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Stephen Lewis: The second thing that we then moved into as a group occurred in 2008 when
we were at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City and a fascinating group, a
fascinating little NGO called the Girl Child Network in Zimbabwe came to us and begged
us to intervene because in the elections in Zimbabwe in 2008, one of which was held in
March, one of which was held in June, between the elections Mugabe had unleashed his youth
core and his war veterans to *** woman, solely and exclusively because they supported the
opposition party. There was no other rationale. And the raping was extensive and terrifying.
And they said to us, "We know you'll take it on, we don't want to do this in a casual
way with one news story or one press conference, we want to do it more seriously can you suggest
what we should do?"
SL: And we got together and agreed that in this instance we would actually go in and
take affidavits. We would find the women who had been *** and take affidavits and assemble
a dossier which we felt would undoubtedly amount to crimes against humanity. And then
see if we could get some of Mugabe's thugs and colleagues before the courts in South
Africa because they're constantly coming into South Africa and I'll explain that in a moment.
There is a vehicle through which you can prosecute in another country. Well just as we prosecute
Rwandan war criminals because we have something called universal jurisdiction, which means
that we have domesticated the international criminal court statute. We have brought it
into Canada and made it applicable here if we choose to pursue the legislation so South
Africa is the one country in Africa that has done that.
SL: So we got two very distinguished law firms, one Canadian and one American. And we made
six separate trips to Africa, to Botswana and South Africa. We secreted the women out
of Zimbabwe and we took the affidavits of over 70 women. We could've taken many more
but we had a panorama of representative *** violence across the country and the patterns
were absolutely repetitive, everywhere. Gangs of young thugs raising clubs would gather
outside a home. They'd chant, they'd cheer, they'd sing, they'd break into the home. They
would either kill or beat the partner. They would *** the woman in the presence of her
children. They would *** some of the young girls.
SL: They would take the women to literally a *** camp and keep her there for two or
three weeks, applying gang rapes on continuing basis. They screamed abuse at the women, they
said things like, "Tell this to Tony Blair. Tell this to George Bush." They actually were
that specific and in every single instance the women were organizers for the opposition
party or married to organizers or candidates for the opposition party or activists in the
opposition party. It was all opposition related. And we felt we had indeed compiled a dossier
that we could pursue under crimes against humanity.
SL: The women were destroyed. The raping was so foul and so brutal, so savage, politically
orchestrated *** that is the beyond the telling. And we were absolutely determined to do something
because the women would say to us, "We want justice, that's all we have left. We want
justice." It's very hard to get justice in the slow moving apparatus of the courts particularly
when you have a country like South Africa which for the longest time indeed, even today,
is resistant to moving in on Mugabe because of the crazy relationships that exist amongst
some of the countries. Although there's more and more impatience with Mugabe and his behaviour
in Zimbabwe and the way in which he has destroyed the country.
SL: But we decided to pursue this in a very serious manner. So we took our dossier before
the leading lawyer dealing with what is called the National Prosecuting Authority in South
Africa, the NPA, to which such submissions are made and we took it to the lawyer and
he said you got an unassailable case, by all means pursue it but the National Prosecuting
Authority wouldn't hear it and we decided we shouldn't take it. This was back in 2009
because another case against Mugabe involving torture had been brought before the National
Prosecuting Authority in South Africa and they had refused to hear it and it was under
appeal and it was taking forever because there was government intervention and there was
police obstruction and the National Prosecuting Authority internally was divided.
SL: But you hang in because you got to get justice for those women. I just can't describe
the women to you. The affidavit sometimes took seven or eight hours. We put it all together
in a report. If you go to the website of AIDSFreeWorld.org you'll find it, we called it "*** Terror
in Mugabe, Zimbabwe" and I think that what happened to the women was almost indescribable
and so we decided we would never give up. And I want to tell you it's just so interesting
that this week, this week, the High Court of Johannesburg to whom the appeal had been
made rendered a decision on the torture case against the National Prosecuting Authority.
It's a hundred-page decision, a most extra-ordinarily, unequivocal decision saying that the police,
the government of South Africa, the National Prosecuting Authority themselves had failed
to execute the legislation that existed.
