R Lindsey. Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 36, Issue 4, 2002.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993, has placed the systematic ethnic rape of women on to the statute books of international law. Since then a small number of Former Yugoslavian men, of all ethnicities, have been tried for rape. The campaign that preceded this legislation, and the legislation itself, have had a formative effect on public perceptions and understanding of rape and genocide. What has been the cost of this legislation? What has been lost in the debate on the way? An analysis of the development of this debate on rape shows that the legal process has shaped the public and academic discourse to give it a narrow, legalistic framework based on the burden of proof. This discourse dominates reportage, analysis and theory to the extent that a number of other discourses that explore alternative readings of rape have been excluded from mainstream debate, while the rapes of women in other conflicts and other genocides have failed to capture sustained media interest.
Breaking news: the start of a legal campaign
On 9 August 1992 the Sunday papers in the United States broke the story of the mass rape of women during the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1991–5) with the publication of an article written by the journalist Roy Gutman. Gutman’s article, published in the Guardian, the British broadsheet, the following day, reported that those targetted for rape were Muslim and Croat ‘girls just above the age of puberty’, and suggested that the rapes might be ‘systematic’. The rape stories derived from two principal sources: spin-doctors from the predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovinan government who were ‘selling’ the rape stories to western media organizations; and grassroots Croatian, Bosnia-Herzegovinan and Serbian women’s NGOs that were working with survivors of rape. These NGOs sent out press releases urging the world press to cover the story. They also established networks with western feminist activist groups asking them to lobby their governments and national media. However, because propaganda wars were a feature of the conflicts in Former Yugoslavia, representatives of the British media were slow to take up the story and were initially sceptical when they did.
The limited press coverage, the lobbying of feminist activists and the persistent claims of the warring sides in the conflicts eventually prompted inquiries from a number of different international groups. NGOs such as the World Council of Churches, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Special Rapporteur and representatives of European, North American and other governments sent investigative teams to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Many of those investigating approached the Former Yugoslavian women’s NGOs to gain access to women who had experienced rape. All of those investigating sought out and interviewed survivors willing to testify: validating, authenticating and recording these survivors’ accounts of rape. The different investigating groups then began to publish their findings, editing the stories of the survivors that they had talked to. As these were published, the British news media also began to publish stories that accepted that the rapes were taking place. The media, and some of the investigating groups, adopted the ‘reading formation’ begun by Gutman. They argued that the rapes had occurred on a mass scale (some tried to guess the numbers that had been raped) and were ‘systematic’, that they were being perpetrated by Serbian men, and that the ‘victims’ were predominantly young, Muslim (and some Croatian) women.
As the international investigations into the rape stories progressed, feminist activists, human rights workers and legal experts began to act and provide commentary. The debates that sprang from the investigation of the rapes in Former Yugoslavia focused on the dynamics and practice of rape, with an emphasis on evidence and proof. Their purpose was to persuade the international community that many women were being raped, and to argue for an international legal response to the raping of women. Accordingly, most commentaries were built around a core framework that included a discussion of the precise number of women being raped, an insistence on the systematic nature of the rapes, and an insistence that rapes were being committed because of a victim’s ethnicity. The debate on rape grew to involve the international legal community, which was already responding to the allegations of mass killing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In the spring of 1993 the United Nations Security Council signalled its intention to set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The statutes of the ICTY were adopted as UN law on 25 May 1993. Conceptually, most of these statutes derived from the International Military Tribunal (IMT) set up by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France in 1945 to try Nazi leaders for atrocities perpetrated during the Second World War. This suggests that the international legal community saw clear comparisons between the atrocities committed in the ongoing Former Yugoslavian conflicts, and those committed by Nazis during the Second World War.
Article 5 of the ICTY statute dealt with ‘crimes against humanity’. Under Article 5 section (a), a perpetrator of mass killing could be indicted for murder, in conjunction with section (h), ‘persecution of a political, ethnic or religious group’. A perpetrator of mass rape could be indicted for rape, section (g), in conjunction with section (h), ‘persecution of a political, ethnic or religious group’. The wording and concept of Article 5 derived directly from the Nuremberg Charter (Article 6c) of the 1945 IMT, and from Control Council 10, established after the IMT for the prosecution of less infamous Nazi war criminals. (Control Council 10 specifically named rape as a ‘crime against humanity’.)
