Serbs Used Rape as a Weapon of War in Bosnia

It is a crime that is perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of the world’s most broken societies – one that destroys the lives of its victims and rips apart the fabric of communities. Sexual assault is increasingly being used as a weapon of warfare, especially in clashes that are tribal or ethnic in nature. For that reason, Jody Williams decided it is time the issue was confronted head on. “There has always been rape in war, yes,” says Ms. Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work to eradicate land mines. “But using it specifically as a tactic of war seems relatively new and on the scale that we’re seeing it in the Congo, in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Burma.”Ms. Williams, an American, was joined in Montebello, Que., on Tuesday by two other female Nobel peace laureates – Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Ireland and Shirin Ebadi of Iran – to talk about rape in conflict zones. They invited more than 100 women from around the world to join them, many of whom have experienced sexual violence. “It’s something we all feel uncomfortable talking about,” Ms. Maguire said. “But we really have to face this as perhaps the worst form of violence next to actually killing someone.”

The Bosnian Genocide was characterized by the policy of systematic rapes of Bosniak women and girls, horrific and prolonged siege and shelling of Bosniak cities, starvation and terrorization of Bosniak population in the besieged enclaves and targeted destruction  of Bosniak culture and history. It is clear who the aggressor and who the victim was; To put things into perspective: During the war, not even one Serb city was under the siege by Bosniak forces; in fact, majority of Serb civilian casualties were killed by the Serbian army commanded by Gen. Ratko Mladic in the process of sniping and shelling multiethnic Bosnian cities like Sarajevo and Tuzla. Serb people and Serb culture were not deliberately targeted for ethnic cleansing, rape, siege, shelling, and destruction in Bosnia; it was the Serb project of "Greater Serbia", modeled on a Nazi policy of ethnic purification, that inflicted tremendous suffering on the Bosniak people between 1992 and 1995.

 

 

NOBEL LAUREATES GATHER IN QUEBEC TO CAMPAIGN AGAINST RAPE

GLORIA GALLOWAY

It is a crime that is perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of the world’s most broken societies – one that destroys the lives of its victims and rips apart the fabric of communities.

Sexual assault is increasingly being used as a weapon of warfare, especially in clashes that are tribal or ethnic in nature. For that reason, Jody Williams decided it is time the issue was confronted head on. “There has always been rape in war, yes,” says Ms. Williams, the Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work to eradicate land mines. “But using it specifically as a tactic of war seems relatively new and on the scale that we’re seeing it in the Congo, in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Burma.”

Ms. Williams, an American, was joined in Montebello, Que., on Tuesday by two other female Nobel peace laureates – Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Ireland and Shirin Ebadi of Iran – to talk about rape in conflict zones. They invited more than 100 women from around the world to join them, many of whom have experienced sexual violence.

“It’s something we all feel uncomfortable talking about,” Ms. Maguire said. “But we really have to face this as perhaps the worst form of violence next to actually killing someone.”

What it does to victims

In April of 1992, Bakira Hasecic was at home with her husband and two daughters, aged 13 and 18, in their town of Visegrad in Bosnia when a knock came at the door.

It was Veljko Planincic, the local police chief, who was also her next-door neighbour and a fishing buddy of her husband. Also known by the nickname “Goodtimes,” Mr. Planincic was an ethnic Serb and an Orthodox Christian. Ms. Hasecic and her family are Muslims. The attempts of the non-Christian Bosnians to establish independence from Serbia had left the neighbours at war.

Mr. Planincic arrived with 15 other men. Ms. Hasecic knew all but two of them, she said.

The men demanded money and she gave it to them. But it was not enough. They forced her 18-year-old daughter into a bedroom where, as the family watched in horror, one of the two men she did not know raped the girl before their eyes.

Mr. Planincic and others held a rifle at their heads and warned them not to move but Ms. Hasecic would not sit still. She ran to the bedroom and jumped on the back of the rapist. The attackers pulled her off.

“I cannot believe a human being could rape a neighbour, especially in such a small town where everybody knows everybody,” she said, the tears forming gentle lines over the bridge of her nose.

As the man climbed off the daughter, he smashed his rifle butt into the girl’s head, fracturing her skull. She survived.

But the family was held under house arrest and both Ms. Hasecic and the girl were repeatedly raped in the following weeks by the Serbs who occupied their village.

Ms. Hasecic’s sister was even less fortunate. Her home was turned into a rape camp by the Serb forces and she died there after repeated sexual assaults.

