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20 Apr 08
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The traditional human-rights image is of a male prisoner of conscience.
Yet the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia show that it’s often women
who suffer most. -
Inside, the 22-year-old former textile worker stood charged with 32 murders and 16 rapes, including the murder of 12 of his 16 rape victims. The date was Friday, 12 March 1993 and Herak was the first Serb to be put on trial for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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No-one will ever know the exact number of women and girls raped during the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
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Though all figures must be treated with caution in a war so plagued by propaganda, these witnesses tell of the organized and systematic rape of at least 20,000 women and girls by the Serbian military and the murder of many of the victims. Muslim and Croatian – as well as some Serbian – women are being raped in their homes, in schools, police stations and camps all over the country.
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The sexual abuse of women in war is nothing new. Rape has long been tolerated as one of the spoils of war, an inevitable feature of military conflict like pillage and looting.
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What is new about the situation in Bosnia is the attention it is receiving – and the recognition that it is being used as a deliberate military tactic to speed up the process of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
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In many cases the intention is ‘deliberately to make women pregnant and to detain them until pregnancy is far enough advanced to make termination impossible’.
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Women and girls aged anything between 6 and 70 are being held in camps throughout the country and raped repeatedly by gangs of soldiers. Often brothers or fathers of these women are forced to rape them as well. If they refuse, they are killed.
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‘Any rape is monstrously unacceptable,’says Semra Turkovic, who works with survivors of rape in Zagreb. ‘But what is happening at this very moment in these rape/death camps is even more horrific. This can only be considered as genocide.’ She believes that the number of women raped in Bosnia exceeds even the highest estimates recorded by human-rights investigators.
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To Mubera Zdralovic, who is developing a programme of assistance in Zagreb for women left pregnant by rape, the torment endured by the thought of giving birth to a child of mass rape is often too much to bear.
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Speaking of the Pope’s recent warning to these women that they must not seek abortions, but learn to ‘accept the enemy into them’, she has only quiet disbelief.
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Amnesty International has no firm evidence on whether rape is being used as a strategic weapon but is clear that local leaders must have condoned it.2
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Catherine MacKinnon, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, claims that rape is being used to help make Bosnia a Serbian state by implanting Serb babies in Muslim mothers. The international community, she says, is refusing to face up to the true nature of the conflict there – that this is not just a campaign of Serbia against non-Serbia but is a form of genocide directed specifically against women.
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Muslim and Croatian woman are facing twice as many rapists with twice as many excuses and two layers of impunity serving to justify the rapes. This is ethnic rape by official policy of war – rape as ethnic liquidation.’ 3
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Yet these violations are not unique to Bosnia. In March this year Nobel Peace Prize winners Mairead Maguire and Betty Williams testified to the UN Human Rights Commission about the repeated rape of Karen women by government soldiers in Burma.
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And during the night: ‘every woman must confront the same problem. My ladies have been raped brutally by at least eight soldiers of the SLORC (the ruling junta) every night. Some women couldn’t continue to walk because of the hurtful raping and torture so they were shot and died. Those who were able to walk have to face the same thing every day and night until they’ve been raped to death.’
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To Zainab Jama, the Somali writer and former BBC broadcaster, the silence surrounding such violence is a measure of its effectiveness. Her research on her own country indicates that acts of unspeakable brutality are being carried out against women in the civil war raging there.
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Rape is unlawful in both international conflicts and civil war. But, according to Amnesty International, many governments do not uphold these norms and are often complacent in the face of such abuses.
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On a visit to Peru’s Ayacucho department in 1986
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What can be done to protect women from such violations? According to Françoise Hampson, lecturer in international law at the UK’s Essex University, what is lacking is the will to prosecute. ‘The act, rape, must be punished. Nothing should be allowed to jeopardize the prosecution of those alleged to have committed rape.’
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To Catherine MacKinnon the issue goes even deeper than this. ‘Human-rights principles are based on experience, but the experiences have not been those of women,’ she says. ‘What most often happens to women escapes the human-rights net. Whether in war or in peacetime, at home or abroad, in private or in public, by our side or by the other side, man’s inhumanity to woman is ignored.’
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Governments must face up to the fact that rape in war can no longer be tolerated. Women’s groups from all over the world are campaigning vigorously for the prosecution of rape as a war crime and, as the World Conference approaches, petitioning the UN to recognize women’s rights as human rights.
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f human rights are to be universally respected and protected, they say, then they must apply to the lives of over half the human race – women.
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Angela Robson is a London-based freelance journalist specializing in human-rights issues.
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