UN: The UN Security Council has demanded that warring governments and factions act to halt violence against women, saying rape was no longer just a byproduct of war but a military tactic.
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who chaired part of the session on Thursday, told the council the world had now recognised that sexual violence during conflicts went beyond individual victims, to affect nations' security and stability.
Echoed by a string of speakers, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon told the 15-nation council that the problem had "reached unspeakable and pandemic proportions in some societies attempting to recover from conflict". Maj Gen Patrick Cammaert, a former UN peacekeeping commander, told the meeting: "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict."
Speakers identified former Yugoslavia, Sudan's Darfur region, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Liberia as conflict regions where deliberate sexual violence had occurred on a mass scale.
A recent survey of 2,000 women and girls in Liberia showed 75 per cent had been raped during the West African country's civil war. A US-sponsored resolution adopted unanimously by the council called sexual violence "a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group".
It called on conflicting parties to take measures to protect civilians from sexual violence, said such crimes should be excluded from amnesty after conflicts, and warned that the council would consider special measures against parties that commit them when imposing or renewing sanctions.