30 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukBOOKS & ARTSRape has always been one of the deadliest weapons of warBOOKS
The cheapest, deadliest weapon
Nothing prepared Antony Beevor for this devastating exposé
of the systematic use of rape in war and ethnic cleansingOur Bodies Their Battlefield:
What War Does to Women
by Christina Lamb
William Collins, £20, pp. 418I had assumed, after 40 years of researching
and writing about war in the 20th century,
that I was prepared for just about any hor-
ror. But Christina Lamb’s research, into the
mass rape of women and young girls in more
recent wars and ethnic cleansing shook me
to the core. This is the most powerful and
disturbing book that I have ever read, and it
raises important questions.
Lamb takes us from one zone of racial
and religious aggression to another. The
attackers have different motives and each
persecuted minority is culturally unique,
yet the pain and suffering of their victims
are terrifyingly similar. She meets the Yazi-
di women, seized by Isis warriors from their
ancient homeland between Syria and Iraq,
chosen by lot as sex slaves, then sold on like
second-hand cars from one rapist to anoth-
er. The Muslim Rohingya women in north-
ern Myanmar are violated with conspicuous
cruelty by the Buddhist army in order to
stampede an entire people over the frontier
to Bangladesh.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram kidnaps girls
en masse to turn them into ‘bush wives’
to produce another generation of fighters
and slaves. ‘I abducted your girls ... I will
sell them in the market, by Allah,’ declared
their leader Abubakar Shekau, after seiz-
ing hundreds of schoolgirls. ‘I will marry
off a woman at the age of 12. I will
marry off a girl at the age of nine.’ Mili-
tia groups in the Democratic Republic of
Congo sometimes even rape babies and
infants because they are led to believe that
this will give them special powers, or cure
them of HIV.
There have been so many more examplesof mass rape in different countries. Bangla-
deshi women were abused terribly in 1971
by their fellow Muslims from the Pakistan
Army in its attempt to crush the independ-
ence movement. The Rwandan genocide
against the Tutsis was known for its massa-
cres, yet the mass rapes which accompanied
them were overlooked at the time. The 2018
report of the UN Special Representative on
Sexual Violence in Conflict named a mini-
mum of 19 states in which women had beenraped during recent conflicts. It also listed
‘12 national military and police forces and
39 non-state actors’ as guilty of mass rape.
Rather like the killing of prisoners in
wartime, rape has seldom been mentioned
in the past, partly because it might have
been embarrassing to think that one’s own
side might also be guilty, but also because
of an assumption that it had always been
a natural part of war. ‘For decades there
was little discussion,’ Lamb writes. ‘It took
rape camps being set up again in the heart
of Europe for the issue to get international
attention. Like many people, the first time
I heard of sexual violence in conflict was in
the 1990s during the war in Bosnia.’ And
yet rape had certainly not been absent from
the ideological conflicts of the first half of
the century.
In the Spanish Civil War, officers in Fran-
co’s Army of Africa, during their advance on
Madrid in the late summer and early autumn
of 1936, urged their Moroccan troops to rape,
and in many cases disembowel, the wives
and daughters of peasants and workers as
a deliberate act of terror to panic the
Republican militias. The greatest example ofThis is the most powerful
and disturbing book
I have ever readall took place in 1945, as soldiers in the Red
Army raped an estimated two million Ger-
man women, tens of thousands of Hungar-
ians, and even those women of supposedly
Allied nations, such as Poles and Serbs. The
Imperial Japanese Army did not restrict itself
to the perpetual rape of ‘comfort women’
imprisoned in military brothels. They
also believed in the gang rape of enemy
civilians as a form of comradeship bonding.
Lamb’s book should certainly provoke
much debate and I hope it will also clarify
some thinking. Perhaps the phrase ‘rape as
a weapon of war’ has become too much of
a standard term. In many cases it is correct,
although a more accurate version would be
‘a weapon of terror in conflict and ethnic
cleansing’. Yet much depends on whether
the ‘weapon’ is a deliberate military policy.
It certainly was with the Pakistani Army
in Bangladesh, Franco’s Army of Afri-
ca, the Japanese Army and the Myanmar
Army, along with all the other acts of
ethnic cleansing.
But there are also examples of where
an army has slipped its leash, and soldiers
simply exploit the opportunity. In the case
of the Red Army, the position was com-
plex. Soviet propaganda had dehumanised
the ‘Fascist beast’, and even the ‘blonde
witch’, with calls for vengeance, yet many
officers and soldiers were horrified by what
their comrades did and took no part in it.
A number even saved German women.
So, we do need to be careful about gener-
alisations.
The feminist definition of rape is that it
is an act of violence driven by a compulsion
to exert power, and has nothing to do with
sex. But that is naturally the victim’s point
of view and does little to explain the motiva-
tion of the perpetrator. All the sadistic acts,
which Lamb quite rightly does not spare
us, clearly support that perspective. TheBooks_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 30 25/02/2020 14:39