A Feminist Postsocialist Approach to the Intercultural Communication of Rape at the ICTY

Abstract

This article argues for postsocialism as an added consideration to postcolonial theory in analyzing and enacting intercultural and international relations of/for social justice. We theorize the need for feminist and communication studies of rape and sexual assault that consider how rape occurs in relation to institutions, bodies, and times that offer varying positions and possibilities to different identities, cultures, and groups. Our study of an international rape trial asks how survivors of rape can have their experiences validated in androcentric international judicial systems. Theorizing Yugoslavia through the prism of rape, we center our analysis on women as property. Utilizing concepts of relationality and performativity, we imagine how the temporal, cultural, and geographic positionalities of women’s experiences of rape can critique patriarchy and global capitalism.

KEY WORDS:

• Property
• Performance
• Nationalism
• Sexual Violence
• Transnational Feminisms

Notes

¹ The list continues and is constantly being updated. Here is a list as of February 8, 2018, from The New York Times:

(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/10/us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html). These high-profile cases importantly bring attention to sexual harassment and rape in the workplace, although access to this platform is enabled and constrained by race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

² The #MeToo movement was started by activist Tarana Burke (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html) and was re-invigorated by actresses posting the hashtag on twitter in response to a New Yorker expose (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories) about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s abuses and rapes of the actresses he employed.

³ We use this term to denote a relational approach to communication: one that places primacy on the ways meaning resides not in subjects/people or objects (messages, structures, institutions) but in the interaction among all these phenomena (Condit, 2006). While meaning making has material consequences, and thus should be critically studied, it is not embedded in these materialities and therefore may be changed or altered.

⁴ Dragoljub Kunarac was a general for the Bosnian Serbian Army who led an ethnic cleansing campaign to exterminate Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian town of Foča. His tactics included murdering men outright and taking women to “rape camps” to systematically rape, torture, dehumanize, and send messages to the remaining men in the community. As part of the war strategy, he commanded his unit to rape women and he himself participated in the rape and torture of many women. Because these orders were produced hierarchically, the ICTY found him culpable for his soldiers’ actions and declared the rapes egregious crimes against humanity that did not need to be classified under other statutes of the Geneva Convention, such as torture. Thus, while previous courts had admonished other war criminals for rape, for this first time in international history, rape was declared a crime against humanity in the Kunarac case. This decision set precedent for all future International Criminal Tribunal cases involving rape and for determining the enactment of justice in wartime rape through juridical means.

⁵ We follow Butler (2004) and understand precariousness, precarity, and precarious labor as a condition of living wherein certain bodies are more vulnerable to exploitation and lack the material conditions needed to live a “liveable life.” She explains, “One reason I am interested in precarity, which would include a consideration of ‘precaritization,’ is that it describes that process of acclimatizing a population to insecurity It operates to expose a targeted demographic to unemployment or to radically unpredictable swings between employment and unemployment, producing poverty and insecurity about an economic future, but also interpellating that population as expendable, if not fully abandoned. These affective registers of precaritization include the lived feeling of precariousness, which can be articulated with a damaged sense of future and a heightened sense of anxiety about issues like illness and mortality” (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 43).

⁶ These excerpts are difficult to read, to write about, and to fathom for level and degree of violence they describe. Our analysis is in no way intended to dilute, objectify, or trivialize the extent and level of violence inflicted during the war and its aftermath.

⁷ In addition to postcolonialism, which is more often called for and recognized as important theoretical perspective (see Shome, 2006).

⁸ Along with India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ghana, the former Yugoslavia formed the Non-Aligned Movement to politically opt out of the Cold War politics that saturated East/West geopolitical dynamics of the time. Although the goal was to opt out of the Cold War, Yugoslavia did not escape the U.S.-bound implications of being a socialist nation during the Cold War.

⁹ We acknowledge that although there are other versions of this story that could be told, we are offering a particular and a particularly feminist version.

