RAPE AND KILLING ARE CHIEF AMONG THE VICIOUS PLEASURES, A MAN'S recreations on the dark side. Medieval kings reserved for themselves alone the right to do such things, in peacetime anyway. In war, the privileges were distributed to the lowliest foot soldier: every man a king.
Killing, of course, is what soldiers are trained to do. The disciplined destruction of the enemy is their military duty. Soldiers may be court- martialed for not killing.
Rape is a disreputable half-brother to that. No glory attends it. The story of rape in war is murky. Rape after battle has usually been regarded as an ugly side effect. The spoils of war, Homeric booty: kill the men and take the women as prizes. Does after-battle rape merely serve to illustrate the human tendency to take things too far once taboos have been breached, especially in the midst of much danger and adrenaline and anarchy? Everyone knows that atrocity has a life of its own, a quality of evil ecstasy.
No one can hear accounts from the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina without sensing that the conflict there has taken the matter of rape in war down into deeper, more sinister dimensions. It is not known how many rapes have been committed since the fighting began in the breakup of Yugoslavia. A European Community team of investigators calculates that 20,000 Muslim women and girls have been raped by Serbs. Other estimates run much higher. The Bosnian government claims that as many as 50,000 Muslim women have been raped. Serbs are undoubtedly committing most of the rapes at the moment; they have also seized the most land. But as Amnesty International reported last month, others in the conflict, Muslims and Croats, have also been guilty of widespread rape. The hideous moral ecology of the region has left no one innocent.
The fighting has opened a door upon horrors -- the wanton siege of Sarajevo, the death camps and other atrocities of "ethnic cleansing" -- suggesting that atavistic nationalisms, or tribalisms, may lie just beneath the civil veneers. The abuses of Bosnian women open a perspective upon wartime rape that is equally terrible. In Bosnia, rape, far from being a side effect of war, has become one of the indispensable instruments of war. The battleground is not only villages and countryside but also women's bodies.
Amnesty International's report Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces, states "The available evidence indicates that in some cases the rape of women has been carried out in an organized or systematic way, with the deliberate detention of women for the purpose of rape and sexual abuse." Rather than being the random indiscipline of soldiers, many of the rapes in Bosnia have almost certainly been committed as a matter of deliberate policy.
And as a weapon of war, rape works -- sometimes even better than killing does. Killing may make martyrs, and thus inspirit and strengthen the morale and solidarity of the victims. Rape, on the other hand, not only defiles and shatters the individual woman but, especially in traditional societies, also administers a grave, long-lasting wound to morale and identity. Rape penetrates the pride and cohesion of a people and corrodes its future. When a woman is raped in war, she and her family and ultimately her community internalize the assault upon their identity. Rape in war is only sometimes an act of simple lust or sadism.