Interview with Jacqui True, Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW)
Following her panel discussion at the June 6th seminar on “Gender, Accountability, and Atrocity Prevention” by HL-senteret, PRIO, and STK, the Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW) Jacqui True agreed to carry out an interview with HL-senteret researcher Ingvill Thorson Plesner. Ms. True addressed the ways gender influences mass atrocities and their prevention, focusing on the cases of Yazidi women, Rwanda, Myanmar, and Afghanistan.
Here is a transcribed snippet of her interviews (disclaimer: minor edits), which you may also watch here:
Gender & Genocide: Case of Yazidi women
Sexual trafficking or trafficking is increasingly understood as also a conflict-related type of violence, and that is also enabled by the state discrimination and the state armed violence in those areas, pushing out women and creating therefore a really precarious situation of vulnerability in which they often had little choice but to accept the offers of traffickers to leave.
But we see that in other context, I think, the Yazidi example with the way in which ISIS early on enslaved and controlled women, Yazidi women, ethnic minority women in Iraq, which also facilitated their trafficking. It’s really interesting to look at in hindsight because at the time no one was thinking about sex trafficking or sex slavery as a primary type of violence in terrorism. So, increasingly we can now see that an early warning sign for terrorist violence, for terrorist conflict, one-sided conflict, is also sexual violence.
Gender & Genocide: Case of Rwanda
- How has Rwanda affected our understanding of atrocity and prevention and the role of gender in that respect?
Well, in in the case of Rwanda we saw that sexual violence is not just a kind of a side effect or a form of collateral damage during war and ethnic cleansing, but it's rather a major mechanism for ethnic cleansing and also for State-making, seeking to produce states that are ethnically homogeneous.
We also saw that sexual violence is perpetrated by both men and women, and both men and women as well as children are victims of this type of violence, so it affects many different groups of people, right, but it affects them in different ways. So there are really clear gendered patterns and there are gendered impacts, so if I can give a few examples here what we see is that women are very much seen as wombs or hosts for an ethnically pure population and men are seen as warriors, the ones who have to kind of commission and create that homogeneous society.
And that is what genocide seeks to achieve, so in the case of Rwanda we saw that men were targeted for sex-selective killing because they were seen as the ones who would be resisting, and women were targeted for sexual violence particularly to impregnate them. So, then there would be mass executions and both were victims of rape, castration, mutilation, and torture, but what we saw is that men were much more likely to be targeted for killing and women were much more likely to be targeted for rape, particularly to impregnate them so they would be reproducing the dominant ethnic group.
Gender & Genocide: Case of Myanmar
Looking forward 30 years later, a gender perspective is informing our efforts to prevent atrocities, to prevent conflict, and to prevent sexual violence. And I think what we've learned there is that the normalization of violence, in particular the normalization of sexual and gender-based violence, is one of the risk factors or early-warning signs for more generalized violence.
- And do you have any – talking about atrocity prevention and possible indicators – do you have any examples from more recent times of situations where one needs to kind of follow closely the development?
Yeah, definitely. Maybe just to give an example from Myanmar, and I think we could even see this in other countries which would have state-sanctioned extremism - Buddhist extremism for example - where you start with discrimination and law against other groups.
But specifically with regard to gender, where you legislate that minority groups need to apply to have children and that they can only have children according to the state regulation, according to a certain spacing of family members and timing. And that's to control the population, but the control of the minority population is through the regulation of women's bodies. That's already creating the conditions – it's already a violation of human rights – but it's creating the conditions in which those bodies are violable, they are thought of as objects that can be subject to control and violence.
Humanitarian actors on the ground, where there is access, do have information and do know about the violence that's occurring, and are able to securely report that through international mechanisms such as the mechanisms related to the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, but also through the global monitoring system.
I think that those are risk factors for widespread atrocities, and what we saw in our research in Rakhine state and Myanmar, looking at the period of unofficial reporting of sexual- and gender-based violence in Rakhine state from 1998 through to 2016, we saw the year before the genocide, or the generalized violence and atrocities in Rakhine state, we saw the highest level of sexual- and gender-based violence reporting over the almost 20-year period before.
Gender & Genocide: Case of Afghanistan
- You mentioned Afghanistan, so is there anything in the situation for the Hazaras or others in Afghanistan that also needs attention from this perspective?
Afghanistan is a really, really important situation to focus on because of the systematic gender apartheid that has been instituted - reinstituted - by the de facto governing authority the Taliban, an Islamist extremist group.
I think there are- I mean we obviously have decades of persecution of Hazara, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan, but what's really important to see is the way in which Hazara women are particularly impacted by the gender apartheid regime. Of course, in the Hazara community there's always been a higher degree of gender equality and perhaps an embrace of women's leadership in that community, and I think that there is a sense that that community is actually being doubly persecuted, because of the status of women in that community in the context of the gender apartheid regime.
But we could say, in the case of apartheid, we have a country in which the majority of people are facing atrocities. Because when you have absolutely limited fundamental freedoms you don't have the right to employment, you don't have the right to mobility, you don't have the right to education, or at least secondary education, then you have little choice but to accept a forced marriage or an early marriage in which you have actually no rights to bodily integrity, and in which any man including your guardian really can exercise their will with impunity.
And then, where male family members in that context seek to empower their female family members, they themselves are persecuted for that. So, I think that the situation of Afghanistan must be of concern for those seeking to prevent widespread atrocities.
- Even genocide you mean?
Well, I think we can say that genocidal violence is ongoing in that country against Hazaras, but I think that the concept of gender apartheid is actually - or gender persecution which is currently being developed by the ICC - means that gendercide is a significant concern in that country.
These interviews with Jacqui True are available to watch here:
Gender & Genocide: case of Yazidi women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gvcx73LJg
Gender & Genocide: case of Rwanda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPrKZ98hYA
Gender & Genocide: case of Myanmar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4axmFVUSy08
Gender & Genocide: case of Afghanistan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxxiIM15930
Ingvill Thorson Plesner also interviewed other panelists after their session. Their interviews are available here: