Manipur women horror: How rape and sexual violence are used as a weapon in conflict

It’s been more than two months and Manipur continues to be on the boil. The ethnic clashes between the Meitei and Kuki-Zomi tribes have left more than 140 dead and tens of thousands displaced. The Centre and the army have stepped in but there seems to be no end in sight.

The months of unrest have brought uncertainty to Manipur. The northeastern state, many say, is the on brink of a civil war. And like it is in any conflict-hit zone, women and girls are the worst affected. Vulnerable, they are exploited and face violence, often sexual abuse. They are humiliated and terrorised. The horrific incident in Manipur where two women from the Kuki-Zomi community were paraded naked by a mob of men and sexually assaulted is a stark reminder of how sexual violence is weaponised amid unrest.

Also read: Two months of Manipur violence: The Meiteis vs the Kuki-Naga battle, explained

The Manipur shocker

On Wednesday, the shocking video of the two women surfaced on the internet. The incident, which reportedly unfolded more than two months ago, when the violence first started has sent shockwaves throughout the nation.

The two women survivors in their 20s and 40s are from the hill district of Kangpokpi, which is dominated by the Kuki-Zomi community. In a video, they are seen being paraded naked by a mob of men down a road. Some can be seen groping the women, as they are dragged towards a field.

The assault took place on 4 May in the Thoubal district and a zero FIR was registered in the matter on 18 May in the Kangpokpi district. The charges in the FIR included abduction, gang rape and murder against unknown miscreants.

In the complaint, the women said that they fled to a nearby forest for shelter after their village was attacked. They were rescued by police and were being taken to a police station but the mob seized them from custody.

Yet the first arrest came only after the video went viral. Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh tweeted the news of the arrest on Friday morning and said that his government will ensure strict action is taken against all the perpetrators, including the possibility of capital punishment.

Also read: What video of women being paraded naked tells us about violence in Manipur

The assault has invited sharp reactions from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who called the incident “shameful for any civilisation” and that his heart was filled with “pain and anger”.

Even the Supreme Court has stepped in calling the video “deeply disturbing”. If the government didn’t act, the Supreme Court would, warned Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, adding that the court would take up the case on 28 July. “It is time that the government steps and takes action. This is unacceptable,” it said.

While there is no end to tension and the Kuki-Zomi people continue to be targeted, it’s their women who are the most vulnerable.

The historical evidence

And this is not in Manipur alone. Across the world, when there is a breakdown of law and order, women become easy targets of hate and humiliation. Throughout history, be it the Partition or the Bangladesh Liberation Movement, women have been kidnapped, raped, and publically humiliated – and the numbers are shocking. At least 83,000 women were victims of sexual abuse during the Partition and anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women were sexually assaulted in the Bangladesh war.

“Rather than being raped and abandoned,” Yasmin Khan writes in The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, “tens of thousands of women were kept in the ‘other’ country, as permanent hostages, captives, or forced wives; they became simply known as ‘the abducted women.’” Why did men “keep the women they had attacked?” Khan asks. It was the impulse to “consume, transform, or eradicate the remnants of the other community,” that drove them.

While women have come a long way not much has changed when it comes to protecting them when humanity is put to the test.

The life of women in conflict zones

In the Russia-Ukraine war, accounts of sexual violence started being reported within days of the invasion on 24 February 2022. The rape of Ukrainian women at the hands of Russian soldiers is widespread.

One year after the invasion, around 154 cases of conflict-related sexual violence were officially identified. It’s been more than 500 days now and even back then the number of victims was said to be substantially higher.

Independent international commission reported to the United Nations in October last year said that victims ranged from women older than 80 to as young as a 4-year-old girl forced to perform oral sex on a soldier, according to a report in The New York Times.

Lyudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian ombudswoman for human rights, told the BBC about how about 25 girls and women in Bucha, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, were “systematically raped” during the Russian occupation. “Nine of them are pregnant. Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn’t want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children.”

Pramila Patten, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said, “Too often have the needs of women and girls in conflict settings been side-lined and treated as an afterthought.”

This is evident in Afghanistan, where the rights of women and girls have been violated since the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

An Amnesty report released last July that relied on interviews with more than 100 women, girls, staff members at detention centres, experts and journalists, pointed out that there has been a dramatic rise in child marriages and marital rape since the Taliban’s takeover. The survivors of domestic violence were promised safety by the authorities but they were imprisoned instead. The women who protested peacefully were harassed and beaten.

In Myanmar, women have been violated for years. When the Myanmar military cracked down on Rohingya Muslims in 2017, rape, sexual assault and abuse were common. Almost 740,000 mostly Muslim Rohingyas fled into neighbouring Bangladesh. According to the UN investigators, the military carried out massacres and lined up women to be raped. It’s a tactic used during civil unrest and ethnic conflicts to create insecurity and terror in the minds of men about their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers.

Now under the junta, which staged a coup and came to power in February 2021, widespread violence against women continues. Women’s League of Burma (WLB), an organization for women’s rights, has documented more than 100 cases of conflict-related sexual violence and gender-based violence, which is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

Women are gang-raped by soldiers and sexually assaulted because they are unable to pay bribes, according to a report in The Guardian. Sexual violence to attack civilian populations is the military’s “modus operandi”, Naw Hser Hser, a human rights defender, told the United Nations last week.

In the past 11 years, warring parties in the Syrian civil war have subjected thousands of women and girls to sexual and gender-based violence. These acts are used to instil fear, humiliate and punish, and in the case of terror groups, to enforce a draconian social order. Rapes and other acts of sexual violence are carried out by government forces and associated militias. In 2018, UN investigators said that Islamic State militants had executed women and girls by stoning for alleged adultery and forced girls into marriage.

The situation is not very different in Ethiopia. Most genocide scholars and rights groups have asserted that sexual violence is being used by both the Ethiopian and Eritrean forces as a weapon of war in Tigray. Most victims report that they were being brutalised because of their identity and the need to ‘cleanse’ them, according to a report by Observer Research Foundation.

In ethnic clashes like the one in Manipur or wars like Ukraine, the safety of women becomes the last priority. Conflicts hurt girls and women more than most other populations.

Rape is used as a tool to terrify and humiliate, as we are witnessing today. The abuse is opportunistic as the justice delivery system is in the doldrums and often it is systemic. Cases are rarely documented and that only means justice is elusive. The only ones who continue to suffer are the women.

With inputs from agencies