A Passion to Understand: Rape

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

Prijedor: An Anatomy of A Genocide

Kozarac memorial [Source: Ranko Cukovic/Reuters]

If there were a guidebook for preparing for a genocide, it is likely that it would include several fundamental steps. The budding genocidaire would be advised to seek out a society characterised by increasing socio-political tensions, preferably in the grips of a war or economic collapse. The media would be used to conduct a campaign of propaganda, vilifying one ethnic group and blaming them for the ill fortunes of another. Radio and news stations would need to be taken over, newspapers controlled.

The enemy would need to be identified, dehumanised. The coup de grace would be getting the enemy to participate in identifying themselves, making them carry passbooks and identity cards, wear arm bands or paint their doors. And then you kill them.

If this reads as flippant, it is certainly not meant to be but it underlines the precise reason why genocide education is so important. After the horrors of the Holocaust, there is no way that the painstakingly well-planned and systematic genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia should have gone unnoticed before it was too late, but they did. And they followed a frighteningly similar pattern to that described above.

Prijedor is a town in north western Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the 1991 census, prior to the war in 1992-1995, Bosniaks formed 43.9% of the town’s inhabitants, 42.3% were Serbs while the rest were Roma, Ukrainians, Croats and Serbs. In the aftermath of the war, 94% of the Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats had been removed from the area in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that saw Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats murdered, raped and interred in concentration camps.

It began shortly after Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in 1991. A local Serbian newspaper Kozarski Vjesnik began to print propaganda, instilling fear of local Bosniak and Croatian populations and imploring Serbs to arms themselves against these perceived threats. The statements were inflammatory and emotive, using historically loaded terms such as Ustaše and Mudžahedini to refer to Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks respectively. The local radio station Radio Prijedor was taken over, as was the television transmitter station.

There were rumours abounding of a document known as the “Silent Night”, a list of Serbian intellectuals, political leaders and community figures that were supposedly being targeted by Bosniak militants. Such propaganda paved the way for the the next phase of identification and removal.

It is reported that on 31 May 1992, the Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor issued a decree that all non-Serb civilians should mark their houses with white sheets or flags and that they should wear white armbands when out of their homes. This was witnessed by European Commission Monitoring Mission observers in August 1992 and is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews during the Holocaust, yet nothing was done to stop the upcoming extermination.

Thousands of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats died in Prijedor and the surrounding villages and thousands more still were forcibly removed from their homes, raped, executed and arrested and sent to nearby Keraterm, Omarska and Trnoplje camps. Inhabitants in camps were subjected to further regimes of torture and beatings, many to the point of death, and widespread rape and sexual assault of both male and female prisoners occurred.

It could be said that a blueprint of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews was taken and applied precisely against the local non-Serb population in Bosnia and just as entire regions of Poland and Europe remain cleansed of Jews, so have regions of Bosnia been cleansed of non-Serbs. It beggars belief that this happened in 1992.

Tomorrow marks 20 years since Bosnian Serb authorities decreed that non-Serbs should identify their homes and persons with white sheets, flags and armbands. To this day, and in spite of ICTY judgements, local authorities have not apologised for or acknowledged these atrocities.

To this end, 31 May is marked as White Armband Day Worldwide and you are invited to show your solidarity with victims of mass atrocities committed in Prijedor and around the world by wearing a white armband or placing a white sheet or flag on your window.

Visited the Stop Genocide Denial website for more details.

Seeking Justice for Nepalese Victims of Rape

Nepalese Woman uploaded by David Orgel on Flickr

Nepal was torn apart by a decade of violence and civil war that ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed on 21 November 2006. Gender-based violence was a key feature of this conflict and women were raped and brutalised by both the government forces and the Maoist rebels.

In October 2011, it was widely reported that Justice still eludes Nepal's civil war rape victims. Five years after the peace agreement was reached, hundreds of women who suffered rape and torture at the hands of armed forces are yet to receive justice. Rape was viewed by the government’s Royal Nepal Army to be a legitimate form of torture and many women were arrested, detained and tortured on charges of aiding or supporting the Maoist insurgents.

In her book Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict, Jane Leatherman estimates that 40,000 Nepalese children were illegally detained by Maoist insurgents during the conflict and tortured, sexually violated and recruited for military activity.

