In the early 1990s, a story broke in the British tabloids of the brutal rape of thousands of Croatian and Bosnian women by Serbian irregulars. On the front pages was a picture of what was quickly dubbed a rape baby.
Older journalistic hands were skeptical. This was the first time I heard the term “the fog of war”; there was an assumption that the rape story was simply the usual anti-Serb propaganda.
After a week of phone-bashing in London, I learned that the allegations of mass rape had originated with a Croatian women’s group who had been getting reports from women who said they had been raped. From there, the story was passed on to a German feminist magazine and was picked up by one of the German mass circulation news magazines before making it across the Channel to the UK.
As part of my background research, I read Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking study, “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” published in 1975, which documented the use of rape in warfare as an element of warfare, as an aspect of the subjugation of the enemy alongside other techniques like ethnic-cleansing. Rape in war, she asserted, was less to do with sex than it was with violence. There was a tendency for women not to be believed when they alleged mass rape.
The story of the mass rape by Serb paramilitaries of Bosnian and Croatian civilians began to assume a currency in the media. Figures as high as 55,000 raped women were being quoted.
Why was this a story now, when it had not been before? The International Red Cross conceded that for a woman to report a rape in wartime they would have to find an interpreter, probably male, and then present herself at their offices to give an account of the assault to a male officer. What was different in Croatia and Bosnia was that this was the first war that had been monitored by women’s organizations, which received reports and collected data.
We will never know how many women were raped in Bosnia and Croatia.
What we do know is that mass rape occurred and it was not a specific aspect of Serb brutality. There has always been rape in war. What this war did was to bring it out of the shadows, out of the dismissive in attention that accompanies the phrase “war propaganda”, or “the fog of war.”
Rape is as much a fact of war, of the control of civilian populations, as ethnic cleansing. It took a modern women’s movement to collect the data and a critical mass of women journalists to insist on writing about it. From then on, rape in war would be taken seriously.
With the arrest two days ago of Radovan Karadzic, and his forthcoming trial in The Hague, there might now be some debate about justice for the women so abused.
It was also, perhaps, the first war in which women were, in increasingly large numbers, gaining high-profile positions in journalism. After the piece came out, I was contacted by Veronica Waddley, then features editor of the Telegraph (now editor of the Evening Standard). She told me that the foreign editor had read my piece in the Independent on Sunday and felt that I had a point; that perhaps these mass rapes really had happened and would I like to go and see for myself. I had no experience as a war correspondent and was advised it was extremely dangerous to go to Sarajevo, but I accepted the commission.
In Zagreb, a farcical situation developed. I had been warned in no uncertain terms not to enter Bosnia without press credentials issued by the UN but due to a bureaucratic snafu, they had run out of the actual cards. Holed up in a grandiose Fin de Siécle hotel, eating a heavy diet of flambéed cherries, I went every day to the UN office to try to get my press card, and every day returned empty-handed. I had a flak jacket and an interpreter, but nothing to do and nobody to interview.
It was the first time in my career that the well-known phrase “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” came in handy, so I went to do a tour of the hospitals. There, an additional complicating factor became apparent. I interviewed the doctor who had delivered the rape baby, whose picture featured on the front of the tabloids. Do the sums, he told me — the baby had been conceived before the Bosnian war started. In his opinion, the mother was terrified of telling her parents she had allowed herself to get pregnant by her boyfriend. The figures for births had not spiked since the start of the war. That did not mean that he believed there had been no mass rape.
A number of factors could, he suggested, have depressed the numbers of pregnancies. During the heavy shelling, many women ceased to menstruate. Free abortion on demand was available up to 12 weeks. But yet more disconcerting were the statistics themselves. How many women had been raped? The numbers were impossible to collate. Some women had been raped multiple times by gangs of paramilitaries. Did that count as one rape or dozens? Either way, it could only result in one potential pregnancy. On other occasions, one rape had been witnessed and reported by dozens of eyewitnesses.
Another day, I interviewed a psychiatrist who had been caring for patients traumatized by war. Jungian-trained, she told me that in the early stages, she regarded the lurid stories of mass rape as aspects of unconscious desires. Only after hearing several similar accounts did she start to believe that these were accounts of real rapes that had actually happened, just weeks before.
Then there was the question of the infamous “rape camps”. The word camp conjures up an image of barracks, barbed war, guard towers. What had actually happened was that Serb irregulars would move into a town, commandeer a small motel or school, round up a group of women and incarcerate them there for nights of drugs, drink and rape. In the mornings they would head off to war high on ecstasy, the first time this drug had been used in wartime, leaving one of their number behind to guard the girls and return in the evening to get even more smashed and rape some more. After a week or two they would move on, to the next town.
We will never know how many women were raped in Bosnia and Croatia. What we do know is that mass rape occurred and it was not a specific aspect of Serb brutality. There has always been rape in war. What this war did was to bring it out of the shadows, out of the dismissive inattention that accompanies the phrase “war propaganda”, or “the fog of war”. Rape is as much a fact of war, of the control of civilian populations, as ethnic cleansing. It took a modern women’s movement to collect the data and a critical mass of women journalists to insist on writing about it. From then on, rape in war would be taken seriously.
With the arrest two days ago of Radovan Karadzic, and his forthcoming trial in The Hague, there might now be some debate about justice for the women so abused.
