Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey 9781350111035, 1350111031

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Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century

ii 

Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century A Comparative Survey 2nd Edition

Edited by Amy E. Randall

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 This edition published 2022 Copyright © Amy E. Randall, 2022 Amy E. Randall has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image: Stained glass panels in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre commemorating the victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide - Kigali, Rwanda, East Africa (© Angus McComiskey / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Names: Randall, Amy E. (Amy Elise) 1967- editor. Title: Genocide and gender in the twentieth century: a comparative survey / edited by Amy E. Randall. Description: 2nd Edition. | New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Revised edition of Genocide and gender in the twentieth century, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021030057 (print) | LCCN 2021030058 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350111004 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350111011 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350111028 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350111035 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Genocide–History–20th century. | Women–Violence against–History– 20th century. | Rape as a weapon of war–History–20th century. Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .G4475 2022 (print) | LCC HV6322.7 (ebook) | DDC 304.6/63082–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030057 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030058 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1101-1 PB: 978-1-3501-1100-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1102-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-1103-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In memory of Jerry Gafio Watts 

(May 17, 1953–November 16, 2015)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Gender and Genocide Studies  Amy E. Randall  1 PART I  Gender and Genocide  25 1

Imperialism, Modern Race Thinking, Gender, and Genocide  Amy E. Randall  27

2

Gender and the Holocaust: Male and Female Experiences of Auschwitz  Lisa Pine  57

3

Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides  Adam Jones  83

PART II  Sexual Violence and Mass Rape  109 4

Exposed Bodies: A Conceptual Approach to Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide  Anthonie Holslag  111

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An Exceptional Genocide?: Sexual Violence in the Holocaust Zoë Waxman  134

6

Constructions of Identity and Sexual Violence in Wartime: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina  Patricia A. Weitsman  148

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Rape as a Weapon of Genocide: Gender, Patriarchy, and Sexual Violence in Rwanda  Jennie E. Burnet  167

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CONTENTS

PART III  Gender and Complicity  191 8

Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship  Stephen R. Haynes  193

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Women as Perpetrators: Agency and Authority in Genocidal Rwanda  Nicole Hogg and Mark Drumbl  220

PART IV  Gendered Genocidal Trauma and Its Aftermaths  245 10 The Biopolitics of “Rescue”: Women and the Politics of Inclusion after the Armenian Genocide  Lerna Ekmekçioğlu  247 11 Wartime Rape and Its Shunned Victims  Olivera Simić  268 PART V  Gender, Memory, and Narratives about the Past  289 12 Memory, Gender, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma among Daughters and Granddaughters of Holocaust Survivors  Janet Jacobs  291 13 Gendered Silences, Gendered Memories: New Memory Work on Islamized Armenians in Turkey Ayşe Gül Altınay  312 PART VI  International Law and Genocide Studies Prevention  333 14 Making Sense of Genocide, Making Sense of Law: International Criminal Prosecutions of Large-Scale Sexual Violence  Doris Buss  335 15 Representing Gendered Violence in Democratic Kampuchea  Maria Elander  355 16 Beyond the Binaries: Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention  Elisa von Joeden-Forgey  375 Appendix 405 Selected Bibliography 408 List of Contributors 444 Index 449

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For over twenty years I have been teaching students about the Holocaust, and for over eleven years I have been teaching an upper-level seminar on ethnic cleansing and genocide in the twentieth century. I am grateful to students in these classes for engaging in an intellectually rigorous inquiry and often emotionally challenging exploration of these difficult topics. I am also thankful for the support provided by Santa Clara University, including a subvention grant from the Provost’s Office to defray the costs of indexing. Tegan Smith, an undergraduate history and women’s and gender studies double major, deserves special thanks for not only providing excellent copyediting and research assistance but also acting as a valuable sounding board for some of my questions about the manuscript. I appreciate Rhodri Mogford and Laura Reeves at Bloomsbury Publishing for their persistent patience and support for this project. Thanks also to the production team, especially Jophcy Kumar and Mohammed Raffi. I am grateful to the anonymous proposal and manuscript reviewers for their helpful comments. I owe a debt to Naomi Andrews, Marko Dumančić, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey for incisive feedback on my ideas and writing. Finishing this manuscript during the pandemic of Covid-19 has been challenging, to say the least. I am indebted to many friends for their love and support, particularly Naomi Andrews, Michelle Burnham, Mary Dakin, Hannah Doress, Rebecca Friedman, Norine Hendricks, Sharmila Lodhia, and Micah Lubensky. Thanks to my family, especially my mother, Angela Gelber, and my stepfather, Robert Bonin, for their unflagging support, and for teaching me to speak out for the rights and dignity of all people. Mathew Reed and our son and daughter, Zeiler and Zaria, deserve my deepest gratitude for making every day better. Finally, I dedicate this book to the late Jerry Gafio Watts, who taught me so much as a friend and a mentor. His radical and intersectional critique of our society, profound authenticity, and deep empathy for others continue to inspire me. * * * I am grateful to the following authors and publishers for permission to reproduce in part or in whole earlier published versions of three of the volume’s chapters:

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 8, “Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship,” by Stephen Haynes, first appeared in Journal of Men’s Studies 10:2 (Winter, 2001). It is reprinted by permission from Men’s Studies Press, LLC. Chapter 10, “The Biopolitics of ‘Rescue’: Women and the Politics of Inclusion after the Armenian Genocide,” by Lerna Ekmekcioglu, is an abridged version of “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013), © Society for Comparative Study of Society and History. It is reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press. Parts of Chapter 16, “Beyond the Binaries: Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention,” by Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, originally appeared in “Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7:1 (2012), © Genocide Studies and Prevention. It is reprinted with permission from the Zoryan Institute.

Introduction Gender and Genocide Studies Amy E. Randall

When feminist scholars in Holocaust studies first began to explore women’s experiences and gender questions in the 1980s, their scholarship was ignored or met with hostility by many academics and others. Critics expressed various concerns, including the ideas that gender analysis would “trivialize” or “politicize” the Holocaust, or deemphasize the centrality of antisemitism and racism to Nazi persecution.1 Another major concern was that it would promote “comparative victimhood” and narratives about “unequal victims.”2 Studying the gendered dimensions of genocide, however, does not trivialize the enormity of the crime, as this edited collection demonstrates. Nor does it minimize the importance of real and imagined ideas about ethnic, national, racial, and religious differences in explaining the victimization, destruction, and mass killing of certain groups. Apprehension that gender analysis will lead to a hierarchy of victims is also misplaced. Gender scholarship does not argue that women had it better or worse than men; rather, it acknowledges differences in women’s and men’s experiences and examines how the unfolding of genocide has involved “events that specifically affect men as men and women as women.”3 More generally, the purpose of this scholarship is to use gender as a lens for better comprehending the seemingly incomprehensible crime of genocide. Scholarship on women, gender, and the Holocaust, which is now an established field, has continued to expand since the first edition of this edited volume went to press.4 One notable area of growth has been the study of men as gendered beings. Recent works have provided important insights into the effects of Nazism and the Holocaust on Jewish masculinities in Germany and occupied Europe.5 This research suggests, for example, that although the “gendered inactivity” imposed on Jewish men in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe largely hindered their ability to perform “normative masculine identities,” many managed “to revitalize their gender identities”

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when forced into ghettos as they regained a limited sense of autonomy and possibilities for the reassertion of male norms.6 New analyses of Jewish men’s camp experiences supplement already existing work, demonstrating, among other things, the “complexities of gendered male sexuality,” the “gendered particularities of male victimization,” and the ways that the exclusion of the weakened, unmanly inmates labeled Muselmänner helped other male inmates “uphold their manliness as an integral part of their humanity.”7 Recent studies on masculinities and the male perpetrators of genocidal violence elucidate how the Nazi ideal of the hypermasculine, soldierly man combined with the regime’s emphasis on comradeship to produce gendered practices of masculine performance and male camaraderie that normalized mass atrocities and murder. Drinking rituals, for example, “became a key expression of masculine identity in paramilitary and police formations; celebratory rituals were used as well to create a closed community of male comradeship among the perpetrators of genocide.”8 New scholarship on sexual violence and the Holocaust confirms the widespread nature and breadth of sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women.9 It was particularly prevalent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as German soldiers, the Einsatzgruppen, and non-German allies and collaborators raped Jewish and other women with impunity. Although German military policies officially forbade sexual violence, it was largely tolerated because it “fostered cohesion in the small units and loyalty toward superiors in ways that secured the military space,” “degraded local women and destroyed social ties in the victims’ community,” and “dehumanize[d] the Jews,” fomenting “a distancing effect toward them that facilitated genocidal killings.”10 Recent studies of sexual violence during the Holocaust also demonstrate that male-on-male sexual violence “was regular and unexceptional rather than a rare occurrence.”11 In many concentration camps, for example, self-identified heterosexual male prisoner functionaries raped and sexually exploited other self-identified heterosexual victims. As research on gender and other genocides in the twentieth and twentiethfirst centuries has continued to develop, many new articles and chapters as well as several edited collections and a special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies on “Gendering Genocide” have provided valuable insight into women, gender, and genocide.12 Although there is also new scholarship about masculinities and men’s experiences as gendered beings in various genocides, it remains limited. One notable exception is scholarship on sexual violence against men in genocides and other major conflicts. This research provides insight into how male-on-male sexual violence, “as a social performance driven by heteronormativity,” has obtained “its meaning through the aversion and abjection evoked by a penetrated/unphallic/emasculated body” in combination with ethnonational and other genocidal ideologies. It also shows that in addition to oral and anal rape, men have suffered gendered forms of sexual violence, including forced incestuous sexual acts, genital beatings, genital mutilation, and castration.13

INTRODUCTION



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Henri Myrttinen’s recent chapter, “Men, Masculinities, and Genocide,” is particularly valuable for explaining the importance of an “intersectional, critical approach to masculinities” for better understanding “the dynamics of violence as well as the gendered ideologies underpinning genocide.” As he notes, men’s positionality in particular historical, political, and social contexts, which is informed by “the intersectional interplay” of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and other aspects of identity, marks some men as targets of genocidal discourses and violence. It also contributes to the “motivations, respective power relations and intent of individual or groups of perpetrators.”14 Another significant area of growth is the study of gender, memory, transgenerational trauma, and genocide. Following on Marianne Hirsch’s pioneering research on postmemory, scholars of the Holocaust and other genocides have examined the gendered dimensions and gendered transfer of memories.15 While some of this work has focused on the negative effects of the transmission of gendered trauma, such as how it has fostered a sense of victimization among female descendants, other research demonstrates the ways in which the transfer of gendered genocidal experiences has empowered daughters and granddaughters, instilling a strong sense of religious or ethnic identity, or transmitting a spirit of “defiance” that “manifests in their own contemporary acts of resistance.”16 Some of this new work is represented in this volume (see herein). The study of gender, “collective memory,” commemoration, and gendered representations of the past has also expanded. As scholars have noted, “how gendered experiences of violence become marginalized or included in national” memories produce gendered outcomes in a variety of ways, “influencing the trajectory of public policies, civic engagement, and collective identities in ways that marginalize or silence some groups” and address or dismiss the consequences of gendered harms and sexual violence in the aftermath of genocide.17 The elision of rape, for example, “perpetuates the trivialization of gendered war atrocities” and contributed to post-genocidal trauma and the persistence of a “culture of stigma and shame.”18 In reaction to the silences and erasures of gendered genocidal experiences, “feminist mediated enactments of memorialization and memory work about wartime rape, sexual violence, torture, and trauma” have served to illuminate and memorialize survivors’ ordeals as well as complicate post-genocidal narratives about the past.19

Why Gender Analysis Matters As this volume makes clear, an investigation of gender and genocide allows us to hear the voices and stories of women and men that are often overlooked and to approach them in a more nuanced way. By considering both women and men as gendered subjects, this research sheds light on how discourses of femininity and masculinity, and gender roles and norms, have contributed

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to victims’ encounters with and reactions to genocidal processes. A gender lens also provides insight into the ways in which the leaders and perpetrators of genocide have implicitly and explicitly promoted gendered genocidal strategies, which produced gender-specific traumas, what some scholars call “gendered harms.”20 Investigating these strategies offers a window on not only victims’ ordeals but also genocidal ideologies, the intentions of perpetrator regimes, and the motivations of perpetrators. A critical gender studies analysis that examines the intersectionality of gender with other forms of identity—socioeconomic status, age, religion, sexual orientation, nationality ethnicity, and race—demonstrates how the diverse positionalities of different women and men in particular political, sociocultural, and historical contexts have informed their experiences as genocide victims and perpetrators. Under international law today, rape and sexual violence can constitute genocide if they are “committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”21 International courts reached this conclusion in the 1990s in the context of the mass rapes perpetrated during the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. Scholarship that shows how sexual violence can be used as a genocidal weapon has usefully complicated older narratives about women, war, and rape, in which rape was depicted as a by-product of war, as something incidental and inevitable. An investigation of genocidal sexual violence additionally underscores the importance of intersectional analysis. This research reveals, for example, how certain gendered beliefs about ethnic, national, or racial identity can inspire the leaders and perpetrators of genocide to promote campaigns of mass rape and forced impregnation, or, alternatively, to promote forced abortion and forced sterilization.22 By shedding light on different forms of sexual abuse, such as forced marriages, and “invisible” victims who do not fit into existing categories of victimhood, such as Hutu women during the Rwandan genocide, or male victims, the study of genocidal sexual violence also calls attention to issues that have been largely ignored by policymakers and others.23 This scholarly work highlights as well how the microdynamics of power and the performance of masculinities among perpetrators in a group or unit can foster sexually aggressive genocidal male behavior.24 Gender analysis can advance understanding of the complexity of human behavior in genocidal circumstances. How do ordinary people become mass murderers or at least complicit in genocidal processes? Why do so many people remain bystanders in the face of terrible crimes whereas a much smaller number become rescuers? What role does gender play in shaping individual and group attitudes and conduct during genocide? How does gender, in conjunction with objective factors, such as age and religiosity, and “subjective factors such as family practices,” contribute to women’s and men’s decisions to actively aid victims?25 While gender is only one variable among many in helping to explain human behavior, it is nonetheless significant. As chapters in this volume demonstrate, for instance, gendered discourses and norms have contributed to the transformation of ordinary men into active killers.26

INTRODUCTION



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Using gender as a lens to examine the aftermaths of genocide can be valuable, for even after mass atrocities and mass killings stop, and genocide has officially “ended,” the effects of genocide persist in the lives of victims and their communities. How do the targeted groups transition to a postgenocidal society? How do international bodies (including nongovernmental organizations), domestic institutions, and local groups negotiate postgenocidal problems such as the emotional and physical trauma, and the pragmatic needs, of victims? Or encourage the reconciliation and the rebuilding of societies? Scholarship suggests that gendered norms and beliefs—as well as the interconnectedness of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and sexuality—can inform perceptions of and responses to post-genocidal issues. For example, after the Armenian genocide ended, local Armenian organizations temporarily suspended long-established ideas about paternal lineage and women’s sexual purity and honor to promote the reintegration of “dishonored” women and children fathered by the “enemy.”27 Paying attention to the gendered effects of trauma underscores how female survivors of sexual violence are often subject to additional violence—such as sexual exploitation or HIV—and male survivors are denied important resources. Looking into and “seeing” the continuation of gendered harms after genocide can result in new and more effective efforts to help survivors. Analyzing the gendered dimensions of genocide “justice” in its various forms raises questions about the value and limits of such justice. How have international criminal courts, for example, recognized and obscured gendered forms of genocidal violence? In recognizing rape as an instrument of genocide, the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals have allowed for violence against women to be foregrounded and taken seriously. Yet as groundbreaking as this has been, the conceptualization of rape as genocide has simultaneously had limiting effects; in focusing on mass rape, for example, international criminal prosecutions have downplayed or ignored other acts of violence—such as “forced marriages.”28 Research on women’s testimonies in international criminal prosecutions has also shown how court proceedings have both valorized and silenced women, leading to distortions in their narratives in the courtroom and in later recounting of their experiences.29 Non-judicial transitional justice processes that help individual survivors, communities, and societies come to terms with their violent pasts and promote reconciliation can also promote gender justice, particularly if they move beyond being “blind to gender and social injustice.”30 For example, reparation programs, a transitional justice tool that serves to recognize victims “as human beings and as equal citizens in the new political order,” can promote gender justice if constructed to address intersectional gendered needs instead of adopting a “gender-neutral” or “class neutral” approach. By establishing differentiated reparations programs, government agencies or community organizations can investigate how the positionality of victims informs their needs, and honor impoverished widows’ expressed requests, for example, for services that address their fundamental necessities and

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“those of their family members”31 or address essential issues for male victims of sexual assault in a particular post-genocidal context.32 Similarly, if “truth-telling” transitional justice projects incorporate women and gender more explicitly into their processes, they can recognize a broader array of gendered harms than judicial proceedings and “respond to women’s situated interests and needs” more effectively.33 Although scholars and advocates of transitional justice have often failed to recognize the complexity and breadth of its gendered dimensions when developing programs and policies, more recent efforts at advancing transitional justice have done a better job incorporating a nuanced gender perspective.34 Still, to aid people and communities even more, “an intersectionality-driven analysis of transitional justice and masculinity is needed” to promote a better understanding of masculinities “within the processes of political transition.”35 Using a gender lens to examine the commemoration of genocides provides important insights into narratives about horrific violence in the past. How do “gendered and racialized power dynamics shape what is remembered or forgotten about the past,” and what is obscured?36 Memorial culture, which produces official representations of genocidal events, is not gender-neutral. How does gender inform the construction of collective memories, historical spaces, and ritual or national remembrance? In what ways are the motifs and tropes of traumatic memorialization gendered? How can the public imagery of gender-specific atrocities—such as the sexual abuse of women— contribute to voyeurism and the sexual objectification of female victims? How do representations of genocidal violence reinforce gender stereotypes and, in the process, render invisible the complexity of men’s and women’s unofficial memories and trauma?37 And what purposes do specific gendered narratives in public commemoration serve? In Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, public memorial culture has largely erased the mass rape of women “to sustain traditional gender norms in the aftermath” of the genocide and to advance the reconstruction of “ethnonationalist identities through the reproduction of gendered narratives of death, widowhood, and maternal suffering.”38 A gender analysis can be useful as well in promoting a better understanding of the transmission of memory and trauma across generations.39 How is the intergenerational transmission of memory gendered? In what ways does trauma get passed down to a second generation within families through the gendered narratives and silences that a parent communicates about a genocide and its effects to children? Research has shown, for example, that while there has been a diversity of “theological responses to the trauma and suffering of genocide,” many Holocaust survivors’ children’s and grandchildren’s views of the divine have been shaped by the historical trauma of the Holocaust and their parents’ or grandparents’ often “troubling and conflicting relationship” with the traditional “biblical God of their Jewish ancestors.” Disillusioned with the “patriarchal God figure” that failed the Jewish people in the face of genocide, many descendants have rejected the traditional masculinized divinity

INTRODUCTION



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in Judaism and turned “instead to alternative images and belief systems that degender, regender, and demasculinize the meaning of godliness.”40 A gender perspective can also contribute to genocide identification and prevention. As scholars, human rights activists, and policymakers grapple with the problems of how to stop genocidal violence before it starts or when it is happening, and how to discern if genocide is unfolding in the midst of mass atrocities and violent conflict, a focus on gender-specific actions and patterns can yield insights. For example, many genocides have involved mass atrocities directed first against “battle-aged” boys and men, and then “rootand-branch” killings aimed at the wholesale annihilation of the targeted group.41 In current-day conflicts if the gender-selective slaughter of male civilians occurs, it might be a red flag that the more generalized destruction and mass murder of a specific population will soon follow. As this short discussion has suggested, gender analysis can complicate and enrich our understanding of genocide and its processes, effects, and aftermaths. The study of genocide can also complicate and enrich our understanding of gender. Scholarship on genocide and gender underscores the lack of fixity to gender; it shows how genocide, like other historically and culturally specific phenomena, can destabilize and redefine gender norms and identities. This scholarship additionally highlights how gender intersects with ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, class, and sexuality, which informs not only how different individuals but also different groups of men and women promote genocide as genocide leaders, perpetrators, and accomplices, and how they experience genocide as bystanders, rescuers, resistors, and victims.

Genocide and the Soviet Union Although I am a scholar of genocide studies and gender studies, I am also a historian of the Soviet Union, but my research does not focus on gender and the mass crimes committed by the Stalinist regime. These crimes included forced collectivization and dekulakization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which resulted in famine and the mass deportation and death of millions of peasants and nomadic peoples; the purges of 1936–8, which led to the execution of hundreds of thousands (if not more) and imprisonment in the gulag of millions of so-called enemies of the people; the mass operations of 1937–8, which entailed the mass repression of millions of “socially harmful elements” (e.g., petty criminals, hooligans, and prostitutes), “former people” (former members of non-Bolshevik political parties and former whites), and nationally suspect peoples (who had “foreign contacts” or lived in the borderlands); the forced deportation of Poles and execution of elites in “Soviet” eastern Poland in 1940–1; and the wartime deportations and related deaths of national minorities—Soviet Germans and other groups—many from the northern Caucasus and Crimea. Some scholars have argued that these mass

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crimes were not discrete events but rather part of a larger project, a “radical, murderous form of social engineering” on behalf of a “transformative vision of Utopia,” and, as such, demonstrate the “genocidal character” of the Stalinist regime, which “killed systematically rather than episodically.”42 While there is a scholarly consensus that these horrific mass crimes destroyed the lives of a countless number of people, there is no consensus on how to conceptualize the brutal violence associated with the economic and social policies of forced collectivization and dekulakization and the purges.43 Some scholars, however, have compellingly argued that the 1932–3 UkrainianKuban Holodomor (which literally means death inflicted by starvation) and the 1931–3 Kazakh famine should be recognized as genocides, as they were “deliberate attempts by Stalin and his lieutenants to subdue and neutralize populations that were associated with nationalism and resistance to Soviet collectivization.”44 Recent scholarship sheds light on the gendered horrors of collectivization, including state officials’ torture and rape of Ukrainian women when searching for grain, women’s exchange of sex for food in the face of starvation, and women’s starvation-related desperation that led them to become the majority of perpetrators of cannibalism (according to official statistics) and defy traditional gender norms by killing others to feed themselves and their children, and sometimes even killing their youngest child to feed older ones.45 Although the purges of the 1930s ostensibly targeted people for political reasons—those deemed “enemies of the people”—this repression became “ethnicized” as specific national minorities, mostly in border regions, were accused of being “enemy nations” that could turn into a “fifth column” during a time of war, actively undermining Soviet power.46 As a result, from “1935–38 the Soviet government exiled 69,283 Germans and Poles, about 30,000 Finns, 6,000 Iranians, some Estonians and Latvians, and also 5,889 Kurds, Armenians and Turks from frontier regions first to the interior of the republics where they lived and then to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and Siberia.”47 Soviet authorities also incarcerated and executed hundreds of thousands of people on “national grounds.” Although these ethnic deportations “were not total in nature,” in 1937 the Communist leadership changed course by targeting almost every Soviet Korean, forcing about 172,000 people from their homes in the Far East to Central Asia.48 During the Second World War, the Soviet regime also committed terrible atrocities against several national minorities, including groups who had already been targeted.49 In 1940–1, the military removed over 300,000 Poles “in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland (western Belorussia and western Ukraine) to special settlements in Central Asia, the far North, and Siberia.”50 Soviet forces also murdered the Polish elite and leadership, including religious authorities and approximately 22,000 army officers.51 Starting in 1941, 950,000 Soviet German citizens were deported East ostensibly as a prophylactic measure, to hinder them from becoming spies or traitors.52 The Soviet government targeted Kalmyks in 1943, deporting 92,000 in two days, and then approximately 600,000 Chechens, Ingushi, Karachais, and Balkars

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in February 1944, sending them to special settlements in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Later in 1944, Soviet forces exiled Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan, and 85,000 Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Khemshils, and other Muslims from the border regions of Georgia to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.53 Communist leaders accused all of these groups of political disloyalty; the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Germans and the other groups of working as spies and bandits for “Turkey’s intelligence agencies.”54 The forced removal and exile of these “enemy nations” involved “deliberately imposed conditions” that led to mass death and “greatly reduce[d] live births.”55 In some of these groups, particularly among Soviet Germans and Crimean Tatars, men were also conscripted into labor battalions, which led to more death and forcibly separated families.56 These wartime deportations were accompanied by cultural destruction and erasure; visible “signs of a once extant people and culture” were extinguished as “place-names were changed, buildings destroyed, and cemeteries bulldozed.”57 In addition, the Soviet regime barred “all education and publications in the native languages of the deported groups,” imposing forced assimilation.58 The obliteration of cultures, in combination with the partial physical destruction of these national minorities, constituted genocide. Although gendered dimensions of this ethnicized violence have largely been overlooked, some recent works have turned to this line of inquiry, highlighting, for example, how ethnic Soviet German women confronted a “serious challenge to their notions of femininity and womanhood when they stopped menstruating” due to “strenuous living and labour conditions and general malnutrition and starvation” when they were exiled.59 Also, young Chechen women faced gender-specific harms on transit to their new destinations; because of religious beliefs and gender norms, they were too ashamed to “relieve themselves” like other deportees in the bucket set aside for this purpose on the train cars that they shared with multiple families. Due to these humiliating circumstances, eyewitnesses and grandchildren have claimed that some women died from the rupture of their bladders.60 Additional research on how gender, along with ethnicity, nationality, social class, age, and other markers of difference, informed people’s experiences of these genocidal deportations would yield valuable insights.

