Fate of women during the wars in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1999). The wars that arose from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s precipitated a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. A vibrant multicultural and ethnically diverse society suddenly imploded, reflecting religious and ethnic feelings that were fueled by corrupt and ambitious politicians seeking to exploit these conflicts for their own ends. Women at all levels of society were caught in savage fighting in which they were both the targets of and the justification for ethnic cleansing. How women suffered and how they responded reflects cultural, economic, social, and political issues that went to the heart of their position in Muslim, Serbian, and Croat communities and were central to the international response to the conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.
The Communist era marked a period of social, economic, and political stability that benefited women. Under Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia was an ordered society with clear rules and norms. In a socialist society with no capitalistic economic fluctuations, low divorce and child mortality rates, and relatively low unemployment, ethnic and religious conflict was minimal. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims lived together, often in the same villages and neighborhoods, as they had for generations. Tito had established a delicate balance among Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups, preaching an ideology of "peace and brotherhood." A complicated constitution had created six republics and two autonomous regions (within Serbia), tied together through their common loyalty to the president and reinforced by a repressive police state. Despite the high degree of political control from the top, Yugoslav women enjoyed comparative freedom and social equality. Higher education and the professions were open to them along with social services. Although they rarely reached the top of the ruling hierarchy, women were active in politics at the village, district, and provincial levels.
Bosnian Muslim women cry as their relative is buried in Potocari, July 11, 2005. Relatives wept over more than 600 coffins of victims of the Srebrenica massacre, dug out of death pits at a ceremony to mark the tenth anniversary of Europe’s worst atrocity in 50 years. The coffins contained the latest identified remains found in mass graves dug by Bosnian Serb forces to hide their slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men between July 11 and July 18, 1995.
The stability of the Tito era evaporated following the president’s death in 1980. Economic decay and drift led to rising unemployment that heightened both ethnic and gender tensions. Tito’s successors tried rotating the presidency among the five ethnic republics, but this revolving-door system triggered conflicts among Yugoslavia’s senior political figures and did not work. Ambitious politicians—most notably Slobodan Milosevic—revived ethnic nationalism for their own purposes. By the late 1980s Milosevic was using the Serb media to stir up Serbian nationalism along with anti-Croat and, particularly, anti-Muslim feelings. The Croats, led by Franjo Tudjman, a former general of the Yugoslav national army, responded with their own brand of nationalism. Tudjman was openly anti-Serb and anti-Muslim.
The brand of nationalism that Milosevic, Tudjman, and their adherents preached had heavily gendered overtones involving the subordination of women. The prevailing concern of these new ethnic-national ideologies with the establishment of cultural and religious values associated with an idealized past meant that women were to be assigned traditional roles. Foremost among these were responsibilities for the reproduction of the group and for the nurturing of cultural values and group identity. This new nationalism marked a revival and celebration of traditional gender codes and male power. Any notions of women’s emancipation developed during the state socialist regime (better access to education, equal employment, equal pay, liberal abortion rights, and so forth) were demonized as unnatural and destructive to the group.
The effects of the wars surrounding Yugoslavia’s dissolution were magnified by their sudden outbreak and, particularly in Bosnia, by the violent onslaught of the federal army and the Serb militias. Fighting had already occurred in June and July 1991 after Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Hostilities erupted in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in April 1992 after Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a plurality of Muslims and a majority of Muslims and Croats, also declared independence from Yugoslavia. Fearing the consequences of Bosnian independence and infused with nationalist propaganda and material support from Milosevic, the large Serb minority in Bosnia resorted to force.
The war’s socioeconomic impact on women in Bosnia was immediate and devastating. The violence they faced was economic, social, and psychological as well as physical. Women in all of the affected areas had to deal with food shortages; loss of their homes due to shelling and bombing; dislocation; loneliness as their men were mobilized into the ethnic militias, killed in the fighting, executed, or sent into exile; and the possibility of being raped or murdered. They lived in constant fear for their own lives and futures as well as those of their families. If their men survived, women had to confront the reality of living with the psychological damage caused by their experiences.
Physical violence, most often in the form of the systematic rape of Muslim women in Bosnia by Serb forces, was central to the strategy of ethnic cleansing. Instances of women being specifically targeted in war zones is not new. In the case of the new ethnically-based nation building in the former Yugoslavia, however, this practice has a specific meaning. It was part of a massive gendered population transfer, if not outright genocide, that operated as a crucial symbolic and material element in the forging of new boundaries between ethnic collectives. This massive forced transfer resulted in women and children being exposed to various forms of violence. The worst attacks on women happened in the areas of the bloodiest fighting— those regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had lived in close proximity to one another before Yugoslavia’s collapse. The concept of women as symbols and reproducers or nurturers of the nation and its cultural identity made them important in the destruction of the opposing ethnic-national group. War reinforced the influence of religious traditionalism that demanded the withdrawal of women from policymaking positions where they might moderate the extreme nationalistic tendencies that surfaced in all of the camps. Thus Croatian nationalism gave the Catholic Church in Croatia greater influence, reinforcing its traditional view of the role of women. In Bosnia Islamic extremists demanded that women receiving aid cover their heads, a step toward keeping them "in their place" (Hunt 2004, 139). Women’s subordinate status left them unprotected and made them targets. Reinforcing the practice of directing violence specifically toward women was the stigma that rape carried in highly patriarchal family structures. Men in all of the warring ethnic groups viewed their specific patriarchal family structures as the ideal they were fighting for. The effectiveness of this strategy—as well as its appalling human consequences—is reflected in the fact that nearly 70 percent of the refugees from the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina were women and children (Korac 1998, 163).
