http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/current/international/stories/china.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
BEIJING (Reuter) - Women from Rwanda, Chile and the United States described atrocities in peace and war at a women's tribunal in Beijing Friday and the tribunal's judges said the U.N. and governments must be accountable for such abuses.
Thea Du Bow's abusive marriage came to an abrupt end when she shot and killed her husband to stop him from beating her. If she had not killed him, she said, he might well have killed her.
Du Bow, 43, spent 3 1/2 years of a 10-year sentence in a maximum security women's prison in New York State for the 1982 slaying of her husband.
Du Bow was speaking in an interview before her testimonial Friday to a standing room-only crowd at the 1,500-seat Huairou International Convention Center at a grassroots women's forum in suburban Beijing.
About 20,000 women are in Beijing for the Non-Governmental Organization forum that hopes to influence next week's United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women.
The Global Tribunal on Accountability for Women's Human Rights heard of the atrocities women have suffered in war and in their homes -- beatings, rape, torture, kidnap, mutilation, slavery and murder.
The tribunal was convened by the New Jersey-based Center for Women's Global Leadership, whose director, Charlotte Bunch, said it aimed to pressure the United Nations to uphold promises it has made to protect human rights.
Norah Matovu told of a 14-year-old Ugandan girl who in 1993 was kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by rebel soldiers, one of whom impregnated her.
The use of rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda during that country's three-month genocidal rampage last year was recounted by Felicite Layika.
``Women were at the center of the tragedy without being responsible for it,'' she said. More than one million women died, 250,000 were widowed, and up to 400,000 children were orphaned.
``In some areas, almost every adult and adolescent woman was spared death at the price of their bodies -- they were raped so they could survive,'' she said.
No one had yet been tried for these crimes, she said.
Other issues raised by women speakers from 20 countries included the effects of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, illegal abortion in Chile, caste-based discrimination in India, incest in Zimbabwe and abuse of migrant Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia and Singapore.