They tell us that Sarajevo has been liberated, but they also tell us that mortars are still pounding several regions in the former Yugoslavia, and we, the European women of France, less than fifteen hundred kilometers away from that country, know that hundreds, thousands, of our sisters there are still being held in camps where they are being raped and impregnated by force.
On March 8, 1994, International Women’s Day, the Tresnjevka feminist group in Zagreb, acting on the initiative of Nina Kadic, called upon the International Criminal Tribunal (created on May 25, 1993, by the United Nations) to judge the crimes against human rights that are being committed in the former Yugoslavia and to judge the rapists as criminals.
1 The women in the group alerted international opinion to the existence of forty-five camps in which women are being systematically tortured, raped, and deliberately impregnated and to the fact that rapes occur constantly in certain parts of that country. The group sought to make April 15, 1994, an international day of protest against rape, a “crime against humanity.”
It was also Tresnjevka that undertook field studies, submitted a report to the United Nations on the mass rape of women, most of them Muslim, and then alerted the press in the summer of 1992. At that point in the war, several missions had already been dispatched to the former Yugoslavia and had observed widespread violations of human rights but said absolutely nothing about the rapes.
In France the media resistance was spectacular. Although news about these systematic and particularly cruel rapes had appeared in the German and American press as early as September, it was only in November that it reached us (in
Libération); and it was not until January 1993, following the Warburton Report (the European Community Report on the treatment of Muslim women in the former Yugoslavia) that a real press campaign to inform the public began. It lasted scarcely two months and, as usual, completely ignored the mobilization of women in France (news, appeals, petitions, debates, subscriptions, fact-finding missions, letters to the United Nations, a demonstration mobilizing nearly ten thousand people on March 6, 1993, and so on). More than nine months later, a politicocultural demonstration, which did receive media attention, together with an evening program on Arte,
2 failed to attract more people and, not without misogyny, forgot about women; the warlike emblem brandished over the proceedings was a chimera, an enormous, monstrous creature with a woman’s breasts!
Moreover, it seems that rapes had to be systematic and on a massive scale before the media would talk about them, and even then the emphasis was put on the racist rather than the sexist nature of the crimes, because the victims were mostly Muslim women (a Serb statement declared that rape would be used as a weapon of war in the strategy of “ethnic cleansing”). These misogynist crimes were scarcely recognized as a political phenomenon.
And yet, while it is true that a few men and boys were raped, women were the ones being raped in massive numbers (we do not have precise figures, but does that really matter when it is certain that we are talking about several thousand women—twenty thousand, fifty thousand?) They were raped in the most atrocious fashion, often in front of their families, and almost always repeatedly by gangs of men: women, but also girls, even very young girls, and old women. Many of them died as a result.
We have been reminded that traditionally war, which tortures and kills, also rapes and that raping a woman is a way of raping the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the enemy in order to destroy, “through them,” as we are told, the power and honor of a man or a people. For bands of brothers, either fraternal or fratricidal, women do not exist. They do not count; similarly, ethnologists do not need women—and they acknowledge this
3—to establish the “elementary structures of kinship.” The assaults on the integrity, dignity, and honor of the women of the former Yugoslavia were scarcely acknowledged in the French press, even though rape has been recognized as a crime in our country since 1980. But, in the absence of any antisexist law, misogyny, unlike racism, is still not a crime; it is merely an opinion.
Such is the ignorance of the history of women that even those who reported on the fact-finding missions, and, in their wake, the media, believed that this was an episode without precedent. Yet recent history teaches us that this was not the first time such cruel rapes have taken place on such a vast scale. There were, for, example the rapes in Nanking in 1936 (over twenty thousand women were raped by Japanese soldiers in the space of one month) and the rapes in Bangladesh in 1971 (between two and four hundred thousand women were raped by Pakistani soldiers during a nine months’ reign of terror).
What is absolutely scandalous about the current war, however, is that, for the first time, women have been deported and held in camps for the purpose of “getting them pregnant.” The goal has not been simply to massacre these women’s children in front of them, to gang-rape them in public places in front of their families and their neighbors, and then to go on and on raping them in the camps; it has been to use them as machines to produce new generations of Serbs. The madness specific to this war, which outdoes even fascism, is a macho-national frenzy. Every rape is accompanied, explicitly or implicitly, by the words “you will give birth to a Chetnik,” in other words, to a boy, a Serb, a warrior, a son without father or mother. The phantasm of ethno-spermatic omnipotence would engender men with no genitrix (no trace of the genetic heritage or of the woman’s work of pregnancy) and with multiple and anonymous genitors (almost all the rapes were gang rapes).
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And this is happening in Europe in the 1990s. In Europe, where for the first time in the history of the human species women and couples are able to control their fertility and enjoy freedoms and rights that make women citizens of the human community.
Little has been said about the devastating effects of these rapes and forced pregnancies, but we know about them thanks to the women activists and/or specialists looking after the women who have managed to survive and find help and thanks to a few eye-witness accounts: mutism, anorexia, insomnia, apathy, loss of interest in life, depression and even suicide; above and beyond the clinical symptoms, there are the moral reproaches—guilt, shame—that lead to humiliation and loss of self-esteem, despite the fact that imams have intervened on behalf of the women who were raped and left pregnant. In 1971 the imams of Bangladesh tried to convince the population that the Muslim women who had been raped were heroines; they tried to convince men that these women could still remain their wives or that, if they were single, they deserved to be married. The imams failed. Rejected by their families, the women who survived either turned to prostitution to eke out a marginal existence or they committed suicide.
Only the condemnation of such gynocide by the International Court in The Hague (which must find the rapists and the organizers of the rapes guilty as “criminals against humanity”) can restore the dignity of the women victims of these crimes and reaffirm their right to life and—this is our most ardent hope—put an end to these crimes now in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Djibouti, in Somalia … and, in the future, all over the world.