{"id":1592,"date":"2020-06-09T16:38:28","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T15:38:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/?page_id=1592"},"modified":"2020-06-09T16:38:28","modified_gmt":"2020-06-09T15:38:28","slug":"the-serb-femicide-by-aart-brouwer-de-groene-amsterdammer-1997","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.balkan-conflicts-research.com\/archive\/the-serb-femicide-by-aart-brouwer-de-groene-amsterdammer-1997\/","title":{"rendered":"The Serb Femicide – by Aart Brouwer, De Groene Amsterdammer 1997"},"content":{"rendered":"

De Groene Amsterdammer\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Sept 3 1997<\/p>\n

The Serb Femicide<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

by Aart Brouwer<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

On March 16th of this year Grozdana Cecez (47) from Bosnia took the\u00a0witness stand at the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague.\u00a0 In May 1992,\u00a0shortly after the outbreak of the Bosnian war, she was taken to the\u00a0Celebici prison camp.\u00a0 In a whispering voice she testified about her\u00a0treatment by second-in-command Hazim Delic and other guards.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For three months she and the other female prisoners had been beaten,\u00a0starved and raped, once even by three different men in a single night.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cecez’ account is definitely not the only testimony of rape during the\u00a0war in Bosnia.\u00a0 The stories, shocking as they are, are also\u00a0disgustingly similar.\u00a0 Apparently the male species has only a limited\u00a0but alas effective repertoire.\u00a0 Whether regular army troops, militias\u00a0or gangs, the pattern the perpetrators followed is always the same:\u00a0 they\u00a0overran a village or town, separated the men from the women and abused\u00a0the latter in hotels, homes and public buildings which had been\u00a0converted to make-shift prison camps.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

According to journalists and researchers this was common practice among\u00a0the Bosnian Serbs.\u00a0 By the end of 1992 estimates of 20,000 to 100,000\u00a0Muslim women surfaced.\u00a0 In combination with the reports about ‘rapecamps’ these figures confirmed a gruesome suspicion:\u00a0 the Serb\u00a0leadership promoted mass rape to break the moral resistance of the\u00a0Muslims.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

According to feminist groups the female body was the actual\u00a0battle-field in this war.\u00a0 Their call for punishment was heard:\u00a0 for the first time\u00a0since the Tokyo Tribunal of 1946 rape in war time is being prosecuted\u00a0as a separate crime.\u00a0 In The Hague Cecez was the first victim to point her\u00a0finger at her rapist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But her case is remarkable for yet another reason:\u00a0 Cecez is a Serb,\u00a0Delic is a Muslim.\u00a0 Celibici fell under the responsibility Alija\u00a0Izetbegovic, who, it is said, visited the camp on several occasions. \u00a0Apparently the Bosnian side committed rapes, too, and not just\u00a0sporadically, as becomes clear from reports by aid workers,\u00a0humanitarian organisations and international observers.\u00a0 Where then did the ‘id\u00e9e recue’ come from that only the Serbs raped prisoners systematically and\u00a0on a massive scale?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

‘The truth about a war becomes only known when it is over,’ says Mira\u00a0Behem, a media teacher, in ‘Kriegstrommeln:\u00a0 Medien, Krieg und Politik’\u00a0(1996).\u00a0 In two resounding chapters she proves that the history of the\u00a0Bosnian war has by far not been written yet.\u00a0 The role of secret\u00a0services, the war-propaganda and the American PR-bureaus which worked\u00a0for the Croatian and Bosnian governments seriously harmed truthfulness.<\/p>\n

When American reporter Peter Brock, by the end of 1993, accused his\u00a0collegues in Sarajevo and Zagreb of anti-Serb ‘pack journalism’ he was\u00a0practically lynched, but later he has often been proved right.<\/p>\n

We now know that the number of 200,000 Muslims killed in the Bosnian\u00a0war, as stated by the government in Sarajevo, is a gross exaggeration.\u00a0The Red Cross, the UN and Sipri in Stockholm estimate the total number\u00a0of victims among all warring parties at between 25,000 and 60,000.<\/p>\n

Still, the 200,000 figure was used for years, without objection and\u00a0with no sources given.\u00a0 From my own research (which went as far is the\u00a0decent poverty of this paper allows) I can draw no other conclusion than that\u00a0the Serb ‘femicide’ is nothing more than propaganda, readily adopted\u00a0by reporters, politicians and feminist ‘researchers’.<\/p>\n

