The Serbs’ systematic raping of Bosniak women returns us to the issue of whether certain kinds of excess cruelty, particularly Machiavellian, in themselves constitute an eliminationist means (beyond the International Criminal Court’s codifying it as a crime against humanity). Even more than general politically inspired cruelty, intended to weaken or subjugate victim peoples, the Serbs raped Bosnian women as an explicit strategy: eliminationism by preventing a people’s reproduction. They sought—effectively—to create a form of social sterilization that was cheaper, easier, and far more emotionally and psychically gratifying to administer than surgical sterilization. Thus, the Serbs’ eliminationist means, used as interchangeable or complementary instruments against Bosniaks, included killing, expulsion, and rape, to prevent reproduction and terrorize the Bosniaks into fleeing forever.
The Serbs repeated this political sexual cruelty strategy, this sexual eliminationist strategy, in Kosovo. It utterly terrorized the Kosovars, who already knew of the Serbs’ raping in Bosnia. One woman conveyed the terror’s magnitude in unmistakable comparative terms: “I wasn’t afraid of the killing. I was afraid of the raping.”97 According to a Kosovar doctor in Pristina, “Rape was our greatest fear. Our main goal was to get our daughters—aged twenty-five, twenty-one, fourteen, and ten—out of the country.”98
Even before raping as a constitutive feature of some eliminationist assaults became broadly known to the world, Pakistanis employed the same strategy in their mass-murderous and eliminationist attack in 1971 against Bangladesh, raping perhaps 200,000 Bangladeshi women. Pakistanis regularly raped them in front of family members and established rape camps for their soldiers. One Indian liberator testified to two such places in Vurungamari:After breaking down the door of the room [of the Circle Officer’s office], where the women were kept, we were dumbfounded. We found four naked young women, who had been physically tortured, raped, and battered by the Pakistani soldiers. . . . We tried to talk to them, but all of them were still in shock. One of them was six to seven months pregnant. One was a college student from Mymensingh. . . . We found sixteen other women locked up in a room at Vurungamari High School. These women were brought in for the Pakistani soldiers from nearby villages. We found evidence in the rooms of the Circle Officers office which showed that these women were tied to the windowbars and were repeatedly raped by the Pakistani soldiers. The whole floor was covered with blood, torn pieces of clothing, and strands of long hair.99
The vast scale and systematic character of the Pakistanis’ raping led Mulk Raj Anand, an Indian novelist, to conclude it must have been a policy “planned by the West Pakistanis in a deliberate effort to create a new race,” or at least an enormous number of outcasts, to weaken Bangladeshi society. The Pakistanis understood well their sexual violence’s political efficacy. A month after Pakistanis had gang-raped one young woman, then a bride, she was in a shelter for rape victims in Dhaka. Her husband had cast her out, her father was “ashamed,” and the people of her village “did not want me.”100
Throughout history, raping the enemy has often been seen as a war spoil. No doubt the intersection of war’s violence and licentiousness and (young) men’s sexual urges, together with hatred of the enemy, has formed a combustible context for Conradian sexual cruelty and vengeful sexual cruelty. Such cruelty’s emblem is perhaps the Japanese assault on Nanjing in 1937. In the first month the Japanese raped and murdered perhaps twenty thousand Chinese women so openly and blatantly that the entire mass murder and eliminationist subjugation became known as the Rape of Nanking (Nanjing).101 Not just eliminationist assaults but, barring extremely tight monitoring and severe sanctions, large-scale military conflicts usually include considerable sexual cruelty. Soldiers often feel rage toward the people of the country or the group they fight for, having endangered their lives, having plunged them into war’s barbarous and discomfiting conditions, having injured, killed, or otherwise harmed their comrades, loved ones, and people. They can and often do take out this rage in retributive sprees upon the easy and fulfilling targets of conquered women. Victorious Soviet soldiers, whose country suffered immensely at the hands of the German army and occupiers, were repeatedly urged to wreak vengeance on the Germans. They did so on a vast scale against German women.
Most eliminationist assaults, as we know, are nothing like war, as the perpetrators themselves do not face armies. They are politically inspired and politically understood programs designed to achieve transformative goals. In Bosnia and then Kosovo, and earlier in Bangladesh, the perpetrators institutionalized sexual cruelty as a critical eliminationist political strategy. As with eliminationist assaults in general, the perpetrators’ conception of their victims prepared them to use sexual cruelty instrumentally. Members of strongly patriarchal cultures often depict rival, hated, or enemy groups’ women in a symbolically potent manner, wresting all virtue from them, including by contrasting them unfavorably to their own culture’s women, deemed (at least comparatively) wholesome. They also see the demeaned women (standing in for the whole group) as a source of disorder and others’ corruption. Long before the Serbs’ eliminationist assault began in full force against the Kosovars, the Serbs had degraded Kosovar women so viciously as to border on dehumanization. Serbian society’s discourse, including crucially on state-run media, presented Kosovar women as baby factories and their many children as “biological bombs” that obviously had to be defused.102 According to one Kosovar woman, “During the late 1980s there was tremendous propaganda against [Kosovar] Albanian women—we were portrayed as open-legged, stupid, uneducated women ready to have sex.”103 When the eliminationist assault began, the Serbs, reviving their Bosnian strategy, carried out their ideologically driven mission of sexual cruelty, raping the women they construed as asking for it.