The ICTY statute also provided for other ways to try the perpetrators of rape. Article 3 of the statute gave the ICTY the power to indict alleged perpetrators for ‘war-crimes’, that is, violations of the Geneva Conventions on laws and customs of wars. Article 2 of the statute gave the ICTY the power to indict for ‘grave breaches’: violations of the four Geneva Conventions. Additionally, under Article 4, the ICTY statute provided for the indictment of an alleged perpetrator of mass rape for a constituent act of genocide under the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
The campaign for the Former Yugoslavian rapes to be recognized as war crimes had been successful; mass rape now stood alongside mass killing in the international legislation. As in the legal work that constituted the campaign, the jurisprudence underpinning the legislation necessitated proving that many women had been raped and that they had been raped because of their ethnicity. This meant that, even after the campaign had been successful, evidence, mostly in the form of testimony, was very important, as this was the basis for the subsequent potential prosecution of a perpetrator. Again, particular attention was paid, within women’s testimonies, to the dynamics, practice and methods of rape. Identifying the ‘who, where, whom and how’ of a rape was the means by which ethnic motivation could be proved. This continuation of an evidence-based approach to rape reinforced international perceptions (informed by the media) that the rapes were ethnically driven. It also influenced and shaped the way in which most information on the rapes was gathered. Evidence-led data-gathering continued to underpin many of the primary sources that dealt with the subject of the war-time rapes in Former Yugoslavia, and that form the epistemological basis for studying them.
Sourcing the epistemology of rape
There is a small pool of accessible primary sources on the rapes that took place during the Former Yugoslavian conflicts. This is comprised of news reportage, investigative reports by international NGOs, reports of the UN Special Rapporteur, reports of international governmental investigations, reports from Former Yugoslavian NGOs working with survivors, human rights reports and individual investigations.
In this context, news reportage and investigative reports from nonhuman rights organizations had their limitations. News articles were not necessarily accurate or reliable. Investigative reports tended to be too focused on brevity and proof. The reports put together by the Special Rapporteur, international NGOs and governmental investigative teams consisted mostly of brief factual accounts, organized by region and sometimes supported by edited testimony. They concluded with a limited analysis that was clearly driven by their mission brief, which was usually to find out whether the rapes were targetted at a particular ethnicity and whether they were systematic
In contrast, in terms of breadth of research and perceived veracity, human rights literature tends to be perceived by experts in the field as a more reliable primary source. Yet this genre comes with its own set of problems. In their attempts to maintain objectivity while giving voice to their extensive collections of testimony on war crimes, editors of human rights literature on Former Yugoslavia collated atrocities into discrete categories. The effect is that, at times, acts of violence can read rather like a shopping list, in which the voice of the survivor is disturbingly neutralized. An example of this repackaging of atrocity into data is illustrated in the index to the second volume (1993) of the report by Helsinki Rights Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, which sorts evidence into the following groups: ‘abuses by Serbian/Croatian/Muslim forces; abuses in detention; rape; mutilation; reported castrations; forced displacement; other abuses; killings; human shields; siege warfare; hostage taking …’
The testimonies of some witnesses/survivors quoted in this volume include evidence of multiple abuses, such as being raped, being beaten, being used as a human shield, being starved or denied access to water, being denied medical attention, being denied access to toilets, or being subjected to mock executions. This results in the need for substantial cross-referencing within the text. In this cross-referencing, the testimony of the informant is cut off and edited, out of context, and thus is only partial, so that the voice of the survivor is never entirely heard. Instead, testimony becomes a collection of episodic memories of specific physical acts of violence, a disconnected temporal narrative that focuses on identifying perpetrators, victims, types of violence and the types of spaces in which violence occurs.
In addition to news reportage, investigative reports and human rights reports, there is an analysis of the practice of rape written by Alexandra Stiglmayer. Stiglmayer, a journalist who interviewed rape survivors when the rape stories broke, collated her evidence into discrete groups, in much the same way as the human rights literature has done. She describes rapes in internment camps, rapes at home, rapes to impregnate a woman, rapes in Croatia, rapes by paramilitaries, rapes of Serbian women. In an essentially descriptive text, she uses testimony to validate this categorization.
What is clear in this description of the available primary sources on rape in Former Yugoslavia is the effect that the legal agendas behind evidence collection have had on the presentation of that evidence. In essence the identity and specific testimony of each individual survivor is lost behind the sorting and categorization of testimonies. This is exemplified by Darius M. Rejali when she summarizes the state of the feminist debate in North America on rape in Bosnia:
Analysts have distinguished three kinds of rape in Bosnia: rapes that occur when Serbs first occupied a village; rapes committed by prison guards in detention camps; and rape camps or houses temporarily commandeered by Serbs to keep women expressly for that purpose. Reports have also emphasized that rapes often took place publicly; and that often the victims knew the aggressors.
In Rejali’s summary the reader is left only with the ethnic identity of the perpetrators. The survivors, and those who did not survive, are elided from this description. She adds:
In assessing this information, American feminists agreed that wartime rape could not be reduced to the psychological attributes of the individual aggressors or their mere aggregate in war. Rape must be understood in relation to social structures and practices. Mass rape also cannot be understood by emphasizing its unique or exceptional wartime character; rather it can only be comprehended in terms of everyday forms of violence which are considered legitimate. Finally, a rape account must identify the interrelationship between ethnicity and gender.
Rejali’s text thus references, and reproduces, an established process in many analyses of rape in the Bosnian conflicts. First, evidence/testimony is examined; second, the evidence is arranged into categories based on different types of practice of rape; and third—and there is a clear, paradigmatic demarcation in Rejali’s own text that demonstrates this point—rape is theorized. There is, therefore, a dialectic relationship between the categorization of testimony/ evidence of the practice of rape, and the theorizing of rape.
