Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Alexandra Atiglmayer

Book Overview

Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the continuing war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. The women--primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin--have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming.

The first...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803292295
• ISBN13: 9780803292291
• Release Date: April 1994
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Rape and and more rape

I read the book. After reading less than 50% of it I got sick of the repeated descriptions of rape incidents. If it is not rape then it is killing or at times both. All of this took place in the backyard of civilized Eroupe ! and for many months. I did like the historical capture of the Bulkans going back to Roman Empire on.

A Generally Strong Analysis of the Horrific Rapes in Bosnia

Stiglmayer's useful book binds together a dozen essays on the mass rapes in Bosnian war. When it was written in 1993 the conflict still raged and disclosures of systematic government-ordered rapes primarily against Muslim women by Serbs were new and shocking to most readers. Now five years later the crimes still shock, but by their magnitude and not their novelty. This book is still a powerful witness to the rapes, but more importantly it provides a legal, psychological, and historic framework for coming to an understanding which is necessary if we are to try to prevent more such horrors in the future, or at least to provide a timely intervention and vigorous prosecution of the perpetrators. Stiglmayer's own pair of essays are the most useful and interesting. Her first piece is an absorbing history of the Balkans that concisely untangles the web of hatreds and violence which have plagued the area for millennia and which are still powerfully germane. Her second piece constitutes the heart of the book. In it she dramatically and persuasively demonstrates that the rapes in Bosnia are not "typical" rapes, even by wartime standards, but are a tool systematically employed by the Serb leadership to pursue its genocidal campaign of "ethnic cleansing". Her interviews illustrate that the rapes are about the humiliation of women, but they are also directed at the Bosnian Muslim population as a whole as a tactical means to accomplish the evacuation by the Muslims of large swaths of Bosnian territory. In other essays, Paul Parin offers some ideas on the psychology of the rapes. He doesn't claim to have all the answers, but his essay is thought-provoking. Rhonda Copelon provides a considered analysis of the state of international law and its applicability to the Bosnian horrors. Her otherwise sound piece is marred by her lawyerly/academic tendency to misuse words ("surface" as a transitive verb meaning "bring to light"; "intersectional" where she means "intersecting") and her occasional unlawyerly hyperbole (she notes on p.198 that a midday women's talk show opened with the script, "In Bosnia, they are raping the enemy's women". Two pages later this has turned into the assertion that the media "often refer to the mass rape in Bosnia as the rape of the `enemy's women'").Surprisingly, the most disappointing essays are those by the best-known authors. The first of Catharine MacKinnon's two pieces is a reprint of a 1993 Ms. Magazine article. She gets in some obligatory feminist chops, pokes at Gloria Steinem, equates the Third Reich with Penthouse, and moans about American women in porn films, in brothels, and in slavery. She slips in a couple of gratuitous anecdotes, and that's it. No analysis, no nothing. It reads as though she wrote it on a train with a short deadline and did her research by cell-phone. Her second piece is marginally better, but her point is a weak one. She is horrified by the crimes ag