“Gang rapes were used as a strategic weapon of ethnic cleansing,” said Ms. Hasecic. ““Whatever they could kill, rape, plunder, they did it.”

What it does to communities

Rape is a tool of ethnic cleansing: Forced impregnation dilutes ethnic bloodlines.

But it is also an effective method of causing the societal breakdown of an opposing tribe or clan. In Sudan, for instance, the Janjaweed Arab militia are “raping women of different ethnic communities to destroy the fabric of the community,” said Jody Williams.

“If you rape one woman in a village, you are certain to destroy that family because the husband will, 99.9 per cent of the time, divorce her.

“If you rape enough women in that village, you destroy the society in that village. If you rape enough women in enough villages of a certain ethnic group, you destroy it.”

It is easy, and it is effective, she said. It is carried out both with the tacit consent of military leaders and by men for whom the rules of society have been overwritten by the violent world they inhabit.

“Where the traditional values or traditional ways of treating each other as humans break down then people start to do things they wouldn’t have done normally,” said Ms. Williams. “And that is part of the horror of war that is frequently overlooked, ignored, not talked about because it’s too uncomfortable.”

Rape is a most effective tool when women traditionally do not stray far from their homes and their crops. It leaves them untouchable in the eyes of their society, outcast and alone.

And sometimes it leaves them pregnant with the child of the enemy, or with a virus like AIDS.

Wangu Kanja of Kenya was raped in 2002 as she walked home from work in Nairobi. It was an act of ordinary thugs, not soldiers. But she started a group for victims that has ended up ministering to the many women were assaulted as a result of the political unrest of 2008.

Women and children are routinely the victims of tribal warfare, said Ms. Kanja. While the men are out fighting, they are not home to protect their families. For the rapists, she said, “It’s a win situation. For them it’s a victory.”

Countries where it happens most

Going back to the earliest human record, invading armies have made sexual prey of the women and children in the lands of their conquest.

But in recent years these assaults have increased as military organizations condone and even encourage attacks as an effective tool of war.

Here are some of the global conflict zones where rape is or has been widespread, as reported in a brief completed in September 2010 for the Bonn International Centre for Conversion, an international agency focused on peace and development.

Democratic Republic of the Congo: Rape has been used as a military strategy, particularly by the Forces Democratique de liberation du Rwanda in retaliation against the DRC government. The victims are often told they are being punished for collaboration. Rapes are deliberately committed in front of witnesses, often family members, and gang rapes are common. Last year there were nearly 15,000 new cases of sexual assault reported in the DRC.

Sudan: Rape has been a constant tool the Janjaweed, an Arab militia that has been in conflict with Darfur rebel groups since 2003. Women are continually under threat and gang rapes are frequent. Some experts suggest it is a form of ethnic cleansing. Women who report the crime are often punished themselves.

Nepal: The armed conflict that raged between the Communist Party of Nepal and pro-government forces between 1996 and 2006 produced many rape victims, most of them young girls. The majority of the assaults appear to have been committed by government security services who acted with impunity.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Bosnia Serb militia is widely reported to have committed rapes during the civil war of the 1990s. There were rape camps where girls and women were brought to be sexually assaulted. Women were taken as sexual slaves. Fathers were forced to rape daughters and brothers to rape sisters.

East Timor: During the Indonesian occupation of East Timor between 1975 and 1999, there were reports of rapes committed both by the Indonesian military forces and by the Timorese militias. Women were taken as sex slaves, especially if they were known to be supportive of independence or married to a member of a pro-independence group.

How to stop it

There have been three resolutions of the UN Security Council since 2000 that call on parties in a conflict to protect women from sexual violence and urge countries to bring perpetrators to justice.

But Jody Williams says there has been no consistent enforcement.

“We have all these resolutions at the UN. They are fine. But if you don’t try to get states to actively implement them, they are just words on paper,” said Ms. Williams.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative, of which Ms. Williams is a member, sees the solution in prosecution.

It argues that

-Impunity must be ended for sexual violence

-Money must be provided for medical and legal services

-A survivor-centric approach must be adopted for all programming

-The UN Security Council resolutions that aim to protect women and children from sexual assaults in conflict zones must be enforced

-There must be reparations for survivors

-Reporting of sexual violence must be standardized

-Prevention must be enhanced

Bev Oda, Canada’s International Development Minister, said she raises the issue with foreign governments at every opportunity – especially in situations where the countries are receiving Canadian aid.