However, there is a deficit in Rejali’s description of the relationship between the evidence for rape and the theorizing of the perpetration of rape. What is missing is an analysis of how and why theorists arrived at the broad conclusions that Rejali outlines. Her text demonstrates that the categorization of the evidence has influenced the theorizing of rape and, as I have stated earlier, this has resulted in a reading formation that favours a focus on the ethnicities of the victim and the perpetrator. But Rejali does not clearly identify the influences that have contributed to this theoretical reading formation. This suggests that there is a historical/analytical void. There is no established historiography that tracks the development of the theorizing of rape, and examines the reading formations that have developed along the way. This leaves a number of questions unanswered. Are there any marginalized theoretical voices that have not penetrated the dominant theoretical discourses? What are the consequences of uncontested theoretical hegemony? Does this lack of curiosity leave us uninformed as to the effect that the dominant theoretical discourses have had on a broader reading of gender and genocide?
Sourcing theories
What the historical picture has specifically neglected, when examining the debate on rape, is the role that was played by Former Yugoslavian women’s NGOs. These groups often acted as the gatekeepers to survivors’ testimony and, through their therapeutic work with survivors, were well placed to theorize on the rapes. Their history, effectively a history of contention and argument around the way in which the rapes were interpreted, informs the history of the development of theory on rape. It begins with the campaign for international legal recognition of the rapes and its focus on ethnically motivated rape. As the campaign gathered pace in late 1992 and early 1993, some feminist commentators, within and without Former Yugoslavia, began to criticize the specificity of the international community’s focus on ethnicity. In early 1993 a huge difference of opinion emerged within the Former Yugoslavian NGO community specifically working with survivors of rape. The community was effectively split by this debate. Some NGOs argued that the focus on numbers and ethnicity was extremely important. They stressed that the rapes were part of a planned genocide and argued that other debates diverted the international public gaze away from the genocide. Other NGOS argued that the framework of this debate was too simplistic and too narrow, glossing over, for example, the fact that men from all ethnic groups were raping women, and that rapes should also be perceived as sexualized violence against women.
The split was dramatic and, in the aftermath, all sides of the NGO divide began to assume more radical political identities. Many of those NGOs that had argued that rape represented genocide began endorsing the actions of their own governments and refusing to acknowledge the crimes committed by those fighting on ‘their’ side. While this move was welcomed and supported by their individual governments, the international feminist-activist community became alarmed by what it saw as an increasing alignment with right-wing and nationalist politics. It began to exclude these NGOs from the international feminist-activist community, effectively casting them in the role of pariahs. Meanwhile, many of the NGOs that had argued against the focus on rape and ethnicity began to be fêted by the international feminist-activist community, while, within their own countries, they were branded by their governments and national media as ‘feminists’ and ‘traitors’.
Split discourse
The rejection by the international feminist community of NGOs that were arguing that rape was part of a broader genocide against their ethnic group had some noticeable negative effects. The Serbian NGOs fared particularly badly in their claim that Serbian women were being raped en masse. The international vilification of Serbians as the ‘bad guys’ meant that Serbian women NGOs with nationalist leanings gained little credence with this argument outside their own ethnic and nationalist networks. Although not vilified by the international political community, the Croatian and Muslim groups claiming rape as genocide were shunned by the international feminist-activist community, and consequently failed to attract international funding. In turn they were forced into closer partnerships with their governments and nationalist and religious NGOs. Their voices were thus limited to networks within their own countries, and to some international Catholic and Muslim organizations.
However, in Croatia, two of these NGOs (part of a broader network of Croatian and Bosnian Muslim NGOs) working with displaced Croat and Muslim survivors in Zagreb had a modicum of success when they hosted the visits of the North American authors Beverley Allen and Catharine MacKinnon. Beverley Allen’s publication, Rape Warfare, grew out of fieldwork undertaken with these groups. What is noticeable in her book is that she does not reference the NGO split, nor does she note the subsequent difference in local readings of rape. Women from the NGOs on the other side of the split, commenting on Allen’s text, voiced concern as to whether Allen was aware of the differences in opinion and interpretation. They also expressed concern about the possible nuancing of the evidence provided to Allen by the host groups, and the type of respondents to whom she was given access.
Similarly, Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘Turning rape into pornography: postmodern genocide’, which originally appeared in the July/August 1993 issue of Ms. magazine, used information from these same groups without referencing the split. More worryingly, MacKinnon failed to indicate how she came about the primary sources she cites for some of her evidence on how and why the rapes took place. Noticeable, even in the titles of both these authors’ works, is the fact that they follow the ideological lines of these NGOs in interpreting the rapes as Serbian-perpetrated genocide. What should also be noted is that the fieldwork undertaken by Allen and MacKinnon has afforded these publications academic kudos. Both are key starter texts used by new researchers, and thus may have had a considerable impact on the development of theory.
