 And hello, everyone. Welcome back to our final panel and plenary of the first day of the Missing Peace Global Symposium on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. This last panel will be talking about the lessons on wartime sexual violence from different conflict settings. So I also imagine that we're going to have a very good discussion after we hear our introductory remarks from all the panelists. I'm very pleased to introduce you to my colleague and longtime friend, Dr. Chantal de Juno Udrat. She is a global fellow at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center. And she served as president and CEO of Women in International Security, otherwise known as WISE, from 2013 to 2021. She was also formerly at USIP as the Associate Vice President of Fellows, which is where we got our start as colleagues. And she is going to take this panel. Thank you so much, Chantal. And the floor is yours. Thank you, Kathleen, and welcome to our online audience. So today we have examined conflict-related sexual violence along different angles. But as Kathleen said, we thought it would be useful to bring in perspectives and experiences from specific conflict settings and examine the differences as well as the similarities between these conflicts. Now, we could have picked any number of cases. And there is, unfortunately, a great number of them, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria. But we have also, we could have looked at past cases, Korea, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Bosnia. And we have many experts on these cases in the audience. And I would like to invite you to, in the Q&A section of this session, to share your assessments and findings in terms of the cases you've been looking at. But to help us start off this discussion, we have a terrific panel of experts from the DRC, Ukraine, Burma, and Colombia. So let me briefly introduce you to them. Next to me is Ali Bitinga Alexandre, who is a social scientist based in the DRC and deeply engaged in community-based programming that seeks to address the impacts and consequences of conflict-related sexual violence in the DRC, and particularly in the Eastern region. He also works very closely with the Panzee Hospital, the Hospital of Nobel Peace Prize winner or laureate, Dennis Mugwege. Next to Ali is Sofia Kornieva, who is a lawyer and specialized in international criminal and human rights law. She's based in Ukraine, and she works with many international organizations, but also with many Ukrainian non-governmental organizations on gender-based violence and conflict-related sexual violence. Next to her is Wei Wei Nu, who is a legal expert and political activist and founder and executive director of the Women's Peace Network in Burma. Through that network, she works to build gender equality, peace, and mutual understanding between Burma's ethnic communities and to empower and advocate for the rights of marginalized women throughout Burma. And she has had a particular focus also on sexual and gender-based violence. And then last, but certainly not least, Rosa Emilia Salamanca, who is a feminist peace builder, human rights activists based in Colombia. She's been a very active participant in the national and international debates and negotiations to secure peace in Colombia and is a driving force behind Colombia's women peace and security national action plan. And her motto is security not through control, but through care. So with this extraordinary panel of experts, we want to focus on two main sets of questions. First, we want to talk a little bit about the perpetrators. Who are the perpetrators? What are their motivations? And what are the different patterns of sexual and gender-based violence? And the second set of questions then has to do with the responses, both by national and international actors. And we want to focus also on the recommendations that you, as experts, have in this regard to be able to stop and prevent conflict-related sexual violence. So Ali, let me start with you. As I mentioned, your work focuses on the Eastern DRC, where we're dealing with a longstanding conflict between government forces and a whole array of non-state armed groups. The conflict we all know has resulted in massive and widespread conflict-related sexual violence. Can you tell us a little bit more about the perpetrators? Who are they? What drives them? And I think you also have some very interesting examples about the variation even within the groups. We've talked a lot about variation, that conflict-related sexual violence is not inevitable when we're dealing with war. So please, Ali. Yeah, thank you very much, Chantal, for the floor. This is a very interesting question. You know, as Chantal said, I have been working at Pansy Hospital for 10 years now. And we have seen many victims coming to the hospital. And previously, our research was based on the stories related by victims. And one day, I discussed with Dr. Mukwege. And we said, OK, we need to shift them, because we don't understand these things. Women coming to the hospital, not only raped, but some genital parts, or the rebels decided to shut in, which is really terrible. And then we decided to go and speak to soldiers from the Congo-Israeli army or from armed groups to understand the motivations of these acts of violence. I know there are so many experts in this room that I have been reading in the literature. And it's my pleasure to meet them. So what I'm going to say is what soldiers told me. I'm not going to be theoretical at first. I will report what soldiers reported about the motivations of sexual violence in armed conflict. So when we asked soldiers why they commit these acts of violence, there are so many explanations. Because the discourse we had before, that we didn't understand profoundly was that sexual violence is a weapon of war. But of course it is. I'm going to get there later. But soldiers and rebels gave multiple complex explanations. Some of them reported about urges. Some soldiers believe that a man cannot stay for a long period of time without