The Perversion of Psychiatry. The Rape of Women as a Weapon of War in the Balkan War
Gonzalo Herranz, department Bioethics, University of Navarra
Session at the International Symposium “Political Space – Civic Space”
The Feminine Social Space
Pamplona, classroom , Central Building, University of Navarra
Monday, May 15, 1995, 1:00 PM
Women’s dignity has been counted among the values destroyed in that war. Through the perverse use of psychiatry and the tactical exploitation of insights derived from clinical observation, the rape of women on the enemy side has been turned by Bosnian Serbs into a weapon of war. An unconventional weapon, yet one that is devastating and highly effective in conquering territory and breaking the enemy’s psychological resistance.
War and rape
Until now, the rape of women from the defeated countryside had been regarded as just another—sad and inevitable—aspect of the brutalization of the combatant. It was considered part of the spoils of war. Historical accounts, from the Rape of the Sabine Women to the present day, tell of rapes committed everywhere and at all times by victorious soldiers.
And although the laws of war, both ancient and modern, require soldiers to attention the civilian population attention and prohibit sexual assault against women, it is only very recently that rape has been declared a criminal act of war: indirectly, at the Tokyo Trials, when certain high-ranking Japanese military leaders, who had ordered such conduct of their soldiers, were convicted as responsible for the rapes committed in China and in the Southeast Asian countries occupied by the Japanese army during World War II. Explicitly, in 1993, when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution that, for the first time, included rape on the list of war crimes and called for the creation of an international tribunal to try the guilty parties: soldiers or officers who had committed or ordered rapes, and the higher authorities who had encouraged them or failed to prevent them. The trigger for this clear condemnation was precisely the employment , agreed upon by government officials and military commanders, of the rape of women as resource .
Events in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere
Perhaps because we have grown accustomed to it—or, it would be more accurate to say, because of the numbness—induced by the overwhelming amount of information—news and images—that the media bombards us with every day, we fail to realize the sheer magnitude of human tragedy that war represents. We have been saturated with information about the wars in Lebanon, Uganda, and the former Yugoslavia, but it is very difficult for us to grasp certain data. For example, that the civilian population has become the primary goal these wars: it accounts for more than 90% of the casualties, including both the dead and the wounded. They are called wars, but at their core they are acts of genocide.
Like everyone else, I was a saddened but detached spectator of the tragedy of the Bosnian War. But my attitude changed when, less than two years ago, I read the August 1993 issue the Journal of the American Medical Association, issue was devoted to examining the war in the Balkans from the perspective of medical ethics. It was clear that, unfortunately, some doctors in the former Yugoslavia were doing things reminiscent of those perpetrated by Nazi doctors half a century ago.
The information—of which I will provide only a few brief examples—came from the International Institute for Human Rights, located at DePaul University in Chicago, where they have been compiling and verifying data only for academic analysis but also to submit to the United Nations Commission of Experts investigating human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia.
The data from observations (medical records and clinical analyses) collected on the ground by doctors and experts from international human rights organizations (Amnesty International, Helsinki Watch), as well as from news reports, videos, photographs, and interviews provided by media correspondents regarding incidents and crimes against human rights. Among the Institute’s objectives is to submit such documentation—duly reviewed, analyzed, and validated—to the Commission of Experts as evidence in the war crimes trials that have already begun in The Hague.
In its first year of work, the Institute, thanks to a subsidy the United Nations, collected information on more than 2,000 incidents (mutilations, rapes, murders, torture) that affected more than 25,000 innocent civilians, the vast majority of whom were women.
In the Yugoslav conflict, the decisive factor is, at its core, the occupation of territory. Radovan Karadžić, who was a psychiatrist before becoming President of the Bosnian Serbs, has used his medical knowledge to instill feelings of aggression and violence among his people—and especially among his soldiers—in order to facilitate territorial conquest. He has fanned the flames of ethnic and religious hatred, stoked feelings of victimhood and revenge, and, thanks to his official document psychiatrist, has done so with great effectiveness.
