By LUBNA JERAR NAQVI
Special to The Japan Times OnlineISLAMABAD -- Before World War I, casualties of armed conflicts were largely limited to battlefields and the soldiers upon them. Combat doctrine and equipment favored flat plateaus, fields or deserts removed from civilian populations. Unless the action took place in a populated area, civilians seldom tasted the bitterness of war.
News then traveled barely faster than the armies themselves, delivering polished, mostly censored summaries of heroics from "the front" and easy-to-swallow capsule summaries of the number of solders killed in action. Thus, the true destruction and misery wrought by the advance, retreat or occupation by an army could be handily concealed from the eyes of the world.
World War II was a watershed in which the number of civilian casualties almost equaled that of combatants. Technological advances extended the boundaries of the battlefield. Nations learned to take their fight deep into their enemy's territory to disrupt war industries and factories.
Yet even as the media has widened its reach, shocking the world with dispatches of massacres and death camps, horrifying war-related crimes against women continue blatantly.
Of the worst of these crimes is rape, a most barbaric weapon of war.
According to a report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross, titled "Women and War" and based on two years of research from 1998 to 1999, approximately 80 percent of war victims are women and children. This is mainly because military conflicts now more commonly engulf towns and cities instead of only frontline areas.
There are many in this world for whom the ravages of war - including arson, looting, murder and rape -- are a way of life. These people have known little else than war all their lives, like their parents before them and their children (if they survive) after them. These generations of war face atrocities on a daily basis, and most of these go unnoticed by the rest of the world.
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