With the end of the Cold War, the formerly communist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, generating bitter conflict. The province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, characterized by a multi-ethnic population of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Bosniak Muslims who had lived in relative harmony for years, became the scene of the most gruesome episodes after a referendum for independence in 1992 (for details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_referendum). Some Bosnian Serbs (a minority within the province) dissented and were supported by nationalists in Serbia itself, including the arch-nationalist Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who backed a Bosnian Serb militia.

The war that ensued saw several notorious episodes of 'ethnic cleansing' (see www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/international/bosniareport.shtml) now regarded acts of genocide. The most serious occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995 when an estimated 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id4wtBJHMdU, and www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdMOG3gJvYs (Warning: some people may find the content of these videos upsetting.)) The subsequent trial of one Serb leader, Radislav Krstić, produced a statement in the Appeals Chamber Judgement following his case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY (for this tribunal see www.un.org/icty/) , which summed up the character of the incident:

'By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. ….' (ICTY, 2004).

Female civilians among the Bosniak Muslims and some other groups were subjected to a different kind of treatment. From an early stage, accounts emerged of women being raped as part of a systematic tactical pattern which included the phenomenon of rape camps where women were subjected to multiple rape, often with the intention of impregnating them with 'Serb' babies (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grbavica_(film)). This came to be seen as part of the wider pattern of genocide, and was also practiced during the Serb campaigns against Croatia and Kosovo. In 1995, a charge of rape was brought in the ICTY, the first time ever that a sexual assault case had ever been prosecuted as a war crime by itself, and not as part of a larger case. The estimates of the number of women raped during the war run as high as 50,000.

The slaughter of men and boys on the one hand, and the systematic rape of women on the other, during this war, illustrate gendered aspects of warfare resulting in the most extreme forms of group violence. In recent years, rape in war (which can also be perpetrated against men as an attack on their masculinity, although it is much less common) has achieved much greater prominence as an issue in the narration of war histories generally. Previously the crime of rape had been the 'hidden atrocity' of warfare; few people, for example, knew that an estimated 2 million German women had been raped by members of the Soviet Army at the end of World War II, or that about 200,000 Bangladeshi women had been subjected to a similar ordeal during their country's war of liberation against Pakistan in 1971 (for a discussion see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_rape). It has been alleged that American soldiers in Vietnam used the same tactic to undermine the morale of their enemies (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6yXxvKtnEY). (Warning: the content of this video may be upsetting for some.)

The example of Vietnam shows that the atrocity of mass rape can be perpetrated during war for a variety of reasons. Victorious male soldiers, already brutalized themselves from combat, can regard women as part of the 'booty' of war. If they capture women after a single battle of a more protracted struggle, they might use rape as a psychological weapon against remaining male combatants, who will be made to feel that they have been unable to protect their wives and sisters. Equally, (as in the example of the Soviet Army in Germany), rape can be inflicted as a way of wreaking vengeance on the population of a country which has caused untold suffering at home.

The atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia were probably the most shocking because the results of this conflict were reported in detail almost as they were happening. Thus it quickly became known in the West that adult men and boys were being separated from women before being shot by the Serbs; it took little imagination to guess what was happening to many of the women. The idea that women were being held in rape camps seemed to be an extension of the crazed 'logic' of the ethnic cleansing which was clearly a central element of the Serbian strategy. The sudden realization that rape was a key weapon of war probably ensured more publicity for cases in other continents, like the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 (for details see http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CE5DA1530F936A25756C0A963958260).

While rape in any circumstances is an appalling crime, the phenomenon of war rape raises complex issues. While some victims of rape find it impossible to live with the memory of violation, many others do live to report their stories. By contrast, in the Bosnian war many non-combatant males were executed out of hand. After the Battle of Naseby (1645) during the English civil war, members of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army came across a large group of women 'camp followers', most of whom were in fact soldier's wives. Instead of herding them into rape camps, they killed more than a hundred on the spot, disfiguring their faces to signify that they were considered to be prostitutes. Even today, Cromwell's army is generally regarded in England as a body of god-fearing patriots. If they had raped the women before killing them, their reputation would probably stand lower. But is it less of a crime to kill any non-combatant without first violating them?

Further reading:
Beverely Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovia and Croatia, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. (For a review see www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/bookrev/allen1.html)