On the other side of the NGO split were Croatian, Bosnia-Herzegovinan and Serbian NGOs that were urging the international community to look at the feminist implications of the Former Yugoslavian rapes, challenging theorists to look beyond genocide for other motivating factors. The feminist analysis NGOs accessed funding and support from feminist-activist groups, and from a range of international NGOs working on sexual violence, gender and conflict, and conflict negotiation in multi-ethnic communities. They became part of the Za Mir (For Peace) electronic network, which enabled communication to cross international borders without challenge, linking Former Yugoslavian NGOs to each other and to the international NGO community. The prolific nature of electronic mail, and the number of electronic mail-bases that replicated Za Mir material in whole or in part, meant that these groups were in contact with an audience that would probably come under the broad umbrella description of ‘alternative’, some of whom were feminist academics. Thus these NGOs managed to influence and infiltrate feminist academic opinion by tapping into alternative networks of communication. There is evidence that a number of feminist academics drew on these networks. However, few academics have acknowledged the split and the difference in local interpretation. Indeed, it is uncertain whether those commenting knew of the split, given that electronic material often became separated from the context of its host mail-base. Metaphorically, the exchanging of electronic material was akin to the passing on of a newspaper cutting, or journal article, without knowing its source or political identity, other than that it was feminist.
Many of these Former Yugoslavian NGOs that were part of the Za Mir network also published reports that explained the group’s reading of rape, but that focused primarily on their praxis, that is, the work being done by these NGOs with survivors. Some also published books based on local and international conferences that they had organized. One group, Medica Mondiale, a German/Bosnia-Herzegovinan NGO, published a critique of the ICTY. However, these groups had little input into mainstream publications. Most of their reports and books had small print-runs and were distributed by the groups themselves. There is, then, little in the way of hard (as opposed to virtual) secondary texts from these groups.
Reading politics
What is noticeable about the local NGO split, and the differences in interpretation of the rapes, is the political basis of the debate. The polarization of the NGO standpoints is a paradigm of the way in which ideological identity can affect the reading of an event. Yet, what we hear too little of, in the historiography of recent catastrophic events, is the effect that religious or political identity can have on the development of a dialectic explaining and historicizing those events.
In this case, one side of the ideological divide, the Croatian NGOs that read the mass rapes as genocide, was hugely influential in kick-starting the debate. Before the split actually took place, one of these NGOs sent out the first press releases breaking the news of the rape camps, defining them as a ‘tactic of genocide’, of a ‘final solution’. This reading was replicated by the media, international lawyers, Croatian and Bosnian governments, international governments, the UN and two iconic authors. Yet these NGOs received little actual recognition for their contribution to this reading. On the other side of the ideological fence were the Croatian, Bosnia-Herzegovinan and Serbian NGOs that advocated a feminist analysis of the sexual violence component of these rapes, as well as an analysis of the links between rape and genocide. These local NGOs failed to penetrate the mainstream media and opted for use of alternative media to reach communities of feminist activists, peace campaigners and feminist academics. In terms of publications, like the NGOs on the opposite side, they also received little recognition for their contribution to the debate.
Thus the ideological influences behind the theorizing of the debate went largely unnoticed or, perhaps, largely unattributed, particularly by academic theorists. This lack of referencing seems inexplicable and dangerous. By not exploring the ideological roots of a theory, does an academic collude with the elisions that are taking place within the various theoretical camps? If this is the case, then, by default, is the academic colluding with the violence itself? In addition, the academic who has used information from local NGOs but does not reference her/his sources for theorizing rape, therein also ignores, or masks, the work that NGO groups have done with survivors. Without their praxis, would the level of current academic debate on rape have been possible?
The separating off, at the level of theory, of academia and praxis, endures beyond the development of theory, to the heart of academic comment, that is, to its aims and objectives, to the message it is trying to get across. Is theory developed for theory’s sake? Or do academics developing theory on rape have the objective of future prevention within the aims of their theoretical discourse? The separation of praxis and academia arguably makes it more difficult to prevent these events from recurring. It also gives little back to the survivors, without whom there would be no theory.
Critiquing emergent academic theory
When the rape debate entered academic discourse it inevitably hit the disciplinary divide, according to which it was categorized and channelled into disciplinary pigeon-holes, such as history, politics, law, women’s studies, ethnic and racial studies. The effect was a watering down of the debate and a narrowing down of the discourses employed to suit the discipline. Exploration of the links between genocide and gender was mostly limited to law, ethnic and racial studies/international relations, and feminist analysis.
