Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Victims: An Examination of Women’s Roles in the Yugoslav Wars

A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in History

By Julia Schneider April 2021

Approval Page

This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of History

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Dr. Steven Miner Professor, History Thesis Adviser

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Dr. Miriam Shadis Director of Studies, History

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Dr. Donal Skinner Dean, Honors Tutorial College

Abstract

In this thesis, I will explore the three main roles that women played in the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-2001: perpetrator, bystander, and victim. Through examining these roles, I hope to draw an equal amount of attention to each of these roles and add new insight to current scholarly discourse on this subject. Furthermore, examining women in Yugoslavia will also reveal how gender influences modern conflicts, especially regarding sexual violence and the justice system. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that women, whether perpetrators, bystanders, or victims, experienced the war differently from men because of gender norms, because women were symbols of the nation, and because the identity of womanhood and their physical differences made them especially vulnerable to sexual violence. Furthermore, the Yugoslav Wars served as a turning point for understanding and prosecution of wartime rape, with the international community finally recognizing it as an intentional, organized strategy and as a crime against humanity. After examining primary documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, reading first-person accounts, listening to interviews from witnesses and participants, and consulting a wide variety of secondary and tertiary sources, I hope this project will prove useful not only to researchers hoping to better understand the Yugoslav Wars, but also those seeking to understand the gender dynamics of conflict and the crucial role of identity politics in modern warfare.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Historic Overview 1.2 Yugoslavian Identity

Chapter 2: Perpetrator 2.1 “An Example for Similar Cases”: Gender and Criminality 2.2 Gender and Nationalism

Chapter 3: Bystander 3.1 The Role of Bystander and the Duty to Testify 3.2 Barriers to Testifying

Chapter 4: Victim 4.1 The Body as a Battleground 4.2 Rape as a Weapon: Breaking the Taboo on Wartime Sexual Violence 4.3 Sins of the Father

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This project grew out of my years-long interest in Yugoslavia, my passion for gender studies, and my core belief in the power of individual stories. I hope this research will contribute to the larger scholarly conversation and raise awareness for the themes I present. I want to thank Mrs. Lisa Richards, whose courses taught me how to write nicely, precisely, and concisely. Her courses and her feedback challenged me, and I would not be the writer I am today without her influence. Thank you to the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College for the opportunity to conduct this research. Though it is imperfect and incomplete in many ways, I have learned much from the process. Thank you to the Ohio University Women’s Center and the Margaret Boyd Scholars Program, both of which have shaped my perspective regarding gender and its influence on cultures, societies, and people. Thank you to the staff at the Ohio University Mahn Center, whose guidance and expertise showed me the value of archival research. Although the pandemic prevented me from pursuing my original vision of an archival project, I hope my passion for archival work and primary sources carried through into this paper. Thank you to the outstanding history professors at Ohio University, and I am particularly grateful to the professors who engaged in one-on-one tutorials with me. Thank you to Janet Carleton, whose mentorship and advice regarding the archival field were critical to my studies during the past couple of years. Thank you to Dr. Miriam Shadis, whose advice and guidance have been instrumental throughout my research and my entire college experience. The biggest thank you goes to my thesis advisor, Dr. Steven Miner, without whom this thesis would not be what it is today. Thank you for all the sacrifices you have made to continue working with me throughout these challenging past few years. Thank you for everything, for suggesting additional sources, for our wonderful conversations and for reading and editing the many, many drafts I sent you. I cannot thank you enough for going above and beyond the normal expectations of a thesis advisor. You inspire me to continue to be a better student, a better writer, a better scholar, and a better person. This project would not have been possible without you. Finally, I want to thank all the men and women whose testimonies are vital to this thesis. I am so sorry for what you have endured. Through this project, I hope to give power to your experiences and your voices. Thank you for speaking up. You are not alone.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1.1: Historic Overview

Despite being one of the youngest countries in Europe, Yugoslavia was also one of the shortest-lived, existing from 1918—following World War I—to its demise in 1992. Infamously unstable and insecure, Yugoslavia consisted of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,

Serbia (including the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro, all with their own diverse ethnic groups and individual political interests. Southeast Europe was a region full of cultural exchanges, overlaps, and confrontations; centuries of imperial rule and powers clashing created a diverse land filled with multiple cultures, ethnicities, traditions, religions, and languages. The former countries of Yugoslavia had existed under the control of external regimes for most of recent history, with the exception of Serbia, making their struggles for independence in the 1990s extraordinarily revolutionary. The Yugoslav Wars were one of the less common instances in which the Southern Slavs fought each other rather than rebelling against a ruling, multiethnic empire.

The Yugoslav crisis, which began in 1991, was the series of political uprisings and secessions that resulted in the total dissolution of Yugoslavia. As republics within Yugoslavia attempted to secede, starting with Slovenia in 1990, Serbia unsuccessfully attempted to squelch growing independence movements to keep Yugoslavia united.1 As more and more republics within Yugoslavia declared sovereignty, the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian Army began to intervene militarily, independent militias heightened the violence, and the conflict turned bloody.

In the worst European atrocity since World War II, the Yugoslav Wars killed over 100,000

1 Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, From Gender to Nation (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2004)

1 people and displaced 2.2 million more.2 Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and rape occurred on a massive scale unseen in Europe since the Second World War, creating economic, social, and political repercussions that still fester today. Cultural monuments were destroyed, cities were shelled, and people were held in horrific detention camps where torture and mass rapes occurred regularly. Women, in particular, experienced sexual violence on a continuum ranging anywhere from the battlefield to the bedroom, and in all the spaces in-between. In response to the armed conflict in Yugoslavia, the international community formed the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to prosecute the individuals most responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and other war crimes that were committed. After the wars, the single state of

Yugoslavia eventually split into the republics on today’s world map. The international community now recognizes Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo as independent nations.3 The brutal fighting and extensive tragedies have also led to disagreement among the scholarly community as to how to approach and explain the crisis.

2 “Human Losses in Wars in Former Yugoslavia: Victims Should Be Remembered by Names Not by Numbers,” Humanitarian Law Center (Humanitarian Law Center, December 16, 2016), http://www.hlc- rdc.org/?p=33130&lang=de 3 Although Kosovo declared independence in 2008, the international response has been mixed. Russia and Serbia, among others, do not recognize Kosovo’s independence.

2

Map 1: Ethnic Groups of Yugoslavia, 19974

If any point in modern Yugoslavian history could be called the turning point for disintegration, it would be the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980. At the center of the entire

Yugoslav system, Tito exercised an enormous amount of political, economic, and diplomatic power in Eastern Europe. With the secret police as a frequent and valuable tool, Tito maintained

4 Source: Loring Danforth, “Economic Collapse and Nationalist Resurgence,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 2020), https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans/Economic-collapse-and- nationalist-resurgence

3 ultimate control and order through eliminating all potential political opposition or suppressing any dissenting voices. Today, some still remain nostalgic about Tito’s Yugoslavia, associating his presidency with relative peace and prosperity.5 Though he ruled with an iron will and could be considered a brutal dictator, he successfully balanced the needs of the republics and acted as one of the strongest forces holding Yugoslavia together. The general communist opinion on nationalism was delineated by Marx himself when he wrote, “The worker has no fatherland.”6

Tito understood his position as a Yugoslav communist and effectively maneuvered around existing nationalisms without allowing any of them to grow strong enough to challenge the dominance of communism. For example, Tito treated Vojvodina and Kosovo like independent republics to quell Serbia’s authority, a sentiment discontinued by his successor, Slobodan

Milosevic. Tito’s death had destabilizing effects throughout all regions of the country. In her memoir Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, Sofija Stefanovic describes how Tito’s suppression quelled nationalist sentiments, but left the country vulnerable after his death, “…now those who had asked fearfully ‘What will happen when Tito dies?’ were learning the answer. We were about to see that Tito’s banning of nationalism did not destroy it; that, in fact, it may have inflamed it, and that there were plenty of people who were ready to jump at one another’s throats like their forebears had done in the Second World War.”7 The ingredients of the Yugoslav crisis were already alive and brewing during his rule, and his death became another spark that helped ignite the wars.

5See Alan Crosby and Dragan Stavljanin, “Nostalgia Keeps Yugoslavia Alive A Century After Its Ill-Fated Creation,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, December 3, 2018), https://www.rferl.org/a/nostalgia-keeps-yugoslavia-alive-a-century-after-its-ill-fated-creation/29633060.html. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, 81 percent of Serbians and 77 percent of Bosnians believe the breakup of Yugoslavia harmed their country rather than benefitted it: see Elizabeth Keating and Zacc Ritter, “Many in Balkans Still See More Harm from Yugoslavia Breakup,” Gallup.com (Gallup, January 14, 2021), https://news.gallup.com/poll/210866/balkans-harm-yugoslavia-breakup.aspx 6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, England: Penguin Classics, 2002) 7 Sofija Stefanovic, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 86

4 Despite the region’s longstanding grievances and historic tensions, the sudden outburst of widescale violence in the early 1990s was quite surprising. Out of all the countries in the

Communist bloc, Yugoslavia was arguably the most exposed to western cultural influences and the most likely to embrace democratization. Many scholars once believed Yugoslavia had overcome its past divisions and could handle its own multiculturalism, with Susan Woodward, expert on the Balkans and political science, writing, “On the eve of the revolutions in eastern and central Europe, Yugoslavia was better poised than any other socialist country to make a successful transition to a market economy and to the West.”8 A common misconception at the start of the war was that Yugoslavia would inevitably break apart due to ancient ethnic hatreds, a belief held even by US president Bill Clinton.9

Contrary to popular belief, Yugoslavia was never doomed from the start. These atrocities were avoidable. “Genocide is not usually the initial policy choice. Rather, genocide is the outcome of a process of fluid decision-making in which events, interactions, interests, ideology, and actors shape the trajectory of violence. Genocide is also a phase within a longer, broader pattern of majority-minority, state-opposition, or inter-group conflict.”10 In the modern era, violence often breaks out suddenly and massively. Conflicts can be intrastate and led by non- state actors, rather than formally declared and led by militaries. The conflicts explored in these readings are a new, complicated, messier kind of warfare, and they require a new political approach.

8 Susan Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D. C.: T Brookings Institution Press, 1995) 9 Richard C. Holbrooke, To End a War (New York, New York: Modern Library, 1998) 10 Scott Straus, “Retreating from the Brink: Theorizing Mass Violence and the Dynamics of Restraint,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 344, doi:10.1017/S1537592712000709

5 The many opposing interpretations of the Yugoslav crisis have attracted much attention from the scholarly community. Each country has asserted its own claims of justice and victimization, while scholars have continuously struggled with where and how to place blame.

No group, country, or person is solely responsible for the conflict. Each republic or ethnic group has been victimized but has perpetrated crimes against others as well. During the war, even the truth was considered controversial. Because of its complicated politics, the Yugoslav crisis presents a challenge for historians looking to provide an impartial and satisfying account of the country’s dissolution. Historians must not only understand the facts, but also chronicle the realities of the situations without, or perhaps regardless of, stepping on any toes. However, public understanding of the crisis and its many causes has increased in recent years. Due to the passage of time, the passions and emotions of the war have somewhat tempered, leaving clarity and room for progress.

