Rape by soldiers is much more than 'simple lust'

As a lot of people have pointed out, one of the striking things about the new historical bestseller, Berlin: The Downfall, is the way that the historian Anthony Beevor gives great attention to the mass rapes carried out by the Soviet army during the Second World War. He shows how the contempt that the Russians felt for the German population was carried through by sexual violence that was sanctioned at the highest level.

There is certainly nothing new about the use of rape by military forces, but there is something new in the way that it is now being understood – not just as a kind of frolic or madness, but as part of a concerted attempt to subjugate a civilian population. We were made particularly aware of this when Serbs systematically raped Bosnian Muslim women. And many current conflicts are also marked by such behaviour.

A memorable article yesterday in the Financial Times drew attention to the use of rape by soldiers against ethnic minorities in Burma. And a recent report from Human Rights Watch, The War Within the War, contained terrifying testimony from the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where forces on all sides of the conflict use sexual violence to try to control the civilian population.

There seems to be a growing desire among journalists, historians and lawyers to bring such persecution to light. In a recent speech about the International Criminal Court, Cherie Booth said that in the past the victims of rape by soldiers "have been let down when it has come to the prevention and prosecution of these offences, largely because sexual violence has been regarded as an accepted concomitant of war", and she welcomed the fact that the statutes of the new court will identify systematic rape as a crime against humanity.

But although we may be able to see in theory how rape can be used by military personnel as a deliberate way of persecuting women, we in the UK seem to be slow to recognise our own responsibility to women who are suffering right now. As we all know, individuals who have a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their home countries can claim asylum if they can get to Britain. But many women who have experienced sexual violence at the hands of military or security personnel are finding that the courts in Britain are brushing their experiences aside. This injustice has just been brought home to me because I spent some time this week with a woman from Uganda, whom we can call Jeanette. She is a middle-aged, softly spoken woman who is struggling to make some kind of life for herself in London, living on £30 a week in a room that she shares with a stranger. She has claimed asylum here, but on Monday her final application for judicial review was rejected by the Court of Appeal.

The main facts of Jeanette's case are not disputed. She came to Britain in December 2000. Before that, she had lived in Uganda with her son, and they ran a shop near to the Congolese border. One day, four soldiers came to her shop and asked her and her son if they had any dealings with the rebels.

"I said, I don't know anything about rebels," Jeanette told me. "They started searching the house. They went to my son's room and one soldier started beating him. I was in the shop. I started crying. Another soldier slapped me, and then one soldier came back from my son's room and said to me, 'You have been saying that you know nothing about rebels, so what is this?' and showed me a piece of paper that I didn't know anything about.

"Then two of them made me go to my room and started searching my room. They said, 'What is in this case?' and I was looking for the keys to the case when..." Jeanette stops talking for a while, and sobs choke in her throat.

"The soldiers raped me," she says eventually. "This is a great shame for me." The soldiers took her son away, and Jeanette ran for her life – she threw herself on the protection of a friend, who hid her, and then helped her to get to the UK before she could be found by the army again.

Even if you believe that there are too many asylum-seekers coming to Britain and that too many of them have unfounded claims, still, Jeanette's case seems to fit perfectly into the strict legal requirements for claiming asylum. She does seem to have a well-founded fear of persecution. Indeed, the persecution seems to have been particularly brutal, with a particularly harsh effect upon her. She has been diagnosed by a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and has tried to kill herself since arriving in the UK.

Those are the bald facts, but it's hard to put over how vulnerable Jeanette seems, as if shock had torn her off her bearings. She is pretty sure that she will never hear from anyone in her family ever again – indeed, she is a woman with little left to hope for, except, if she is lucky, a safe future.

But the authorities here seem pretty determined to deny her even that.

Interestingly, they do not dispute the fact that she was raped in the circumstances that she describes. They simply dispute the idea that this can be seen as a form of persecution. One appeal judge, Lord Justice Latham, said on Monday that the soldiers' rape was a matter of "simple and dreadful lust". Because the laws on asylum are there to protect people who are confronting persecution, rather than lust, this conclusion means that Jeanette can be returned to those lust-crazed soldiers.

Ian Macdonald, the QC who argued Jeanette's case in the Court of Appeal, was quite scathing about the way that the law is currently being interpreted. "If you don't recognise that rape can be part of deliberate persecution, then there is an inbuilt bias against the persecution that women face," he points out to me. "After all, if a man was beaten unconscious during interrogation, it would be seen as part of the political persecution he suffered – but if a woman is raped, it is seen as a separate problem."

In the current political climate it is extremely hard to make a case for a more understanding attitude. "I don't think anyone should underestimate the pressure on the officials," says Ian Macdonald, "and if you can sideline certain persecutory acts by saying those acts are just gratuitous lust, you can exclude large numbers of persecuted women from seeking asylum".

Indeed, forthcoming changes to asylum law, which will speed up deportations and reduce opportunities for appeal, will only make things worse for women like Jeanette. The redoubtable pressure group, Women Against Rape, is trying to call our attention to the situation of Jeanette and others in her position. They estimate that about 50 per cent of women who seek asylum may have experienced sexual violence.

As it is, Jeanette's case may go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but in the meantime, as she says, she can't feel safe for a moment. "Any time they can take me away and make me go home," she says. "If I go back I know I'm going to be killed. I cannot explain how I feel."

n.walter@btinternet.com