Seven

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHICAL INTERVENTION IN GENOCIDE1

Natalie Nenadic

1. Introduction The recognition that rape and other sexual atrocities can be acts of genocide and crimes against humanity is now becoming a common sense in the world’s consciousness. Kadi v. Karadi, a 1993 civil lawsuit in New York City against Radovan Karadi, head of the Bosnian Serbs, first got them recognized, in 1995, as genocide under law.2 Then, in the 1998 Akayesu decision, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) recognized rape as genocide.3 Indeed, sexual atrocities are now a part of what journalists, human rights groups, lawyers, political leaders, and others more routinely investigate in situations of international conflict. We began to see this even in Rwanda in the early 1990s and more recently in Darfur.4 But this recognition is a recent development, one that appears to be eclipsing the common sense that has prevailed from time immemorial, namely denial in its variety of forms. The breakthrough of this acknowledgement is the culmination of a long and arduous process, one that began with the recent genocide in Europe. It began with on-the- ground initiatives by feminists and by survivors in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, by women who were responding to the events that were suddenly engulfing them, the events of the “compelling present.”5 For it is here that these crimes made their first recognized appearance, in the Serbian campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemism for variously destroying the non-Serbian populations of the region. Rape and other sexual atrocities, especially through the proliferation of camps for raping and killing women, were a defining feature of this campaign. They were a cheap, effect- ive, low-grade technology of it. This campaign began against Croatia in 1991, resulting in the occup- ation of one third of its territory and establishing a template for what would follow elsewhere. In 1992, it widened to include Bosnia-Herzegovina, re- sulting in the occupation of two-thirds of its territory, an occupation that continues to this day and where perpetrators roam freely under the eye of the 136 NATALIE NENADIC

U.N.’s presence there. As a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) concentration camp survivor who just visited this area recently told me, he observed Serbs who ran the camps as well as one who organized rapes moving freely about, even doing financially well for themselves. Moreover, in their midst, ordinary Serbs wear T-shirts with a picture of Radovan Karadi and Ratko Mladi on them, architects and perpetrators of the genocide, a picture with the caption “Serbian heroes.”6 In 1998, Serbia’s campaign widened further still against Kosovo, continuing an attack there that first began in an earlier form in 1989. Finally, in 1999, the “ethnic cleansing” was stopped through U.S.-led NATO airstrikes against Serbia, in a strategy bypassing the U.N. and its years of ineffectual response,7 and completing the task in seventy-eight days. Perhaps we may describe today’s growing recognition of the sexual atrocity dimension of genocide with a version of a Hegelian idea, a version divested of his metaphysics. Hegel draws our attention to the worldly or “historical” sources of eventual breakthroughs in philosophy’s understanding and in the wider human consciousness concerning matters of oppression and liberation from it. He notes that such breakthroughs are the culmination of long, complex, and painstaking developments that first take place in the world, in a variety of concrete, more immediate areas of human endeavor. Eventually, response in these forms can create enough of a groundswell that percolates to affect philosophical thinking and where, all together, they can precipitate a fundamental shift in the wider common sense. Hegel says of such shifts that they are “the product of a widespread upheaval in various forms of culture, the prize at the end of a complicated, torturous path and of just as variegated and strenuous an effort.”8 My task here is to present a brief account of that “complicated, torturous path” that somehow set in motion a chain of events that yielded a new understanding of genocide and sexual violence and is now shifting the world’s common sense about them. That is, I present a phenomenology of this philosophical moment, where I understand philosophy in the senses sug- gested by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel. Heidegger refers to philosophy as ontology that is possible only as phenomenology.9 What he means is that philosophy is about pursuing the indications being revealed by a previously unacknowledged dimension of an area of inquiry, a dimension that prevailing and reductive metaphysical determinations of it have variously designated as unreal and as philo- sophically irrelevant. Heidegger, however, considers these indications the life-source of possible new and groundbreaking understanding, which when it occurs, is something he refers to as an ontological moment. For Wittgen- stein, genuine philosophical problems have their source in this kind of space, the kind where we thus find ourselves off the grid of established understanding. Here, there is no charted map, no staked-out ground under foot, to guide us. Such problems, he says, have the form “I do not know my