Editors' Note: On the Subjects of Rape, Murder, and Plain Old Neglect

Abstract

Editors' Note On the Subjects of Rape, Murder, and Plain Old Neglect The systematic rape and abuse of women in Bosnia (mainly Muslims and Creations, but some Serbian women as well) have been widely publicized by stories in which individual women testify about their experiences . While this is a very vivid way to portray these atrocities, one has to wonder why survivor testimony has been the predominant format in the coverage. One reason could be that it is simply the most immediate and effective way of reporting crimes about which most women in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina would remain silent—crimes about which most women in most wars have remained silent. Another is that such accounts "sell" well with the public and make it easier for newspapers (especially the tabloids) and magazines to avoid dealing with the implications of such accounts or suggest positive ways of responding to such crimes. In other words, raped women become just another titillating way of increasing readership. Interestingly, the first stories about these atrocities that came from women in former Yugoslavia did not personalize the incidents. Instead, they named the individual "death and rape" camps, gave their locations, and provided as much demographic information as possible about the women in them. Among other things, the Croatian women's group, "Tresnjevika," pointed out that in the fall of 1992, women and children made up 75 percent of those then held in concentration camps in BosniaHerzegovina and 70 percent of those killed by the fighting.1 Why had the American press and U. S. and U. N. officials been portraying this as a war primarily between ethnically different male forces for territory? Why had the gender implications of "ethnic cleansing" not been reported from the beginning? Why were all-male camps singled out initially for television coverage? Why were stories from the female victims themselves required before equal attention was paid to the gang rapes and other sexual abuses of women? We all know why. It is a universal maxim that the female right to control their (women's) sexual, reproductive, and psychic well-being is not as important as the male right to control violence against their (men's) bodies and souls. The legal systems of all countries reflect this same bias. What harms men is important; what harms women is not or is deemed so "natural" that it eludes juridical consideration entirely. Women are always raped during wartime. The only time men take wartime rape seriously is when their side is losing and then they raise it as example of dirty tactics— an attempt to destroy their manhood and nationhood in a dishonorable 1993 Editor's Note 7 way—as if everything else about war was honorable. After peace is proclaimed the stories about rape or other violence toward women are usually written off as an exaggeration of wartime or, again, as such a "normal" part of warfare that it is seldom mentioned in postwar legal documents or trials. Until Bosnia. For the first time in the history of modern warfare, which is designed to destroy civilian populations as well as military forces, women all over the world have the opportunity to take the tragedy of Bosnian women to create something positive and permanent on behalf of all women. Rape must become a war crime recognized by the United Nations and the courts of the European community. It must become the first international issue in reporting wars rather than the last or the most quickly forgotten as were the mass rapes of Bangladesh women by Pakistani soldiers in 1971. It is also time to combine rape as a war crime with the fact that women are disappearing all over the world in such great numbers that they no longer constitute a majority of the planet's population. This could not happen except by design through aborting almost exclusively female fetuses in India and China or by the systematic neglect of the nutritional, medical, and health needs of women in Africa and Latin America. Technology will also make the former possible in most advanced industrialized countries once the separation of female and male chromosomes—now common in cattle breeding—is perfected for the human race...