Women, War & Peace Series
Mary Cassatt, c.1900
Just after my son was born, I remember hearing about mass rapes going on in Bosnia. I cannot remember where I heard about this, but I remember that not only were women being raped on a mass scale, but that the rapists were so brazen, they actually aired these rapes on their local television.
What stunned me most was that no one was intervening. Yet, we, the great USA, had spent $36 billion dollars invading Kuwait to stop the Iraqi invasion and protect our national ‘interests’.
Sitting in a sun-filled room, nursing my newborn son, I was totally smitten—gaga in love with my baby. Those were my halcyon days with both of my children, nourishing them from my own body, drunk with love. Two tiny lives born of love between a man and a woman. Becoming aware that a half a world away, that very act, which for me is sacred, was being ‘committed’ against women for the intention of erasing their humanity was bad enough, but the lack of any action of the part of not only my government, but any government was chilling. What was it that Edmund Burke had said?
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Fingerprints by Fredrik Ekren
Did none of these men—the good ones or the evil ones—have mothers? Had the entire world gone mad and forgotten where we all come from? I asked myself as I marveled at the miracle of my son’s tiny fingers and toes.
When my children were born, I was overcome with the most contradictory feelings—a sudden awareness that I was capable of killing anyone who would harm my child while simultaneously, I felt a tenderness that I had never felt before. I was aware I had crossed over into motherhood, just as billions of women before me had and billions after me would. The atrocities just did not compute. How could the world turn a blind eye? But we did.
Last Tuesday was the premiere of the first of a 5-part series called Women, War & Peace, called: I Came to Testify which is about that time in Bosnia and the courageous 16 women who stood up before International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague tribunal and testified against 3 Serbian military men from their own villages. These testimonies led to the first time that rape qualified as a crime against humanity, second only to genocide, as the worst of the worst crimes that can be committed. They were guilty of genocide too, but maybe it was politically incorrect to push your luck in the international courts…
“The rapes were used for not only the immediate impact that they had on women, but the long-term destruction of the soul of the community.” ~ Refik Hodzic — Tribunal Spokesperson & journalist.
Rape not only destroys the humanity and dignity of a woman, it renders her man impotent. It taunts: I can do whatever I want to YOUR woman and you cannot stop me. It aims to destroy the most primary part of a human being—where we come from. It emasculates the men of the culture as it defiles their most precious treasure. It turns women into objects to be reviled. It is worse than shitting on an altar. Its intention is to obliterate whole human beings while still keeping them alive.
Killing them would grant them more dignity– but they weren’t even worth that. Killing them would have actually been compassionate.
No, this was evil at its most flagrant. These men did not just DO evil things, they were Evil.
Even with such depressing subject matter, I Came to Testify left me feeling surprisingly empowered by these women who went against their pride and instinct for survival to testify anyway. One of the women said,
“I wasn’t ashamed. I was actually proud and full of strength. I looked into his face and wondered why HE wasn’t ashamed.”
These women spoke at length with such genuine sanity that, however long over-due it is, they changed the way the world sees rape. But don’t get too excited because we’re still a world away from this being a unanimous consensus in the world. Still, it’s progress from the first Nuremberg trials which dismissed prosecuting Nazis for rape so as not to ‘have a bunch of crying woman in the courtroom’.
The healing is as private as the wounds are from such horrific crimes but one witnesses said it all when she said,
I came to look him in the face. I came to testify.
Watch Episode 1: I Came to Tesify on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.
You can watch the entire first episode here:
Next Tuesday night, tune into your local PBS station for the second in the series of five and watch the remarkable documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the women of Liberia who’d had enough of war and put a stop to it by banding together, literally.
©2011 Stephanie Ericsson
I am a bit dissapointed with your article. First, you deliberately failed to mention that the victims of this mass rape were Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) women. Second of all, your tags indicate that Crimes Against Humanity were committed in Bosnia; no, that is not true — it’s GENOCIDE that was committed in Bosnia and against the Bosniak people.
The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between April 1992 and December 1995. The war involved several sides. The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and those of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina — ‘Republika Srpska’ and ‘Herzeg-Bosnia’. Both para-states enjoyed substantial political and military backing (overall control) from Serbia and Croatia respectively. NATO was involved in air-strikes against the Serbs.