The source can be found in Croatia, where, in 1992, aid workers startedto file testimony from Croatian and Bosnian refugee women.\u00a0 The\u00a0coordination was in the hands of the Croatian Information Center (CIC)\u00a0in Zagreb, which had been founded by the Ministry of Information to\u00a0promote Croatian independence and the interests of the Tudjman regime.\u00a0The CIC was led by Croatian Jadranka Cigelj, vice-president of\u00a0Tudjman’s party, who wanted to bring the Serb rapes to the world’s attention.<\/p>\n

Cigelj claimed to have been raped herself in the Omarska camp, but\u00a0issued conflicting versions of her ordeal over the years.<\/p>\n

The first reports about rapes were published by women’s groups around\u00a0Cigelj and the CIC.\u00a0 Piles of testimony were forwarded to Western women\u00a0and the press.\u00a0 At the time there was no talk of a systematic rape\u00a0campaign by the Serbs, but in the Summer of 1992 the Bosnian government\u00a0made new evidence available, which originated from the State Commission\u00a0for War Crimes in Sarajevo.\u00a0 This institute claimed to have 20,000\u00a0well-documented cases on file, and stated that the rapes were intended\u00a0to conceive as many ‘Serb children’ as possible.\u00a0 Many victims were\u00a0told during the rapes:\u00a0 ‘You are going to deliver a Chetnik.’\u00a0 Towards\u00a0that end the women were held captive until the moment that an abortion\u00a0had become too great a medical risk, according to Sarajevo.<\/p>\n

From that moment on reporters stumble over each other to supply theireditors with rape stories.\u00a0 The dance was opened on August 23rd 1992 byNewsday reporter Roy Gutman, whose journalistic CV was published in\u00a0this paper on January 31st, 1996.\u00a0 In his articles about Serb rapes,\u00a0written in cooperation with Cigelj and the Bosnian Ministry of the Interior,\u00a0and based on just a couple of testimonies, he wrote that Muslim women were\u00a0‘systematically’ raped and that the orders came from ‘circles around\u00a0Karadzic’.\u00a0 He never produced any evidence, but was awarded the\u00a0Pulitzer Prize for his reports.<\/p>\n

In Germany too, the item became a hot issue, thanks to the efforts of\u00a0the ‘Internationale Gesellschaft fuer Menschenrechte (IGMF) in\u00a0Frankfurt.<\/p>\n

This association presents itself as the German counterpart of Amnesty\u00a0International.\u00a0 In reality, though, it is a propaganda institute with\u00a0its roots in Association of Russian Solidarists (NTS) which was founded\u00a0by expatriates.\u00a0 During the war the NTS worked for the Nazis and for\u00a0the Croatian Ustashe, who managed to kill hundreds of thousands Serbs\u00a0and to make Sarajevo the first ‘judenreine’ (cleansed of Jews – FT)\u00a0city in Europe.\u00a0 After the war the NTS stayed in contact with the Croatian\u00a0nationalists who had gone in hiding, now under the human rights\u00a0banner.<\/p>\n

Among the NTS supported ‘prisoners of conscience’ were for instance\u00a0Dobroslav Paraga, the leader of the extreme-right Croatian JusticeParty, and Ante Paradjik, co-founder of the fascist HOS-militia.<\/p>\n

The association, which was renamed IGFM in 1981, led a publicity\u00a0campaign against the Sandinistas in the eighties; they were accused of\u00a0running camps where opponents were tortured, raped and murdered on a\u00a0massive scale.\u00a0 The Nicaraguan campaign was a market testing exercise\u00a0for the offensive which the IGFM, together with the CIC, started in\u00a01991.\u00a0 Apart from Germany, Austria, and the Vatican the world did not\u00a0like Tudjman, a virulent nationalist, anti-semite and admirer of the\u00a0Ustasha regime.<\/p>\n

These nasty associations with the new Croatia needed to be shielded off\u00a0from world attention by presenting the Serbs as the sole aggressors.<\/p>\n

The offensive was backed up by the American PR bureau of Ruder & Finn,which worked for the Croatian government.\u00a0 Ruder & Finn had experience\u00a0with similar projects ever since their first campaign, in 1967, for the\u00a0Nigerian break-away province of Biafra.\u00a0 It then followed a two-pronged\u00a0strategy:\u00a0 first it presented the Nigerian government as the ruthless\u00a0aggressor, then it painted Biafra as the defenceless victim of hunger\u00a0and terror.\u00a0 For the benefit of Muslims and Croats, Ruder & Finn used the\u00a0same strategy, but this time with the aid of modern electronics,\u00a0databases and media training.\u00a0 Later on, more PR bureaus were used.<\/p>\n