Contributions to the Volume The second edition of Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century includes all but one of the chapters from the first edition. Most of the chapters have been updated, and one was revised so significantly that it reads like a new chapter. The volume also contains four new chapters. Two of the new chapters focus on topics not covered in the first volume: the connections between imperialism and genocide, and the Cambodian genocide.61 The other two new chapters examine gender and transgenerational trauma and memory in the context of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.

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The volume has undergone some changes since it was first imagined, so there are two fewer chapters on genocide and masculinity than originally planned. This second edition is also being published later than anticipated. The pandemic of Covid-19 that we are living in, and other personal and professional reasons, played a role in these changes. Part I of this volume focuses on gender and genocide and reviews some of the scholarship on this topic in the context of European imperialism, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide. The first chapter, which is new, explores how European imperialism, modern race thinking, and biopolitics, and their intersections with gender and sexuality, contributed to the Nazi vilification and genocide of Jews. Colonial practices and ideologies, buttressed by the biologization of race and new racial discourses, fueled mass violence against colonized peoples, including the first twentieth-century genocide, the Herero-Nama genocide in German South West Africa. Scientific racism and colonial logics also encouraged a new type of populations politics and the racialization of groups in Europe. This chapter explores how race, gender, and sexuality, which were intertwined in the making of the colonial racial “Other,” were similarly intertwined in European discourses of the internal “Other,” and in the Nazi context, led not only to the mass murder of Jews but also to the targeting of other “undesirable” groups, including people with mental and physical “disabilities,” Afro-Germans, Romanies, and members of the LGBQT+ community. The second and third chapters examine not only women but also men as gendered victims of genocide. Lisa Pine’s Chapter 2 examines Jewish men’s and women’s responses not only to Nazi persecution in the 1930s but also to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps. Pine’s analysis provides insight into how gender norms and social constructions of male and female identities informed victims’ experiences as well as their testimonies and memories about this past. Pine also explores a subject that is often glossed over—how some men and women “deviated” from expected gender and sexual norms in the context of the camps. Pine focuses in particular on women’s “deviation,” and describes, for example, how many women traded sexual favors for food and other items. Pine’s discussion provides a window on how women and men at Auschwitz-Birkenau faced difficult moral choices that challenged their previous senses of self. In Chapter 3, Adam Jones examines masculine vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese genocides, upsetting the standard framing in studies of mass violence of men as perpetrators and women as victims. He details how in both the Rwandan and Congolese cases (and in the ongoing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo), men and boys—particularly those of “battle age”—were specifically targeted for direct killings and sexual violence because they were male. In addition, Jones explores how “gendercidal” military conscription and forced (corvée) labor have historically resulted in the victimization of men, including more recently in Rwanda and the DRC. Jones argues that it is imperative “from a humanitarian-intervention

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viewpoint” to recognize and address the forced mobilization of and genderselective atrocities against males. Although sexual violence is addressed briefly in Pines’s and Jones’s chapters, Part II provides an in-depth exploration of sexual violence against girls and women in four cases of genocide. The chapters analyze a wide variety of forms of sexual violence and, together, provide an important comparative perspective, underscoring how different ideologies, as well as historical and cultural contexts have shaped this type of violence. Anthonie Holslag, in Chapter 4, argues that sexual violence played a key role in the Ottoman Empire’s leaders’ efforts to construct a new Ottoman Self based on Turkishness, which in the context of the First World War, came to rely not merely on the marginalization but also on the elimination of the Armenian “Other.” Holslag explores how perpetrators sought to destroy the very essence and reproduction of Armenian identity by committing acts of “gendercide” and rape, sexual torture, and “degenderization,” and by exposing the intimate parts of the bodies of the dead. Holslag also examines how the forced assimilation and enslavement of women and young boys served not only to subordinate but also to eliminate Armenianness. In Chapter 5, Zoë Waxman analyzes how the Nazi persecution of Jews included various forms of sexual violence against Jewish women, including forced abortion, forced sterilization, and the sexual humiliation and violation of women upon first examination and registration at concentration and death camps. In comparing these forms of sexual violence to similar sexual aggression in more recent cases of mass violence, she argues that the Holocaust was distinctive. Whereas rape was an integral and widespread instrument of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, the rape of Jewish women was not a systematic or organized part of Nazi genocidal policy because of the regime’s racial ideology. This does not mean, as Waxman notes, that Jewish women were not raped, although she suggests that there is “little evidence” to suggest widespread rape. Recent scholarship, meanwhile, shows that German guards and functionaries at camps and German armed forces and collaborators in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union sexually violated many Jewish women with impunity.62 Patricia Weitsman examines the Serbian policies of mass rape, forced impregnation, and forced maternity against Muslim women during the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Chapter 6. In the process, she illuminates how particular conceptions of gender in the former Yugoslavia informed constructions of ethnic identity to produce specific forms of sexual violence. The popular perception that women were mere vessels for paternal identity, and that their maternal biological connection and role in a child’s upbringing did not contribute to a child’s ethnic identity, allowed the Serbs to claim that forced impregnation would result in more “Serbian” babies. Weitsman also discusses how this gendered notion of ethnic identity resulted in tragic consequences for the children born of rape.

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In Chapter 7, Jennie Burnet explores the mass rape of women during the Rwandan genocide. Her chapter adds to the already existing scholarship on this subject by examining in particular how the political economy of everyday gender violence and notions of sexual consent and gender roles in pre-genocidal Rwanda—all of which subordinated women to men— heightened “women and girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence” during the genocide, affected the ways this mass violence unfolded, and shaped the postgenocidal repercussions of this aggression on survivors, their families, and local communities (e.g., reactions to children born of rape). By discussing the perpetrators and survivors who did not fit into the “Hutu-perpetrator/ Tutsi-victim dyad,” and by raising the question of women’s “sexual agency” and militarized sex, Burnet complicates traditional narratives of sexual violence in Rwanda. Part III of this volume contains two chapters that use gender as a lens for better understanding mass participation in genocidal violence. Although in the 1980s and 1990s scholars raised valuable questions about German women’s relationship to and support for the Nazi regime and its antiSemitic and racist policies, and how gender informed women’s direct roles as perpetrators, research on male perpetrators as gendered subjects has only recently begun to emerge.63 Stephen Haynes’s Chapter 8, which examines this topic and was first published in 2002 in The Journal of Men’s Studies, remains groundbreaking, even though the introduction is dated. Since the initial publication of this work, the field of masculinity studies has burgeoned, and in the last five years, scholarship on how male gender norms and constructs of manhood shaped men’s experiences as victims and perpetrators of Nazi violence has burgeoned, some of which Haynes discusses in his postscript, a new addition for the second edition of Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century.64 Haynes explores how discourses of masculinity contributed to male Holocaust perpetrators’ genocidal conduct and “verbal self-justifications” for their behavior. In addition to analyzing male Nazi leaders—death camp commandants, SS men, and officers of Einsatzgruppen units—Haynes investigates “ordinary men/ordinary Germans,” that is, the reserve police forces that have been the subject of so much scholarly debate. His analysis of these groups underscores the need for genocide scholarship to investigate men as gendered beings and sheds light on how notions of ideal German masculinity played a part in influencing men’s actions. Nicole Hogg and Mark A. Drumbl examine the mass participation of “ordinary” women and female leaders in the Rwandan genocide in Chapter 9. Although the vast majority of those engaged directly in killings were men, many women did kill Tutsis. Moreover, they actively contributed to genocidal processes by exposing victims to the killers and engaging in the looting of victims’ property. Some ordinary women, however, tried to save Tutsis. Hogg and Drumbl explore the importance of gender roles and dynamics in determining ordinary women’s actions as bystanders, active participants, and rescuers. They also investigate the gendered discourses that

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were deployed against and by women perpetrators in leadership positions who faced prosecution after the genocide.65 The chapters in Part IV focus on gendered genocidal trauma and its aftermaths. How do the victims of genocide recover after the violence has ended? How do communities try to rebuild? How do ideas about gender affect recovery efforts, what kind of violence is recognized, and survivor resources? Lerna Ekmekçioğlu’s Chapter 10 examines the complexities of Armenians’ post-genocidal and post–First World War rescue efforts to track down, “emancipate,” and reintegrate into their own communities the children and women who had been taken into Muslim households and orphanages during the wartime genocide. Ekmekçioğlu explores how differences between Ottoman and Armenian authorities about how to deal with married female abductees, resistance to reintegration among some Armenian children and women, Ottoman fears that “true Muslim” children were being taken in Armenian rescue efforts, and a broader Turkish–Armenian dispute over territory in Eastern Turkey (which was connected to demographics) led to a fierce battle about ethnoreligious identity and “who belonged to whom.” In order to repopulate the Armenian community and strengthen Armenian land claims, Armenian leaders promoted a pronatalist campaign and temporarily altered lineage rules as well as gender and sexual norms. In the process, maternity trumped paternity in determining a baby’s identity, and women who had been forcibly married or served as sexual concubines, and children of Muslim fatherhood, could be reclaimed as “Armenian.” In Chapter 11, Olivera Simić investigates the sexual violence experienced by men during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the silence surrounding these male victims, and the consequences of this silencing for male survivors. These male victims have been virtually ignored—both by the international community and by local bodies—partly because of their shame and reluctance to speak out about their experiences, and partly because of a gendered narrative about the war, which has underscored the great sexual violence that Bosniak women were subjected to but has rendered male victims invisible. Moreover, gender norms and stereotypes have made it difficult for men to be acknowledged as victims of sexual violence. The result, Simić argues, is that male survivors of sexual violence have not received counseling or other forms of assistance, nor have they seen the prosecution of their perpetrators, all of which could have helped with healing from their great trauma. Moreover, the lack of scholarly attention to these male victims has hindered understandings of masculinity, wartime and genocidal violence, and how the sexual abuse of “enemy” men not only disempowers and feminizes them but also assaults their ethnic group as a whole.66 Part V contains two chapters that are new to this edition, both of which discuss gender, historical narratives, memory, and trauma across generations. In Chapter 12, Janet Jacobs examines how gender informs the transmission of trauma among Holocaust survivors. Using a wide variety of sources, Jacobs explores how daughters and granddaughters are often chosen by survivors to

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be the child listener and witness of their traumatic memories, and how their empathic identification with the trauma has shaped their sense of self. In particular, she considers the effects of postmemory, both on their childhoods and as re-experienced in adulthood. Jacobs additionally considers the increasing role of daughters and granddaughters in public memorialization, such as Holocaust Remembrance Day in the United States, as they join or replace survivors as the carriers of genocidal trauma and memories. Ayşe Gül Altınay, in Chapter 13, discusses the emerging literature on the approximately 200,000 Ottoman Armenian women and children who survived the Armenian genocide because of forced Islamization; many Turks (as well as some Kurds) coerced them into families as “wives,” sexual slaves, and servants. Although some of these Armenians were reincorporated into their own families and communities after the genocide ended, as discussed in Ekmekçioğlu’s chapter, many were not. Altınay provides a critical analysis of the gendered historical silencing and unsilencing of these Islamized Armenian survivors in familial memories and postmemories of 1915 as well as in academic and popular histories. She also raises questions about the contemporary implications of this historical unsilencing for the national identifications of Turks and Armenians. The last section of the volume considers how international law has shaped understandings of genocide, and how the gendering of genocide studies can assist with genocide prevention. Doris Buss’s chapter examines the role of international law in recognizing gendered forms of genocidal violence. In particular, she contextualizes how the ICTR and ICTY came to see rape as a crime of genocide. The courts’ framing of rape and sexual violence as a product of elite-orchestrated ethnic conflict, she argues, was linked to a broader effort to make sense of violence in Rwanda and Yugoslavia by reframing these conflicts as a product of elite manipulation of ethnic identities, rather than as a product of old tribal hatreds and “atavistic animosities.” Although in many ways this narrative can be seen as an improvement over older narratives about war and its effects, in which the sexual victimization of women was ignored or considered incidental, Buss points out the limits of this legal framework, and how it has obscured other forms of gendered harms that accompany genocide as well as some of the victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. In Chapter 15, Maria Elander examines justice in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide, focusing on how prosecutors approached sexual and gender-based violence at the recent prosecution of Khmer Rouge leaders in the Trial Chamber in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), aka the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. She investigates how this tribunal failed to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of these types of violence by not including, for example, charges related to the widespread rape of women at security centers, execution sites, and work sites. Nonetheless, the ECCC prosecuted and convicted leaders for the crimes of forced marriage and rape within that context, characterizing them as crimes against humanity.

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It did not, however, recognize the gendered harms men experienced as a result of forced marriage and forced sexual intercourse. The last chapter in the volume, “Beyond the Binaries: Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention,” argues that gender analysis can aid in the determination of mass violence as genocidal and in efforts to prevent it. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey cautions against a masculinist definition of genocide as mass murder. Instead of reading the crime of genocide in the numbers of bodies and massacres, she urges scholars and policymakers to read genocide from the “bottom up”—through examples of gendered violence and life-force atrocities. If human rights organizations, government agencies, or other watchdogs of violent conflicts were to identify the existence of these types of crimes, this information might serve as a red flag for the unfolding of genocidal violence. Joeden-Forgey also advocates that scholars move beyond the gender binary in their analyses to better illuminate the complexities of the “gender question” in genocide, instead of focusing largely on “women’s” and “men’s” embodied experiences as perpetrators or victims. She additionally makes the thought-provoking suggestion that the imposition of a gender binary in most societies, and the meanings associated with it, might play a role in the unfolding of genocidal violence. * * * As I finish the second edition of this volume, I am struck by the conditions under which I have been writing and how they differ from the circumstances of my work for the first edition. In the summer of 2015, as the first edition was already under production, a male white supremacist murdered nine African American worshippers at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina: Cynthia Marie, Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.67 In August 2017, a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others by ramming his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, who were peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally that happened the night before at the University of Virginia. At this rally, white nationalists, alt-right members, Ku Klux Klan members, and Neo-Nazis carried lit torches, saluted Nazi style, and chanted anti-Semitic and racist slogans, such as “Jews will not replace us,” “blood and soil,” and “white lives matter.” In October 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an antiSemitic man entered the Tree of Life Synagogue, shouted “all Jews must die,” and assassinated eleven congregants. When arrested, he told police officers that Jews were committing genocide against his people, meaning white Christians. The victims included Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger. Another anti-Semitic man killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye and wounded three others at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, a year later, in April 2019. In the

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summer of 2019, a white supremacist murdered twenty-two people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Apparently inspired by a similar attack earlier in the year, which had resulted in the killing of fifty-one Muslims in an antiMuslim rampage at two mosques in New Zealand, the shooter at Walmart targeted the group he most hated, Latino immigrants, in part as a reaction to what he viewed as the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Among the victims were US citizens, Mexican nationals, and one German citizen: Jordan and Andre Anchondo, Arturo Benavides, Leo Campos, Angie Englisbee, Maria and Raul Flores, Jorge Calvillo Garcia, Maribel Hernandez, Adolfo Cerros Hernández, Alexander Gerhard Hoffman, David Johnson, Ivan Filiberto Manzano, Gloria Irma Márquez, Elsa Mendoza de la Mora, Luis Alfonzo Juarez, Margie Reckard, Sara Esther Regalado, María Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, Teresa Sanchez, and Juan Velazquez. These were only the most extreme examples in the United States of white supremacists enacting violence against groups because of their ethnic, racial, and religious identities in the last five years. Racial slurs against and harassment of people of color, anti-Jewish and antiMuslim attacks, anti-Black aggression, and anti-immigrant and xenophobic violence are, of course, not new in the United States. But in the last five years, and particularly since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, the number of overtly racist incidents has increased significantly with the growth of an emboldened and publicly visible white supremacist culture in the United States—and in some other countries too—that touts conspiracy theories of a global elite of Jews and pedophiles planning to commit white genocide with the assistance of immigrants and people of color. Every year in the United States, a disproportionate number of transgender and gender non-conforming people are murdered, particularly trans women of color, speaking to the intertwined nature of racism, transphobia, and homophobia. And as the incredible growth in Black Lives Matter protest movements this past year attest to, the long-standing problem of police and white vigilante brutality against people of color, particularly African Americans, persists. Some of the many victims in 2020 included George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Dion Johnson, Rayshard Brooks, Donnie Sanders, Michael Thomas, Daniel Prude, Manuel Ellis, Kurt Reinhold, Albert Lee Hughes, Joel Acevedo, Yassin Mohamed, Robert D’Lon Harris, Amir Johnson, Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis, Anthony Mcclain, Jonathan Price, Sincere Pierce, and Angelo (AJ) Crooms. Meanwhile, the pandemic of Covid-19 has led to the loss of millions of lives and a resurgence of anti-Asian violence in the United States. Systemic racism and related health and social inequities in this country have exacerbated the deadly effects of the Covid-19 pandemic; Black, Latinx, and Native Americans have suffered from a much higher death rate than white people. Violence against women in this country, so commonplace as to not even warrant much attention, also increased with lockdowns and quarantining, as individuals retreated into their homes. We might take these events as warnings that the United States is not immune to the forces that make horrific violence and genocide possible.

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Notes 1 Joan Ringelheim, “Thoughts about Women and the Holocaust,” and Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. R. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 144–5, and 152, respectively. 2 Helene Sinnriech, “Women and the Holocaust,” in Plight and Fate of Women during and Following Genocide, ed. Samuel Totten (London and New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 27. 3 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1985), 126. 4 The scholarship is too extensive to cite in full. For some recent works, see the selected bibliography as well as Andrea Pető, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (Warsaw: Central European University Press, 2015); Sarah Helm, If This Is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2015); Elissa Mailänder, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944, trans. Patricia Szobar (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015); Rachel Century, ed., Female Administrators of the Third Reich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Agnes Grunwald-Spier, Women’s Experiences in the Holocaust in Their Own Words (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2018). 5 Michael Geheran, “Remasculinizing the Shirker: The Jewish Frontkämpfer under Hitler,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 440–65; Sebastian Huebel, “Disguise and Defiance: German Jewish Men and Their Underground Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1941-45,” Shofar 3 (2018): 110–42; Monika Rice, “‘Higher Reasons for Sending People to Death?’ Male Narrativity and Moral Dilemmas in Memoirs and Diaries of Jewish Doctors,” in The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men, eds. Björn Krondorfer and Creangă Ovidiu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 99–127. 6 Maddy Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust: Between Destruction and Construction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 56, 58, 86. 7 Robert Sommer, “Masculinity and Death: De- and Resexualization in Nazi Concentration Camps”; Lisa Pine, “The Experiences and Behavior of Male Holocaust Victims at Auschwitz”; and Michael Becker and Dennis Bock, “Musselmanner in Nazi Concentration Camps: Thinking Masculinity at the Extremes,” in The Holocaust and Masculinities, eds. Krondorfer and Ovidiu, 73, 78, and 144, respectively. Also see Sebastian Huebel, “Nazi KZs as Gendered Jewish Spaces? German-Jewish Masculinity and the Negotiation of Gender Practices in Prewar Nazi Concentration Camps,” Jewish Culture and History 21, no. 1 (2020): 24–41. 8 Thomas Kühne, “Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity: Soldiers in the Third Reich,” and Edward Westermann, “Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 390–418, and 367–89, here 371.

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9 In addition to the excellent book, Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule by Beverly Chalmers, see the selected bibliography for recent work. 10 Regina Mühlhäuser, “Reframing Sexual Violence as a Weapon and Strategy of War: The Case of the German Wehrmacht during the War and Genocide in the Soviet Union, 1941–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3 (September 2017): 366–401, here 400; idem, “Sex, Race, Volksgemeinschaft: Sexual Encounters of German Soldiers with Local Women and Men during the War and the Occupation in the Soviet Union, 1941–1945,” in Beyond the Racial State, eds. Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas, and Richard Wetzell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Franziska Karpiński and Elysia Ruvinsky, “Sexual Violence in the Nazi Genocide: Gender, Law, and Ideology,” in Genocide: New Perspectives on Its Causes, Courses and Consequences, ed. Uğur Ümit Üngör (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 149–74; Elissa Mailänder, “Making Sense of a Rape Photograph: Sexual Violence as Social Performance on the Eastern Front, 1939–1944,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 3 (2017): 489–520; Waitman Wade Beorn, “Bodily Conquest: Sexual Violence in the Nazi East,” in Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe, eds. Alex J. Kay and David Stahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 195–215; Anika Walke, “‘To Speak for Those Who Cannot’: Masha Rol’nikaite on the Holocaust and Sexual Violence in German-Occupied Soviet Territories,” Jewish History 33 (March 2020): 215– 44; Regina Mühlhäuser, “Understanding Sexual Violence during the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research and Sources,” German History (2020); idem, Sex and the Nazi Soldier: Violent, Commercial and Consensual Encounters during the War in the Soviet Union, 1941-45 (Edinburgh, SCT: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Elizabeth Baer, “A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and Its Representation in Holocaust Texts,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, eds. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 651–68. 11 Dorota Glowacka, “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-So-Silent) Silence,” German History 3 (2020); Monica Flaschka, “Sexual Violence: Recovering a Suppressed History,” in A Companion to the Holocaust, eds. Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2020), 469–85. 12 The articles and chapters are too extensive to cite in full. For the edited volumes, see JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz and Donna Gosbee, eds. Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival, and Resistance (Toronto, ON: Women’s Press, 2016); Rochelle Saidel and Batva Brutin, eds., VIOLATED! Women in Holocaust and Genocide (Remember the Women Institute, 2018); Elissa Bemporad and Joyce Warren, eds., Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). Also see the special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015). 13 Paula Drumond, “Sex, Violence, and Heteronormativity: Revisiting Performances of Sexual Violence Against Men in Former Yugoslavia,” in Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics, eds. Marysia Zalewski, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prügl, and Maria Stern (London: Routledge, 2018), 153; Amalendu Misra, The Landscape of Silence: Sexual Violence

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against Men in War (London: Hurst & Company, 2015); Ellen Gorris, “Invisible Victims? Where Are Male Victims of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in International Law and Policy?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 412–27; Sara Meger, “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Armed Conflict,” in Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 174–88); Gabrielle Ferrales, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, and Suzy Mcelrath, “Gender-Based Violence Against Men and Boys in Darfur: The Gender-Genocide Nexus,” Gender and Society 30, no. 4 (2016): 565–89; Elise Ferron, Wartime Sexual Violence against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones (Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018); Olivera Simić, Silenced Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence (New York: Routledge, 2018); Claire Bradford Di Caro, “Call it What It Is: Genocide through Male Rape and Sexual Violence in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,” Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 30, no. 55 (2019): 58–91. Henri Myrttinen, “Men, Masculinities, and Genocide,” in A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention, Rethinking Political Violence, eds. M. M. Connellan and C. Fröhlich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 36, 38, 41. For more on Hirsch’s ideas, see Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28, and more recently, Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Petö, “Gender, Memory and Connective Genocide Scholarship: A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 386–96. Nikki Marczak, “Transmitted Defiance: Genocide Resistance across Generations of Armenian Women,” International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies 4, no. 1 (2019): 37. Other work on gender, memory, transgenerational trauma, and genocide is too extensive to cite in full. A few examples include Arlene Avakian and Hourig Attarian, “Imagining our Foremothers: Memory and Evidence of Women Victims and Survivors of the Armenian Genocide: A Dialogue,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 476–83; Krinka Vidaković-Petrov, “Memory Mediation by First- and Second-Generation Survivors: Why They Said Nothing: Mother and Daughter on One and the Same War by Magda Bošan Simin and Nevena Simin,” Studia Judaica 41, no. 1 (2018): 31–54; Lina Chhun “Walking with the Ghost: Affective Archives in the Afterlife of the Cambodian Holocaust,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 40, no. 3 (2019): 24–62; Grace Kagoyire, “The Ghosts of Collective Violence: Pathways of Transmission Between Genocide-Survivor Mothers and Their Young Adult Children in Rwanda,” in Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma, eds. Kim Wale, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Jeffrey Prager (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 229–57. Nicole Fox, “Memory in Interaction: Gender-Based Violence, Genocide, and Commemoration,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 45, no. 1 (2019): 124.

18 Janet Jacobs, “The Memorial at Srebrenica: Gender and the Social Meanings of Collective Memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Memory Studies 10, no. 4 (2017): 435.

