Lunch seminar with Ehlimana Memisevic
Sexual violence as a weapon of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990-1995: unresolved, unforgotten, and denied
Abstract
Rape and sexual violence were deliberately and methodically used as a weapon of war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-1995. As the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the territory of the former Yugoslavia noted in 1992, rape was used in “particularly sadistic ways” and “intended to humiliate, shame, degrade and terrify the entire ethnic group.”
It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 predominantly Muslim girls and women were raped and sexually assaulted. Many of them were detained in „rape camps,“ systematically raped and often forcibly impregnated and intentionally held until it was too late to legally or safely procure an abortion. Some entire towns, like Višegrad or Foča, were turned into rape centers.
The widespread use of rape and sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda in the late twentieth century has laid the ground for international judicial precedents. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda decided that rape was a genocidal crime, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) treated it as a crime against humanity. However, the case of Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovač, and Zoran Vuković, in which the ICTY found that rape was “used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror” was a landmark case since it was the first time in history that the combination of sexual enslavement and rape was treated as a crime against humanity and a violation of the rules of war.
The ICTY showed serious commitment to prosecuting rape and sexual violence; however, even the worst crimes against women committed in the notorious rape camps still remain 'invisible,' under-reported, and un(der)documented. Of 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, 93, or 58 percent, faced charges of rape or sexual iolence or had evidence of such violence presented against them at trial, but it is still just a fraction, considering the Tribunal received reports of more than 20,000 rapes. Many victims are still waiting for justice, and some criminals go unpunished, and even convictions do not always result in reparations for victims.
In this research, I will analyze the international courts' judgments relating to rape and sexual violence in the context of the recent history of atrocities. It will focus on the contribution of women who survived wartime rape to prosecuting the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.
In the second part of this research, I will focus on how these international criminal courts’ judgments relating to rape and sexual violence are received domestically by examining the current narratives in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. It will concentrate on the forms of genocide and war crimes denial, including crimes of rape and sexual violence, which have detrimental effects on the healing processes as well as reconciliation processes.
Speaker bio
Ehlimana Memišević, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Legal History and Comparative Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Sarajevo. She holds her BA and MA in Law, and PhD in Legal History and Comparative Law. Her major research fields include legal history and genocide studies.