The first casualty of war....

...is not truth, it's women.

I have always been rather amazed and amused at the people who fought so hard to keep women from combat positions in the military. Their arguments were often based on the principle that women didn't belong in combat or that war was no place for a woman.

The brutal irony is that women have been in wars since time began and as Stephanie Nolen reported in the Globe and Mail this weekend, it continues. Conflict ebbs and flows in the Congo and as any one of the 23 armed militia groups makes a play for power by overtaking or burning villages, they resort to the tried and true way to destroy a population - rape.

In the Congo it is particularly vile (of course I'm trying to come to terms with the idea that there are degrees of vileness here) because for a number of the women, this isn't the first time. This isn't the first time and the world does nothing.

It isn't that G8 leaders aren't aware - because they are. But they are currently too busy loaning money to bankers who have been forced to give up their multi-million dollar salaries because they have no concept how to balance risk and greed. And before that they were focused on Iraq and Afghanistan and global warming. Besides, it's only women we're talking about, right?

In my experience the best way to determine the direction a country is going in is to measure the rights their women have. The Taliban stripped women of virtually every conceivable right, including the right to be seen, and there was not a peep from the Western world. In fact, the greatest outrage expressed by anyone in the west prior to 9/11 was when the Taliban destroyed the precious Buddha statues of Bamyan. The imposition of the burka, the summary executions, the erosion of women being considered human beings was all secondary to these archaeological treasures.

Rape has been a weapon of war for millennia. And it continues because it is allowed to continue. How is it in 2008, the United Nations - that leader of civil society - has organizations covering every conceivable issue from the Postal Union to HIV/AIDS yet it has a measly, tiny underfunded group - UNIFEM - to cover women's issues. On what exactly should we base our belief that women and what happens to them matters to anyone?

Much of what concerns the UN - refugees, famine, disaster, HIV/AIDS - disproportionately affects women, yet there is no one - no government, no organization - no one who speaks for women on the international stage with enough gravitas to ensure action.

What's happening in the Congo happens in Darfur. It's happened in Sierra Leone, South Africa, Mozambique; it happened in Bosnia, in Rwanda, in Korea. It is jarring in its universality.

Women have been in war since the beginning of time and to say otherwise is to deny history.

Write to your newly elected Members of Parliament or to your Congressman; write to Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the UN; write to your newspapers; talk to your friends, to your family; talk to strangers but do something. Anything. Demand action and express your outrage. When we allow this to happen to any woman, we are giving complicit permission for it to happen to all women.