Sexual violence in the Kosovo conflict: a lesson for Myanmar and other ethnic cleansing campaigns

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the patterns of sexual violence against Albanian women during the Kosovo conflict (1998–1999) as a weapon of the Milosevic regime’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. We used a broad combination of sources: a secondary literature of history and social science, human rights reports, trial records, our oral history of survivors, interviews with advocates and psychologists handling hundreds of survivors, and a subset of survey data of reported discrete incidents of sexual violence. Our focus on Kosovo as a single-case study rich in data allowed us to discern patterns that offer important insights for understanding how women’s bodies come to be sites of militarized violence in the context of ethnic exclusion and destruction. This carries policy implications for preventing the use of sexual violence in other conflicts, or, in the case of Myanmar military’s sexual violence against Rohingya women, to offer a roadmap for the prosecution of perpetrators.