Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
pages 29-30 | 2532 words
Why it’s much better to describe the plight of women in war zones without seeking to whitewash their crimes
Rakiya Omaar and Rachel Sevenzo
- What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa edited by Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya
Zed, 180 pp, £39.95, April 1998, ISBN 1 85649 537 X
Nowadays in Africa, it is easier to attract overseas aid for projects that address ‘the concerns of women’ than it is to fund almost any other kind of initiative. Most donors want to know in detail how any allocation will benefit women specifically. What Women Do in Wartime includes contributions from several women’s groups which have sprung up on the continent as a result of this turn of events. Most, like the Women’s Commission of the Human Rights League of Chad, are advocates on behalf of women in war-torn nations, or nations which have only recently emerged from conflict. The argument that is held to justify the existence of these groups is that women have been so completely marginalised, and their problems are so specific, that they require special measures. The trouble with this ‘gendered’ approach is that it discourages any analysis of the ways in which the experiences of men, women and children overlap and intersect – a fact which helps to explain why this book is less concerned with ‘what women do’ and more with a grim accounting of what is done to them.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 6 · 18 March 1999
From Robert Bell
Rakiya Omaar and Rachel Sevenzo (LRB, 18 February) take a brave stand in the face of worldwide concern about the female victims of war, and its almost universal focus on sexual abuse – a consequence, as they point out, of the revelations of the mass rape of Bosnian women. The contention that mass rape was a conscious and organised strategy of war in Bosnia sold a lot of newspapers. I was surprised then, on arriving in Sarajevo six months after the end of the war, and in the three years I have spent in Bosnia since then, to find that this defining characteristic of the war is never mentioned: no international programmes of any size target the problem and the expected flood of abandoned babies has not materialised.
The first accounts of mass rape appeared during the Croatian war, with Serb forces accused of systematic targeting of Croat women in Eastern Slavonia. This was a bit of off-the-cuff propaganda from Franjo Tudjman's Government in Zagreb, but it was instantly seized on by the international press and the feminist movement. And it wasn't very difficult to find women who had been raped to back it up. The following year, the beleaguered Bosnian Government repeated the exercise to even greater effect, as part of the further demonisation of the Serbs (as if their real activities weren't enough), and again rape victims were easily found.
But there is no evidence of systematic or strategically targeted mass rape. Despite this, the 'phenomenon' spawned untold numbers of press reports, several books and a proliferation of seminars. The objective of the mass-rape campaign, as reported, was to alter the 'ethnic' balance through the propagation of little Serbs. Since there is no ethnic difference between the Serb aggressors and the rape victims, such a campaign would have led merely to the propagation of little Croats or little Muslims. This is not to say that rape on a large scale did not happen. It always does in war, particularly in this kind of civil war. But it was not the strategy it was made out to be.
Robert Bell
Sarajevo