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19 Lara Lengel, “Mediated Memory Work and Resistant Remembering of Wartime Sexual Violence, 1992–1995,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 325. 20 See, for example, Doris Buss’s chapter in this volume. 21 Roger Smith, “Genocide and the Politics of Rape,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, eds. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 99. 22 See Patricia Weitsman’s chapter. 23 See, for example, the chapters by Anthonie Holslag, Adam Jones, and Olivera Simić. 24 Euan Hague, “Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and National Identities in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Rohit Lentin (London, and New York: Zed Books, 1997), 50–63. 25 Joanna Michlic, “Gender Perspectives on the Rescue of Jews in Poland Preliminary Observations,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 30: Jewish Education in Eastern Europe, eds. Eliyana Adler and Anton Polonsky (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 425. 26 See the chapters by Adam Jones and Stephen Haynes. 27 See Lerna Ekmekçioğlu’s chapter. 28 See Doris Buss’s chapter. 29 Selma Leydesdorff, “Distortions in Survivors’ Narratives from Srebrenica: The Impossibility of Conveying their Truth,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, first ed., ed. Amy E. Randall (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 30 Rosemary Nagy, “Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflection,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2008): 276. 31 Ruth Rubio-Marin, “The Gender of Reparations: Setting the Agenda,” in What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations, ed. Ruth Rubio-Marin (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2006), 25, 31. 32 Olivera Simić, “Engendering Transitional Justice: Silence, Absence and Repair,” Human Rights Review 17 (2016); Janine Natalya Clark, Rape, Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice Challenges: Lessons from Bosnia Herzegovina (New York: Routledge, 2017); and Arnaud Kurze and Christopher Lamont, eds., New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art, and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). 33 Maria O’Reilly, “Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10, no. 3 (2016): 419–45. 34 Suzanne Buckely-Zistel and Magdalena Zolkos, “Introduction,” in Gender in Transitional Justice, eds. Suzanne Buckely-Zistel and Ruth Stanley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 35 Brandon Hamber, “There Is a Crack in Everything: Problematising Masculinities, Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Review 17 (2016): 25–6.

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36 Fox, “Memory in Interaction,” 124. 37 Janet Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide, and Collective Memory (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd, 2010). 38 Jacobs, “The Memorial at Srebrenica,” 430. 39 See Janet Jacobs’s chapter in this volume. 40 Janet Jacobs, “Redefining the Sacred: Spirituality and the Crisis of Masculinity among Children and Grandchildren of Survivors,” in Holocaust across Generations: Trauma and its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 41 See Adam Jones’s chapter. 42 Nicholas Werth, “The Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, 1937-1938,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 238; Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3, 4, 137. 43 There is a vast and excellent literature on these topics. More recent titles include Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2004); Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); James Harris, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999);Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim Staklo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); David Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Alexander Vatlin, Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police, ed. and trans. Seth Bernstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); idem, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 44 Olga Bertelson, “‘Hyphenated’ Identities during the Holodomor: Women and Cannibalism,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 77–96, here 77; Andrea Graziosi, “Why and in What Sense Was the Holodomor a Genocide?,” in Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine, ed. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk (Kingston, ON: Kashtan Press, 2008); Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Haida, and Halyna Hryn, eds., After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2014); Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (Anchor, 2018); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 21–58; Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, 70–9.

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45 Bertelson, “‘Hyphenated’ Identities,” 77, 82, 86. 46 Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 813–61; J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). It should be noted that politics and social class were deeply intertwined, so some social classes (such as a someone who was formerly identified as a member of the nobility) was more or less assumed to be anti-Soviet; Jeffrey Burds, “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists’: The Case of Chechnya, 1942-4,” Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 270. 47 Alexander Statiev, “Soviet Ethnic Deportations: Intent versus Outcome,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, nos. 2–3 (2009): 243–4. 48 Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 78–9; Alexander Kim, “The Repression of Soviet Koreans during the 1930s,” The Historian 74, no. 2 (2012): 281. 49 Alexander Nekrich, Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1981); Alex Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule (New York: Routledge, 2010). 50 Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, 90. 51 Allen Paul, Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); N. S. Lebedeva, “The Deportation of the Polish Population to the USSR, 1939–41,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 16, nos. 1–2 (2000): 28–45; Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Waitman Wade Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 52 J. Otto Pohl, Eric J. Schmaltz, and Ronald J. Vossler, “‘In Our Hearts We Felt the Sentence of Death’: Ethnic German Recollections of Mass Violence in the USSR, 1928–48,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, nos. 2–3 (2009): 334–5. 53 Burds, “The Soviet War,” 304; Francois Grin, “Kalmykia, Victim of Stalinist Genocide: From Oblivion to Reassertion,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 97–116; Isaac Scarborough, “An Unwanted Dependence: Chechen and Ingush Deportees and the Development of State–Citizen Relations in Late-Stalinist Kazakhstan (1944–1953),” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 1 (2017): 93–112; Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule; Alexander Statiev, “The Nature of Anti-Soviet Armed Resistance, 1942–44: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 285–318; Michaela Pohl, “‘It Cannot Be That Our Graves Will Be Here’: The Survival of Chechen and Ingush Deportees in Kazakhstan, 1944–1957,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 3 (2002): 401–30. 54 Brian Glynn Williams, “Hidden Ethnocide in the Soviet Muslim Borderlands: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Genocide Research 4,

INTRODUCTION

55 56

57 58 59

60 61

62

63



23

no. 3 (2002): 35–73; Yaacov Ro’i, “The Transformation of Historiography on the ‘Punished Peoples,’” History and Memory 21, no. 2 (2009): 157–8. J. Otto Pohl, “Stalin’s Genocide against the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 288; Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, 96–7. J. Otto Pohl, “Soviet Apartheid: Stalin’s Ethnic Deportations, Special Settlement Restrictions, and the Labor Army: The Case of the Ethnic Germans in the USSR,” Human Rights Review 13, no. 2 (June 2012): 205–22. Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 81. Otto, “Stalin’s Genocide,” 288. Irina Mukhina, “‘The Forgotten History’: Ethnic German Women in Soviet Exile,” Europe-Asia Studies 57, no. 5 (July 2005): 744. See also Irina Mukhina, “Gendered Division of Labor among Special Settlers in the Soviet Union, 1941–1956,” Women’s History Review 23, no. 1 (2014): 103. For analysis of how non-Soviet Polish women navigated deportation and resettlement in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, see Katherine Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). Pohl, “‘It Cannot Be that Our Graves Will Be Here,’” 403–4. Unlike the introduction to the first edition, this edition’s introduction does not discuss the emergence of the new term “genocide” during the Holocaust and the international community’s legal recognition of it as a crime, nor does it examine the evolution of genocide studies or the development of scholarship first on gender and the Holocaust and then on gender and genocide more broadly. See sources in the selected bibliography, such as Sonja M. Hedgpeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, Sexual Violence against Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), as well as sources cited in notes 9 and 10. For example: Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” in When Biology Became Destiny, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 271–96; E. Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); S. Heschel, “Does Atrocity Have a Gender? Feminist Interpretations of Women in the SS,” in Lessons and Legacies: New Currents in Holocaust Research, Vol. IV., ed. Diefendorf (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 300–21; Wendy Adele-Marie Sarti, Women and Nazis: Perpetrators of Genocide (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2012); Irmtraud Heike, “Female Concentration Camp Guards as Perpetrators: Three Case Studies,” in Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 120-142; Geoff Eley, “Missionaries of the Volksgemeinschaft: Ordinary Women, Nazification, and the Social,” in Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 91–130; Wendy Lower,

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Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013); Lower, “German Women in the Holocaust in the East,” in Women and Genocide, 111–36; Century, ed. Female Administrators of the Third Reich. 64 In addition to sources listed in Pines’s and Haynes’s chapters, see Zoë Waxman, “Towards an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Masculinity, Femininity, and Genocide,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies, eds. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (London: Continuum, 2010); Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust; Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, the Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 65 For more on women’s complicity, see Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 387–99; and the other sources listed in Hogg’s and Drumbl’s chapter. For women perpetrators in the Nazi genocide of the Jews and other victims, see references in note 63. 66 For more analyses of the male-on-male sexual violence in the Bosnian conflict, see Simic’s endnotes as well as Elysia Ruvinsky, “My Heart Bleeds, But Where to Take My Grief Is Not There”: Wartime Sexual Violence against Men in the Balkan and Great Lakes Regions (thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012). 67 A mass shooting in June 2016 at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the Pulse Club, resulted in the death of forty-nine people; the shooter pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Although initially this horrific event appeared to be a hate crime, in which the shooter deliberately targeted members of the LGBQT+ community because of their sexual and gender identities, subsequent evidence (presented at a 2018 trial) showed that he did not know it was a gay nightclub nor did he express any particular animus toward the community. Nonetheless, because homophobia and anti-LGBQT violence in this country remain common, despite some progress in recent years, and because ISIS condemns homosexuality and executes gay men, at the time of the attack it appeared entirely plausible that this was a targeted assault against a demonized “Other,” which made the carnage even more traumatic.

PART I

Gender and Genocide 

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1 Imperialism, Modern Race Thinking, Gender, and Genocide Amy E. Randall

What is the relationship between European imperialism and genocide? How did the violence wrought by European imperialism and colonial settlement inform the barbarism of National Socialism? In examining these questions, this chapter argues that the broader context of European imperialism and the consolidation of modern race thinking and biopolitics in the nineteenth century is critical for understanding how and why the Nazis waged a racial war against Jews and other groups during the 1930s and the Second World War, which led to the devastating death of six million European Jews and approximately five million other victims. It examines how the biologization of race, which intersected with the racialization of gender, sexuality, and reproduction, informed and was informed by European imperialism and biopolitics. The construction of colonized peoples as the “Other” via racialized discourses of religious, cultural, civilizational, and purported gender and sexual differences, as well as colonial policies that served to establish their dissimilarities from and “inferiority” to Europeans and their descendants, dehumanized them, fostering discriminaton and great violence against them. Moreover, modern race thinking, which scientific racism helped to produce, shaped biopolitical efforts to attend to the “mechanics of life” of populations, such as health, reproduction, life expectancy, and mortality.1 As political leaders and experts linked procreation and sexuality to the perceived well-being of different races and nations, European anxieties about racial contamination and degeneration in both the colonies and back at home increased; in the latter case, it was internal “Others,” including European Jews, who were imagined as a threat. This background, combined with long-standing antisemitism in Europe, the dynamics of

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German nationalism, the legacies of the First World War, the centrality of radical antisemitism as well as racial thinking to the Nazi worldview, and the construction of warfare in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a military war against Jews and Judeo-Bolshevism, contributed to the possibility of the genocide of European Jewry and other groups deemed “racially undesirable.”2

Imperialism and Genocide When considering the connections between European imperialism and genocide, and imperial violence and Nazi violence, it is worth considering how the progenitor of the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, conceived it. In the context of WWII and Nazi efforts to destroy Jews and other groups of people, including members of his own family, Lemkin produced a broad definition of genocide—one that could include but was not reduced to mass murder. He explained: Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves [my emphasis].3 In Lemkin’s view, nonlethal techniques of destruction, such as culturally harmful acts that effaced a group’s identity and policies that damaged a group’s well-being, could be genocidal, insofar as they were part of a broader plan of eradication. Lemkin’s expansive definition of genocide is important to debates about how to evaluate the question of genocide and the horrific carnage caused by European imperialism. As Europeans conquered the “New World,” they enacted mass violence against indigenous populations that led to the biological and cultural destruction of the Incas, Aztecs, Mayans, and many other native peoples.4 Although the majority of deaths were caused by new diseases introduced by European conquests, conquistadores and later colonists engaged in genocidal massacres and adopted policies and practices that did not always cause “immediate death” but led to the “steady destruction of the group,” including forced labor, terrible living conditions “forced displacement, denial of health and healthcare, denial of food.”5 They also extinguished the “essential foundations of the life of [national] groups” by eradicating the social and political structures, cultural traditions, and religious practices of the groups they subjugated. Although Europeans might not have explicitly planned to “annihilate” various groups, a key criterion for the legal definition of genocide, they promoted actions that they knew would have fatal consequences, actions that were “essentially

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genocidal in effect.”6 European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relied on similar practices that not only killed a lot of people but also destroyed their communities and collective ways of life.7 Moreover, in many countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, descendants of European colonists also forced assimilation on native peoples and impeded their cultural and biological reproduction by removing children from their families and sterilizing indigenous women, thereby “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” processes recognized as genocidal in the UN definition of genocide.8 The violent history of European imperialism has raised questions about its nature—was it inherently genocidal? It has also raised questions about its relationship to genocides in the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, particularly since the first genocide of the twentieth century was perpetrated by Germans against the Herero and Nama peoples in the colony of German South West Africa (GSWA). Indeed, in January 1904 the Hereros waged an anti-colonial rebellion against the economic exploitation, “land appropriation and despoliation,” and violence (including sexual violence) that they suffered at the hands of white settlers. Instead of ending the conflict with a negotiated settlement, the Germans opted to achieve a “total victory of military force” according to standard German military logic.9 Even after the defeat of Herero combatants, General von Trotha and his troops pursued a strategy of expulsion and annihilation, an explicit policy articulated in his “extermination” proclamation.10 By October 1904, the Nama people also became targets of German genocidal tactics. When colonial forces finally allowed the remaining Herero and Nama peoples to surrender, they put most survivors in concentration camps with appalling conditions that led to high mortality rates, executed the majority of male leaders and men of battle age, and raped women and girl survivors “in high numbers” while also allowing German civilians to take some as “sex slaves.” Women were also subjected to other gendered forms of abuse, including forced prostitution, sexualized whippings, and forced undressing (often accompanied by photograph taking, yet another source of humiliation).11 Even before the genocide, sexual violence was commercialized in common postcards, underscoring the Germans’ colonial and “gendered concept of power” over native peoples and their lands—that it was their prerogative to violate and claim them.12 Published memorial volumes that pictured “overt crimes against humanity, such as two German soldiers packaging a case of Herero skulls with a caption informing the readers that these had been cleaned of flesh by Herero women using glass shards,” also demonstrated this colonial and gendered logic of power by forcing survivors to desecrate the dead bodies of their own communities.13 At Shark Island, prisoners were subjected to horrific experiments in the name of medical research and racial science. By the time the camps were dismantled in 1908, approximately 75–80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama peoples had died as a result of German colonial policies.14

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According to many recent works, the German annihilation of Hereros and Nama served as an important precursor to Nazi violence and genocide. This scholarship argues that German colonial practices, “techniques of rule,” and “genocidal ideas and methods were transferred from German South West Africa to the leadership of the Third Reich.”15 The colony’s legal system of discrimination, for example, which banned miscegenation and interracial marriage, was replicated in the Nuremburg Laws, and the colonial rhetoric of Rassenschande (racial shame) became an important part of Nazi discourse.16 German ideas about “race and space” in the colony of South West Africa, which involved eliminationist ideas about racial “others” and the pursuit of Lebensraum (living space) for German colonial settlement,17 expanded on earlier German nationalist ideas and paralleled Nazi discourses about Jews and other groups deemed racially undesirable as well as expansionist plans to pursue Lebensraum in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for the health of the nation.18 Germans conceived the destruction of both the Herero and Nama in GSWA and the Jews during the Second World War as a “race war.”19 The colonial concentration camps and related “scientific” experimentation on and mutilation of victims presaged Nazi practices. Some individuals involved in the destruction of the Herero and Nama were important “human conduits for the flow of ideas and methods between the colony and Nazi Germany.”20 The “genocidal gaze” of German settlers and soldiers, “which translated racist hierarchies into dehumanization and eventual extermination of victims,” was transferred to Germany via literary, visual, and artistic texts, as well as “Reichstag debates and newspaper editorials,” fostering an “acceptance of the genocidal strategies employed in GSWA,” helping to make Hitler’s pursuit of a “racially pure” Third Reich and the Holocaust imaginable.21 While some scholars reject the idea that the German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples is relevant to understanding the Holocaust,22 others do not necessarily dispute linkages but are wary of overemphasizing the significance of German colonial violence or suggesting that it was particularly horrific (and therefore aberrational), given how violent European imperialism was as a whole.23 To be sure, German imperial practices were generally not “worse” than other European imperial practices. In the mid-nineteenth century, the French used “genocidal” tactics in Algeria, leading to the death of 825,000 Algerians.24 In the Belgian King Leopold’s Free State of Congo (1885–1908), an inhumane system of forced labor and mass atrocities, combined with disease and famine, led to the death of approximately ten million people in just a couple of decades.25 The French employed comparable brutal methods to extract rubber in the French Congo and to force Africans to build a railroad between Brazzaville and the Atlantic Ocean.26 British colonial forces employed “collective reprisals and scorched earth policies, starvation tactics on the enemy as well as the wider population, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, punitive expeditions, looting,” and ignored “international standards of warfare” to maintain imperial power in many regions. The Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan in 1898 was notoriously brutal, even if not

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genocidal.27 As a result of these and other similarly vicious imperial crimes, scholars have cautioned against seeing the German Empire as unique.28 Anti-colonial activists, postcolonial intellectuals, and scholars have debated the relationship between European imperialism and the Holocaust more generally. Aimé Césaire, a Martinican writer and politician, argued in 1950 that colonialism was linked to the murderous barbarism of Nazism. In his view, as European colonialists deployed brutal “violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” to take control of other lands and people, they brutalized and dehumanized themselves.29 This is because the colonial project, which was “based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.” Césaire asserted that this “boomerang effect of colonization” led to savagery on the European continent and the application of colonialist procedures against other white Europeans that had previously “been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”30 In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt also discussed the “boomerang effect of imperialism on the homeland,” although in a slightly different way.31 She argued that European imperialism in the nineteenth century, with its race thinking, psychology of domination, and authoritarian and non-democratic colonial practices, had adversely affected European politics, culture, and society, which, in conjunction with other forces such as the First World War, made totalitarianism “on the basis of race” possible.32 Yet, even if Arendt suggested a link between European imperialism and Nazi totalitarianism, she simultaneously disavowed it, suggesting that the latter was a radicalization of elements of overseas imperialism in pursuit of continental imperialism, and therefore something novel and aberrational. The genocide scholar Dan Stone argues that this perspective emerged in part in an effort “to rescue western tradition” and insist that it “set[s] its house in order.”33 Other thinkers, inspired by Arendt’s recognition that genocide was a part of Western history and “had happened in modern colonization,” have used her insights to justify comparative genocide studies, and to examine similarities as well as differences “without diminishing the specificities of any given case.”34 From this research, some scholars have concluded that colonial genocides were not fundamentally different from Nazi genocides but were “less-organized, centralized, and bureaucratized.”35 Moreover, the racial logics of the new European imperialism in the late nineteenth century—including the idea that it was legitimate to brutalize and destroy large groups of racially “inferior” indigenous people on behalf of European pursuits—paralleled Nazi plans for expansion and annihilation. According to this scholarship, while imperialism did not cause the Nazi genocides, the continuities in discourses and practices between the two suggest that the Holocaust could not have happened “without the precedent” of genocidal massacres and colonial genocides.36

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Despite a scholarly debate about the connections between European colonial violence and Nazi violence, scholars agree that there were important differences. Although the Nazis deployed a racial worldview to claim that German and other European Jews constituted an inferior race, similar to the way European colonists imagined indigenous peoples, the Nazis also saw Jews very differently—as a strong global force that threatened the German Volk. According to conservative German nationalists and Nazis, Jews were “colonizers of Germany itself,” “a foreign people” who had established a “‘tyranny’ over Germany, enslaving it through the stock exchange, the media, cultural life, and the governmental machinery of the Weimar Republic.”37 The Nazis also viewed Jews as impediments to Germany’s imperialist plans to secure Lebensraum in, “plunder the resources” of, and exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe.38 These views are linked to another significant distinction: the Nazis did not merely see Jews as Germans saw colonized peoples—as racially lesser and expendable, fit to brutalize or enslave under atrocious conditions that would inevitably result in a terrible loss of life. They viewed Jews as “unworthy of life” and sought to eliminate them altogether from Nazi Germany and Europe. This included the Soviet Union, where the Nazis planned to exterminate all Jews and enslave and eradicate tens of millions of Slavic peoples as they pursued their racist imperial plans in the East.39 Notwithstanding these differences, violent European imperial practices, combined with new ways of thinking about race and the nation as well as the racializaton of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, informed the Nazis’ vilification of and murderous policies against the racial Jewish “Other.”

Race Thinking, Nationalism, and the Racialization of Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction Race, as scholars have pointed out, is not a “timeless” concept. Instead, it is a modern way to comprehend and categorize variations among groups of people. Before the eighteenth century, many people understood human differences in environmental terms; “Climate and terrain made some people fierce, others gentle, some wise, others savage, gave some a penchant for reason, others for the senses.” Religious differences also helped to explain human variation. Key to both, however, was a conception of difference that was variable; people’s behavior and cultural practices would change if they migrated to new lands or if they adopted new religious practices and beliefs. In these framings, differences were not “‘natural’ to the physical body.”40 The European “discovery” of the “New World,” the Atlantic slave trade system, the Scientific Revolution, and “Enlightenment” thinking all

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contributed to the making of race, that is, to the idea of immutable differences among groups of people rooted in the body. As Europeans encountered nonEuropeans in the “New World,” they sought to delineate “their differences from—and superiority to—the Native Americans they conquered, and then later the Africans they enslaved.”41 In the process, they translated phenotypical as well as other variations—cultural, religious, and social—into essential distinctions of the “Other” to justify mass subjugation and brutal violence in service to resource exploitation, religious conversion, colonial settlement, and the Atlantic slave trade system. Colonial laws and social practices, as well as alleged gender and sexual differences between indigenous and enslaved peoples and colonial settlers (and their descendants), contributed to the racialization of Native Americans and enslaved Africans and justified the new racial hierarchy. In the colonial era and early American republic, for example, court trials and reports about rape taught “early Americans to associate race with certain sexual behaviors.” Significant racial disparities in the number of and specific charges brought against Black and enslaved men versus white men as well as major differences in criminal proceedings, conviction rates, sentences, and punishment contributed to “the racialized criminalization of sexual assault,” feeding discourses that “black men had a proclivity to rape, and white men did not.” Meanwhile, the corporal punishment of rapists was reserved mostly for Black people; “excessive whippings, castrations, and physical mutilations” marked Black bodies as different from those of white people.42 So too did the physical atrocities “such as amputations or brandings” and sexual violence perpetrated against enslaved peoples, particularly rape and castration. These different forms of violence served “to codify racial conceptions that rooted difference in the collective body of each group.”43 As the Atlantic slave trade system developed, the Scientific Revolution contributed to the making of race. As botanists and zoologists studied, identified, and classified organisms in the plant and animal worlds, many scientists sought to categorize humans in a similar way and promote a “new science of humankind.”44 In 1735, the naturalist Carolus Linnaeus classified the great diversity of humans into four different groups distinguished by skin color, ascribing more favorable characteristics to the Europeans.45 In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German physician, naturalist, and anthropologist, proposed five different races instead and used comparative anatomy, particularly the study of skulls, to justify his classifications. Although Blumenbach emphasized the unity of the human species, he adopted the term “Caucasian” to refer to light-skinned Europeans and offered “one of the first ‘scientific’ explanations for white people as the progenitors of the human race.”46 Moreover, he argued that the Caucasian skull was “the most perfect racial type of homo sapiens.”47 As colonial settlers in the Americas and scientists promoted the idea of race in the context of human diversity and constructed “the African as radically different” from Europeans, Enlightenment thinkers promoted ideas about

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the “natural rights” of man, which suggested that all humans had universal rights, regardless of differences. And yet even as philosophes declared liberty to be one of these rights, and some criticized the enslavement of Africans and the Atlantic slave trade system, many of these thinkers simultaneously reaffirmed the idea of Africans’ essential difference. Voltaire, for example, who was a critic of slavery, nonetheless believed that Africans constituted an inferior species. Indeed, he suggested that Africans’ “liabilities” helped to explain why they had “become slaves to other men.”48 Montesquieu, another Enlightenment thinker, argued that “the African’s dubious mind and altered body,” called into question the universality of “Enlightenment-era political theory.”49 Most colonists in North America, who touted “liberty to be inalienable” and discussed the necessity of freedom from British rule, supported an ideology of racial inferiority, which helped them to resolve “the contradiction between slavery and liberty” and contributed to the “making of race” by making it appear “as a self-evident truth.”50 Through the making of race, the concept of “blackness” emerged. Over time, as a result, Europeans and colonists reimagined the African, transforming them from being a “barbaric heathen (a moral and religious category)” to a “subhuman (racial category) for whom human bondage seemed the logical but regrettable extension” of Africans and their descendants’ alleged limitations.51 In the nineteenth century, scientists claimed to find empirical evidence of what they viewed as fundamental biological differences among groups of people. Comparative anatomists, for example, measured skulls, skeletons, and body parts and argued that Caucasians’ skulls provided proof of their difference from and superiority over “Mongols” and “Negroes.”52 As scientists collected “physical data in order to establish both normal and degenerative categories of humans,” they increasingly relied not only on exterior markers of difference, such as the color of skin, but also on alleged interior physiological differences.53 Researchers also argued that alleged sexual differences between the races marked racial differences. In 1816– 17, the naturalist Georges Cuvier examined the body of Saartje Baartman (aka Sarah Bartmann aka the Hottentot Venus), a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who had lived in Europe for five years, put on display for the amusement of Europeans and commercial profit, and ridiculed and sexualized, partly by those who saw her body as aberrational and “different.” Cuvier concluded that Baartman’s “distinct” genitalia and anatomy distinguished Baartman and her people, as well other “negro women” more generally, from white European women.54 Other white men’s descriptions of Black and white women’s bodies in the mid- to late nineteenth century asserted similar bodily differences and associated the perceived distinctions with Black women’s supposedly more “primitive” and “unbridled sexuality.”55 Popular and scientific discourses about Black women’s bodies demonstrate the interconnections of race, sex, and gender in the nineteenth century. The dynamics of European empires in the second half of the nineteenth century contributed to and were shaped by the growing influence of

