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thREE natality and Destruction: arendtian Reflections on war Rape RoBin May Schott Sex crimes are perpetrated against women civilians around the world, and appallingly the number of these crimes is increasing rather than decreasing . Amnesty International reports that forty thousand women and girls were raped in the congo in the period 1999–2005. Sexual torture has been documented in Rwanda,the Sudan,yugoslavia,Iraq,and East Timor (Booth 2005: 118). For those of us interested in the safety of women and girls, and their economic and political rights,addressing the issue of war rape is high on the agenda. This issue has recently attracted active engagement by international lawyers as well as by scholars working in political science, anthropology, and psychology, to name a few fields. The question that motivates me here is whether sexual violence also puts a claim on philosophical reflection. My starting point is that sexual violence does demand the engagement of philosophers. Just as Hannah Arendt argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism and the Nazi death camps placed a demand to reflect on the fundamental problem of evil, so I argue that sexual violence in wartime puts a demand on us to reflect anew on the fundamental relation between the human body and the body politic. In this essay, I will be thinking with Hannah Arendt on the relation between the body and the body politic, though I will arrive at some non-Arendtian conclusions.1 Sexual violence in wartime is not new to the twentieth century, though I will discuss below features that are specific to the twentieth century. We find references to it in Homer’s Iliad, as well as references to capturing women in war in the Hebrew Bible. Not until the fourteenth century did European leaders announce standards of chivalry to forbid rape, though these rules were rarely enforced. The license to rape was considered a major incentive for being a soldier (Niarchos 1995: 660–62).2 Not until the nineteenth century did humanitarian law protect noncombatants, including women. In the twentieth century, mass rape occurred during the Rape of Nanking, which refers both to the rape of 20,000–80,000 chinese women by Japanese soldiers 50 Robin May Schott in 1937 and the killing orgy that took 350,000 lives in a few weeks. During World War II, up to two million women were raped by soldiers in the Soviet army (Beevor 2002).3 The French army allowed Moroccan soldiers to rape Italian women. And there was evidence of major Nazi sexual crimes against French women, though the Nuremburg tribunal did not mention rape in the final judgment.4 Rape did take place in Auschwitz, though there has been a conspiracy of silence about it, and the victims of rape in the camps were psychologically the“sickest”after liberation (Krystal 1968: 342).In the 1990s, not only did war rape take place in Europe (with an estimated 20,000–50,000 women raped in the former yugoslavia), but during the genocide in Rwanda when 500,000 to 800,000 Rwandans were massacred, the majority of them Tutsi, at least a quarter-million women were raped. In the congo, every armed group has discovered that rape is a cheaper weapon of war than bullets (Goodwin 2004: 8–22).A Human Rights Watch specialist noted that women have had their lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after they were raped, so they cannot identify or testify against their attackers (ibid.). Until recently, sexual violence in wartime has been characterized by physical invisibility—in the double sense that civilian casualties are often invisible in official casualty statistics and that rape does not always leave visible signs on the bodies of the victims. With this physical invisibility has been a political invisibility. What is new in the late twentieth century is the political visibility, of war rape which has had decisive consequences for international law. The United Nations resolution leading to the establishment of the yugoslavia Tribunal contained the Security council’s first condemnation ever of war rape. Richard J. Goldstone, chief prosecutor of the United Nations International criminal Tribunal for the former yugoslavia and Rwanda (1994–96), notes that despite the fact that rape is a war crime that has been occurring for centuries, it had never received sufficient attention even to justify definition.The Rwanda Tribunal took a major step by defining rape as“a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive...

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