Here are a few examples of egregious attacks on women’s dignity, as reported by Cheriff Bassiouini, Director International Human Rights Institute at DePaul University. He will, in all likelihood, be one of the judges presiding over the trial of crimes committed during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
In the Yugoslav War, the rape of women has been transformed into a form of aggression that is planned, institutionalized, and subject to systematic administration and military logistics. Rape is no longer the traditional form of aggression—whether individual or group—through which soldiers satisfy their sexual desires and display their power as victors.
Behind the systematic rape carried out in Bosnia lies a deep knowledge only of the immediate devastating psychological effects and the permanent wounds that rape inflicts on its victims. But, above and beyond that individual effect, the systematic rape of all women in a community possesses a sinister capacity to undermine the family and the ethnic community. Its purpose is purpose only to dominate and humiliate the enemy, but also to control behavior.
In Bosnia, many rapes were carried out in the presence of the victims’ husbands, children, or brothers. Attacks followed by systematic rape—sometimes announced in advance—proved to be a tremendously effective deterrent, as they contributed, far more than armed attacks, to the evacuation of villages and towns and the dispersal of enemy forces. On the one hand, it forces women—and with them, their families—to abandon their homes; and is, therefore, highly effective for the ethnic cleansing of the territory. On the other hand, it confronts combatants with the dilemma of choosing between staying by their women’s sides to defend them, or postponing or abandoning attacks already prepared against the enemy.
A particularly cruel tactic is to assign soldiers from the victims’ own village to carry out the rapes. When rape is committed by acquaintances, it ceases to be a random, anonymous act: not only does it exacerbate the trauma of the sexual assault, but it also makes it impossible to conceal. In a harrowing testimony, recorded on video by a BBC correspondent, a young Muslim woman—who had been raped by a group Serbian soldiers, neighbors from her own village—is heard saying between sobs, her face hidden: “My life is over... I’ll never be able to look anyone in the face again... I was a virgin, and this is what they’ve done to me... They were my neighbors, and they’ve taken my life away.”
Moral insensitivity can reach unimaginable levels when ideological fanaticism reinforces the idea that, in war, anything goes. Bassiouini interviewed a Serbian soldier, Boris Herrak, who was captured and convicted by a Bosnian military tribunal of raping 26 Muslim women and murdering 19 of them. During the conversation, Herrak showed not the slightest sign of remorse. When Bassiouini asked him why he had killed them, why he hadn’t let them go after raping them, the soldier looked at him indifferently and simply said, “Can I have a cigarette?” Bassiouini adds: “I think Herrak now feels he shouldn’t have done it, but he’s not sure why.”
Cases like this raise a difficult question about the nature of social coexistence in the postwar era. How will people be able to live in a society with so many open moral wounds, where a significant portion of the population has grown accustomed to senseless violence as a normal way of life? The reeducation of moral consciousness will be an urgent priority once peace is restored.
It is not easy to provide data the issue rapes committed. Bosnian Serbs established four concentration camps—which also served as brothels—where hundreds of Muslim women, aged between 12 and 60, were taken. Regular soldiers or members of paramilitary groups lined up to rape them. An issue of women were held until their sixth month of pregnancy, too late for them to have an abortion, thus forcing them to become mothers of children fathered by Serbs.
staff January 1993, the United Nations sent a medical commission to investigate rape in the former Yugoslavia. Based on issue resulting pregnancies and applying a pregnancy rate of 1% for rapes, the number of women who survived rape can be estimated at around 60,000. It should be noted, however, that this is likely an underestimate of the actual figure, as multiple rapes have been very common. In times of peace and war alike, if the rape did not occur in public, it tends to be concealed, especially if it was not followed, as is usually the case, by pregnancy. Silence tends to conceal the humiliation, prevents family and social misunderstanding, and tends to mitigate the moral stigma and emotional trauma.
