War

Implicit in my chapter so far is the symbiotic relationship between sexual violence during armed conflicts and in more peaceable times. It is important not to position ‘war' as existing outside of broader societal practices, ideol­ogies and power struggles.

However, it is equally crucial not to conflate the two contexts. Mass rape in wartime requires significant planning: combatants have to be trained; propaganda disseminated; military hardware marshalled; racial and other intercommunal prejudices drummed up. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which interpersonal violence can take place, but also dramatically alters the nature of that violence. Compared to peacetime, wartime rape becomes an intensely public display of brutality; it could even be valorised as a patriotic act and one that facilitated emotional bonding

between perpetrators. The international research group SVAC (Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts) has been instrumental in analysing these particularly egregious components of wartime rape.^{[220] [221]}

The ‘violent' component of ‘sexual violence' is especially problematic when entire armies set about attempting to destroy each other. In armed conflicts, rules against violent behaviour can become extraordinarily relaxed. During the First World War, the most thoroughly documented instances of mass rape took place in Belgium and Russia. From the late 1930s, rape and enforced prostitution were a feature of the Japanese invasion of China. In Nanjing, for example, over 20,000 women were raped in 1937 alone. Indeed, every invading army during the Second World War proved to be rapacious. Sociologist J. Robert Lilly calculated that between 14,000 and 17,000 women were raped by American military personnel between 1942 and 1945.26 Notorious mass rapes took place in Germany, Russia, Korea, China, Japan, Italy and the Philippines.

Despite horrific levels of sexual violence during the Second World War, international law was sluggish in responding. The war crimes trials in Nuremberg ignored rape and other gender-based crimes. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East prosecuted rape, but as ‘inhumane treat­ment' and ‘failure to respect family honour and rights', rather than as a major war crime.

The catalogue of sexual violence in armed conflicts goes on and on. In 1947, the partition of Punjab between India and Pakistan led to mass rapes. During nine months in 1971-2, Pakistani soldiers raped around 200,000 Bengali women, 80 per cent of whom were Muslim. Some scholars believe that twice that number of women were sexually assaulted. In the 1990s, there was widespread rape as well as torture and killings in Timor, Sierra Leone and Guatemala. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, it was concluded that between half and 90 per cent of surviving Tutsi girls and women had been sexually attacked. An unknown number of Hutu girls and women had also been sexually assaulted, generally because they associated with Tutsi women or were in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time'.

In the twenty-first century, mass rape in Darfur was an attempt to drive populations out of valuable land and into the desert. As a genocidal strategy, it has been relatively effective. Another place where sexual violence was driven by economic incentives, internal political ambition, the weakness of state authorities and ethnic rivalries is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That conflict has been called ‘Africa's world war', since it is the deadliest war in the world since 1945. A thousand girls and women are raped every day; today, there are over 200,000 surviving rape victims in the DRC. One third of victims are children under the age of 18. Other conflicts that have seen sexual violence reach such extreme levels that it amounts to femicide include Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Croatia, Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Serbia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Zaire and Zimbabwe.

Even more than in peacetime, wartime rape communicates a powerful message between men: it has a symbolic value as an insult to the masculinity of the enemy. In the words of anthropologist Veena Das, ‘The woman's body... became a sign through which men communicated with each other.'^{[222] [223]} It was an indictment of these women's male associates: that they had patently failed to fulfil the unwritten ‘gender contract', under which men fight to protect women, who, in turn, provide them with nurture. Because women have been positioned as ‘biological reproducers of the collectivity' and ‘transmitters of its culture', their rape was a potent declaration of

28

dominance.

The trigger-point for international attention being paid to wartime sexual violence was the 1991-9 conflict in the former Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe. Mass rapes took place on all sides, but systematic and widespread violations were perpetrated by Serbian forces against Muslim women, Catholics and Croats. According to some estimates, nearly 20,000 women were raped. Women and girls were routinely violated in their homes; they were incarcerated in detention camps established explicitly for the purpose of rape; they were forced into prostitution; and at rape camps like the one at Foca they were deliberately impregnated, then forced to bring the foetus to term and give birth.