The exercise became a sensational success, not in the last place because of\u00a0the documentation supplied by the CIC and IGFM.\u00a0 President of the IGFM\u00a0branch in Zagreb was Albert Bing, who was also a member of the CIC;vice-president was Jadranka Cigelj.<\/p>\n

The German public became most alarmed by the accounts of reporter\u00a0Alexandra Stiglmayer in ‘Die Weltwoche’ and ‘Stern’, which were\u00a0re-printed in countless other papers.\u00a0 Basing herself on an anonymous\u00a0Bosnian source, ‘Besima’, Stiglmayer wrote that 2,000 women were held\u00a0captive and raped in a school in the village of Doboj.\u00a0 German\u00a0TV-reporter Martin Lettmayer and his Bosnian interpreter immediately\u00a0went to Doboj for an investigation, but found nothing of the kind in\u00a0the village.\u00a0 Even the local Muslims were shocked and rejected Stiglmayers\u00a0claims.\u00a0 Lettmayer checked other rape stories and came to the\u00a0conclusion that those, too, had been made up.\u00a0 His report appeared in the March 10, 1994, issue of ‘Weltwoche’, but nobody would buy his TV reports.\u00a0 “They definitely need to be broadcast,” said one editor, “but I am not going\u00a0to risk my job.”<\/p>\n

Ever since, ALL stories about Serb rape camps have been proved false,\u00a0but the idea that the Serbs were compulsive rapists had deeply sunken\u00a0in by the end of 1992.\u00a0 During the December, 1992, EU summit the European\u00a0leaders condemned the Serb rapes even though not a single serious\u00a0investigation had been carried out.\u00a0 In order not to remain\u00a0empty-handed, a committee under the leadership of British politician\u00a0Anne Warburton was ordered to report on the rapes of Muslim women.\u00a0Mind you:\u00a0 only of Muslim women.\u00a0 Moods were such that no-one wanted to\u00a0hear about other victims.\u00a0 The committee informed itself at the Croatian\u00a0Ministry of Public Health, spoke with just four victims (two males and\u00a0two females), yet called the number of 20,000 women ‘reasonable’ in its\u00a0final report.<\/p>\n

Committee member Simone Veil dissociated herself from the report and\u00a0Warburton failed to show up for the final hearings, where the reportwas called imperfect.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yet the figure of 20,000 was used everywhere and exaggerated still.\u00a0‘Newsweek’ mentioned 30,000 to 50,000 victims in January of 1993.\u00a0‘Paris Match’ opened with a picture of three distressed Bosnian women\u00a0and the text:\u00a0 “Like them, 60,000 other Bosnian women were raped.”\u00a0The ‘New York Times’ went as high as 100,000.\u00a0 These figure were obtained\u00a0by multiplying what few testimonies there were with an enormous factor.\u00a0The reasoning behind it was that in war time rape is less often\u00a0reported to the authorities, hence the real figure must be much higher than the\u00a0reported number of cases.\u00a0 On the other hand propaganda and rumours are\u00a0abundant in war time, which means that the number of reported cases was\u00a0already highly inflated.\u00a0 Jerome Bony, reporter for ‘Envoye special’,\u00a0the prestigous foreign affairs program of ‘France2’ experienced this\u00a0when he followed up on a lead:\u00a0 “Fifty kilometers from Tuzla I was told\u00a0to go to the school building because there were 4,000 raped women\u00a0there. At twenty kilometers the figure had gone down to 400 (…) and upon our\u00a0arrival we found four women who wanted to testify.”<\/p>\n

An often-used but dubious source was Borislav Herak, a Serb soldier who\u00a0had been captured by Bosnian government forces; a death sentence for\u00a0war crimes had not been executed and Herak was allowed to tell his story\u00a0for the Western media.\u00a0 He never stopped talking of rape, torture and\u00a0murder.<\/p>\n

Alas, all his stories contradict one another, which is not surprising\u00a0since Herak is mentally retarded.\u00a0 “He tells his audience whatever they\u00a0want to hear,” says Finnish reporter Vesa Toijonen, who was present\u00a0during several of Herak’s interviews.\u00a0 Nonetheless the American John\u00a0Burns did a major interview with Herak and saw it published in the ‘New\u00a0York Times’.\u00a0 It brought him the Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

