Women's Perspectives on Human Security

Violence, Environment, and Sustainability

Richard Matthew, Patricia A. Weitsman, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Nora Davis, Tera Dornfeld, Richard Matthew, Patricia A. Weitsman, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Nora Davis, Tera Dornfeld

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446997
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Violent conflict, climate change, and poverty present distinct threats to women worldwide. Importantly, women are leading the way creating and sharing sustainable solutions.

Women's security is a valuable analytical tool as well as a political agenda insofar as it addresses the specific problems affecting women's ability to live dignified, free, and secure lives. First, this collection focuses on how conflict impacts women's lives and well-being, including rape and gendered constructions of ethnicity, race, and religion. The book's second section looks beyond the scope of large-scale violence to examine human security in terms of environmental policy, food, water, health, and economics.

Multidisciplinary in scope, these essays from new and established contributors draw from gender studies, international relations, criminology, political science, economics, sociology, biological and ecological sciences, and planning.

Part 1

Conflict and Violence

Chapter 2

Women, War, and Identity

Policies of Mass Rape in Bosnia and Rwanda

PATRICIA A. WEITSMAN

Understanding war—its causes, its prevention—is a quest that has driven scholars and practitioners for millennia. This has culminated in a voluminous literature that has facilitated our knowledge in profound ways. Detailed studies have provided us with a comprehensive list of indicators that flag when military conflicts are likely to occur and have outlined the diplomacy required to prevent it. One theme that pervades these studies, as diverse as they are, is the necessary condition of a self and an “other.” Although these in-groups and out-groups are defined differently depending on the study (democracies versus nondemocracies, allies versus nonallies, economic-trading partners versus non-economic-trading partners, native ethnic populations versus nonnative ethnic populations, and so forth), in the absence of two or more differentiated and hostile groups, war simply could not occur.

One essential question in the study of war thus necessarily becomes how do warring parties identify themselves, and how do they distinguish themselves from the group with which they are in conflict? In other words, how does identity promote conflict, and how does war in turn shape identity? These are questions that get at the heart of the war experience and require answers that go beyond any singular discipline. No one book or article could comprehensively address these questions either. What I seek to do here is to explore the answers to these questions in a very specific context—namely, to examine the policies undertaken by governments during wartime that promote or prohibit forced impregnation or maternity, in order to explore the ways these governments seek to define identity to construct the self versus the other. It is worth mentioning that while my article investigates the politics of sexual violence via forced maternity, it is equally important to view policies of forced sterilizations in the same light, although it is beyond the scope of this project to do both. I proceed as follows. The next section of the paper examines the policies of sexual violence in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in order to understand the connection among the ideas that underpin the policies. I then conclude with some thoughts about the causes and consequences of identity politics, gender, and war.

GOVERNMENT “IDENTITY” POLICIES DURING WARTIME

There are a number of ways in which government “identity” policies manifest during wartime. These policies often entail the limiting of rights or civil liberties of some segment of the population, such as restricting their movement or requiring them to bear some mark of their identity either on their persons or on their identification papers. In addition to policies that serve to make explicit the differences between the “self” identity and the “other,” government policies sometimes go further by seeking to craft a national identity through invasive policies of social or genetic engineering. This may entail policies of forced maternity and the production of new babies whose identities are connected to their fathers. Alternatively, a government or military group may attempt to eradicate complete decimation of a group whose identity is constructed as the enemy.

Greater Serbia, Early 1990s

The end of the Soviet era brought significant restructuring and realignment within the region that had been the Eastern bloc throughout the Cold War. The future of Yugoslavia was uncertain. In July 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, bringing about war between Croatia and the Yugoslav state and, to a lesser extent, between Yugoslavia and Slovenia. By early 1992, a shaky peace was forged, but shortly thereafter Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence. This culminated in civil war among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia that lasted for several years. The atrocities that occurred during the war were very hard to comprehend. Somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand people died, two million people were left homeless, and tens of thousands of women and girls were raped. During the years of the civil war, there was no refuge—in the United Nations (UN) safe haven of Srebrenica, more than eight thousand men and boys were massacred.¹ Mass graves continue to be uncovered. Many of the missing were never found, and some families were never reunited.

