- Well, welcome everyone, to the
Kupferberg Holocaust
Resource Center and Archives.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
If it's any of your first visits,
I hope you'll stay a little longer
or come back and see our exhibits.
Unfortunately, our permanent
exhibit needs to go away
for the sake of having
this beautiful space,
but please come back again and see it.
We have, out on the back counter,
if you haven't picked up,
a schedule of events of
our other fall lectures
and film screenings,
so please grab one of those.
And I wanna just highlight
for you one particular event
that we have coming up on
the evening of November 10th.
These'll be handed to you as you leave,
so please feel free to grab one.
But, November 10th marks
the anniversary of an event
that was pivotal in the
unfolding of the Holocaust
called the night of broken
glass or Kristallnacht
and we're having a really
wonderful presentation
with survivors of three
genocides, three woman,
who were all from nine to 14 at the time
that they experienced genocide.
We have a survivor of the
Holocaust, Hanne Liebmann,
a survivor of the Rwandan
genocide, Jacqueline Murekatete,
and a survivor of the Srebrenica
genocide, Adisada Dudic.
And they're all wonderful,
powerful and incredible speakers.
So I encourage you all to come visit us.
Grab the flyer so you can remember.
But, in general, The
Kupferberg Holocaust Center
exists to facilitate discussion about the
lessons, we say, of genocide,
but really, what that means is
what is it that we can learn from the past
in order to change the
world we live in today?
And that's really what we
strive for day after day here.
We love having help and partners
from students and staff and faculty,
but, primarily, students.
So come back and speak
with us and engage with us.
We have lots of ideas
and we have lots of opportunities for you.
But you are here today,
for the second lecture
in this year's KHRCA colloquium series.
I hope that some of
you had the opportunity
to hear the first lecture.
It was really remarkable and powerful
and helped set out some of
the definitional framework
that the following lectures
will be referring to.
But, here to give you
the real introduction
to today's presentation
is Dr. Amy Traver.
Thank you.
(audience members applaud)
- It's such a pleasure to
see all of you here today
despite the rain.
Some of us have traveled
quite far today to be here.
One of our speakers actually
landed about an hour ago
and all of us know the traffic on the LIE
and the Grand Central Parkway
and all the different routes to get here,
so we owe her, and, of course,
the other speaker today
a lot of appreciation.
Thanks for being here.
As Dr. Leshem has mentioned,
my name is Amy Traver.
I'm an associate professor
of sociology and education
here at Queensborough.
It's a pleasure to see all of you today
at the second event of
our Kupferberg Holocaust
Resource Center and
Archives colloquia series
titled Gender, Mass Violence and Genocide.
At our first event in the series,
we heard from Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey
whose important research situates gender
at the center of the
analysis and prevention
of genocidal processes.
During her remarks, Dr. von Joeden-Forgey
described rape and other
forms of sexual violence
as instruments of power,
preplanned or deliberate acts
that can both signal genocidal intent
and serve as a weapon of genocide.
Dr. von Joeden-Forgey also introduced us
to the ways in which
Article II of the UN's
1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide,
as well as the work of Raphael Lemkin,
the father of that convention,
should be read to include
crimes of rape and sexual violence.
Today's event will build
on this introduction.
Please join me in welcoming
to Queensborough Community College,
Dr. Natalie Nenadic and
Professor Cynthia Soohoo.
Together they will discuss how mass rape
came to be established as a war crime,
crime against humanity
and crime of genocide.
We'll hear first from Dr. Natalie Nenadic,
an assistant professor of philosophy
at the University of Kentucky,
whose expertise lays in
the 19th and 20th century
continental philosophy,
the philosophy of law and human rights.
With Asja Armanda, Dr. Nenadic
named and conceptualized
the crime of genocidal rape
in their work with survivors
of mass sexual atrocities
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.
Through this work, and with
the help of renowned attorney,
Catharine MacKinnon, Dr. Nenadic
helped to pioneer the crime's recognition
under international
law in a judicial venue
created before the existence
of the international criminal tribunals.
Currently, Dr. Nenadic is
completing a book tentatively titled,
The Imperative of
"Thinking" after Auschwitz:
The Genealogy of the
Concept of Genocidal Rape.
We'll then hear from Professor
Cynthia Soohoo, the director
of the International
Women's Human Rights Clinic
at CUNY's law school and an
expert in women's human rights
and human rights advocacy
in the United States.
Prior to coming to CUNY,
Professor Soohoo was a director
of the US legal program
at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
In addition to managing US litigation
and state advocacy work, she
spearheaded and supervised
the development of the center's
US human rights advocacy
and fact-finding work.
From 2001 to 2007, Professor
Soohoo was a director of
the Bringing Human Rights Home project
of the Human Rights Institute
at Columbia Law School.
She's worked on US human rights issues
before UN human rights bodies,
the Inter-American
Commission for Human Rights
and in domestic courts.
Today's events will
obviously include all of you
and your comments and questions
and we'll reserve them
for after the speakers have spoken to us.
Thank you very much.
(audience members applaud)
- I'd like to thank Amy Traver
and the Kupferberg Holocaust
Research Center and Archive
for organizing this wonderful event and
for the invitation to
present on this topic.
I've worked on it for as
long as I can remember and,
for most of that time, it
was extremely difficult
to get a space to hear
about these atrocities and
to talk about them in a way
that was responsible to them.
So I really commend the center
and this particular program.
Thank you very much for the
opportunity to speak about this.
What I will talk about today is,
philosophy in a general way,
its relationship to the topic of genocide,
to getting genocide itself
recognized as a crime
and its relationship to
getting the sexual atrocity
aspect of genocide recognized.
Hopefully, this will work here, let's see.
All right, so a bit of the
philosophical background.
One way of thinking
about philosophy's task,
what philosophy does, is that
it helps us understand
aspects of the human condition
that are usually hidden
are not well known.
The way that it does this is through
concretely grappling
with how these aspects
of the human condition are experienced
and through looking at
interdisciplinary sources
of that human condition to come up with a
bigger-picture understanding of it.
So the crime of genocide was
mainly hidden and unknown
before and during the
time of the Holocaust.
It, of course, has taken
place across history
in different ways, as Raphael
Lemkin's work has shown,
even prior to his efforts
to get the Holocaust
recognized as a genocide.
During the end of the
1930s to 1945, of course,
it was being perpetrated throughout Europe
in an unprecedented way, in a new way.
But it had no official name.
It was not recognized.
So it required, among other disciplines,
the participation of
philosophical thinking
to help clarify what it is.
To bring it from the place,
the realm, of being unknown,
to being visible and
known and having a name
and recognition in world
awareness as well as in law.
A major figure who
participated in this process
is, of course, Hannah Arendt,
a German-Jewish philosopher
and refugee to the United States.
One of the major places where
she reflects on the Holocaust
is, of course, her famous work,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil.
She went as a philosopher journalist,
on behalf of The New Yorker,
to write reports about this trial.
Of course, it's an unprecedented trial.
There was no forum
to bring charges of
genocide during this time,
so he was brought to
Jerusalem to stand trial
and to use the best legal
mechanisms available
to do something about a
crime that, at that point,
had no other way of being tried except
through this way that was
done in the Jerusalem court.
Here, I just wanna summarize
her reflections on the Nuremberg trials,
and a little bit about the Eichmann trial,
but the Nuremberg trials
are significant here because
she is addressing how,
in spite of the fact,
that there was some recognition
of an unprecedented crime
having took place in Europe,
the Nuremberg trials still did
not do justice to this crime.
It didn't come to recognize
genocide explicitly.
So it had this really
ambivalent relationship
to the crime of genocide
and it also goes to show
how very difficult it is
and how a long, difficult,
arduous process it is
to make new crimes known,
bring them to world awareness,
much less to get them prosecuted.
There was some recognition
that an unprecedented crime
had been perpetrated
against the Jewish people
that needed some sort of reckoning.
Of course that is the crime
that we would come to know as genocide.
Genocides had taken
place before in history,
but there wasn't a name to
give to those experiences.
But the Holocaust was
different from these crimes
in a number of ways.
Of course it was a genocide,
but, unlike other genocides,
it aimed to have global reach.
It aimed to go after the
Jewish population globally,
wherever it could send its armies
to go after the population.
It also had an unprecedented
technological way of doing it.
It was done, of course,
through gas chambers,
through this incredible
industrial bureaucracy.
Train stations that could
organize and move people,
populations from different parts of Europe
to the death camps in Poland.
The aim of having global reach
had the technological wherewithal at hand
to actually accomplish this.
The nature of this genocide,
which is different from
other genocides in the past,
also contributed to making
genocide finally, to some extent,
visible in the world consciousness.