Statements from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Red\u00a0Cross that all parties involved were guilty of rape, and that no\u00a0systematic pattern could be found in the Serb’s madness went unnoticed.<\/p>\n

Worse even, these organisations were unashamedly presented as sources\u00a0in articles about rape camps.\u00a0 A different story came from the feministSusan Brownmiller, author of the standard publication on rape ‘Against\u00a0Our Will’ (1975).\u00a0 She wrote in ‘Newsweek’ that the Serbs were at most\u00a0‘the bad guys’ because they conquered the most territory:\u00a0 “To women\u00a0there is alas nothing unique in mass rapes (..), nor is it unique that\u00a0a country’s leaders, weeping for emotion, present structural sexual\u00a0violence as a conspiracy against their national pride, masculinity and\u00a0honor”<\/p>\n

At the beginning of 1993 there was still just one official report on\u00a0rape available, a UN document dated December 18th, 1992, which dealtwith the rape of Serb women.\u00a0 It had been embargoed for weeks; later onit was distributed in very small numbers.\u00a0 Jacques Merlino, the\u00a0assistant editor-in-chief of ‘France2’, who wanted to check the rape\u00a0reports, writes in his account of his search for this document that he\u00a0only obtained it after months of asking (‘Les verites Yougoslaves nesont pas toutes bonnes a dire ‘ – 1993).\u00a0 After reading it myself I can\u00a0understand why.\u00a0 It contains well-documented testimony, medical details\u00a0and other material that could have been checked by independentinvestigators – and hence have shattered the anti-Serb image.<\/p>\n

In the meantime UN rapporteur for former Yugoslavia, TadeuszMazowiecki, was conscientiously collecting data on all sorts of war\u00a0crimes.\u00a0 He reported at regular intervals; in his reports especially\u00a0the Serbs were blamed.\u00a0 Yet, in his most alarming report (dated February\u00a026th, 1993), he concludes that rape was common practice among ALL\u00a0warring factions.\u00a0 But Mazowiecki was a rapporteur in the broadest\u00a0sense; he had to deal with countless issues at the same time.<\/p>\n

The only body involved with the subject in a really investigative way\u00a0was the UN committee of experts which started work in October 1992\u00a0under the presidency of University of Leiden (The Netherlands – FT) Professor\u00a0Frits Kalshoven.\u00a0 This committee investigated all accusations of war\u00a0crimes, set up a documentation system in Chicago, and attempted to find\u00a0patterns in the collection of data holding victims, perpetrators,\u00a0places and dates.\u00a0 Rotterdam University Professor Tinke Cleiren, the\u00a0committee’s member specialising in sexual violence, stated that the\u00a0omnipresence of rape and murder depressed her most:\u00a0 “All parties are\u00a0guilty of everything.”\u00a0 The committee soon found out that it was\u00a0extremely difficult to separate authentic testimony from propaganda.<\/p>\n

Kalshoven resigned in mid-1993 because of a serious illness, which waspossibly related to his dissatisfaction with the quality of the\u00a0collected data.<\/p>\n

“There is a lot of material to start court cases with,” he wrote in apublication, “but very little that will serve in evidence.”\u00a0 His task\u00a0was taken up by American professor Cherif Bassiouni.\u00a0When the final report was published in 1994, the real news about rape\u00a0was to be found in paragraph 239.\u00a0 There, the researchers come to the\u00a0conclusion that the Bosnian Commission for War Crimes, which had\u00a0claimed to have 20,000 well-documented cases on file, on closer inspection had only 105 rape victims in their dossiers.\u00a0 The committee goes on to say\u00a0that, despite repeated attempts, it had failed to prove the existence\u00a0of Serb rape camps.\u00a0 The committee was ‘…under the impression that in\u00a0certain areas there existed a systematic rape policy, but it is as yetunproven that such a policy existed with regards to all non-Serbs.’<\/p>\n

Alas, the report is unclear about what the committee understands by’systematically’.\u00a0 What exactly did the Serbs do what the Croats andthe Muslims did not do?\u00a0 Cleiren, employed at the Dutch Justice Ministry\u00a0nowadays, gives, at my request, an important qualification.<\/p>\n

