Mr. Speaker, first, it is an honour to address the House on this subject today. I am here because I was the chair of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights, a subcommittee of the foreign affairs committee. Our group studied this issue and produced the report that was subsequently endorsed by the foreign affairs committee and has now made its way to the House for us to consider its acceptance in this concurrence debate.
In my remarks I will deal with three themes. The first of these is a bit of background on the nature of the hearings. The second is a discussion of the importance of the issue and its implications. The third is to discuss the title of the report, which we called “A Weapon of War: Rape and Sexual Violence Against Women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Canada's Role in Taking Action and Ending Impunity”. Members will see why that is important as I get to it.
Let us start with a bit of the background.
The Subcommittee on International Human Rights operates by consensus. We are the only subcommittee on Parliament Hill that does so on a consistent basis. We have been doing so since I became the chair of the committee, back in 2007, and, indeed, before that, the practice had already been established. This has been enormously important for the success of the subcommittee. We are been able to pick our topics. Unfortunately, we can do this because there is a vast and endless smorgasbord of human rights abuses in this world. We pick topics where we are fundamentally in agreement, where the issues do not represent proxies for some sort of other issue, whether members are for or against some foreign policy initiative. We try to find issues that can be dealt with in a timely fashion, allowing us to return to the House so members can act in a manner that will potentially achieve some benefit.
The subcommittee held 13 hearings and listened to 32 witnesses between November, 2010 and June, 2013. Anybody who knows their electoral history will realize that there was an intervening election. As a result, the subcommittee did not succeed in wrapping up its hearings within a single Parliament. In part, that occurred because of a non-confidence vote in the government. It also occurred because of the extent of the problem.
We started out with a motion from one member. I honestly cannot remember which member it was, but it does not matter, because all members of all committees agreed to the motion. We agreed to looked at rape as a weapon of war. “Control” might be a better way of putting it, but we said “of war” at the time. It looked at three areas, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan. We brought in witnesses to talk about all of these countries. However, it soon became apparent that the Democratic Republic of the Congo stood out among all of these countries for a variety of reasons. Some of the reasons were the geographical extent, the number of victims and the very long period in which the problem had been occurring and continually recurring, which now goes back more than a generation by the most modest estimate.
The report produced 12 recommendations. All were agreed upon by all members of all parties. It was then taken by myself, as the subcommittee chair, to the foreign affairs committee, which approved all 12 recommendations, again with all-party support, and it has come here in that form.
I am mentioning this and stressing it at great length to make the point that everybody on all sides of the House is genuinely concerned with this issue. I have no doubt that my colleagues on the other side are deeply committed to the subject, including those who participated in the hearings and those who did not.
The 12 recommendations asked for a government response, and the government has provided a response to these recommendations, which is available to all members. This is one of only several studies in which we have engaged and have looked at the use of rape as a weapon.
I was talking earlier about three themes, one of them would be discussing the importance of the implications of this issue. I do not think the general public is aware of just how widespread a problem this is, how widespread in the world the use of rape and sexual violence is as a weapon of war and a means of social control.
Certainly when the issue first arose and I heard about it as an inexperienced chair of the subcommittee, my initial response was to ask why one would use rape as a weapon. Surely if the goal is to intimidate and control others, just having a gun accomplishes that goal, so why does one need more than this in order to oppress a population? If individuals dig through the public records, they will find where I said this. I have since learned that there are a number of different ways in which rape, sexual violence, and the threat of sexual violence are very powerful weapons of control.
Let me give some examples and go through a little geographical tour of the planet as I do this. Historically we are all familiar with the famous story from the Second World War of Korean women forced into sexual slavery, so-called comfort women, who were systematically sexually exploited, raped, and generally abused by their Japanese captors. They were one of many populations abused by not merely the Japanese, although the Japanese certainly were terrible abusers in this regard, but by other military forces in that conflict. That was not a unique conflict in this regard.
In our subcommittee we heard testimony about sexual abuse in Sri Lanka used as a mechanism of extortion by the occupying military in Tamil areas of the north of the country, and this is happening contemporaneously right now. This is not an official government-sanctioned activity, but it is an activity the government tolerates in which members of the military will capture the wives and daughters of prominent and relatively prosperous Tamils and effectively threaten that they will be sexually abused if a ransom is not paid. Of course, it is one thing to hold someone as a hostage, but it is that much more effective to threaten abuse if the goal is to force someone to pay a ransom, as well as to have a credible record of having followed through on threats. This is a form of sexual terrorism.
Now I am starting on the third theme I mentioned I would be dealing with, which is the different kinds of sexual abuse and why we chose to refer to this as a report on rape and sexual violence as opposed to our initial title, which was simply rape.
That is Sri Lanka. Just today in the subcommittee before question period we heard witnesses from Burma who reported on sexual violence. It is hard to get exact numbers, but there appears to be a rising number of incidences of rape being used by members of the military with impunity in the outlying ethnic regions of that country.
In Rwanda we have dealt with the issue of sexual violence 20 years after the fact of that massive genocide, which was characterized not only by many murders but by literally thousands of rapes and huge numbers of pregnancies, huge numbers of HIV infections, which resulted in full-blown AIDS. Almost all the women who were raped at that time who developed HIV and AIDS have now passed away. There is a whole generation, and we have had a number of hearings of young people, now 20 years old, who are the children of rape, and the social ostracism they can face makes them essentially an entire lost generation.
To come back to the DRC, I would make this observation. There have been different kinds of sexual abuse, sexual violence, sexual terrorism. More than one kind has occurred in the Congo. There has been rape for intimidation. There has been rape where the military, the terrorizing forces, or the militias would force people to engage in sexual activities that break social prohibitions, force them to have sex with members of their own family. They do not kill either of them, but they are essentially social outcasts, and social disintegration results. The spread of disease is an issue. The forcing of women into sexual services against their will is also an issue. Unfortunately, almost all of the different forms of sexual abuse that have occurred elsewhere are encapsulated in this particular area, and this indicates why this is so important.
This is the prototype, the paradigm of this kind of abuse worldwide, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is the epicentre. It is the area where we most need to correct this problem.