Guinea’s junta leader, Capt. Moussa “Dadis” Camara, was shot by his aide-de-camp early this month and evacuated to Morocco for emergency surgery. The state of his health is unclear, and the nation of 10 million has been essentially without a government since then.

A recent report by U.N. investigators on the troubled country says there is sufficient reason to believe that Camara was directly responsible for the mass killings and rapes of protesters in September.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, answering questions in parliament, said he was waiting for the case on Guinea to go before the U.N. Security Council, adding, “there will be sanctions.”

“In the meantime, I hope that Mr. Dadis Camara stays in his bed in Morocco and doesn’t return (home), because he is capable — his return alone is capable — of setting off a civil war, and we don’t need that,” Kouchner said.

The U.N. investigators’ report concluded that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that Camara, the army officer who shot him in a dispute Dec. 3, and Guinea’s anti-drug chief bear “individual criminal responsibility” for the events of Sept. 28 and the following days.

But when I met with 20 or so Guinean women to hear about their experiences on Sept. 28 — the day Guinean soldiers trained their guns on pro-democracy protesters and then, allegedly, unleashed a brutal wave of rapes — something was different.

This time, I saw women my age, others who could be my daughters or nieces or sisters, in an urban setting.

Their attackers had turned the Guinean capital, Conakry, into a combat zone; sexual violence became a weapon of war to try to silence and control women.

The troops allegedly attacked women in and around the stadium where they