Cleiren:\u00a0 Our data-analysis justified the conclusion that the Serbs\u00a0systematically committed war crimes.\u00a0 But this does not exclude that\u00a0the other parties acted likewise.”<\/p>\n

The Bassiouni committee had filtered out 800 reliable cases in the end,divided over all parties, but the Serb rape policy remained on thereporters’ repertoire.\u00a0 In 1995 ‘Vrij Nederland’ (a Dutch weekly – FT)\u00a0published a report which had been written in cooperation with the IGFM\u00a0and Jadranka Cigelj, in which all ‘topoi’ surface once again, including\u00a0the ‘20,000 well-documented cases’.\u00a0 The weekly even printed the bank\u00a0account number of IGFM.<\/p>\n

Kalshoven, on the contrary, is adamant in his rejection of the myth.\u00a0He has retired, but is still ‘alive and kicking’.\u00a0 During our telephone\u00a0conversation his aversion is undiminished.\u00a0 Kalshoven:\u00a0 “Terms like\u00a0‘genocide’ came all too easily from the mouths of people like\u00a0Bassiouni, an American Professor at Law, who has to establish a reputation and to work on ‘fund-raising’.\u00a0 In my opinion these terms were way out of\u00a0line.<\/p>\n

‘Genocidal rape’ is utter nonsense.\u00a0 ‘Genocide’ means extermination,\u00a0and it is of course impossible to exterminate people and make them pregnant\u00a0at the same time.\u00a0 It is a propaganda term which was used against the\u00a0Serbs right from the start, but I have never found any indication that\u00a0rape was committed systematically by any of the parties – and I\u00a0understand by ‘systematically’:\u00a0 ‘ordered by high-up’.”<\/p>\n

“Yet Bassiouni found a certain system in what the Serbs did.\u00a0 Was thatconclusion completely wrong ?”<\/p>\n

Kalshoven:\u00a0 “You must not forget that Bassiouni was only able to reporton the first stages of the war.\u00a0 At that time the Serbs conquered vast\u00a0territories, hence their war crimes were of a grander scale.\u00a0 But the\u00a0Croats and the Muslims, then as well as later on, took revenge wherever\u00a0they could.\u00a0 And they had by far the best ‘public relations’, much\u00a0better than the Serbs had.\u00a0 I had the tremendous problems to obtain\u00a0evidence from the Serbs, though they sometimes held clear testimony\u00a0with lots of photographs.\u00a0 They were completely convinced that the whole\u00a0world was against them.”<\/p>\n

A complete domestic industry centered around the Serb mass rape\u00a0campaign exists nowadays; its gospel is preached at conferences, in women’smagazines, in books.\u00a0 One part of these products is targeted at the\u00a0Western feminist market; it preaches that all men are rapists, just\u00a0waiting for the order from above; another part is Croatian and Muslim\u00a0propaganda.\u00a0 Of course the genres are often mixed.\u00a0 Recently I received\u00a0the book “Breaking the Wall of Silence” (1996) by Bosnian journalist\u00a0Seada Vranic in the mail; it came from hitherto unsuspected ‘Press Now’\u00a0in Amsterdam.\u00a0 The book opens with eleven accounts of rape victims,\u00a0which I believe to be authentic, but then Vranic launches her own\u00a0‘analysis’ based on the data of the discredited Bosnian State\u00a0Commission for Warcrimes, an exercise which inevitably ends in the by now\u00a0well-know high numbers and big words.<\/p>\n