Chapter 1.2: Yugoslavian Identity

In modern politics and warfare, identity is “second only to force as the means by which power is effected in oppressive and exploitative systems.”11 Identity politics played a major role leading up to and during the Yugoslav Wars. Identity itself is social, relational, complex, fluctuating, and subjective. About the power of identity politics, Cynthia Cockburn, author and expert on gender in war, writes,

It is through the creation of collective identities that ethnic and national movements and the land-rights claims they make, gain their force. The discourses emanating from influential social sources, such as intellectuals and the media, compellingly hail individuals as nationals at the same time making it clear who is ‘other.’ They mobilize

11 Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict, (London: Zed Books, 2003), 10

6 culture, tradition, religion, and notions of history and place to evoke a sense of unity, an ethnic or national identity. But it is not only in the matter of ethnic and national hegemony that identity processes have such importance. When control by any group is capable of being maintained without direct force it is always because compliance has been won through processes of identification.12

The longstanding grievances between ethnic identities, cultural differences, and ineffective identity-building efforts by the Yugoslavian political elite prevented widespread acceptance of a single unifying Yugoslavian identity; rather, existing identities became insecure and unstable, creating the spark for ethnic warfare.

Across the periods, from King Aleksandar’s kingdom of 1921-1934, to Tito’s regime from 1943-1980, finally to the presidency of Milosevic from 1991-2000, the meaning of the

Yugoslav identity fluctuated and shifted.13 Regional nationalities remained dominant over the

Yugoslav identity. For decades, Yugoslavia was caught in an identity crisis, an inner struggle between nationalist groups attempting to preserve their regional identities and the state trying to impose the new Yugoslavian identity onto them, urging assimilation and relinquishment of former loyalties.14 The rise of the new Yugoslav identity caused conflict between existing identities and confusion over where people belonged. Simultaneously, the ethno-linguistic lines which had divided these groups of people became more pronounced and contested during the process of forced assimilation. In the post-WWII period, political leaders expected nationalist sentiments to subside in favor of the new, unifying Yugoslav identity and state. “Increased urbanization, reduced isolation of rural areas, higher education attainment… and nearly two generations of living as a single state were expected to reduce the political strength of

12 Ibid. 13 Christian Axboe Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia. (University of Toronto Press, 2014) 14 Dusko Sekulic, Garth Massey, and Randy Hodson, “Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia,” American Sociological Review 59, no. 1 (February 1994): 83-97, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096134

7 nationalism, leaving in its place cultural traditions and ethnic pride held in common by all South

Slavic people.”15 The Yugoslavian political elite assumed the modernization of society— particularly the increasing acceptance and recognition of diversity—would weaken nationalist sentiments. In Yugoslavia, however, that assumption was proven incorrect:

“What actually transpired [instead of increased Yugoslav belonging] was increased fragmentation of identities and the development of political rivalries associated with nationalist claims. Yugoslav identification came to be seen as a threat to the republic- level Communist Parties that were increasingly governing in separate directions as federated Yugoslavia began to unravel. The stage for collapse was set by growing economic gaps between republics, economic nationalism, a weak central government, and the political fragmentation of the LCY [the League of Communists of Yugoslavia].”16

A single, politically unifying identity was never fully accepted by all of the groups within this ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally diverse state. Many of the transformative policies meant to build Yugoslavian unity were not effective enough to offset growing regional loyalties.17

The end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in the late twentieth century was seemingly a victory for the West, a confirmation of Western ideology and politics and a triumph over opposing values. Yugoslavia occupied a unique position between the two systems, straddling both, but fully belonging to neither. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia ruled the country for decades, but Yugoslavia was never part of the Warsaw Pact.18 Some Americans viewed Yugoslavia as firmly Eastern European, but most Yugoslavs considered their country quite independent and unique from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.19 Yugoslavia was “ascribed the

15 Ibid. 16 Ibid, 88 17 These efforts included education, propaganda, and the public endorsement of Yugoslavian identity by prominent intellectuals. 18 Cockburn, The Space Between Us, 30 19 Vida Penezic, “Women in Yugoslavia” in Postcommunism and the Body Politic, edited by Ellen E. Berry (New York: NYU Press, 1995)

8 difference and inferiority reserved in American popular discourse for an ‘other,’ particularly for one associated with the former ‘evil empire.’”20 The dissonance between the general Western perception of Yugoslavia, how Yugoslavs perceived themselves, and the country’s unstable footing undermined efforts to build Yugoslavian identity and national unity.

In the years leading up to the war’s outbreak in 1991, continued unification efforts failed.

Rather than expanded Yugoslav belonging, identities became increasingly fragmented and the fervor and fanaticism of various nationalisms rose. National differences were maintained and solidified through census categories and precariously balanced mechanisms that allocated and reserved positions of power in the government for members of each nation, like quotas. Because of its position and far different historic and political traditions from both the East and the West, a firm Yugoslavian identity never gained significant popularity. Instead, people remained loyal to their longstanding regional identities, as demonstrated by the following chart:

Percentage Identifying as Yugoslav Geographic Area 1961 1971 1981 Dominant Nationality Yugoslavia 1.7 1.3 5.4 36.3% Serbian Croatia 0.4 1.9 8.2 75.1% Croatian Serbia 0.2 1.4 4.8 85.4% Serbian Bosnia and 8.4 1.2 7.9 39.5% Bosnian Herzegovina Muslim Kosovo 0.5 0.1 0.1 77.4% Albanian Macedonia 0.1 0.2 0.7 67.0% Macedonian Montenegro 0.3 2.1 5.3 68.3% Montenegrin Slovenia 0.2 0.4 1.4 90.5% Slovenian Vojvodina 0.2 2.4 8.2 54.3% Serbian Table 1: Yugoslavian Self-Identification21

20 Ibid, 58 21 Source: Sekulic, Massey, and Hodson, “Who Were the Yugoslavs?” 85

9 In each geographic area, the percentage of people who identified as Yugoslav never rose above a single digit. Non-Serb groups frequently perceived Yugoslavian unity as merely an extension of

Serbian politics and priorities, making them less likely to align with the Yugoslav identity.

Clearly, the vast majority of each population felt a stronger sense of belonging to their ethnic group rather than their civic group.

While several factors deterred people from accepting the Yugoslavian identity thrust upon them, some Yugoslavs looked to the prosperity in the rest of Europe and thought a uniform

Yugoslav identification would encourage greater integration into Europe. Some believed a unifying identity and the appearance of stability would appeal to the rest of Europe and lead to eventual acceptance into the European Union. Many minority groups were attracted by the idea of “defensive Yugoslavianism.”22 Identifying as a Yugoslav was a way for minority groups to shed their old affiliations and become part of the majority. Yugoslavian self-identification also served a protective purpose: minorities—such as Muslims in Bosnia—could claim to identify as

Yugoslavian to resist pressure from the dominant group to assimilate with the majority.23

Ethnic conflict gains its power through the creation of collective identities and their related claims to politics, power, and land. Politicians, the elite, and the media determine who is part of the accepted, inner group and who is cast as an outsider. To set these boundaries, those in power utilize history, culture, tradition, religion, and especially ethnicity. Creating divisions allows the top to control and manipulate everyone below, exerting domination without explicitly exercising direct force. Ethnic identity is unique because it is the most powerful method to exact oppression and exploitation over populations; therefore, ethnicity is often the foundation off of which a society’s entire social, economic, and political hierarchies function. Identity politics

22 Sekulic, Massey, and Hodson, “Who Were the Yugoslavs?” 86 23 Ibid.

10 continue to play a major role in the former Yugoslav region. As intrinsically social creatures, humans long to be accepted by and belong to groups, yet nonetheless want to be recognized as individuals rather than defined by these group memberships. Women and men must continue to grapple with the distance between how they view themselves and how particular notions of national, religious, ethnic, and gender identities inevitably define how others perceive them.

11 Chapter 2: Perpetrator

Chapter 2.1: “An Example for Similar Cases”: Gender and Criminality

Out of the three major groups in the perpetrator-bystander-victim constellation, the category of perpetrator is the most studied and understood. Perpetrators receive the most attention for two main reasons: first, because perpetrators generally produce the most documentation, such as political speeches, orders, news, bureaucratic records, propaganda materials, and other relevant or associated items; second, scholars study perpetrators because understanding those responsible for the destruction helps to explain the reasons for its occurrence.24 Subcategories exist within the general category of perpetrator, defined by level of active willing participation in the destructive processes. Perpetrators range from those guilty of committing war crimes on a massive scale, to bureaucrats who commanded but never enacted any crimes, to minor accomplices and collaborators, and every individual in-between who helped participate.25

However, one particular group within the general category of perpetrator is often overlooked: female perpetrators. From voluntary participation in the Holocaust and earlier through the Yugoslav Wars to modern organizations like ISIS, women have proven they are clearly capable of committing war crimes.26 Because women generally have limited access to positions of power, therefore making them less likely to command others or actively partake in acts of violence, they are often overlooked by international tribunals. Until the past few years, sufficient scholarship on the subject of female war criminals has been minimal because they are

24 Tim Cole and Robert M. Ehrenreich, “The Perpetrator-Bystander-Victim Constellation: Rethinking Genocidal Relationships,” Human Organization 64, no. 3 (September 2005): 217, https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.64.3.2y2n9ughblwc7qq2 25 Ibid. 26 For further reading, see Lower’s Hitler’s Furies (2013)

12 such a relatively small minority.27 Investigating this group presents many challenges: the lack of existing sources and our inherent gender biases regarding female perpetrators makes research difficult, however, it also means addressing this topic is groundbreaking, drawing much-needed attention to longstanding inequalities in the law, gendered assumptions about criminality, and why these issues still exist. Until recent decades, during which public understanding of the dynamics of gender greatly expanded, the belief that men are inherently more criminogenic remained relatively unquestioned and accepted. To achieve greater justice, female perpetrators, despite being the minority, must be recognized, both by scholars and legal systems, as an existent threat, and the “natural” gendered dichotomy between male perpetrator and female victim deeply embedded in genocidal group relationships must be dismantled.

The exact number of female fighters during the 1990s Yugoslav Wars is unknown, but at least 5,360 women fought with the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.28 The only woman convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY, was

Biljana Plavšić, the former president of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska.29 In her position as president of Republic Srpska, Biljana Plavšić served in one of the top leadership roles during one of the darkest episodes in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s history, where ethnic cleansing claimed over 100,000 lives.30 She was an unashamed Serb nationalist who often proudly preached her views, even calling Bosnian Muslims "a genetic defect on the Serbian body."31

Considering Plavšić is the only woman to have been prosecuted by the ICTY, compared to the

27 Women are a minority in terms of access to power, not in terms of percentage of population. 28 Jovana Prusina, “Female War Criminals: Untold Stories of the Balkan Conflicts,” Balkan Transitional Justice, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, November 30, 2018, https://balkaninsight.com/2018/11/30/female-war- criminals-untold-story-of-the-199s-conflict-11-29-2018/ 29 Prusina, “Female War Criminals: Untold Stories of the Balkan Conflicts” 30 “The Conflicts,” International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (United Nations), accessed March 10, 2021, https://www.icty.org/en/about/what-former-yugoslavia/conflicts 31 Patrick Moore, “Bosnia: Biljana Plavsic--The Bosnian Serbs' Iron Lady,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty (Bosnia: Biljana Plavsic--The Bosnian Serbs' Iron Lady, April 9, 2008), https://www.rferl.org/a/1086147.html

13 160 men, the percentage of female to male prosecutions is fewer than one percent.32 Plavsić’s trial serves as an excellent case study through which scholars can examine the relationship between gender and criminality in the Balkans.

