The New York Times

June 14, 1998

An Old Scourge of War Becomes Its Latest Crime

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

U NITED NATIONS -- They strike without warning, bringing terror to
an apartment in Algeria, a Chinese shop in Indonesia, a squalid
refugee encampment in Africa or a Balkan farming village under
siege. They are shadowy men with causes so blinding and hatreds so
deep that they have transformed modern warfare into orgies of
primordial savagery -- raping, brutalizing, humiliating, slashing
and hacking women and girls to death.

More civilians than soldiers are being maimed and killed in the
wars of nationalism and ethnicity that are the hallmark of the
century's end, wars fought in neighborhoods rather than
battlefields.

More to the point, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the
new style of warfare is often aimed specifically at women and is
defined by a view of premeditated, organized sexual assault as a
tactic in terrorizing and humiliating a civilian population. In
some cases the violators express a motive that seems to have more
in common with the tactics of ancient marauding hordes than with
the 20th century -- achieving forced pregnancy and thus poisoning
the womb of the enemy.

International attention first focused on the use of rape as a
tactic of warfare in Bosnia, where a U.N. commission and human
rights groups found that ethnic Serb paramilitary groups had
systematically tolerated or encouraged the raping of Bosnian Muslim
women as part of the effort to drive Muslims from their homes and
villages between 1991 and 1995.

Rape was also employed by Hutu troops against Tutsi women in the
genocidal campaign Hutu leaders conducted in Rwanda in 1994. Last
year, women who have identified with secular culture in Algeria
accused desperate rebels fighting in the name of Islamic revolution
of kidnapping them and making them sex slaves.

In Indonesia, reports are surfacing that suggest members of the
security forces may have been among the men who raped ethnic
Chinese women during rioting last month.

And in the Balkans, Serbs are again emptying towns of a rival
ethnic group -- this time Albanians in Kosovo -- and human rights
and women's groups are monitoring the growing violence for the
possibility that rape will again be one of the techniques.

None of this is the essentially random rape that traditionally
follows conquest, intolerable though that is; it is different even
from forcing conquered women to be prostitutes for the victors, as
Japan did in Korea during World War II.

The difference is that in all four recent cases, sexual degradation
and intimidation -- often public -- seem to have been used as a
strategy of ethnic or religious conflict itself.

This use of rape as a premeditated act of warfare is challenging
anew the efforts by nations of the world to organize effectively to
prevent and punish crimes against humanity, a monumental task that
moves into new territory tomorrow with the opening of a treaty
conference in Rome to create the world's first international
criminal court.

Largely because of the systematic use of sexual assault in ethnic
wars in the Balkans and Rwanda, the court is expected to rank rape
as an internationally recognized war crime for the first time in
history, alongside violence against noncombatants, mistreatment of
prisoners, torture and other unusual punishments.

Widney Brown, an advocate with the women's rights division of Human
Rights Watch, echoed other experts when she said that rape "has
probably been an issue in every major conflict, but what happened
in Bosnia, particularly with the creation of the rape camps, really
brought it to light."

In the Balkans, where soldiers of every faction were accused of
rape, the discovery of areas where Serbian soldiers confined
Bosnian Muslim women to be raped shocked many. "In Yugoslavia rape
was a part of ethnic cleansing, because the message that you got
was if you stayed, the men would be murdered and the women would be
raped," Ms. Brown said.

"That was followed very quickly by what happened in Rwanda, where
we have similar widespread allegations of rape and mutilation," she
added. "In fact, part of the preliminary campaign that created the
atmosphere that allowed the genocide to happen was the demonization
of Tutsi women as oversexualized creatures who were seductresses.
It's not surprising that during the conflict they were subjected to
rape, and a lot of sexual mutilation. Mutilation is another way of
saying, 'We don't perceive of this person as a human being.' "

For about five years now, ad hoc tribunals have been hearing
allegations of war crimes, first in the Balkans and later in
Rwanda, and these tribunals have already decided to consider rape a
war crime in those conflicts. Since they have been serving as
small-scale models for the permanent international court that is
just being formed, that court is expected to follow suit.

