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Politics of mass rapes in ethnic conflict: a morphodynamics of raw madness and cooked evil

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Abstract

To explain war rapes in former Yugoslavia, the work of cultural ideology is never complete, but an unstable relation between cultural activism and cultural norms and practices provides the point of departure to move beyond the stereotyped accounts of mass rapes and develop a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on discourse analysis and transformational morphodynamics. Methodologically, the new model takes lead from the abstract mathematical operations and canonical transformations suggested by Lévi-Strauss for the structural study of myth. The assumption is that mass rapes are fueled by a specific cultural activism that activates a cultural ideology that makes mass rapes effective in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing.

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Notes

  1. Cultural activism corresponds to the traditionalist and survivalist principles of the World Values Survey cultural map [2].

  2. Structural methodology is implicit in previous works on social morphology [32, 33], processes of identity construction and cultural socialization [34, 35], women’s agency [36], the myth of many children within the so-called Albanian patriarchal extended family [1], the religious movements during much of Southeast European history and politics [37–44], the narrative legacies and international representations of Balkan wars and their implications in regional and international politics [45–47], or the transformations of European identity [48].

  3. Major newspapers and media from many countries and a high number of organizations have collected data and written up reports, commentaries and accounts that have given rise to an enormous though widely divergent literature on wartime rape, published in print or posted on their websites, both in Western countries and in former Yugoslavia.

  4. In both Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, the International Tribunal was the first institution to convict for using rape as a weapon of war and to recognize that systematic rape and sexual enslavement in time of war was a crime against humanity and an instrument of genocide. See UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, ICTR-96-4-T (1998), ICTR-96-4-A (2001), http://unictr.unmict.org/en/cases/ictr-96-4; UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, IT-96-23-T & IT-96-23/1-T (2001), IT-96-23-A & IT-96-23/1-A (2002), http://www.icty.org/en/case/kunarac/4.

  5. UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, IT-98-33-T (2001), IT-98-33-A (2004), http://www.icty.org/case/krstic/4.

  6. Human Rights Watch, Serb Gang Rapes in Kosovo Exposed, 20 March 2000 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2000/03/20/serb-gang-rapes-kosovo-exposed), Human Rights Watch, Kosovo: rape as a weapon of ethnic cleansing (https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/fry/index.htm).

  7. Information reported by Nita Luçi

  8. Even an anonymous reviewer of a previous version of this article submitted to a major anthropological journal went to considerable length to discard genocidal rape as a “pure rhetoric, not a legal category”, to disparage most sources as not credible, written by people not experts in former Yugoslavia or competent in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian language, and to minimize figures of rapes and other casualties. As expected, they discuss rape and genocide for only to deny them both in “the pretty modern European society” of a country they cherish. Their conclusion could not be but “there is actually almost no good evidence for the proposition that there was a campaign by Serbian military or political leaders to rape mass numbers of Bosnian women, even less that there was a campaign to impregnate them.” Finally, all this makes it sound as though mass rape and genocide in former Yugoslavia were a children's game in the grade school playground.

  9. International Court of Justice, Case concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro): Judgment, 26 February 2007, ICJ General List no. 91, p. 108, § 297, http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICJ/2007/2.html.

  10. Ibid., § 298. The World Court found (although not unanimously) that Serbia was neither directly responsible for the Srebrenica genocide, nor that it was complicit in it. However, the Court’s Vice-President appended a dissenting opinion to the Judgment of the Court, stating that “Serbia’s involvement, as a principal actor or accomplice, in the genocide that took place in Srebrenica is supported by massive and compelling evidence”. In his opinion, the involvement or implication of Serbia in the genocide that took place in the 1990s in Former Yugoslavia was “both more serious in nature and more extensive in territorial scope than the mere failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica conveys”. This implies that the charge that Serbia was “responsible not only for its failure to prevent genocide but for being actively involved in it either as a principal or alternatively as an accomplice or by way of conspiracy or incitement would in all probability have been proven had the Court … followed a different methodology”, which could also improve “the high standard of proof or the rigor of its reasoning”. See: International Court of Justice, Case concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro): Judgment, 26 February 2007, Dissenting Opinion of Vice-President Al-Khasawneh, p. 254, § 30–34, http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/91/13689.pdf.

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Acknowledgments

Interest on this topic started almost twenty years ago when war mass rapes were still waged in Kosovo. Different aspects were presented in several research seminars and conferences. Aspects of the critical review of literature on mass rapes over the 1990s were presented in the Stoetzel Seminars on Social Anthropology and Psychology in Paris Sorbonne (2000). Aspects of the boundary condition in social and anthropological theory were presented in the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan/South Wales U.K. (2003), in the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia PA (2009), and in the Visiting Scholars Seminar at Harvard University (2017). Several aspects of the morphodynamics approach to mass rapes were presented in the Medical Anthropology Seminar at the University College London (2004), in the Annual Conference of the Anthropological Association of Ireland at the University of Limerick (2004), in the Conference on War and Sexual Violence at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2016), and in the Interdisciplinary Forum on Rape Cultures and Survivors in Santa Barbara CA (2018). I am thankful to Katherine Verdery, Roland Littlewood, Sarah Danielson, Tuba Inal, Merril Smith, Marie-Louise Pellegrin, and to the organizers and all other participants for their comments and discussions. A special thanks also to Nita Luci, Ruth Seifert and Zarana Papic for their help with many useful materials on mass rapes at the beginning of this work and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments at the final stage.

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Doja, A. Politics of mass rapes in ethnic conflict: a morphodynamics of raw madness and cooked evil. Crime Law Soc Change 71, 541–580 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-018-9800-0

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