In Plavšić’s defense, she distinguished herself from the rest of the Serbian political elite by blaming them for Serbia’s actions during the war. She claimed that she, and the rest of the

Serbian people, were victims of the rogue, corrupt leadership, and thus should not be held responsible for Serbia’s crimes. However, she later changed her defense to one of open remorse, taking full responsibility for her crimes. She justified her crimes by arguing that she was acting as a protector to the Serbian people, that she acted out of duty as a “mother” to her nation. By attempting to distance Plavšić from the genocidal intentions of other perpetrators, the defense purposefully employed gender norms to dilute her own agency and gain preferential treatment from the ICTY.33

Paragraphs 61 through 84 of Plavšić’s trial sentencing judgement focused on her redeemable qualities: her alleged remorse, and the positive effects of her guilty plea, such as its influence on other leaders to take responsibility for their actions. The defense emphasized her compliance to prove she could return to being a normal, virtuous woman. The trial emphasized her remorsefulness, her guilt, her advanced age, and her gender rather than her authority and criminal actions, leading to the Tribunal dropping seven counts against her and sentencing her to only 11 years, which ultimately was reduced to nine years when she was released early for exemplary behavior. In comparison, Radovan Karadžić, who served as co-president with Plavšić,

32 Olivera Simic, “The Multiple Roles of Women in the Bosnian War: Victims, Ex-Combatants, Peace Builders, and Perpetrators,” Edited by Molly Thomas, ILA Reporter, International Law Association, 2017, http://ilareporter.org.au/2017/04/multiple-roles-of-women-bosnian-war/ 33 Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko-Darden, Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice (Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, 2020), 30

14 pleaded not guilty to all charges against him and received a 40-year sentence, which was later increased to life in prison.34

Several high-profile witnesses, including former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine

Albright, were instrumental in garnering sympathy for Plavšić. Even Elie Wiesel, winner of the

Nobel Peace Prize, Holocaust survivor, and author of Night, praised her guilty plea, saying, “The fact that she is the only accused to have freely and wholly assumed her role in the wrongdoings and crimes set out in the indictment, even though she once moved in the highest circles of power in her country, could and should make her an example for similar cases.”35 In portraying her character as virtuous and deserving of forgiveness, Robert Frowick, U.S. Secretary of State for the implementation of the Dayton Accords, ironically argued that Plavšić was a crusader against wartime criminality, saying, “I have thought of her as, in a way, attacking corruption, injustice, and becoming the champion within Republika Srpska of a struggle against criminality.”36 The defense and witnesses successfully shaped Plavšić’s narrative as one of courage, compliance, and repentance.

In 2005, while she was still imprisoned, Plavšić released a two-volume memoir in which she completely contradicted her statements of regret and remorse during the ICTY, admitting, “I would do the same again.37” Her words reiterated her original nationalistic beliefs, proving her remorse was false and dispelling any hopes of rehabilitation. Despite her extremely public change of heart, she was nonetheless released only two-thirds of the way through her 11-year

34 Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko-Darden, “Why It's Important to See Women as Capable ... of Terrible Atrocities,” The Myanmar Times (Myanmar Consolidated Media Co. Ltd., December 9, 2020), https://www.mmtimes.com/news/why-its-important-see-women-capable-terrible-atrocities.html 35 Steflka and Trisko, Women as War Criminals, 34 36 Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497-619, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/trans/en/021217IT.htm 37 Olivera Simić, “‘I Would Do the Same Again:’ In Conversation With Biljana Plavšić,” International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (December 2018): 317–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/1057567718769703

15 sentence for war crimes. About the return of Plavšić, the head of the Mothers of Srebrenica association Munira Subašić said, “How can we be expected to return to our homes in Srebrenica when the project to destroy us still lives in the heads of the Bosnian leadership?”38 Her return to ordinary life evoked fear and apprehension from many victim groups and human rights activists, who believed the ICTY’s favorable treatment towards her undermined national reconciliatory efforts and sowed greater division.

Rasema Handanović, Azra Bašić, and Ranka Tomic are three female war criminals who received no trial nor sentences until 2011, 2017, and 2018, respectively.39 They were tried, but not by an International Criminal Tribunal like Plavšić. Their actions were unlawful and inhumane, yet none of these women received punishment for nearly 20 years—in Tomic’s case, for over 25 years. Before her trial, Rasema Handanović lived in the United States with, ironically, the status of a victim of persecution.40 Handanović and other members of Bosnia’s

Zulfikar special unit played a key role in the Trusina massacre, where 22 unarmed people, including women and seniors, were killed in the village of Trusina in 1993.41 She plead guilty to executing six Croats in Trusina and was sentenced to five years and six months in prison. After fleeing Yugoslavia in 1994, Azra Bašić settled in Kentucky and became a naturalized citizen. For years, Bašić hid in plain sight and avoided justice. Eventually, she was arrested in 2011 and found guilty of participating in the killing, torture, and inhumane treatment of Serbian civilians

38 Jelena Subotić, “The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšić at The Hague,” Southeastern Europe 36, no. 1 (2012): 39-59, https://doi.org/10.1163/187633312x617011 39 Steflja and Trisko-Darden, Women as War Criminals, 31 40 Ibid. 41 Rick Anderson, “U.S. Authorities Seek to Strip Citizenship of Bosnian War Criminal Living in Oregon,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2018), https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oregon-war-criminal- 20180406-story.html

16 and prisoners of war, as well as other abuses.42 According to witnesses, she “ordered prisoners to remove their shoes and clothing, to eat money, to walk barefoot on glass and to lick blood” off a dead body.43 She was sentenced to 14 years for her horrific actions. Ranka Tomic was found guilty of torturing and physically assaulting civilians, and killing war prisoners and nurses. She even made one of her victims, a nurse for the Bosnian Army named Karmena Kamencic, dig her own grave before killing her.44 She was only sentenced to five years behind bars, which was then shortened to only three years.45 In comparison, Duško Tadić, a minor prison guard, received a

20-year sentence.46 The appeals court justified her short sentence by claiming since she had not committed any subsequent crimes, and because of her advanced age, there was no need to prevent future crimes from her.47

The treatment and sentencing of these female war criminals raises an important question: why and how do female perpetrators often evade punishment for years, sometimes decades?

Gender-based rhetoric about war frequently frames women, children, and the elderly as innocent, vulnerable civilians, excluding adult men. Traits traditionally associated with masculinity include aggression, assertiveness, dominance, and competitiveness, while traditional traits associated with femininity include passivity, gentleness, emotionality, and empathy. These automatic impressions, whether true or false, influence assumptions about criminality and victimhood in environments of both war and relative peace. This gendered juxtaposition reinforces the common

42 Emina Dizdarevic, “Female Bosnian Croat Fighter Jailed for War Crimes,” Balkan Insight (Balkan Transitional Justice, May 18, 2018), https://balkaninsight.com/2017/12/27/female-bosnian-croat-fighter-jailed-for-war-crimes- 12-27-2017/ 43 Ibid. 44 Milica Stojanovic, “Serbian Court Cuts Female War Criminal's Prison Sentence,” Balkan Insight (Balkan Transitional Justice, July 18, 2019), https://balkaninsight.com/2019/07/16/serbian-court-cuts-female-war-criminals- prison-sentence/ 45 Ibid. 46 Steflja and Trisko-Darden, Women as War Criminals, 21 47 Stojanovic, “Serbian Court Cuts Female War Criminal's Prison Sentence”

17 view of men as natural combatants, thus making their deaths justifiable and more legitimate than women, children, and the elderly, whose lives should be spared because they are firmly rooted in the civilian category.48 Losing men harms all members of a society, such as through the destruction of the family unit, and employing gender essentialisms, or assumptions, in peacekeeping efforts may be “enabling and legitimizing the targeting of adult civilian males and older boys.”49

Prescribing women an inherent non-combatant status implies a certain innocence; male civilians can be just as innocent as female civilians, yet one gender gains far more sympathy for their pain. No civilian population is deserving of war, and to prioritize the suffering of certain populations over others is inhumane. Ideally, all civilians should receive fair protection based on their susceptibility to violence. Not only do gender-based assumptions perpetuate the existing myth that almost all perpetrators must be men, they also invalidate the experiences of male victims and divert attention from female perpetrators. By portraying themselves as young, naïve, and controlled by men, female defendants intentionally utilize gender assumptions in their favor, attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility, and gain preferential treatment from the court.

By crying and admitting guilt, female war criminals often deceive the courts, who interpret these actions as signs of humanity, remorse, and genuine care. Underlying stereotypes of women as natural maternal figures, peace makers, and victims highly influenced the legal outcomes of these cases. Relying on a fallible dichotomy inevitably damages the outliers. Ultimately, gender- based assumptions about war cannot be taken as fact because of the damage they cause to male victims and the leeway they provide to female perpetrators.

48 For further information on gender essentialisms in war, see Charli R. Carpenter, “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups: Gender, Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 2 (June 2005) 49 Carpenter, “Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups,” 206

18

Image 1: Female Nazi war criminals pictured at the Belsen trial, 194550

Reduced accountability for female perpetrators likely goes back further than history can trace it. The postwar trials of Nazis and collaborators from 1945 to 1946 is one clear historic example of how female criminals can receive preferential treatment. Because they occupied low- level positions in the Nazi bureaucracy, including as clerks and secretaries, women were assumed to be less dangerous and less responsible for the crimes that occurred. Examples such as

Maria Mandl, a female prison guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau who was directly involved in over

50,000 deaths of women and children prisoners, disprove this argument.51 Nearly one-third of

German women were involved with the Nazi party to some degree and roughly 500,000 women participated in the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, yet only 26 women were sentenced to death in the following decade. Some Nazi women died fairly recently, living comfortably in civilian life. Erna Wallisch, a former concentration camp guard who ranked seventh on the

50 Claire Barrett, “Nazi Angels of Death,” HistoryNet (HistoryNet LLC, October 22, 2020), https://www.historynet.com/nazi-angels-of-death.htm 51 Jie-Hyun Lim, Karen Petrone, and Claudia Koonz, “A Tributary and a Mainstream: Gender, Public Memory and the Historiography of Nazi Germany,” in Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 147-168

19 Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals, evaded justice for decades and lived freely in Vienna until her death at age 86.

Like race, gender heavily affects treatment in relation to criminality. Not only are women less likely to be convicted for the same crime as a man, but female criminals also receive disproportionately lighter sentences. According to Sonja B. Starr of the University of Michigan

Law School, men are fifteen times as likely to be incarcerated as women are in the United States and men face a 63% average increase in sentence length.52 When women choose to plead guilty or express remorse for their actions in court, they are more likely to receive reduced charges and sentences as compared to male defendants.53 In 2021, the United States executed Lisa

Montgomery, the first female prisoner since 1953. According to the NAACP Legal Defense

Fund, women constitute less than two percent of the total death row population.54 On the state level, 1,532 people have been executed in the United States since 1976, with only 17 of them being women.

Sometimes, gender can work against female perpetrators as well. Generally, people tend to look for ‘the face that fits the crime,’ associating poorer physical appearance with increased criminality and untrustworthiness, especially in the case of women.55 According to the Merriam-

Webster dictionary, lookism is “prejudice or discrimination based on physical appearance and especially physical appearance believed to fall short of societal notions of beauty.”56 Attractive

52 S. B. Starr, “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases,” American Law and Economics Review 17, no. 1 (2014): 129, https://doi.org/10.1093/aler/ahu010 53 Steflja and Trisko-Darden, “Why It's Important to See Women as Capable ... of Terrible Atrocities” 54 “Facts about the Death Penalty,” Washington D.C., January 26, 2021, https://documents.deathpenaltyinfo.org/pdf/FactSheet.pdf 55 Ray Bull, “Physical appearance and criminality,” Current Psychological Reviews no. 2 (1982): 269–281, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02684461 56 Merriam-Webster, “Lookism,” accessed February 27, 2021, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/lookism#:~:text=It%20describes%20the%20prejudice%20or,others%20who%20were%20h eavier%20set

20 people are considered more honest, sociable, successful, intelligent, agreeable, and healthy, creating what is commonly known as the halo effect.57 Unattractiveness, on the other hand, is considered unwomanly and leads to harsher treatment both inside and outside the courtroom. The beauty bias affects professional advancement, self-esteem, relationships, and much more. Some social scientists also argue that female criminals are more ‘masculine’ than non-criminal females, biologically and socially, and—derived from Freud’s ‘penis envy’—that female criminal behavior is motivated by a desire to reverse society’s given gender roles.58

Women are capable of crimes, murder, ethnic cleansing, and all the other crimes that men commit as well. Female war criminals are a long-established phenomenon, not deviants, and to see them as rare exceptions reduces their culpability and perpetuates the false gendered notion that women are inherently protective, nurturing, and less capable of violence. The public must acknowledge the full capability of women to perpetrate crimes in order to finally achieve equal accountability for all under the law, regardless of gender.