having sexual intercourse. So this is biological. That might be simplistic. I'm not saying it, but I'm saying what soldiers told me. So please. So this is a physiological explanation. But when you analyze this very closely, you find out that these transcend physiological explanations. And it is connected to ideas of masculinity. So some soldiers believe that a man is a person who should be active sexually. And when he stays for a long period of time without sex, when he has an opportunity to commit sexual violence, he will. Some soldiers said that, not me. But I just reported that sexual violence is a spoil of war. And when does it happen? It's a very important question. Because we have this discourse of sexual violence as a weapon of war, which is true. I'm going to explain it. But soldiers do not come in the village and start raping first, especially when there is resistance. Soldiers told me that when they are fighting with enemies, they focus on fighting. So they don't think about sexual activities until the war is won. Then when the war is won, in French, there is an expression that they told me that fuit de territoire conquis, which means search in the conquered territory. So if you have won the war, you have to look, OK, what is it? You have to find out what is in this territory. And then all the properties of your enemies, including their houses, their staff, and their wives. This is not me, please. This is what the soldiers are telling me. Become yours. And then to enjoy, to be happy, because they have won the war, they start committing sexual violence. The soldiers told me during the war, during the active fighting, so the genital parts cannot function properly. This is exactly the expression. The penis goes off. So it can't get erected, because you are worried about being killed, and you want to kill the enemy. And some other soldiers told me that sexual violence is like a reward after sexual violence. A commander who is a commander in the Congo is regular. I mean, he told me that he was in a fight in a war in Katanga. And then he won his arms group, won the battle. And then people came to loot a shop. But he protected the shop from being looted. And then later on, the owner of the shop came and told him that in the road, for what you have done for me, you have protected my shop. I give you my daughter as a wife. And you see, this is connected to gender inequality, because the father should not decide on the marriage of his daughter. Because there are so many, there are debates in the literature. Is sexual violence connected to gender inequality or not? So researchers are fighting there. So I'm just reporting what soldiers told me. And again, some soldiers say that sexual violence is an instrument of humiliation, of intimidation. A weapon of war, simply. So I'm going to give an example. One told me that he was in a fight in Fizi. And it was a fight between the Congolese regular army and the Maimai arms group. And then the Congolese army lost the battle. And the group of Maimai started singing, because they were very happy that they have beaten up the regular army. They started singing, today is a great day. We shall rape your daughters and your wives today. Of course, men are also victims of sexual violence, but I'm just repeating what they told me. Well, the Congolese soldiers from regular army, some ran away, others were hiding in houses. It was a psychological attack on them. So my wife is going to get raped today. They felt very demoralized. But this soldier continued and told me, later on, the commander of the Maimai arms group took a megaphone and said, oh, he said, on this occasion, no systematic rape is organized. Any soldier who is going to rape, he will be severely punished. And collective massive rape did not happen, because the commander took a megaphone and ordered his troop not to commit sexual violence. So there are so many things that we can learn from this experience. You see, if the commander says, on this occasion, no sexual violence is organized, that means sexual violence was deliberately planned, organized, on previous occasions. But also, we can learn that sexual violence can be prevented. He asked his troop not to commit sexual violence, and nobody did it. So yeah, that's a really interesting example. So sexual violence was basically perceived as the highest form of humiliation. So when they rape, they say when they rape women or men, not only they target women, but the idea is also to demoralize their husbands or brothers and sisters, because I'm going to conclude like that. So another soldier told me about the war in Shabunda. The RDC, which was an armed group backed by Iran that was active in DRC some decades ago, they were fighting somewhere in Shabunda against a Maimai armed group. And then the RDC won the battle, but they were angry because the community, the community was feeding, was providing food to these Maimais because these Maimais are boys, are men from this community. And when they lost the battle, the people from the communities hid them in their houses. And then the enemies get angry, it's today we're going to show you. They bring all people from the community in a football ground, they separated men from women, married women from unmarried women in the football ground and started committing sexual violence on a woman after an hour. And some men were of course raped. So it was a kind of lesson to teach the community that they should not be supporting the rebel groups. One about variation, the concept of variation is very important when we say that some armed groups commit sexual violence and others don't. But this is a very simplistic explanation. So you can say these armed groups do not commit sexual violence because sometimes it will be an order received from the commander and sometimes it will be a personal motivation. So I don't know an armed group whose soldier has never been raped because, for example, the effort they say in 2016, they committed public rape in central Kassai against a religious group during the Khamon Asap war because the Khamon