Diplomats, like bureaucrats, should never be asked to deal with rape
The NY Times is reporting an interesting skirmish in a UN General Assembly Committee vote — was it the Sixth (or Legal) committee?
The U.S. sponsored what it thought was a self-evident text, and was mystified when other delegates didn’t agree.
The NYT writes that today “A UN committee has watered down a U.S. draft resolution on rape that will now go to the full UN General Assembly for approval. South Africa’s ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, defended the revised measure. ‘The original U.S. draft appeared to concentrate on condemning rape when perpetrated for political and military purposes only’, he said. ‘We felt strongly that this would have created two categories of rape, that is, [1] rape by military and militia groups and [2] rape by civilians’. Mr. Kumalo said that the Africans had insisted on the changes ‘to balance the text by making certain that there was no politicization of rape’. [!] Grover Joseph Rees 3rd, an American ambassador with responsibilities for human rights, protested that ‘contrary to what some have suggested, this resolution never said there were ‘two kinds of rape’. He said the original language had been aimed at ‘the particularly outrageous situation in which a state condones the use of systematic mass rape by its own forces or surrogate militias in order to advance their military or political objectives’. While he said the Unites States welcomed the final agreement by consensus, he added, ‘is no secret that we would have strongly preferred the final wording to place stronger emphasis on the use of rape to attain political and military objectives’. Kristen Silverberg, the [U.S.] assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, said Friday: ‘We are very disappointed that we could not secure stronger language condemning government-sponsored rape. We would not have imagined that language along those lines would provoke controversy‘.”
The NYTimes account of a UN GA Committee negotiation on a U.S. draft resolution on state-sponsored or military rape is here.
Filed under: Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Harassment, UN General Assembly
Politicians SHOULD NOT be appointed as diplomats ( no matter where they come from) . EOL
They have many of the same skills, the same qualities — and the same faults. Diplomats have more patience, however.