NATO IN THE BALKANS
Rape & U.S. war propaganda
The following is from a chapter by Sara Flounders in the
book "NATO in the Balkans," published in 1998. It deals with
the charge that the Serbs in Bosnia had used rape as a
deliberate strategy in the war there. Now that the Pentagon is
bombing Serbia, it has once again tried to inflame public
opinion by accusing Serbs of rape--based on what it says is
information from one unnamed source. The movement needs to once
again examine this aspect of U.S. war propaganda.
One charge against the Serbs has aroused the anger and
shaped the view of millions of people who previously had little
interest or involvement in the Balkans. The charge is
rape--rape as a systematic weapon of war, a planned deliberate
strategy. The media assert that rapes were a conscious policy
and the responsibility of the Bosnian Serb leadership.
Between the fall of 1992 and spring of 1993 sensational news
reports claimed that at least 20,000 and up to 100,000 Muslim
women had been raped by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. This
crystallized the view that the Serbs were the aggressors and
the Muslims the victims.
Women are the first victims in every war. Rape and the
degrading abuse of women are all too often carried out as a
stamp of conquest by invading armies imbued with patriarchal
possessive attitudes. But the charge of rape has many times
been consciously used as an essential prop of war propaganda.
The purported defense of women is used to mobilize armies and
galvanize blind hatred.
The sensational charges of rape were used to a cynical
extent by the major corporate media, especially in the United
States, with no attempt to examine the sources. The foreign
minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, first charged
at peace talks in Geneva that 30,000 women and girls had been
raped. Ms. magazine ran a cover story that accused Bosnian Serb
forces of raping for the purpose of producing pornographic
films. No such films were ever found and the charges were not
supported by the findings of Helsinki Watch or Human Rights
Watch.
In January 1993, the Warburton Report, authorized by the
European Community, estimated 20,000 Muslim women had been
raped as part of a Serb strategy of conquest. This report was
widely cited as an independent, authoritative source. No
coverage was given to a dissenting member of the investigative
team, Simone Veil, a former French minister and president of
the European Parliament. She revealed that the estimate of
20,000 victims was based on actual interviews with only four
victims--two women and two men.
The Croatian Ministry of Health in Zagreb was the main
source upon which the Warburton Report based its figure of
20,000.
Newsweek magazine of Jan. 4, 1993, reported that up to
50,000 Muslim women had been raped in Bosnia. Tom Post, a
contributor to the article, explained that the estimate of
50,000 rapes was based on interviews with 28 women. This
estimate was the result of an extrapolation--multiplying each
charge of rape by a certain factor because historically rape
has been and continues to be an under-reported crime.
French television reporter Jerome Bony explained the
problem. "When I was 50 kilometers from Tuzla, I was told: `Go
to the Tuzla high school grounds. There are 4,000 raped women.'
At 20 kilometers this figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers
only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only four women
willing to testify."
The New York Times of Jan. 15, 1993, carried a photo story
with the caption, "A two-month-old baby girl born to a teen-age
Muslim woman after she was raped in a Serbian detention camp."
USA Today of Jan. 13, 1993, told the story of a 5-month-old
baby, presumably the product of systematic Serbian rape. At
that time, the war was not yet nine months old.
Women's organizations, understandably outraged by these
lurid reports, demanded that the United States and the European
powers take action. However, many of these same women ought to
be aware that U.S. troops do not protect women. In every U.S.
military operation an entire sex industry is created and tens
of thousands of women are forced into sexual slavery and
prostitution. Consider the experience of Vietnam, Thailand,
Korea and the Philippines. Even U.S. women in the military
experience rape and sexual abuse, then cover-ups and denial, as
the Tailhook scandal and subsequent exposés so
graphically demonstrated.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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