The Nuremberg trials were
created, in large part,
because there was such a recognition.
Now, there was an ambivalent
outcome of those trials,
but there was a thrust to create them
as a result of having recognized
that something unprecedented
had taken place.
This was the challenge
that these trials faced.
You have something
unprecedented taking place.
How do you prosecute it if law is,
if you prosecute crimes
based on existing law,
things that law already understands,
how do you prosecute something
that's not in the law books?
The Nuremberg trials,
it had a new category,
this category called
crimes against humanity,
that could have been used
as a rubric under which
to charge, prosecute the facts,
the experiences of genocide,
and as Hannah Arendt argues,
they didn't rise to the
challenge of the unprecedented.
To think of a way of talking
about these new crimes,
that were not familiar, that were new,
and covering them in
the Nuremberg verdict.
I just wanna go through the difference
between genocide and war crimes
and then show how, in
fact, the crime of genocide
ended up, in some sense, concealed
in the Nuremberg verdict.
This is, basically, a simplification of
Arendt's treatment of
this and her analysis
of the Nuremberg trials.
So just, very generally, war crimes.
That was a crime that
was already on the books
so law was familiar with it,
lawyers were familiar with it.
It was something you could tap.
When you went to a war situation,
those were the kind of crimes
that you could recognize
and according to what was familiar,
you could go there and that's
what you can kind of pick out.
You had that framework of war crimes,
you'd see a war, then you
can pick out the things
that are already familiar.
What are war crimes?
Generally speaking, excesses in war
that happen on all sides,
by those few people, the rogue elements,
the bad apples on each side.
And those few bad apples, they'd,
an example of war crimes would be
deliberately targeting civilians.
You're not supposed to target civilians.
Brutal excessive crimes.
Brutal, sadistic treatment of civilians,
of people who are not legitimate targets,
but any kind of gratuitous brutality.
You have a war mission.
You are supposed to
accomplish your war mission
and anything beyond that that you do
along these lines is
considered a war crime.
They don't happen very often.
They're the exceptions to the way that
legitimate war is conducted,
and so they stand out.
They're easy to pick out
because they don't happen too often.
Genocide, on the other
hand, during this period,
was a new, previously unknown crime
that was happening in a context of war.
Unlike a war crime, genocide is the
planned, systematic
destruction of an ethnic group.
Its whole point is brutality,
is a gratuitous brutality
targeting civilians.
So that's not, that
behavior's not the exception.
It's not the work done
by a few bad apples.
It's the rule.
And in fact, the exceptions would be
those few people who are in
this kind of a war situation
but refuse to participate in it.
So, it's very different.
If this is what you've inherited, legally
and in the world in terms
of your awareness of crimes,
things that can go bad in a war,
it's not gonna fit what is happening
in terms of these new crimes.
And this was the challenge
presented to the Nuremberg trials
and, according to Arendt, one
that they didn't meet so well.
What did they do?
They took the familiar crime of war crimes
and applied it to these new facts.
Excessive brutality
that happens on occasion
by a few bad apples.
Whereas, the Holocaust was a
planned, systematic brutality
where the whole point of it,
not just the few, exceptional
bad apples were doing this,
that's the whole point.
The whole point was to
go after civilians in this horrific way.
So the trials misinterpreted genocide
as if it were a war crime.
There was a misfit
between the legal concept
and the facts that were
happening to the victims.
As she states, it ended up
concealing or, in some way,
covering up the new crime
that required a new concept
and a new thinking.
So it required philosophy.
It required to re-conceptualize
based on this new set of facts.
How we understand crime within war.
In the end, they ended
up not prosecuting harms,
egregious harms, abuses
that constitute genocide.
As she suggests, they
were rather uncomfortable
in kind of breaking new ground,
going into this new, unfamiliar territory
and setting a precedent
that would recognize
something that, at this
time, barely even had a name.
It was, I think even in her book,
she uses it one or two times,
so it wasn't widely known.
There was a conservative
aspect to the court
where they didn't step up
and be responsible to the facts at hand,
as well as they could have been.
Next I wanna discuss, very
briefly, the Eichmann trial.
It's a little bit too much
to go into detail right now,
but, what is relevant
here, is that she analyzes
some shortcomings of this trial, but
the bottom-line difference
between the Nuremberg trials,
what the Nuremberg trials accomplished,
and what the Eichmann trial accomplished,
was that the court in Jerusalem
did not mix up war crimes,
those few crimes by bad apples,
with the crime of the Holocaust.
She says here, the main difference
between the Jerusalem court,
a court that was looking at
this atrocity against the Jewish people,
and the Nuremberg trials
is that the Jerusalem court
did not "fall into the trap
of equating [the Holocaust]
"with ordinary war crimes."
It drew a very clear line there.
So the difference here was
between familiar crimes
and unprecedented or not-yet-known crimes.
She said that, at that Jerusalem court,
there was enough of a distinction made,
so that that could serve as a precedent
for future, legal reckoning of this crime.
So, if there was a future
legal forum, for instance,
where you're bringing charges
against perpetrators of the
Holocaust or another genocide,
the Jerusalem court could serve
as a better legal precedent
to be responsible to
the facts of this crime
than what had taken place at Nuremberg.
Now, a summary of the background,
like the conceptual
background that we had,
as we move to events
in Europe in the 1990s.
At this point, there had been already
a growing awareness of genocide,
an awareness that did not exist
at the actual time of the Holocaust,
and immediately after it.
Of course there was the
genocide convention and
you're well aware of the components of it.
What counts as genocide
and what was recognized
under the convention.
During this period, you also had
a lot of scholarship on the Holocaust.
Children of Holocaust survivors
were writing what was happening.
They were studying.
There was research, serious research,
scholarship and knowledge
about this, so that we,
as a civilization, became
more aware of what this is.
One of Hannah Arendt's ideas is that
this better understanding of
the specific genocide of the Holocaust
could then serve as a way
to help future victims.
Her idea was that, well
if this crime had shown,
it had shown itself in
history for the first time,
at least in this industrial
way that it was done
during the Holocaust,
it opened the door to it being
more likely to be repeated.
For that reason, there was
a need for recognition of it
conceptually and legally in
order to protect victims,
for law and other institutions
to be there to protect victims
in the way that it wasn't there
to protect victims of the Holocaust.
Another conceptual resource, sort of
in the back of, as our
intellectual inheritance,
is this recognition that
rape does happen in war.
This was made more visible
by Susan Brownmiller's book,
this famous book and I think
it was published in 1975,
Against Our Will Men, Women And Rape.
Within the feminist movement,
which was now starting to address,
at least in North America,
issues of sexual violence,
there was a recognition
that rape happens in war.
The way that it was characterized
in Brownmiller's book
was that, well, this is men being men.
This is what happens in all wars.
It happens on all sides.
This is something that we
would come to challenge
when we took this concept
and kind of checked it
against the facts of
sexual atrocities happening in genocide.
In any event, these were sort
of the theoretical resources
that we had as we were confronted with
the philosophical task of,
how do we talk about these
particular atrocities
that are happening in this context?
Atrocities that don't have a name,
that are not known in law.
So how do we wrap our heads around them?
What do we call them?
Now we have these atrocities
starting to happen again in Europe.
1991 through 1995 and, as you see,
this is what was Yugoslavia.
It's in southern Europe.
I guess I can point this out a little bit.
We had first attacks
happening in this region here.
We had concentration camps
throughout this region here.
And then he exploded
to about 2/3 of Bosnia.
And then, a few years later,
it starts again in Kosovo as well.
Some of these concentration camps
were built before the attack,
so in preparation for the attack.
What survivors were reporting,
who had survived concentration camps,
who were fleeing these
Serbian-occupied areas
were a system of torture,
mass killings, mutilations,
but also rape and other
sexualized torture,
killings, forced impregnation.
All these crimes above were something that
we had heard of in relation to genocide
in terms of how we understand genocide.
But this other part, we didn't know about.
We didn't know,
How do you talk about it?
That part was new.
It's not that it didn't
happen in previous genocides.
The Nazis did sexual atrocities.
There were sexual atrocities
in other genocides.
But, it wasn't known about
in the wider consciousness.
It was a crime that remained hidden.
And we needed to give it a name,
just like we needed to give the atrocity
that we would come to
call genocide, a name.
It didn't have a name before.
1991, these are just some images.
These are mass graves throughout Croatia.
There were mass graves throughout Bosnia.
Here we have the first uncovering of
concentration camps, a system
of concentration camps.
This is the Omarska Concentration Camp.
It was the death camp.
Many of the clients who were in our case,
were women survivors of this
camp in northwestern Bosnia.
