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Every 26 Seconds
JOHANNESBURG
 After being raped, Charlene Smith became an anti-rape activist. |
(CBS) Every 26
seconds a woman is raped in South Africa. According to
Interpol statistics the country is the rape capital of
the world. Correspondent Bob Simon reports from
Johannesburg. In the seven years since the end of apartheid, law and order has broken down and violent crime is raging out of control. Fifty-two thousand cases of rape were reported to the police last year. But the vast majority of South African rape victims don't report the crime. Lately there is at least a little more awareness of the problem. This is largely due to journalist Charlene Smith, who did something no woman in South Africa had ever done before. |
She wrote and published a detailed account of a rape - her own.
"It
wasn't a particularly dramatic rape," Smith says of her
experience. "He didn't use abusive language toward me. He
didn't beat me up badly. He didn't stab me. It was a very
ordinary rape. And what it meant was, it could happen to
anyone."
When the ordeal was over, Smith wasted no time: She started
writing. She left nothing out.
"In the story that I wrote I brought (readers) onto the
bed with me," she says. "I brought them into the
bathroom where I was bound and where I was battling to escape. I
wanted them to know - I didn't want to skip over the thing and
say and then I was raped. I asked my children for permission
before I wrote. They gave me permission."
The story turned into a series of harrowing reports on rape.
Smith became South Africa's top anti-rape activist.
Unlike many South African women, Smith says she feels no shame at
all. "The rapist should feel shame," she says. "A
society that does nothing to stop rape should feel shame, but why
should I feel shame?"
Society's failure to stop rape was only part of the shame. South
Africa has the fastest growing HIV rate in the world, which means
that women who survive the rape often die of AIDS. On the night
she was raped, Smith raced right over to a hospital to get the
drugs which can fight the virus.
At the hospital, the receptionist told Smith that because she
didn't have an appointment, she could not receive the drugs.
Smith got angry: "I leaned across the desk at her, and I
said, 'Listen darling, I've just been raped, I have two children,
this is my life, I want these drugs, and I want them now.
Otherwise I am going to cause more trouble than you can begin to
imagine.'"
Smith's account prompted a chorus of shocking stories. Jean Saul
was in her home outside of Johannesburg when four men broke in,
robbed her at gunpoint, tied her up in her bed and raped her. Her
husband was tied up next to her during the whole thing.
"They told my husband 'We've got AIDS and we're going to
rape your wife,'" Jean Saul remembers.
When she said something they didn't like, they kicked her or her
husband. They called her a "white bitch," she
remembers. "They'd been drinking heavily and everything
smelled of booze. He stood on the bed and he actually peed on us.
Just urinated over both of us."
Jean Saul is struggling to build barriers against the fear which
has entered her life. Her house has new fences. She has bought
guard dogs. She has tried to turn her home into a fortress, but
admits it feels more like a prison. When she drives at night, she
carries a gun.
"I can carry it in my hand when I am driving,"
she says. "I don't feel that if I am hijacked or anything
I've have to fiddle around for a gun. I've got it in my hand and
there's no surprise."
Eight months later, no one has been arrested in the Saul case.
That's not unusual. In South Africa only about four percent of
reported rapes end with a conviction.
"In South Africa, women won't report because they have no
belief that the rapist or rapists will land up behind bars,"
Smith says.
In Smith's case, a suspect was arrested. But Smith had more to do
with that than the police did. She says that the police lost the
entire case file and all the evidence, within five days of the
rape. "It's inefficiency, it's a lack of training, it's a
lack of investigation," says Smith. "And they actually
don't care."
Recently, anti-rape public service ads began running on South
African TV. It featured South African actress Charlize Theron.
The ads were briefly pulled off the air after protests by some
South African men who found them insulting.
Psychologist Namfundo Walaza was one of the women who helped
create the ad. A few years ago, she counseled apartheid-era
torture victims in her Capetown clinic. Now she sees women who've
been raped and tries to make sense of South Africa's culture of
violence.
The vast majority of the women raped in South Africa are black.
They live in poor townships, where law and order has broken down.
In Alexandra, even the police say they won't go out with their
girlfriends after dark.
On election day last June, Busiswe Shezi was walking home after
voting in Alexandra, when she was attacked by three men who had a
gun. "I tried to scream but they said just shut up we are
going to shoot you and we are going to shoot to kill,"
she says.