Asap rebels were fighting against the government and they wore red uniforms and there is a religious group in central Kassai that's put on red clothes, that's the clothes for the religion. And then the effort they say soldiers confused those people from the Khamon Asap armed group. They raped them systematically. This is a government force raping women. But also in another context, I heard of stories that effortless soldiers went to fight against Interahamwe and liberated women who were kept captive by the Interahamwe. Sometimes they rape and sometimes they play a different role. So there is a kind of complexity. I don't have much time. Maybe we'll continue the discussion later. Thank you, Shantar. Thank you, Ali. And I think the complexity is indeed very important to underline as well as these ideas connected to masculinity. Sofia, I want to turn to you. The use of sexual violence as a weapon or tactic of war has been widely reported on in Ukraine and it started to be documented. What can you tell us more about that effort? Thank you for your question. I feel there are many similarities in different contexts, but I could share just some of the patterns and issues which I heard from the survivors. I was representing international courts and international instances, which they shared and which we see in most cases in Ukraine in reported cases. So the first one is when we are talking about the motives of the perpetrators, many survivors say that they felt and they heard being under occupation that the CRSV was, in some cases, directly, it was the orders. And in some cases, they feel that it was not prohibited, like the Russian soldiers felt that it is normal within the war when it's war to conduct the CRSV. So the survivors are telling that they heard that the commanders may say that go and have some rest and enjoy something like that. So this is the first pattern or motive which the survivors are telling us. The second one is that the CRSV was made with the ethnic motive. So in some cases, the perpetrators were telling, like, we will rape you so you will not have the desire to give the births for new Ukrainians. And it's quite a common practice for the CRSV cases all over the Ukraine because it's the widespread one and we have the reported cases in the east and the central part of Ukraine. It's the common tendency for these cases. Another one is the motive of demoralization of the Ukrainian army. We also hear from many survivors and when we are investigating the cases and conduct the evidence, we see the pattern that the CRSV is used as a tool to psychologically push and demoralize the Ukrainian army. So when the CRSV cases are happening, the perpetrators are telling that, like, okay, we will do this with your women, with your children. And so Ukrainian army see this and it will show them who we are and something like that. So it's another what we see from the survivors. Also, it was quite challenging and interesting thing for us. When we were starting talking with the survivors and that they were telling us that many of them were feeling that the perpetrators were convincing them that it was with their consent. So they were approaching the survivors with the idea that it's a wartime, you know, it's occupation, we are the controllers here. So the CRSV, it's like the normal coincidence of war times. And some survivors, I feel many of them, felt that they really gave the consent for that. Even being under the occupation, they have no access to Ukrainian prosecutors. So in those coercive environment, they felt that they maybe really gave the consent by pushed to believe in this by the perpetrators. And we have some cases and it's also indicated in the case files that it was like the pushing for, you know, that it's your fault actually, because there was a consent. And also just to elaborate a bit about the military groups supported by Russia in the east of Ukraine is in the self-proclaimed republics. It's another challenge for the national justice system and for the lawyers, because when the CRSV, we have these cases reported to the clients. When the CRSV is conducted by the militants supported by Russia, but those are not from the Russian army. So it's much more harder to prove the case, to gain the evidence, because it's occupied territory and the survivors are not afraid and are not willing to provide additional evidence or information, because it's very close to the front line. And another issue is that in Ukrainian, like media awareness rising campaigns, there is a lot of information now about the CRSV that it's a war crime, that like what you should do, what rights you have and who are the perpetrators. And of course, as most of the CRSV cases reported against the military of the Russian armies, but we had the client who survived from CRSV conducted by these military groups and she even didn't know that it is a crime. So the agenda and the media provided much information about the CRSV conducted by the Russian forces, but the survivors, the potential survivors may not know and understand that it's also the war crime conducted within the context of war by those military groups as well. Maybe I'll stop on this in terms of time, thanks. Thank you, Wei Wei. In Burma, the government forces, the military in particular, have had a long history of resorting to sexual violence, to suppress minorities and opposition groups. Can you please elaborate? Thank you very much. Thank you for this opportunity to share the situations and the cases of Burma today. Yes, actually we cannot talk about sexual violence, historical sexual violence by the Burmese military. Although we acknowledge that there has been cases of sexual violence by the armed resistance movement, historically is the Burmese military consistently and deliberately using rape as a weapon of war against the ethnic and religious minority groups, against the political activists for decades. And sexual violence was a hallmark of the military's operations in 2017, denocidal clearance operations against the Rohingya. According to the UN international fact-finding