¹⁰ The transcript reads as follows: “The accused, who raped the witness, first humiliated the trembling woman by saying that she had to enjoy what he was doing. And when the witness put her hands on her eyes, he told her that she had to look a Serb in his eyes while he was raping her. The victim was then also raped by the other two soldiers. While this happened, the accused Kunarac taunted the witness by telling her that she would have a son not knowing who the father was, but most important, that it would be a Serb child” (Kunarac p. 6243).

¹¹ Graphic media coverage of ethnic cleansing and violence in Bosnia brought the conflict to international attention and prompted international response. The response varied, from international peace talks hosted by the United States in Dayton, Ohio, to NATO bombing campaigns on Serbia led by the United States and President Clinton, to international feminist debate and advocacy. In the aftermath of the war, the United Nations (UN) formed a tribunal to punish former Yugoslav commanders that violated the Geneva Convention by enacting genocide. The court for the former Yugoslavia was under the larger International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague in the Netherlands. The court creates a new tribunal for each genocide, hence, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The purpose of the court is contested; some feel it is only symbolic while others feel that it provides justice for war-torn countries. Nonetheless, the ICC is an international and intercultural space that operates by using six official languages, can sentence people to prison, and represents an international community wherein the decisions made by the court impact discourses surrounding international and intercultural justice. For more about the scope and history of the court, see its website (https://www.icc-cpi.int/about).

¹² Dutch UN Peacekeepers at Srebrenica in Bosnia were responsible for watching after refugee Bosnian Muslim men and boys to protect them from murder by Serbian soldiers. The space in Srebrenica was declared a safe space by UN Peacekeepers and this was agreed upon by the Serbian army. However, in July 1995 the Serb army killed 8,000 refugees in the camp, making it one of the worst massacres of the war. Some claim that the Dutch let this happen and that the UN was to blame for the deaths of Muslim men and boys.

¹³ “The charge of rape is based in the indictment on various provisions—Article 7(1) of the Statute, direct participation in rape, 7(1) of the Statute again, but in a different respect, allegations of aiding and abetting rape; 7(3) of the Statute, namely, an allegation that he is responsible as a commander for rapes committed by subordinates and, again, then under Article, rape as a crime against humanity, widespread assault, rape as a part of a widespread assault on the Muslim population of Foča” (Kunarac, p. 31).

¹⁴ “The Prosecution is claiming that you committed rapes and/or failed to stop a rape being committed by your subordinates and, in this way, you have perpetrated a crime against humanity. Now, what is meant by a crime against humanity? I am sure that your legal counsel has already explained everything. You are aware of that. That means a serious attack on human dignity—a very serious attack on human dignity, which may take the form of murder, rape, enslavement, extermination and so on, in this case rape, which has a target of civilians, so not committed against soldiers but against civilians. This is the second legal ingredient, so a very serious attack on human dignity in the form which I have just set out, then, having as a target one or more civilians, and the third legal ingredient of this offence is that this serious attack on human dignity is part of a widespread or systematic practice in the area or in the country where the offence has allegedly been committed” (p. 37).

¹⁵ Yuval-Davis (1997) makes this argument by insisting that women’s bodies are the first to be symbolically mobilized as representative of the nation in war.

¹⁶ “What the evidence shows are Muslims, women and girls, mothers and daughters together, robbed of their last vestiges of human dignity, women and girls treated like chattels, pieces of property at the arbitrary disposal of the Serb occupation forces, and more specifically, at the beck and call of the three accused” (Kunarac, p. 6560).

¹⁷ “So the standpoint of the Prosecution, as put forward in the closing brief that the accused was in uniform or that he was armed is not based—because without this fact, rape cannot be seen as a war crime. So the fact that he was in uniform and that he was armed cannot be taken as an element of the crime and at the same time as an aggravating circumstance, because had there been no war, there would have been no criminal offence” (Kunarac, p. 6450).