Violence against women in armed conflict situations is one of the most massive-scale violation of human rights, in terms of the nature of the atrocities and the number of persons affected. Yet history has hardly recorded war crimes committed against women. Even under conditions of war and internal conflicts, in which states are the protagonists, war crimes against women were hardly addressed and their occurrence has been repeatedly denied. One of the most painful reason for this denial is that these are the violations perpetrated against women.

It is only now that these war crimes against women are given attention on a national and international level mainly because the women victims have decided to come out and tell the stories which they have once tried to forget. More importantly, the coming out of these women have given issue of rape in wartime political significance.

Violence against women in war has confirmed the treatment of women as objects in a terrible way. The world has come to speak of rape as an inevitable fact of war - as part of the reality of the behavior of the armed forces. But the origins of the systematic practice of rape and why it is rampant in armed conflict situations, is never discussed.

We hope this initiative will help us in our future work among women victims of armed conflict, whose numbers have increased and justice continuously denied.

• To be able to identify different issues of violence against women in war and conflict situations.
• Tc redefine and broaden the definition of wartime rape to include sexual slavery, forced impregnation, mass rape, chemical warfare impact, military sexual slavery, genocide, trafficking, physical experiments, mutilation etc., as war crimes.
• To gather statistics and cases of violence against women in armed conflict situations to assist us describing the issues and establishing the pattern of violations.
• To concretize role and capacity of women's human rights groups in advocating f r the issues in armed conflict situations.
• To submit our resolutions/recommendations/cases statistics to UN Special Rapporteur Rhadika Coomaraswamy for her perusal and study - for her coming report to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in March 1998.
• To explore legal strategies in national or international courts in defense of women victims of armed conflict, in order to demand accountability, justice and legal compensation.

INDAI LOURDES SAJOR
indai@mnl.cyberspace.com.ph

Asian Centre for Women's Human Rights (ASCENT)
ascent@mnl.cyberspace.com.ph

YAYORI MATSUI
yayori@jca.ax.apc.org

Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center (AJWRC)
ajwrc@jca.ax.apc.org