What is going on in the picture, above, of the former First Lady of Ivory Coast, Simone Gbagbo? It ran on MSNBC’s photo blog, and is jarring; it may be meant to suggest more than has happened, to make a point about Gbagbo’s defeat. But even as a piece of theatrics, the scene wouldn’t be good. She is surrounded by six men, most of them in mismatched camouflage, and there are half a dozen hands on her, two of them holding fistfuls of her braids. Her clothes appear to be torn. At the moment, United Nations guards are said to be overseeing, if that’s the right word, the detention of both Simone and her husband, Laurent Gbagbo, who killed a lot of people in his effort to pretend that he didn’t lose an election. What about women with less prominent husbands, in towns and neighborhoods where Gbagbo loyalists live? Yesterday, the question was what French forces in the Ivory Coast made possible, in terms of the air strikes and helicopters that played a role in Gbagbo’s final fall; today, it might be what they prevent, or fail to prevent.
Rape has been one of the many charges against Gbagbo’s soldiers, and yesterday Hillary Clinton said that his removal showed how “tyrants” fall. Human Rights Watch, which has documented crimes in which Gbagbo is implicated, has also reported allegations that, in March, gunmen loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the lawful winner of that election, “summarily executed and raped perceived Gbagbo supporters in their homes, as they worked in the fields, as they fled, or as they tried to hide in the bush.” (Ouattara said, after the Gbagbos’ capture, that he wanted to reassure Ivorians that about their “physical safety,” and that his government would begin “judicial proceedings against Gbabgo, his wife, and his collaborators.”) Where does this leave the foreign country that intervenes? What are our obligations when we put one side or the other in power—what are they, even, when we are simply observers?
And what are they at home? We cannot say that the connection between war and sexual violence is entirely an alien concept. Newsweek had a report last week about male-on-male rape in the American military. (The numbers for male-on-female are worse.) One soldier described being raped at Fort Benning, Georgia. A base is not a village of the women and children of the defeated side in the battle, but it is also a closed space in which control and vulnerability can become distorted things. They can do so in homes, as well; this is not just about soldiers, in terms of character. Soldiers have guns, though, which adds to the imbalance—and is another reason, from Libya to Georgia to Afghanistan and back, to think about whom we give guns to, and why.
Photograph: EPA.
