were used as sexual slaves, as people who would take care of these warriors, as domestic servants.

So, again and again a lot of people sort of talk about this in the context of that “it's a byproduct of war” and “it's a reality of war”, but the problem is that it's actually a tactic of war. It's a way you destroy and hurt communities in a way that it takes generations for them to able to recover and move on.

So, the thing is that sexual- and gender-based violence, again, is a way in which you hurt a group in part or in whole. Sometimes the acts committed can be constitutive acts of genocide, but in many contexts they are war crimes and they are crimes against humanity, and they're very, very serious crimes in the sense that they really, truly shock the consciousness of what makes us all human.

So I think that it's so important that we consistently work on it and we don't only talk about sexual- and gender-based violence or gender discrimination in the context of war and conflict, but we talk about it constantly in times of peace. Because if we do, if we create better strategies, if we create better education systems to educate people about what these crimes actually do to entire communities and entire generations, then maybe we will have better outcomes.

- So Savita, how can a gender perspective enhance atrocity prevention?

Including a gender perspective on atrocity prevention just helps us protect different kinds of populations by using different strategies. We always say in this field that the experience of every person is different of an atrocity crime, and in that context the experience that men, women, girls, boys, other genders, LGBTQI – all their experiences are different.

And if we take those experiences into account, if we see how they are targeted or how violence is perpetrated against different genders, then we can create better prevention and protection strategies. And that is the reason it's so important to have not only a perspective of what women go through, but what all genders go through in an atrocity situation, and if we have that perspective then we can prevent them better but we can also protect these people better.

So, the biggest obstacle is that we do not incorporate gender perspectives in policymaking. We know what to do, we have done a lot of learning since the Rwandan genocide, since the genocide in Srebrenica, the crisis in the Balkans, of how to think in terms of what are the best ways of incorporating gendered points of views not only in prevention and protection strategies but also in terms of justice and accountability.

But what we have not done is that we don't actually listen to people on the ground, women on the ground, marginalized communities on the ground, people who are sexually marginalized. All of these are not only people against whom atrocities are committed, but are often actors who provide early warning, who are the first responders within their communities. In the aftermath of atrocities these are the people who influence and bring about change, heal their communities, but these are also the people who are heard last within policy discussions in New York, or in Geneva, or in the big capitals.

And that is what we want to do, that is what needs to change, that is the biggest obstacle, because policies should not be made by people who are not living a particular reality. Policies should be made for people by the people.

- How does a gender approach to genocide prevention differ from the women, peace and security approach?

I wouldn't say that they're different. I would say they complement each other, because the WPS agenda was created to protect women, better increase their participation in peace and security conversations, because women have been traditionally missing from peace processes, from big government decisions. So the idea of the WPS agenda was to increase participation, provide better protection for women, and also prevention of course – always prevention from sexual-based gender violence, but other kinds of things too, from discrimination.

So, WPS as an agenda compliments atrocity prevention, and atrocity prevention as an agenda complements WPS. So they're not distinct, they're different ways in which we look at what's happening in our society. The atrocity prevention agenda looks at the world from a lens of whether there is a risk or possibility of atrocity crimes being committed, and here we don't only talk in terms of genocide but we also talk in terms of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.

So you are consistently looking at the world from that lens, and when you add the WPS discussions into that lens, what you do is that you bring in women's perspectives, you bring in their participation not only in the prevention of atrocity crimes but also to rebuild societies after atrocity crimes are over, because women are such a big part and such a big influence on that.

These interviews with Savita Pawnday are available to watch here: