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Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory

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Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory Dartmouth College Dartmouth Digital Commons Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty Faculty Work 2002 Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory Lynda E. Boose Dartmouth College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa Part of the Women's Studies Commons Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation Boose, Lynda E., "Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory" (2002). Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty. 2051. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/2051 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Work at Dartmouth Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Dartmouth: Published works by Dartmouth faculty by an authorized administrator of Dartmouth Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory Author(s): Lynda E. Boose Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory (Autumn, 2002), pp. 71-96 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175701 Accessed: 14/05/2009 20:34 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs. http://www.jstor.org Lynda E. Boose Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory n February22, 2001, at the trial of three indicted war criminals from Foca, the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded for the first time that rape and sexual enslavement were violations of sufficient gravity to be considered as "crimes against humanity" under international law. This overdue move to place sexual crimes on the list of most serious crimes for prosecution came in the wake of the international outrage generated by the Bosnian war, where the mass rape and forced incarceration of women in so-called rape camps had been one of the chief strategies used by Serbian forces primarily against the Muslim populations of both Bosnia and Kosovo. Thus, in what the As- sociated Press described as "wrenching, horrific testimony" (Associated Press quoted in Gartenberg 2000), those Bosnian women courageous enough to testify became symbolic speakers for the many thousands of women who did not appear, either because they had been killed after being raped, or because their rapistsremained unapprehended, or because they remained silent for fear of being ostracized within their own culture. Conservative estimates of the number of women raped during the Bos- nian war run between twenty thousand and fifty thousand; what happened in the rape camps of Bosnia includes a list of atrocities as endless as the sadistic imagination might devise.' Throughout 1992 and 1993, truck- I owe a special note of thanks to Nermina Zildzo, Nenad Filipovic, and Drazan Lapic for sharing insights into their culture with me and to Annabelle Winograd for her invaluable help in commenting on the manuscript. 1 The two books that have become the standard references for documented information about rape and the Bosnian war are Stiglmayer 1994 and Allen 1996. A lesser-known but excellent account, published in English, comes from Montenegrin journalist Seada Vranic (1996), whose work includes the perspective of Bosnian psychologists as well as the voices of rape victims. Additionally, see Bernard 1994; Ramet 1999; and Drakulic 2000. Recently made available is the English translation of a text originally published in Belgrade; Vesna Nkolic-Ristanovic's collection of essays ([1995] 2000) written by four women all from the present Yugoslavia (the Serbian-controlled remnant of the former federal Yugoslavia) offers a variant perspective on the Bosnian war and its particular violence against women. By its [Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society2002, vol. 28, no. 1] ? 2002 by The Universityof Chicago.All rightsreserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0040$10.00 72 I Boose loads of eastern Bosnia's Muslim women arrived in the central cities of Travnik, Zenica, and Visoko, and from there they were taken in busloads to the nearest hospital for abortions. Speaking of the likelihood of psy- chological rehabilitation for the rape victims of this war, Bosnian psychi- atrist Muradis Kulenovic makes the point that even the terms by which psychology understands the word rape are rendered grossly insufficient if not meaningless by the experience of large numbers of Bosniak women,2 for whom rape commonly occurred within an interlinked sequence of traumatic events in which, Kulenovic says, "the victim, prior to the rape, had experienced the massacre of children and parents, then had to watch the murder of her husband, who had been forced to watch the rape of his wife. Finally,. terrified and probably naked, she had to flee under a rain of bullets from her burning village, stumbling on the mangled and charred bodies of her relatives, neighbors and friends" (quoted in Vranic 1996, 194). Under such circumstances, the term rape exceeds any context in which traditional forms of therapy can assume its meaning. While several decades of feminist pressure have brought at least some change in the view of rape within North American and western European societies, in most other cultures the way that rape is socially constructed makes it primarily a violation defiling the male members of both the victim's family and her community, and thus the narrative of the raped woman has always been a text that is simply disallowed from the culture's self-story.3Yet while this very reaction hands the invader a useful weapon attempt to hide an evident Serbian nationalism under the guise of feminism, however, and by its insistence throughout on a purportedly apolitical stance that wants us to read the violence of the Bosnian war as equally suffered and enacted by all three ethnic groups, the book exposes its unacknowledged participation in that particular discourse that seeks to minimize the enormity of Serb responsibility by redistributing responsibility to those who were disproportionately the war's real victims-the Bosnian Muslims. Ironically enough, by implicitly invoking such claims, the book seizes on the same strategy that the United States adopted during the Bosnian war as a means of glossing over the reality ofvictim and victimizer and rationalizing its own decision to avoid militaryintervention in a war that the U.S. military hierarchy balked at entering. 2 Bosniak is the Balkan term for Bosnians who are Muslim. 3 Only a deeply entrenched patriarchalismcan explain the story of a Kosovar Albanian family's reaction to the rape of their thirteen-year-old daughter, Pranvera,who was among the twenty young girls raped by Serb troops who ethnically cleansed her Kosovar village in 1999 and forced the Albanians to flee in exile across the border. While for four days and nights Pranverawas held in the basement and gang-raped, her family upstairs was held at gunpoint and forced to listen helplessly to her screams. The battered little girl was eventually returned to her family, but unlike the other family members, she never reached the relative safety of the Kukes camp. Before reaching the border, this deeply loved daughter was sac- rificiallysent by her father to join the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillaforces, where S I G N S Autumn 2002 I 73 for destroying the invaded community and may in fact encourage him to rape, even that consequence is apparently deemed preferable to the fem- inization of the community body implicit in the acceptance of either the violated woman or the story for which her body is text. As a vivid illus- tration of how resistant cultural narrativescan prove when faced with such undesirable histories, it is telling to note that it is only now, more than a half century after the fact, that the national narrativesof India and Paki- stan are reluctantly allowing any space at all for the suppressed stories of the mass violation of Muslim and Hindu women that took place during Partition.4 Likewise, only recently have the equally unwelcome stories of the sexual enslavement that Korean, New Guinean, and other so-called comfort women suffered at the hands of the Japanese army during World War II finally surfaced.5 Culture has authorized only one narrative for a woman raped by the enemy-the one of the Roman, Lucrece, that con- cludes with her suicide. In postwar Sarajevo,as some forty Bosnian women survivors banded together to publish their testimonies and thereby force them into public consciousness, the bravery of the survivors ran nearly at cross purposes to the apologetic defensiveness implicit in the title they gave their book, I Begged Them to Kill Me (Association of Camp In- mates-Canton Sarajevo [2000]; described in Drakulic 2001).6 Such am- bivalence itself speaks volumes about the coercive interplay of gender and cultural memory.
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