NADA Alliance: Peoples’ freedom tied to women's freedom 

On the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, which fell on Thursday, June 19, the NADA Regional Democratic Women’s Alliance in the Middle East and North Africa issued a statement today.

The statement emphasized that “this day is not merely symbolic, it is a reminder of international silence. What survivors need is not a symbolic day, but a genuine feminist revolution and real justice that brings redress to victims and accountability for perpetrators. We raise our voices against a crime that was never an exception in wars but rather remains one of its central tools. Women’s bodies become battlefields, violated for mass humiliation, political score-settling, terrorizing society, or redrawing power balances by force.”

The statement pointed out that “from Bosnia to Congo, from Iraq to Syria, and from Sudan to Palestine, the same tragedy repeats: abduction, torture, mass rape, sexual slavery, and trafficking of women in modern slave markets. While the perpetrators change, the structure remains the same, authoritarian and reactionary regimes, extremist patriarchal organizations, and military alliances using women’s bodies as tools of invasion, deterrence, and occupation.”

It noted that “since the Special Court for Sierra Leone recognized sexual slavery on June 19, 2008, as a crime against humanity, this date has become a platform for survivors, for demanding justice, and for rebelling against impunity, a witness to one of the most brutal war crimes.”

The alliance stated that “despite the United Nations recognizing this day in 2015 as an international observance honoring survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and reminding the global community of its legal and moral responsibility, we at NADA Alliance clearly declare: this recognition is not enough. Survivors do not need a symbolic day, but revolutionary justice and structural change, systems that protect rather than legitimize rape.”

The statement stressed that conflict-related sexual violence is not merely rape, but a systemic mechanism of humiliation, control, and social disintegration, specifically targeting women and girls as bearers of collective identity and the pillars of the social fabric. It includes forced marriage, forced pregnancy, constant threats, sexual trafficking, forced sterilization, sexual humiliation, public shaming, and the enactment of laws that protect perpetrators and criminalize victims, such as laws pardoning rapists if they marry their victims, child marriage, and “honor” crimes.

It further emphasized that “sexual violence is not a side effect of war, it is a military strategy in its own right, involving militias, state armies, authoritarian and reactionary governments, and at times even international forces. This makes it one of the most dangerous and under-addressed crimes due to institutional complicity and neglect.”

The NADA Alliance called for “Comprehensive investigations into these crimes, especially during the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the war in Sudan, and the genocide in Gaza, prosecution of all perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence as war criminals in independent international and national courts, recognition of conflict-related sexual violence as a crime against humanity in all constitutions, without dilution or justification, establishment of a global support fund for survivors, managed by an independent UN body that ensures access to medical care, protection, and economic, social, and political reintegration, involvement of survivors in all stages of transitional justice and peacebuilding, ensuring their shelter, rehabilitation, and treating them not as victims but as leaders and historians of their own experiences, rejection of “marriage in exchange for pardon,” “honor,” and other laws that legitimize rape under cultural or religious pretexts, ban on the exploitation of sexual violence in media campaigns or international aid policies, rejecting the politicization of women’s suffering and special protection mechanisms for women and girls in displacement and refugee camps, overseen by independent feminist bodies, to prevent the reproduction of violence in supposedly safe spaces.”

The statement also issued a direct call to “the International Criminal Court to open closed files on sexual violence, and expand its jurisdiction to include Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and others, to international organizations to move beyond empty condemnations and take tangible actions and public accountability, to governments to dismantle legal structures that legitimize violence against women, especially laws related to “honor,” “forced marriage,” and “rapist pardon by marriage”, to media outlets to break their complicity, confront the culture of objectification with authentic feminist voices, and stop portraying survivors as tragic stories; instead, highlight their resilience and political demands, to regional and global feminist alliances to go beyond denunciation, strengthen coordination, and form a global feminist front that holds perpetrators accountable and builds grassroots, gender-democratic protection systems and to popular and international movements, because there is no freedom for peoples where women are raped, there is no liberation without free women.

On the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, the NADA Alliance launched a series of slogans: “From Sierra Leone through Iraq, Syria, and Sudan to Gaza, our bodies are not spoils of war. Justice does not come without the screams of survivors. Justice for survivors is not an option, it is a revolutionary necessity. Break the cycle of impunity. Free justice from its patriarchy. Sexual violence is a weapon of states and regimes, we will not forgive. We, women, are not the margins of war but its core. From Rojava and Iraq to Gaza, from Darfur to Sierra Leone, we will raise the banner of justice and declare:

No peace without accountability. 

No liberation without ending sexual violence. 

No future for democratic societies unless they are feminist.”

A-H 

ANHA