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biological “race thinking” and the emergence of Social Darwinism. Although Charles Darwin argued that all people were of the same species, the human species, he still argued that some groups of people, like some species, were more developed than others. Social Darwinists borrowed Darwin’s hierarchical ideas about speciation and misrepresented his theories about natural selection and evolution to explain the political and social order, both internationally and domestically. In their view, in the “struggle for existence,” it was only natural for the superior races—those who were the strongest and the “fittest”—to rule over the weaker and “degenerate” races, such as the colonized peoples in the respective empires.56 Social Darwinists racialized class and other differences among people living in Europe as well. The changing nature of nationalism in the nineteenth century also informed and was informed by the development of biological race thinking. If the “nation” was conceived of as “the aristocracy or other legally defined groups” before the American and French Revolutions in the late eighteenth century, revolutionary politics transformed this understanding. As scholars have noted, the “nation” became equated with the idea of the state and the people, with the idea of a political community. Right from the beginning, however, the notion of national citizenship was gendered, classed, and raced, limiting who could be an active participant in the political community. The view of the nation as being composed of a particular ethnic/racial community was intensified in Europe in the nineteenth century when “culture, not political rights, was made the defining element.”57 As a more civic and potentially more inclusive understanding of the nation was challenged to lesser and greater extents by a more ethnic/racial and exclusive conceptualization, minority groups in nation-states and empires became marginalized in new ways. This had tremendous implications for Jews, who had historically been deemed religious and cultural outsiders in many European countries but had achieved a modicum of political rights in some places in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Biological race thinking, scientific racism, and a more racialized understanding of who could count as a legitimate member of the body politic fostered a new kind of racial antisemitism in which Jews were anathematized as a distinct race and national outsiders, even if they assimilated and became secularized. Racial antisemitism, like anti-Black racism, associated Jews’ “racial” distinctiveness with purported gender and sexual differences. Anti-Semitic stereotypes in the late nineteenth century departed from earlier discourses about Jewish men by feminizing them and depicting them as “unmanly and unmilitary, chubby and wimpish, with flat feet, narrow chests, and poor posture.”58 These stereotypes also depicted Jewish men as sexual aggressors because “like women in general, they were seen as lacking in selfcontrol.”59 This sexual aggression, combined with Jewish men’s supposed tendency to be dishonest and calculating, positioned non-Jewish women as potential victims of their immorality and carnality. Gendered anti-Semitic discourses, meanwhile, characterized Jewish women as sexually aggressive

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and “dangerously seductive.”60 These ascribed gender and sexual differences contributed to the demarcation of Jews as racially distinct and the growth of a new racial antisemitism. Scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and the growth of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century were imbricated and dependent on the politicization and racialization of gender, sexuality, and reproduction.61 European fears about maintaining “racial purity” and the dangers of “racemixing” as well as concerns about white impoverishment and cultural contagion in the colonies undermining white prestige and European dominance resulted in increased efforts to manage “the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized” and police “the domestic recesses of imperial rule.”62 The goal was twofold: to eliminate “improper” interracial sexual and social interactions in the colonies that would contribute to the degeneration of the white race; and to hinder the procreation of mixed-race children, who threatened imperial rule by blurring the racial, cultural, and class boundaries that separated Europeans from colonized peoples. Anti-miscegenation policies and “the demarcation of new spaces that were racially off-limits” were some of the many measures adopted to clarify the boundaries between white Europeans and nonwhite colonized peoples.63 The emergence of “Black peril” discourses about European women in danger of being sexually attacked by Black African men reinforced calls to safeguard white women’s purity in particular.64 Colonial authorities also promoted gendered, racialized, and classed discourses about European civility, respectability, domesticity, and proper childrearing to reaffirm distinctions between the European self and the racial Other, and assigned European women a central role in promoting certain gender norms and social practices that would protect white “prestige and morality and insulate their men from the cultural and sexual contamination of contact with the colonized.”65 Anxieties about race-mixing in the colonies, and fears that colonial climates promoted decreased fecundity, sterility, and high infant mortality among white settlers, intersected with growing anxieties in different European countries about national reproduction, depopulation, and “race suicide.” A declining birthrate, partly a result of the major social and demographic changes that accompanied industrialization, became a cause of concern as political leaders equated national strength with population size and began to promote national conscription and the growth of armies and navies in the late nineteenth century. In this context, reproduction became a state matter, and motherhood and childrearing became a woman’s national and racial duty.66 Reproduction and sexuality were also politicized as a result of a shift in governance and techniques of power in the modern era: states and experts increasingly sought to manage populations through “biopolitics,” a “series of interventions and regulatory controls” focused on disciplining the individual body and the social body. The growth of the biological and social sciences was critical to this shift; as demographers, sociologists,

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anthropologists, anatomists, and other experts studied the human body, behavior, and social relations, they measured, defined, and categorized them, and produced knowledge that established standards and norms that supported the government’s management of “the ‘population’ as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.”67 The increased “attention to the processes of life” and the “performances of the body” made sex a matter of secular and state concern, and combined in the nineteenth century with racial science to make procreation and sexuality central to the perceived well-being or infirmity of races.68 Scientific/medical discourses of sexuality intertwined with scientific discourses of race to produce discourses about racial degeneration, miscegenation, and sexual “perversions” that “pathologized both the nonwhite body and the nonheterosexual body to greater or lesser extents.”69 In the context of modern race thinking and new approaches to managing national populations, the international eugenics movement that developed in the late nineteenth century and expanded dramatically in the early twentieth century also fostered the racialization of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Advocates of eugenics mobilized ideas about genetics  and heredity, informed by scientific racism, to promote “better breeding” and the improvement of humankind. As eugenics was popularized, policymakers supported pronatalist incentives such as tax breaks and birth bonuses to encourage greater reproduction of “desirable” traits among those deemed racially “fit.”70 Many eugenicists endorsed not only pronatalist but also antinatalist measures, that is, “negative eugenics.” They endorsed programs to limit the reproduction of those viewed as “lesser,” such as isolation and segregation in “mental” institutions, sterilization, and anti-immigrant policies. The targets of negative eugenics included people with physical and mental “hereditary diseases,” as well as conditions that were nonhereditary but characterized as such. This included the dubious diagnosis of “feeblemindedness,” which was frequently linked to the violation of gender norms, such as women’s alleged moral deficiencies as evidenced by their “atypical” sexuality (sexual relations before marriage), and men’s negative social behavior, such as pauperism. Sterilization laws that took “negative” eugenics to the extreme were adopted in many different countries in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, including the United States.71 The radical intervention in people’s bodies to eliminate the reproductive abilities of those deemed unfit prefigured even greater radicalization under the Nazis. * * * Gender and sexuality, which were inextricably linked to the making of biological “races” and scientific racism, racialized discourses in European empires, and the increased management of populations in the nineteenth century were

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similarly intertwined in Nazi discourses and policies. This affected not only Jewish victims of the Nazis but also non-Jewish victims. An examination of the centrality of gender and sexuality to Nazi conceptualizations of race and population politics, as well as German national belonging, is critical to understanding these other victims of Nazism in the 1930s and during the Second World War. It also helps to illuminate how the persecution and mass murder of Jews was, in the minds of the Nazis, part of a broader racial war. In this war, Jews were the primary target, but other “undesirable” groups who were imagined to impair Aryan racial purity and health were also persecuted, including people with mental and physical “disabilities,” Romanies, members of the LGBQT+ community, and Afro-Germans and Black people.

Other Victims of Nazism and Its Racial Worldview “Disabled” People The international eugenics movement fueled Nazi interest in breeding a superior race and preventing births by those deemed inferior. Soon after Hitler came to power, the Nazis passed the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring to “prevent the procreation” of inferior people with mental and physical illnesses that made them biologically and “hereditarily unfit.” The idea was for this antinatalist measure to “bring about a gradual cleansing of the people’s body,” which, combined with pronatalist measures, would “increase the number of hereditarily healthy progeny.”72 Ultimately this law resulted in the forced sterilization of approximately 400,000 people, the majority of whom were non-Jewish Germans (although as discussed herein, Romanies and Afro-Germans were targeted as well). As was true in many countries, the Nazis did not merely ascribe inferior characteristics to different racial groups and establish a hierarchy of races; they applied eugenical thinking to members of their own “race” and concluded that some persons were of unhealthy stock. In their minds, it was not only “alien races” who led to Germany’s racial degeneration; so too did the “‘biologically inferior’ among one’s own people.”73 Public health and social welfare workers, teachers, prison wardens, and others provided hereditary health courts with lists of possible sterilization candidates. The largest category of victims consisted of the “feebleminded”—“an extremely vaguely defined concept” that included people identified with “prostitution and alcoholism.”74 Although both women and men were sterilized, the procedure for women required a more violent bodily intervention, which resulted in thousands of deaths.75 In 1935, in addition to the Nuremberg Laws, which, among other things, banned sexual relations and marriages between “Germans” and Jews, the Nazis also passed a Marital Health Law that required German spouses to produce proof of

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their racial health. Unions between those considered “fit” and “unfit” were banned. These measures were a product of the idea that the Third Reich had to be purified from “impurities” and “sickness” to guarantee its survival and advancement.76 Nazi propaganda emphasized this by pointing out the hundreds of mentally and physically inferior descendants who would emerge from allowing one “asocial” woman to reproduce, and by highlighting the economic expenses of supporting such unproductive and incapable people, which could be used instead to take care of healthy Germans.77 Along with sterilization, the Nazis forced abortions on persons whose progeny, they believed, would fuel racial decline.78 In 1939 the Nazis went from sterilizing to murdering people deemed disabled and “unworthy of living.” After medical personnel killed a disabled infant at the request of parents, Hitler moved to implement a children’s “euthanasia” program in the summer.79 Operations expanded to at least 22 children’s killing wards, resulting in the death of approximately 5,000 children.80 Health officials pressured parents to institutionalize their disabled children in special wards, promising that “advanced scientific therapies” would be used to cure them.81 In these killing centers, personnel starved children to death or gave them medication that caused their demise, either directly or by causing complications such as pneumonia, which allowed them to list a child’s cause of death “natural.” Whereas infants and toddlers were killed initially, during the course of the Second World War older children were also murdered. The murder of disabled adults began in the fall of 1939, first by injections, and then via gassings. The T4 program, as it was known, entailed six killing centers, which simulated health institutions to trick patients and their families. After killing patients, staff desecrated their bodies by removing gold tooth fillings to fund the Third Reich as well as body parts for “scientific study.”82 The Nazis exported their program of killing those with “disabilities” to the East, so in the end, they murdered approximately 290,000 such people in the Third Reich, Poland, and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1945. The technology of gassing people to death, and the transfer of personnel from the T4 program to the East, facilitated the murder of Jews and others in the gas chambers of German death camps.83 Although the Nazis implemented murderous measures against physically and mentally disabled people, it is important to keep in mind that their actions were a product of a broader racial worldview that had gained ascendancy in modern Europe and the United States by the late nineteenth century, which ascribed hierarchical racial value to different groups of people and advocated negative eugenics to eliminate “degenerates,” those labeled inferior and unfit.

Romanies/Romani People When the Nazis came to power, they considered not only Jews but also Romanies (the collective term for Roma and Sinti, aka gypsies) an inferior

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race. Although prejudice against the Romanies was long-standing in Europe, including in Germany, Nazi anti-Romani measures were far more severe, resulting in not only increased vilification and harassment but mass violence and genocide. Romanies, like Jews, were murdered in Nazi concentration and death camps and slaughtered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen (special killing squads), German and Axis armed forces, and local collaborators in the towns, fields, and forests of Eastern Europe. Recent research suggests that at least 500,000 and up to one and a half million Romanies were killed.84 Some scholars and Romani activists use the terms Baro Porrajmos, which means the Great Devouring, or Romani Holocaust, to describe the genocide.85 For many years, however, this Nazi genocide of Romanies was essentially ignored. Although it was clear that Romanies had suffered greatly in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe as well as in Axis territories, many scholars and others considered their persecution to be fundamentally different from the persecution of Jews. Purportedly the Nazi regime targeted Romanies for social, rather than racial, reasons, that is, because it viewed them as social deviants, criminals, and unproductive outsiders, a common perception in Germany that predated the Nazis. This interpretation echoed that of German authorities in the postwar period, who argued against paying reparations by claiming that Romanies were victimized for “security” reasons. Although the West German government finally acknowledged in 1979 that Romanies were persecuted for racial reasons, most scholarship, memorials, and museums about the Holocaust did not recognize this until the 1990s, and even today, many who know about Nazi violence against Romanies do not view them as racial victims.86 Scholarship on the plight of Romanies under Nazi rule and during the Second World War in the last twenty to thirty years has demonstrated that the Nazis attempted to annihilate the Romanies as a racial group and not just punish them as a perceived social menace. Moreover, as the Romani scholar Ian Hancock has noted, the distinction between the Nazi persecution of the Romanies as a social, rather than a racial, problem belies the conflation of the two; the Nazis viewed Romani “criminality” as a “genetically transmitted and incurable disease,” which “was therefore ideologically racial.”87 Right from the beginning, the Nazi assault on Romanies, like the Nazi assault on Jews, involved laws and policies that marginalized and stigmatized them, depriving them of employment and businesses, residences, and connections with nonRomani Germans. The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring applied not only to Germans viewed as biologically unfit but also “asocials,” which included Romanies, many of whom were subsequently sterilized forcibly. The 1933 Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals led to the imprisonment of many Romanies in camps. The 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, which prevented sexual relations and marriage between Jews and Aryan Germans, and redefined Jews as national subjects rather than as citizens, came to apply to Romanies and Black Germans, because all three groups were deemed to have “alien blood.” A national agency, the Reich Central Office

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to Combat the Gypsy Menace, was created in 1936, supplementing local offices that harassed and policed the Roma and Sinti, both before and after the beginning of Nazi rule. Anthropologists, biologists, and racial hygienists traveled across Germany, compiling “scientific” and genealogical information on Romanies to prove their inferiority and demonstrate how their “criminal and asocial behavior was hereditary.”88 Various measures in the late 1930s, such as a 1937 Decree on Crime Prevention and “Gypsy Clean Up Week” in 1938, resulted in public violence against and deportations of thousands of Romanies to concentration camps.89 In 1938, Nazi leaders began to talk about a “Final Solution to the Gypsy Question,” and in 1939, the head of the Nazi Office of Racial Hygiene, Johannes Behrendt, called for the elimination of all Romanies. Upon commencing war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler called for the “extermination of all Jews, Romanies, and communist political functionaries.”90 As Nazi leaders sought to rid the Third Reich, the general government, and occupied Europe of the “Gypsy plague,” they radicalized anti-Romany measures and determined that all Romanies, regardless of perceived racial purity, were no longer worthy of life.91 The Nazi violence against Romanies resulted in gendered harms. Nazis and other “Aryan” Germans sometimes humiliated Romani women by forcing them to publicly undress. Nazi authorities evicted Romanies from their homes, often to special “Gypsy” municipal camps, and then later to concentration camps; as the caretakers for their families, this meant that “Sinti and Roma women were forced repeatedly to reinvent the actuality of ‘home’ as a concept and as a specific location.”92 Nazis, German armed forces, and their allies in Eastern Europe, also committed sexual violence against Romani women, not infrequently in front of family members. Many relatives who tried to protect the women were subsequently killed. As a result, the sexual violence was not only gender-based but also “family-based,” which is reflected in the way that some “Romani women recount their lived experiences of sexual violence as part of familial and communal assaults.”93 This sexual violence also entailed forcing at least some Romani women to serve as prostitutes in military brothels.94 In addition to sexual assault, Romani women faced particular traumas because of their gender roles as mothers and nurturers. Unable to fulfill their caretaking duties after being deported to camps in Transnistria, many Romani women made “choiceless choices,” abandoning children or the elderly to survive, or turning to infanticide to save their other children.95 And while both many Romani men and women were subjected to sterilization, the procedure and its consequences were not “gender-neutral”: as mentioned previously, the sterilization of women was a more major and dangerous endeavor, resulting in many deaths. Women’s childlessness was also more destructive to their sense of self than it was for men, because motherhood was central to Romani women’s identity, although men also lost some community standing if they were infertile.96At Ravensbrück and other camps, Romani and Jewish women and girls suffered from a particularly harsh and painful experimental sterilization

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technique: the injection of chemicals in their uteruses.97 Romani men and boys undoubtedly experienced gender-specific traumas as well; additional research using a gender lens would provide insight into this history.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, and Transgender Communities For a long time, the Nazi persecution of members of the LGBQT+ community, including the mass violence perpetrated against gay men in particular, was ignored or discussed very briefly in research, memorials, museums, and other forms of Holocaust education. In part this was a result of the persistence of anti-gay laws and homophobia for decades after Nazi rule, both in Germany and in other countries. Some gay men were even forced to serve out their sentences after the collapse of the Nazi regime and end of the Second World War. “Still seen as criminals and perverts,” and marginalized in society, queer survivors were often reluctant to speak up about their experiences and, when they did, were denied recognition as Nazi victims.98 Greater research about and sympathy for LGBQT+ victims of Nazi persecution, which first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, has resulted in the publication of survivors’ personal accounts and memoirs, new scholarship, and greater representation in museums and memorials about the Holocaust. Nonetheless, because there was no Nazi plan to exterminate all members of the LGBQT+ community, and persecution was uneven and dependent on many variables, such as whether or not the victim’s homosexuality was seen as inborn or acquired, some people view the Nazis’ anti-homosexual policies and violence as fundamentally distinct from its genocidal antisemitism. Despite key differences, however, it is important to understand how racism and antisemitism were imbricated in the Nazis’ vilification and targeting of the homosexual “Other.” In the nineteenth century, scientific racism informed and was informed by medical and sexological discourses of sexuality and gender, which contributed to the “identification of the homosexual as a specific species.”99 Scientists’ efforts to discover biological markers of racial difference between groups of people were accompanied by similar medical and sexological efforts to identify biological markers of sexual difference on the homosexual body. As Siobhan Somerville notes, “[o]ne of the most consistent medical characterizations of the anatomy” of both women of African descent and lesbians of European descent “was the myth of an unusually large clitoris.”100 In addition, in many ways the categorization of Jews and homosexuals emerged as mutually constitutive.101 Another indication of homosexuals’ supposed racial difference was their deviation from bourgeois gender norms, which anti-Semites also associated with Jews, because of their purportedly effeminate men and manly women. Indeed, the construction of the racialized Jewish “Other” and the sexual “Other” were marked by similar alleged “deviations” from normalcy: “nervousness,

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sexual perversion, physical deformation, and reproductive dysfunction.”102 Both Jews and homosexuals were also “thought to use their sexuality as an additional weapon against society.”103 As characteristics and behaviors associated with Jews were ascribed to homosexuals as well, the two groups were conflated as racial and national outsiders who threatened the well-being of society, which contributed to the Nazis’ antipathy toward both. The nineteenth-century racialization of sexuality informed the Nazi regime’s worldview and its treatment of same-sex desiring and gender nonconforming individuals. Nazi leaders saw male homosexuals as unhealthy degenerates who threatened the German nation by not contributing to the reproduction of the “Aryan” race. They viewed homosexuality as a dangerous “contagious social disease” that could spread among heterosexual men and lead to an epidemic if the regime didn’t take harsh measures against it, undermining social respectability, national cohesion, and the purity of the Aryan racial stock.104 Gay and bisexual men also raised the “spectre of gender deviance, male passivity,” and the “feminization of the nation-state.”105 The alleged danger they posed to the heteronationalist masculine order, and racial purity and health of the nation, fueled the Nazis’ demonization and persecution of them. Although Weimar Germany had a thriving gay, lesbian, and transvestite community and an incipient homosexual rights movement, the broader society was still homophobic, which contributed to social support for and indifference to the Nazis’ anti-gay policies.106 Soon after coming to power, Nazis and students attacked the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, a renowned institute founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfield for research and teaching about diverse sexualities and gender identities that also served as a social space and refuge for Berlin’s queer communities. Not content to merely destroy the institute, the Nazis stole thousands of books and other materials from its sexological archive and library, including significant queer collections, which they then torched in their infamous 1933 public book burning of “un-German” texts. The Nazis also banned homosexual rights organizations and attacked social networks, including many gay and lesbian bars and clubs. After the Nazis murdered Ernst Rohm, the gay leader of the Stormtroopers (SA), as well as tens of other top-ranking SA officials in 1934, top officials claimed it was a necessary measure to subvert a plan to overthrow the government among a “small group of individuals joined by a common predisposition,” that is, same-sex desire.107 They “justified [it] as a blow against homosexuality,” as a necessary moral measure against supposed depravity, even though the main reasons for the purge were political—to placate the army and big businesses critical of the SA and to use the potential charge of homosexuality as a way to threaten leaders in the Catholic Church. This purge was useful in confirming the Nazi Party’s respectability, underscoring the difference between what was viewed as unacceptable homosexuality and the appropriate intimate comradeship and homosociality of the Nazis’ militarized community of men, the Männerbund.108

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After Rohm’s murder, the Nazi persecution of homosexuals intensified. In 1935, Germans altered Paragraph 175, the already existing law that criminalized sexual relations between men, to broaden its purview; as a result, men who engaged in a broad array of “indecent acts,” including showing a hint of sexual interest in another man, were redefined as criminals. The revised law, in combination with denunciations from citizens and the actions of the police and Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, resulted in the arrest of 100,000 men, who were sometimes tortured to give up names of other gay and bisexual men, and the conviction of 50,000 men, who were incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. “[G]uided by the demand for a healthy race,” Nazi officials also promoted the “voluntary” and forced castration of many same-sex desiring men, because it would rob them of their “reproductive capacity,” and hinder the inheritance of their degeneracy in any progeny. Many Nazis believed as well that castration would diminish men’s sexual desire, thereby preventing the seduction of other men and the spread of a contagious disease that led to the racial contamination of the Volk.109 Out of the 50,000 men convicted, approximately 10,000–15,000 were sent to camps where they suffered terribly. Forced to wear a pink triangle badge or a shirt with 175 written on the back, signaling their status as homosexual prisoners, they were treated particularly badly—assigned to the most difficult and often deadly work tasks and ridiculed and abused by guards and other prisoners. This abuse included rape, sexual torture, and cruel “medical” experiments. Mortality rates were greater than for most other categories of prisoners. Survivors reported that except for the Jews, they received the worst treatment.110 It is clear that the men incarcerated as “homosexuals” in Nazi concentration camps were not meant to survive. This murderous logic was explicitly stated by one of the most homophobic Nazi leaders, Heinrich Himmler, when he declared that “we must exterminate these people root and branch . . . the homosexual must be eliminated.”111 Although the Nazi regime did not condone sexual relations between women, it didn’t criminalize them. Long-standing ideas about the “inherent passivity of the female body and women’s lack of independent sexuality” contributed to beliefs that women’s same-sex activities were insignificant,112 and that most lesbians were only “pseudohomosexual” and thus curable. According to most Nazis, the racially fit and allegedly heterosexual German women who were “seduced” by lesbians retained their “utility for population policy purposes.” In other words, they could still serve as vessels to produce healthy Aryan racial stock.113 The Nazis also treated same-sex desiring women differently than their male counterparts because of their lack of economic, social, and political power; women were seen as less likely than men to spread homosexuality by example or corrupt politics and public life.114 The Nazi regime’s racialized heteronormativity, however, involved the policing of sexual and gender norms, which had a significant impact on same-sex desiring women who did not perform their proper gender roles by becoming mothers and wives and/or for displaying gender noncomformity.115 Citizens

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contributed to this policing by denouncing women for their “nonnormative gender expression and sexuality” in coded language.116 Some of these women were imprisoned as “asocials” in concentration camps. Lesbians and bisexual women were also persecuted for political reasons “insofar as they challenged the gender/sexual politics” of the Nazi regime.117 The regulation of gender and sexuality, in conjunction with the destruction of public queer life and possibilities for a “collective lesbian lifestyle and identity,” led many queer women to go into hiding by becoming more gender-compliant and getting married—sometimes to gay men—to escape social condemnation and negative attention.118 The different treatment of lesbians and bisexual women under the Third Reich from their male counterparts underscores how race, gender, and sexuality were intertwined in the Nazi construction of undesirable “Others”; “Aryan” lesbian and bisexual women who enacted their gender in a traditional feminine way, and/or became wives and mothers who furthered the regime’s procreation goals, frequently escaped persecution but not oppression. Nonetheless, even though the Nazis did not criminalize same-sex relations between women and automatically persecute them for their sexual difference, they sometimes used other laws, including gender-neutral sexual laws—such as “morally endangering” a person who was sixteen or younger—to prosecute lesbian, bisexual, and “transvestite” women and incarcerate them in prisons and concentration camps.119 And once inside the camps, lesbianism was prohibited. This meant that women who were caught in same-sex relationships, including those who identified as heterosexual before imprisonment, had to endure harsh penalties.120 During the Second World War, the Nazis’ violence against racial and other “degenerates” intensified, including those identified as members of the LGBQT+ community. In addition to sending many civilian men convicted of Paragraph 175 to die in camps, men charged with same-sex activities in the military were punished. In 1941 Hitler also authorized the “death sentence for such offenses in the SS and police.”121 Although this policy was not widely implemented, the radicalization of policies against same-sex desiring men—combined with earlier policies enacted against members of the LGBQT+ community— underscored the Nazi regime’s efforts to extinguish a group identity, even if not all members of the group. The Nazi destruction of queer ways of life and communities as well as the promotion of a racialized heteronormativity and its consequences, in conjunction with the actual persecution and violence against LGBQT+ folks, was life-destroying, although not always murderous. In essence, the Nazis’ actions led to what Lemkin would call the “destruction of the essential foundations of the life” of the group.