When we see images like this,
we can recognize them to some extent,
given what we've learned about genocide
in the intervening period
after the Holocaust until now.
So, the world responds.
They see evidence of mass killings,
concentration camps and atrocities.
They have a name for what to
peg on these types of crimes.
For instance, starting in 1991,
the French-Jewish philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut
called it ethnocide.
He's an expert on Holocaust
denial and Arendt's philosophy.
So, there was a concept tied to this
that fit the facts better than
if it had been called
war crimes, for instance.
Roy Gutman of Newsday
from here, Long Island,
he just went off the beaten path.
As a journalist, went to
these very dangerous parts of Bosnia.
He broke the story about the
Omarska Concentration Camp
and other horrific atrocities,
as well as one of the first people
to start writing about these
actual atrocities in the media.
He knew what to call it.
Then three years later,
even though it was named,
we have atrocities happening again.
It's just spreading to
other parts of Bosnia.
You may know of what
happened in Srebrenica.
The UN, at this point,
it'd initially been
denying what was happening.
Then ,as more and more
evidence was coming up
of these atrocities,
it set up a series of
safe havens in Bosnia.
So, a lotta the Bosnians
were hiding from the Serbs
who were, this is what
they wanted to do to them.
And so, the UN said,
well, we'll make some safe havens.
Come out of your hiding.
Go to the safe havens.
So, they went to the safe havens
and this is what happened.
In three days they massacred
like over 8,000 Bosnian
muslim men and boys.
The Serbian forces there,
they usually didn't allow
relief supplies to come to the victims,
but, in this particular occasion
they allowed fuel to come in.
It was very peculiar, so they thought,
wow, maybe they're kinda letting up,
that these people will be safe.
They allowed the fuel to come in
so that they could use
the United Nations' fuel
to fuel the buses that they
would put the victims on
and then they had the UN soldiers
help them put the victims on the buses.
Then the buses took
them to the mass graves
where they executed them.
So, the UN helped coral
them into these safe havens,
which they, otherwise, would
not have trusted to go to.
The UN supplied the fuel
and they supplied some of the soldiers
who helped out to put them on
the buses that took them here.
This is later, a commemoration of bodies.
They're still finding bodies.
They're still excavating mass graves.
It's an ongoing process.
Now, we're back, sort of at the,
what I noted at the
beginning of the lecture
where genocide was a hidden crime.
Now, the sexual atrocity
aspect of genocide
is a hidden crime.
It's still unknown.
How do you make it known?
The key person in this
is a person by the name of Asja Armanda.
She's a Croatian-Jewish
feminist and philosopher.
She's based in Zagreb.
She grew up in Yugoslavia,
which was a communist, totalitarian state.
She's this incredibly brilliant person.
Somehow she managed to maintain
contact with the free world
regarding knowledge about the Holocaust,
about feminist writings in the West,
about issues of sexual violence.
She responded to the
genocidal war in her midst
and she came to the aid
of refugee survivors.
This is while she was
also under sniper fire.
There were air raids going on in Croatia.
There were attacks.
But Croatia then became like
the biggest refugee center.
There were over a million Bosnian refugees
and displaced persons from
eastern part of Croatia.
She went there working with survivors
and she started asking women
questions, the right questions,
and she earned their trust
and they began revealing
traumatic experiences
that they didn't even
know how to articulate.
They were afraid to talk about.
They thought they wouldn't be believed.
They just were trained, like
women have been historically,
that this is insignificant, that nobody,
that it's not gonna be taken seriously.
But, she took them seriously and so,
that increased the trust.
Then they would, they heard,
in the refugee camps there was word out
that somebody really is interested in this
and word spread and
they would contact her.
Then she found out that
there was a pattern
of mass rape and killing,
rape and forcible impregnation
and sexual atrocities
that make survivors wish they were dead.
So, she found whatever region
across the occupied parts
of Bosnia or Croatia,
it didn't matter, there was this pattern.
That suggested that that was a policy.
It wasn't just happening
in this one little isolated incident.
It was a pattern.
So, she tries to let the world know.
What does she do?
The first place you go to
that you think is gonna help,
you go to international
human rights groups.
You go to the international
women's community.
Yugoslavia borders on
Italy, Austria, Germany.
So she had contact with women's
groups in these countries.
But the international human rights groups,
they were functioning within
their own inherited concepts.
So they didn't have a
history of dealing with
mass crimes against women.
Often the responses that she got were,
they didn't believe them.
Some of them would say, well, you know,
the Nazis didn't even do that,
so probably it didn't happen,
or that they're war crimes,
they happen on all sides,
so even if it was,
if it took place in the
form of a war crime,
like that it does happen on
all sides in the same way,
that would be all the more
reason to investigate it,
rather than to dismiss it.
The European women's
groups that she approached
were not then very knowledgeable
about sexual violence.
She even went to their conferences.
She brought them lists.
These women are in concentration camps.
These atrocities are happening to them.
Help us do something.
It fell on deaf ears.
She gets me involved.
This is August 1992.
I was your age.
I just had gotten outta college.
I had the opportunity to
study with Angela Davis,
who, as you know, is a famous
African-American philosopher activist.
I'd traveled to Europe before this
and I had the occasion to meet Asja
and that's how she knew me.
I was sort of her contact.
Studying with Angela Davis,
I studied in a more organized way,
these intersections
between race and gender.
How women of certain
racial or ethnic groups
could be targeted in specific ways
that are different from the
ways other women are targeted.
That was a important theoretical clue
to help us understand this.
I was on my way to work
with Catharine MacKinnon
at the University of Michigan Law School,
who's a leading authority and
theorist on sexual violence.
Literally, I was in my
car from Los Angeles
driving to Michigan and then
Asja gets in touch with me
and I was gonna work
with Catharine MacKinnon
on other topics that she
works on, but instead,
Asja pulled me into this issue
and then I pulled Catharine
MacKinnon into it.
I went to the war zone to help Armanda
and we named the crime
genocidal sexual atrocities
or genocidal rape.
So we were familiar with
Susan Brownmiller's notion
of war rape, rape as a weapon of war,
it's the same on all sides,
so we kind of, we had that concept.
We looked at the facts.
The concept didn't fit the facts,
so we had to think of another concept.
And then now the media
starts to investigate.
Asja's successful in,
we can't, the human rights
groups aren't helping.
The women's groups aren't helping.
So we bypass them.
We go to the media.
People like Roy Gutman get the story out
and some European outlets
get it out as well.
And then we decide,
We're going to all these
places to beg them to help us,
so how do we do something
where we take action into our own hands?
We're more active than
passive, so we decide, well,
we'll organize survivors for a lawsuit.
We don't know how or how
this is gonna happen,
but, maybe we can do something,
make a case somewhere
and that could have the
effect of stopping this and,
as some of the survivors who
are involved in our case said,
we didn't wanna leave the women behind,
we wanted to do something
for the women who are left in the camps.
Those of us who survived
but there's women who
are dying in the camps.
We need to do something for them.
So the story breaks in
the international media.
Now the international women's
community gets involved.
But, by this time, there had been
all this media attention to the genocide.
It was recognized that it was a genocide,
but the international women's community
wasn't paying attention to
it when it was a genocide.
But now, when we're paying
attention to it a lot less,
but now that the issue of rape had sort of
broken the media,
the way they tended to interpret this was
through this Brownmiller
idea that this is war rape.
Oh, this is men raping women on all sides.
It's the same.
This was not too helpful,
which is not to say that,
there aren't rapes in every group by men
and across ethnic lines,
but this wasn't what was distinctive
about these particular atrocities.
There was the notion
that rapes were happening
by rogue elements, by
bad apples on all sides.
That women on all sides
were treated the same way.
This ended up concealing or covering up
the nature of these particular atrocities,
which were taking place
in a particular way
by one group of men against
women of other groups.
It was part of a policy to destroy people
on the basis of ethnicity and as women.
The story broke in the international media
and then it became concealed again
because people used that war rape concept,
just like Nuremberg used
the idea of war crimes
to conceal the fact of genocide.
So, at this point, I was
in Croatia and Bosnia
for, like two months, and I went back
to the University of Michigan Law School,
so the idea was I would go and study
what I initially studied,
but then, instead, I
asked Catharine MacKinnon
to help field the media questions
that were being asked of me at this time
'cause the media started inquiring.
And I asked her to represent survivors.
Can you do something legally?
What could we do?
And then she agreed to represent them.
So then I returned to Croatia in 1993,
there's a little typo there,
to prepare a legal action with survivors.
