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

Theme 4: Analysis

Theme 4 A N A L Y S I S Enforced pregnancy as a method of genocide makes sense only if you are ignorant about genetics. No baby born from such a crime will be only Serb. It will receive half its genetic material from its mother. Moreover, it will be raised within the mother's cul­ ture—if her culture survives anywhere, that is. The Serb policy of genocidal rape aimed at pregnancy offers the specter that making more babies with a people equals killing that people off. This illogic is possible only because the policy's authors erase all identity characteristics of the mother other than that as a sexual container. It has been surprisingly difficult for many who are concerned about this phenomenon to recognize the blatant contradiction it contains, even though it is preciselythat contradiction that makes this particular atrocity restive to most international war­crime legislation. Even feminists who have experience in gender­aware analysis often fail to note the specific way in which the Serb policy erases the victim's cultural identity and treats her as nothing more than a kind of biological box. As a result of this critical blindness, 87 88 T H E M E 4 such feminist analyses have, by a logic shockingly similar to the Serb one, also erased all the victims' identities but the sexual. Susan Brownmiller, whose 1975 study of rape is staunchly en­ sconced in the U.S. feminist theory canon, comes very close to just this sort of erasure. In an article carried by the Newsweek is­ sue of January 4, 1993, that devoted its cover story to "A Pattern of Rape: War Crimes in Bosnia," Brownmiller, in "Making Fe­ male Bodies the Battlefield," hastens to emphasize the crime of rape as a crime of violence based on the gender relations that per­ tain in patriarchy, and thus, by her reasoning, one unfortunately endemic to all wars. She dismisses a TV newscaster's line, "This is all about identity," for example, by suggesting he should Have amended it to say "male identity." She reminds us of the univer­ sality of rape during wartime and callously challenges what she calls the "emotional Bosnian appeal" that "calls the Serb rapes 'unprecedented in the history of war crimes,' " and "an orga­ nized, systematic attempt 'to destroy a whole Muslim population, to destroy a society's cultural, traditional and religious integrity' " (37). She laments: "Alas for women, there is nothing unprec­ edented about mass rape in war when enemy soldiers advance swiftly through populous regions, nor is it a precedent when, howling in misery, leaders of the overrun country call the en­ demic sexual violence a conspiracy to destroy their national pride, their manhood, their honor" (ibid.). Brownmiller reminds us of the historically all too common pa­ triarchal association of the female body with territory, so that rap­ ing one and conquering the other come metaphorically to the same thing:1 Women are raped in war by ordinary youths as casually, or asfre­ ANALYSIS 89 netically, as a village is looted or gratuitously destroyed. Sexualtres­ pass on the enemy's women is one of the satisfactions of conquest, like a boot in the face, for once he is handed a rifle and told to kill, the soldier becomes an adrenaline­rushed young man with permis­ sion to kick in the door, to grab, to steal, to give vent to his sub­ merged rage against all women who belong to other men. (Ibid.; em­ phasis in the original) Brownmiller has much of this right. She may well be describing the crimes of rape perpetrated by Croatians, Bosnian­Herze­ govinians, and Unprofor soldiers. But she misses the criminal specificity of what the Serbs are doing because she leaves out the role of impregnation in the Serb policy. She gets close when she notes the lasting effects of such rape, even if not by means of childbirth and child raising, when she says: Sexual sadism arises with astonishing rapidity in ground warfare, when the penis becomes justified as a weapon in a logistical reality of unarmed noncombatants, encircled and trapped. Rape of adou­ bly dehumanized object—as woman, as enemy—carries its own terrible logic. In one act of aggression, the collective spirit of women and of the nation is broken, leaving a reminder long after the troops depart. And if she survives the assault, what does thevic­ tim of...