Dialogue,
N° 21, March 1997

 

The Victimization of Women:

Rape and the Reporting of Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1993*

 

Norma von Ragenfeld-Feldman

Berkeley, USA

 

Summary: The focus of this paper is on the way German and American news media dealt with rape against women in the first year of Bosnia's inter-ethnic conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. Virtually from the outbreak of the war in the spring of 1992, reporters accused the Serbs of launching a massive, pre-planned campaign of aggression against the Bosnian Muslims. Using mass rape as a conscious instrument of a war of conquest, the Serbs allegedly violated and tortured tens of thousands of-primarily-Bosnian Muslim women in order to achieve their territorial aim of an ethnically cleansed "Greater Serbia." In short, mass rape in the Bosnian war constituted an integral part of the Serbs' plan to either expel or annihilate the non-Serbian population of the region. Examining some of the reasons for this extraordinarily one-sided view of the Bosnian rapes, this paper attempts to demonstrate to what extent it rests on exaggerated numbers, dubious facts, and the misuse of evidence. It also points to the detrimental effects which the use of evidence as a tool in political conflicts has on the attempt to arrive at an objective or accurate view of events of war and their participants. Furthermore, it indirectly raises the question as to the dangers of such instrumentalization of evidence for the purpose of condemning rape or in the struggle against male violence generally. Ultimately, such a procedure implies the reduction of women themselves to instruments of precisely the kind of (usually male dominated) politics and propaganda from which they have been trying to liberate themselves.

 

In the fall of 1992, with Bosnia-Herzegovina in its sixth month of appalling ethnic conflict, reports of rapes that were being committed on a massive scale became the shocking headline news in Western Europe and the United States. Particularly shocking about these rapes were their enormous scope, their extraordinary brutality, and the fact that, reportedly, of the three warring groups the Serbs were the perpetrators. According to the press, up to 60,000 rapes occurred alone in the period of April to November 1992, and the terror of rape was magnified by reports of repeated beatings and other tortures as well. Sexual violations were said to be frequently carried out in numerous so-called "rape camps," set up in Serb-controlled areas to facilitate the systematic brutalization of women. The other characteristic feature of the Serbian rapes, as disclosed by the media to an increasingly outraged public, was that they formed an integral part of the official Bosnian Serb "ethnic-cleansing" policy against the Muslims. The policy itself, press and television repeatedly charged, was rooted in the preconceived plan of the Bosnian Serb government and military to rid Bosnia of its Muslim population; this would be achieved through a series of genocidal sweeps, of which systematic "mass rape" of Bosnian Muslim women was the centrepiece.

In the months following this grim newsbreak, the United Nations (UN) and the European Community (EC) set up official fact-finding commissions, while other international organizations, semiofficial and private groups, and reporters- individually or as teams-also conducted inquiries, involving the gathering of testimonies from rape victims or secondary accounts from eyewitnesses.¹ Already the first findings of international investigative commissions, made available to the public at the end of 1992 and in the spring of 1993, diverged sharply from the media's insistence on Serbian "mass rape" affecting more than 50,000 victims.² The line of division henceforth ran between international agencies on the one hand and a host of reporters and political commentators on the other. Both sides generally agreed on the horrific nature and widespread occurrence of rapes in Bosnia, as well as their systematic use as an instrument of terror against civilian women. Their disagreement over the Bosnian rape issue concerned three major aspects which became closely interrelated in the media, namely, that rape occurred massively and systematically so as to warrant the accusation of "genocide," that the Serbs-to a lesser extent also the Croats-were the perpetrators, and that the Serbs used rape-predominantly of Muslim, but also of Croatian women-as a tool to implement their predetermined genocidal program of "ethnically cleansing" Bosnia of its Muslim population.

These disparities, above all, have prompted the following examination of the Bosnian rape issue. The gap between the assessments of international fact-finding (and, later, war crimes) commissions, on the one hand, and an ever growing number of media reports on "mass rape" and "genocide" in Bosnia, on the other, was immense. Who was right?- The host of journalists, political commentators, and academic authors with their insistence on the enormously high number-between 50,000 and 60,000-of rape cases? Or were the international agencies to be believed, whose estimates amounted to 20,000 in January 1993, steadily decreasing in the course of 1993 and later years to 2,400, then 800, and finally to estimates of 330 documented cases, a fraction of the original assertions in the media? Did it indeed make a difference whether it was 50,000, 20,000, 2,400, 800, or 330 women in Bosnia who were raped by the Serbs (and sometimes by Croats)? After all, a rape is a rape, a terrible crime, an age-old instrument of terror against women,³ and one or a few are too many, giving justifiable cause for outrage.

It was not the wide divergence of statistical figures per se, of course, that was worth examining, but the specific interpretation which hinged on them. Enormous numbers of Muslim rape victims, within a short span of six months no less, were central to the allegation that this was a case of genocide and that the Serbs were culpable. Thus, from the moment the rape issue was publicized, the media propounded the close correlation between the extent of rapings by Serbian forces and the existence of a calculated policy involving the mass expulsions and mass killings of Bosnian Muslims. This goal, supposedly, to achieve a Greater Serbia through territorial conquest and purification, drove Serbian forces to prosecute this war as a genocidal war. In this sense, the astronomical figures cited by the media testified to the systematic policy of genocide as well as to the fact that the Serbs were the genocidal rapists and killers.⁴

These and other issues concerning the representation of the Bosnian rapes in the media and, to some extent, the literature on the war in the former Yugoslavia form the subject of the following paper. Since the view that the Serbs were the perpetrators a