The United Nations has established a research fund research apply forensic identification techniques for perpetrators (DNA polymerase chain reaction) and thus gather evidence for the planned war crimes trial. The business is business without its challenges. The staff sent to the field often finds that treating the physical and psychological aftermath of rape is far more urgent than detecting cases and obtaining the necessary evidence. It is a laborious and difficult task to help victims regain their sense of human dignity and physical health. The rates of suicide, depression, and psychotic episodes among assaulted women are very high, which appears to be a universal phenomenon. The post-rape data Bosnia are practically comparable, despite the significant cultural disparity, to those obtained in Uganda: frequent nightmares related to the rape, being easily startled, emotional detachment from one’s surroundings, loss of interest in things, feelings of shame and guilt, and irritability. The trauma of rape has changed her life. It leaves a virtually indelible mark of negative feelings toward men, exacerbated by the fact that, when news of the rape spreads within the family or local community, young women are frequently rejected by their parents, boyfriends, or the rest of the community.
Karadzic and the Use of Psychiatry as a Weapon of War
The particular brutality of the Yugoslav War is largely due to the psychological manipulation of the combatants, particularly Serbian peasants, whose long-standing hatred was stoked by propaganda devised by Radovan Karadzic.
Some researchers and journalists have shed light on Karadzic’s political and ideological background, specifically the process of applying psychiatry to warfare. This information appears in articles titled “Psychiatry and Genocide,” “The Psychiatric Conspiracy in Bosnia,” and “In Bosnia, Just Like in Lebanon: Wars Planned by Psychiatrists,” published in French, Italian, and English journals.
Karadzic has been deeply influenced by his mentor Raskovic, the mad psychiatrist director a major mental hospital in Bosnia. In addition to experimenting with unorthodox forms of electroconvulsive therapy, Raskovic gathered material for thesis on the profile of the various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia, and published it in a degree scroll significant book: Crazy Peoples.
Karadzic widely disseminated Raskovic’s theories among Bosnian Serbs in order to incite his people to hatred and contempt for their rivals and to justify their inhumane acts in the service of Greater Serbia.
Raskovic’s idea, exploited by Karadzic, is that Serbs suffer from a collective Oedipus complex, which predisposes them to uncontrollable outbursts of violence, regardless of whether their claims are justified: this trait is what particularly frightens the Croats, whom he attributes with a castrated, fearful mentality, incapable of exercising authority and in need of guide. Bosnian Muslims, who are people who like to accumulate wealth, are easy prey for deception, easy victims of cunning. With this outline , Radovan and Karadzic have attempted to rationalize the savage violence of the war.
Where does this destructive mindset come from? The decisive role played by a issue Serbian psychiatrists in the Balkan tragedy has been highlighted. And, curiously, by some of their patients as well. Jovan Raskovic was an internationally renowned psychiatrist, a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences, and the Republic’s official psychiatrist. Slobodan Milosevic, Belgrade’s strongman, was his patient, as was Milan Martic, chief of police of the so-called Republic of Krajina, the Croatian territories occupied by the Serbs. In Belgrade, another psychiatrist, Svetovar Stojanovic, returned from the U.S. to take charge of political propaganda.
This is not the time to consider the indirect yet pivotal role that the Tavistock Institute in London has played in the instrumentalization of psychiatry in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Although it appears to be a conventional institution dedicated to clinical practice and research , the Tavistock has long served laboratory a laboratory programs of study psychological warfare for the British military. It was there that, under the inspiration of the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer, the theory and logistics of paradigm shifts were developed as tool psychological warfare, of which wartime rape is just one aspect. That aspect does not fit into the story I wanted to tell today, a story whose origins are lost in the mists of time, when it began as a brutal, primitive sport of the soldiery. But by the end of our century, it has become a strategic action, programmed with scientific criteria, refinedly villainous, aggressive, and hurtful. How sad it is that this has been carried out by some doctors who, because they know with great precision and detail the indelible traces of pain left in the soul of a sexually assaulted woman, have renounced their vocation and have turned the primum non nocere—the principle of “do no harm,” which is the first commandment of medical ethics—on its head!
The soldier’s rape of the woman has been declared a war crime. Let us hope that those who devised and carried out this procedure against the woman receive a fair and public condemnation, one that prevents the recurrence of behavior that is as cruel to its victims as it is degrading to its perpetrators.
Thank you very much.