BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A global effort is needed to tackle rape and other sexual violence in war zones, the United Nations said on Wednesday, calling responses to a worsening problem with tens of thousands of victims "grossly inadequate."
An international conference in Brussels involving participants from more than 30 countries heard horrific reports of sexual abuses in war zones worldwide.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, told the meeting most proposals to address the issue continued to go unfunded by donors.
"The responses so far have been grossly inadequate compared to the scale of the problem," she said. "We need political will and leadership and certainly sustained action."
Translation: Send more money!
A U.N. report for the meeting said Bosnia and Herzegovina documented 40,000 cases of war-related rape until 1993 and up to 45,600 Kosovar Albanian women suffered similarly from 1998-99.
In Sierra Leone's protracted conflict up to 64,000 women may have been sexually victimized and one in five of 1,500 Burundian women surveyed by the UN in 2004 reported being raped and many knew of or had witnessed rape of minors.
Whats horrific, of course, is that the UN is arguably the single biggest group of rapists, child molesters, and sexual predators on the planet. The accusations against UN personnel, including the infamous blue-helmted peacekeepers, have poured in from all across the globe for years. I notice the figures given above do not identify what proportion of the attacks were assumed to have been perpetrated by UN personnel.
Naturally, with an irony of such monstrous proportion, there is a punchline:
In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged donors to provide funds, calling the issue a "human rights problem, a global health problem and an impediment to peace."
Send more money!