When she went to the police station, she had to tell her story in
front of a crowd of men, who didn't seem to take it seriously at
all. They were joking about the rape, she says, and asked her if
she had enjoyed the experience.
People are beginning to protest the crisis, and the government's
failure to deal with it.
A growing number of rapists never make it to the police station.
Vigilantes get them first and justice of sorts is done.
Simon had a difficult time finding a South African
official to talk to him about rape.
Uninvited, Simon and a crew went to a Cabinet cocktail party, and
found the ministers in charge of law and order busy honoring the
national football team. Steve Tshwete, the minister in charge of
police, attacked those who raise the issue of rape.
"We want to dismiss with contempt this whole notion that
South Africa is a rape case," he said. "The rape
capital of the world is a very silly notion that is intended to
tarnish the image of our country."
Children are being raped too. Nine-year-old Emily Sithole
recently had her second AIDS test just weeks after being raped by
a 40-year-old man on her way home from school.
Emily's mother Clementia has good reason to worry the rapist had
AIDS. There's a popular belief here that a man can get rid of
AIDS by having sex with a virgin. That myth is increasingly
becoming a death sentence for girls like Emily who are now
targeted by rapists.
Smith arranged for Emily to be tested for free at a clinic that
opened after muckraking revealed how badly rape survivors are
treated by the health system. Emily and Smith will not find out
for months if they have been infected.
In the meantime, Smith has had to go through the trial of her
alleged rapist. "You can't sleep properly," she
says. "You can't concentrate. You get depressed. You get
terrible flashbacks. You are just consumed by fear."
Smith has shown up every day of the trial. But even if the legal
system delivers some sort of justice, Smith will have lost
something forever.
"I've really loved this country so much," she
says. "We went through tremendous struggles in the past.
We've seen awful things. I had such hopes for my children here.
Such hopes for all of us - that we would stay, that we would
build this country, that we would make this a better country,
that the people that died here didn't die for nothing. And it
really upsets me that I don't see a future for my children
here."
Shezi has much the same feeling. "People are pointing
finger at me right now," she says. "I'm scared
of the AIDS test. I (have) a little daughter and people are
poisoning my daughter and saying 'Your mother has been raped.'
I'm futureless."
© MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Rape Now A War Crime
THE HAGUE, Netherlands, Feb. 22, 2001
(CBS)
A U.N. war crimes tribunal convicted three Bosnian Serbs standing
trial on charges of rape and torture, the first case of wartime
sexual enslavement to come before an international court.
As CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports,
Thursday's convictions were based on just 36 counts. The total
number of rape victims in the Bosnian war is estimated at more
than 10,000.
The tribunal convicted Dragoljub Kunarac of sexually assaulting
and torturing Muslim women at rape camps during the Bosnian war,
sentencing him to 28 years in prison.
The court said Kunarac was involved in a "nightmarish
scheme of sexual exploitation" that was "especially
repugnant."
"You abused and ravaged Muslim women because of their
ethnicity, and from among their number you picked whomsoever you
fancied," said the presiding judge, Florence Mumba,
reading the first verdict.
The second defendant, Radomir Kovac, also was found guilty of war
crimes and crimes against humanity by rape, and sentenced to 20
years.
The third defendant, Zoran Vukovic, was convicted of raping and
torturing a 15-year-old girl — who was about the same age as
his own daughter — but acquitted him of most other charges
for lack of evidence. He was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment.
Mumba went through the testimony of woman after woman who had
told horrendous tales of rape and torture in the Bosnian town of
Foca, a city Southeast of Sarajevo, after it was overrun in April
1992, when Muslims were herded into separate prison camps for men
and women.
The defendants stood in silence wearing headphones as the
judgment was read in somber tones.
Mumba said the defendants carried out their rape in full
knowledge of the systematic attack against the Muslim population
ordered by the Bosnian Serb leadership.
She told one defendant, "You personally raped witness 183
...You further mocked the victim by laughing at her while she was
raped by other soldiers and finally by saying that she would
carry Serb babies and she would not know the father."
The verdict in the Foca case follows months of testimony from
dozens of witnesses, including 16 former rape victims who came to
The Hague to confront their alleged former tormentors. The trial
began March 20.
The women told how Bosnian Serb paramilitary soldiers entered
detention centers and selected women and girls as young as 12 for
nightly gang-rapes and sexual torture.