Vranic does realise that those big numbers require an explanation, even\u00a0if the Serb leadership at the time had issued express orders to rape.\u00a0After all, it is unlikely that so many rapes would have been committed\u00a0just at the orders from high-up.\u00a0 Fortunately Vranic found a\u00a0psychiatrist – there’s quite a couple of them walking around freely on\u00a0the Balkans as a result of the war – who explained to her that Serb\u00a0males have erections out of sheer hatred, incited by the ‘…age-old\u00a0propaganda against their neighbours’, and they also are sexuallyaroused by the sound of one-string violins.\u00a0 I cannot help it, it’s\u00a0written in black on white.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the book Vranic writes that ‘not a single independent\u00a0investigation has proved that the army of Bosnia and Herzegovinacommitted rapes.’\u00a0 Maybe ‘Press Now’ ought to invite Mrs. Vranic to The\u00a0Hague.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stiglmayer has joined forces with eleven other authors in ‘Mass rape:the War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (1996).\u00a0 The book is\u00a0unashamedly hybrid, and therefore the most readable of what was\u00a0published so far.\u00a0 It contains, among other contributions ,\u00a0Brownmiller’s enlightening article from ‘Newsweek’.\u00a0 Stiglmayer’s own\u00a0chapter, on the other hand, contains an extensive interview with\u00a0Borislav Herak.\u00a0 “It is probably a set-up, but nonetheless revealing’\u00a0she writes above it.\u00a0 American legal expert Catherine McKinnon claims\u00a0in her contribution that the Serbs recorded their rapes on video, as a\u00a0kind of ‘mass produced’ sadistic pornography.\u00a0 Alas, no such tapes have\u00a0ever surfaced.\u00a0 Ourightly offending is ‘Rape Warfare:\u00a0 The Hidden\u00a0Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia’ (1996) by Beverly C. Allen,\u00a0an American professor at Literature, Italian and Women’s Studies.\u00a0 A\u00a0fatal combination, it turns out.\u00a0 A Croatian student gave her the first\u00a0rape stories and at the same moment she stopped thinking.\u00a0 She now\u00a0attends women’s conferences in Zagreb, she believes everything that\u00a0Cigelj wants her to believe, and attacks the Serb ‘femicide’ with\u00a0tautologies that have the size of cathedrals.\u00a0 She describes Cigelj’s\u00a0rape account as ‘an example of systematic genocidal rape in a\u00a0rape\/extermination camp inside a concentration camp where rape is part\u00a0of the torture that precedes murder.’\u00a0 She might be close friends with\u00a0Vranic’s psychiatrist, were it not that Allen prefers other evidence.<\/p>\n

Thanks to her knowledge of the Italian language she discovered the\u00a0obscure booklet ‘Noi, criminali di guerra’ (1994) by Giusseppe\u00a0Zaccaria.\u00a0 <\/span>This Italian jounalist claims to have obtained ‘authentic’ Serb\u00a0documents from the Bosnian government.\u00a0 The document s make clear that\u00a0the Serb leadership stimulated violence against female Muslims and\u00a0Croats – the weakest group within the opponent side – to hasten the\u00a0ethnic cleansing process.\u00a0 But the Bosnian government produced\u00a0falsifications before, and the Zaccaria papers are suspect.\u00a0 They also\u00a0prove that Unprofor general Lewis Mackenzie, in broad daylight, abused\u00a0young Muslim women in Serb rape brothels.\u00a0 The papers were given to\u00a0Zaccaria at a time when Sarajevo had grave differences of opinion with\u00a0Unprofor.\u00a0 Please judge for yourself.\u00a0 Allen considers the Zaccaria\u00a0document as the ultimate proof of the Serb ‘systematic genocidal rapecampaign’.\u00a0 To support her view she quotes all atrocities from the\u00a0Mazowiecki and Bassiouni reports without explaining that most quotes\u00a0relate to ALL warring factions, not just the Serbs.<\/p>\n

Reporters and researchers, with the best of intentions, have allowedthemselves to be used and their one-sided reports have undeniably\u00a0helped many victims.\u00a0 Care for raped refugees in Croatia received a financial\u00a0injection, there are indications that the number of rapes by Serbs\u00a0diminished as a result of the world-wide attention, and rape from now\u00a0on is a ‘full-blown’ war crime.<\/p>\n

On the other hand:\u00a0 the Serb victims have been left out on their own:\u00a0Nobody wanted to know who they were, and where they were held captive,\u00a0even though several Bosnian prison camps were within reach of the\u00a0hordes of reporters in Sarajevo.\u00a0 Gutman has alway s categorically denied that\u00a0the Bosnian government ran camps.\u00a0 The most important objection against\u00a0such a line of action is of course that a mythical picture of the enemy\u00a0is a breeding ground for new wars.\u00a0 But there are colleagues who believe\u00a0that is no problem.<\/p>\n

Aart Brouwer<\/p>\n

(c) 1997 De Groene Amsterdammer – sept 3 1997<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

De Groene Amsterdammer\u00a0 Sept 3 1997 The Serb Femicide   by Aart Brouwer       On March 16th of this year Grozdana Cecez (47) from Bosnia took the\u00a0witness stand at the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague.\u00a0 In May 1992,\u00a0shortly after the outbreak of the Bosnian war, she was taken to the\u00a0Celebici prison camp.\u00a0 In … <\/p>\n

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