Professional paper
Wartime Sexual Violence Against Women and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Sara Meszaros
Abstract
The text analyses the problem of the treatment of the wartime sexual violence against women at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The starting point of the analysis is the gender-ethnical discourse based on the evaluations of data on war rapes published by the media and the UN. Two fundamental lines of thinking developed: gender-subject and ethno-political. The gender-subject corpus of theories examines the gender dimension of the wartime sexual violence. The ethno-political questions the relationship between the female subject and the ethnical subject. I will refer to the analytically problematic places as spaces of disjunction. The first such place is the female body. Here we discuss the ICTY’s insistence on naming as war crimes only the rapes that belonged to the systematic and mass politics of rape. The second space of disjunction is the female subject. Here we examine subordination of the female subject to the ethnical subject, which is most evident from the treatment of forced pregnancy exclusively in the context of ethnical cleansing. The third and the last space of disjunction is the female silence. The ICTY legally neglects survivors and witnesses, which increases the probability of secondary victimization, and discourages the breach of silence. The final part of the paper examines possible consequences of the humanitarian-legal
foundation of the patriarchal construction of identity during the peacetime, especially the perpetuating of ethnocentrism and patriarchy. The International Criminal Tribunal is not seen as being able to fill the spaces of justice, emptied by the disjunctions. Such a
role may come to be assumed by the courts of alternative justice.
Keywords
wartime sexual violence against women; war rape; International Criminal
Hrčak ID:
3425
URI
Publication date:
15.11.2004.
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