Afro-Germans and Black Soldiers Long-standing anti-Black sentiment in German society—a product of the growth of modern race thinking in the West, colonial discourses

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about African peoples in the German Empire, and racist propaganda about the French West African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland after the First World War—strengthened under Nazi rule. Efforts to combat the racial degeneration of Aryan Germans and create a “Master Race” went beyond colonial measures to prevent the decline of the white race, which was exemplified in Nazi policies toward Black Germans, a group of approximately 2,500–3,000 people composed primarily of Africans and their children, many from the former German colonies of Cameroon and Togo who had settled in Germany during 1884–1914. Beliefs about the inferiority of Black Germans and the need to limit racial-mixing and further marginalize them, both socially and economically, led the Nazis to restrict them from many occupations, higher education, and other “citizenship entitlements.”122 Concerned about miscegenation, the Nazis also covertly and illegally sterilized hundreds of biracial Afro-German children, even though the sterilization law was supposed to be limited to “individuals deemed to suffer from hereditary diseases or defects.”123 The majority of these children were the progeny of white German women and French African soldiers stationed in the Rhineland between 1918 and 1930, and, as such, were conceived of as racially unacceptable and a symbol of racial shame suffered at the hands of occupation forces. The sterilization of Afro-German children, as with the sterilization of other targeted groups, had gendered effects; for boys, it represented emasculation and “an attack on male sexual and procreative potential,” and for girls, it was an attack on their femininity, depriving them of motherhood, which was seen as essential for achieving true womanhood.124 As mentioned previously, Black Germans were also subjected to the Nuremberg Laws, which further stigmatized them. These anti-miscegenation and sterilization policies, along with Nazi racial laws and policies, such as not being allowed to enroll in certain schools, were accompanied by the incarceration of some, but not all, Black Germans in prisons and concentration camps. Nazi global objectives undermined a coherent approach to Black people in Germany, for “[a]s long as there was some hope of recovering the colonies which Germany had lost under the Versailles Treaty, and while representation of the old Colonial Office still had the ear of those close to Hitler, former colonial subjects continued to enjoy patronage of a kind that had protected them during the 1920s.”125 Nonetheless, even though Black Germans were not targeted for mass extermination and had different and inconsistent experiences of inclusion and exclusion under the Third Reich, they suffered under Nazi rule as racial outsiders and alleged threats to the purity of the “Aryan” race.126 Significantly, the “simultaneity and mutual processes of gendering and racialization” informed the lived reality of Black Germans during this time.127 The Nazis’ virulent anti-Black sentiment influenced military policy. When German forces attacked France in the spring of 1940, they captured thousands of colonial soldiers from French West Africa and treated them very differently from their white counterparts. In violation of the Geneva

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Conventions, the Germans massacred approximately 3,000 of them in 1940.128 In subsequent years, many other Black soldiers captured by the Germans, including African American soldiers, were similarly treated; they were executed or forced to engage in slave labor in concentration camps. Some were also subjected to brutal medical experiments.129 Given the centrality of anti-Blackness to the Atlantic slave trade system and European imperialism, the biologization of race and growth of scientific racism and eugenics in the nineteenth century, and the association of Black people with national shame following the First World War, it is not surprising that the Nazis viewed Black people as an inferior “Other.” Perhaps more surprising is how they violated international agreements to murder Black soldiers to promote their racial worldview. * * * The intertwining of gender, race, and sexuality in the emergence of modern race thinking in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—which influenced and was influenced by the logics and practices of European imperialism and biopolitics—contributed to mass violence against colonized racialized “Others” and internal racialized “Others” in Europe. Although it was not inevitable that violence against the racialized “Others” in Europe would be genocidal, the Nazis and Germans perpetrated genocide against Jews and other groups who allegedly threatened the realization of Nazi Germany’s national, racial, heteronormative, reproductive, and political goals.

Notes I am indebted to Naomi Andrews, Marko Dumančić, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey for their valuable feedback on this chapter. 1 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 139. 2 Waitman Wade Beorn, “Understanding the Holocaust in the Context of World War II,” in Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust, eds. Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 83–4. These additional factors are beyond the scope of this chapter. 3 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944; repr., New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 1973), 79. 4 Alfred Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 273. 5 Sheri Rosenberg and Everita Silina, “Genocide by Attrition: Silent and Efficient,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, eds. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 107.

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6 Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” 280. 7 In the mid-1800s the descendants of European colonists also perpetrated genocidal violence against Native Americans in California as they expanded the nation’s borders, leading to their near extermination. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 346. 8 Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” and Robert K. Hitchcock and Thomas E. Kuperski, “Genocides of Indigenous Peoples,” in The Historiography of Genocide, 273–95, 577–617, respectively; Elazar Barkin, “Genocides of Indigenous Peoples,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, eds. Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117–39; Andrea Smith, “The Gendered Logics of Indigenous Genocide,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 17–35; Karen Stote, “The Coercive Sterilization of Aboriginal Women in Canada,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36, no. 3 (2012): 117–50; Myla Vincenti Carpio, “The Lost Generation: Indian Women and Sterilization Abuse,” Social Justice 31, no. 4 (2004): 40–53; Leonardo Pegoraro, “Second-Rate Victims: The Forced Sterilization of Indigenous Peoples in the USA and Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 161–73. For the United Nations definition of genocide, see Appendix I. 9 Nicole Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a Criminology of Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 57; and Isabel Hull, “Military Culture and the Production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelminian Germany,” in The Specter of Genocide, eds. Gellately and Kiernan, 150, respectively. 10 Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes, 60. 11 Elizabeth Baer, “A Reconsideration of Sexual Violence in German Colonial and Nazi Ideology and Its Representation in Holocaust Texts,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture, eds. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 654. 12 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Women and the Herero Genocide,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, 37, 49. 13 Reinhart Kössler, “From Genocide to Holocaust? Structural Parallels and Discursive Continuities,” Africa Spectrum 40, no. 2 (2005): 313–14. 14 David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Dominick Schaller, “Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa,” in Centuries of Genocide, eds. Samuel Totten and William Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1997): 89–114; Rafter, The Crime of All Crimes, 54–79. 15 Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society, ed. Dirk Moses (New York

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and Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 56; Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35 (2005): 450. 16 Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz,” 438–9. For more on German concerns about “race-mixing,” see Helmut Walser Smith, “The Talk of Genocide, the Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Notes on Debates in the German Reichstag Concerning Southwest Africa, 1904-14,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, eds. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 17 Dirk Moses, “Colonialism,” in Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, eds. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 70. 18 Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” 54, 67. 19 Jürgen Zimmerer, “Annihilation in Africa: The ‘Race War’ in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) and Its Significance for a Global History of Genocide,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 37 (2005): 51–7. 20 Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz,” 430, 451–7. 21 Elizabeth Baer, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017); Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz,” 438, 457. For more on connections, see Shelley Baranowski, “Nazi Colonialism and the Holocaust: Inseparable Connections,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27, no. 1 (2013): 58–62. 22 Much of this critique is focused on the supposed “lack of evidence for personal and structural continuities between Windhoek and Auschwitz” and/ or the “false understanding” of policies and practices in German Southwest Africa and in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, upon which these scholarly comparisons are based. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History 42, no. 2 (2009): 284; Jonas Kreienbaum, A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900-1908 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019). 23 For a good overview of the debates, see Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 339–62. 24 Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 4; William Gallois, “Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Algeria,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 1 (2013): 69–88. 25 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 280–1. 26 J. P. Daughton, In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021).   27 Michelle Gordon, “Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 21, no. 4 (2015): 276, 281. 28 Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Reflections on the Disputable Path,” 284.

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29 Aimé Césaire, A Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Paris: Éditions Réclame, 1950; New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 13. Citations refer to the Monthly Review Press edition. 30 Ibid., 20, 14. 31 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 10th ed. (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968), 155. 32 Ibid., 221; Richard King and Dan Stone, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Empire (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 2–3. 33 Dan Stone, “Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies,” New Formations 71 (Spring 2011): 53. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” 67. 36 King and Stone, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 8. 37 Phillip Spencer, “Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism and the Problem of Genocide, Past and Present,” History 98, no. 4 (2013): 609; Moses, “Colonialism,” 73. 38 Spencer, “Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism and the Problem of Genocide,” 609. 39 Nazi leaders planned for “serial genocides.” This included eliminating Poland as a nation and culture, and enslaving, murdering, and deporting millions of Poles to Siberia. It also entailed killing approximately 30 million Slavic peoples in the Soviet Union via mass starvation and other murderous methods. See Robert Gellately, “The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide,” in The Specter of Genocide, eds. Gellately and Kiernan, 241–63. 40 Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 19. 41 Ibid., 17, 25. 42 Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 208, and 190. Block explains how this early social construction of Black men as sexual predators, in conjunction with “the growing de emphasis on white men as rapists” in the nineteenth century, contributed to a “widespread fear” of Black men’s alleged hypersexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (166). 43 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 25. While the rape of enslaved women has been studied extensively, the sexual violence committed against enslaved men has only recently become a focus of study. For example, see Thomas Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). 44 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 27. 45 Staffan Müller Wille, “Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World,” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900, eds. Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla Peterson (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 191–209.

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46 Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 24. 47 Nicholas Hudson, “The ‘Hottentot Venus,’ Sexuality, and the Changing Aesthetics of Race, 1650–1850,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41, no. 1 (2008): 21. 48 Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 148. 49 Ibid., 149. 50 Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2012), 121, 141. 51 Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness, 149, 223-4. 52 Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, eds. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 27. 53 Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness, 176. 54 Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race, and Nation,” 38. 55 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 90, 99. 56 It should be noted that Social Darwinism was a product not only of Darwin’s ideas but also those of T. R. Malthus, Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, and Francis Galton. Gregory Claeys, “The ‘Survival of the Fittest’ and the Origins of Social Darwinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 2 (2000): 223–40. 57 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, 31. 58 Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “AHR Roundtable: Gender and the Politics of Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 123, no. 4 (2018): 1214. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 1217. 61 Although scientific racism and negative eugenics largely ceased to have scholarly credibility in the second half of the twentieth century after their murderous use by the Nazis, the biologization of race still has popular currency, and science is still mobilized to propagate racist ideas. 62 Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 4. 63 Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 60. Also see Timothy Keegan, “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 459–77. 64 See Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000);

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David M. Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society: ‘Black Perils’ in Kenya, c. 1907-1930,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 38, no. 1 (2010): 47–74. For anti-colonial voices against interracial unions that posited a similar discourse about white European male settlers, see Carina Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 78–110. 65 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 71. 66 Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (1984): 648–76. 67 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 25. 68 Ibid., 139. 69 Siobhan Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (1994): 247. 70 Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 15, 29. 71 Ibid.; Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2012); Michael Burleigh, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136–98; Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 63–80. 72 Gisela Bock, “Antinatalism, Maternity and Paternity in National Socialist Racism,” in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, eds. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 235. 73 Ibid., 236. 74 Beverley Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule (Surrey: Grosvenor House Publishing, 2015), 26. 75 Bock, “Antinatalism,” 237. 76 Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” 53–4. 77 Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 81. 78 Ina R. Friedman, ed., The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 67–76. Also, in 1943 the Nazis banned births in many of the ghettos of occupied Europe; as a result, pregnant Jewish women were compelled to get abortions or face execution, usually including other members of their family (Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse, 80–1). 79 Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse, 32. 80 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 66.

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81 Ibid., 76. 82 Ibid., 97–8. 83 Dagmar Herzog, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 46. 84 Ian Hancock, “Romanies and the Holocaust,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 391–2. 85 Ibid., 385; Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 23–4. 86 Hancock, “Romanies and the Holocaust,” 383–4. 87 Ibid., 383. 88 Sybil Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, eds. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 217. 89 Ibid., 215. 90 Hancock, “Romanies and the Holocaust,” 389. 91 For more on Romanies and the Holocaust, see David Crowe and John Kolsti, eds., The Gypsies of Eastern Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991); Janos Barsony and Agnes Daroczi, Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma during the Holocaust (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008). 92 Sybil Milton, “Hidden Lives: Sinti and Roma Women,” in Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, eds. Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 58–9. 93 Michelle Kelso, “No Shelter to Cry In: Romani Girls and Responsibility during the Holocaust,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, 142, 145; idem, “Romani Women and the Holocaust: Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Romanian-Controlled Transnistria,” in Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival, and Resistance, eds. JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz and Donna Gosbee (Toronto, ON: Women’s Press, 2016), 62. For more on sexual violence, see Otto Rosenberg, A Gypsy in Auschwitz, trans. Helmut Bögler (London: London House, 1999), 79, 120; Tony Sonnemann, Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), 46; Paul Polansky, Black Silence: The Lety Survivors (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2011), 83, 110, 122, 246; Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Gypsies Under the Swastika (Hatfield: University Of Hertfordshire Press, 2009), 106. For more personal accounts, see Walter Winter, Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz, trans. Struan Robertson (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004; Anton Fojn’s narrative in The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of NonJews Persecuted by the Nazis, 11–23. 94 Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse, 160.

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95 Kelso, “No Shelter to Cry In,” 146–54. 96 Bock, “Antinatalism,” 239; Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse, 131. 97 Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse, 130–1; Milton, “Hidden Lives,” 65; Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), 480–1. 98 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (New York: Holt, 1986), 14. 99 Stefan Dudink, “Homosexuality, Race, and the Rhetoric of Nationalism,” History of the Present 1, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 259–64, here 261. 100 Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body,” 253. 101 Dudink, “Homosexuality,” 261. 102 Ibid., 260. 103 George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 151. 104 Harry Oosterhuis, “Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 2 (1997): 194. 105 Dudink, “Homosexuality,” 27. 106 In Nazi Germany, the term “transvestite” was used to refer to cross-dressing individuals as well as those who identified as male or female instead of the gender assigned to them at birth. Some women and men identified as gay and lesbian were actually bisexual, but this term was not commonly used, and some of those identified as gay, lesbian, or transvestite were intersexed. 107 Stefan Micheler, “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of SameSex Desiring Men under National Socialism,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 106. 108 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 158. For more on the Männerbund, see Oosterhuis, “Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany,” 196–202. 109 Gunter Grau, Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933-45 (Chicago: Fitzborn Dearborn Publishers, 1995), 259. 110 Jürgen Lemke, Gay Voices from East Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 19; Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, trans. David Fernbach (Boston, MA: Alyson Books, 1994); Gad Beck, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, trans. Allison Brown (Madison: University of Wisconsin Pres, 2000); Pierre Seel, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Basic Books, 2011). For secondary sources, see already existing citations and Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Herzog, 256–90; Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, eds. Gellately and Stoltzfus, 233–55; Giles, “‘The Most Unkindest Cut of All’: Castration, Homosexuality

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and Nazi Justice,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 41–61; Erik Jensen, “The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the Memory of Nazi Persecution,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1 & 2 (2002): 319–49; Dagmar Herzog, “Sexual Violence against Men: Torture at Flossenbürg,” in Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2012), 29–44; Samuel Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 1 (2017): 30–59; William Spurlin, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality Under National Socialism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008). 111 Plant, The Pink Triangle. 112 Huneke, “The Duplicity of Tolerance,” 35. 113 Claudia Schoppmann, “National Socialist Policies towards Female Homosexuality,” in Gender Relations in German History, eds. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 182. For experiences of queer women under the Nazi regime, see idem, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich, trans. Allison Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 114 Laurie Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943,” American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1177–8. 115 Javier Samper Vendrell, “The Case of a German-Jewish Lesbian Woman: Martha Mosse and the Danger of Standing Out,” German Studies Review 41, no. 2 (2018): 335–53. 116 Ibid., 337; Helm, Ravensbrück, 92. 117 Spurlin, Lost Intimacies, 45. 118 Schoppmann, “National Socialist Policies,” 180; R. Amy Elman, “Lesbians and the Holocaust,” in Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, vol. XXII, ed. Esther Fuchs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), 9–17. 119 Marhoefer, “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State,” 1177; Helm, Ravensbrück, 93. 120 Cathy Gelbin, “Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar,” Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 183; Helm, Ravensbrück, 94. 121 Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic,” 249. 122 Robert Kesting, “Blacks under the Swastika: A Research Note,” The Journal of Negro History 83, no. 1 (1998): 90–1. 123 Campt, Other Germans, 68 124 Ibid., 107. 125 Eve Rosenhaft, “Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the ‘Racial State,’” History Workshop Journal 72 (2011): 165. 126 Martha Stark, “My Thirteen Years under Nazi Rule,” in Remapping Black Germany: New Perspectives on Afro-German History, Politics, and Culture,

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ed. Sara Lennox (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 171– 202; Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany Paperback (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001); Theodor Michael, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, trans. Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). 127 Campt, Other Germans, 111. 128 Rafael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of European Blacks, Africans and African Americans during the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2002); Firpo Carr, Germany’s Black Holocaust: 1890-1945: Details Never Before Revealed (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). 129 Robert Kesting, “Forgotten Victims: Blacks in the Holocaust,” The Journal of Negro History 77, no. 1 (1992): 30–6.

2 Gender and the Holocaust Male and Female Experiences of Auschwitz Lisa Pine

Introduction The lens of gender has been applied comparatively recently both to the Holocaust, in particular, and to genocide studies, more widely. Research on gender and genocide has expanded considerably over recent years.1 Gender-based distinctions provide a useful analytical tool in the discussion of genocides. As Adam Jones has noted, the perspective of gender allows us to define how men and women are targeted during episodes of genocidal violence.2 Moreover, Stephen Haynes, writing on “ordinary masculinity” in Chapter 8 of this book, underlines how a greater recognition of the gendered character of male experiences can enhance our understanding of the Holocaust. Haynes’s chapter is concerned with perpetrators, but a discussion of male attributes in Holocaust victims and the behavioral norms expected of Holocaust victims as men is also highly significant. Much of the writing on gender to date has been on women and their experiences. This chapter examines both male and female experiences, and both as particular to their gender, rather than as universal experiences. Femininity and masculinity are about the social construction of particular kinds of identities and behavioral expectations. This chapter explores how this is related to women and men during the extreme and extraordinary circumstances of the Holocaust. To be sure, gender is just one of several

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factors that had a bearing on experiences and reactions—nationality, class, and degree of religious observance also shaped individuals and their circumstances and responses during the Holocaust. However, gender is the one under discussion here. This chapter begins with an analysis of the main developments in the historiography of the Holocaust in relation to gender. This is an important starting point, as the implications and knowledge from this research are very significant to our understanding of the Holocaust. Having established the parameters of the existing research in this area of scholarship, this chapter turns to a discussion of the concepts of gender and gendered expectations in relation to Holocaust victims. The social construction of male and female identities and roles was important in the history of the Holocaust. This chapter examines, first, the structural sources of gender difference in relation to Nazi persecution before the war and then the distinctions between the ways in which Jewish men and women experienced the Holocaust, using significant examples from both male and female survivors’ accounts to underline and illustrate the key points. In particular, it discusses genderrelated experiences at Auschwitz. It considers both male behavior that reflected expected gender norms, such as egotism, strength, and identity through work, and male behavior that deviated from these expectations, such as social bonding to enhance chances of survival. It then examines female behavior that met with traditional gender norms, such as adaptation and coping mechanisms and social bonding among female victims. Lastly, it moves to a consideration of female behavior that differed from the expected female type. While this is an uncomfortable topic, it is nevertheless an important one. The literature has tended to overlook the desperate actions undertaken by Holocaust victims in order to survive under the appalling conditions in which they found themselves. But this does not mean that they did not occur. The purpose of such discussion is not to judge but to offer a more complete picture of Holocaust experiences and to try to establish a greater historical understanding of the subject.

Historiographical Developments Raul Hilberg argued that “the road to annihilation was marked by events that specifically affected men as men and women as women.”3 Yet, the subject of gender was a relative newcomer in the wider field of Holocaust studies. Gender studies of the Holocaust emerged as a response to existing research and available sources within both the broader fields of Holocaust studies and women’s studies. The term “gender” refers to the social and cultural construction of the roles of men and women in society. The application of a gendered perspective to comprehend the Holocaust has become an important development in the area of Holocaust studies since the 1980s.

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Yehuda Bauer has suggested that “the problems facing women as women and men as men have a special poignancy in an extreme situation such as the Holocaust.”4 Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman have emphasized that rather than distracting us from the Nazi brutality against all Jews, a gendered approach enhances our understanding of it “by locating it in the specificity of individual experiences.”5 It expands our knowledge base and provides a greater and more differentiated understanding of the experiences of Holocaust victims. As Myrna Goldenberg has argued, a separate examination of “the lives of women and of men” allows us “to determine the differences and the similarities in the way they were treated as well as the way they responded.”6 The situations faced by Jewish men and women under Nazi persecution meant that some aspects of their traditional gender roles were increased, while others were decreased. As Anna Reading has suggested, some “aspects of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ and their respective cultural scaffolding were disarticulated and dismantled.”7 In addition, certain aspects of life and experiences have been taboo subjects in the writing on the Holocaust. Joan Ringelheim has referred to the “sexual” vulnerability of women: sexual humiliation, rape, sexual exchange, pregnancy, abortion, and vulnerability through their children. Women expressed feelings of “sexual vulnerability as women, not only about mortal danger as Jews.”8 These were concerns that men either described differently or did not describe at all. Stories about sexual abuse are infrequently told, as Ringelheim has explained: “Some think it inappropriate to talk about these matters; discussions about sexuality desecrate the memories of the dead, or the living, or the Holocaust itself. For others, it is simply too difficult and painful. Still others think it may be a trivial issue.”9 Moreover, as Anna Hardman has noted, the tendency in historical writing has been to define Jewish women “with a very particular notion of what constitutes female behavior”— as mothers, sisters, and nurturers.10 Testimonies that homogenize women’s experiences and identities can be misleading.11 Sara Horowitz challenges the type of interpretation that “erases the actual experiences of women and, to an extent, domesticates the events of the Holocaust.”12 Zoë Waxman argues that assumptions that women only had motherly and caregiving roles “obscure the diversity of women’s Holocaust experiences.”13 She states that “the collectivization of Holocaust memory has led to a homogenization of Holocaust comprehension that eschews difficult testimony or stories that fall outside accepted narratives.”14 Pascale Bos, too, has examined the place of gender in the study of Holocaust victims and survivors.15 She has called for a more critical approach to the evidence of gender distinctions in Holocaust narratives, emphasizing the discursive construction of the experience, memory, and representation of the past. Indeed, Bos maintains that “precisely in acknowledging (and highlighting) the elements of choice and subversive power in the creation of (gendered) personal narratives we can conceive of survivors’ agency in compelling new ways.”16 The lens of gender enables

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readers to consider what is distinctive between the ways in which women and men have selected and constructed their narratives. As Bos argues, “Men and women experience, remember, and recount events differently,” because of their socialization.17 For example, in her testimony, Giuliana Tedeschi uses knitting, a traditionally feminine activity, as a metaphor to describe the significance of female bonding at Auschwitz.18 This mode of narration is particular to a female voice. It is indicative of how women not only experienced their imprisonment differently than men but also remembered and expressed their experiences in ways that were prompted by their gender. As Baer and Goldenberg have noted, “gender-based experience influenced the way women survivors interpreted and transmitted their experiences.”19 This is also true about men’s writings if we analyze them through the lens of gender, rather than simply accepting them as “universal.” Petra Schweitzer rightly shows the differences between writing among men and women and describes their testimonies “as sites for specifically gendered representation.”20

Gendered Responses to Nazi Persecution before 1939 In the early twentieth century, the dynamic of most Jewish families in Western Europe corresponded to the bourgeois model, in which the men were the breadwinners and the women were responsible for the spiritual essence and harmony of the family.21 Their roles and responsibilities involved them in different experiences, social environments, and networks, which gave them different knowledge and skills with which to face the Nazi persecution and subsequently, the “Final Solution.” Their roles changed and their relationships transformed as living conditions for Jewish people in Germany deteriorated throughout the 1930s.22 As Jewish shops and businesses were closed down and Jewish men became unemployed, they were no longer in the position to make all the important decisions. Women had to both run their households and keep up the morale of their family members. They comforted their husbands and children, who faced abuse and hostility outside the household.23 They tried to maintain a semblance of normality in the home at a time of growing uncertainty and persecution outside the home. Many also undertook voluntary work for Jewish women’s organizations.24 Jewish women were generally less assimilated into German society than Jewish men, who had non-Jewish business and professional contacts. They took refuge and solace in their familial duties such as cooking. They tried to retain their composure for the sake of their children.25A gendered analysis of the desire to emigrate highlights distinctions between men’s and women’s priorities and perceptions. Women were generally more keen than men to