2.2 Gender and Nationalism

War captures public attention like little else, and even more so when war is fueled by ethnic conflict and nationalism. When one thinks of the word nationalism, the mental images that pop up are likely of violence, ethnic cleansing, and authoritarian regimes. However, nationalism is more than just the buzzwords, the news headlines, and its worst extremes. The swift rise of

57 For more information on the beauty bias, lookism, and the halo effect, see Stefanie K. Johnson et al., “Physical Attractiveness Biases in Ratings of Employment Suitability: Tracking Down the ‘Beauty Is Beastly’ Effect,” The Journal of Social Psychology 150, no. 3 (2010): 301-318, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224540903365414 58 Mohammed J. Islam, Subrata Banarjee, and Nurjahan Khatun, “Theories of Female Criminality: A Criminological Analysis,” International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (December 2014), 2

21 nationalism as the dominant ideology of Southeastern Europe, as well as nationalism’s relationship with gender, are crucial to understanding the conflict as well as women’s actions and experiences within it.

Some degree of socioeconomic inequality exists in every community, and the populations which hold larger amounts of wealth and property typically wield greater political power than their poorer counterparts. In societies with rigid social hierarchies, especially where governments do not possess the desire or ability to change the status quo, disenfranchised citizens tend to suffer. When large groups of people, such as minorities, possess little to no political power, they find alternative methods to make their concerns heard. To be properly acknowledged, they sometimes resort to violence, such as through staging revolutions, adopting radical beliefs like nationalism, and taking up arms against one’s own neighbors and friends. To those who are most excluded from power, progress often appears distant and bows to the whims of the small aristocracy. In an environment where civil society allows few paths for groups, including the chronically impoverished, to enact significant change, ordinary people sometimes see extremist methods, through certain perspectives, as legitimate and appealing.

To understand nationalism, it is first necessary to understand nationhood. People feel connected to a nation because of shared beliefs, shared political goals and societal values, group belonging, historic narratives, rhetoric, shared ethnic identity, and geographic connection.

Nations and states exist in a symbiotic relationship, each equally important in the success of modern countries. Nationhood creates attachments between people who may have never interacted or who may share few commonalities, and it also affects how each individual within that community navigates the world.

22 Nationalism can be roughly defined as an ideology and movement which promotes the importance of one nation above other nations, with particular significance placed on cultural superiority, national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and shared history, language, traditions, and location. Nationalism is a powerful tool in unifying groups of people behind a single identity, declaring a set of collective interests or common goals for this group, and motivating them towards decisive action. In war, nationalism can also effectively rally citizens to the military. Though nationalism has been weaponized throughout history, it is a phenomenon rooted in modernity. Despite extensive scholarly attention and discourse surrounding the subject, it remains an ill-defined, nebulous movement that must be approached with sensitivity.

Nationalism is not the same as national identity, nor is it the same as national pride; rather, it is a complex topic that is historically and politically distinct.59 In the context of the Yugoslav Wars, nationalism was a tool elites used to legitimize violence, including sexual violence, and was a major cause of the crisis.

Nazi ideology is associated with nationalism because of how Nazi leadership defined and actively strengthened members of the “true” German nation. In their view, strengthening

Germany began with strengthening the citizens, or the Volk. Because of nationalism’s emphasis on national unity and belonging, a strong distinction grows between those who are considered part of the “true” nation and the groups that are excluded, especially minorities.60

Not everyone who supported the Nazi party was a violent extremist capable of murder.

Rather, many groups of collaborators, from those who silently approved of the destruction to those who partook in the violence for the sake of self-preservation, were necessary for the Nazis

59 Kim Holmes, “The Problem of Nationalism,” The Heritage Foundation, December 13, 2019, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/the-problem-nationalism 60 Andreas Wimmer, “Why Nationalism Works,” Foreign Affairs (Council on Foreign Relations, February 13, 2019), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2019-02-12/why-nationalism-works

23 to control so much of Europe. The key to German nationalism’s success was the support, or at least compliance, of everyday people. Without assistance from the wealthy, powerful German elite, for example, it would have been much more challenging for the Nazis to achieve complete political domination. The Holocaust was not simply carried out by the highest-ranking Nazi officials; rather, the Holocaust could only be realized due to widespread anti-Semitism and nationalistic sentiments within the German populace and the active collaboration of hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of non-German gentiles. Ideological preparation comes before militaristic deployment, or “a war of words precedes a war of bodies.”61 In Nazi Germany, the power of the state depended on the power of the German Volk, or the people’s community.

Based on fascist notions of national unity behind a singular dominant party, strengthening the

German state began with strengthening the nation that comprised that state.

Nationalist narratives are founded on reverence for the nation’s past, shared lived experiences, and a specific vision for the future. In the case of the Yugoslav conflict, facts become muddled by experiences of trauma and hurt. Each group asserted its own claims of justification and victimization, so scholars have continuously struggled with how to manage these competing stories and where, or even how, to place blame. Wartime propaganda, false causality, nationalist ideologies, trauma, and flaws in memory have distorted both scholarship about and general understanding of the war. Because guilt can be found on all sides, fully explaining the conflict without upsetting or insulting any group is nearly impossible.

As communism’s hold over Yugoslavia progressively weakened, nationalism became the region’s dominant ideology. Nationalism did not replace communism, rather, it grew out of it.

Slavenka Drakulić, author of Balkan Express, describes growing up under nationalism’s

61 Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 4 (2000): 519-532, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343300037004007

24 influence in Croatia as being “told to shout slogans and clap our hands but never to question what those words meant. And when I did, it was too late. Brothers started to kill one another, and unity fell apart, as if Yugoslavia were only part of a communist fairy tale. Perhaps it was.”62

Within the Balkans, there were—and continue to be—several competing nationalist movements, with perhaps the most powerful being Serbian nationalism. Serbian nationalism was a major cause of World War One and it continued to cause major regional upsets decades later.63 During the Yugoslav period, some Serbians saw themselves as heroic defenders of Yugoslavia who made many selfless sacrifices for the good of the state. Often, they were some of Yugoslavia’s strongest supporters.64

With the example of Serbia, nationalism intensified the desire for a Greater Serbia—one unified state integrating all Serb populations across the region—and pushed nationalists to ruthlessly pursue that goal in the late twentieth century. Serbians leapt at the chance to rule themselves and be free from the outside interventionism which had created so much hurt and bitter resentment throughout their recent history. Stories of Ottoman rule had been passed down through generations, and some still remembered the Austro-Hungarian occupation. The long- term setbacks of foreign rule, such as poverty and lower rates of education, built and fostered resentment for colonialism. The appeal of having the chance to seek and claim freedom, based on the colonialist past of imperial powers in Serbia and greater Yugoslavia, cannot be underestimated. Devotion to Yugoslavia was devotion to the Greater Serbian state, and defending Yugoslavia meant defending Serbian interests.

62 Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993) 63 Jonathan Gunz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 64 Sekulic, Hodson, and Massey, “Who Were the Yugoslavs?” 83-97, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096134

25 When nationalism is manipulated and exacerbated by leaders, it is an extremely effective political tool. Slobodan Milosevic specifically appealed to Serbian nationalist sentiments in order to further his personal career and to gain public favor. To spread his message and “sustain a nationalist siege mentality,” Milosevic utilized the state television as his main method of propaganda.65 Milosevic’s reign was vastly dissimilar from his predecessor, Tito, because Tito eliminated all political rivals and threats to his power and ostracized possible allies. Since Tito did not prepare anyone to take his place after his death, Milosevic carved a distinct new path by appealing to longstanding Serbian grievances, advocating for Serbian self-determination, and establishing a powerful cult of personality. He effectively turned nationalism into the official state ideology of Serbia.

Although Serbian nationalism was a decisive force in the Yugoslav conflict, it was not all-encompassing. Many Serbs were liberal and did not subscribe to Milosevic’s brand of nationalism. Extremist nationalists were a small, select few that motivated the more moderate majority to violent action. In the case of the Yugoslav conflict, the die-hard nationalists were few, but pulled many non-extremists to their cause. The ethnic populations living outside political borders before the war, such as Serbs living in Croatia and Albania, became justification for invasion.66 Serb nationalists, in particular, sought to reunite disparate ethnic Serb populations under one state, legitimizing the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Military leaders pursued these conquests on the argument that they were “simply liberating parts of their ethnic homeland that

65 Timothy Garton Ash, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name, (Yale University Press, 2009) 66 V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Cornell, CA: Cornell University Press, 2006)

26 had long been submerged under foreign rule…”67 Political elites twisted existing ethnic lines with fear, promoting the need for a Greater Serbia and other nationalist dreams.

In traditional military and nationalist discourse, the country itself is gendered. Germans refer to Germany in a masculine sense, as the Vaterland, or fatherland. Most national personifications, however, are maternal. Marianne, who personifies the classic French values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, or liberty, quality, and fraternity, is the national symbol for France.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary of Mexico, represents Mexican identity, faith, and pride. Russians generally uses the word “rodina” to refer to Mother Russia, the national personification. The republics of Yugoslavia shared this perspective, seeking to establish sovereignty and defend the honor of their motherland.

Because of how masculinized and militarized nationalism became during the conflict, women’s movements and nationalism may seem incompatible at first glance. However, not all women’s movements are feminist movements, and some sought to follow and maintain the status quo rather than challenge it, even willingly reinforcing existing patriarchal gender norms. Many

Yugoslavian women engaged in “feminist nationalism,” in which they “actively participate[d] in the process of reproducing and modifying their roles as well as being actively involved in controlling other women.”68

Understanding nationalism is vital to understanding the modern world. The nation-state dominates modern politics, education, trade, economics, social life, and global relationships.

When twisted and abused by political leaders, nationalism is capable of terrible atrocities.

Nationalist narratives are selective at best and destructively false at worst. In the case of

67 David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002), 222 68 Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman-Nation-State (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989)

27 Yugoslavia, political leaders intentionally exacerbated nationalist sentiments to motivate, or manipulate, ordinary people to decisive action and realize their republic’s goals. To prepare for and fully understand nationalism, the public must strive to shatter existing subjective preconceptions, expand the standard perception of what nationalism is and understand how it complements modern national projects.

28 Chapter 3: Bystander

For every person who directly victimizes others or is directly victimized themselves, there are hundreds, thousands, or even millions more who play neither role but are nonetheless affected by the conflict; these people, who are neither directly targeted as victims nor directly engage as perpetrators, are bystanders. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines bystander as

“one who is present but not taking part in a situation or event: a chance spectator.” In the face of escalating violence, bystanders in war neither participate in the persecution of others nor attempt to stop it. As there is no perfect measurement for what determines a bystander, it can act as somewhat of a catchall term for people who do not fit into the narrower categories of perpetrator or victim. Although bystanders far outnumber perpetrators and victims, they are arguably the least understood. Not as united in goals or power as perpetrators but not as united by shared experience and trauma as victims, bystanders are varied in motivation and experiences, making them a complex, difficult entity to investigate.