The suffering of these refugees and their portrayal in the Western news media generated pressures on the international community to intervene. The initial international reaction to the wars in the former Yugoslavia and reports of mass rape and ethnic cleansing was tentative and ineffective. The United States and the European Community both recognized Bosnia’s independence. The United Nations sent small peacekeeping forces (mostly from the Netherlands, France, and Canada) to protect refugee sanctuaries and provide food and medical supplies to war victims. These measures did not deter Serb atrocities or protect refugees from marauding Serb forces. The United Nations recognized Bosnian independence and admitted Bosnia to the United Nations while barring Milosevic’s rump Yugoslav state. The United Nations also ordered trade sanctions against Serbia. The U.N. Security Council, however, refused to order the use of force. Similarly, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were reluctant to get involved militarily. An arms embargo against both sides hindered Muslim efforts to get weapons even as the Bosnian Serbs received arms from Serbia and Russia. This ineffective reaction on the part of the United Nations and the Western powers further undermined U.N. and NATO credibility among all of the warring ethnic factions, thus jeopardizing peace efforts. U.N. weakness was shown at its worst on July 11, 1995, when Serb forces entered a supposed U.N. safe zone in Srebrenica, pushed aside a small U.N. force, and rounded up 25,000 unarmed Muslim men, women, and children. They tortured and killed the men and boys, and the women and girls were forced to flee. The international outcry over the Srebrenica atrocity finally triggered military action by the United States and NATO that forced the Serbs into negotiations at Dayton, Ohio.
Exposed to the ravages of war and unable to rely on international efforts or protection from their own men, politically active women in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia began to take matters into their own hands. Ironically, the wars and genocide that Serb and Croatian ethnic nationalists unleashed shattered the credibility of their notions of traditional women’s roles and led to a heightened group consciousness among women on all sides. Their suffering led many into increased political and social activism.
Despite the gender-restrictive nationalist ideologies that pervaded all sides, the wars afforded women opportunities for service outside their traditional roles. Women with medical training as doctors and nurses were in demand to staff military hospitals. In these positions, they often helped negotiate local cease-fires to evacuate wounded soldiers and civilians. The absence of the male family head often left women in charge of harvesting crops and running family businesses.
The greatest opportunities for women, however, grew out of their suffering. Refugee camps in particular provided organizing opportunities for female activists. Women in the camps found that their efforts to find the basic elements of survival—food, clothing, housing, and money— depended on their sticking together and organizing. Local self-help groups such as the Association of Displaced Persons and Refugees of Bosnia and Herzegovina (formed during the siege of Sarajevo) not only facilitated communication among women in the camps but also served as avenues for refugee women to mobilize international human rights groups (such as Amnesty International) and women’s organizations (such as Women Waging Peace) to help alleviate their plight and facilitate the peace process. Women’s groups both on the scene and in the United States were active in contradicting the Balkan nationalists’ contention that ethnic hatreds were deep-seated and inevitable, in agitating for stronger intervention in the wars of the former Yugoslavia, and in facilitating a peace process. Swanee Hunt, who served as U.S. ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997, was responding in part to reports from women in the refugee camps when she hosted negotiations and several international symposia to facilitate peace efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Despite intensifying female activism both in the war zone and internationally, women were excluded from the peace negotiations that commenced in Dayton, Ohio, in the fall of 1995. Many women activists believe that the warmak-ers intentionally shut them out of the Dayton talks because they feared women would give peace priority over nationalist aims. In any case, the Dayton negotiations allowed Serbian and Croatian nationalists to carve Bosnia up along unworkable ethnic lines. Most women activists were unhappy with the Dayton Accords because their implementation depended on the very elements responsible for the war to begin with. Although women comprised over half of the adult population of Bosnia, the elements charged with implementing the Dayton Accords did not seek or welcome their opinions. This omission undermined international peace efforts before, during, and after the Serb-Bosnian war. The Dayton negotiators ducked the war crimes issue by not requiring the parties to turn over Milosevic, Ratko Mladic (the senior commander of the Bosnian Serb army), and other accused war criminals to the Hague Tribunal for trial. In the view of many observers, the omissions of the Dayton Accords sent a signal to the Serb leadership that the international community would not take decisive action in the face of ethnic cleansing in other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Thus the same issues appeared in the brutal Serb attempt to stop the predominately Albanian-Muslim province of Kosovo from breaking away from Serbia in 1999—leading to a massive U.S.-NATO bombing campaign against Serbia.
The flaws of the Dayton Accords, as well as the hope they symbolized, galvanized women to organize to gain a greater voice in postwar Balkan politics and to create a stronger political and economic base to protect themselves. In June 1996, 500 women convened a meeting in Sarajevo to organize Women Transforming Themselves and Society. Funded by Women Waging Peace, it was the first effort following the Dayton agreement to bring citizens together across ethnic lines. The fall of Milosevic in the face of international economic sanctions and the Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo and his extradition to The Hague for war crimes trials (along with several other major accused war criminals) served as partial vindication for the victims of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The success of the victims in highlighting their suffering is reflected in rulings from the World Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that mass rape is a war crime. Their courage and resourcefulness in the face of horrific conditions and their development of a common sense of identity present a moving story. Their political significance for women in similar circumstances is even greater.