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leave Germany, being “less status-conscious, less money-oriented . . . more confident of their ability to flourish on new turf,” but in practice, as Marion Kaplan states, “fewer women than men left Germany,” often because they ultimately chose to stay behind with elderly parents.26 In terms of anticipatory reactions to the Nazi regime, most Jews, especially at first, believed that the Germans were “civilized” and, therefore, honoring traditional norms would not harm women and children. (The reality, however, turned out to be exactly the opposite.) Hence, they formulated plans to save the men, whom they believed to be the most endangered. Jewish families generally decided that the men should have priority in their plans for emigration, hiding, or escape. Even in everyday activities, such as queuing for bread, expectations of German behavior dictated that women should go out because Jewish men, especially those in traditional garb, were easy to identify and harass. Their beards, sidelocks, and clothing made Orthodox Jewish men identifiable as such, and they were subjected to abuse because of them. Many Jewish families believed that it was safer for the women to go out than for the men. How did Jewish men and women differ in their responses to Nazi persecution? Maddy Carey has highlighted the importance of understanding “the normative Jewish identities of this period” in relation to gender and the ways in which these were enacted.27 An analysis of testimonies demonstrates significant differences in the impact of Nazi persecution upon men and women. Much of the testimony given by men initially focused on feelings of being betrayed by their fatherland. Edwin Landau recalls his feelings on the day of the national boycott of Jewish shops and businesses on April 1, 1933: I was ashamed that I had once belonged to this people. I was ashamed of the trust I had given to so many who now revealed themselves as my enemies. . . . And when, as always, I consecrated the Sabbath . . . [my] composure was at an end. The whole weight of the day’s experiences struck me, and I broke down, just barely stammering the last words. . . . This was my leave-taking from everything German, my inner separation from what had been my fatherland—a burial.28 This sense of betrayal and the feelings brought about by the situation in which he found himself were closely connected to gendered notions of both citizenship and men’s place in the public sphere. In contrast, the testimony of women often highlighted their unselfish feelings of concern and worry for the welfare of their children and husbands, particularly in cases of physical separation. As Hilberg has noted, this was an era in which “the newly isolated community consisted of men without power and women without support.”29 Both men and women recounted feelings of despair at the worsening situation and its impact upon their children, in particular. Men who lost their businesses and jobs, their financial security, and their ability to provide for their families experienced a corresponding

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loss in their status and dignity. They were unable to fulfill their traditional roles and became demoralized and depressed. On a psychological level, too, men felt damaged in their capacity to act as men, specifically as protectors of their wives and children. They could not fulfill this traditional gender role, and this was an assault upon their sense of manhood and their identity. Women shouldered an increased physical workload and psychological duty to compensate for these changes. They did not blame the men, but tried to help them. Women’s testimonies have tended to relate in more detail the impact of the physical destruction of their homes. Margaret Czellitzer described the state of her house when she returned to it after the “Night of the Broken Glass” (November 9–10, 1938): I found my radio broken at the garden door, my lovely china smashed all over the kitchen floor, the beds overturned, the mattresses cut into pieces, the paintings as well as all the other valuables stolen. . . . We were all heartbroken, but especially myself, who had discovered . . . that lovely place and built our little house according to my own ideas.30 Of course, the construction and development of the concentration camp system had begun shortly after the Nazi regime came to power.31 After the war began, the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews escalated rapidly, culminating in the construction of death camps in Poland where the “Final Solution” was carried out. The following sections of this chapter discuss the privations and experiences of male and female internees at Auschwitz, in particular.

Men at Auschwitz: Experiences and Behavior32 The terrible privations and circumstances of internment at Auschwitz included thirst and hunger, extremes of temperature, arduous physical labor, overcrowding, inadequate food and foul water, lengthy roll calls, exhaustion, illness, injury, and the constant fear of “selection” for the gas chambers. In terms of men’s behavior, gendered expectations were centered on strength and hardness, toughness, and determination.33 Signs of weakness fell short of normative behavior for men. Victor Frankl states that “it was necessary . . . to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum.”34 Men did not wish to appear cowardly or weak. As a result of different social constructions of gender, men were less likely to discuss emotions or admit to weakness or the need for another person with whom to share their burden. Lagerway notes that “male survivors framed their narratives in order and coherence, and often de-emphasized emotions” and that they told of “personal isolation, personal survival at any cost, ruthless competition.”35 It appears that, because men had been socialized into being independent and autonomous, these characteristics were the

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ones most often portrayed in their narratives. Male and female survivor accounts also represent work as a means of survival very differently. Pride in work and its impact on their identities are much more common in male writings. By contrast, female accounts have tended to be much less specific about work and how it was conducted. This suggests that work was more central to men’s experiences, in line with contemporaneous gendered norms. While “food talk” among women at Auschwitz has been much written about (see the section “Women at Auschwitz: Experiences and Behavior”), Victor Frankl also recounts men engaging in food talk. He states that the majority of prisoners, when they were working near each other and were not closely watched by guards, “would immediately start discussing food,” asking each other about their favorite dishes. Frankl writes: “Then they would exchange recipes and plan the menu for the day when they would have a reunion—the day in a distant future when they would be liberated and return home.”36 Male memoirs have tended to underplay bonds and relationships and to emphasize instead examples of individual valor, strength, or autonomy. Bruno Bettelheim has explained his view on the subject of survival in the camps as follows: Survival in the camps—this cannot be stressed enough—depended foremost on luck. . . . While nothing one could do could assure survival, and while chances for it at best were extremely slim, one could increase them through correctly assessing one’s situation and taking advantage of opportunities; in short, through acting independently and with courage, decision, and conviction, all of which depended on the measure of autonomy one had managed to retain.37 Dutch survivor Louis de Wijze underlined the need for care of the self in his memoirs as well: “Everyone lives for himself. Our one and all-encompassing credo is: Survive! Between the outer limits of life and death, previous values and norms lose their meaning, and our spiritual baggage gradually erodes. The only norm that counts is ‘I.’”38 It is important to note and add, however, that references to close relationships do appear in male narratives, and there are instances of male writing that show men behaving in ways that differed from expected male gender norms. Richard Glazar, who survived the Treblinka death camp, recalls: My friend Karl Unger and I were always together. We were like twins. In this camp you could not survive an hour without someone supporting you and vice versa. We knew that we were destined to die. . . . No individual could make it alone. . . . I and my friend Karl survived because

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we supported each other constantly. We divided absolutely everything, even a small piece of bread.39 To be sure, such support groups in themselves could not avert death, but where they existed they were, in some ways, life-promoting, as Glazar’s experience shows. Primo Levi provides another example of this, telling of an Italian civilian worker, Lorenzo, who brought Levi “a piece of his bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months.”40 Without Lorenzo, Levi believes that he would not have survived Auschwitz. He states that this was: not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage. . . . Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.41 He later describes a “tight bond of alliance” with Alberto, another prisoner.42 Hence, social bonding did apply to male experiences, not only to female ones. Furthermore, the testimonies of other male survivors underline the importance of the father-son relationship to survival, when fathers and sons had managed to avoid separation and stay together. Henry Wermuth recalls: “The presence of my father was, without a doubt, a major factor in my survival; but it also meant that I did not have, nor was I in need of, any other social contacts.”43 This suggests that the father-son relationship was so strong and significant that it completely replaced the necessity for other bonds. On the death march from Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel recalls his momentary desire to fall out of line, to the edge of the road, and die: “My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. . . . He was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit’s end. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support.”44 Wiesel shows here the significance of his relationship with his father and their mutual support. The death marches have been described in many memoirs and testimonies as driving Holocaust victims to increasingly desperate behavior. Hans Winterfeld recalls the death march from Auschwitz: Normally, one could talk to the other prisoners, but when food was distributed, they began to look and act like lunatics: their eyes stared rigidly at the ladle or at the arm that distributed the bread. When they received their ration, they constantly watched other prisoners to check that nobody had been given more. It was completely irrelevant what kind

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of person it was: uneducated and primitive, or educated and intellectually superior. I often wondered how cultivated human beings could behave like animals.45 Indeed, Levi comments too on the aim of the Nazi camps to “reduce us to beasts.” But, he writes, “we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.”46 His desire to survive was thus underpinned by his desire to bear witness. He was determined to defend his strength and dignity for this purpose. As Eva Kolinsky has noted, many other survivors defined their own personal code of behavior in a bid to maintain a sense of their own self-value.47 In Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, for example, Steinlauf insisted on washing, even though washing did not get him clean, because it enabled him to keep his dignity and demonstrated his refusal to become a beast, thus undermining German goals. This type of behavior is also evident in the writings of female survivors.

Women at Auschwitz: Experiences and Behavior Female prisoners at Auschwitz had to deal with a number of problems that affected them specifically as women. Their testimonies highlight the trauma of losing their sense of their physical selves. One significant aspect of this was the SS camp ritual of shaving the inmates on their arrival. Having their heads shaved was a much more traumatic and degrading experience for women than for men. While all prisoners were deeply shamed by this measure, for women this was a blow to their feelings of femininity and to their sexual identity. Livia Bitton-Jackson writes of newly arrived female prisoners having their hair shaved from their heads, under their arms, and in the pubic area: “The shaving of hair has a startling effect. The absence of hair transforms individual women into like bodies. Indistinguishable. . . . We become a monolithic mass.”48 Rena Gelissen describes the humiliation of being “naked in front of strangers” and of being shaved by male prisoners: “They shear our heads, arms; even our pubic hair is discarded just as quickly and cruelly as the rest of the hair on our bodies.”49 Another survivor, Isabelle Choko, in her memoir, also relates that, at Auschwitz, “at the precise moment my head was shaved, I ceased to exist as a human being.”50 Rose Meth, who was deported to Auschwitz in August 1943, gives a similar account of her arrival: “I can’t begin to describe the shock and the humiliation. We were sheltered children. They made us undress completely in front of the Nazi soldiers. We wanted to die. They shaved our heads. They shaved all our hair, everywhere. We were given numbers.”51 The tattooing of their camp numbers was described by survivor Eva Schloss as “part of the process intended to strip me of my pride and identity.

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When I was marched away from Auschwitz railway station, I left the girlish Eva Geiringer and her dreams, behind.”52 Olga Lengyel describes the degrading and humiliating treatment of female inmates on their arrival, having to undress and undergo physical examinations, before being allowed to dress in camp clothes. Gelissen mentions the gynecological examination for new female prisoners as well. These gynecological examinations were invasive and humiliating; they were painful and traumatic experiences recounted with much horror by female survivors. The distribution of random and ill-fitting clothes had a significant impact on women as new camp inmates. Their individuality and their sense of feminine identity were entirely removed by all of these actions. Gelissen recounts her feelings of despair when she noticed her “lovely white boots with their red trim” being worn by an SS woman.53 Lengyel describes the “bizarre rags that were handed out for underwear” that were “not white or any other color, but worn out pieces of coarse dusting cloth.”54 In addition, tattered dresses were randomly distributed with no regard to size. In terms of the emotions these circumstances generated, Lengyel states: “In spite of the tragedy of our situation, we could not help but laugh as we saw others so ridiculously outfitted. After a while, it was a struggle to overcome the disgust we felt for our companions, and for ourselves.”55 A similar reaction to their “grey, sack-like dresses” is described by Bitton-Jackson, as she compares herself after her arrival at Auschwitz with inmates who had been there longer: The strange creatures we saw as we entered the camp, the shaven, greycloaked bunch who ran to the barbed wire to stare at us, we are them! We look exactly like them. Same bodies, same dresses, same blank stares. They, too, must have arrived from home recently. They, too, were ripe women and young girls, bewildered and bruised. They too longed for dignity and compassion. And they, too, were transformed into figures of contempt instead.56 After the initial shock and horror engendered by their new appearance, some women attempted to ameliorate their outfits. In the space of twenty-four hours, they adjusted their ill-fitting garments to their bodies and sewed up the holes, “using needles made out of wooden splinters and threads pulled out of the one blanket allocated to them.”57 Isabelle Choko describes feeling a need to hide her shaved head and tie up her dress, which was much too large: “I ripped a piece from the bottom of my pale pink shirt to tie around my head like a turban and another piece to roll into a belt. My mother helped me since I had no mirror. . . . Other women, too, were trying to ‘look human’ again.”58 Menstruation became a significant biological problem that women had to face in Auschwitz. Bitton-Jackson describes a girl in front of her at roll call: “the blood simply flows down her legs.”59 When they menstruated, women

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and girls had no way of stopping the flow of blood, which was extremely difficult and humiliating. Gelissen recalls her first period at Auschwitz: “I scour the ground for anything that might help me hinder the flow. There is nothing.”60 Over time, in the abnormal circumstances in which they were living, women stopped menstruating. While this removed the problem of humiliation, the cessation of menstruation created other concerns for many women. Some felt a loss of their identity as women, while others feared they would never be able to have children. Lengyel attributes the ceasing of menstruation partly to “the constant anguish under which we lived,” but she also suggests a “mysterious powder” or “substance” mixed “into all the food given to” the inmates.61 Gelissen writes similarly that “most of the girls and women in camp” lost their periods.62 Female inmates specifically faced these biological and psychological issues relating to menstruation and its cessation.63 In addition, some girls and women were subjected to appalling violence, as well as sexual abuse and violations.64 In her desperation for some string to use as shoelaces, Gisella Perl hoped to exchange her bread ration for a piece of string from a Polish male prisoner: I stopped beside him, held out my bread and asked him, begged him to give me a piece of string in exchange for it. He looked me over from head to foot, carefully, then grabbed me by the shoulder and hissed in my ear: “I don’t want your bread. . . . You can keep your bread. . . . I will give you a piece of string but first I want you . . . you . . .” For a second I didn’t understand what he meant. . . . His hand, filthy with the human excrement he was working in, reached out for my womanhood, rudely, insistently. The next moment I was running, running away from that man, away from the indignity that had been inflicted on me, forgetting about the string, about the shoes, about everything but the sudden realization of how deeply I had sunk.65 After this shameful experience, she was determined to maintain her dignity in the face of every humiliation, every torture. Women’s vulnerability, their fear of rape, and their reactions to humiliation are amply evident in the narratives of female survivors. For example, the fear of rape and the theme of humiliation run through the account of Judith Magyar Isaacson, a Hungarian Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1944.66 Schloss too writes: “It seems hard to believe that the German SS guards would take a sexual interest in the starving, dirty, ragged women they were ruling over—but some of them did.”67 Hence, while rape was not official policy because Nazi racial laws prohibited German sexual relations with Jewish women, there is evidence that at least some German guards and others, including Kapos (prisoner-supervisors) and other prisoners, raped Jewish women. Women and young girls were subjected to traumatic sexual abuse and violations.

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In Liana Millu’s first narrative in Smoke over Birkenau, a young inmate, Lili, was the victim of the cruelty of her Kapo, Mia, whose “frustration and impatience” turned to anger if her boyfriend was late or failed to turn up: “A violent shove sent my head slamming against the iron bar.”68 This was commonplace behavior on the part of the Kapo. Lili’s position was invidious and fraught with tension. She was a pretty, young, and gracious girl, and because of this, she was favored by the Kapo, who gave her good work— sewing. However, Lili was in a very dangerous situation, as Mia’s boyfriend liked her. On one occasion, Mia’s boyfriend, who had drunk too much, began overtly flirting with Lili and kissing her, “his lips brushing her neck.” This proved catastrophic for Lili, as Mia was furious and savagely attacked her, inflicting terrible injuries.69 She called Lili “a whore” and subsequently ensured that she was selected for the gas chambers.70 In another of Millu’s narratives, Zina, accused of being “a whore,” was violently attacked by an old camp guard: “Raising his club, he began beating Zina furiously on the chest and shoulders. The blows were so fierce that in her frail state she collapsed instantly. He kept on beating her as she lay there on the ground.”71 Bitton-Jackson describes violence from the moment of her arrival at Auschwitz and numerous episodes of random punishments and beatings.72 Lengyel similarly details the threat of violence from the outset and refers to many occasions on which she and other female inmates were subjected to violence and physical abuse.73 Gelissen’s writing too mentions many incidents of extreme violence and brutality directed against female prisoners.74 Apart from such examples of random punishment and brutality, Lengyel further describes “medical” experimentation on female inmates, including experiments in relation to menstruation, subjection to artificial insemination, injection with sex hormones, sterilization, and gynecological experiments.75 Gelissen’s narrative makes reference to such experiments as well.76 Sterilization experiments on women at Auschwitz took place in Block 10, a place described by Robert Lifton as “quintessential Auschwitz.”77 The notorious Block 10 induced fear and terror in female victims. At Auschwitz, women tried to adjust and adapt to their changing circumstances. They used resourcefulness, homemaking skills, and cleaning in order to establish some modicum of control over themselves and their space. For instance, they tried to clean themselves and to rid themselves of lice. Lengyel recounts how they “passed the single scrubbing brush to one another with a firm determination to resist the dirt and the lice. That was our only way of waging war against the parasites, against our jailers, and against every force that made us victims.”78 Gelissen too writes of how the women engaged in a “ritual cleansing” of lice.79 Furthermore, there was a need for cooperation in extreme circumstances and self-preservation through mutual help, which has been highlighted, in particular, in many female survivor testimonies. At Auschwitz, women used different strategies to cope with their situation, such as the formation of ersatz families and

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“camp sister” relationships, as well as the sharing of recipes, cooking methods, and memories of Sabbath and Festival meals. Millu writes of Gustine, a prisoner at Auschwitz from Holland, who talked about her home, “for hours on end,” as a coping strategy, describing “the fire sparkling in the big blue tiled stove and her mother preparing the snacks for tea, the smell of fresh bread, the most comforting smell in the world, and the butter, the ruby-hued currant marmalade, the gaily colored curtains on the windows. Oh, beloved home, the most cherished place on earth!”80 Gelissen recalls the Sunday morning picnics with cheese Danish pastries that she used to have with her sister Danka: “Around noon we open Mama’s Danishes, still warm from the oven, or maybe the sun kept them warm, and eat them while languishing in the sun. . . . How I miss . . . eating Mama’s homemade sweets.”81 Lengyel too talks of reminiscing and reciting poetry as coping strategies, “to escape the frightful present.”82 Furthermore, Gisella Perl recalls: “Later, as we came to know one another better, we invented games and recited poetry to keep our minds off the sordid present.” Other evenings, Perl describes: We played another game, which spread from block to block until every woman in Auschwitz played it enthusiastically. We called the game “I am a lady”. . . I am a lady—I said one night—a lady doctor in Hungary. It is morning, a beautiful sunny morning and I feel too lazy to work. I ring for my assistant and tell her to send the patients away, for I am not going to my office today. . . . What should I do with myself? Go shopping? Go to the hairdresser? Meet my friends at the café? Maybe I’ll do some shopping. I haven’t had a new dress, a new hat in weeks.83 The references in this game are clearly gender specific to the women’s previous experiences and social construction. Furthermore, kitchen memories reminded women of their former position in their families and communities and reaffirmed their own sense of value. Women used conversation as a distraction from their circumstances and talked about their “old” lives.84 Women’s exchanges with each other reminded them of their strengths as nurturers, homemakers, and cooks. Food preparation was part of the ritual of living in family, social, and community life, as well as Jewish festivals, and it defined the former status of many women. The sharing of recipes and cooking tips was significant for women psychologically, because it indicated a commitment to the future.85 In addition, they fantasized about the future, a time when the war would be over, as a coping strategy.86 These types of themes are common in female survivor testimonies and narratives. Furthermore, by describing the food they once cooked to another inmate, “they shared a familiar experience and connected to another person.”87 Female narratives often describe how inmates shared food with each other. For example, Lili shared a “precious gift” of “some cabbage leaves” with two of her fellow prisoners.88 Gelissen describes clandestinely sharing a packet

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of macaroni, procured from a nearby factory, between a few women in the laundry room: “Dividing the noodles evenly into their waiting bowls, I figure, accurately, that there are five tablespoons for each girl, then pour the hot water on top, making sure everyone gets some. Danka and I are served last. The rest wait until we are all served; then in silent unison we begin to eat the warm, nourishing macaroni.”89 On another occasion, she describes sharing another rare provision: sugar. Rena and Danka agreed to share a bag of sugar they procured with “twenty of our closest girlfriends . . . after everyone is asleep.” Rena carefully levelled off each spoon, “making sure that everyone gets an equal amount.”90 Bitton-Jackson recalls smuggling potatoes and how her mother saved hers in order to use them in place of candles on Friday night: One evening while shoveling snow in the yard, we discover mounds in which potatoes are stored for the winter. We quickly dig them up and, hiding them under our dresses, smuggle enough potatoes into the camp to allow each inmate at least one potato. We wash them in the toilet and eagerly await our bedtime. . . . Noiselessly, with utmost care, so as not to attract the attention of the guard on patrol we bite into the hard, delightful skin of the raw potato. But Mummy saves her potato. “For Sabbath lights’” she says. Friday at sunset Mummy kindles her Sabbath lights in the carved-out potato halves using oil smuggled from the factory and threads from our blankets for wicks.91 This example illustrates not only the resourcefulness of these women but also the determination of Bitton-Jackson’s mother to try to continue her tradition of lighting candles for the Sabbath. She was caught but not punished on this occasion. Bitton-Jackson goes on to relate how they subsequently saved “potatoes for a Hanukkah celebration with lights.” With care and secrecy, they lit “Hannukah oil lamps in carved-out potato halves” and succeeded in kindling the lights for eight nights without being caught.92 Millu writes of maintaining rituals and the celebration of Hannukah as well.93 These attempts by women to uphold religious traditions were valuable coping strategies. Family relationships were of great significance where mothers and daughters, or sisters, could stay together, as illustrated by Gelissen’s account. She was fiercely protective of her sister, Danka, and tried to shield her as much as possible. Rena’s promise, after all, was to protect and look after her sister—indeed, her determination to bring her sister back alive was her raison d’être and motivation for survival: My one great feat in life, my fate, is to survive this thing and return triumphant with my sister to our parents’ house. . . . I will succeed because I have no other choice. Failure does not even occur to me. We may die in the interim—death cannot be avoided here—but even that will not

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dissuade me from my sole purpose in life. Nothing else matters but these four things: be with Danka, be invisible, be alert, be numb.94 She looked after Danka when she had scabies and procured lotion to treat it, and she cared for her sister when she became ill with malaria.95 In Danka, Rena found her “reason and will to live.”96 Gelissen kept up her sister’s spirits when she lost the will to go on and swore to her that if Danka was ever selected for the gas chambers that she would accompany her.97 Ultimately, they both survived. Millu’s writing also notes the strength of feeling between sisters in the camp and that most of them loved each other “with an almost morbid attachment.”98 Moreover, even in ersatz family relationships, such as those of “camp sisters,” social bonding, in groups of two or more, helped women to keep up their struggle to survive. Meth describes her ersatz camp sister: “Estusia and I were like sisters. People never knew that we were not really sisters. As soon as all my real sisters were taken away from me and Estusia saw my condition, she helped me a lot morally. She told me I must be strong and survive.”99 Such surrogate families cared for each other and improved women’s chances of survival. Lucie Adelsberger describes her camp family in which her “daughters” provided her with clothing and food whenever they could. She states that members of such families often put their own lives at risk and that even for those who did not survive “the friendship and love of a camp family eased the horror of their miserable end.”100 This kind of bonding was not exclusive to women, but it appears to have been much more prevalent among women and has been expressed in many testimonies written by women, including those of Isabella Leitner and Charlotte Delbo.101 Female prisoners offered each other support, comfort, and solidarity. Women were able to “transform their habits of raising children or their experience of nurturing into the care of the nonbiological family.”102 As the isolation and separation of families were deliberately imposed by the camp system, the creation of new “families” helped inmates by giving them a system of mutual support and a source of material and psychological strength in place of their real families.103 For example, Tedeschi recounts “a small, warm hand, modest and patient, which held mine in the evening, which pulled up the blankets around my shoulders, while a calm, motherly voice whispered in my ear, ‘Good night, dear—I have a daughter your age!’”104 She goes on to describe how this ersatz mother, Zilly, comforted her when she felt desperate. Such relationships gave prisoners the courage to live a little longer.