Leading law
Most of those commenting on the international law on rape were feminist lawyers (including Catharine MacKinnon). Rhonda Copelon, a North American legal academic, led international feminist legal theory with a number of publications commenting on the Former Yugoslavian rapes. In 1994 she commented on the setting up of the ICTY and its future role in trying the perpetrators of mass rape. Copelon questioned why the Former Yugoslavian rapes had attracted global attention, and a reading of ‘genocidal rape’, when there were a number of other cases of ethnically motivated rapes, in other parts of the world, that could be read as genocide. She quoted the examples of genocide-driven rapes in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Liberia, which have, so far, gone unchallenged by the international community. Unfortunately, Copelon did not answer this particular question (possibly because its remit extends beyond international law to the field of cultural studies).24 She concentrated, instead, on the term ‘genocidal rape’. Deconstructing it into its component parts ‘genocide’ and ‘rape’, she argued that these needed separate legal consideration on their own terms.
The elision of genocide and rape in the focus on ‘genocidal rape’ as a means of emphasizing the heinousness of the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia is thus dangerous. Rape and genocide are each atrocities. Genocide is an effort to debilitate or destroy a people based on its identity as a people, while rape seeks to degrade and destroy a woman based on her identity as a woman. Both are grounded in total contempt for and dehumanization of the victim … From the standpoint of these women, they are inseparable.
Copelon endorsed the jurisprudence of the ICTY, but warned that in the current legislation the ‘import for other contexts in which women are subjected to mass rape apart from ethnic cleansing is not clear. The danger, as always, is that extreme examples produce narrow principles.’
Commendably, Copelon wrote the survivor of rape into her analysis. However, her conclusion that survivors see genocide and rape as inseparable is questionable; its rigidity suggests a lack of knowledge of the survivor community, or the possibility that she had not talked to a wide range of NGOs working with survivors. Copelon wrote later in the same article: ‘Every rape is multidimensional.’ Although she was referring to the motivation of the perpetrator, this thesis should be extended to survivors’ explanations for their experience of rape. From interviews with NGO activists who have worked with survivors, my own conclusions are that most survivors will have multiple and, at times, contesting readings of why they were raped. For some, ethnicity leads as the perceived explanation of their experience; for others, a sexual-violence reading has more meaning. However, what stood out, during fieldwork in Former Yugoslavia, was the need for more research into the role that some NGOs have had in influencing a woman’s reading of her experience. Activists from some of the NGOs, in which rape was read as genocide, hinted that their therapists and counsellors had explored that reading with a survivor, and that the reading itself may have helped a woman to rationalize what had happened to her. Similarly, in some NGOs in which rape was read as sexual violence, activists made references to exploring this reading with a survivor. In a therapeutic sense, either reading may have been useful to survivors. Understanding the motives for rape can enable recovery, particularly if a woman acquires, or holds on to, a strong ideological identity throughout this process. In the longer term, though, there is the question of the effect on a survivor’s political trajectory. Does such a politicized reading of rape create nationalists or feminists out of survivors? If so, what effect will this have on the future generations of Former Yugoslavia?
International relations: gendercide versus feminism
In 1994 Adam Jones, commenting in the field of international relations with a controversial piece on gender, ethnicity and the rapes in Former Yugoslavia, was extremely critical of the feminist reading of war-rape as it stood. Initially a lone voice, but now a leading light in what he terms the ‘gendercide’ debate, Jones contested feminists’ narrow foci on the rapes within both the media and academic theory. He argued that ‘… feminism is in some respects constrained by its normative commitments and by the distinct standpoint by which these commitments arrive’; that is, feminism has its limitations because it derives from women’s experience. In the case of Former Yugoslavia, he argued that the focus on the rapes within the genocide debate had occluded male (in particular younger, ‘battle-age males’) experiences of violence, torture (including sexual torture) and genocide in Former Yugoslavia. Extrapolating this further, to genocides per se, he argued that men experience more sexspecific violence, in particular gender-selective killings, and, when it comes down to numbers, there are always far fewer male survivors.
Although Jones’s argument is tenable (and there are a number of feminists that concur that the genocidal killing of men should be studied on its own ‘merits’), it is also extremely problematic because of his insistence in placing his argument in opposition to the rape debate. The effect on Jones’s own argument is to make it seem narrow, tendentious and uninformed. It forces the reader to imagine that the feminist debate on rape focuses solely on genocide while at the same time excluding all other victims of genocide. There is no room for an inclusive or sophisticated feminist reading of rape or genocide.
In more recent work and in his work with the NGO Gendercide Watch, Jones corrects this imbalance by removing his focus from the rape debate. The group Gendercide Watch has admirable aims in attempting to monitor the occurrence of sex-selective verbal and physical violence towards ‘outgroups’ of men and women throughout the world, noting that these are the early warning signs, the precursors to genocide. Nevertheless, Jones’s 1994 article remains on public record as a commentary on the rapes in Former Yugoslavia. Its tendentiousness, its opposition to the feminist debate on rape, gives it an appeal to the anti-feminist, and promotes an inter-gender tension. It also detracts from the strengths of his original thesis and his current work, which, if combined with the work of those working on alternative progressive feminist analyses of gender-specific violence, as outlined in the conclusion of this paper, would formatively change the debate on sexual violence in war.
