Subject: War Crimes Panel Examines Rape Cases
From: Jill McCorkel (mccorkel@sun.soci.niu.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2000 - 16:33:48 CST
On today's AP.... thought it may be of interest.
Jill McCorkel
War Crimes Panel Examines Sex Case
By JEROME SOCOLOVSKY
Associated Press Writer
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- As long as man has waged war, rape has
been an outrageous weapon in his arsenal. And as long as man has sought to
punish war crimes, rape has been near the bottom of his list.
A Yugoslav tribunal, which has been investigating Balkan war crimes
since its establishment in 1993, wants to turn things around.
A rape trial opening here Monday marks the first time an international
court tackles sexual enslavement. The case is a keystone in the most
ambitious attempt yet to acknowledge a woman's vulnerability to the excesses
of war.
Bosnian Serbs Radomir Kovac, Dragoljub Kunarac and Zoran Vukovic are
charged with rape, torture, enslavement and outrages upon personal dignity
in the Foca case, named after the city where the crimes allegedly took
place. All three have pleaded innocent to war crimes and crimes against
humanity, which carry a maximum life prison sentence.
According to the indictment, the defendants operated
"quasi-brothels'' -- or "rape factories'' -- in a local school, a sports
hall and a construction workers' barracks in Foca, southeast of Sarajevo, in
the summer of 1992.
Nightly, women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, were
allegedly forced to have sex with soldiers and paramilitary fighters. They
were gang-raped, tortured and often forced to give birth, Prosecutor Dirk
Ryneveld wrote in his pretrial brief. Adding to the humiliation, the women
were ordered to perform household chores for their victimizers, Ryneveld
says.
Although the total number of victims is not given, 72 women were
detained at the sports hall.
"Many of them suffered permanent gynecological harm due to the sexual
assaults. At least one woman can no longer have children,'' the indictment
said.
At least 10 rape victims are expected to testify at the trial. They
will be protected by privacy measures, and are identified in court documents
with codes: FWS-48, FWS-50, FWS-75.
Although Foca was the most notorious case of systematic rape in the
1992-95 war, there were reports of rape by all sides in dozens of camps
across Bosnia. In 1993, a European Community commission estimated 20,000
rape victims in the conflict. The Bosnian government put the figure at
50,000.
One Muslim woman who submitted to rape during the Bosnian war to
protect her daughter told a researcher "it's something you never forget.''
"I carry it around with me in my heart, in my soul,'' the woman was
quoted as saying in the book "War Crimes against Women,'' by scholar Kelly
Dawn Askin. "I think of it when I go to bed, and I think of it when I get
up. It doesn't let you go.''
Rape is as old as war itself. Since the battles of ancient Greece,
commanders have given soldiers license to rape women, who were seen as a
spoil of war.
But what distinguished the Bosnian war was that women were prime
targets in "ethnic cleansing'' campaigns because of their role in
propagating identity.
"What is new, and extraordinarily horrifying, is that many of the
rapes committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia (were) ...
committed with the intent to impregnate, in an effort to destroy a
particular ethnicity,'' Askin wrote.
Such attacks -- a soldier of one ethnicity raping a woman of
another -- reportedly led to thousands of forced pregnancies and children.
Since medieval times, attempts have been made to curb the practice of
wartime rape, at least on paper. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Kings
Richard II and Henry V of England declared rape a capital offense. The
Lieber Instructions outlawed rape by U.S. Army soldiers during the Civil
War.
But even when rape was outlawed, it was low on the list of priorities.
It was not prosecuted at the 1945-46 Nuremberg trial of Nazi officials. At
the Tokyo trial of Japanese leaders, rape was not recognized as a
full-fledged war crime.
"That's part of the reaction of patriarchal society,'' said Patricia
Viseur Sellers, the tribunal's rape expert. "Men are tortured and that's
important. Women are raped and that's not important.''
The only known prosecution of forced prostitution occurred in 1948 in
Batavia, now Jakarta, Indonesia. A Dutch colonial court tried Japanese
military defendants for raping Dutch women prisoners during World War II.
The Yugoslav tribunal is making every effort to put sexual crimes at
the top of its list of priorities. At least half the staff is female; one of
the three judges in the Foca case is a woman, Florence Mumba of Zambia.
The tribunal, along with its Tanzanian-based sister court judging
perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, has recognized the massive and
methodical nature of the sexual assaults in both cases. Judges have
acknowledged rape not only as an act of torture and a war crime, but also as
crime against humanity -- a more serious offense encompassing systematic
crimes.
"We've been immensely successful at prosecuting sexual violence at
both tribunals,'' said Sellers, formerly an attorney at the Philadelphia
public defender's office.
For feminist activists and many legal scholars, however, that's not
enough. They want systematic rape recognized as an inherently genocidal
crime and insist that women be named a protected group in an annex to the
1948 Genocide Convention.
Says Catharine A. MacKinnon, a University of Michigan law professor
who has worked with Bosnian rape victims: "Genocide denial seems
particularly tempting to some when the victims are women and the atrocities
are sexual.''
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