On a tour of Sri Lanka, Ms. Oda said she was invited to visit a police station at a refugee camp where rape victims could report the crimes. And it quickly became apparent that the police did not speak the same language as the women who had been assaulted.

“When I pointed it out to the President of Sri Lanka, he happened to have the chief of police in the same building so he brought him in and told him it was not acceptable,” said Ms. Oda.

But “here were these victims who are living in tents and getting [no more than the] the necessities of life, not knowing what their futures are, being told that there is access to redress,” she said. “However, when they go there [to the police station], there’s no one there who can appropriately help them.” theglobeandmail.com

 

Bosniak Girl Describes Night of Terror

By Roy Gutman

Dressed in jungle fatigues and armed with knives and guns, the guards scoured the dark, crowded room with their flashlights, searching for girls to abduct for the night. Then one of them noticed 16-year-old S.T.

“Get up,” he ordered, rifle in hand.

The teenager was led at gunpoint with three other girls to a covered green truck, where she was raped three times. She spoke on condition that she not be identified.

The triple rape of the Muslim teenager in June was only one among thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of assaults that officials of Bosnia-Herzegovina fear have been carried out against Bosniak and Croatian women in the Serbian prison camps of northern Bosnia.

Reports of rape have been so extensive that some analysts think it is systematic. Sevko Omerbasic, leader of the Muslim community in Croatia and Slovenia, who is in direct touch with hundreds of refugees a week, has reached that conclusion. “There is more and more evidence that all the young women have been raped,” he told Newsday.

There are an astonishing number of reports of gang rapes of girls just above the age of puberty. And unlike S.T., who was released from the Trnopolje camp in late June, thousands of rape victims may remain in these prisons set up in schools and factories.

The Bosnian government estimated Friday that 200,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, are being held. Officials said they know of at least one or more camps reserved entirely for women and children, but they said that there is no way to estimate how many have been raped.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic denied that there are any detention camps for civilians in Bosnia and added that no women or children were detained at any location. Asked about the reports of systematic rape, he told Newsday: “There are six places in Sarajevo alone where they (the Muslims) are raping Serb women. We Serbs know what is going on.” [note: Karadzic is an outspoken Serbian propagandist comparable to Joseph Goebbels]

S.T.’s kidnaping and rape was a fairly speechless affair. The three guards were clean-shaven, S.T. said. Each had a “four S’s” tattoo on his hand, initials of the slogan under which the Serb military has committed mayhem in Bosnia: “Only solidarity saves the Serbs.”

The three soldiers and the four girls climbed into the back of the military truck, which came with a driver, and they stopped outside a gas station a few miles from the camp. S.T. was crying, and the guards left her on the truck. The other three girls, who were older, were led into a house that had once belonged to a prominent Bosniak in the town and now served as a brothel for camp guards.

One soldier who had remained behind ordered S.T. to disrobe and lie down on the floor of the truck. He left his clothes on and forced her to have intercourse. When the first soldier was satisfied, he fetched his friend. Finally, the third one took his turn.

“What are you doing?” S.T. recalled asking the last of the rapists.

“That’s what your people are doing to us, as well,” he said in reply.

He thought a minute and said, “I’ll get you out of here.” Then he told her to get dressed. Before driving off, he called out to his buddies, “I’m going to get some more.” Then he drove her back to the crowded school at the Trnopolje camp and left her there.

He searched the room with his flashlight for other women, and the process began all over again. It was the second of three visitations that night.

In a way, S.T. was lucky. The other girls remained inside the brothel, and one of them told S.T. she had been raped by 12 men. The soldiers brought them back about 3:30 a.m.

Judge: Serbs Used Rape as a Weapon of War in Bosnia

By Marjorie Miller

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague convicted three former Bosnian Serb commanders of rape and torture Thursday in the first international trial to focus exclusively on wartime sexual violence.

The three received sentences ranging from 12 to 28 years for enslaving Bosniak women and girls in “rape camps” during the Bosnian war, after Serbian forces overran the southeastern town of Foca in April 1992.

The sexual violence was deemed to be part of a widespread attack on a civilian population during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and was termed a crime against humanity – a charge second only to genocide.

“Rape was used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror,” presiding Judge Florence Mumba said as she delivered the verdict. “The three accused are not ordinary soldiers whose morals were merely loosened by the hardships of war…. They thrived in the dark atmosphere of the dehumanization of those believed to be enemies.”