SL: We know that will be appealed again to the Supreme Court in South Africa and after
that to the Constitutional Court in South Africa, but now that we have a case which
the National Prosecuting Authority has lost, we will very quickly and urgently submit our
own case on *** in Zimbabwe. We know now we're part of the mix. We will submit an Amicus
brief to the higher levels when the torture case proceeds. It just feels that by God we're
not gonna let some of them off the hook. That when they venture these corroborators and
predators and rapists whose names we know, when they venture into South Africa it will
be possible to bring them before a court of law. It will take another year or two but
it just doesn't matter. We're going to give those women a sense of justice.
SL: And then after Zimbabwe, we got pulled into the Congo which is without question the
worst place in the world for women where since 1994 after the Rwandan genocide, multiple
malicious have wondered through the Congo creating havoc and engaging in patterns of
*** violence which are absolutely a nightmare. There was one report at one point just last
year of a thousand women being *** every day in the Eastern region of the Congo in
what is called the Kibus. And I visited the Eastern Region and spent time in the Congo.
And in the Eastern Region in the South Kibu part of the region there is a little capital
called Bukavu, and in Bukavu there is a little hospital called the Pansie Hospital headed
by an astonishingly gifted and principled surgeon whose name is Deni Mckwage, and he
and his colleague surgeons, few in number, spend a good part of their time surgically
repairing the reproductive tracts of the women.
SL: And it is... It's just terrifying to think that this is a pattern. And although the international
criminal court as you may have read finally found guilty a leader of one of the worst
militias, a leader called Lubanga, he was found guilty and had been indicted of crimes
against humanity around child soldiers. They found it difficult to prove the *** because
women will not come forward when they have been ***. So then we went to Kenya and to
Liberia to begin to try to understand why wouldn't women come forward so that you can
prosecute the *** and begin to overcome the culture of impunity.
SL: And in Kenya which had a terrible outbreak of *** violence after their elections in
2007-2008, we met with 20 or 30 women's groups all of whom said, "We'd like to start a process
of getting the *** before the courts so you could change the culture of impunity.
You could give women some sense of justice that we could break this pattern of congenital
endemic raping, whether you've got conflict or pre-conflict or post-conflict or politically
orchestrated or generally within the society." And there we started talking to them about
safe houses. About women coming forward and witnesses coming forward and having safe houses
which would allow the prosecution to proceed.
SL: Then we went to Liberia where we had the first ever woman president, Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf who shortly after she was president created a *** court, the first in Africa
because the raping, you just read about the indictment of George Taylor who will be sentenced
later this month, the raping that occurred during the Civil Wars in Liberia and Sierra
Leon were just ghastly. And Ellen Johnson Sirleaf wanted to send a message so she setup
a separate court... By the way Canadians were involved in drafting the legislation and not
many women are coming forward to the court and it's particularly appalling in Liberia
because after the Civil Conflict was over, the raping continued but it was focused on
young girls between the ages of eight and 12.
SL: I visited with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, we had together served for two years on a
panel investigating the genocide in Rwanda, so we were friends. And I said to her, "As
president, Ellen, what are you gonna do about this?" And she said, "Steven, I don't know.
I'm gathering together some of the best front line women in the world, on international
women stand. We're gonna try to find out how to handle it." And gradually there emerged
for us from our work in Zimbabwe, in the Congo, in Kenya, in Liberia, there emerged for us
the need to answer the question, "Why don't the women report the rapes?"
SL: And we put it under the rubric of "Know your epidemic of ***," and Paula again who
has a particular skill in these areas drafted a fascinating kind of prospectus, which we're
using to raise some money because you see, it's both fascinating and unnerving to recognize
the reasons. In Liberia, the reason women weren't coming forward or the reasons women
weren't coming forward, were primarily A, because the police didn't have petrol for
their motor scooters to go into the villages to collect the evidence. Or B, the women didn't
want to come into Monrovia in case the trial lasted two days. Where would they sleep over
night? They certainly had no money for however down trodden the hotel. Or C, what if you
had a trial during harvest period, and the women are doing the harvest? How could they
possibly go to a trial when they needed the food both for their families and for sale?
SL: So... And when we were in Kenya it all had to do with the doctors who were not prepared
to do an examination, or the police who would not give the woman the form she had to fill
out in order to claim *** violence. So, everywhere you look there were cascading series
of reasons which were they to be confronted and overcome might, I'm not being definitive
about it, might open the door to actual trials, actual convictions and begin to reduce the
culture of impunity.
