'Rape camps' were set up by the Serb military to impregnate Bosnian women and - for the first time - rape is being treated as a war crime. Although Milosevic is not directly implicated, his 'final solution' was to breed out the Muslim population, writes Clodagh Mulvey
More than 20,000 Muslim women and girls were raped in camps established by the Serbian army during the civil war that destroyed Yugoslavia. Rape was used as a cynical weapon of war in a conflict that was about ethnicity.
Impregnated by Serbs, Bosnian Muslim women became the pawns in genocidal warfare.
Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, in a nationalist bid to create a Greater Serbia, orchestrated a series of wars within the former Yugoslavia beginning in 1991 with the Serb invasion of Croatia, followed by Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 and finally the 1998-1999 Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
In Bosnia, the human rights of at least 20,000 women and girls, as young as 12, were violated in the extreme at Fóca, a small city south-east of Sarajevo and the seat of some of the most notorious detention camps established by the Serbian army during the war. For four months, from April to August 1992, Muslim women were detained at three "rape camps" within Fóca and subjected, daily, to torture, beatings and systematic gang rapes, by groups of up to 15 soldiers.
During the war, women were detained en masse until they were impregnated and held until it was impossible to have a termination.
In 1996, a legal landmark was set at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), when for the first time in history, wartime rape was given legal distinction by an international court. It was tried as a war crime in its own right, as opposed to one of a litany of offences that constituted a breach of the laws and customs of war, outlined in the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Evidence from Fóca provided the basis for that trial, in which two of the main Serb commanders there were convicted for ordering and participating in the rapes.
Dragoljub Kunarac (41), a Serbian army commander and Radomir Kovac (40), a sub-commander and paramilitary leader at Fóca, were last year sentenced to 28 years and 20 years imprisonment, respectively, for their crimes.
The UN indictment of Kunarac for torture and rape states: "Dragoljub Kunarac took FWS-75 and D.B. several times to his headquarters where his soldiers were housed. On or around 16th July 1992, Dragoljub Kunarac, together with his deputy, 'GAGA', took FSW-75 and D.B. to this house for the first time. When they arrived at the headquarters, a group of soldiers were waiting. Dragoljub Kunarac took D.B. to a separate room and raped her, while FSW-75 was left behind together with the other soldiers.
"For about three hours, FSW-75 was gang-raped by at least 15 soldiers. They sexually abused her in all possible ways. On other occasions in the headquarters, one to three soldiers, in turn, raped her."
Although no direct link has been proven between the actions of the Serb army in Bosnia and Milosevic, he has been linked to mass rape in Kosovo where he was commander of the armed forces. However, it is widely accepted that Milosevic's political ambition became manifested in the brutality of the Serbian army - the "final solution" being to breed out the Muslim population.
Bosnian journalist Tajma Kapîc suggests, however, that the military regime was not quite that straightforward. A survivor of the invasion of Mostar and a journalist for the resistance movement in Bosnia, Kapîc believes the Serbian army specifically and cynically attacked rural Bosnians and their particular belief system. She claims the rape camps did not affect those in cities such as Mostar as much as people from the countryside. "Those people that were collected and brought to those camps were all collected from tiny villages and rural areas," she says. Kapîc believes this was a deliberate move on the part of the Serbs, as rural Bosnians had "a totally different set of rules".
She claims abortion was widely available in Socialist Yugoslavia at the time of the war, but says rural people held more traditional values than most city-dwellers and "would not have considered it an option under any circumstances".
"The Serbian army and the politicians behind it, knew exactly what they were doing," she insists. "It was a tactic to destroy the morale of the people and of the army - while men were away fighting, their wives and daughters were being attacked physically and biologically."
American war correspondent Sylvia Poggioli, who won the 1993 George Foster Peabody award for her reports on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, agrees: "In Bosnia, the rapes were aimed at producing humiliation and shame and, specifically, the break up of the family - because that would ensure the family would never return to its home again. This was a very specific aspect of ethnic cleansing."
THE taboo associated with rape for many Bosnian Muslim women was also evident to those working with witnesses at the ICTY.
Wendy Lobwein, UN head counsellor with the Victim-Witness Protection and Support Group, says many women refused to testify to the tribunal because they didn't want to upset their husbands and family. Others simply wanted to leave the war's horrors in the past.
Women constitute just 20 per cent of all the witnesses at the ICTY, but represent the majority of sexual assault testimonies. And although many men have also testified to having been raped and sexually assaulted, Lobwein says she has noticed a distinct difference in the way men and women victims describe the attacks.
"What I find with men is that they'll add it into a litany of terrible events. They'll say they were beaten and their teeth were smashed and a rifle was pushed inside their anus. It will become one of the many tortures.
"Women will say, 'and I was beaten, and my teeth were smashed and then something terrible happened I can't tell you about'.
"Generally, I find that women are so impacted by a sexual crime, so violated, that it's difficult even for their mouths to say the words. Whereas I find that men aren't separating it out as worse than some of the other things that happened to them."
And it appears many Serbian men were also victims of the blood-spattered path to Greater Serbia. According to Tim McFadden, chief of the Detention Unit at the Hague, many former Serb soldiers have claimed they were forced to rape women.
On RTÉ radio last year, he said: "Many of them would say, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time - I was conscripted when the army was mobilised and I just found myself in a position where I was doing what I was told. The option to disobey meant I wouldn't know what would happen to me or my family."
Kapîc, however, says she knows the fate one Serbian soldier faced when he refused to rape an 11-year-old child. "The soldier had been friends with the girl's father before the war and when she was born her father had bought him a drink. He just couldn't do it and so they murdered him as an example to the rest of the troops."
As of two years ago, only 27 individuals had been indicted for sexual assault in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Fifteen people have been convicted.
International Criminal Tribunal for the fromer Yugoslavia website: www.un.org/icty/