Behavior outside Female Gendered Norms There has been a taboo on considering women whose behavior did not match perceived gender norms and expectations that largely reflect a reluctance to deal with a painful and difficult subject. Yet, examples of

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such behavior in female narratives do exist. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller states in her memoirs that “the unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger led to acts of desperation among many who survived; some stole, others lied and schemed. Still others took comfort in intimate relationships that might be considered illicit or misguided in ordinary times. It was not all pure and righteous, but it happened.”105 Gendered norms about expected types of female conduct such as social bonding and nurturing were contradicted by examples of spiteful and hateful behavior. Millu describes how physical hardship and deprivation produced competitive, self-interested behavior—women who were “ready to pummel and trample over the others in order to get in first and grab a good place,”106 Lengyel relates how women, “who formerly would not have taken a hairpin, became utterly hardened thieves and never suffered the slightest feeling of remorse.”107 Millu also refers to inmates stealing food from others: “It’s so awful to sleep with a thief. You can’t ever relax. Just last night she nibbled up a piece of bread someone had left over for the morning. A regular rat!”108 Schloss too states that “if you kept some of your ration to eat later, another starving inmate would usually steal it from you.”109 Gelissen, who shared everything with her sister, was dismayed to see a teenage girl eating a whole lemon without sharing it with her mother, who begged for a bite: “I do not understand the selfishness before me.”110 Bitton-Jackson details an episode when a bed collapsed onto her very weak mother. The other inmates did not care or help as they were awaiting the distribution of food—“They laugh at my alarm. . . . Not one of them pays attention to my frantic pleas.”111 Millu describes the “morbid curiosity” of the women at Birkenau at the selections for the gas chambers. They craned their necks to see “like spectators at a sports match.”112 Such behavior was at variance with gendered norms about women’s conduct. Millu depicts the transformative and destructive effect of Birkenau on the identity and behavior of its prisoners over time. The inmates taunted and abused each other. She writes: “I recoiled in shame from their weary eyes gleaming with malice and their pinched mouths spewing out vulgarities, sick at the sight of what our misery had made of us. . . . Soon I would be a true daughter of the Lager [camp]. . . . I would be no different from the old-timers.”113 Lengyel too states that “it seemed as though the Germans constantly sought to pit us against each other, to make us competitive, spiteful and hateful” and notes how even “the most peaceful souls were occasionally seized with a desire to strangle their neighbors” in the overcrowded conditions in the bunks, through exasperation at their circumstances.114 Lesbianism was a taboo form of behavior and references to it are uncommon in survivor narratives; however, in the context of Auschwitz, sexual identity and behavior that differed from traditional gender norms emerged, and there is some mention of lesbianism. Lengyel distinguishes between “three categories” of lesbians. The first group, who were “lesbians

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by instinct”; the second group who, “because of the abnormal conditions, suffered changes in their sexual viewpoint” and often “yielded under the pressure of necessity”; and the third group, who “discovered their lesbian predilections through an association with corruption.” She goes on to describe lesbian “orgies.”115 In Millu’s book, there is a reference to a “most evil Kapo” with a “black triangle” on her shirt, portrayed as “fat and sturdy.”116 There is an implicit connection drawn between her appearance, lesbianism, and her “evil” character. There is reference to another lesbian Kapo, the “Kapo of the dressmakers renowned for her lesbian predilections.”117 The “heavy, resounding footsteps” of the “formidable” Frau Gotti could be heard every morning as “she came to wake her lover with a long kiss as well as a little snack.” The suggestion here is not only of lesbian stereotyping but also of sexual favors granted for food. Gelissen too details an occasion on which Erika, a Kapo, asked her to spend the night with her, although Gelissen did not understand her meaning: “Erika laughs. ‘You go back to your block. You’re not ready for this.’ She leads me toward the door. ‘Here.’ She slips me an extra portion of bread. I take it quickly, not understanding why she would offer me such a nicety, not comprehending anything that has just happened.”118 The fight for survival also affected women’s sexual conduct. Survivor narratives refer to the granting of sexual favors by some girls and women in exchange for food, other items, or “camp luxuries.” This was commonplace and formed a significant aspect of what women found to be so humiliating and degrading about the camp experience. Lengyel describes an episode when Tadek, a carpenter who came to mend the bunks, was friendly and attentive to her. She describes him as handsome, tall, and smiling. He gave her food but then made it clear that he expected sexual favors in return.119 Some women adopted the survival strategy of flirting, bantering, or acting coy with men and performing sexual favors as a way of gaining extra food or luxuries. The final chapter in Millu’s book tells the story of Lise, who, although married and devoted to her husband, ended up submitting to the foreman’s demands for sexual favors in exchange for food and a harmonica. The story particularly focuses on how Lise grappled with her dilemma and offers an insight into her motivations for making her choice. Lise was upset at the suggestion that she was getting “prettied up” for Sergio, “the foreman with the harmonica.”120 Her distress intensified later on, as she had to decide whether or not to grant him sexual favors. Her dilemma is constructed in terms of a choice between chastity and death. Yet Lise applied different standards to other women. She was not “like those little tarts who for a slice of bread spread themselves out for half the camp.”121 She was “a respectable woman who loved her husband.” In the end, she submitted to Sergio’s demand for sexual favors. Her predicament was that she felt forced into a contradiction: “If I deceive my husband, it’s because I love him.”122 Lise’s capitulation to Sergio’s demands makes a statement about the nature of existence at Auschwitz and the types of choices it might have been

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necessary to make. Sergio had a predatory, callous demeanor and made it clear that he expected sexual favors from Lise in return for allowing her to play his harmonica. He made cruel remarks about Lise’s husband and was physically aggressive toward her, yet ultimately she acquiesced to his sexual demands.123 The impact of the existence of the Puffkommando (brothel) on different women was significant. There was a marked difference of attitude between those women inside the brothel and those outside. On one level, there was the moral stance of rejection of a woman for prostituting herself, yet on another level, there was some jealousy and resentment about the “luxuries” that life in the brothel afforded. References to this type of prostitution are difficult to find, but they do demonstrate behavior that deviated from perceived attitudes and conceptions about the appropriate conduct of women. Indeed, in the historiography of women’s experiences of the Third Reich and the camps in general, brothels have been mentioned only comparatively recently as these fields have developed to encompass them.124 Pregnancies had to be concealed at Auschwitz, because all pregnant women were sent immediately to the gas chamber. Pregnant women hid their condition for as long as possible, for “the camp was no maternity ward.”125 Despite the attempts of German officers to trick women into revealing their pregnancies, Lengyel writes: “Incredible as it may seem, some succeeded in concealing their conditions to the last moment, and the deliveries took place secretly in the barracks.”126 At the infirmary at Auschwitz, as soon as a baby was born, both mother and infant were sent to the gas chambers. Lengyel describes how, to save the lives of the mothers, newborn infants were killed: “And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of us. . . . The only meager consolation is that by these murders we saved the mothers.”127 Gisella Perl, a Jewish doctor, also recounts killing newborn children in order “to save the life of the mother.”128 “It was up to me to save the life of the mothers, if there was no other way, than by destroying the life of their unborn children.” She recalls that the procedure took place “in the dark, always hurried, in the midst of filth and dirt. After the child had been delivered, I quickly bandaged the mother’s abdomen and sent her back to work.” She states: I delivered women pregnant in the eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth month, always in a hurry, always with my five fingers, in the dark, under terrible conditions. No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy these babies. After years and years of medical practice, childbirth was still to me the most beautiful, the greatest miracle of nature. I loved those newborn babies not as a doctor but as a mother and it was again and again my own child whom I killed to save the life of a woman . . . and if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.129

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Conclusion The lens of gender provides a useful tool for interpreting the behavior and experiences of Holocaust victims. Gender is a characteristic of all human experience. Both masculinity and femininity have been socially constructed and shaped by historical circumstances and expectations. Moving away from universal interpretations, both women’s experiences as specifically female and men’s experiences as specifically male are significant to our understanding of the Holocaust. The field of Holocaust studies that was gender-neutral until the 1980s now includes a substantial body of literature on gender. Furthermore, a comparatively recent, yet substantial, output of memoirs and testimonies by female Holocaust survivors has ensured that women’s voices are no longer unheard. These developments in the historiography have meant that scholars are now in a much better position to comprehend the diversity and complexity of the experiences of Holocaust victims. Both male and female survivors state that luck played a large part in their survival. For example, Eva Schloss, with a similar view to that of Bruno Bettelheim, writes: “A large part of my survival was down to pure luck.”130 Emerging gender analyses that include discussions of men as men and of masculinity shed light on the differences in, and similarities of, male and female Holocaust experiences. For example, men’s traditional role as protectors of women and children entirely turned on its head during the Holocaust, as Jewish male victims were unable to fulfill this role, and Nazi perpetrators in the death camps dispensed with women and children with alacrity. In the face of experiences at Auschwitz, it is important to note not only distinctions in how men and women have written their testimonies but also that not all female and not all male behavior in the camp was homogenous. The formation of surrogate families was life-sustaining when families were separated. While this is mentioned more widely in female writings, it is also evident in male writings. Sharing recipes, reminiscing, and forming social bonds were important survival strategies and coping mechanisms that many women utilized. In some ways, although women had more severe circumstances, this was balanced by the additional support from and solidarity with other female prisoners, in close bonds or ersatz families. However, the situation in which women found themselves at Auschwitz led some of them to behave in desperate ways. Some lied, schemed, and stole. Some granted sexual favors to men (and women) who were in a position to ameliorate their circumstances in some way in return. A reluctance to treat subjects such as lesbianism, prostitution, indifference, or cruelty—that is, modes of being or behavior that did not fit into broad traditional gendered expectations—has led to the creation of an incomplete picture in much of the historical literature. Previously unknown and unheard voices have begun to find their place in our knowledge and understanding of Holocaust experiences.

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Moral choice has gendered implications too—not only did women have to make choices that men did not have to make, but also they were judged (and indeed judged themselves) by a double moral standard that was harsher. This often engendered a sense of shame and guilt. At times, women were forced to make very difficult moral decisions. Lawrence Langer’s term “choiceless choices” refers not to “options between life and death, but between one form of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victims’ own choosing.” Some women worked as prostitutes in the camp brothel. Other women had to make extremely difficult decisions in relation to pregnancy and childbirth, as Jewish newborn infants, babies, and young children were completely expendable to the Nazi rulers, and so too were their mothers. In many ways, women were placed in a position of “double jeopardy”— they were in a position of blame not only for behaving in a particular manner or for carrying out an act or deed but also because, by so doing, they contravened the social construction of femininity whereby they should not prostitute themselves or kill their babies in order to survive. Women were placed in moral and physical situations that men did not have to face. During their imprisonment at Auschwitz, they had to opt for agency and make choices in a variety of ways that were distinctive from those made by men. Frankl notes that for men, too, the “choice of action” existed even in the face of the terrible privations they faced at Auschwitz.131 In the end, all Jews were equally destined for death, but there were differences on the road to that destination for men and women. Women’s and men’s experiences of the Holocaust were not identical, but, as Goldenberg has suggested, they were “different horrors” within the “same hell.”132 Hence, an analysis of gender-based distinctions in Holocaust experiences and the ways in which they have been narrated by men and women adds an important angle to our knowledge and understanding of this dark chapter in modern history.

Notes 1 Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985); Adam Jones, Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); Helen Fein, “Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Woman and Group Destiny,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 1 (1999): 43–63; Roger Smith, “Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8, no. 3 (1994): 315–34. 2 Jones, Gendercide and Genocide, 264. 3 Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933 to 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 126. 4 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 167.

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5 Lenore Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, eds., “The Role of Gender in the Holocaust,” in Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 13. 6 Myrna Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” in Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust, ed. R. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 152. 7 Anna Reading, “Scarlet Lips in Belsen: Culture, Gender and Ethnicity in the Policies of the Holocaust,” Media, Culture and Society 21 (1999): 496. 8 Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” in Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, eds. C. Rittner and J. Roth (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 376. 9 Ibid., 377. 10 Anna Hardman, “Women and the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Educational Trust, Research Papers, 1, no. 3 (London: Holocaust Educational Trust, 2000), 12. 11 Brana Gurewitsch, Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 12 Sara Horowitz, “Memory and Testimony of Women Survivors of Nazi Germany,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. J. Baskin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 265. 13 Zoë Waxman, “Unheard Stories: Reading Women’s Holocaust Testimonies,” The Jewish Quarterly 47, no. 177 (2000): 53. 14 Zoë Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 186. 15 Pascale Bos, “Women and the Holocaust: Analysing Gender Difference,” in Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis and the Holocaust, eds. E. Baer and M. Goldenberg (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 23–50. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 33. 18 Giuliana Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 124. 19 Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis and the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), xiv. 20 Petra M. Schweitzer, Gendered Testimonies of the Holocaust: Writing Life (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York; and London: Lexington Books, 2016), xiii. Other contributions to the growing field of study of gender and the Holocaust include Andrea Peto, Louise Hecht, and Karolina Krasuska, eds., Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (Warsaw, PL: Central European University Press, 2015); Myrna Goldenberg, ed., Before All Memory Is Lost: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (Toronto, CA: The Azrieli Foundation, 2017); Agnes Grunwald-Spier, Women’s Experiences in the Holocaust in Their own Words (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2018).

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21 Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 129–30; Lynn Abrams, The Making of Modern Woman (London: Longman, 2002), 127–9. 22 Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59–62. 23 Marion Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm: Jewish Women’s Responses to Daily Life in Nazi Germany,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, 43. 24 Marion Kaplan, “Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles, 1933-1939,” Feminist Studies 16 (Fall 1990): 579–606. 25 Kaplan, “Keeping Calm and Weathering the Storm,” 44–5. 26 Ibid., 48. 27 Maddy Carey, Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust: Between Destruction and Construction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 19. 28 Monika Richarz, Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 311–12. 29 Hilberg, Perpetrators, 127. 30 Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 162. 31 On this, see Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015). On the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, see Sarah Helm, If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (London: Little, Brown, 2015). 32 Sybille Steinmacher, Auschwitz: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2005); Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 33 Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson, Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995). 34 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 86. 35 Mary Lagerway, Reading Auschwitz (London: Sage, 1998), 75. 36 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 41. 37 Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving the Holocaust (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1986), 100–1. 38 Louis de Wijze, Only My Life: A Survivor’s Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 67. 39 Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 188-9. 40 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Wolff (London: Abacus Books, 1987), 148. 41 Ibid., 150. 42 Ibid., 168. 43 Henry Wermuth, Breathe Deeply My Son (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993), 139.

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44 Elie Wiesel, Night: with Connections (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), 92–3. 45 Eva Kolinsky, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2004), 27. 46 Levi, If This Is a Man, 58. 47 Kolinsky, After the Holocaust, 14. 48 Livia Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years (London: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 75. 49 Rena Gelissen, Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 139. 50 I. Choko, F. Irwin, L. Kahana-Aufleger, M. Kalina, and J. Lipski, Stolen Youth: Five Women’s Survival in the Holocaust (New York and Jerusalem, IL: Yad Vashem, 2005), 42. 51 Carol Rittner and John Roth, Different Voices (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 136. 52 Eva Schloss, After Auschwitz (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013), 114. 53 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 67. 54 Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995), 29. 55 Ibid., 30. 56 Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 77. 57 Ruth Bondy, “Women in Theresienstadt and the Family Camp in Birkenau,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, 323. 58 Choko, Stolen Youth, 48–9. 59 Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 92. 60 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 81. 61 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 98–9. 62 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 139. 63 Tec, Resilience and Courage, 168–9. 64 For a discussion of the complexities of sexual violence, see Waitman Wade Beorn, “Bodily Conquest: Sexual Violence in the Nazi East,” in Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe, eds. Alex J. Kay and David Stahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 195–215. See also, Sonja M. Hedgepath and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010); Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 221–46. 65 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 109. 66 Judith Isaacson, Seed of Sarah (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 67 Schloss, After Auschwitz, 127–8.

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68 Liana Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 22–3. 69 Ibid., 39–41. 70 Ibid., 47. 71 Ibid., 138. 72 Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 73, 99, 127, 140. 73 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 26, 108, 131, 156. 74 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 75, 83, 90–1, 115, 144–5, 166–7, 172. 75 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 186–93, 199. 76 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 148, 183. 77 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Macmillan, 1986), 270. 78 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 135. 79 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 80. 80 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 155. 81 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 225. 82 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 72. 83 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 109. 84 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 26–7. 85 Myrna Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Ofer and Weitzman, 335. See also, Michael Berenbaum, introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen: Recipes from Terezin, ed. Cara de Silva (Northvale, NJ and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). 86 Goldenberg, “Memoirs of Auschwitz Survivors: The Burden of Gender,” 62–3, 122, 148. 87 Myrna Goldenberg, “Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps,” in Experience and Expression, ed. Baer and Goldenberg, 171. 88 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 29. On sharing food, see also 57. 89 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 207. 90 Ibid., 213. 91 Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 153. 92 Ibid., 154. 93 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 68–9. 94 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 101. 95 Ibid., 127–8 and 154–62. 96 Ibid., 71. On this, see also 52, 72, 73, 75, 99, 101. 97 Ibid., 124–5. 98 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 151. 99 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 140.

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100 Lucie Adelsberger, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 98–100. 101 Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1978), 44; Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (New York: Yale University Press, 1995), 63, 66, 103. 102 Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (1985): 747. 103 Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 178. 104 Tedeschi, There Is a Place on Earth, 9–10. 105 Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memoirs (New York: Devora Publishing Company, 2005), 10. 106 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 52. 107 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 56. 108 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 104. 109 Schloss, After Auschwitz, 127. 110 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 190. 111 Bitton-Jackson, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, 121. 112 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 46–7. 113 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 58. See also 65, where Millu uses the metaphor of smoke to describe how the camp transformed prisoners over time. 114 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 36, 40. 115 Ibid., 197–9. 116 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 173. 117 Ibid., 192. 118 Gelissen, Rena’s Promise, 88. 119 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 60–2. 120 Millu, Smoke over Birkenau, 187. 121 Ibid., 181. 122 Ibid., 191. 123 On the object-function of women in this way as “luxury objects” for sex, see Bozena Karwowska, “Women’s Luxury Items in Concentration Camps,” in Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges, ed. Peto, Hecht and Krasuska, 70. 124 Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality and German Fascism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005). On this and related topics, see also Robert Sommer, Das KZ_Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbiet in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Paderborn, DE: Schöningh, 2009); Robert Sommer, “Camp Brothels: Forced Sex Labour in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Brutality and Desire, ed. Herzog, 168–96; Robert Sommer, “Pipels: Situational Homosexual Slavery of Young Adolescent Boys in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives

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on the Holocaust in a Changing World, eds. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 86–103. 125 Lengyel, Five Chimneys, 116. 126 Ibid., 115. 127 Ibid., 114. 128 Rittner and Roth, Different Voices, 114. 129 Ibid., 113–14. 130 Schloss, After Auschwitz, 116. 131 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 74-5. 132 Goldenberg, “Different Horrors, Same Hell: Women Remembering the Holocaust,” 152.

3 Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides Adam Jones

Introduction: Genocide and Gender “The word [genocide] is new, the concept is ancient,” wrote Leo Kuper in a field-defining 1982 volume.1 Much the same can be said of the concept of male and masculine vulnerabilities in genocide and crimes against humanity. On some level, most people “know” that the phenomenon of selectively targeting males en masse for slaughter and other atrocities extends back to the dawn of history, and surely to prehistory as well. We find glimpses of it in the Old Testament, in Homer, and in Thucydides.2 Moreover, genocide has always been inseparably bound to warfare: the two institutions are the “conjoined twins” of mass atrocity.3 We likewise “know” that war has traditionally been a hellish experience for men, who are usually the ones forced and conscripted (as well as those who eagerly volunteer) to kill and be killed. Yet the concept of specifically masculine vulnerabilities in genocide is also quite new. The designation of men and masculinity as the human standard, captured in the use of the universal “he,” has tended to obscure the distinctively male/masculine component. As Harry Brod wrote, While seemingly about men, traditional scholarship’s treatment of generic man as the human norm in fact systematically excludes from consideration what is unique to men qua men. The overgeneralization from male to generic human experience not only distorts our understanding of what,

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if anything, is truly generic to humanity but also precludes the study of masculinity as a specific male experience, rather than a universal paradigm for human experience.4 Of course, until the midpoint of the twentieth century, we effectively lacked a meaningful gender framing of human experience at all, until Simone de Beauvoir and her indispensable successors laid the foundations of contemporary feminist inquiry. But while greatly heightening awareness of female and feminine vulnerabilities and liabilities to violence and persecution, feminist framings created obstacles of their own to comprehending male and masculine experience. Feminist studies of violence tended to cast men and masculinities in the role of perpetrator and victimizer, a trend that perhaps intensified with the extension of feminist frameworks beyond the Western world. The key concept of “gender-based violence,” popularized in the 1990s, is still constructed overwhelmingly in terms of female victims/survivors and male perpetrators. The notion that men and boys are also gendered beings with specifically gendered vulnerabilities has barely begun to be articulated. In this chapter, I want to explore male/masculine vulnerabilities in the genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 1996 to the present.5 I place these case studies in a globalhistorical context, with references to other twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury genocides. My main themes are the selective (“gendercidal”) killing of males; the little-studied theme of rape and sexual violence against men and boys; and the “gendercidal institutions” of military conscription and forced labor. In the closing section of the chapter, I explore the implications of my findings for a gendered approach to humanitarian intervention and a gendered discourse of human rights. I have always stressed, and reiterate here, that while my critique challenges certain feminist framings of gender and violence/mass conflict, it would be inconceivable without them. The objective is not to obscure women’s specific vulnerabilities to genocide and mass atrocity, which are amply represented in this volume and acknowledged at various points in this chapter. Rather, I want to explore an alternative and still little-studied side of the gender-andgenocide equation, one that is intimately linked to female experiences—and is of great concern to the female victims and survivors of genocide, who often call for greater attention to be paid to their menfolk’s vulnerabilities.6

Male/Masculine Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides Gendercidal Killing The term “gendercide” was coined by the US feminist Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Warren’s

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focus was on females and femininities targeted (especially) by structural and institutional forms of violence, such as female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. She nonetheless provided, in her framing chapter, a defense of the concept that makes clear its utility for examining male and masculine vulnerabilities as well: By analogy [with genocide], gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as “gynocide” and “femicide,” have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But “gendercide” is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.7 In my own work, I have proposed a division of genocides into two broad categories: gendercides, in which the dimension of mass killing is relatively strictly limited to one gender, virtually always males;8 and “root-andbranch” genocides, in which the slaughter extends to all demographic sectors of the targeted population.9 Examples of the former would be the Congolese “rubber terror” under Belgian King Leopold; Stalin’s purges and other mass killings in the USSR; genocidal killing in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992–5 (aside from the sieges of Sarajevo and other cities); and Kosovo in 1999. In cases where root-and-branch genocide has resulted—the most infamous twentieth-century examples being the Ottoman genocide of Christian minorities, the Jewish Shoah, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994—a progression is typically evident from gendercidal to root-andbranch killings. Thus, in the genocides of the Christians, Ottoman forces typically rounded up both male elites and those of “fighting age”; these cohorts were murdered before the genocide was extended en masse to the remaining women, elderly, children, and handicapped of the targeted groups. Much the same dynamic was evident in the Jewish Holocaust. It was presaged by the roundup, detention, and brutal mistreatment of 20,000 Jewish men in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht in November 1938, and continued with the separation for mass slaughter of Jewish males during the first weeks of the “Holocaust by Bullets” in summer 1941, before full-scale “root-and-branch” genocide descended. The prevalence of this pattern in the 1994 Rwandan genocide is somewhat open to question, as I pointed out in a detailed 2002 treatment of the subject: To enter into a discussion of the gendering of the holocaust’s victims is both a painful and a difficult exercise. The pain and difficulty alike arise from the widespread accounts of massacres in April 1994 that were both gargantuan

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in scale and largely indiscriminate in targeting Tutsi men, children, and women. One of these massacres, in fact, may qualify as the worst groundlevel slaughter of the twentieth century, with another not far behind. “On 20 April, at the Parish of Karama in Butare, between thirty-five and fortythree thousand people died in less than six hours”—a higher death toll than the Nazis’ two-day slaughter of some 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in September 1941, and higher than the highest single-day extermination spree in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. An even greater toll was exacted, though over a much longer period, in the weeks-long carnage on Bisesero mountain in southwestern Rwanda, where “more than fifty thousand people . . . lost their lives” amid heroic scenes of resistance. A number of other massacres, particularly in Cyahinda prefecture, claimed “ten thousand or more at one time.” In nearly all cases, the carnage seems to have been utterly indiscriminate—save, of course, for the overriding ethnic variable. (“They encircled the whole hill,” recalled one survivor of Bisesero. “They shot and shot and shot. There was no distinction. Everyone died—adult men and women, young men and women and children.”)10 In contrast to the Ottoman Christian and Jewish cases, the worst and most gender-indiscriminate massacres in Rwanda occurred in the first weeks of the genocide, in April and early May 1994. Nonetheless, there is a wealth of evidence that during this period, and subsequently, Tutsi males were also targeted as such—a strategy that may account for the demographic gender disparity that was widely noted in the genocide’s aftermath. Consider the account rendered by African Rights in its immensely detailed report, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance: The primary target of the hunt [for survivors of the opening massacres] were Tutsi men, particularly what extremist propaganda portrayed as the “ultimate” enemy—rich men, men between their twenties and forties, especially if they were well-educated professionals or students. Most hated of all were well-educated Tutsi men who had studied in Uganda (and to a lesser extent Tanzania and Kenya) who were immediately suspected of being members or supporters of the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front]. Within days, entire communities were without their men; tens of thousands of women were widowed, tens of thousands of children were orphaned.11 Male children were also selectively targeted: “The extremists were determined to seek out and murder Tutsi boys in particular. They examined very young infants, even new-borns, to see if they were boys or girls. Little boys were executed on the spot. Sometimes they ordered mothers to kill their children.”12 As these accounts suggest—and a great many more are cited in my 2002 article—gender is often tied, empirically and in the génocidaires’