So, in early 1993, when Radovan Karadžić,
who was head of the Bosnian Serbs,
who's currently on trial at the Hague
for the crime of genocide,
he came to New York as a diplomat,
as a leader of the Bosnian Serb Republic.
to participate in UN peace talks.
We served him with legal papers
in a civil action in New York
charging him with genocide
and sexual atrocities.
This also posed a major legal challenge.
There's no international
venue to try this crime.
So we had to create one the
way that the Israelis had to
when there was no legal
forum to try Eichmann.
What do you do?
Well, you try the best way that you can
to create a forum to get
justice for this atrocity.
In 1995 the New York court
recognized that sexual atrocities
can be acts of genocide.
And then Catharine MacKinnon
became a public voice
that would hear what
survivors were going through
to break through that denial,
where rape as genocide was
conflated with war rape.
This is Karadzic at the UN.
But still, even three years later,
he is one of the major architects
of the Srebrenica genocide,
the one that was assisted by the UN.
So it didn't stop him.
He kept going.
Some of the implications
of this recognition
of genocidal sexual atrocities.
What we learned about
genocide from the Holocaust
made it possible to recognize it in places
like Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur,
even though this crime was not recognized
during the time of the Holocaust.
Our work on genocidal sexual atrocities
helped make it possible
to investigate this crime
right away when the
Rwanda genocide happened.
We worked so hard, like
lobbying, human rights groups,
the media, lawyers,
anybody who would listen,
just investigate this atrocity.
Go find out about it.
Write about it.
But when the Rwandan genocide happened,
it was covered right away.
So, at that point, the
issue had already broken
in the international
awareness and so journalists
had the green light, that they
could go investigate it here.
It also comes up in terms
of investigations about
what is happening in Darfur more recently,
in the atrocities by Islamic State
against Yazidi women in Iraq.
Now people ask about this.
They ask about the
sexual atrocity dimension
of destroying people as an ethnic group.
The United Nations finally,
So these crimes, there was some
benefit in these other areas
because there was a
concept that they could use
to identify what was happening,
something that was not
immediately available
in relation to sexual
atrocities in Bosnia.
Then the United Nations finally formed
the International Criminal Tribunals
for Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, which then
prosecuted perpetrators of
genocide and sexual atrocities.
I think I will end it there.
So, directions for further inquiry.
Now, the next sort of philosophical task
in relation to this issue of genocide
is to discern dimensions of it
that we still don't know about
and you do that by being grounded.
Where it's happening,
working with survivors
and eliciting, what other dimensions of it
do we still not know about it?
There's a lot still to learn.
So that would be one way
to continue this work.
I think that's it.
Some acknowledgements there.
All right. Thank you.
(audience members applaud)
- Good afternoon.
Is this working?
- [Woman] No, it is not working.
- [Natalie] It has to be kinda close.
- It's not close enough, or
- [Man] To yeah, to you.
- Okay, can you hear me now?
- [Audience Members] Yes.
- I'm like that commercial,
that Verizon commercial.
Good afternoon everyone.
I'm Cindy Soohoo.
I teach at CUNY Law School where I direct
the International Women's
Human Rights Clinic.
I'm so pleased to be here today
at the Kupferberg Center
and it's just been great for me
to actually get to meet the faculty here
and to hear about the important
work that you're doing.
So I'm so pleased to be here
and so pleased to be part
of this important colloquia
on gender, mass violence and genocide,
and, as well, to be here with Natalie.
My talk today is gonna be on the
intersection of two movements
where I think there've been
incredible developments
over the past 25 years.
The first is the quest to hold individuals
who commit egregious human rights abuses
responsible for their crimes.
The second is the movement to
integrate a gender perspective
into international human
rights and humanitarian law.
Here, I think I'm gonna try a little bit
to, I hear, Natalie, I know, sort of,
experienced the Bosnia conflict first-hand
and worked so closely with survivors
working to document what happened.
I'm gonna try a little bit
to defend the women's human,
international women's
human rights movement,
but recognizing, I'm sure,
that there are areas and places
where they came to the game late,
or maybe failed to
recognize the full impact
of what was going on
in Bosnia soon enough.
After the horrors of World War II,
the international community recognized
that the protection of human rights
is a subject of global concern,
and that it requires an
international commitment
to uphold human rights and
to hold those who commit
mass atrocities responsible
for their actions.
Since World War II, the
international community
has made significant
progress on human rights,
including, recognizing human
rights and humanitarian law
protections in international treaties
and developing and
strengthening UN protections
and enforcement mechanisms.
Efforts to impose international
criminal responsibility
for mass atrocities led to the creation of
ad hoc criminal tribunals in the 1990s
and the establishment of
the permanent International
Criminal Court in 2002.
These have been substantial milestones,
which I think should be celebrated.
Yet, as the legal
architecture was developing
to hold individuals accountable
for egregious human rights abuses,
there was a concern that
women would be left behind.
Throughout history, women have suffered
unique violations and rights
abuses because of their gender,
including domestic violence,
rape and sexual abuse.
The everyday violence that women suffer
is repeated and exacerbated
in times of war and conflict.
Yet, throughout our history,
the rights violations suffered by women
were, for the most
part, largely invisible.
The International Women's
Human Rights Clinic
was founded by Professor
Rhonda Copelon in 1992
to address this issue.
CUNY Law School's International
Women's Human Rights Clinic
was one of the first law
school human rights clinics
in the country, and, at that time,
it was the only one to
focus on women's issues.
Professor Copelon came to CUNY
after a career with the Center
for Constitutional Rights.
At CCR she brought the
groundbreaking Filártiga case
that used the Alien Tort Statute
to open up US courts to
victims of human rights abuses.
In creating the clinic,
she sought to focus on
creating accountability
for human rights violations
and ensuring that gender-based violations,
harms predominantly suffered by women,
were part of a human rights conversation.
I wanna emphasize that Professor Copelon
was not alone in this goal.
She worked side-by-side
with dedicated women's right activists
who created a movement that
took the issue of gender-based violence,
invisible for most of human history,
and brought it to the mainstream
of the global human rights discourse.
In my talk today, I'm gonna
first summarize the global gains
in creating accountability
for human rights violations,
and then devote the majority of my time
to discussing the tremendous progress
that has been made on gender-based
violence in the 1990s.
In my human rights class, we discuss
that the modern human rights movement
really began after World War II.
Prior to World War II,
under international law,
the prevailing wisdom was that,
what countries did within
their own boundaries
was not a matter of
international concerns.
The horrors of World War II
shocked the world's conscience
and the international community
recognized a collective responsibility
to prevent human rights abuses.
In addition to creating the UN in 1945,
there was a recognition
that individuals should be
held responsible for serious
human rights violations.
So the international military tribunals
were created in Nuremberg and Tokyo.
The purpose of these tribunals
was to try Axis powers
responsible for atrocities
committed during World War II.
But, as Natalie said, at the tribunals,
individuals who committed acts of genocide
were convicted of war crimes
and crimes against humanity,
but not genocide because,
prior to World War II,
there was no international
legal definition of genocide.
Recognizing the need to
name what had happened
and to create an
international legal response,
the Genocide Convention was
one of the first treaties
adopted by the UN in 1948.
It defines genocide as the
commission of certain acts
with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part,
a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group.
But once genocide was recognized
as an international crime,
there needed to be courts
that would be willing
to try the perpetrators.
Under the convention, all
nations have an obligation
to prevent and punish genocide,
and individuals accused
of genocide can be tried
in national courts or in
an international court.
However, the creation of
a permanent international criminal court
would prove to be elusive.
Although a commission was charged with
developing recommendations
for a court in 1947,
the Cold War set in in the 1950s
and the work on the court stalled.
In the 1990s, after the
fall of the Berlin Wall,
worldwide attention was
captured by the genocide
occurring in Bosnia, and later, Rwanda.
This led to a new interest
in international responses
to mass atrocities.
In 1993, the UN Security Council
creates the International
Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY.
In 1995, it creates
the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda, or the ICTR.
In 2002, building on
the law and procedures
developed in the ad
hoc criminal tribunals,
the International Criminal
Court, or ICC, was created.
The ICC has jurisdiction over
the most serious international crimes,
what I like to think of is the big three.
War crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide.
I'll note that, in
addition to the creation of
international criminal
courts and tribunals,
there's been substantial progress in
opening up national courts as forums
to try international crimes
and human rights abuses.
In addition to the Alien
Tort Statute litigation
which I discussed earlier,
starting in the 1990s,
prosecutors in Europe have
brought criminal proceedings
against former dictators
accused of genocide
and crimes against humanity based on
the Doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction.
Indeed, the ICC Statute
is built on the principle
that nations have the responsibility
to investigate and prosecute
international crimes,
and its jurisdiction
is limited to instances
where national courts are unable
or unwilling to prosecute.