Chapter 3.1: The Role of Bystander and the Duty to Testify

“Let us remember: what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.” -Elie Wiesel

For people caught in the middle of the horrors of the Yugoslav conflict, survival was paramount. The diverse peoples of Yugoslavia were primarily persecuted for an unavoidable, integral factor: their identities. Slavenka Drakulić, author of Balkan Express, explains the effects of her Croatian label during the war with bitterness, “Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood…that is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation…I am nobody because I am not a person anymore. I am one of 4.5 million Croats…I feel as an orphan does, the war having robbed me of the only real possession I

29 had acquired in my life, my individuality.”69 Ordinary people, people who would pose seemingly no threat such as those with no political or military experience, were pulled into the war inexorably. Because identity is inescapable, so too was the conflict. The war enveloped the citizens of Yugoslavia without their consent, sometimes without any understanding of the situation around them.

Being a bystander can be an isolating experience: outsiders do not afford bystanders as much pity as the victims, yet can never fully grasp or relate to experiences of conflict. As bystanders make up the majority of the population affected by the Yugoslav Wars, they remain an incredibly diverse yet ill-defined category. In examinations of the Holocaust, for example, bystanders were “characterized more by ambiguity, controversy, and charges of political and moral failure.”70

Even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, in the midst of despair and devastation, survivor testimonies show the strength of the will to survive; Abdulah Ahmić is one such example. Ahmić, a survivor of the Ahmići massacre, witnessed Croat soldiers murder his brother and father right in front of him. He later learned that his mother and three sisters were executed. Despite still reeling from the loss of his entire family, he testified at the International

Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and is still alive today.71 When investigating incidents of war crimes, eyewitnesses are necessary to prove that what happened was real.

Evidence, such as photographs, can be doctored. Personal experiences and testimonies, however, are much tougher to fabricate. The majority of the knowledge about an event comes neither from perpetrators nor victims, but bystanders.

69 Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993), 51 70 David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine, Bystanders to the Holocaust: a Re-Evaluation (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), 213 71 Prosecutor v. Dario Kordić and Mario Čerkez, IT-95-14/2-T, ICTY (1999) (testimony of Abdulah Ahmić)

30 In conflict situations, bystanders are usually presented a decision: either help the aggressor or be part of the solution. From the perspective of perpetrators, bystanders pose a threat through their potential to stall or halt the violence.72 When a bystander chooses to partake in the violence of the perpetrators, they become a collaborator. However, due to the conditions of war, where normal concepts of morality and safety evaporate, sometimes helping the enemy to save oneself is the only option. When faced with unthinkably inhumane, demoralizing, and life- threatening situations, individuals were forced to make choiceless choices to ensure their own survival.73

In the process of learning about a subject, scholars, researchers, students, and readers become, in a sense, bystanders or witnesses themselves. If the number of survivors left ever dwindles, the responsibility of educating the public about Yugoslavia passes to the secondary witnesses, which are the historians, the readers, or anyone else who looked through the eyes of a primary witness and felt the imprint of experience stay. The international community and international organizations can also be considered bystanders when they have knowledge of a conflict, yet fail to stop it.

The responsibility of the bystander to testify can be explained partially through identity politics and group loyalty: “Once collectivized, human agency in all its dimensions is conceived of in such a way that the individual is compelled to answer for everything ‘his’ group does, has done, or is held to be about to do; conversely, the group is made to answer for everything a single individual member does, has done, or is about to do.”74 Bystanders, therefore, feel

72 Vetlesen, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander” 73 Choiceless choices is a concept attributed to Lawrence Langer when describing the decisions Jews made to try and survive in the Holocaust, including the loss of freedom and independence. See Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: the Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). 74 Vetlesen, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” 525

31 compelled to answer for other members of their group. They lend their efforts to justice and healing because they, as members of the same identity as persecutors, feel partially responsible for failing to stop the destructive processes.

Witnesses and victims bringing their stories forward and voicing trauma not only builds community through shared experiences, but also creates more space for solidarity and public acceptance in the future. Bystanders must become actively engaged in creating the narratives of the events they witness because “even the most initially passive and remote bystander possesses a potential to cease being a mere onlooker to the events unfolding.”75 As more time passes, witnesses will inevitably dwindle, a problem currently facing Holocaust survivors: Once those who saw it and lived it are gone, history will be much harder to remember for future generations; in this way, bystanders are essential to storytelling, writing history, and preserving memory. If witnesses and victims did not choose to provide believable, truthful testimonies, then the world would not know that certain events, massacres, or crimes had happened at all, and perpetrators would never face prosecution.

Chapter 3.2 Barriers to Testifying

The central decision that divides witnesses is whether they choose to speak about their experiences or not. Elie Wiesel describes the value of survivor testimony as follows, “Ask any survivor; he will tell you, he who has not lived the event will never know it. And he who went through it will not reveal it, not really, not entirely. Between his memory and his reflection there

75 Ibid.

32 is a wall – and it cannot be pierced.”76 Sometimes, those who choose not to speak do so because of the decisions—the choiceless choices—they were forced to make in the midst of conflict and the guilt that haunts them in hindsight. Perhaps that can be thought of as a choiceless choice in itself: if one speaks about their experience, they may be criticized, asked invasive questions, ignored, invalidated, or worse, and if one chooses not to speak, they will be bombarded with questions of why. The motivations for testifying must battle the harsh barriers that prevent both witnesses and victims from speaking.

The bystander effect is the phenomenon in which the higher the number of people present, the lower the chance an individual bystander will act. Bystanders tend to intervene more often when they are alone rather than in a group. One element of the bystander effect is the diffusion of responsibility, or the belief that someone else will take action, absolving oneself of guilt.

Fear of putting themselves and their stories on trial bars many witnesses from speaking up during and after conflict. Not only does testifying mean putting oneself on display to be judged and criticized before an audience, but telling one’s story forces the individual to relive their trauma, invoking strong psychological and emotional responses such as pain, fear, and loss.

Drakulić describes the mental numbness she adapted about what she witnessed, “Strangely enough, watching it day after day the war teaches you to get used to blood, you are forced to cope with it. After a certain point (which comes very quickly) you realize that people are dying in great numbers and bodies simply pile up like an abstract number on the surface of your mind.

In order to survive, you become cruel. You are touched only if you knew the person who

76 Elie Wiesel, “Art and Culture After the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, ed. Eva Fleischner, 405

33 died…otherwise, you feel the pain but it is vague and diffuse, as if you are wearing metal armor that is too tight.”77

Another barrier that bystanders face to intervention is ingrained prejudice. Though unlikely to admit it, some bystanders were happy to see their neighbors persecuted. In a sense, persecution served as validation of previous negative stigmas or dormant hatreds. It is likely that some ethnic Serbs living within the political borders of Bosnia, who consciously knew and felt their minority status, were happy to see Bosnian Muslims persecuted.

Women bystanders faced the unique struggle of watching their male relatives go into battle, yet being unable to stop their deployment. They defended men by actively organizing and opposing men’s military conscription, but were ultimately unable to stop military mobilization.78

When male soldiers were killed or went missing, wives, mothers, and other family members were not only bystanders, but also indirect victims.; female relatives of the 8,000 men and boys killed in the Srebrenica genocide are one example of female bystanders that were left behind in the Yugoslav Wars.79

Despite the many hurdles to intervention, to successfully prevent genocide and sexual violence in the future, the duty to act must be recognized as everyone’s responsibility, as a communal obligation. When asked about why he intervened, politician and author Mihailo

Markovic simply said, “I got involved to save Serbs in eastern Croatia. Otherwise they will be slaughtered.”80 The bystander has the most power over whether the actions of the aggressor are allowed to stand unprosecuted or not. Bystanders must employ their potential power for good rather than silent complicity.

77 Drakulić, The Balkan Express, 56 78 Cockburn, The Space Between Us, 168 79 The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 1970s Argentina is another famous example of female bystander activism. 80 Vetlesen, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” 528

34 Chapter 4: Victim

Persecutors intentionally target members of a society who hold little to no power, or they target the most powerful leaders to incapacitate the rest. People are targeted on the basis of their marginalized identities, such as gender, class, religion, culture, ideology, and ethnicity, which distinctly classify them as an “other” outside of the majority. In the Yugoslav Wars, identity politics dictated victimhood, and because identity is inescapable, victimhood was, therefore, inescapable for many people.

Chapter 4.1: The Body as a Battleground

In the Yugoslav Wars, gender highly influenced one’s experiences, creating distinct and disparate perspectives of the conflict for men and women. Because it is comparative, notions of femininity depend on their clear, separate counterbalance: notions of masculinity. Each gender carried its own unique set of expectations, duties, and norms in Yugoslavia, and these preexisting constructions directly impacted to how men and women were treated during the war. Socialism successfully integrated women into the workforce, but their duties in the public and private spheres differed from men because they were still socially, sexually, and reproductively different. Under socialism, every worker believed they were equal, effectively silencing women’s experiences and suppressing women’s activism. With Yugoslavia’s gradual deviation from socialism, the public split from Soviet influence, and the growing separation between

Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern bloc, nationalist ideologies of Southeastern Europe depended upon a new classification of ideal patriotic womanhood: the necessity of motherhood and the significance of women as a vessel of culture and honor. The Yugoslav conflict twisted existing gender expectations, locking in the ties between womanhood, motherhood, and honor,

35 and effectively weaponized gender to further military ambitions and reinforce nationalist narratives, making women especially vulnerable to violence.

Once war broke out, political leadership intentionally transformed and utilized gender roles to rally nationalist sentiments and mobilize the military. War itself is, predominantly, a masculine affair, and in the minds of the elite, either those who fought for their country’s sovereignty or those who fought to keep Yugoslavia together, men needed to fight for their country while women needed to produce and protect these men. The idea of biological essentialism, that the meaning of women is invariably tied to reproduction, heightened pressure on women to be mothers. Both before and during the war, political leaders emphasized the importance of motherhood as a social requirement and as a tenant of patriotism. According to nationalists, as biological producers, it was the duty of women to produce new sons and daughters and strengthen their nation. During the conflict, each nation needed the strength of its people to solidify both the military and the home front; for mothers, this meant they had to sacrifice their sons to fight or even die in the war because they believed they were contributing to a just and noble cause. “Those women who did oppose the conscription of their sons into their own national armies were vilified and accused of wanting the destruction of their own people by not wanting the country to defend itself.”81 Nationalists argued that men and women who did not fulfill their respective duties failed in their obligations to the nation, effectively recruiting and motivating via the weaponization of wartime gender expectations.82 Along with Yugoslavian gender constructions, traditional roles of men and women in conflict, with men as fighters and women as protectors of the home, influenced wartime experiences. Men and women had their

81 Jovanka Stoisavlievic, “Women, Conflict, and Culture in Former Yugoslavia,” Gender and Development 3, no. 1 (1995): 38, www.jstor.org/stable/4030423 82 Sabrina P. Ramet, Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999)

36 own separate responsibilities to ensure the survival of the nation, and nationalists intentionally crafted these responsibilities to serve their own agendas by building and strengthening the individual nations within Yugoslavia.

Because of their physiology and symbolic value, women were especially vulnerable to attack, particularly sexual assault. Nationalists and political leaders accepted women as representatives of the heart of the land and as mothers of the nation, so an attack on an enemy’s women was an intentional attack on the heart of that nation. While men represented the front lines, women symbolized the home front. Through controlling and conquering women’s bodies, militias effectively occupied physical land. The correlation between female citizenry and the land they inhabited was reinforced by “protectionist values that are inherent in patriarchal relations [which] promote views of women as men’s property to be defended.”83 According to traditional Southeast European values, a woman’s virginity and purity are considered sacred and worthy of protection. Dishonoring a woman’s body through rape had far-reaching effects: it also dishonored her family, her descendants, her lineage, her community, and her people. The organization of Yugoslavian society depends on the zadruga, or the foundational Southern Slavic extended family unit associated with social ties and shared culture.84 Women held primary responsibility for upholding the family unit, so when nationalism ripped apart their families and destroyed communities, women were left especially vulnerable. Though the physical act of rape is temporary, the damage is sweeping and permanent. “Women protect the honor of their community through marriage and cultural practices that maintain a pure lineage and pure ethnic- cultural identity. It follows, then, that rape and sexual violence during ethnic conflict become

83 Farwell, “War Rape,” 394 84 As defined by Natascha Vittorelli, “An ‘Other’ of One's Own: Pre-WWI South Slavic Academic Discourses on the Zadruga,” December 2002, http://www.yorku.ca/soi/_Vol_2_3/_HTML/Vittorelli.html

37 strategies for infiltrating or destroying these boundaries and attacking the honor of the community and the purity of its lineage.”85 In addition, modern warfare’s focus on political control over populations rather than territorial gains greatly exacerbated the violence that women endured. In modern wars, civilians are involved and targeted more than ever before. The members of a linguistic group or nation become a quasi-family, and the bodies of these groups became the symbolic boundaries of their land. Throughout history, when a woman is ravaged, the country itself is assaulted. Therefore, an attack on a woman was also an attack on her entire nation and her nation’s pride.

