A Ceremonial Battlefield

Borislav Herak, a Serb and a POW in a military jail in Sarajevo, reached the pages of the "New York Times", "CNN" and other leading international media. The authorities in Sarajevo liked to parade him in front of journalists because he would recapitulate in detail how he had butchered scores of people, and give exhaustive descriptions of his pathological sexual aberrations. "Raping Moslem women is good for raising the morale of Serbian fighters," Herak told US journalists. He did not say, however, if anyone had ever ordered him or his comrades at arms to rape Moslem women. But, his Commander had "advised him several times" to visit a motel which served as a jail for Moslem women. Herak also "recalled" that he and his "comrades" killed some of the women. It is impossible to check the truth of his testimony, but the world has added another war crime to the list of those being committed by Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the mass rape of Moslem and Croatian women.

Historians say that all wars have three things in common: death, destruction and rape. Just as there are no reliable data as to the number of people killed, the number of historical buildings destroyed, there are no data on the number of women who have been raped in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Depending on the source, the number of Moslem women who have been raped varies from "several thousand" to 30,000 and 100,000. Data given by the West European and US media come mostly from (official) Zagreb, and were sent there by the Bosnian government.

There are no independent sources of information. Members of peace organizations in Zagreb claim that their colleagues in Sarajevo have documents for 3,000 recorded cases of rape. All peace organizations claim that the number is probably several times higher, but it was not possible to obtain more documentary material in war conditions.

Various institutions and organizations in Zagreb, including foreign journalists in Croatia, have swarmed down on convoys of Bosnian women coming to Croatia. All reports on the rape of Moslem women come from Zagreb. The journalists themselves are surprised at the women's frankness in the retelling of their horrendous experiences.

Women from the Belgrade Center for Anti-War Action only recently started collecting statements and data on rape in B-H from those women who reached Belgrade and Serbia via refugee channels or privately. The existing documents have also been collected by Belgrade doctors whom the raped women visited. Some of the statements were submitted by the state commission for investigating war crimes.

Early this summer Zagreb feminists wrote of mass rapes in B-H. No one in Zagreb took their warnings seriously. They were criticized for lacking a clear nationalist approach. "Violence against women is carried out by soldiers, volunteers, mercenaries, camp wardens and neighbors. Women of all nationalities are victims of sexual abuse. All sides rape in war, and this war is no exception. According to current information, Serbian paramilitary units have established camps for women in occupied territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the rape and abuse of women are a regular practice. This is just the tip of the iceberg when speaking of violence against women in peacetime," says an appeal made by independent women's groups from Zagreb.

In late September the foreign press carried a statement by the Dabro-Bosnian Metropolitan Nikolaj, who said that 30,000 Moslem women had been raped in Bosnia, of which number several hundred were pregnant. A hasty and clumsy denial was issued, and the priest was not heard again. A statement issued after a meeting between Serbian Patriarch Pavle and Zagreb Archbishop Franjo Kuharic in Geneva, says: "We express our horror at the immoral abuse of women and girls and even little girls. Only inhuman persons are capable of such acts, no matter how they may style themselves."

Reports of raped Serbian women had appeared in Belgrade's national-state press. This summer, "Vecernje Novosti" brought a text based on talks with high representatives of the Orthodox Church and the Moslem community, and the key issue was can women raped in war abort or not!? The priests agreed that the raped women must bear the babies. Cardinal Kuharic said that: "Concerning the acceptance of the child, our only advice is that the mother must try and develop motherly feelings for the child in her womb, this new human being which is without guilt, and which has a right to life."

Both sides grasped the propaganda value of women's suffering when it became necessary to use all means in forcing a military intervention, or rather, in proving one's "innocence" and in "justifying the struggle for freedom." Director of the Islamic humanitarian organization "Merhamet" in Zagreb Faruk Redzepagic told the German magazine "Der Spiegel": "If Europe wishes to help women in Bosnia then it must send arms to their men."

