Five - Tactical rape in the former Yugoslavia

Summary

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated a style of warfare where civilians were targeted, where international intervention happened within a context of new understandings of the limits on sovereignty, where a tribunal that was deliberately an ad hoc entity extended judgments regarding tactical rape and sexual violence as contraventions of established international law. It became:

… the paradigm case, from which different lessons are drawn, the example which is used to argue out different general positions, and, at the same time, a laboratory in which different ways of managing the new wars are experimented.

The judgments of the ICTY provided a base in international law for recognising that tactical rape and sexual violence were issues of security for women, for communities and for states. The rate of convictions has been criticised, and as will be seen later in this chapter, handover to national judiciaries has been problematic. International law is justifiably criticised for being male-centric and for setting a context that neither recognises the needs, capacities nor the realities of women.

While acknowledging this essential nature of international law and the many shortcomings of the international tribunals (detailed later), I argue that it was due to working with established law that significant progress was made in recognition and response to tactical rape and sexual violence in conflict. There is much still to achieve, but this was a beginning. The establishment of legal precedents was not an end to bringing perpetrators to account, but it did open one route to doing so.

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995 concerned Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs and Croats. Muslim nationalists wanted a centralised independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serb nationalists wanted a Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia. Croats wanted an independent Croatian state. In March 1992, Bosnia declared independence, conflict broke out and the Serb Republic was proclaimed. The Serbs then began a process of ‘ethnic cleansing’. In April 1992, a report by the Secretary-General to the UN General Assembly and Security Council noted:

Ethnic cleansing is the direct cause of the vast majority of human rights violations which have occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the present human rights emergency began in March and April 1992.

In early August 1992, reputable media reports were widely published about the Omarska Prison Camp in Northern Bosnia, telling of violations including torture and rape.