In Darfur, the Political Islamic regime’s perpetrators, many of whom are part of the government-sponsored and -aided Janjaweed militia, have also been using rape as a political weapon to terrorize the Darfurians, get them to flee, and undermine their collective strength. The extensive testimonies Amnesty International collected “point to rape and other forms of sexual violence being used as a weapon of war in Darfur, in order to humiliate, punish, control, inflict fear and displace women and their communities. Rape and other forms of sexual violence in Darfur are not just a consequence of the conflict or the result of the conduct of undisciplined troops.”104 The voluminous reports of the perpetrators’ raping have understated its actual incidence, because—as always—many women shy away from reporting rape, and additionally, as one victim explains, “in our culture it is a shame, and women will hide this in their hearts so that the men do not hear about it.” If the men do, the consequences in this patriarchal and puritanical society are often terrible. One sixteen-year-old explained in 2005 what happened when, after being gang-raped the year before, she told her family: “They threw me out of home and I had to build my own hut away from them. I was engaged to a man and I was so much looking forward to getting married. After I got raped, he did not want to marry me and broke off the engagement because he said that I was now disgraced and spoilt. It is the worst thing for me.” When she was eight months pregnant the police arrested her at gunpoint. “I told them that I had been raped. They told me that as I was not married, I will deliver this baby illegally. They beat me with a whip on the chest and back and put me in jail,” where, housed in deplorable conditions with other similarly situated women, she stayed for ten days.105 The perpetrators know well how the women they rape will be treated in their communities, and the long-term harm they do the women, as well as their families and society.
The Political Islamists laying waste to Darfur have integrated rape into their eliminationist repertoire of descending on villages, burning homes, killing many people, expelling many more, and raping as they please. Like the Serbs in Bosnia, they have set up rape camps, where they enslave Darfurian women. One victim, Asha, describes the rape camp of her imprisonment as systematically run. “There were 35 women ta
ken and they split us up, one for each group of Janjaweed.” This is common procedure. “If women are few, they divide us five or six Janjaweed per woman. If there are enough women after their daily collections then it’s one to one.”106
This points to another of the Holocaust’s unusual features. Germans rarely raped Jewish women. Why, given the Germans’ total demonization and dehumanization of Jews, their unsurpassable thirst for vengeance, their ready and steady infliction of virtually every kind of horror upon them, did they desist in this one cruel practice that is eliminationist assaults’ virtual hallmark, which perpetrators appear to need little more than Conradian opportunity to widely practice? The Germans’ sexual restraint vis-à-vis Jews is still more noteworthy as it differed from their ready sexual use and abuse of non-Jewish victims, including the dehumanized (but not demonized) Russians and others.
The Germans did not rape Jewish women for powerful and mutually reinforcing reasons. The German regime outlawed sexual relations with Jews, severely punishing offenders, sometimes by death. While this may seem to demonstrate regimes’ power to prevent excess cruelty, in many, perhaps most, settings, individual or small groups of Germans could do whatever they wanted with Jewish women with de facto impunity, as the German authorities deemed a Jew’s testimony, as a matter of definition, mendacious and without value, especially against a German’s word. And, according to the Germans’ security service’s own report in 1942, similar German army attempts “to ban any kind of sexual intercourse with Russian women and girls have up to now been without any noteworthy effect.”107 This included widespread rape. So probably a second reason far more powerfully inhibited Germans from raping Jewish women. Germans genuinely feared that these enemies, deemed biologically potent and demonic, would pollute them. They wanted to expose themselves to this danger no more than to intimate contact with a leper or, more precisely, a demonic leper. The Germans genuinely held that sexual relations with Jewish women would racially (i.e., biologically) endanger the German race. The act evoked such horror it had a German name, Rassenschande, meaning race defilement, which was also the punishable legal offense’s name.