"These tribunals were literally forced to pay attention to a series
of petitions and pressures from women's organizations demanding
that rape be recognized," said Felice Gaer, an expert on human
rights and international organizations for the American Jewish
Committee. Ms. Gaer said that ultimately the support of Justice
Richard Goldstone, the first war crimes prosecutor for the Balkans
and Rwanda, succeeded in elevating sex crimes to the level of
genocide and crimes against humanity.

This was the first step taken by nations trying to tackle
collectively this new scourge of war. But women are drawing up a
longer list of gender-related crimes in wartime, and promise a
battle to have them recognized by the International Criminal Court.

Ken Franzblau, who tracks the sexual exploitation of women for
Equality Now, a New York-based organization that aids women in poor
nations and immigrant women here, said rape is so widespread now
because it is so effective in ethnic wars.

"It has such devastating effects on communities, particularly in
traditional societies or very religious communities where the
virginity and the fidelity of women can be central to the makeup of
that society," he said. Rape is a psychological grenade thrown into
the middle of daily life to provoke maximum terror. "That's why you
see a fair number of these rapes committed in front of family
members of the girls or women involved," he said.

Some analysts believe that the fast pace of international
communications today may be a factor in the rapid recurrence of the
use of rape as a tactic of war in such widely separate parts of the
world. But if that is true, it is also evident that rapid
international communication has played a role in stirring
international outrage about the tactic.

Over the last decade, there have been significant changes among the
vulnerable women themselves. Women who were the victims of sexual
abuse in the name of ethnic purity, nationalism and sometimes
religious zeal have begun to speak out, often aided by human rights
organizations and women's crisis centers. For many, this has been a
revolutionary change.

"Lots of women just committed suicide in the past," said Charlotte
Bunch executive director of the Center for Women's Global
Leadership at Rutgers. "That's one very clear thing that's
beginning to emerge now. In this decade, the outrage that women
have been able to raise about the issue means that people are
reporting it. But the truth is that there is also a backlash about
women speaking out. There may be some moments before we reach a
point where there is enough outrage to get the phenomenon under
control."

The phenomenon takes human form in a number of recent accounts
reported by journalists. Take the story of Nawal Fathi, who was
captured by militants in Algeria in 1996, made into a sex slave and
raped by a score of men before being rescued by government troops.
A psychiatrist who treated her said that despite a year of medical
treatment, Ms. Fathi committed suicide at the age of 24 last year.

In Jakarta, aid workers were quoted last week as saying that
hundreds of ethnic Chinese women had been sexually assaulted during
the looting of Chinese neighborhoods, apparently by organized gangs
that may have had links to security forces. "Some of the attackers
said, 'You must be raped because you are Chinese and non-Muslim,' "
one woman recalled. Again, a number of women have killed themselves
rather than live in shame.

Although militants in Algeria and roving gangs of rapists in
Indonesia are Muslims, the phenomenon is probably not related to
religion, though radical religious views may provide justification
to an elemental misogyny.

The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, for example, has repressed
women but its holy warriors have not abused them sexually, as their
predecessors in the Mujahedeen armies were frequently accused of
doing, Afghan women say.

Roman Catholics butchered other Roman Catholics in Rwanda and
Burundi. Sex slaves are also a hallmark of the vaguely evangelical
Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. Burmese troops in Myanmar, a
Buddhist country, are accused in a new report from the human-rights
group Earthrights of using rape as a weapon against women from 20
or more ethnic minorities or student groups that oppose the
military regime.

Because women displaced by ethnic warfare or other forms of mass
violence are often not safe even in refugee camps -- or arrive
there pregnant through rape -- United Nations relief agencies and
some private groups have begun to offer gynecological services and
the "morning after" pill, which prevents conception.

Although this practice has been sharply criticized by anti-abortion
groups in the United States, the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees, Sadako Ogata, and others have continued to provide help
to abused women.

At Equality Now, Franzblau said the kind of sexual abuse that took
place in Bosnia, where Serb rapes of Muslim women were numerous and
intense personal hatred was directed at neighbors, not some distant
stranger at an enemy gun emplacement, makes the impact much worse
and stokes the fires for the next round of strife.

"That's why it is going to be very difficult to reconcile these
communities," he said. "How can you move families back to homes
where a mother or daughter or sister was raped by a next-door
neighbor?"