The dishonor that inevitably followed the violation of a woman’s body in Yugoslavia created a culture of shame surrounding sexual activity. Militias intentionally targeted women to break the enemy’s culture and destroy the nation through the desecration of the keystone of the family unit. When it is nearly impossible to distinguish groups through physical appearance, other markers are ascribed to define group membership, such as lineage. Because members of different Southern Slavic ethnicities were often physically indistinguishable from each other, it is clear they were targeted for cultural reasons. In addition, monuments, historic sights, religious institutions, and other places with significant heritage value were systematically destroyed, proving symbols of culture were intentionally targeted. The female body was a vessel of culture, and as such, received violence as a result of their cultural identity.

85 Farwell, “War Rape,” 395

38 Chapter 4.2: Rape as a Weapon: Breaking the Taboo on Wartime Sexual Violence

Wartime sexual assault has existed for as long as war itself. Before the Yugoslav conflict, rape was primarily perceived as an unfortunate yet inevitable and unavoidable part of war.

Although viewed as a crime, most armies did not prosecute wartime rape with the same vigor as other crimes. Wartime rape was so mainstream that it was considered acceptable in most times and places. Perpetrators viewed their victims—usually women—as spoils of war. Stalin articulated the common attitude as such, “Can’t you understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or makes some trifle?”86 Occurrences of wartime rape remain so rampant that prosecuting every single case would be impossible. In the case of the Yugoslav Wars, the exact number of cases committed may never be determined, but more importantly, the conflict served as a historic turning point for understanding and prosecution of wartime rape. Sexual violence in the Yugoslav wars was targeted against women on the basis of their ethnic or national identity, becoming a weapon of war and leading to international recognition of rape as a crime against humanity during the

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The weaponization of rape during war likely goes back as far as war itself, with Susan

Brownmiller author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, writing, “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire, and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more

86 Lance Morrow, “Unspeakable: Rape and War,” Time (Time Inc., February 22, 1993), http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977808,00.html

39 or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep women in a state of fear.”87

Serb paramilitary units, the Bosnian Serb army, and other military groups overwhelmingly perpetrated mass rape in detention centers or various ‘camps,’ which ranged from small houses to large warehouses or hotels. According to a report by the UN Commission of Experts, about 715 camps existed throughout Bosnia, with the Serb side managing about 55% of them.88 The victims were usually non-combatants who were captured while attempting to flee the conflict. Detainees faced horrific treatment, including questioning, unhygienic conditions, and torture.89 In particular, gender shaped experiences within the camps: while the men were subjected to forced labor, the women repeatedly endured sexual violence, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups, sometimes even publicly or in front of other family members.90 The International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found that the level of sexual violence in these detention centers often amounted to sexual slavery.91

The amount of sexual violence that occurred during the Yugoslav Wars will never be known. Efforts to pinpoint or estimate an exact number have, in the past, been motivated by political narratives, such as countries trying to assert greater victimization through the desecration of their women, rather than remedial reasons, such as establishing support for individual victims. Many of these rapes occurred at the concentration camps, where sexual violence, torture, inhumane treatment, and death were common. Survivor Kelima Dautovic

87 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, (London, United Kingdom: Penguin Books, 1976) 88 Anette Bringedal Houge, “Subversive Victims? The (Non)Reporting of Sexual Violence against Male Victims During the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Nordicom Review 29, no. 1 (2008): pp. 63-78, https://doi.org/10.1515/nor- 2017-0162 89 Cockburn, The Space Between Us, 170 90 Ibid. 91 United Nations, Review of the Sexual Violence Elements of the Judgements of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Light of Security Council Resolution 1820 (Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2010)

40 described the situation as, “If you looked feminine or if they knew you previously and wanted sex they would just take you. Probably ten were raped every night…The girls would come back the next morning totally exhausted but no one would talk about it. They were ashamed. We all knew silently what had happened but no one discussed it.”92 Danira, a Bosnian Muslim woman, described her experiences in an interview, saying, “It must have happened over 100 times that I was raped. They raped me everywhere, in burnt-out houses and in different rooms in the concentration camp. Once I asked them to kill me, because I could not go back to my kids after this, but they did not do this.”93 As a state-sponsored strategy, wartime rape stemmed more from gendered power relations than of men’s sexual desires.

Perpetrators intentionally targeted female victims because of their ability to bear children.94 “Women were the fertilizer from which sons grew in order to continue the bloodline.”95 In countries of the former Yugoslavia, nationality is patrilineal, meaning children, even those fathered by rapists, automatically inherit the identity of the father; therefore, raping and impregnating enemy women was intentional and strategic, a method of genetic imperialism.96 Family, friends, and community members often viewed women who became pregnant with and gave birth to children fathered through wartime rape as traitors. “Under these

92 Sue Turton, “Bosnian War Rape Survivors Speak of Their Suffering 25 Years On,” July 21, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/bosnia-war-rape-survivors-speak-serbian-soldiers-balkans-women- justice-suffering-a7846546.html 93 Inger Skjelsbæk, “Victim and Survivor: Narrated Social Identities of Women Who Experienced Rape During the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Feminism and Psychology 16, no. 4 (2006): 382, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353506068746 94 See Lance Morrow, “Unspeakable: Rape and War,” Time (Time Inc., February 22, 1993), http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977808,00.html, Siobhán K. Fisher, “Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation As Genocide,” Duke Law Journal 46, no. 91 (1996): 91-133, and Inger Skjelsbæk, “Victim and Survivor: Narrated Social Identities of Women Who Experienced Rape During the War in Bosnia- Herzegovina,” Feminism and Psychology 16, no. 4 (2006): 373-403, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353506068746 for further information. 95 Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Granta Publications, 2009), 85 96 Farwell, “War Rape,” 394

41 circumstances, the perpetrators seek to dilute or “purify the blood” of the attacked group by creating “ethnically cleansed” children who belong to the invading group.”97 Purity of blood is a cornerstone of Balkan nationhood and identity, so forcefully impregnating enemy women effectively undermined the core of the nation. “The aim of this strategy [wartime sexual attacks] is to humiliate enemy men, and destroy the fabric of family and society; a raped woman is no longer viewed as ‘clean,’ and often no longer has a place in her family or community.”98

Symbolically, attackers were diluting the blood of the nation. Perpetrators aimed to eradicate the identities of the mother by replacing the mother’s national, ethnic, and religious identities with the father’s through their children. These systemic efforts of forced impregnation amounted to genocide. By targeting women on the basis of their group memberships, the incredibly personal and intimate act of rape turned into one of dehumanization and objectification, robbing them of their personhood and individuality by devaluing them to one specific trait. Identity itself, exacerbated by nationalism’s us versus them mentality, became a battlefield.

The feelings of humiliation, shame, and guilt associated with being raped, as well as the subsequent negative social treatment, exacerbated its power, becoming the lasting effects of a temporary action. “The most common prejudice that victims of sexual violence are generally faced with, regardless if they are men or women, is that rape is a disgrace for the victim, not the perpetrator, and that as a result of such an act, the victim is tainted, filthy, and unworthy of respect.”99 The actions of the women within communities directly reflect and impact the reputation of that community; therefore, the community has a stake in the woman’s sexual

97 Ibid. 98 Jovanka Stoisavlievic, “Women, Conflict, and Culture in Former Yugoslavia,” Gender and Development 3, no. 1 (1995): 39, www.jstor.org/stable/4030423 99 Zinaida Djelilovic, “Male Rape Victims Confront the Bosnian War's Last Taboo,” Balkan Insight (Balkan Transitional Justice, May 5, 2020), https://balkaninsight.com/2020/04/24/male-rape-victims-confront-the-bosnian- wars-last-taboo/

42 purity.100 “Male honor and women’s sexuality are seen as interconnected, and an affront to the woman’s body is also an affront to male members of her family.”101 Shame disincentivizes victims from reporting their assault, as one female victim said, “What happened to me, happened to many, but the women kept it a secret. It is shameful. Thus the mother conceals it if it happened to her daughter so she can marry and if it happened to an older woman, she wants to protect her marriage.”102 Rape victims were, and continue to be, blamed for what happened to them and for the resulting dishonor brought upon their families, communities, and themselves; therefore, the victims were, in a sense, considered responsible for the consequences of the rape. When survivors come forward, some people characterize these women as the real perpetrators because their stories negatively affect the lives, futures, or careers of these rapists, turning accountability into victimization and turning testimony into a witch hunt. These narratives effectively warp victims into perpetrators.

Survivors are further disincentivized from coming forward due to the many personal costs and few benefits of going public with one’s story. Aside from preventing future crimes by the same perpetrator, a woman has little to nothing to gain from speaking up. The feelings and experiences a survivor must endure post-assault can amount to a second victimization of their trauma, or in a way, a second rape. Ceca, a woman who became pregnant from her rape, says,

“I never told my husband that I have been raped and that my daughter was as well. He does not know what happened to us, and I find excuses all the time to avoid having sex…I only told my mother. She helped me get an abortion. It was not a proper abortion. I took medicines and different teas—I mean different grasses—and one night I went to the toilet and felt that I lost the baby. I could not bear to have a baby whose father I didn’t know, a baby made during those circumstances.”103

100 Farwell, “War Rape,” 394 101 Skjelsbaek, “Victim and Survivor,” 386 102 Sabrina P. Ramet, Dorothy Q. Thomas, and Regan E. Ralph, “Rape in War: The Case of Bosnia,” in Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 210 103 Skjelsbaek, “Victim and Survivor,” 389

43

Plagued with insomnia, nightmares, and memories of her trauma, Ceca relies on tranquilizers and the support of her family to tell her story. Others, however, are not deterred from speaking out, with one anonymous survivor saying, “I am not ashamed. It did not happen from my will, and everybody knows it. It was like having a knife under your cheek and a gun to your head.”104

Of all the populations that suffered in the Yugoslav Wars, Bosnian Muslim women endured exceptionally brutal treatment during the war, particularly at the Serb rape camps, not only for their gender, but also because of their religious beliefs and ethnicity. As the Serbian

Orthodox Church was the dominant religious organization throughout Yugoslavia, and the Croat minority followed Catholicism, Islamic people, places, and beliefs were often marginalized and sidelined. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was quite multiethnic, with diverse communities maintaining a relative level of respect and tolerance for their neighbors. Animosity did not publicly erupt, or at least stayed nonviolent, until the war broke out. The ethnic divides of

Bosnia are shown in the map below:

104 Skjelsbaek, “Victim and Survivor,” 384

44

Map 2: The Distribution of Ethnic Groups within Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1991 105

When Serb forces seized the Bosnian town of Foča in April 1992, they forced Bosnian

Muslim women as young as 12 into rape camps, sent Bosnian Muslim men to labor camps, destroyed sites with cultural significance to the Muslim community, and displaced or killed thousands more.106 Srebrenica was the most infamous massacre, where violence rose to the level

105 “Bosnia's Ethnic Divisions, Before and After Dayton,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, November 16, 2015), https://www.rferl.org/a/lasting-ethnic-divisions-in- bosnia/27363192.html 106 “Bridging the Gap - Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina,” International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (United Nations), accessed March 24, 2021, https://www.icty.org/en/outreach/bridging-the-gap-with-local- communities/foca

45 of genocide in 1995. Over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered and thousands more became refugees.107

About Muslims in Bosnia, Biljana Plavšić infamously said, “We are upset by a rising number of mixed marriages between Serbs and Muslims, for they allow genes to be exchanged between ethnic groups, and lead subsequently to the degeneration of Serb nationality,” as well as the following, “Muslims are genetically spoiled material who converted to Islam. And those genes have been reinforced generation after generation. They have become worse and they dictate and express the Muslim way of thinking and behaving. The latter is embedded in their genes.”108 Serb paramilitary groups aimed to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of its Muslim populations, treating it like ridding the nation’s body of an infection. The practice intended to rid these areas of Muslims to connect Serb-inhabited areas of Bosnia with the country of Serbia.109

Serbian nationalists wished to incorporate Bosnia and Herzegovina as the “central region and core of an imagined expanded Serbia” and Croatian nationalists, whose country surrounded

Bosnia on three sides, called it “the core of the old Croatian state.”110 Ideal nationalist visions of

Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia were of ethnic, national, and religious homogeneity, so although they sought to control the land of Bosnia, no country’s geopolitical ambitions included the Bosnian Muslim people.