SL: So, under that broad heading of ending the epidemic or knowing your epidemic of ***,
we're in the process of setting in place a research apparatus for six or eight sites
in countries, ranging from politically orchestrated *** to the *** that occurs around extractive
industries, around mining sites, and see if we can find a way of breaking that monolith
of obstruction that prevents women from getting justice. I have to say and I have been influenced
so hugely by Michelle in this, that I can't say it strongly enough, that I believe the
single most important struggle on the planet is the struggle for gender equality, nothing
comes close to it. And to watch the absence of gender equality, to watch...
[applause]
SL: To watch the absence of gender equality destroying women's lives is the most heartbreaking
and unconscionable and insufferable reality I have witnessed. And then the third thing
that we then got involved in was that something called the Mac AIDS Foundation came to us.
You may know Mac AIDS, they sell the lipstick, Viva Glam, which I hope all of you who apply
lipstick will here after purchase. Every penny that Viva Glam raises goes to work on ***
and AIDS. And now that Lady Gaga has announced that she's using Viva Glam, suddenly what
began when we started with Mac AIDS, with a 12 to 13 million dollar a year preposition
has become a 60 million dollar a year preposition, I assume all purchased by Lady Gaga herself.
[laughter]
SL: I think that it's important to know that there are these idiosyncratic outfits out
there that do wonderful work. And Mac Aids came to us and said, "AIDS Free World, we
know you are small, but you seemed to be approachable and determined. Would you do something about
homophobia in the Caribbean?" And we said, "The exact connection?" And they made, "Of
course, the exact connection." They said, "The incredible homophobia in the Caribbean
drives men who have sex with men underground. They don't get tested or treated, there is
no prevention. Sex is furtive and anxious." And then you look at the rates of infection
and they are very high. In Jamaica the rate of infection on *** of the general population
is 1.6%. In the gay population, in the gay male population, it's 32%.
SL: So, obviously something has to be done to overcome the intense anti-homosexuality
of the society. So, we decided to work on Jamaica first. Because frankly, I'd be quite
frank with you, I've never seen such a homophobic society. I went to Jamaica and did a number
of open line radio programs, and I felt I was leaving with my life intact or barely
intact because it was so brutal of attitudes. And we decided on a two prong strategy in
our advocacy. One prong would be to deal with the culture. The prevailing, social, and cultural
attitudes. And, the second prong would be legal and that would constitute an advocacy
package.
SL: So we started softening up the culture. We started doing public service announcements,
letters to the editor, debates with the fundamentalist right wing, demonstrations outside appropriate
buildings, handing out of material, getting people to realize that we were fighting for
tolerance in a society where a recent survey had shown that 86% of the population self-identified
as homophobic. So that's a fairly high mountain to climb. And we were determined and we kept
at it and we hired a remarkably talented gay lawyer in Jamaica named Maurice Tomlinson
who has now established an international reputation and has been working now, not only in Jamaica,
but they're doing training on documentation and bringing evidence together in St. Lucia
and Trinidad and Tobago. And we're supporting a cross-dressing case in Belize and doing
some work in Guyana. It's really fascinating. But, Jamaica was the target.
SL: And then we did something that gives me great pleasure. We launched the first ever,
this is just a few months ago, we launched the first ever case against the Jamaican anti-homosexuality
law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And if in fact it is heard as
seems to be the case, we've had it accepted and the dossiers there and it's in the docket
and they're ready to proceed. When it's heard, I think we will win and I think that we will
have significant reverberations throughout the Caribbean, let alone, overturning the
legislation in Jamaica.
SL: But then something happened which sort of took my breath away. There was an election
in Jamaica in December and the party in power and the Prime Minister had been extremely
homophobic. In fact, the Prime Minister in an interview on the British program Hard Talk
had said that under no circumstances would he ever have a gay man in his cabinet, ever.
Publicly, unequivocally. It was difficult after those circumstances. But the woman who
headed the official opposition at the time said publicly that she would allow a free
vote on the sodomy laws, as they're called in Jamaica. And the last 10 days of the campaign
was consumed by a discussion of homosexuality. It was most extraordinary that a country's
electoral process would deal with a LGBT issue of that import.