Now, I wanna shift my remarks
to discuss the struggle
to recognize gender-based
crimes under international law.
International media
coverage of the use of rape
as a weapon of war in Bosnia
was a big part of the pressure
to create the Yugoslavia Tribunal.
But despite this, it
was in no way certain,
that the ICTY or ICTR would
prosecute gender-based crimes
as serious violations
of international law.
Why do I say this?
Because until the 1990s,
gender-based crimes
were consistently minimized
or ignored during conflict.
Walking around the center earlier today,
I was pleased to see
the events and the work
and the memorials that the center has
to ensure that the experience
to the comfort women
in World War II is not forgotten.
But, the fact is that, after World War II,
prosecutors in the Tokyo Tribunal
failed to indict Japanese officials
for the sexual enslavement of
an estimated 200,000 young
women during World War II.
Euphemistically referred
to as comfort women,
these women were abducted
from Japanese-controlled territories
and forced to travel with the troops
to serve as sexual slaves.
This system was authorized
at the highest levels
of the Japanese military,
yet no one was charged.
Despite this consistent pattern,
in the 1990s, historical gains were made
in surfacing gendered rights violations
and making them part of the mainstream
of international criminal law.
These legal gains include
groundbreaking decisions from
the ICTY and ICTR tribunals,
recognizing rape and sexual
violence as a form of genocide
and rape as a form of torture,
as well as the explicit
inclusion of crimes
of sexual violence in the ICC Statute
as crimes that can be prosecuted as
war crimes and crimes against humanity.
So what made these changes possible?
First and foremost, I think the work of
the women and men, maybe
there were men, but,
the people who, yeah, there were men,
who came forward, the
victims who were willing
to share their studies and
the people who worked closely
with them to document what had happened.
Because I think one recurring
issue with sexual violence
is making it visible and
it's so difficult, I think,
for survivors to come forward
and to share their stories.
Often when they do it,
they don't have the
support that they need.
So I think that that work was crucial.
I think the work of feminist
scholars and theorists
also made visible the
gender bias in the law.
They developed legal theories
and strategies to change it.
I'm pleased to be here with Natalie
who is an initial theorist on this issue
but I also wanna recognize the
work of Catharine MacKinnon
and Professor Copelon and
Charlotte Bunch and many others.
I think that another big factor
in the change that we've
seen in international law
was the active global
women's movement that
consistently and effectively
and stubbornly demanded change.
After the adoption of the ICC Statute,
Professor Copelon was asked to
reflect on the progress made in the 1990s.
She said, "The gains of which I will speak
"were successful because they animated
"from a global mobilization of women
"asserting that women's
rights are human rights,
"that human rights are indivisible
"and that impunity for gender crimes
"and acceptance of
discrimination must end.
"Through mobilization, women's movements
"have become a force to be
reckoned with internationally,
"despite the desperate
and concerted efforts
"of right-wing religious
forces to block our progress
"and reluctance of others
to accept or recognize
"the need to make
gender-inclusiveness a priority.
"The interrelationship between
"mobilization at every level
and international legal change,
"exemplifies the basic
principle that human rights,
"like law itself, are not
autonomous, but rise and fall
"on the course and strength,
the people's movements,
"and the popular and political pressure
"and cultural change they generate."
In particular, Professor
Copelon, as well as
political scientists
like Catharine MacKinnon,
have connected global gains
in addressing gender-based violence
to effective women's
organizing and mobilization
around a series of
international conferences
on human rights and development
in the 1980s and '90s.
Organizations around these conferences
brought together women's rights activists
from around the world.
These activists worked to
mainstream women's rights
in all aspects of human rights,
but a clear priority that emerged
was the need to address
gender-based violence
as a human rights violation.
At the world conferences,
the women's rights movement
hijacked the global human rights agenda.
For instance, women's rights were not even
in the preparatory documents
for the 1993 Vienna
Conference on Human Rights,
but through the work of
human rights activists,
the consensus documents
adopted by 171 countries
after the conference made women's rights
and gender-based violence a focus.
The Vienna Declaration
specifically recognized
that systemic rape, sexual
slavery and forced pregnancy
violate fundamental principles
of international law
and that perpetrators must
be persecuted and punished.
The women's movement created visibility
for gender-based violence
and political pressure
on the international
community to address it.
The organization and sustained
pressure from the movement
would prove important
during the ad hoc tribunals
and the creation of the ICC.
As I mentioned earlier, historic cases
came out of the ICTY and ICTR.
Yet, despite the international attention
to the use of rape in Bosnia,
and the evidence that 250 to 500,000 women
were raped as part of
the genocide in Rwanda,
the prosecutors in the ad hoc
tribunal were initially slow
to charge defendants
with gender-based crimes.
Because of this, monitoring groups
sent multiple letters to
the prosecutor's office
calling for institutional
changes and more effective
investigation and
prosecution of gender crimes.
The ICTR case against Jean-Paul Akayesu
is famous for being the first case
to recognize that rape and sexual violence
can be instruments of genocide.
But rape and sexual violence crimes
were not included in
his initial indictments.
Even though rape was not included
in the charging documents
in the Akayesu case, during the trial,
information about rape started to come out
when a woman testified that
her six-year-old daughter
was raped by three men
who murdered her husband.
Navi Pillay, a female
judge from South Africa,
pursued the line of questioning,
asking two other witnesses
about whether rape
occurred in the district.
Based on the testimony, IWHR
and a coalition of groups
filed an amicus brief urging a continuance
to allow the prosecutor
to investigate the rapes
and amend the indictment.
The indictment was amended
and the rest is history.
But the landmark Akayesu
case may not have happened
but for the intervention of Judge Pillay
and the consistent monitoring and pressure
placed on the prosecutor's office.
When it came time to
draft the ICC Statute,
the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice
formed to monitor and
influence the negotiations.
The statute that emerged
reflected most of the caucus's demands.
The ICC Statute leaves no doubt
that gender-based crimes can
form the basis of conviction
for the big three international crimes,
genocide, crimes against
humanity and war crimes.
The ICC Statute also ensures
the integration of a gender perspective
on the court by recognizing the need
for fair representation of female judges
and judges with expertise
on violence against women and children.
Finally, the statute provides
important protections
for witnesses and victims
and creates a victims unit
with experts on trauma
and sexual violence.
Through the work of a generation
of women's rights activists
we have seen tremendous changes
in the recognition of gender crimes
under international law,
and the creation of
institutions to address them.
But more work remains to be done.
The history of the ad hoc tribunals
teaches us that we must
continue to be vigilant
to make sure that gender-based
crimes are investigated
and documented and prosecuted at the ICC,
as well as in national courts.
In addition to making sure
that crimes against women
are recognized, prosecuted and punished,
we must also do more to
prevent armed conflicts
and violent extremism.
In 2000, the UN Security Council
issued Resolution 1325 on
women, peace and security.
The resolution emphasized the need
to take a gender perspective in conflict
and protect women and
girls from sexual violence.
But it goes further and stresses
the importance of women's
equal participation
and full involvement in efforts
to maintain and promote
peace and security.
In particular, it emphasizes the need
for women to participate in
preventing and resolving
conflicts, peace negotiation,
peace building, humanitarian responses
and post-conflict reconstruction.
This year is the 15th
anniversary of Resolution 1325.
To mark the anniversary,
the Security Council
commissioned a global study and review
that was released earlier this month.
In the reports Forward,
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka,
Executive Director of UN Women writes,
"Resolution 1325 was one of
the crowning achievements
"of the global women's movement
"and one of the most inspired decisions
"of the UN Security Council.
"The recognition that peace
is inextricably linked
"with gender equality
and women's leadership
"was a radical step for the highest body
"tasked with maintenance
"of international peace and security."
But like Professor Copelon,
she warns us that the
creation of legal recognition
is an important first
step, but not enough.
She goes on to say, "We have
an enormous responsibility
"to ensure that the normative framework
"spurred by Resolution
1325 is not just given
"periodic visibility and attention
"but that it lies at the heart
"of the UN's work on peace and security."
My colleague, Catherine Powell,
at the Center for Foreign Relations,
has written that, in the last 15 years,
we've seen tremendous progress
in addressing the issues
women face as victims
of sexual abuse and other
violations during wartime,
but less progress on
increasing the role of women
as agents of change.
This, I think, is the next challenge
for the women's rights movement,
to build on the gains that we have made
to ensure, not only that
women's rights violations
are recognized in times of
conflict and mass violence,
but that women have an active role
in preventing such violence.
Thank you.
