#radly

What the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s (Yugoslav and Rwanda wars) showed was that sexual violence of women was a way of acting revenge against the male opposition. Women weren’t seen as actual combatants or enforcers of the opposing regimes but as the women belonging to the Bosnian or Tutsi men. It was about defiling the wives, daughters, mothers and sisters of the men they hated.

Moreover, women are targeted with rape in ethnic conflicts specifically as a way of “breeding out” the other ethnic population. With rape comes forced impregnation, increased female infertility, and overall psychological trauma. In the eyes of men this will led to the opposing ethnicity being “bred out”, because it is the man’s “seed” that prevails over the female’s “incubation”.

Cindy Snyder in “On the Battleground of Women’a Bodies: Mass Rape: in Bosnia-Herzegovina”, explains that enacting sexual violence against women has long been considered as symbolic of the “rape of a nation” in conflicts. In Bosnia, because women were predominantly valued for their reproductive capabilities, they were particularly vulnerable to sexual violence as “the potential repositories of future soldier-sons, symbols of the nation, yet the property of the nation.”

The half-Serbian children born to raped Bosnian women, were wholly Serbian in the eyes of both groups. The women who were raped faced added social ostracization from their own communities, because they had been “defiled” by the opposing ethnic group.

In the wider context of the Israeli-Palestine conflict this takes on a specific meaning with the need to “out-populate” the opposing ethnic group. And you may be thinking that because Israelis are the oppressor group, it’s illogical to compare it to the Serbian rape of Bosnian women. But we also saw the inverse when the historically oppressed majority Hutu enacted mass sexual violence against the historically oppressor Tutsi minority in Rwanda. Thus, in both the Bosnian and Rwandan wars, women were targeted with sexual violence as a way of enacting patriachy-influenced genocide. Its why we have to consider sexual violence as completely divorced from other acts of violence (often born from desperation), because it’s purpose is completely removed from that of actual resistance. This isn’t to say Israel have not and will not utilise rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, they have and will, and it will be equally abhorrent.

The overall point is that the way men wage war on whatever side they are, leads to sexual violence because women are considered only in relation to men. They aren’t considered actual people, just vessels to enact male hatred and violence.

Further Reading:

1. Campbell, K. (2003) ‘Rape as a ‘crime against humanity’: trauma, law and justice in the ICTY’, Journal of Human Rights.

2. Clark, J.N. (2017) ‘Untangling a rape Causation and the Importance of the Micro Level: Elucidating the Use of Mass Rape during the Bosnian War’, Ethnopolitics.

3. Farewell, N. (2004) ‘War Rape: New Conceptualisations and Resolutions’, AFFLIA.

4. Reid-Cunningham, A.R. (2006) ‘Rape as a weapon of genocide’, Genocide Studies.

5. Schmitt, R.M. (2011) ‘War rape, Natalie’s and genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research.