I was watching the 3 a.m. news that either ABC or CBS was running on Tuesday morning (the 15th), when they had some female talking head talking about the recent request by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court for an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for war crimes committed during the Darfur conflict.
The talking head stated that the Darfur conflict was “the first time rape has been used as an instrument of war.”
Uh, hello? Has this woman heard of World War II?
During World War II, the Japanese invaded China in 1937. In December of 1937, the city of Nanking, at the the time the capital of the Republic of China, was captured by Japanese forces.
In what became the Nanking Massacre, a.k.a. the Raping of Nanking, 300,000 unarmed soldiers and civilians were killed according to United States records (link). The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a.k.a. the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, estimated that 20,000 women were raped during the first month of occupation, including adolescents and the elderly (link).
Estimates for the number of rapes in Berlin after the fall of the city to the Soviet Red Army range from 90,000 to 130,000. A female Soviet war correspondent stated the following: “‘The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty,’ she recounted later. ‘It was an army of rapists.'” (The Guardian)
If a news agency is going to have a talking head on, they might want to get one with some knowledge…