Academic bandwagonism and the politics of testimony
My criticism of Jones’s work lies not only with his championing of male victimhood in the face of a perceived feminist hegemony, but also with his use of ‘borrowed’ testimony to illustrate gender-specific genocide. In exoneration of Jones, this criticism is not limited solely to his work, but extends to a broad range of academics, and others, writing at the time. The use, or rather abuse, of testimony is pervasive in mid-1990s writing on the violence in Former Yugoslavia. Some writing is more problematic than others. For example, Slavenka Drakulić, normally a writer with some integrity, appeared to jump on the testimony bandwagon when she wrote an article on rape in 1994. Her methods of investigation appear crude and ethically suspect. However, the work of Stiglmayer and MacKinnon is also particularly problematic in terms of both ethics and style. What causes me concern is that, since their work tends to be used as primary texts by new researchers, it may have established a genre in terms of the way in which future writers will use testimony when commenting on mass rape and genocide.
Stiglmayer’s lengthy article on the rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina might illustrate this argument. Her interest in the subject evolved out of an existing involvement as a journalist in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, and her journalistic background permeated her work in terms of style and hard-nosed investigating, as she freely admits in her introduction.
In order to get to the bottom of the matter, my friend and colleague the American journalist George Rodrigue and I set out for Bosnia-Herzegovina to find other women with similar stories. Psychiatrists had told us that raped women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the danger is more immediate, would be more likely to speak about what they had suffered than women who had escaped to the safe-haven of Croatia.
What immediately struck me in this introductory piece was that Stiglmayer seems to have had little understanding of the mental health of her respondents, or consideration of the ethics in gathering testimony. This, unfortunately, is very much in keeping with many of the journalistic methods that were being used in Former Yugoslavia during the wars. In terms of style, what is problematic with Stiglmayer’s text is the way in which she uses testimony as data, while employing journalistic devices to make that testimony believable and readable, effectively using testimony to hook the reader. Her method is relatively simple: she introduces each survivor, then quotes edited portions of testimony that include graphic descriptions of sexual violence, the range of emotions felt by women and the conditions that women endured during imprisonment. The effect is curiously unsettling, imbuing testimony with a voyeurism that can only be compared to the genre of hard-core pornography.
MacKinnon has much in common with Stiglmayer. Her analysis of the links between pornography and rape in Former Yugoslavia, which appears in the same volume as Stiglmayer’s article, employs similar devices to those used by Stiglmayer. MacKinnon describes, in horrific detail, the pornographic scripting of rapes, the positions women were made to adopt by the perpetrators, the language used and the filming of rapes. As in Stiglmayer’s piece, the effect is one of voyeuristic hard-core porn, ironically closer in style to the pornography that MacKinnon lambasts than to an academic text.
What one might question, perhaps, is why, when Stiglmayer’s and MacKinnon’s texts were published in English in 1994, were they not criticized as journalistic, voyeuristic or ethically suspect? Instead, they were academically accepted as evidenced-based articles that formed part of a volume edited by Stiglmayer herself, to which several renowned and academically respected western feminist academics contributed, including Ruth Seifert, Susan Brownmiller, Rhonda Copelon and Cynthia Enloe. Indeed, Stiglmayer’s volume continues to be referenced by academics without criticism. Similarly, it has been deemed academically acceptable for a number of other academics to use graphic testimonies of violence almost routinely in their texts. I suspect that time and the location of these events has much to do with this phenomenon. The immediacy of the events, the fact that they were taking place even as we read about them, gave them a news-room urgency that suspended normal rules of style, of what is acceptable and unacceptable, pressuring academics and lay readers alike into engaging with these texts. The location of these events, the fact that they were taking place in Europe, occurring to women who were different, but not too different from those reading about them, also contributed to attracting the horrified voyeur in a predominantly European and North American readership. Yet this doesn’t quite explain how voyeurism became acceptable and ‘normal’. Renata Salecl cast some light on this, when she theorized about why people empathized with those directly experiencing the conflicts in Former Yugoslavia: ‘The first response is “something like this could have happened to me”. This is the kind of imaginary identification when we perceive the suffering victim in a mirror image—as the possible image of ourselves.’
Extending Salecl’s thesis further, it is the difference, in conjunction with a perceived similarity, between those people who testified to rape and the people who read their testimony, that has allowed voyeurism. Identifying as similar, but different, allows the reader to create a boundary between her/ himself and the victim, so that the testifying victim becomes removed and objectified as ‘other’. This removal, this objectification, allows the reader to suspend the rules on what it is acceptable or unacceptable to print and read.
Yet it should be noted that the acceptability of Stiglmayer’s and MacKinnon’s texts was reinforced by the juxtaposition of other, seemingly academically respectable texts next to their articles. This juxtaposition acted as an endorsement of MacKinnon’s and Stiglmayer’s work, persuading the reader that it must be academically credible. This issue of academic credibility needs examination. I suspect that a lack of precedent in examining rape in an academic context is a central issue in considering the phenomenon. The mass rapes in Former Yugoslavia were, in a sense, unique. It was one of the few times that mass rape had been publicly reported by survivors, had come to the attention of the global media, and had caught the public imagination for a sustained period of time. This, in part, is the problem. The difficult nature of rape testimony, its overarching sexual theme, exacerbates the problems for those who are reporting/commenting/writing on the rapes. How does one present a graphic testimony of sexual violence without subscribing to voyeurism, and without privileging the perpetrator? Should one be attempting to do this? Is this one of the dangers of an evidence-led discourse?