Feminists found themselves disagreeing vehemently on how to respond. The debate became: was national or female solidarity to be prioritised? On the nationalist side was American activist Catharine MacKinnon. She argued that the rapes were genocidal. In her words, Serbian-perpetrated sexual violence ‘are to everyday rape what the Holocaust was to everyday anti-Semitism. Without everyday anti-Semitism a Holocaust is impossible, but anyone who has lived through a pogrom knows the difference.'^[224] In contrast, the feminist group ‘Women in Black' warned against ‘the politics of instrumentalization of victims'.

The high levels of sexual violence during the break-up of Yugoslavia have been designated ‘rape as a weapon of war' (also called ‘rape warfare' and ‘strategic rape') taken to extremes. Should the violence be considered as ‘ethnic cleansing' by Serbian forces? There is general agreement that the mass rapes were part of an attempt to clear territory of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, with the intention of destroying their cultures. In the words of Kelly Dawn Askin, legal consultant and adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the methods of achieving ethnic cleans­ing were

not limited to physical elimination. For instance, a person may be sexually assaulted in order to be humiliated or emotionally destroyed or to be proven submissive or subordinate; a person may be raped in order to cause chaos or terror and/or to make people flee the area, effectively destroying the group; a woman may be raped in order to forcibly impregnate her with a different ethnic gene. Different tactics but with the same objective - destroying or removing the unwanted group.^[226]

But was ‘ethnic cleansing' a form of genocide? Should widespread, systematic rapes conducted by Serbian forces be regarded as genocidal or were they a dramatic extension of ‘everyday rape'? Was there a risk ofignoring the rapes carried out by non-Serbians? Notably, the first time that the ICTY judged rape to constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law (rather than a breach of the Geneva Convention) concerned a Croat defendant (Furundzija) while the second prosecution involved a Bosnian Muslim defendant who raped Serbian women at Cclcbici (Foca).

An important plank in the argument that the Serbian rape campaigns were genocidal lay in the deliberate impregnation of women who were then forced to give birth to what the rapists claimed would be ‘little Chetniks'. In other words, they assumed that infants born of rape would be Serbian. This is deeply problematical, and not solely for the obvious physiological reasons. This version of the genocidal argument accepts the ideology of the rapist that ethnicity is biological and paternal: that is, infants born of rape belong to the father. As legal expert Karen Engle put it, the belief that ‘if a Muslim egg were inseminated with a Serbian sperm, a Serbian child would ensure' too often went unchallenged.^[227] This socially constructed notion of biology, favouring the male, was particularly stark in the context of Bosnia, where there is little to differentiate Bosnian Muslims and Serbs genetically and where, prior to the war, around one-third of marriages in the region were inter-group.

In the international furore over the genocidal violence in both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, important legal precedents were established. In 2001, both the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda recognised rape as a crime against humanity, as opposed to a violation of men's property rights or an inhumane act. In the words of philosopher Debra Bergoffen, by

identifying rape, like torture, as a crime against humanity, the ruling affirms the principle of embodied subjectivity. It goes beyond past rulings on torture, however, in attending to the sexual realities of embodiment and in insisting that violating a woman's sexual integrity is a crime against humanity.^[228]

International scholars were jubilant; sexually violent perpetrators barely noticed.

It is important to reiterate, however, that ‘rape as a weapon of war' should not be allowed to dominate the history of sexual violence. As Miranda Alison reminds us, such a focus ‘misses so much'. It ‘means that sexual violence that occurs during conflicts but does not stem from a directed military strategy is either obscured from view or is, troublingly, assumed to be part of a military strategy instead of the deeper structures of power in any given society’.^[229] We should be just as wary of a ‘politics of exception' (wartime rape is worse than endemic abuse) as the ‘politics of accountancy’ (only once this threshold of victims is reached can it be labelled an atrocity).