(audience members applaud)
- So it certainly seems
like you're comments
(microphone humming)
- [Woman] They can't
be on at the same time.
- I guess not.
- [Woman] (speaks quietly without mic)
- Do they need to be on?
So I'll speak loudly.
It certainly seems like your comments
build on each other's and there,
at some points, are some
contrasts, tensions between your comments,
which, I think, probably illustrates
the reality of this kind
of action on the ground.
Sometimes the legal response
is not quick enough for the people,
and sometimes the legal response
has to take its time for it to be
the structure that we need it to be.
So I wondered if, before we
invite questions from students,
if you would like to speak to each other
about those opportunities
and those tensions
that exist in your comments.
- When I was putting
these remarks together,
it's interesting, because
I teach international
human rights law and, really,
my focus has been trying
to think about addressing
gender bias and trying to mainstream
the experience of women
in human rights law
and international law.
I think we agree that
there's been a long history
of violence against women
in times of conflict
and that that has really been
failed to be addressed
by international law
or the international
community for many years.
I think an overall goal
of the women's movement
in the 1980s and 1990s
was really surfacing
gender-based violence and making the law
and the public aware of it
and to take it seriously.
I think, but when we're
talking about genocide
I think there's also an issue in terms of
is this a different kind
of violence against women,
and should it be looked
at in a different way,
rather than through sort
of the lens that we look at
other kinds of sexual
abuse of women in conflict.
Right, I think, maybe
that's sort of the nugget
of the tension?
Is that?
- Yeah, just to recognize
that it's distinct.
So, these facts need to be
conceptualized in this way.
These set of facts, where
it does happen on all sides,
have to be conceptualized that way,
and then these facts of
sexual atrocities in peacetime
have their own kind of concept.
So, the tension was to
wrest out from under,
the distinct kind of ways
that women who were targeted for genocide
were sexually targeted so that war rape
doesn't conceal it, it can
stay as its own category,
but it lets this one be.
And so this is the nugget of the tension
because it would assert a sameness
that wasn't experienced by survivors.
So we saw that tension
like throughout the work of
getting this issue out.
You had mentioned,
there's the few things
that you had mentioned
that I was privy to actually on the ground
when some of these
things were happening so,
when we had our case,
when Rhonda Copeland had
written about it initially,
it was war rape, and so we
were in very much tension
with that approach.
And then the Vienna
Conference on Women's Rights,
I was at the Vienna
Conference on Women's Rights.
It's 1993.
It's happening down the road from
the biggest example of genocide,
concentration camps in Europe,
since the Holocaust, down the road.
And you have women's organizations there
who are utterly oblivious to this
and not providing a space for survivors.
The concentration camp survive,
women who had survived this
were trying to find a
way to be present because
the people who were actually
taking a lot of the space
were, not only women who
weren't understanding this
as rape as genocide,
but women who actually were
echoing Serbian propaganda,
who were from Serbia, who were minimizing,
for whatever reasons,
that this was happening.
They asked Catharine MacKinnon
if she could try to create a space there.
Somehow, through survivor groups,
we were able to have like
one little tiny forum
where they could speak and
have a space in this conference
about atrocities happening
to women all over the world.
Down the road there are
death camps operating
where they have no
representation in this forum.
So, that was a point of tension.
You also mentioned of
course it's very difficult
to create circumstances
so survivors can feel safe to speak.
When we tried to get the
representatives from the UN
to come, many of them had no experience
working with sexual violence survivors.
They, I remember being in this,
they'd come to this Grand
Hotel in Zagreb in Croatia.
They were having parties
and there were survivors
who had just come out of
the most horrific situation.
They're out there waiting
for them to talk to them
and they don't have time for them
because they're having festivities.
So these women, young girls, they leave.
They don't have a place to live.
They don't have food.
They barely have clothes.
And so they're not being,
There was just a great disconnect
with this UN bureaucracy
and the women there.
And then they had some of the
translators, for instance.
I witnessed this myself.
I was there listening to this.
They had Serbian translators
who were translating
in the language of the perpetrators
and also mistranslating
what was happening.
So then it minimized what
actually had happened.
So there were all these things
that we would never have expected.
Another point too, was when they declared,
okay, there's gonna be
this criminal tribunal,
that there'll be
jurisdiction over war crimes,
crimes against humanity and
genocide, Professor Copelon,
actually, she wrote a
letter to the court there,
requesting a policy change,
so that there could be
an exception such that
there could be a space for
the possibility of consent.
Consensual relationships
under this rubric.
Survivors were horrified because
they couldn't believe that
somebody would push that
kind of a initiative
and it scared them away from the tribunal
because they felt that it could
be said that they wanted it,
that they had consensual relationships.
So, I would say that the main
source of that disconnect
is working from afar,
rather than constantly running
your decisions by survi,
like vetting it out with
people on the ground
so that that is part of
the conversation as well.
We've often criticized the traditional way
of looking at human rights
in ways that are disconnected
from women's experiences.
Having to be regrounded.
But that could also happen when
women who are seeking to
expand women's human rights,
but in a way that is
disconnected from those
who are experiencing
those horrific violations.
- You've had a lotta
comments and I appreciate
your comments, especially as someone
who was directly involved
in this specific conflict,
which I was not.
I'll say that I think a lot of work
of the international women's movement
and women's activists has actually been
to mainstream a gender
perspective in the UN
and I think that we all are appalled
and we all recognize,
and when I talked earlier about the need
to have women judges on
international criminal tribunals
and at the ICC, having a
victims' protection unit
with services for survivors,
including criminal protections
in terms of the use of
former sexual experience,
having shield rules,
that was all, I think,
on the agenda and something
that the women's movement worked for.
As I said in the beginning,
I think that there is a tension
in terms of
thinking about whether rape and genocide,
recognizing the difference
of rape as a form of genocide
and rape in other contexts,
I think, the reason why the ICC
had jurisdiction over genocide,
crimes against humanity and war crimes,
is sort of this recognition that
these are certain crimes where
the international community actually has
the right and the interest in prosecuting
because they're sort of a larger harm.
I think some of the concern of
the women's movement though,
was that, even as we're recognizing
that rape can be a form of genocide
and that it is one of most serious,
genocide is one of the most
serious international crimes,
the concern that rape
that happened every day
as a part of war, you know,
every day in women's lives,
and rape that occurred
as part of war time
in terms of the rapes that
were suffered from women
who were viewed as booty
or the comfort women,
would not be eclipsed as
we're sort of focusing on
the harm to women as part of a community.
I think that that was part of the tension
in terms of thinking about,
yes, we want to recognize
the unique harm when rape is
used as a form of genocide,
but we also wanna make
sure that we don't forget
that women have been
victims of sexual violence
in times of conflict
and not eclipsing that.
So I think that was part of the tension.
- [Amy] I'd like ask
questions of our audience.
- I actually, ooh, I actually
had a number of things
that I would have loved to ask,
but, just following up on the last thing,
it seems to me that what's missing just,
and maybe you can clarify a little more,
is just, why it is important
to include it within
genocide and not just,
It's like why we have the
term genocide to begin with.
There's always mass violence.
There's always individual violence.
But the same kind of comparison
between a rape by a husband
or a rape by a relative,
although, of course it is terrible,
this is why I don't let my
students use the word terrible
or horrible because, of course it is.
But that we are talking about
something qualitatively different
and something that has a broader impact.
And so maybe you can address that.
I think that kind of answers
as to why this is important
and it also explains, I
think to the students,
why it matters and why
the genocide term matters.
I actually also wanted to ask you
if you think, perhaps,
the genocide concept
itself is the problem here,
that we know from Lemkin's footnotes
that he grapples with the term ethnocide,
that maybe that is the
more appropriate word.
And one of the things that,
even though the Genocide
Convention doesn't do this,
there is disconnection between,
It develops disconnection between genocide
as if it is only involved in
death and mass annihilation.
Lemkin, himself, of
course, didn't do that,
but that becomes sort of the development.
I'm critical of Lemkin generally.
But one of the things
that, it seems to me,
that maybe it is a more appropriate word
and maybe the genocide
word needs to be rejected.
That perhaps ethnocide
perhaps better includes
this range of acts that, in fact,
Lemkin himself was involved in.
So those are the two things.
- Perhaps it could be expanded.
I'd have to think about
that more carefully,
but, sort of what does come to mind
in terms of like,
Ethnocide would, perhaps,
recognize a crime
that took place where there
wasn't an explicit racial policy
as took place against the Jews.
So, it may be a difference of precision,
but in terms of modifying it
that way, I'm not sure, but,
I think that because women
experience it in a distinct way,
in a context where they're
targeted for destruction
as part of their ethnic or racial group,
it's a different set of experiences
and the issue merely was
to give it its proper name
because it didn't happen as this
getting back at one group or another.