The closest parallel to this academic dilemma is probably the study of the Holocaust, in which, in some academic, as well as populist, accounts of killings, sexual slavery and dehumanization of victims and survivors, authors have used testimony to create voyeuristic narratives of perpetrator violence. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s internationally acclaimed, recent work on the Holocaust might be considered such an example. Critiquing Goldhagen’s style, Tony Kushner argues that, in the text, ‘Jewish voices, either from sources or more often as imagined by the author, are there purely to show the full horror of Jewish mass murder’ (my emphasis). Kushner observes that, as a result, Goldhagen’s text ‘verges on the pornographic’.
Kushner’s criticism of Goldhagen exemplifies a broader problem surrounding the purposes for which testimony is used, as embodied in MacKinnon’s, Stiglmayer’s and Goldhagen’s work. All three of these writers are driven to convey horror, to shock their audience. There is an implication in their texts that they, as keepers of testimony, have a duty to do this, that testimony must be used for political ends, primarily to re-educate. However, this feels like extremely suspect political territory. Should a writer be using testimony to shock? Is this not, as Kushner argues in reference to Goldhagen, akin to pornography? What are the limits of representation? Indeed, should there be limits?
Do the experiences and personal reactions of survivors have a greater validity? Although some academics (myself included) are morally squeamish regarding the Goldhagen book, many survivors applauded the tone and content of the book. This forces me to reappraise my position and my argument. This tension between the academic and the survivor is foregrounded by Joanna Reilly et al. who observe, with regard to the Holocaust, that: ‘Many survivors fear, not without reason, that the Holocaust could, in the hands of insensitive academics, lose its human dimension.’ This observation bears equal weight with regard to the future study of the recent conflicts in Former Yugoslavia.
What, then, of the Former Yugoslavian testifiers themselves? Stiglmayer writes of her respondents: ‘When they faltered and began to cry, I myself often had a lump in my throat.’ It is possible that, at this particular point in time, these women needed to give their testimony, and that Stiglmayer’s emotional engagement and her empathy made her more accessible, more spontaneous, more human, than a counsellor, a UN investigator or feminist academic. It is also possible that, if these women were to read Stiglmayer’s article, the horror would be acceptable to them because the political purpose of their testimony was based on a need for the world to know the horror of what had happened to them. Perhaps, then, this is what respected feminist writers also saw in Stiglmayer’s work when they chose to collaborate with her.
Although this discussion appears inconclusive in terms of how one should interview survivors and how one should treat their testimony, what it demonstrates is how little we know about the needs and feelings of those giving testimony. This ignorance, endemic within both the academic and the human rights community, extends to our knowledge of the long-term effects of testifying.
What also emerges from the analysis is the way that survivors have been written out of their stories at the publishing stage by those to whom they have entrusted their testimony. The problems of representation, inclusion, style and tone are matters on which Former Yugoslavian survivors and witnesses have not been consulted. This highlights the fact that the experience of testifying is, in essence, very one-sided. Whether a researcher writes as a populist author or an academic, the physical act of collating testimony for publication is essentially a selfish one because the ego and career of the person who will be controlling that testimony is bound up in the process of gathering it. The people collating testimony rarely consult those testifying about their experience of testifying, the representation of that testimony and the after-effects of testifying. The case of Former Yugoslavia, at this particular juncture in time, represents a rare opportunity to redress this process, while at the same time contributing to a nascent body of debate on testimony
What is missing from this analysis is the link between the ICTY evidence-led discourses reviewed earlier in this article and the use/abuse of testimony. The dominance of this evidence-led discourse should not be underestimated; it had a definitive effect on the way in which theory was presented and illustrated. Developing theory through evidence is part of an established positivist tradition but in the study of mass rape it inevitably leads to the use of testimony to illustrate that theory and accordingly to a debate on the limits of representation. My concern, though, is that the damage has been done, and that the use of testimony is so well established as a genre that it is hard to challenge. Indeed, it seems to have become so ingrained that there is a wholesale borrowing of testimony from secondary texts. All those commenting in this field probably know the range of well-used apocryphal rape stories/quotes that have done the academic rounds and can easily be drawn on to illustrate a point. This has led to a further degrading of the worth of testimony.
