Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1992, Beverly Allen learned of the existence of rape/death camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia from a former student, a women of Croatian heritage. In these camps, women have been detained and raped repeatedly by Serbian soldiers, whose goal often is to impregnate their victims or to torture them before they are killed. In this highly personal account, Beverly Allen provides a compelling testimony and analysis of the horrifying phenomenon of "a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide." In Rape Warfare, Allen examines the complexity of identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia through the accounts of rape/death camp survivors and those who work to help them. She then presents and analyzes the information she has gathered about genocidal rape, all the while asking, "How can I, an empathizing outsider, communicate what is happening without reinforcing the damage that has already been done?" In a nuanced discussion of the ethics of representing such atrocities, she decides to "forgo storytelling except when the stories I tell are my own." Allen concludes with an impassioned argument for bringing to trial the perpetrators of genocidal rape. By turns personal, polemical, and informative, Rape Warfare is a lucid guide for anyone seeking to make sense of what is happening in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The systematic rape of Muslim and Croat women as part of the ``ethnic cleansing'' campaign in the former Yugoslavia is by now common knowledge. Less well known is the military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide currently practiced in Bosnia-Herzogovina by members of the Yugoslav Army and the Bosnian Serb military. The author of this outraged protest asserts that rape is being used increasingly as a weapon of war in the Balkans, combining murderous misogyny with rabid nationalism. Allen explains the twisted logic by which perpetrators consider the act as cancelling the victim's cultural identity. If the victim is impregnated, so the theory goes, the offspring is nothing less than ``a little Serb soldier.'' Allen urgently argues that the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal must prosecute the perpetrators of pregnancy-aimed rape as a crime of biological warfare. Her self-consciously feminist book, documenting the mass scale of rapes at some 30 concentration camps, is shockingly effective. Allen is director of the humanities doctoral program at Syracuse University and a prominent advocate of women's rights. (Feb.)

Booknews