mission. And during the period of clearance operations, the Burmese military has systematically used the act of rape, gang rape, sexual slavery and sexual mutilations. The US government's determined this acts and attacks as a mountain to genocide and crime, against humanity in March 2022. The military has used sexual violence deliberately as a tool of genocide with the intent to destroy Rohingya population. Sexual violence also manifests itself in hate speech against the Rohingya and the military's spread propaganda depict in Rohingya as animals. It spread messages like rape harm. I myself actually received messages like rape harm, you know, online and offline to these days. Although the perpetrators are the same, the Burmese military today, the victims and the survivors are very, very different. Nearly three years since the attempted coup, the Burmese military is using similar tactic across the country in a more brutal manner. As the special reporter on the situations of human rights in Burma, Mr. Tom S. Andrew said in his last report to the UNGA, the military is committing crimes of these crimes in a greater frequency and intensity. Everyone who is opposing the attempted coup is at risk of violence by the Burmese military. In detention centers and prison, military has been, you know, committing this brutal act of sexual violence as a form of torture and psychological warfare. We have seen cases of rape, sexual molestations and other forms of sexual abuses. Now that the military has taken these tactics of this tactic to another level, forcing the detainees, males and LGBTQI plus community to rape each other, often blindfolded. You know, in the conflict affected area across the country where military is targeted with airstrikes and ground attacks, we see in cases of soldiers, gang raping and modern young girls, pregnant women and elderly women. We also see in military targeting women who marry a stiffender with sexualized hate speech and often doxin' campaign online like telegram and threatening them with rape. The reason that the military is becoming more brutal by the day is because they want to terrorize the society, the Burmese society as a whole and destroy pro-democracy movement. They've been able to continue this act, these brutalities for decades. It's because of the impunity. The Burmese military never been held accountable for its international crimes, including CRSB. And that is why I believe the end in CRSB must focus on bringing justice and accountability to victims and survivors else the pattern will continue as we see in my country today. Most importantly, I think, I believe what we have learned from Burma case is that CRSB is not inevitable cause of violence, rather deliberate and widespread act of violence. And it was completely preventable. Thank you. Yeah, that's very depressing. Rosa Emilia, I'm going to turn to you because Pramila Patton earlier this morning has called Columbia a light point of hope and she referred to the fact that the special jurisdiction for peace that is the transitional justice mechanism that was established in 2017 agreed to look at sexual violence committed during the conflict, committed both by the FARC, by the state security forces, as well as the sexual violence and assault and abuse that was committed within the FARC and within the state security forces. What do you expect of this initiative or the fact that the special jurisdiction is not going to look at this? Thank you so much for the question and thank you for the invitation. I'm very glad to be here. And yes, we have this special, a special peace in the peace process we have this special justice trial for special justice. So I can say that we have, I mean, it has been a high struggle for women to really have a case. And I think the first thing we must say is that is the first official case that is open in this kind of places in the world. I mean, this is very innovative and but it's also very challenging because we don't know, we don't know how to do it. So the first challenge we have or that women have is that we are five years after the special justice was opened, the transitional justice. So women and victims and everyone has been struggling to have this case, but the special a justice, transitional justice space is going to be for 10 years and now we have already five. So we are five years late to be open in this case. So it's called a macro case 11 and then we have to do what we haven't done for the next five years. So that means that it was really very hard to make this case being opened because they didn't know how to, they really didn't know how to. So and because it is six years after, now we have incredible challenges for this. And the first one is, well, the quality of the advisory, legal advisory must be very, very good because all the evidence and everything, you know, it has not prevailed all the time. So we need really to be very qualified legally because if not it's going to be very difficult to demonstrate what happened so long ago. So I think this is a very, very big challenge. The second thing that I think about this case is that it needs that the independent justice, the women's organizations have to be really very fund because if they don't have the instruments, if they don't have everything, it's going to be very hard to debate and to have all these coming forward because, you know, in Colombian society there is actually a lot of resistance to understand that we have such cases of sexual violence. It has been hard for the society to realize that it was such an extended sexual violence in our country during the conflict and to understand that this is not because only of the conflict, it's because we have a very patriarchal society that has exacerbated a lot of values, a lot of things that we have in daily life. They have been exacerbated during the conflict and the outcomes of that has been an extremely high sexual violence against women. The other challenge is that sexual violence and other based gender cases are on the other 10 cases. So not only women have to go through the 