An additional legacy of the war in the former Yugoslavia was the violence committed principally against Bosnian Muslim women by the Serb militias.² In August 1992, two reporters, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy, were able to gain access to the Omarska camp, located in the north of Bosnia.³ They emerged with stories of the atrocities being committed in the camp:

Omarska was a place where cruelty and mass murder had become a form of recreation. The guards were often drunk and singing while they tortured. A prisoner called Fikret Harambasic was castrated by one of his fellow inmates before being beaten to death. One inmate was made to bark like a dog and lap at a puddle of motor oil, while a guard and his mates from the village jumped up and down on his back until he was dead. The guards would make videos of this butchery for their home entertainment. But the most extraordinary hallmark of the carnage was its grotesque intimacy. People knew their torturers, and had often grown up alongside them.⁴

Extreme forms of torture included forced cannibalism, castrations done in the most humiliating and painful ways possible (e.g., tying testicles with wire to the back of a motorcycle that took off at high speed, ordering a prisoner to bite off the testicles of another, and so forth), and beatings of all imaginable kinds, frequently to death.⁵ At this one camp alone, thousands perished May through August 1992, the months the camp was open. It closed after reports were broadcast about what was occurring there. Yet camps of this kind were established throughout Bosnia, and in addition to the tortures, beatings, and castrations, at Omarska as well as all over Bosnia, women were segregated, held, and repeatedly raped day after day for months. One such camp at Foca, a small town in Bosnia, was almost exclusively constructed as a rape camp. In the summer of 1992, dozens of women were held there:

The Serbs had a fairly regular procedure. They usually transported a new batch of . . . prisoners to a temporary detention center where some of the women—most often the younger ones—were raped for the first time, frequently by more than one soldier. After a day or two, the prisoners were trucked to one of the main rape camps. These included Foca High School and Partizan Sports Hall (“Partizan” for short), which was a gymnasium near the central police station. Those who went first to the high school stayed anywhere from several days to several weeks. From there, most were transferred to Partizan, where roughly seventy-five people . . . were trapped at any one time. . . . The Serbs . . . aimed to impregnate as many women as possible, certainly for the added trauma this would produce, but also to expend the procreative capacity of Muslim women on Serb-sired babies. The Serbs regularly taunted their victims while they were being raped: “Now you’ll have Serb babies.” Forty of the women and teenagers in Partizan became pregnant.⁶

Not only was mass rape a critical element of the war in the former Yugoslavia, but forced impregnation and forced maternity were as well. Principally Bosnian Muslim women were the targets, although Croatian women and Serbian women also were sexually violated during the war. According to the final report of the UN Commission of Experts established pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 789, there were about 162 detention sites in the former Yugoslavia where people were sexually violated, although this may be an underestimate.⁷ At rape camps across the country, Bosnian Muslim women were held, repeatedly raped by numerous men, and then either killed or detained for additional sustained sexual torture. Some women were raped by as many as forty men in one night; some women were gang-raped in this way day after day for months at a time:⁸

The strategy of mass rape and forced impregnation was a clear policy dictated by the Serb authorities. Despite denials by the Serbs, the rape camps were established in nearly identical ways—even down to the layout of the camps—throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the patterns of rape were the same. Further, the rapes occurred in noncontiguous sections of Bosnia simultaneously.⁹ In the words of one survivor, Rasema, who identified her neighbor as one of the three men who raped her, “I said, ‘Sasha, remember your mother. Remember your sister. Don’t do it.’ He said, ‘I must. If I do not they will hurt me. Because they have ordered me to.”¹⁰

The mass rapes of men and women in the former Yugoslavia were undertaken with the intention of humiliating, degrading, and torturing the victims. They were also undertaken with the clear purpose of forcibly impregnating women and ensuring the children were carried to term. In her testimony against Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic in July 1996, Irma Oosterman, a member of the prosecution investigation team, said, “The soldiers told often that they were forced to do it. They did not say who forced them to do it, but they were ordered do it.” Her testimony continues, “they wanted to make Serb or Chetnik babies. The pattern was, yes, all over the same.”¹¹

Further evidence that forced impregnation and maternity were goals of the Serbian authorities is provided by survivors’ accounts. Narratives provided by hundreds of women held at camps around Bosnia suggest that women were repeatedly raped and then, once impregnated, held until abortion was no longer an option. In the words of one survivor of the Doboj camp:

They said that each woman had to serve at least ten men a day. . . . God, what horrible things they did. They just came in and humiliated us, raped us, and later they told you, “Come on now, if you could have Ustasha babies, then you can have a Chetnik baby, too.” . . . Women who got pregnant, they had to stay there for seven or eight months so they could give birth to a Serbian kid. They had their gynecologists there to examine the women. The pregnant ones were separated off from us and had special privileges; they got meals, they were better off, they were protected. Only when a woman’s in her seventh month, when she can’t do anything about it anymore, then she’s released. Then they usually tak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Conflict and Violence
• Part 2: Environmental and Economic Security
• Contributors
• Index