It's you are a target for destruction
and women of that group
are going to be targeted
in a particular way,
or there's a sexualized
way of killing somebody
that takes place mainly against women,
though not all the time women.
While the Vienna Conference was happening,
we went to a refugee
center where all the people
are fleeing out of Bosnia
and this part of Croatia
that was under sniper attack,
and there were Bosnian men who
heard us talking about women
and then they came up to us and they said,
well, you know, it didn't
just happen to women.
And they kept lingering
around and we're like,
why are these guys around?
What are they doing?
And then they came to
us and they said that,
these atrocities had happened
to men as part of genocide.
So, it's just merely to respect
that it's a different set of experiences
that was not visible, whereas
war rape had some visibility.
Not enough visibility.
It should have more visibility.
And it's just respecting the distinctions
so that one doesn't eclipse the other
and so that you have a way
of understanding a set of,
You have the proper concept
for the different contexts
and you can navigate them properly
so that survivors don't feel re-violated
in the way that you're naming it.
- Yeah, and the most
important thing is also
to recognize how survivors
experience the violence.
I think that there is a history of
looking at people sort
of based on one identity.
I think that we have to
recognize that everyone
has intersectional identities.
So, when we're talking
about rape as genocide,
we're talking about women being targeted
because of intersection of two identities.
I think that that's an
important distinction.
I think another concern,
and I've actually worked less
in this area than you have,
but I think another concern,
when we're thinking about the
concept of rape as genocide
is that there's a danger
that it be only understood
as harming a group, rather than
harming women as individuals
or women as women,
because I think there has been a history
in terms of thinking about
rape as not a violent crime
and violation of a woman,
but, rather a violation of,
thinking of women as property.
So like in some countries,
there have been, historically,
if a woman was raped,
it was viewed as an honor
crime against her family.
Or if a woman was raped,
if the person who raped her
married her, it would be okay.
So I think that we have to also recognize
that it's an individual
harm against a woman,
and not just a harm against a people.
- Yeah, I think that's
a really important point
and I just do wanna emphasize
that the recognition came,
just, I mean, I think,
that let's me enter with
another interesting point,
which is that, the people
who were most animated
to get this recognized,
came from that very perspective
that you're talking about
that recognizes it first and foremost,
as a violation of her as an
individual, as a woman then,
and then that was the foundation for
how then do we fit this
with the ethnic component?
It's not that the people
who understood genocide
were now investigating
how do we talk about women
that got it recognized like this.
This was a feminist movement.
This came from people who were
coming from that perspective
that you're saying, but then,
really worked, like you
said, on their experiences,
how they experienced
it, and then from that,
they elicited the ethnic component.
So it didn't go the other way.
There were attempts to go the other way.
So, for instance, just
individual Bosnians on the ground
who were reporting what was happening,
they had just people from the village.
They didn't have a sophisticated apparatus
for how to call this, not
even how to call a genocide.
But, trying to be responsible
to what was happening
to their community, they would say,
well, then, the young women
were taken away to this place,
then they use euphemism,
all these horrible
things happened to them.
So they were groping for a
language for how to call this.
They were trying from their
way, and it kinda didn't fit.
Roy Gutman, who broke the
story of the death camps
and had a way to talk about genocide,
was trying with his language.
First they were talked about
as bordellos and brothels,
which is the peacetime way
that sexual violence is denied
transposed into a genocide context.
That's what happens when you go from,
okay, you understand genocide
and how do we fit women in?
But if you go from this
way, from a feminist way
that starts first as an
individual, then as women,
and then you negotiate the
race and ethnicity side,
then you can arrive at
the balance that you were,
I think so rightly saying,
is the more responsible
way to talk about this.
- [Amy] Who's got questions?
- [Man] (speaks quietly without mic)
- [Amy] I'm concerned about the feedback.
You wanna come up here?
- [Man] (speaks quietly without mic)
- [Amy] Or you can take this--
- [Man] But I think people can hear me.
First of all I'm gonna take that
(speaks quietly without mic)
and thank you very much for coming out to
(speaks quietly without mic)
- [Woman] Can't hear you.
- [Man] You can't hear me?
- [Woman] No, (speaks quietly without mic)
- [Man] (clears throat) I'm
gonna put more bass in my voice.
Sorry.
The questions that I did have,
I didn't wanna take up
too much of your time, is
I didn't quite get who
we hold responsible,
how do you judge them?
How do we police them?
I'm sure a punishment of this crime
(speaks quietly without mic)
statute that would hold people up to
10 years, 15 years, 20 years.
And also, did anybody
specific go to Guantanamo
'cause that's where you put
people convicted of war crimes?
And, if so, shouldn't there be more people
convicted of these (speaks
quietly without mic)?
- Yeah.
- [Man] Thank you.
- Oh, okay.
- [Man] (speaks quietly without mic)
- Well in terms of punishment,
I think, this issue, in terms
of how do we hold people
accountable, is difficult.
First of all, any time, in
a normal everyday context,
rape is illegal, murder is illegal,
sexual violence is illegal.
What we've mostly been talking about here
is mass violence, mass rape
in the context of conflict or war,
which is really recognized
as an international crime.
Usually what happens though,
when these levels of atrocities occur,
it's often difficult for societies
to try people for these crimes,
often because they were
leaders in their community
or the political upheaval.
And the reason why the ICTY
and the ICTR were created
was to try to create a forum
to hold these people accountable,
outside of their everyday
criminal justice system.
The idea of the ICC is it's
also supposed to be a place
where you can bring people
who have been accused
of these most serious
international crimes,
but the problem is, not all
countries have ratified the ICC,
including the United States,
and the ICC is incredibly limited
in terms of its staff and,
frankly, political will.
Because the ICC has issued
a lot of indictments
but it doesn't have a police force.
So it can indict people,
but unless countries around the world
actually take steps to arrest these people
and bring them to the Hague,
they're not going to be held accountable.
So I think we still have,
I mean, I sort of talked about
that there had been advances
but we still have an
incredible gap in terms of
actually enforcing and
holding people accountable.
- I would just add that I agree
that there's this major gap
in terms of international enforcement
and the few people that
have been prosecuted,
they serve sentences in
different parts of Europe.
They get off on good behavior.
One of the major
architects of the genocide,
a woman who was with Karadzic,
I think her term was only five years
and she got off for good behavior.
So it's just there's a real gap
in terms of enforcement and, perhaps.
Maybe you could speak better
to this than I can, but,
perhaps that opens the door for
pursuing courts in national venues
because it's within a jurisdiction,
you have a police force,
you have the mechanisms
that are needed to take care of justice
better than is in place
in an international venue.
So that may be something
to do in the alternative
'til the international system
gets better on these things.
- [Man] (speaks quietly without mic)
- [Woman] I wanted to
just add to your wonderful presentation
that sexual violence against
women happens a lot in war.
That it's not always acknowledged then.
We're just realizing now
that the women in the Holocaust were raped
as a part of their torture, and,
so much of this was written
by men about women that
failure to include the
experience of women who
(speaks quietly without mic)
people who were killed,
by maybe, not necessarily,
acknowledge the torture
that they went through,
I think does the victims a disservice and
lets the perpetrators discount it.
I remember reading years
ago before rape was a
acknowledged crime in this country,
you got more punishment
for breaking and entering
than for rape.
Remember reading how men would think, oh,
you think you're gonna rape
(speaks quietly without mic)
for rape was free because the
punishment was so minimal.
So I think that attitude
that the rape was free
kind of clouds the way
we fail to acknowledge
its experience in genocide.
And in the Armenian genocide also.
We tend to hear about
the sexual program and
I think it's important
for a complete sense of what genocide is,
to acknowledge the experience of
so many different ways that people are
(speaks quietly without mic)
- Thank you for mentioning that point.
It's a really good point that
we had to think a lot about
when we were working to
make this crime visible.
You mentioned the Armenian genocide.
I've gone to some events
on the Armenian genocide.
There's people written like poetry
and other kind of literary
responses, survivors.
It's woven in there, and you'd have to go,
kind of, unstitch it and
see it as its discreet
kind of crime and, of
course, in the Holocaust,
there's a lot more evidence
of that having taken place.
But I would also add that
it's important, also,
to have a environment
that can hear it because,
When I began working on this,
I had heard that this had empowered
some women who survived the Holocaust
to talk about what had
happened and that, before,
they couldn't talk about.
But survivors of this genocide
initially, it was a very difficult choice
to decide to speak, not only
because it wouldn't be heard,
but it would be turned around in a way
that blamed them or
that called it war rape,
or that, all these ways of denial
that is, as we know from
Holocaust literature,
denial is like the second death.