11 macro case, but also they have to be present in all the other 10 cases because there are also cases that are related with sexual violence, but they are nominated as different cases, these appearance and others. And also because in Colombia and in this case and this is very important to say, sexual violence has been, it is a crime in itself and it is not subject to atmosphere. So that is very important because it is going to be punished. You cannot get away with this kind of sexual abuse. And also we have to say that because of, it's so difficult and there is a lot of tension between even women, thinking what is justice? I mean, how to understand what is traditional, what is transitional justice in sexual violence? Because sometimes many women are really thinking, so we are going to have back to our communities the perpetrator and we are going to see them working with us here and they say, no, no way. We don't want to have them here. We want them away, we want them in jail, we want them really far away from us. So the concept of transitional justice for sexual violence in itself is really a challenge. What does it mean, transitional justice for these type of crimes? So there is like discussions, division and also we think that that transitional justice for us is like building a new kind of justice in the country. It's not only a justice for a peace process because you know that the peace process for us is a tool for change. So this is also a tool for changing the idea of justice and how we have this approximation to just in nowadays. So it is a huge discussion between society and for finishing, I think that truth and victims in the center is one of the things that Colombian are all the time saying, victims in the center and we need to have truth. But we all think that the sexual perpetrators, the FARC, the army and we have already some cases about paramiliters because as you know, the paramiliters are the biggest perpetrators and then FARC and militars. So they are not going to say the truth because it's very difficult to say the truth about sexual violence. It's a shame and really it's very difficult. So we don't know what is going to happen but we suppose that eventually we and it's going to end in confrontative justice and we are working. Yeah, that's the way things are moving forward. Well, thank you Rosa Emilia. You have made it very easy for me to make the transition to the second question that is about the responses and the responses both within societies as well as from the international community. Weiwei, what should happen to change the situation in Burma? So unfortunately in Burma there is no domestic or national mechanisms to address as conflict related sexual violence. The Burmese governments and the military traditionally historically denied these cases including the widespread sexual violence against Rohingya women in 2017 even by the democratic leader, Doong San Suu Kyi. So it is really hard to talk about what we have in Burma. Therefore, many of our civil society groups have been calling for the international responses. It has been decades of the military's atrocity crimes and six years of denocidal attacks against Rohingya and now three years after attempted coup, these violence are ongoing and this is also widely reported including by the UN fact-finding missions on Burma. However, this response seems to be very slow and ineffective. It is because I realize these crimes are not taken seriously by the international actors, especially when it's come to Burma, it's a lot about their political interest and politicizations of the international community and the violations of the issue itself. It's the failure to look into the seriousness of crime as it is and responding to it effectively. And also there is no, I think, effective internationally exercise practice mechanisms to address it. So it's all about the political will of the state actors especially when it's come to the UN, when we talk about justice and accountability specifically. And so we have made a number of development on the international justice front that include the investigations by the International Criminal Court not necessarily related to these conflict-related sexual violence but the case of forced deportations of Rohingya to Bangladesh as well as we were able to get an independent international mechanisms on Burma to investigate the military's crime. We are encouraging these mechanisms to be more inclusive and basically take the cases of sexual violence seriously and really put effort to understand the different nature, diverse nature of their contacts and the nature of their crimes itself against it in Burma because we're such a diverse country. The tactic, the motivations, the all the practices that they have deployed in different contexts, different groups, different victims group is different. So it is important that these mechanisms, one, take this issue as serious issue and two, make it more a victim-centered approach and basically understand what is going on. One, I think progress that we have not progressed. The one achievement that international community was able to make is the communique by the SRSG Pamela Patent in 2018. However, even that one is extremely flawed, lacked involvement of the civil society groups or victim groups and it's to this day implemented because of the coup. So we are still very early to talk about transitional justice or any forms of reparations for the victims and the conflicts are ongoing. There are hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons are still living in limbo whether inside Burma or in Bangladesh. So I think we really need a lot more support and work to get this issue resolved. On the other hand, there are some progress we're making domestically after the military coup among the society. Burmese democracy, pro-democracy movement have been putting a lot of effort to basically able to address this issue once we defeat the military basically. Especially through the women's group, through the national unity consultative council, which I am a council member as