Advocating a progressive feminist analysis
As well as leading to the problems of style discussed above, the almost casual over-use of testimony has led to a point in the development of theory at which testimony no longer needs to be used. Instead it can be alluded to, or it is present through its absence, because the writer and the reader know what these testimonies would say if they were used. Rejali’s text, which summarizes the current state of play in feminist analysis of rape, demonstrates that feminist analysis is evidence-led and thus, by association, built upon testimony. The phenomenon of alluded to, or absent, testimony is, therefore, dominant within this field. My concern is that the nature of this debate—the fact that we have been habituated to testimony and are driven by an evidencebased culture of study and research—is fossilizing the debate on the rapes in Former Yugoslavia, and the broader debate on gender and genocide. What the debate needs is a change in direction, method and theoretical influence.
There are theoretical avenues that have been under-explored and which could reform and revitalize the gender and genocide debate. Here I would like to focus on one particular avenue that informs feminist analysis, is broadly interdisciplinary in nature and thus accessible to scholars from many disciplines. It was initiated by the Croatian academic/statistician Silva Meznarić in 1994.Identifying with the need for a local feminist analysis, Meznarić gained international recognition, within the feminist academic community, for her contribution to a volume edited by Valentine Moghadam. Meznarić used her local political and statistical knowledge, as opposed to drawing on testimony, to critique the links between ethnicity and rape within the rape debate. Although she concurred that women were being raped because of their ethnicity, she argued that focusing on a woman’s ethnicity endorses the concept of ethnicity as a ‘marker’ of women, identifying them, or rather objectifying them, as the possession of a particular man, family or group. Meznarić reasoned that recognizing rape as a crime against a given ethnicity gave weight to the perception of raped women as ‘damaged goods’, which led to the perception of rape as a weapon of war and, therefore, a reading that rape in war is inevitable. Extrapolating this argument further, reading rape solely as genocide encourages a view that women will always be targetted for rape during genocide. It does little to challenge or prevent this view, and it does little for the rehabilitation of a survivor. Meznarić’s focus broke away from genocide and ethnicity to a consideration of inter-gender relations. She looked to the example of the ‘Kosovo rapes’, a rape myth that flourished in Kosovo in the 1980s (and may have influenced the incidence of rape in the 1991–5 conflicts). The ‘Kosovo rapes’ derived from a rumour that Albanian men in the province were trying (but failing) to rape Serbian women. Meznarić read this as anti-Albanian propaganda, but expanded her reading to look at the effect of this rumour on Serbian women. She argued that, through its insistence that Serbian women in public places were in danger of rape from Albanian men, the rumour instilled fear ‘in women of entering into the public domain …’ It was a way of ‘disguising the opposition between men and women that inevitably accompanies women into the public domain in traditional societies’.
Mirjana Morokvašić, who is also a local academic, concurred with the need for a feminist analysis that looked at the background of Former Yugoslavian gender relations. Developing Meznarić’s argument, she linked the raping of women to the growth of nationalism in Former Yugoslavia during the 1980s. Morokvašić argued that nationalism had an effect on local perceptions of women, whereby there was an increase in overt sexism and an ‘othering’ of women. She argued: ‘Turning rape exclusively into a crime against an ethnic community obscures the fact that women are raped because they are both the female “Other” and the “ethnic Other”.’ According to this reading rape is motivated by misogyny engendered by a nationalist, masculine discourse. The sex of the survivor/victim is as important to the perpetrator as her ethnicity.
Morokvašić’s argument looked away from evidence and looked, instead, to social structures. These are not the social structures mentioned by Rejali, which pertained specifically to rape and the difference between genocidal/war rape and so-called ‘everyday’ (non-war) rape. Morokvašić’s social structures were much broader; she attempted to identify what it was in pre-genocide Former Yugoslavian society that made men rape women. This focus on social structures has also been developed in Sabrina P. Ramet’s interdisciplinary volume of essays on gender in the Balkans. The volume draws on the research of a group of American, Yugo-American and Former Yugoslavian scholars who examine a range of social structures within Former Yugoslavia, including family hierarchies and the relationship between mothers and sons, homosexuality, constructions of gender in Serbia, religion and gender in rural Croatia. Although the volume represents an eclectic grouping of material, the combination of research methods and subject matter creates an original and novel interrogation of the Former Yugoslavian social order. Its gaze is directed at the private and the family, where gender and sexuality are first negotiated, and the way in which the private informs the public.
The work of Meznarić, Morokvašić and Ramet represents a starting point in looking beyond proving that the rapes took place and were sexually or ethnically motivated. It initiates an debate on the role of the public and private in shaping the citizens of Former Yugoslavia who comprised the perpetrators and victims of rape, those who colluded, those who ignored and those who resisted and contested these events. It represents an intellectual route that attempts to explain violence rather than prove and describe it. It is an interdisciplinary route that can raise the debate from its narrow and limited focus on Former Yugoslavia to a global examination of mass rape, one that is applicable, for example, to the under-researched cases of rape in Rwanda, Indonesia, Ecuador, Bangladesh. Perhaps equally important, it can also privilege and include marginalized local voices. In the longer term it could contribute to a body of theory that changes the nature of the current debate on gender and genocide from a data-led, evidence-based categorization of rape, to a debate on why rape takes place in different societies experiencing genocide.