Persecution on the basis of identity robs victims of their individuality, reducing them from complex, multifaceted people to simply numbers within a group. Criminal acts were committed on behalf of a nation’s agenda, but the consequences remain human. The victims are

107 Francesca Cleverly, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia,” srebrenica.org.uk (Remembering Srebrenica, October 15, 2014), https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/what-happened/history/ethnic-cleansing-bosnia/ 108 Jelena Subotić, “The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšić at The Hague,” Southeastern Europe 36, no. 1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1163/187633312x617011, 42 109 Cleverly, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia” 110 David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts?, 221

46 more than their religious beliefs and more than what happened to them. To build and keep peace in modern Bosnia, multiculturalism cannot simply be tolerated: rather, it must be embraced and accepted.

Although the vast majority of sexual assault victims during the Yugoslav conflict were women, men were targeted to a significant degree as well. Despite being the most extensively researched and examined conflict in terms of sexual violence, there is still no adequate estimate for the total number of men who were victimized in Yugoslavia. A natural dichotomy is assumed to exist between men and women in war: “We see men in combat fatigues, bearing weapons.

Women we see expelled from their homes, raped, bereaved. But a certain naturalness is assumed in this too. Here are men and women acting in their age-old historic roles. Facts that do not fit are sidelined.”111 In Yugoslavia, the state ascribed power to masculine identities, but not to feminized identities, and this hierarchal relationship explains the coupling of man with perpetrator and woman with victim.112 However, this dichotomy was not always the case. Just as gendered power relations affect how the public perceives female perpetrators, male victims are adversely affected as well: “In public perception within the civilian population (although not in international humanitarian law) within the civilian population as a whole women have tended to be classified in the single category of ‘women and children,' and men have tended to be largely forgotten as civilians, as if they were all combatants.”113 Women, children, and the elderly are ascribed an “immunity norm” while men are burdened with assumed guilt.114 Though male

111 Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 2003) 13 112 Nancy Farwell, “War Rape: New Conceptualizations and Responses” Affilia 19, no. 4 (2004): 397, https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109904268868 113 Charlotte Lindsey, Women Facing War (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 2001), 28 114 R. Charli Carpenter, “‘Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups’: Gender, Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 2 (June 2005): 296, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-8833.2005.00346.x

47 victims of sexual assault are the minority of cases, they do exist and deserve greater attention.

Their stories and perspectives have been minimized and forgotten, and this erasure is perpetuated in the language used by politicians, by academics, in the media, and even in legal discourse. The taboo on sexual assault in former Yugoslav societies is incredibly high for women, but even higher for men. To understand the experiences of male victims, a group which has been underrepresented in existing research on the Yugoslav conflict for too long, to recognize the challenges they face, and to give extra voice to their stories, traditionalist roles of men and women in combat need to be questioned, criticized, and reexamined through a modern perspective and sexual violence must be understood as an issue for all humans, not just women.

Because sexual violence against men directly contradicts patriarchal and militaristic norms, the media and public often forget that men can experience sexual assault survivors as well. Being a victim of sexual assault can be, in a way, emasculating, as Cynthia Cockburn writes: “Rape is an effect not of men’s sexual drive but of gender power relations. Enemy men too were ‘reduced’ to women, by being raped.”115 Even today, stigmatization prevents men from speaking out. According to Dubravka Žarkov, the perpetrator is most likely assumed to be a Serb male and the identity of the victim is most likely assumed to be a Bosniak female, erasing male victims from immediate thought, limiting potential post-conflict support, and affecting how male victims perceive themselves.116 A male victim who chose to remain anonymous admitted, “There are more men who have not spoken out, and they never will. I wouldn’t have if things didn’t turn out the way they did. It’s hard. It has to be dealt with. I survived it and nothing can compensate for it. You carry it inside you, like a bomb.”117 His abusers have never been prosecuted.

115 Cockburn, The Space Between Us, 170 116 Žarkov Dubravka, The Body of War Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) 117 Djelilovic, “Male Rape Victims Confront the Bosnian War's Last Taboo”

48 Rigid gender norms and inflexible expectations for masculinity stretch far beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stigma, denial, and shame prevent victims from speaking up, reporting their experiences, or applying for help or benefits. Many victims fear the reporting process because they will be asked invasive questions or forced to retell and relive their trauma, further disincentivizing people from coming forward. The biggest hurdle to studying the experiences of male victims and identifying any patterns is the lack of documentation.

Due to the disparity between the number of women and men who experienced wartime sexual assault, men do not have the same access to resources or support networks. Medica

Zenica, for example, which was founded in 1993 as the first NGO to specifically help female survivors of sexual assault, did not provide specialized services for male survivors until 2013.118

Based on the research she conducted while writing her doctoral thesis, Sabiha Husic, the director of Medica Zenica, vaguely estimates that about 3,000 men were raped during the war, but only seven men have achieved the status of civilian victim of war through Medica Zenica.119

However, because hardly any male victims openly voice their trauma, it is impossible to know how many men were truly affected.

Though this subject is difficult to discuss and even more difficult to find evidence on, patterns do arise. Men, like women, were most vulnerable to rape while captive at mass internment camps. Legal protection and social support specifically for male survivors tends to be minimal or nonexistent.120 Even amongst advocacy groups, medical professionals, and

118 “Medica Zenica: Who We Are,” Medica Zenica, accessed January 25, 2021, https://medicazenica.org/en/about- us/ 119 Djelilovic, “Male Rape Victims Confront the Bosnian War's Last Taboo” 120 “Legacies and Lessons: Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys in Sri Lanka and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” All Survivors Project (UCLA School of Law: Health and Human Rights Law Project, May 2017), https://allsurvivorsproject.org/

49 organizations dedicated to the treatment and support of survivors, the notion that sexual violence only affects girls and women persists.121

The lack of evidence serves as proof of the power of the taboo. Researchers only know what survivors are willing to share, and often, that is little. The drawbacks to sharing outnumber the incentives. Perhaps the best that a survivor can hope for is that their story will prevent the repetition of the same crime by the same perpetrator, but even that is not a guarantee. Even today, sexual violence against men remains “one of the least documented and most inadequately addressed of all the human rights abuses that took place during these wars.”122 To alleviate this problem of under-reporting sexual violence, the public must dismantle stigmas and stereotypes to create an environment welcoming and supportive of male experiences.

The key to utilizing rape as a weapon is the active participation of perpetrators.

Neighbors turned on neighbors. Hatred tore friendships or even families apart. “Unlike the policymakers who dealt in theories and plans, these were the individuals who rounded up innocent women and girls, then raped them or sexually assaulted them, tortured them, enslaved them and then… exchanged, sold or transferred them to other soldiers.”123 Nationalist sentiments amplified existing tension and pressure, and the dire realities of war drove many to rationalize inhumane brutality. In addition, the Yugoslav state actively encouraged rape as a weapon of war, enabling ordinary people to commit atrocities without normal societal constraints. The circumstances of war cannot be solely blamed for the transformation of ordinary people into perpetrators. Scholars have not discovered any evidence of instances where perpetrators were

121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ian Black, “Serbs ‘Enslaved Muslim Women at Rape Camps,’” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, March 21, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/21/warcrimes.balkans

50 punished for refusing to commit war crimes or follow orders.124 The physical nature of rape requires volition and is more invasive than other acts of violence, such as shooting someone.

There is no legitimacy or logic in the argument that perpetrators can be forced to rape. People consciously choose to become perpetrators, but people have no power or say in becoming victims.

The Yugoslav Wars transformed how international law and the world handle wartime rape.125 The widespread incidents of sexual violence during the conflict drew greater attention to its existence, ramifications, and extensiveness. The international community recognized that in

Yugoslavia, gender-based violence was intentionally employed as a weapon of war with genocidal intentions. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made history by classifying rape as a crime against humanity and declaring it a weapon of war, a tool used to weaken an enemy nation by attacking and degrading its citizens, especially its women.

Rather than a series of individual crimes committed by individual perpetrators, wartime rape is now understood to be a systemic, organized, and purposeful strategy.

Wartime rape is neither incidental nor private: it as a violation of international law and it must be prosecuted as such when it occurs. Wartime rape is a strategy dependent on relational concepts of nationalism and ethnicity which reduce women to symbols of a group or country. By sharing their stories, survivors often sacrifice their mental, physical and emotional wellbeing, yet gain little from sharing their stories publicly, except the possible prevention of repeated offenses.

Even today, most perpetrators of wartime rape go largely unpunished, and some victims still

124 Also called the “Nuremberg defense,” some defendants during the ICTY claimed they were just following orders and cannot be held responsible for their crimes. 125 At this time, rape was already prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, but the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the first to formally recognize rape and sexual violence as acts of genocide and crimes against humanity.

51 regularly see their rapists in their local communities. The hurt of the past is still alive, and until the wounds of history are mended, they will continue to bleed.

Chapter 4.3: Sins of the Father

Since the Yugoslav Wars, rape as a weapon of war has received increasing attention from a multitude of sources, such as journalists, authors on the internet, international tribunals, academics, and governments; however, despite the growing awareness of wartime sexual violence, its causes, and its victims, the same spotlight has not been cast on its living, breathing products: the children of wartime rape. Wartime sexual violence and the resulting children are not new phenomena, but until recently, the voices of these children were not included in most discussions or research on these topics. “Their existence, in the hundreds of thousands, is a widely ignored reality—to the detriment of the individuals and the local societies within which they grow up.”126 Born of War, the first book focused solely on these children and their plights, was published in 2007, meaning the research into this population is incredibly recent.127 To bring greater awareness to their existence, to identify and spread awareness about the common challenges they face, and to garner help and solutions for the unique problems they face, children born of war need further academic study and greater public attention.

The children who were born out of wartime rape during the Yugoslav Wars are now in their twenties, the living legacy of the conflict. Because the exact number of sexual assaults committed during the Yugoslav Wars is impossible to calculate, estimating the total number of

126 Sabine Lee, Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 15 127 Charli R. Carpenter, Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones, (Connecticut: Kumarian Press, 2007)

52 children born out of it is difficult to determine or even vaguely estimate.128 Raised without fathers, bullied by their peers, shamed by their mother’s family and friends, and forever marked by the circumstances of their conception, these people are thrust into inescapable victimhood from the moment of their birth.129 Their existence carries a myriad of challenges for themselves, their mothers, their community, and their states. The psychological, physical, social, and economic consequences from the individual instance of rape cause a ripple effect, affecting not only the next generation, but also the wider family and community.