representing WPN. We're trying to develop transitional justice policies and gender policies and other necessary policies so that we can basically address these crimes, including CRSP. So I think we don't have a lot of good practices or work has been done but we're still in the early stage and we need a lot of your support to help us overcome from this crisis. Thank you. Sofia, maybe in Ukraine it's a little bit different. I think there's actually a lot of attention to the crimes committed by Russian soldiers. Yeah, I would like to provide the brief description of what we have and what the responses should be or what recommendations may be. So the whole scale invasion in 2022, we had the article in the criminal court which covers war crimes including CRSV so it doesn't specify the CRSV and it needs to be amended and brought in. But we had this at that time. And just to mention that it was not used before the 2022, so the war started in 2014 and we had the reported cases of CRSV in the east of Ukraine and they were classified under another article which covers the activities of the terrorist organizations. So now these cases are being reclassified under this article which covers the war crimes. But despite the fact that we have this article when the cases started to be reported, we, the legislation, lacked the approaches and the procedural guidelines for investigating the CRSV cases based on the international standards because actually this article just refers you to the International Humanitarian Criminal Law and it doesn't specify it like anything. So you should, the investigators, the prosecutors, they should understand how to apply the international standards, the international law to investigate these crimes, the war crimes, not the general criminal offenses because our criminal procedural legislation just prescribes the approaches and the mechanisms for investigating the general criminal offenses. And now we have the situation when they are being used to investigate the war crime by the national investigators and the prosecutors and it really puts the additional traumatization for the survivors and when they got into this proceeding of the criminal investigation they are put it into more trauma because of application of these standards and approaches which should be applied for the general criminal offenses just in some couple of examples. For example, when investigating the CRSV, the investigators put the burden of proof for the survivor of the consent so they should investigate the coercive environment if it's the war crime, yeah, and they approach this at the general offense, the rape for example. In other case, there is no protection program for the victims and for example, we had the cases now it's changed because the civil society organizations kind of pushed the authorities to do that but in the beginning the notices of suspicion were published on the website of the OPG, the prosecutor office and the names of the survivors were indicating there and for the survivors who are living near the front lines it was just the additional issue of safety and security when they reported about the case and their names are published. So the law and the protection of victims and witnesses also like really need to be amended and we have a lot of things to do. So a lot of issues but yeah, and also just to mention, we have the cases when the survivors were accused of collaborationism and it's another issue which we need to work in but if we are talking what need to be done it's firstly I would say that the response, the international response and the mechanisms which are proposed should be very adapted to the national context but because it differs and for example in Ukraine the cases which happened before 2022 they felt like to be not covered by what is going on now and all the system is focused on what is going on on the whole scale invasion. And another thing it's very important to conduct the training of the investigators, the prosecutors on the international humanitarian law and criminal law because we can have the brilliant system established, the departments, the structures, the legislation but if the people who are working with the survivors in the field don't understand this and don't really believe in this and understand the roots, the approaches, the victim-centered approach, it will not work. Another I would say that it's very important to understand what is the result for us. What I'm talking about that it feels like in Ukraine the system aimed to show the result in the maybe with the positive roots for that but if we are focusing on just a number of cases forwarded to the court or the number of indictments it's probably not the result yet. The result is the provision of really justice system for the survivors because in Ukraine for example we have the in absentia proceeding prescribed by the legislation and most cases seriously and other work crimes are conducted within this in absentia proceeding. It helps the system to show the result, the cases because you can conduct the so kind of quick investigation but it really influences bad the quality of the investigation of these cases. So it's another question. And just the last one that if we are talking about the system which will help the international, the other countries to lead with the establishment of the system and also to build the national system we think that the civil society organizations are focusing for the hybrid mechanism which will help to bring the international expertise and to prescribe the rules for investigating the war crimes. And on the other hand it will include the national systems as well the judges and the prosecutors because we understand that they will be the main who should respond and investigate these crimes because the universal jurisdiction or ICC will be not doing the main part of this. So the hybrid mechanism seems to be as an effective option for hearing these cases. Thank you. Very briefly Ali and then I want to go to the audience. Yes, I'll be very brief. Regarding the responses to sexual violence I would like