The Germans’ reserve toward Jewish women aside, exterminationist and eliminationist perpetrators, as with excess cruelty’s other major forms, frequently practiced rape. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification’s “investigation has demonstrated that the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity. The majority of rape victims were Mayan women. Those who survived the crime still suffer profound trauma as a result of this aggression, and the communities themselves were deeply offended by this practice. The presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame.”108
Yet raping varies from one eliminationist onslaught to the next, depending on a host of familiar factors, including perpetrators’ conception of the victims, commanders’ restraints, if any, on their men, each eliminationist onslaught’s character, creating differing settings and opportunities, and the perpetrators’ political understanding of chastity, defilement, even ethnically mixed progeny, and the aims to which they may be put. For the British in Kenya, raping the putatively subhuman Kikuyu women seems hardly to have been a socially significant act. Milka Muriuki explains: “The white officers had no shame. They would rape women in full view of everyone. They would take whomever they wanted at one corner and just do it right there.” The British, seeing the Kikuyu women as utilitarian playthings, raped them regularly. While respecting the colonialist pecking order, either themselves raping their victims first and then letting the British Home Guards, their Kikuyu loyalists, take their turns, or dividing them up with the British taking the choicest victims, usually adolescents, whom they called “un-plucked chickens,” for themselves.109 The scene described earlier of Major wa Wanjiru and his men torturing Kikuyu men and women, culminating with them carting the men away and killing them, continued in a different manner of cruelty for the women. Esther Muchiri explains: “That night all of the women including myself were divided amongst the Home Guards and raped. Even this lady who was eight months pregnant was not spared. We were raped throughout the night.”110 Whatever a given eliminationist assault’s baseline sexual cruelty, it varies, as with other forms of excess cruelty, in its implementation according to individual perpetrators’ personalities and pathologies.
Rape is a familiar but little-focused-upon and theorized aspect of mass murders, expulsions, and eliminationist politics. Eliminationist rape has produced an institution that until the Serbs’ assault on Bosnians was not known or recognized for what it is, a new kind of camp in the universe of camps, the rape camp. This failure occurred even though one formal rape camp system, although not conceptualized as such and not leading to further study and theorizing, has been well known: the Japanese’s so-called Comfort Stations populating their vast domination, elimination, and exploitation empire. In them, they imprisoned perhaps 200,000 sex slaves, euphemistically called “comfort women.” Yasuji Kaneko, a Japanese soldier, raped countless women in such camps and also in villages in China with, whatever other emotions, a blunt callousness: “They cried out, but it didn’t matter to us whether the women lived or died.” The Japanese master race, especially its warriors, conceived of these women, as subhumans to be used, like all Chinese, Koreans, and others, in a utilitarian manner, as objects to be exploited or discarded. “We were the emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.”111
Eliminationist rape remains out of focus and untheorized as a political and eliminationist act and strategy even though it appears to be as widespread as such assaults’ other aspects. Johannes Kruger, a prominent Baster serving with the Germans through their annihilationist campaign against the Herero, conveys the slaughter’s extended butchery, and that for Germans raping and killing, usually with bayonets, went hand-in-hand. Kruger says he and the other Africans “refused to kill Herero women and children, but the Germans spared none. They killed thousands and thousands. I saw this bloody work for days and days and every day. Often, and especially at Waterberg, the young Herero women and girls were violated by the German soldiers before being killed. Two of my Hottentots . . . were invited by the German soldiers to join them in violating Herero girls. The two Hottentots refused to do so.”112 Many Armenian survivors testify to their own and others’ rapes. One woman relates that on her death march, “all the old women and the weak who were unable to walk were killed. There were about one hundred Kurdish guards over us, and our lives depended on their pleasure. It was a very common thing for them to rape our girls in our presence. Very often they violated eight- or ten-year-old girls, and as a consequence many would be unable to walk and were shot.” When their forlorn, bedraggled column passed a village and “a Kurd fancied a girl, nothing would prevent him from taking her.”113 Reciting this practice’s sickening horrors alone could fill an entire book. In scenes perpetrators acted out seemingly endlessly in Bosnia and other eliminationist onslaughts, two Bosnian women in Foca recount Serbs bringing them and two other women to an apartment and repeatedly raping them while their children watched. Their sexual torturers continually conveyed to them their motivation’s eliminationist dimension. One woman explains: “The four of them raped me, one after the other. They told us we were going to give birth to Serbian children and they would do everything they could so we wouldn’t even dare think of coming back again.” The second woman recalls the rapists becoming enraged when she stood up without permission even though they had ordered her to do the dishes, “Fuck your Turkish mother” and “Death to all Turkish sperm.”114 These women’s and much other testimony demonstrates that the perpetrators conceive of politically inspired and organized rape as constituting a particular form of eliminationist violence. As one Serb explained to his victim, the Serbs wanted to “plant the seeds of Serbs in Bosn
ia,” and as another Bosnian rape victim recounts, her tormenters “said they wanted to drive us out, that there shouldn’t be any more Muslims in Europe.”115 The Political Islamic Janjaweed perpetrators in Darfur are just as explicit. Many rape victims and witnesses report that the Janjaweed, or the women accompanying them, have sought to humiliate them with abusive language and songs. One victim relates, “When we tried to escape they shot more children. They raped women; I saw many cases of Janjaweed raping women and girls. They are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish.”116 Another woman testifies that “I was sleeping when the attack on Disa started. I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they were telling us: ‘You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god.’ At night we were raped several times.”117
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