Serbs committed at least 90 per cent of all war crimes in the Bosnian war, according to extensively documented 1995 report from the Central Intelligence Agency. (note: this report came to light in March of 1995, four months before the Srebrenica genocide)
The International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague proved — at least five times — that the Bosnian war was NOT a ‘civil war’ but an international armed conflict involving Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and NATO.
Bosnian Genocide was the brutal Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing — in which 1 million Bosniaks were displaced from their ancestral land, and 65,000 to 75,000 innocent Bosniak civilians and defenders killed (people had to defend themselves, so you can call them soldiers, but they are still innocent victims killed by those who sought racial purity in the name of “Greater Serbia”) during the 1992-95 international conflict that took place on a territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Bosnian Genocide was characterized by the policy of systematic rapes of Bosniak women and girls, horrific and prolonged siege and shelling of Bosniak cities, starvation and terrorization of Bosniak population in the besieged enclaves and targeted destruction of Bosniak culture and history.
It is clear who the perpetrators and who the victims were. To put things into perspective: During the war, not even one Serb city was under the siege by Bosniak forces; in fact, majority of Serb civilian casualties were killed by the Serbian army commanded by Gen. Ratko Mladic in the process of sniping and shelling multiethnic Bosnian cities like Sarajevo and Tuzla. Serb people and Serb culture were not deliberately targeted for ethnic cleansing, rape, siege, shelling, and destruction in Bosnia; it was the Serb project of “Greater Serbia”, modeled on a Nazi policy of ethnic purification, that inflicted tremendous suffering on the Bosniak people between 1992 and 1995.
Presently, there are four legal judgements in which genocide was proven to have happened in Bosnia, other than Srebrenica.
The four international judgments acknowleding that genocide, indeed did take place in Bosnia, other than Srebrenica, include: Prosecutor v Nikola Jorgic (Doboj region), Prosecutor v Novislav Djajic [Dzajic] (Foča region), Prosecutor v Djuradj Kuslic [Kusljic] (Kotor Varos) and Prosecutor v Maksim Sokolovic (Kalesija, Zvornik region). All three cases were tried in Germany — at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — to ease caseload of the ongoing trials at the Hague.
IN ADDITION, the United States court determined that Radovan Karadzic is liable for acts of genocide, rape and torture.
Currently, former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic are on trial for the 1992-95 Bosnian Genocide. They are charged with genocide in the following Bosnian districts: Bratunac, Foča, Ključ, Kotor Varoš, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica, Zvornik and Srebrenica.
Dear Daniel,
Thank you for your extensive comment. I can understand your disappointment with my blog post if you did not watch the film that it was about — I Came to Testify — which is specifically about how rape is being used as a weapon of war. However, I DID make the film available at the end of the post, so I hope you will watch it.
The ENTIRE film is about these Bosnian Muslim women so there was nothing ‘deliberate’ about not identifying them specifically. Whatever the ethnic or religious origins are of the victims, the fact that these were WOMEN — mothers, daughters, sisters, wives — was the point. Their testimonies and tens of thousands of other testimonies led to a landmark change in how rape is prosecuted in the international courts — as a crime against humanity — which is exactly what it is — whether or not it is used against Bosniak women, Congolese women or ANY woman. THAT is what the film is about. The perpetrators were specifically charged with ‘crimes against humanity’ for the rapes they committed. Their crimes of genocide are an entirely different matter, and although just as important, they were not within the focus of this film or my blog post.
I sought to describe my reaction, as a woman, and my horror about the fact that the world stood by as these atrocities were committed in full view. I am not qualified to comment on the imbroglio of the history of the Bosnian War, but anyone who wants to know more should go your excellent blog at
The series, Women, War & Peace, is “designed to advance international accountability in regard to women and security” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/women-war-and-peace/about/). It is not merely a film series, but a global initiative meant to not only to raise awareness of the realities of women’s lives as targets of modern warfare, but to stimulate dialogue and put pressure on the international community to include women as vital partners in bringing an end to war.
Steph Ericsson
To know more about the Bosnian War, you only need to click on Daniel Toljaga’s name above and it will take you to his website or go to (http://danieltoljaga.wordpress.com/). Apparently, my spam program did not like it when I put the link between <>!