to say that it's extremely difficult to develop adequate responses if causes are not well known because when we see conflict related sexual violence we are likely to say that only military or only soldiers commit sexual violence but I can tell you that civilians extensively commit sexual violence in armed, during armed conflict which poses a serious definitional problem. What does conflict related sexual violence mean? Only the one committed by soldiers or by civilians as well. So and you know there is a debate in the literature that do the pre-war does the pre-war level of sexual violence influence war related sexual violence? I'm gonna give an example, I don't have answers but I just to raise some, to bring in some reflections. I know a soldier who married, who used rape as a tactic of marriage. He was already a soldier, a commander in one of my my armed groups in Ruzizi plain. So he sent out his soldiers to bring a woman he loved and he raped her and then she became his wife and up to now they are living together. But this rape is a tactic of marriage dates back from pre-war period in different Congolese societies and it is reflected in the army because some soldiers I spoke to told me that they did not, some lanced to rape in the army because sexual violence could be used as a tactic of war but others told me that this is a behavior you come with from home but not in the army. So sexual violence is a very complex problem. Now we have been taking some quick conclusions. I agree that the discourse of sexual violence as a weapon of war is simplistic but that statement is also simplistic in itself because there are so many things we don't understand and in this process when sexual violence is used as a weapon of war. I'm wondering under which conditions because I spoke to one soldier who told me that he quitted the army because he was forced to commit rape that he didn't like. So I'm not sure he was raped as well because he was forced to rape. He felt also victim of sexual violence but we don't understand how this process works. From the western point of view you have to have some written laws that this is a policy, no. Maybe not everyone write the policy. Maybe it's oral. So some of the soldiers told me when they receive order the commander doesn't tell you go and rape. He can tell you, for example, go and pay yourself. Show them that we are strong. So there are many different ways that the order could be expressed and this expression transcends some ways. of our cultural understanding. So we, and how do soldiers react to the orders? Who is more likely to commit rape? So there are so many questions that we can research on. You can conduct the whole research on opportunistic sexual violence. You can conduct the whole research on sexual violence as a weapon of war. So all these theories could come together. So not only one is true so all of them could be true. Maybe we need a general theory of sexual violence. Thank you, Ali. I think you're raising a lot of questions and also connecting with the points that Rosa Emilia was making about the patriarchal nature of societies that are of influence. I want to open it up to the audience, Mindy. And please stay to who you are and be as brief as possible in terms of your question or comment. My name is Mindy Cutler with Asia Policy Point. I'm a historian. I want to know what do you do when the perpetrator starts to deny and backtrack. And I say this in the context of the most important contemporary historical of war crime and sexual violence, which is the comfort women. Which was sex slaves for the Japanese military and bureaucrats that were, was created by the, and managed by the Japanese government during the 30s and 40s. In the early 90s, the Japanese government made some progress in giving some apologies, some kind of reparations, but there was never an official cabinet decision sanctioning this. And so starting with the Abe government, they started to re-examine these statements, question the women, question even the scholars that said these things. And so there's been a massive backtracking officially to deny that they were, it was state-sponsored trafficking, state-sponsored sex slavery. And even to the point where in its official war apology, they no longer say learning from history. So what do you do? This is 80 years later where they're using traditional denier history tactics of discrediting the victims, sowing doubt, and even attacking in scholars. Thank you, Renata. Thank you. I'm Renata Giannini, I'm a fellow at the Wilson Center. I wanted to pick up on the point Ali was making about civilian perpetrators and asked Rosemilia about lessons learned on the Colombian experience regarding differentiating conflict-related sexual violence from other types. Specifically in Colombia, we have a declared armed conflict. We have a lot of criminal violence. We have all sorts. And Colombia has different kinds. I mean, it counts sexual violence differently. And for me, it's very hard to differentiate coming from a background where sexual violence is very much committed with very similar impact in undeclared armed conflict. So I just wanted your input. Thank you. Okay, thank you. There's somebody in the two people in the back of the room there. Please, and then we go to you two in the back. Thank you. We have seen many... Can you please introduce yourself? My name is Binah Nepram and I am the Senior Advisor on Indigenous Issues at USIP. But I'm asking this question on a personal capacity from the state of Manipur in Northeast of India. First is I just wanted to know what are the different forms of... We have seen UN level, global level, but I wanted to know if there are Indigenous ways of responses when these kinds of crimes, violent crimes against humanity has happened in your experience, number one. Number two, I agree with Brother Ali and I'm going to tell one example of how sexual violence and conflict has not been committed just not by state, non-state, but also by violent mobs. We saw this happening in the last five months in my home region in which women