"I saw a woman who was stripped naked . . . They tore off her clothes. They surrounded her. They made her lie down. They lifted up her feet, and one of the soldiers advanced. They took turns." This unfortunate and latest chapter of Rape As A Weapon of War finds the women of Guinea the latest victims -- a cruel echo of similar cases around the world.

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PD toolbar!On Sept. 28, thousands of citizens gathered to protest Guinea's military junta, led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, who seized power in a coup last December. In recent weeks, Camara has reneged on a promise not to run for president in elections scheduled for January.

Monday's rally was led by opposition forces calling -- peacefully, by all accounts -- for democratic reforms. According to witnesses, Camara's elite Presidential Guards, wearing their signature red berets, locked a stadium and began a brutal campaign of rape and killing. Local human rights organizations put the death toll at 157 (the government says the figure is closer to 56), with nearly 1,200 injured. The suffocation deaths of over 50 people, the deaths from stabbings and beatings while victims fled gunfire -- these are indeed horror stories.

But the nightmarish documentation on cellphone cameras and in eyewitness accounts of women being systematically targeted, assaulted and brutalized by the very same guards designated to keep the country safe has provided the most scarring evidence. "I saw soldiers putting their rifles into women's private parts whilte they were hitting me," said one victim.

Asked whether rapes had occurred, Captain Camara responded: "I wasn't at the stadium. These are things people have told me." He blamed opposition figures instead.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced: "It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice." A former French colony, Guinea has traditionally had a partner in France, which has suspended military aid in the wake of the violence. On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said, "It seems to me that today, one can no longer work with Dadis Camara, and there should be an international intervention."

Faced with widespread outcry at having sanctioned these grave violations of human rights, Camara is parroting the same post-colonial script performed for a global audience by the likes of Omar Al Bashir of Sudan. "Guinea is not a subprefecture, is not a neighborhood in France," Camara said. When faced with looming sanctions and the prospect of becoming an international pariah, too many of the world's despots revert to the same tired rhetoric: that the West is out to get them and always has been. The problem is that all too often, their neighbors mutely follow alongside, offering protection to these Criminals-in-Chief.

The notion that Camara was unaware of atrocities that his very own guards were perpetrating on Guinean men and women -- in broad daylight -- is preposterous, just as Bashir's claim that allegations of rape in Darfur "were fabricated and made up" is absurd.

It's laudable that the United States and others are at least trying to stop one crooked election from coming to fruition, unlike too many others (Zimbabwe and Burma among them) that have proceeded and legitimized sham regimes. But if our president has today been awarded the world's highest honor for promoting peace, then I'd hope that tomorrow will see more concrete action on his part in ensuring it exists where it's needed the most.


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