Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

Theme 3: Facts

Theme 3 FACTS The Aggression, the War The noted scholar of nationalism Eric Hobsbawm has written that "no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist" because "nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so" (Hobsbawm, 12). He quotes Renan, the father of critical European discourseregarding nationalism, who said, "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation" (12).Although I have been sympatheticto Hobsbawm's analysis for years, I must say that the versions of Serb nationalism that justify the ritual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in the name of a mythical "Great Serbia" have made Hobs­ bawm almost the only person I can bear to read on the topic of nationalism. Nenad Popovic, a thoughtful oppositional intellectual in Zagreb, considers the Serb aggressionin a particular way.1 It is, he says, a military aggressionperformed in the name of an extremist nationalist mythos but without the foundation even of a nation­ state. In other words, the Serb military, the Bosnian Serb soldiers, 41 42 T H E M E 3 and the Chetniks are united in their cause, which they justify by a bloody form of nationalism even though they enjoy little or no functional state­based authority. In fact, the Belgrade govern­ ment, continues Popovic, is a fluke government voted into power by a manipulated electoral body in an election in which only a part of the electorate (which in any case does not include two mil­ lion Kosovo Albanians!) went to the polls. Not used to democratic institutions, the Serbs who did bother to vote accomplished something that, in the United States, would have been like elect­ ing candidates from the Ku Klux Klan to the presidency and to majorities in the House and Senate. Given this political reality, the nature of the war itself emerges as utterly eclectic, according to Popovic. With its dizzying array of means, from the knife to rape to starvation to the smart bomb, from orders by fax to orders by scream, from well­fed interna­ tional negotiations between well­dressed British lords and well­ maned Serb war criminals in Geneva to the boiled potatoes and chilblains of the refugee camps, this war turns out to be, in addi­ tion to everything else, also the ultimate in citational practice, in historical collage. Not even the borders of the fighting and the slaughter can be said to correspond to national territories of memory. Instead, they derive from the blood­cloudy mists of ex­ tremist Serb nationalist legend. This eclectic reality, this mortal sea of paradox, this undoing of history in the name of brute ag­ gression, is truly a postmodern war. It is also a genocide. Let me emphasize that, in speaking of genocide, I am speaking precisely of a Serb policy. I have defi­ nitely taken sides. It is clear to me that the Yugoslav Army, the Bosnian Serbs, the Chetniks, and the Belgradegovernment are the aggressors in an illegal international aggression in which they aim FACTS 43 to take territory belonging to two internationally recognized sov­ ereign states, Bosnia­Herzegovina and Croatia. I realize that rapes and other atrocities have been committed by Croatian, Bosnian­ Herzegovinian, and United Nations forces. But, to my knowledge, none of these forces has an official policy that not only permits but recommends and commands that atrocities, including geno­ cidal rape, be committed as the means for furthering a military and political goal: the establishment, on territory that belongs to Croatia and to Bosnia­Herzegovina, of a so­called Great Serbia justified by legend and the sort of lies and historical errors Renan and Hobsbawm lament. The Commission of Experts appointed in October 1992 by Boutros Boutros­Ghali "to examine and analyze information gathered with a view to providing the Secretary­General with its conclusions on the evidence of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia" draws the same conclusion. In its report to the secretary­general of the United Nations (a report I shall call the Bassiouni Report), this commission, chaired by Professor Cherif Bassiouni, describes the relative responsibility and guilt in the various war crimes and, in particular, in the widespread genocide that accompany this war. Quoting from its first interim report (8/25274), the commission describes "ethnic cleansing" as follows: 55. The expression "ethnic cleansing" is relativelynew...