In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, cultural identity is key to how one navigates and is treated by society. Family and heritage form the foundation to communal belonging and acceptance, connecting individuals to their people and the land. However, in the case of ethnic conflict, families often impose the ethnic identity of the father or rapist onto the child. Because the mother’s ethnic identity is considered subordinate to the father’s, children of rape are often excluded from their maternal family.130 Perceived as a child of the enemy, the children feel marked and othered. From their peers, children born of wartime rape often face bullying, social rejection, and ostracization.131 In addition, possessing ethnic attributes of two groups but fully belonging to neither causes lasting mental and emotional stress. Without a place where they feel accepted, the child’s senses of home and belonging are a lasting battlefield of the conflict. Alen

Muhic, whose Muslim mother was raped multiple times by a Serb man she knew named Radmilo

Vukovic, met his biological father after Vukovic was freed from jail.132 Muhic described the

128 Lee, Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century, 19 129 René Provost and Myriam Denov, “From Violence to Life: Children Born of War and Constructions of Victimhood” (October 25, 2019), http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3475496 130 Maria-eve Hamel, “Ethnic Belonging of the Children Born out of Rape in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 2 (2016): 287–304, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12151 131 Provost and Denoy, “From Violence to Life” 132 Jocelyn Hackett, “Prosecutor's Office v. Radmilo Vuković,” Legal Information Institute (Cornell Law School, December 26, 2019), https://www.law.cornell.edu/women-and- justice/resource/prosecutor%27s_office_v._radmilo_vukovi%C4%87

53 experience, “When he opened the door, I saw myself twenty to thirty years in the future. Same physical appearance, same shape of the head. Identical. It was like copy, paste. We introduced ourselves, sat down in the garden, and started talking. I was so furious with his answers to my questions. I wanted to know why he admitted everything at the trial, but never got in touch with me after his release. He said he had never known my mother, he didn't commit any crime. I became so angry when he said the DNA analysis was fake and was planted on him. I realized then that there was nothing human in him and I just turned around and left without saying goodbye, without anything.”133 Though Muhic has a loving adoptive father, a good home, and a family of his own, he is still often called the son of the enemy, or a Serb bastard.

Children born of war in the former Yugoslavia are not visibly distinguishable or obviously different from their peers, meaning elements other than physical appearance act as markers of their identity. In comparison, children fathered through American soldiers during the

Vietnam War are easily identifiable. Because of their obvious visibility, children born of war in

Vietnam were targeted for discrimination, but also received greater attention and publicized interest.134 In Yugoslavia, where ethnic lines are blurred and one’s nationality is not immediately indicated through physical appearance, children born of war are more invisible. However, their identity is often still known based on speculation by local communities, circulated knowledge, and word of mouth.

In addition to external shame and judgement, the people conceived through wartime rape also face many inner struggles, such as how they view themselves and their own identities. Ajna

Jusić, president of the Forgotten Children of War Association, explained some of her feelings

133 “Children of Bosnian Wartime Rape Victims Seek Justice,” PBS NewsHour, Public Broadcasting Service, July 8, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/adults-born-from-wartime-assault-in-bosnia-search-for-paths-to-justice 134 Lee, Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century, 9

54 regarding the circumstances of her birth, “We’re not children of love. We’re children of hate. It took me a long time to accept that the war is the only reason I’m alive.”135 For people born out of wartime rape, accepting their own beginnings in an environment that constantly reminds and shames them for it is a lifelong battle. The victims are condemned as much as the perpetrators, sometimes more. Because their lives are constantly affected by the war, it can never be fully delegated to history. The Yugoslav conflict lives on within them, permanently linked to their identity.

For post-conflict societies such as Bosnia, most people would like to believe that the war ended and that its causes were relatively resolved. Thinking of past trauma, such as the Yugoslav

Wars, can bring back unpleasant memories of bloodshed, battle, loss, death, violence, and trauma. Many people, including women who experienced wartime rape, would rather avoid reminders of the war altogether; however, because of the discrimination they face, children of wartime rape do not have the luxury of forgetting or ignoring. The war brings up such painful memories for most, so serving as a living reminder of the war has frequently put children of wartime rape at the receiving end of hostility. Avoiding painful elements of the past and distancing oneself from potential triggers is normal behavior, but children of wartime rape are unfairly blamed for their mere existence. Nobody has any control over the circumstances of their birth, yet children of war pay nearly every day for theirs.

Discussions of wartime rape, especially discussions regarding the resulting children, are rare in countries of the former Yugoslavia. Rape is viewed as a direct attack on the honor of the individual, family, and wider community, so it is considered extremely taboo. However, the taboo is being confronted and challenged by these children, who are now full-fledged adults.

135 “Living in Dignity: Ajna Fights for Bosnia’s ‘Children of Shame,’” dw.com (Deutsche Welle, October 26, 2019), https://www.dw.com/en/docfilm-living-in-dignity-ajna-fights-for-bosnias-children-of-shame/av-50999139

55 Because of increased research and spreading international awareness regarding wartime rape, forceful impregnation is no longer considered a by-product of warfare, but a strategic weapon aimed at weakening and corrupting the soul of the enemy nation.

The relationship between a mother and her child born out of rape is complicated and impossible to generalize. Some mothers choose to keep and raise their children, but many mothers choose to have abortions or put their children up for adoption, some going as far as infanticide. One woman describes her pregnancy as, “I only told my mother. She helped me get an abortion. It was not a proper abortion. I took medicines and different teas – I mean different grasses – and one night I went to the toilet and felt that I lost the baby. I could not bear to have a baby whose father I didn’t know, a baby made during those circumstances.”136 To many women, these children serve as a permanent reminder of their worst, most painful memories, so they would rather be rid of the children as a way of erasing any reminders of their trauma. Even those who keep their children face lifelong mental and emotional strain.

The responsibility of reconciliation now rests on the shoulders of those who had nothing to do with the conflict: the younger generations. These people, many of whom are now mature individuals and activists, continue to fight for legal and social equality. Political and legal institutions must explore paths toward justice for children born of war, starting with recognizing their status and needs as a special group of wartime violence victims.137 Current laws meant to protect these people are sporadic and lack enforcement, so children born of war do not receive the same privileges and protections as other war victims.138 The Forgotten Children of War

Association is one group founded by and fighting for their rights, including the right to withhold

136 Skjelsbaek, “Victim and Survivor,” 389 137 Lee, Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century, 19 138 Sabine Lee, Ingvill C. Mochmann, and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, “The Children of the Occupations Born During the Second World War and Beyond,” Historical Social Research 34, no. 3 (2009), 263–82

56 a biological father’s name from official documents. These people and their plights can no longer be ignored. To achieve progress for children born of war, recognizing their situation, understanding their struggles, and implementing social and legal changes are essential. When the people of the former Yugoslavia finally face the past, accept the truth, and deliver justice, only then can personal and national healing occur. The sins of the father must be atoned for and replaced with the actions of the children. If the new generation cannot forgive, the conflict will never end. Perhaps these children will help inspire greater tolerance and reconciliation, leading

Yugoslavia to a place that can finally be considered post-conflict.

57 Chapter 5: Conclusion

“Of everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living, nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.” -Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

The relationships between nation, state, ethnicity, and gender construct the basis of modern ethnic conflicts. Gender and national identity depend not only on the other, but on outside oppression. Identifying with a nation is as exclusionary as it is inclusionary; however, when love for one’s nation evolves into hatred of others, national belonging becomes nationalism. Not only did gender and national identity control how individuals experienced the

Yugoslav wars, but they continue to affect modern ethnic conflicts, inequalities in criminal justice, politics, nationalist narratives surrounding the events of Yugoslavia, and individual healing.

Though the categories of perpetrator, bystander, and victim are standard and useful when examining conflicts, they cannot cover all experiences. The borders between each group are permeable: bystanders can become perpetrators, perpetrators can also be victims, and so on.

Identity is complex, and though these labels are limiting, they are helpful in dissecting the dynamics and players involved in conflict. Women in the Yugoslav Wars, whether as perpetrators, bystanders, or victims, were active participants and agents of change. Women can occupy the positions of both oppressor and oppressed, can be victims and victimizers simultaneously. Some of the potential problems with focusing on the roles of women, especially their pain and victimization, are the following,

“…in regarding the pain of women, we often split these women off from their lives and deaths, their stories and experiences. We may hold the pain of women in high regard, but when we regard it, we also find spectacle in it, converting their suffering into cultural, even psychological, objects around which we tell our own stories, find large meanings,

58 fixed and full of symbolic portent ... these idealized icons of victimization, innocence, or even resistance ... serve as fixtures around which other survivors’ stories are told, around which cultures and nations may even tell their own stories.”139

To alleviate these problems, academia should continue to center personal narratives and survivor testimonies when studying trauma and memories of violence. Rather than granting women an immutable status of victimhood, maternity, innocence, and morality, scholars, including feminists, must recognize the wide range of actions women take, including perpetrating crimes.

Reality must subvert old conceptualizations of feminine powerlessness and masculine dominance. Regardless of time or place, women throughout history have engaged with the world around them, influencing and changing it; their stories are neither an exhibit to gawk at nor irrefutable gospel. Properly understanding the political and social history of a country’s women is vital to understanding the overall politics and history of that country.

Although the Yugoslav Wars officially ended in 2001, many of the problems which contributed to the outbreak, such as ethnic tensions, conflicting or controversial stories of the same event, and economic troubles, still exist in the Balkan republics today.140 There is no simple solution for the issues that continue to plague the post-war Balkans. The problems of the past continue to survive and affect the present. Nobody bears exclusive guilt for the war because each group was victimized; however, each group perpetrated crimes as well. Tensions are still alive and festering in the former Yugoslavian countries. Like William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” While most try to move on, forgiving and forgetting is harder.

Because no single country or group fully accepted responsibility and blame for the wars, people

139James E. Young, “Regarding the Pain of Women: Questions of Gender and the Arts of Holocaust Memory,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124, no. 5 (October 2009): 1778-1786, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.5.1778 140 Ivo Banac, “The Fearful Asymmetry of War: The Causes and Consequences of Yugoslavia’s Demise,” Daedalus Vol. 121, No. 2, (Spring 1992): 141-174

59 of the former Yugoslavia have not fully acknowledged or confronted the past, making it all the more difficult to overcome.141

However, there are reasons for hope: wartime sexual violence has occurred since time immemorial, but the Yugoslav conflict revolutionized international justice and the ICTY proclaimed rape as a crime against humanity. When identified, perpetrators continue to be prosecuted by local courts. Feminist organizations remain active in their support of both female and male survivors. The children born of war in the former Yugoslavia are entering adulthood and seeking social and legal equality for themselves.

Nothing in history is inevitable. The Yugoslav conflict was not the result of centuries-old anger and resentment; ethnic conflict is not directly caused by so-called ancient hatreds and can be prevented with proper knowledge. Though the Yugoslav conflict was unique, many elements of the crisis, such as xenophobia, religious cleavages, nationalism, the involvement of non-state groups, rapid political and economic transitions, sexual violence, genocide, and the deterioration of the line between civilian and combatant could easily strike elsewhere. In particular, identity politics are more integral to politics and power relations now, in the global age, than ever before.

History is not perfectly repetitive, but it is cyclical: the circumstances that led to Yugoslavia’s collapse are extraordinary but could also happen again. Yugoslavia will occur again in the future; how the world reacts will depend on what, if anything, was learned from the past.

141 In comparison, Germany’s full acceptance of guilt for WWII helped propel international postwar recovery.

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