were paraded naked and sexually violated in a deep conflict situation. Number three, we are also seeing a phenomena in which ethnic groups are made to fight against each other. Ethnic groups in the process of making them fight each other, women as are offered to the armed groups or the armed paramilitaries so that they can win their battle of war. This is happening right now in the Indo-Burma border and I want to understand how the silence of sexual violence in conflict in democratic countries, in some of the world's largest democracy, why is the conversation of rape and conflict in one of the world's largest democracy, for instance, India, absent in conversations like here? Thank you. In the back? Yeah. And then we move to the other side of that back row and that will be it. Please be brief because we're nearing the end. Thank you for the opportunity. This is Nima Ahmadie, the Founder and President of Darfur Women Action Group. My question is that when it comes to the case of Sudan, we have a chronic and long-standing use of rape as a weapon of war. It has been a deliberate policy of the state but when it comes to solution, we want to see a solution that will transform the system because you can't prevent or respond or end violence and sexual violence against women without changing the system that's used to perpetrate. But then always women are systematically excluded and then whatever the civil society effort to participate in this solution so that they make sure that solutions are made with those who are impacted, voices in. So the international community and regional actors who are working on bringing this solution or mediating, they're doing also the same thing they talk to people with guns, people with money and power and women don't have any sort of this. So we are advocating a paradigm shift in a solution the way they approach Sudan, calling for atrocity prevention approach rather than traditional conflict resolution because that promotes status quo. So what do you think in terms of like policy shift and also approach shift in terms of how we approach a situation when a large scale systematic sexual and gender-based violence being committed? Thank you. Thank you and then there's that, yeah. Hello, thank you for all the esteemed panelist and for Dr. Chantal. My name is Hannah and I'm from Unidire and you probably will guess the angle I'm taking if you were there at our session just before this. I think this applies across the board to the situations that were mentioned, but especially to Myanmar, the special rapporteur on Myanmar has recently issued a report. UN member states arms transfers to the Myanmar military and this report details known arms transfers from member states to Myanmar since 2018 and in particular since 2021, since February and it linked it to attacks on civilians. So I just wanted to hear from you regarding the recommendations of this report where the special rapporteur recommended that state stop transferring arms to Myanmar and also that an arms embargo be applied and be more implemented to see if you think that this would also be a response to CRSV given that justice legal response take time but this is also an immediate action that can be taken. And that was it. Thank you for that question. So we're over time and I think a lot of the questions that were raised here we will continue each one of us in the whole outside of this conference room but I want to give our panelists the opportunity to make a final remark and what would be the sort of one thing that you would like people to walk away with from your experience and from where you sit? Rosa Emilia. Oh, I was preparing my answer to the other questions. One of the things that support for the case in Colombia, we need qualified legal advice as I said. So we need a lot of support but I also want to raise two points if I'm permitted. Very briefly. Very briefly. Because the first one is these are huge lessons for the new negotiations and that they are going to be different because each negotiation and violence is different in each case. And secondly, prevention, prevention for no repetition, prevention. And third, we have to ask all these about organized crime that is in this moment one of the biggest challenges we have back home. Thank you. Weiwei. Thank you very much. So for the case of Burma, I think it is utterly important to end impunity, to address root causes, to hold perpetrators accountable. Otherwise, we will see negative consequences of these crises in a really large scale that include the ricks in these victims and survivors of recurrence of the sexual violence and traumatizations and, you know, stigmatizations and marginalizations as a circle as they become refugees or displaced. And in the case of Burma, not only that women continue to ricks sexual violence across the country, but also when they become refugees, they ricks sexual violence in other countries as they had to flee by land or by boat. And these are very, very serious cases that the international community, the entire world has been overlooking. So it is essential we must address the root causes and end impunity. Thank you. 30 seconds, Sophia. Okay. The one thing I would say, it probably putting the survivor in mind in the center of each operations you are making or you're aimed to make, because it feels like we have the millions of initiatives, corporations, projects, you know, and for many reasons, some of them may not influence positively each survivor's life. And when we are developing the projects, when we are making the legislation, we should be very focused and remember that. It will be probably the one thing which I would like to point. Thank you. Ali, 30 seconds. 30 seconds. 30 seconds, merci beaucoup. So very briefly, I just want to say that there is a lot that we still need to know about sexual violence. So we haven't completed the research. So we should continue researching on this complex issue. Thank you. I would succumb to that conclusion. Please join me in thanking the panelists and this conversation will continue tomorrow. Thank you all.