After the session of the Holy Synod, the Orthodox Church claimed confidently that the Serbs did not have any camps for raping women - "there are none, and there were none" (from which it follows that no mass rapes are being conducted by this side), while there are "numerous verified testimonies" that Moslem and Croatian soldiers have raped Serbian women. Radovan Karadzic asked cynically how it is possible that his fighters, of whom there are not enough, could have raped 80,000 to 100,000 Moslem women.

Women are the greatest victims of the war waged by men in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They have been left to look after the children, parents and farms. They are the targets of criminals, rapists, and "war propagandists" and all those engaged in measuring the suffering of "their" nation. Suzan Braunmuller says in her book "Against Our Will": "The body of the violated woman becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a place of victory parades by the conquerors. A crime committed against a woman is an unmistakable message among men - irrefutable proof of victory and a document of defeat for others to see."

In spite of the unreliability of various sources, two things need not be doubted: rape is a mass occurrence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and it is more frequently practiced by the Serbian side, which is militarily superior to the other two and also holds more territory. Foreign media have made differences here, according to which the Serbian side "rapes systematically", while the others "do so sporadically."

Statements made by raped women from all sides do not offer evidence of any difference among the rapists from any of the sides. All are aware that rape is an "ideal" method of ethnic cleansing. A (patriarchal) family might return one day even though its house has been burned down, but not to a village where its women have been dishonored.

Consciously or unconsciously, rape in Bosnia has another more subtle dimension: to estrange women (stories that some rape more, others less and randomly) and in destroying the germ of renewing neighborly life. Women, left at home by the warriors who went off to war, perhaps understood the sameness of the deception they found themselves in. Raped women can only perceive neighbors of another nationality as the wives, sisters and daughters of their tormentors.

The number of documents in which the issue of rape by the Serbian side has turned up the last few weeks, is frightening. Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel discussed the matter in mid November in Bonn. French President Francois Mitterrand and Kohl discussed the issue during a meeting in early December. The UN Human Rights Commission is dealing systematically with the problem of rape in the Bosnian war.

International human rights organizations (Helsinki Watch, Amnesty International), humanitarian organizations (ICRC, UNHCR) which are active in Bosnia-Herzegovina, do not give any data on the possible number of raped women, nor the number or location of camps which serve only for gratifying the soldiers' sexual needs. The Bosnian government's office in Zagreb was the only one to submit a list of 16 places, which they claim to be rape camps. Some of the places on the list are: the village of Pejkovici near Bijeljina, the Motel "Vilina Vlas" in Visegrad, Hotel "Elvis" in Brcko, special barracks in the camps of Trnopolje, Lomnica, Jesenica, Ripac...

Women's organizations and peace organizations from Belgrade and Zagreb demand that rape be treated as a war crime and be placed under the competency of the International Court of Justice, and that in accordance with this, section IV of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which refers to the legal protection of women, be changed. It would be possible to bring rapists and those who ordered rape (even if they only gave tacit approval) before court with the existing evidence. At the Nuremberg Trials, the prosecutor submitted extensive documentation regarding rapes committed by German soldiers in France in retaliation for actions undertaken by the Resistance Movement. The rapists were not convicted. Will this be the case after the war in Bosnia?

Since time immemorial, rape has been a part of war. The Bible mentions it i Chapter 21, when it speaks of distressed women. Greek and Roman conquests were always followed by mass rapes. When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, captured and bound women were taken in great numbers to Turkish camps, writes the chronicler Runtziman. Catholic soldiers took over 10,000 women to their camps after Protestant Magdeburg fell in 1631 in the Thirty Years War.

Arnold Toynbee writes about rapes committed in Belgium and France at the end of World War One by German soldiers. The Nazis and Hitler's soldiers raped detainees in concentration camps in the occupied territories during World War Two. On entering Germany, allied troops, Russian and French soldiers raped German women. Around 200,000 Chinese women had been raped by the Japanese by 1945.

US soldiers faced very strict punishment for rape, but officers were known to turn a blind eye to such acts. Abortion was allowed for the first time in Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion, which left some 5,000 raped women.