I would feel like I would
have to tell these survivors,
these are the possibilities
of what's gonna happen to you
if you say this.
So you create a space for it to be heard,
but you also know that
it might be minimized.
I think there was,
this is what I heard.
I don't know this in a studied way,
but that there was fear that
if we talked about sexual
atrocities during the Holocaust,
because women's experiences
are so minimized,
then the Holocaust itself, it
would like rub off on that.
There wasn't an audience.
There wasn't an intersection
of a feminist movement
to be able to hear that, so
what is worse?
Being silent or saying something in a way
that then is torturing you in another way?
I would have to leave
that up to the survivor
to make their decision,
knowing as much as they can
about the context of receptivity.
There were times when
I was even wondering.
I have to do my diligence in
relation to these survivors
to tell them how this
is gonna be perceived
and in the darkest days of
trying to get this issue out.
It was a nightmare when the
international women's community
finally recognized it,
but then kept calling it
like it's the same on all sides.
It makes you wonder, perhaps
it's not good to talk,
If you're going to be
re-violated in this way,
do you have the wherewithal
to keep doing this?
It's a very hard, difficult,
complex decision to make
and I just wanna emphasize
that it's important also
that there's someone to
hear it, to recognize it
and not then re-violate you
in the way that they're framing it.
Whether blaming you like
they do in peacetime,
or calling it what it isn't, or whatever.
- I just wanted to say,
I finished reading this
book Ravished Armenia.
It was written by this girl
who had this experience.
It was written in 1918.
She's referring to all these atrocities
that occurred to her and her
family and everyone she saw.
She never used the word rape.
It was always outrage.
And then, as I finished reading,
I was wondering if you know
whether that word, rape,
was recognized as a term.
Is this a very new thing or is
this something that has been
part of our culture for a long time?
Because it's never mentioned in this book,
and certainly--
- But is there euphem,
I mean, is there, are there things there
that you're suspecting are
possibly sexual atrocities
but they don't give it a
language, or you don't know?
- (speaks quietly without mic)--
- Outrages.
- rape as outrage.
- Yeah.
- They would choose outrage.
(speaks quietly without mic)
- I think it goes to the--
- I suspect that that was
like maybe a political choice
that the writer made.
- [Woman] No, I think it's just internal
that she did not recognize it herself.
Today you can say the word
and you feel confident--
- Right, right, right.
- saying that word.
- Well this is what Asja encountered
and that's why it was so
key that she knew how to ask
the right quest,
'cause that's, they were bungling around,
like trying to figure out a language.
They were speaking that language.
When the Bosnians in
the villages of Bosnia,
who were recording what was,
they would say, and outrages
were done against women.
Or, there's these euphemisms because
they don't have a language
that recognizes it.
So, that was the challenge here
for her to elicit from them,
to be able to ask them questions
so that they can come to call it that
and feel safe to call it
that and not be afraid,
well, then they're gonna
be called a prostitute.
Or that's it's gonna be,
or they're gonna be bla,
or they asked for it.
All the kind of denial that comes with
explicitly naming something
as a sexual violation.
- And I'll just add, I
think part of the difficulty
or one of the suggested reasons
for the failure to charge
gendered crimes initially
in the ICTR and the ICTY,
was because the investigators
really weren't trained.
They didn't really actually
know how to ask questions
in a sensitive way in order
to get the information.
- Mm-hmm.
- [Woman] I just found a lot
of what you're talking about,
and thank you so much for
coming and visiting us,
really informative and helpful.
A lot of what you're
talking about in terms of
the silence of the victims,
the shame of the victims,
the fear that they won't be believed,
I think we could try to help
within the larger framework
of rape culture and maybe
that might help our students
conceptualize why there's
been such a resistance
within the international
community and on a systemic level
in terms of recognizing the
scope of sexual violence
within the context of genocide.
Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on
the role that rape culture might play in
kind of historical and
present-day resistances
to full recognition of what
(speaks quietly without mic)
- It's funny when you say rape culture.
I also just think about that
we're having that conversation
in the United States as well.
Just this idea, I think I
talked about it a little bit,
in the context of war, that
initially, people have probably
watched Game of Thrones.
Just this idea that rape was part of war
and, for a period of
time, it was accepted,
and then, I think, there
are laws that developed
that sort of recognized it wasn't proper,
but just this view that
this is what happens.
This is what happens,
and I think it's similar
to the rape culture we have today
in terms of boys will be boys.
So that even though there was sort of
some recognition that it was improper,
it was just not taken seriously.
It wasn't punished
as we saw in the case
of the comfort women.
You have this whole tribunal
that was put together to
deal with wartime atrocities,
and you had this systematic system,
sexual enslavement of women,
and there's nothing in the tribunal.
- I think it was a significant
issue in bringing it up
in relation to the Bosnian genocide.
You had, in that culture,
pornography was rampant, so it
normalized, it was, in the culture,
became normal that women
enjoy these kinds of things.
They enjoy sexual violation, so
that's all the more reason not
to say what happened to you
because it's going to be pulled into that
and reinterpreted into that.
That functions as a silencing mechanism
and so, I think that functioned
on the individual level,
that you're afraid to call it what it is,
because there's already a
language of denial from peacetime
that's going to make
into blame the victim.
That just highlights one
level of the various denials,
the peacetime denial, the
wartime, all the levels.
I think that poses a
very interesting question
in terms of being able
to talk about it now
in Western societies where the
rape culture's getting worse
and then, is that having
more of a silencing effect.
Is the recognition that
you're working so hard
to come into effect,
is that strong enough to
overcome the rape culture?
I don't know.
That would be an interesting dissertation
for somebody to do.
Yeah, but it's very good
question, thank you.
- [Woman] Can I just make some comments on
(speaks quietly without mic)
is that, one of the
things I noticed is that
the international women groups
(speaks quietly without mic)
these women were saying,
and it's like we're
fighting against each other
and the men are looking on
seeing us fighting against each other
and there the ones who
are sitting as judges.
Obviously they're going
to throw our case out.
(speaks quietly without mic)
This is what has happened to me.
He said, oh, it's because
you were dressed this way.
Because you were of Arab
ethnicity or whatever.
You're just inflating
whatever has happened to you.
And all the people are listening
and the men are listening so it was like,
eventually it's just
gonna consume everything.
And I think that's why the
women were kind of like
hesitant to come forward and say something
what you have experienced.
And also you
that the children were also
included in some cases.
- A lot, yeah.
- [Woman] And so it has escalated from
just women, or adults, to children.
And even in domestic situations,
you find this happening
that a child would say
maybe a father or a
relative has done whatever
and we don't listen to the child.
We try to shut the child up
or say that it's probably a
figment of your imagination
and because of all of these things
we find that the situation
has not been dealt with
in the way it should be.
- Yeah, well, you made
many, many comments.
I think you're right in terms of
just this lack of attention
and believing people
is a problem that we continually have
and I also do agree with you that we,
that women's movements
need to work together.
I feel like, another common critique
of the International Human Rights Movement
is that they're sort of
like a top down thing
in terms of its, sort of Western groups
defining priorities and sort of saying
this is what the human rights is about,
rather than being a bottom up process
where we're actively engaging with people
and recognizing their
intersectional identities,
their nationality, their experiences
and bringing that up in terms of making it
the human rights response.
- And I do think also that
there's this need, of
course, to work together,
and, as you mentioned,
this need also to recognize
that intersecting forms of oppression,
and part of what was
very interesting about
the African-American Women's Movement is,
some of the early writings in the '80s,
was this recognition that, sometimes,
you have a commonality with women, but
sometimes you have
more or the same commonality
with your ethnic group,
especially if the women
that you're working with
don't recognize what's happening to you
in terms of your ethnicity.
So this is something I really understood
in working the Bosnian genocide.
So, I understood less as
an American white woman.
But, going there, it really came to life,
and so, I think that it's
important to do working together,
but also, you recognize
on some issues of your gender oppression,
you feel safer with women.
On some issues you feel safer
in a center that is
addressing the Holocaust.
You know, your ethnic group.
- [Amy] So, we've gone beyond our time.
- Sorry, sorry.
- Well, no, because you
have a very engaged audience
and the reason you have
such an engaged audience
is because you were
such engaging speakers.
So, thank you.
- [Natalie] Thank you. Thank you.
(audience members applaud)
- We have two more events
in the series this semester
and four events next semester.
I encourage you to attend
any and all of them.
You're always welcome and
you will certainly learn
even more as we go along.
But, thank you.
- [Natalie And Cindy] Thank you.