For such abuses, the court sentenced 40-year-old Dragoljub Kunarac to 28 years in prison, 39-year-old Radomir Kovac to 20 years and Zoran Vukovic, also 39, to 12 years.

In London, the rights group Amnesty International applauded the verdict and said it set a precedent.

“This verdict is a significant step for women’s human rights — sexual enslavement in armed conflict is now legally acknowledged as a crime against humanity, and perpetrators can and must be held to account,” the group said in a prepared statement.

The defendants were charged with more than 30 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, enslavement and outrages upon personal dignity. The crimes carry maximum penalties of life in prison.

During the 11-month trial, the court heard testimony from 63 witnesses, including the horrifying accounts of 16 victims held for months in sexual slavery and subjected to multiple gang rapes.

The victims, some of whom were 12 and 13 years old at the time of their abuse, were identified by numbers rather than names as they testified. Their voices were scrambled and their faces hidden to avoid further shame in their conservative Muslim communities. Some sobbed as they recalled their nightmares, but they confronted their attackers in court.

When Serbian forces occupied Foca, they separated Bosniak men and women into separate camps, detaining men in a local prison and women in a sports hall and various hotels and houses. The victims told how soldiers arrived at their detention centers in groups of three to five and selected their prey.

“They would point their finger: ‘You, you and you,’ ” Witness No. 50 told the court in March. Just 16 at the time of her confinement, she was raped so often during two months of terror, she said, that she lost count.

One woman, identified as Witness No. 75, said she was raped for three hours by 15 men. Two teenage girls said they were held for months by one of the defendants as personal sex slaves before each was sold for 500 German marks (about $330 then) to soldiers from the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.

Kunarac commanded a reconnaissance unit of the Bosnian Serb army, while Kovac and Vukovic were paramilitary leaders, according to the prosecution. The three admitted that they participated in the attack on the town but denied the charges against them.

“I remember he was very forceful. He wanted to hurt me,” one witness said, referring to Kunarac. “But he could never hurt me as much as my soul was hurting me.”

The Hague tribunal was established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993 to go after the alleged architects of the Bosnian war’s bloody “ethnic cleansing” campaigns, including the former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic. Both remain at large.

One European Union study estimated that 20,000 women, most of them Bosniaks, were assaulted by Bosnian Serbs during the first year alone. The same year, a U.N. commission concluded that a “systematic rape policy” was being implemented by the Bosnian Serbs.

Thursday’s verdict on wartime rape contrasts with that of the tribunals set up in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, and the reluctance of the Japanese government for decades to recognize the existence of so-called “comfort women” who were forced to serve their soldiers sexually.

At the Rwanda war crimes tribunal, rape has figured as part of a genocide case against a former mayor who was sentenced in October 1998 for his role in his country’s 1994 genocide.

“What sets this apart is that this is a case in which we have a large rape camp organization,” said lead prosecutor Dirk Ryneveld. “This is the first case of sexual enslavement and the only one with sexual assaults and no murders.”

Kunarac and Kovac, who received the longest sentences, kept young women and girls at the quarters as domestic servants and sex slaves. Kunarac organized the transfer of women to other soldiers, while Kovac raped, beat and subsequently sold his charges, including a 12-year-old girl [Almira Bektovic].

“You abused and ravaged Muslim women because of their ethnicity, and from among their number you picked whomsoever you fancied,” Mumba, the presiding judge, told Kunarac.

When his 28-year sentence was announced, Kunarac flinched and looked down.

Regan Ralph, director of the women’s rights division of the group Human Rights Watch, lauded the verdict and said the definition of sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity will serve as the basis to prosecute others who torture women around the world.

But she said she was disappointed that the court held that Kunarac did not have command responsibility for the rapes and sexual assaults committed by soldiers who were arguably under his command.

The tribunal said the prosecution had failed to show that the soldiers were under Kunarac’s control at the time they committed the crimes.

Sexual Enslavement

With the rape convictions of three Bosnian Serbs, a U.N. tribunal established sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity.

The panel identified what it said were “elements of particular relevance for the crime of enslavement” relating to sexual assault. They include:

* Detention in poor living conditions and lack of food.

* The victims having “to do everything they were ordered to do, including the cooking and household chores.”

* Exclusive control, with victims at the constant disposal of the rapists.

* Offering the victims to others for sexual abuse in exchange for payment.

* Mistreatment, such as beating and slapping.

* Effective denial of the victims’ control over their own lives.