Victims face multiple hurdles when seeking justice for these attacks. Despite widespread reporting of the atrocities by organisations such as Amnesty and in reports that appeared in the mainstream media (see: “Children suffer in Nepal conflict”, BBC, 2005), the majority of Nepalese women remain silent about their ordeals. Rape victims are stigmatised and rejected, especially if the rapes result in pregnancies.

Nepalese human right rights activists have received constant threats of violence which has further contributed to the silence of victims in the country. In January 2009, Nepalese radio journalist and activist Uma Singh was hacked to death by 12 to 20 men in her room. Her only crime was to raise awareness of the levels of violence against women in Nepal (see: “Nepal radio journalist murdered”, BBC, 2009).

It is important to note that the sexual violence against women and children that occurred during the armed conflict did not occur in a vacuum but against the backdrop of a patriarchal society where men’s status is elevated and women are forced to remain in subordinate positions.

The United Nations Population Fund in Asia (UNFPA) has uploaded a video titled “Silent Tears: Gender based Violence in Nepal”. In the video, they note that:

“Gender-based violence is widespread in Nepal. Male dominance and female subservience is at the root of violence against women. 95% of the women and girls surveyed reported that they had personally experience violence, 77% of them from their own family members (SAATHI). nearly 58% reported that such violence was a daily occurrence.”

You can view the video at the end of this post.

Despite these hurdles, a survivor of violence during the armed conflict has come forward but local police are refusing to register her complaint. The Advocacy Forum Nepal reports that the police invoked a law which states that rapes had to be reported within 35 days of the incident. International law prohibits such limitations on rape and, in fact, the Nepal Supreme Court issued a directive to the Nepalese government in 2006 to amend the law and remove all conflicts and limitations in serious crimes such as rape.

There has been no progress on this case since the beginning of October 2011. Despite the many incidents of sexual violence during the conflict, this is the first case to be lodged with the District Police Office. Human rights organisations continue to lobby the government in this case and it will no doubt have serious consequences for other women seeking justice across Nepal.

Silent Tears: Gender based Violence in Nepal

Bosnia: Rape a Legacy of War

“The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina may have ended fifteen years ago, but for so many of the nation's women, the legacy of wartime rape lives on.”

The use of rape in the war in Bosnia was so systematic and pervasive that the Geneva Convention was modified to include rape. When rape is widespread and systematic, it is now recognised under the Geneva Convention to be a crime against humanity or war crime. When it is committed alongside the intent to destroy, in part or whole, a targeted group, rape is now considered to be an element of the crime of genocide. (See: Rape as a War Crime)

At least 20,000 women were raped in the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. They were often raped repeatedly or by gangs and rape camps were set up in towns around Bosnia. Mass rapes also took place during the Rwandan genocide, in Kosovo in 1996 to 1999, in Darfur, and currently in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Their problems haven’t gone away because time has passed. They relive their traumas every day,” says Faris Hadrovic, head of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The video above follows the journey of Enisa, a survivor of the campaign of rape during the Bosnian war. It is powerful in that it puts a human face to the suffering that was endured by thousands of women in the region. Enisa is president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors which is a Bosnia organisation which seeks to provide support to the surviving inmates of concentration camps. The provide physical and psychosocial support to survivors. Of the more than 2,000 members of the association, a quarter were raped.

Two things struck me about this video:

Enisa was about the same age I am now when the war broke out. We have similar interests (she worked as a social worker) and similar pursuits. We are the same, we are both women, we are both just living our lives.
The men that committed these rapes are, for the most part, walking free and living their lives. The organisers have been prosecuted in some cases but the perpetrators have not significantly been pursued or identified.

(If you struggle to follow the video in parts because of the simultaneous interpretation, you can read the script or view the shorter news piece entitled Bosnia: Rape a Legacy of War).

Video: Sound of Silence Bosnia: Rape, Legacy of War

Photographer Armin Smailovic's photographic portraits of survivors of sexual violence during the 1992- 1995 war.

“No one may ever be able to determine how many women in Bosnia and Herzegovina were sexually abused during the 1992 – 1995 war…

… or how many children were born of sexual violence”