They were charged with about 50 counts of war crimes and crimes
against humanity, including rape, torture, enslavement and
outrages upon personal dignity. The crimes carried maximum life
sentences.
The tribunal was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993
to go after the alleged architects of the Bosnian war's bloody "ethnic
cleansing" campaigns, including the former Bosnian Serb
president, Radovan Karadzic, and his military chief, Ratko
Mladic, who remain at large.
The ruling marked a milestone for the recognition of women's
special vulnerability during war and the need for legal sanctions
to prevent them from being treated as spoils of battle. It will
help set legal precedent by outlining the criteria necessary to
bring future cases.
Some witnesses sobbed and others shrieked with rage as they
recalled being assaulted by up to 10 soldiers at a time in
classrooms of the high school where they were detained, or in
soldiers' private apartments — so-called "rape
camps."
The women attested to the long-lasting gynecological damage and
other injuries that resulted, in many cases, in permanent
infertility.
"I remember he was very forceful. He wanted to hurt
me," one witness said, referring to Kunarac. "But
he could never hurt me as much as my soul was hurting me."
The horrific testimony was repeated day after day by the
different witnesses in order to demonstrate that rapes were
carried out in a systematic and organized fashion — the
essential ingredients of a crime against humanity.
Although women's identities were disguised from the public by
electronic voice and image scrambling, they testified in full
view of the defendants.
Last July, Bosnian Serb lawyers opened their defense, seeking
unsuccessfully to get the torture counts thrown out. They did not
deny the occurrence of widespread rapes in Foca, but they
maintained the women who testified had been willing partners. One
defendant's lawyer claimed the defendant was a victim of sexual
coercion; another claimed a witness fell in love with his client
and wanted to marry him.
The Yugoslav tribunal is considered to be at the vanguard on
gender crimes. Its case law stipulates that witnesses who have
suffered traumatic experiences are not necessarily considered
unreliable, and its statute requires no corroboration of
testimony from rape victims.
Copyright MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved.
By ANGUS SHAW, Associated Press Writer
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - President Robert Mugabe lashed out Saturday at the United States and other Western nations he said were planning racist and punitive sanctions against his government because of its seizures of white-owned farms.
``What is our crime? Our crime is that we are black and in America blacks are a condemned race,'' Mugabe told a ceremony honoring black guerrillas of the bush war that ended white rule of Zimbabwe in 1980.
On Aug. 1, the U.S. Senate approved a bill offering a wide-ranging aid package to the southern African nation on the condition it ends government-endorsed violence and intimidation.
The bill also urged President Bush (news - web sites) to consult with European Union (news - web sites) countries, Canada and other nations on possible sanctions against Zimbabweans responsible for the ``deliberate breakdown of the rule of law, politically motivated violence, and intimidation in Zimbabwe.''
The bill still has to be approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mugabe called the Senate action an affront to Zimbabwe's sovereignty.
``We will never revert to be a colony by remote control by the United States,'' Mugabe said.
He said his government was acting in fairness by demanding land ``from the kith and kin of the God-chosen Anglo-Saxons who only yesterday condemned us as slaves.''
``These Anglo-Saxon bigots glibly use the language of democracy to duck their colonial responsibilities,'' he said.
He condemned white farmers in Zimbabwe who supported foreign sanctions.
``We will proceed with land reform with or without their cooperation, with or without sanctions. Let that be known here and abroad, let farmers tell their constituencies overseas,'' Mugabe said. ``We will not budge on this question.''
On Friday, 21 white farmers were denied bail after their arrest Monday on charges of attacking black squatters and ruling party militants who had occupied white land in the Chinhoyi corn and tobacco district, 70 miles northwest of Harare.
Addressing about 6,000 supporters at the Heroes Acre, a cemetery for guerrilla leaders and politicians, Mugabe said some of the arrested farmers fought against his guerrilla fighters in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known.
Mugabe's government has targeted more than 4,600 white-owned farms - about 95 percent of land owned by whites - for confiscation without compensation.
Since March 2000, ruling party militants led by veterans of the independence war have illegally occupied more than 1,700 farms.
The occupiers have been blamed for much of the political violence that surrounded parliamentary elections last year and has continued ahead of a presidential poll early next year, leaving at least 36 people dead, nine of them white farmers.