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interpretation, to variables of economic status and community prominence. Accordingly, it is unwise to draw too artificial a distinction between the gender variable and that of social-economic-political elite status. In that males of an imputed “fighting age” (roughly eighteen to fifty-five years of age) are depicted by génocidaires as constituting another societal elite— defined by age, physical strength, and presumed military capacity—they are also typically swept up in genocidal killing, particularly during its early stages (when the perceived need to “decapitate” the target group of both its leadership and its militarily capable members is felt most intensely by the killers). We are not, therefore, talking about a generalized hatred and fear of men (misandry) as alone fueling the gender-selective slaughter—although it is probably a more important factor than is usually appreciated. Instead, gender combines with other variables, as multiple variables always combine, to produce genocidal outcomes.13 My study of the Rwandan genocide also pointed out that the forces of the RPF—whose leader, Paul Kagame, now rules Rwanda—inflicted mass atrocities against Hutu civilians in the late stages of the genocide that displayed a gender configuration similar to the mass slaughters of Tutsis. The gendercidal component carried over to the post-genocide period. Seth Sendashonga, the ex-minister of the interior in the RPF government, told documentary filmmakers from the Canadian National Film Board in 1997 that the RPF wanted to establish its supremacy, and to do so they had to eliminate any potential rival. In many cases the Army came for men, ages 18 to 55, and took them away by night, never to be seen again. . . . The general pattern was to select youth and men who were still active, as well as leaders, teachers, farming instructors—anyone who played a role, any community leader was particularly singled out.14 In her recent work, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace, Susan Thomson points to the same pattern in the years following the genocide, writing that the RPF concentrated its atrocities on Hutu men deemed “guilty of acts of genocide regardless of what they may have done or not done” in 1994.15 Given that the Rwandan government and army bear responsibility for much of the direct and indirect killing in the DRC from 1996 onward, what can be said about the gendering of this violence? While much remains unclear, some observations can be hazarded. The first again takes the form of a caveat. By all accounts, the majority of the killing that has occurred in the DRC since 1996 has been indirect in character, resulting from disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion—often a combination of all three. This by no means disqualifies it as “genocidal,” or at least potentially so. The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) features, in its Article 3(c), an

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understanding that genocide can be perpetrated by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”16 The article, together with the almost identically framed offense of “extermination” as a crime against humanity under international law, points to those instances where populations are killed not by mass shooting or hacking or gas chambers, but by imposing conditions intended/ calculated to produce mass deaths. (Historical examples include German forces driving rebellious Hereros into the wastes of the Omaheke desert during the genocide of 1904–7; the Nazi imposition upon Jews of desperately crowded and unsanitary conditions in ghettos and death camps during the Shoah; the Khmer Rouge’s starving of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians from 1975 to 1978; and the Indonesian government’s contemporaneous infliction of mass deprivation on the population of East Timor.) Because most of the mortality in the DRC has been inflicted indirectly, a persuasive case was made by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, in a 2006 study, that women and girls suffer disproportionately in such instances, because their average life expectancy declines more than men’s. Plümper and Neumayer pointed to the economic and nutritional effects of war and social breakdown, contending that “women are likely to suffer more from an increase in food prices and famines,” in part because of a physiological susceptibility “to vitamin and iron deficiencies in diets,” and in part because “in male-dominated societies, males get priority in food distribution at the expense of girls and women.” Likewise, “the decline in basic health care hits women more because of their specific reproductive roles. Damage caused to the health infrastructure reduces obstetrical care and increases the number of miscarriages as well as maternal and infant mortality.” While acknowledging Philip Verwimp’s findings of a gendered deficit of males in Rwandan households after the 1994 genocide, Plümper and Neumayer cited alternative data on life expectancy that suggested “a small decline in the gender gap: while life expectancy of [Rwandan] men declined from 45.1 to 41.1 years between 1993 and 1995, female life expectancy declined by 4.8 years from 47.2 to 42.4 years over the same period.” In Congo, meanwhile, according to the Red Cross, “an extraordinarily high maternal mortality rate of 3 percent [prevailed] in the rebel-controlled areas” of the country. Likewise, women were especially afflicted by conditions in refugee camps and by an elevated incidence of sexual assault that is typical in conflictridden regions; “Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, rape was used with the intention of spreading HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Injuries to vaginal tissue is a common consequence of rape and renders affected women much more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases.”17 Plümper and Neumayer concluded: The finding that, on average, conflicts lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men means that policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and the academic community need to pay much closer

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attention to the hidden, indirect consequences of conflict, which are both “profound” and “underappreciated.” .  .  . Our findings suggest giving priority to women when it comes to the indirect and long-term effects of armed conflicts.18 Their work is an important corrective to gendered framings of conflict that privilege more traditional understandings of “violence” over more structural and institutional manifestations.19 Turning to direct forms of mass atrocity, it is clear that in keeping with the strategies pursued in the Rwandan genocide, much of the mass killing in the DRC since 1996 has been of the gender-indiscriminate, “root-and-branch” kind. Human Rights Watch’s 2009 report “You Will Be Punished”: Attacks on Civilians in Eastern Congo, for example, cataloged mass slaughters by the rebel group Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda, a holdover from the “Hutu Power” regime in Rwanda. In a grotesquely gender-inclusive note left for the civilians of the community of Mihanda in South Kivu province, the group warned: “Be on guard. We are going to kill the pregnant women and open their stomachs and we are even going to kill the young girls. The men will be decapitated like the salted fish.”20 Typical of the atrocities that resulted was the FDLR’s May 2009 attack on the town of Busurungi and adjacent villages: The FDLR combatants massacred at least 96 civilians, including 25 children, 23 women, and seven elderly men. . . . Nearly half of the victims were shot or hacked to death by machete. Some had been tied up and then had their throats slit. Others were deliberately locked in their homes and burned to death or killed as they tried to flee into the nearby forests for safety. A further 26 civilians were seriously injured, the vast majority women and children. Two later died of their injuries.21 Note that in this account—and in a trope that is common in media and human rights coverage of abuses worldwide—the victims “included” in the count consist of all major demographic categories except men of an imputed “fighting age.” One must engage in a grim arithmetic to discern that forty-one of the ninety-six civilians murdered—that is, the preponderant category—were adult males in this age range. The systematic inattention to this class of victims often makes it difficult to establish the extent to which “fighting-age” civilian men are specifically targeted. Substantial evidence indeed suggests that along with “root-and-branch” massacres, the strategy of selectively slaughtering men and boys has spilled over from the Rwandan genocide to the DRC. In a careful sifting of the evidence available as of 2009, Paula Drumond found that “in the Congolese genocide, men and boys are . . . more frequently victimized by killings and summary executions.” She pointed to a 2001 mortality report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) focusing on eastern Congo, where most of the direct violence has been concentrated. It detailed

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that 61 percent of those violently killed were adult males. . . . In another mortality survey conducted in 2004, the IRC indicated another increase in this figure, affirming that in eastern DRC, “adult males aged 15 years and over were at great risk of being killed, constituting 72 percent of all violent deaths, although women and children were not exempt.”22 The most extensive and significant source on mass atrocity in the DRC for the 1993–2003 period, focusing on the First (1996–8) and Second (1998– 2001) Congo Wars, is the Mapping Report prepared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR).23 The 566-page volume represents an extraordinary and laudable feat of human rights investigation. But it also serves as another object example of the difficulties that confront the analyst who seeks to discern the gendering of direct acts of killing. The challenge lies in the complex and ambiguous discourse surrounding gender in the Mapping Report. When reference is made to mass killings of civilians, members of groups traditionally coded as “vulnerable,” notably children and women, are specifically mentioned as such (most commonly via the phrases “including women and children,” “including many women and children,” and “including large numbers of women and children”).24 Of course, as noted previously, large numbers of adult male civilians are also “included” in such massacres. But this gender element tends to pass unmentioned. In some cases, it is possible to adduce a large majority of adult male victims, as when the report refers to a massacre of “11 civilians, including a woman and child.”25 It must also be assumed that in many, possibly most, cases where massacre victims are described as “civilians” or “people” (without members of traditional “vulnerable” groups being specifically mentioned), adult males constitute the large majority or even the totality of victims. (Sometimes further clues are provided, such as references to victims’ excombatant status, or their political/administrative role, or accusations that they were “traitors” or “infiltrators.”)26 Beyond this, the Mapping Report makes a single general reference to a pattern of selective killing of males, in the context of mass killings by Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of CongoZaire (AFDL) militia and its principal ally and sponsor, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). “Whilst in general the killings did not spare women and children,” states the report, “it should be noted that in some places, particularly at the beginning of the first war in 1996, Hutu women and children were apparently separated from the men, and allegedly only the men were subsequently killed.”27 Relatively numerous instances of such gendercidal killing are cited throughout the report, as in an account from the village of Luberizi, where “on 29 October 1996, units of the AFDL/ APR/FAB killed around 220 male refugees. . . . The soldiers separated the men from the rest of the group and shot them or killed them with bayonets. The bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves near the church.”28 As in the case of the Rwandan genocide, the relative prominence of such

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gendercidal killing versus “root-and-branch” extermination strategies will likely never be fully known.

Rape and Sexual Violence Like gendercidal killing, the targeting of males for sexual violence29 is an ancient phenomenon. In one of the earliest sustained treatments of the subject (2002), Augusta Del Zotto and I noted that “Ancient Persian murals show triumphant warriors marching along bearing plates piled high with their enemy’s penises,” while “for centuries, men and boys who were captured in, or as a result of, combat became the ‘body servants’ (sex slaves) of western warriors, or the ‘brides’ of warriors in Mesoamerica.”30 Carefully documented studies by Sandesh Sivakumaran, Amalendu Misra, and Marysia Zalewski et al. point to the prevalence, even pervasiveness, of such atrocities in contemporary instances of genocide and war-unto-genocide.31 According to another notable investigator, Lara Stemple: An astonishing 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in El Salvador in the 1980s reported at least one instance of sexual torture. In the wake of another conflict, 21% of Sri Lankan Tamil males receiving service at a torture treatment center in London reported that they had experienced sexual abuse while in detention. The forms of abuse began with forced nudity, taunting, and verbal sexual threats, creating an experience of degradation and humiliation. Ultimately, the abuse included various forms of genital mutilation and forced sex acts. Most of those abused had not reported the incidents to authorities, explaining that they were too ashamed. . . . One study of 6,000 concentration camp inmates in Sarajevo Canton [in Bosnia and Herzegovina] found that 80% of males reported that they had been raped in detention. Accounts of abuse throughout the conflict were often quite graphic, including severe genital mutilation and forced incest. . . . Reports have emerged from southern Sudan that boys held as slaves have been subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of government soldiers, including violent gang rape.32 The mass rape of women and girls in the Rwandan and Congolese genocides has become an international cause célèbre. Until very recently, however, there has been little investigation of the sexual violence also inflicted on Rwandan and Congolese men. Nonetheless, available evidence and testimony suggest widespread sexual attacks against males as well as females, and with like aims: to degrade and humiliate the victims, and bolster the self-image of the perpetrators;33 to terrorize target communities into flight and fragmentation; and to alienate community members from each other, further undermining the targeted group’s cohesion, identity, and solidarity.34 Elysia Ruvinsky has studied what she has called “male sexual violence” (MSV) in both the Balkans and African Great Lakes regions. During

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the Rwandan genocide of 1994, “the use of [such] sexual violence can be gleaned from victim statements and eyewitness reports.” Ruvinsky describes male genocide “victims who had previously posed as Hutus, been more prosperous or whom the perpetrators [especially] disliked” being “stripped in the marketplace before they were hacked to death by machete.” Tutsi boys were often at risk of rape, such as the “13-yearold . . . kidnapped by a Hutu woman, kept in her house and raped three times a day for three days until he escaped.” “There were also reports of mutilation and subsequent public display of male genitalia,” such as the testimony of Lt. -Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who “saw objects crushed or implanted in vaginas, breasts cut off, stomachs opened and the mutilated genitals of men.”35 The prevalence of MSV during the Congolese genocide is likewise hard to gauge, but it has featured in a commendably gender-inclusive report by Kirsten Johnson and her co-researchers, published in 2010 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Of nearly one thousand individuals surveyed, Johnson and her team found that “39.7% . . . of women and 23.6% . . . of men were reported to have been exposed to sexual violence during their lifetime.” “Conflict-associated sexual violence” accounted for the assaults suffered by 74.3 percent of female and 64.5 percent of male survivors, with both sexes reporting rape as the primary form of abuse they experienced. (Strikingly, the survey found that 41.1 percent of the perpetrators of sexual violence against women were themselves women, while 90 percent of the assailants of men were themselves men. In both cases, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly combatants. The finding, as the authors noted, “challenges the myth that women do not have the capacity to commit [such] atrocities.”)36 More personal insights into the sexual violence inflicted upon men and boys have been generated by the exemplary work of the Refugee Law Project based in Kampala, Uganda. The organization, headed by Dr. Chris Dolan, was the focus of journalist Will Storr’s groundbreaking investigation, “The Rape of Men,” published in the UK Observer in 2011.37 Storr relayed accounts from workers not just of the systematic and widespread rape of males but also of “other ways in which their clients have been made to suffer. Men aren’t simply raped, they are forced to penetrate holes in banana trees that run with acidic sap, to sit with their genitals over a fire, to drag rocks tied to their penis, to give oral sex to queues of soldiers, to be penetrated with screwdrivers and sticks.”38 A regular strategy of sexual violence against males, in the African Great Lakes region and around the world, is forcing men and boys to rape or otherwise sexually assault others, both men and women. In its major 2009 report on atrocities in eastern Congo, “You Will Be Punished,” Human Rights Watch found that FDLR rebel forces had “in some cases . . . forced civilian men and boys to rape women or girls, sometimes their own family members.” For example:

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In February 2009 in Miriki, Lubero territory, the FDLR stopped a group of six young people and forced the three boys to rape the three girls in the group. On July 2, in Remeka, Masisi territory, the FDLR tried to force a man to rape his 28-year-old daughter-in-law, after she had already been raped in his presence by seven FDLR combatants. When he refused, they killed him.39 As with sexual violence against women and girls, the atrocities inflicted on Congolese men and boys leave enduring physical and mental scars, as Christian et al. reported in a groundbreaking 2011 article in the journal Medicine, Conflict and Survival: Physical health issues reported included weakness, headaches, body aches, loss of appetite, bloody noses, incontinence of urine and stool, fever and symptoms consistent with sexually transmitted infections, and reduced desire for sexual activities with their wife. . . . Loss of memory, nightmares, anger, loss of appetite, loss of sleep, sadness and shouting were the most frequently reported mental health consequences by male survivors, family/friends and stakeholders, all symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). . . . Survivors also report that they live in fear that the armed groups may return.40

Gendercidal Institutions against Men and Boys The concept of “gendercidal institutions”—structural forms of violence that inflict gender-selective suffering and death, often on a massive scale— was introduced earlier in the discussion of female mortality in Rwanda, the DRC, and elsewhere. In developing the concept, however, I have also explored the forms in which gendercidal institutions may target males. Two such institutions are worth citing for our purposes: military conscription and forced (corvée) labor, which throughout history and around the world have overwhelmingly victimized men and boys. Neither of these institutions necessarily produces massive fatalities, of course. In this respect, they differ from female-specific institutions that are fatal by definition, such as female infanticide and maternal mortality. Nonetheless, at many times and in many places, the results of conscription and forced labor have been a vast wastage and debilitation of male lives, on a scale and of a character that qualify as gendercidal. In approaching military conscription in both the Rwandan and the Congolese genocides, a challenge is to determine the extent to which males (and sometimes females) have been forcibly conscripted into the various armed forces; the extent to which they have joined “willingly”; and how far even “willing” participation reflects a desperate lack of alternatives (as women will sometimes “choose” prostitution or sexual

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concubinage when no other means of earning a livelihood is available, or no other means of protection from more generalized predation can be found). In the Rwandan case, there is little doubt that the large majority of men who “served” in Rwandan government forces and militias did so voluntarily, even eagerly. There was no formalized military conscription in pre-genocide Rwanda. Indeed, the incipient threat of a downsizing of the Rwandan army (Forces armées rwandaises, FAR) as part of the Arusha Accords peace process—with the loss of thousands of male jobs that it entailed— seems to have been one of the factors that promoted a genocidal esprit de corps among “Hutu Power” forces. As the Interahamwe and other militias mobilized thousands of ragtag affiliates once the genocide erupted, they likewise offered undreamed-of opportunities to marginalized males. This gendering is implicit in Gérard Prunier’s vivid description of the déclassés formations that perpetrated much of the savagery: [The] social aspect of the killings has often been overlooked. In Kigali the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi [militia] had tended to recruit mostly among the poor. As soon as they went into action, they drew around them a cloud of even poorer people, a lumpenproletariat of street boys, rag-pickers, car-washers and homeless unemployed. For these people the genocide was the best thing that could ever happen to them. They had the blessings of a form of authority to take revenge on socially powerful people as long as these were on the wrong side of the political fence. They could steal, they could kill with minimum justification, they could rape and they could get drunk for free. This was wonderful. . . . They just went along, knowing it would not last.41 A separate, quite different dynamic was also evident with regard to ordinary Rwandan Hutu men coopted into the genocidal enterprise. My study of the mobilization of masculinities and femininities in the Hutu genocide of Tutsis found that frequently, “men participated only reluctantly, as numerous accounts from the barricades make clear. Adolescent boys— sometimes even younger ones—were also coerced into killing.” For example, A ten-year-old named Ndayambaje described being ordered by a local councillor to murder another young boy: “The councillor was holding a machete and a masu [nail-studded club]. He beat a boy with the flat part of the machete. Then he said to me, ‘Either you kill him or you will fuck your mother.’ Still, I did not understand what I would have to do. The person he was beating was a boy slightly older than me. He had already clobbered him and wanted me to finish him off. He gave me a masu and told me to kill him after insulting me.”

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Ndayambaje complied and was tried and convicted for his participation in the genocide.42 Doubtless this witches’ brew of eager “service,” grassroots genocide entrepreneurialism, and conscription/coercion has featured in the Congolese wars and genocides as well. But investigations of the subject are extremely scarce, in contrast with the global attention paid to Congolese women who have been conscripted and violated as sexual slaves. The one male cohort that has received significant notice is child soldiers—children, like women, being classed as a “vulnerable” group by definition. Here, the challenge of distinguishing voluntary from involuntary participation is arguably less relevant, given the minority age of the victims. Available data makes clear that the forcible recruitment of children has been widespread in the DRC conflict. The UN Security Council Group of Experts report, published in January 2014, cited “the recruitment of 459 children by armed groups. . . . The children were between 9 and 17 years old; many were under the age of 15. Of the total, 403 were boys and 56 were girls.” The organization also “confirmed other cases of child soldiers” in the eastern DRC. Screening of Mai Mai rebels who surrendered in the town of Bweremana indicated that “of 1,211 combatants, .  .  . 27 [were] children between the ages of 15 and 17, of whom 3 were girls” (and twenty-four were boys, presumably).43 It is worth noting that male conscription, particularly of boys, has often involved sexual servitude analogous to that experienced by women and girls. The findings of Johnson et al.’s DRC survey found that a slight majority of conscripted females (51.1 percent) cited sexual servitude as among the principal requirements of their “service.” So, too, did 20.3 percent of males.44

Forced Labor The territory known today as the DRC has long been associated with the murderous—indeed gendercidal—conscription of men and boys as forced laborers. During the “rubber terror” instigated by Belgium’s King Leopold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of men were forced deep into the rainforest to harvest the precious new commodity of the industrial age. The immense death toll, combined with permanent injury/debilitation and the protracted separation of the sexes, prompted one of the most dramatic population collapses on the human record—estimated by Adam Hochschild at around ten million between 1890 and 1920. The gendercidal character of the direct and indirect killing was established by the 1970s research of the Belgian anthropologist Daniel Vangroenweghe, who, as reported by Hochschild in his classic account King Leopold’s Ghost: found persuasive demographic evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids.

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. . . No other explanation accounts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census. These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men. At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children, 402 adult women, but only 275 adult men . . . At nearby Iboko in 1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men. Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. In an unforgettable coda, Hochschild declared that “sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium. They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.”45 “Precise death tolls” are no easier to establish for the resurgent use of forced labor in the contemporary Congo wars. The evidence, however, suggests widespread abuse and atrocity. The trend of conscripting males, overwhelmingly, for these often deadly tasks—and abusing or murdering them when they prove “unfit”—persists, although again the gender dimension is downplayed in the available investigations. Human Rights Watch’s report “You Will Be Punished,” for example, avoids an explicit gender framing in its brief discussion of forced labor during the Congolese government’s 2009 offensive against FDLR rebels—in stark contrast to the “women-and-girls” framing for the coverage of sexual violence. But it does not take much reading between the lines to discern who are the “civilians” being victimized: Since the start of military operations against the FDLR, Congolese army forces have pressed hundreds of civilians [sic] into forced labor to carry their supplies, ammunition, and other equipment to the frontlines. The journeys are long and difficult, and the loads often very heavy. At least two men died after collapsing under loads that were too heavy for them to carry and at least ten others were killed when they refused or were physically unable to lift the load assigned to them. The report cited the testimony of one man conscripted for forced labor in March 2009: The FARDC [Congolese army] . . . made us transport their baggage all the way from Kirundu to Busurungi and then to Kibua. It took three days. There were over 100 civilians, all men taken from villages along the way to transport their baggage. If you walked slowly, they beat you. They beat me badly several times, and that’s why I’m still sick and can’t walk well. Some beat me with the butt of their gun and others whipped me on my legs. Another male informant described soldiers

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go[ing] in front of each house every morning to force all the men to transport their baggage. . . . If we said we were tired, they beat us and told us to walk faster. There were children among us—five kids from the primary school, some as young as eight, who had to carry the soldiers’ children on their backs. The investigators acknowledged that “many civilians [sic] suffered serious and long-term injuries as a result of the physical beatings and the heavy loads.”46 In recent years, the “conflict minerals” or “blood minerals” aspect of the Congolese conflicts has received sustained attention. Control over mining sites for gold, tungsten, cobalt, coltan, and other valuable resources has become essential to the operation of the various armies and militias. Such operations tend to feature the same complex mixture of coerced and “voluntary” labor. Congolese men and women—and boys and girls—have flocked to the mines, which offer one of the few halfway-viable livelihoods in the conflict-torn East of the country. Predictably, men’s work has tended to concentrate on extraction and women’s on the provision of services such as bar work and prostitution. Women and girls have been exposed to pervasive sexual predation and servitude. For men and boys, the physical toll of mining work has likewise been extreme. According to a 2011 investigation by the US-based organization Free the Slaves: Miners work without basic equipment and suffer landslides, cave-ins of shafts, and asphyxiation. Malnutrition, exhaustion, physical trauma, poor sanitation, lack of medical treatment, and no clean water supply mean that public health concerns are equally high. Common injuries and ailments include: eye injuries; silicosis; conjunctivitis; bronchitis; tuberculosis; asthma; diarrhea; skin lesions; deformed muscle and bone in children due to heavy loads; regular dental problems including abscesses, cavities and lesions; tetanus; fractures and contortions; and contusions and severe bruising. Added to these are the impact of extensive drug use and sexually transmitted diseases. The intense crowding—enslaved miners are sometimes forced to sleep jammed together in the mine shafts—means that infectious diseases are rampant. . . . One informant stated that after four to five years working in the mines the body was “completely deteriorated”; he cited spinal column damage and lung damage, conditions worsened by the extreme pollution of air and water and exposure to toxic chemicals.47 Congolese army and militia formations have frequently forced men and boys to work in the mines without compensation and on pain of death: “Villagers [are] rounded up at gunpoint by an armed group, brutalized, threatened, and put to work. No payment is offered, there is no freedom of movement or choice, and resistance is met with deadly force. The work may

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entail digging of minerals or hauling or processing of mineral ores.”48 The long-standing tradition of part-time corvée (known in Congo as salongo), institutionalized by the Belgians and retained after independence, has been revived for extraction purposes. Strategies of debt peonage are also frequent. New workers are required to borrow money to purchase food, supplies, and the tools and equipment needed to keep them employed. The return on their work proves to be insufficient and borrowed money is exhausted as the worker struggles to pay for food and drink, lodging, medical expenses and in some cases, school fees. Interest rates are usuriously high and engineered to make it impossible to pay off the debt.49 Free the Slaves found that peonage was in fact “the most frequently found type of slavery, almost exclusively affecting males. . . . When unable to repay their debts, [men] are forced to work excruciatingly long hours, while often subjected to threats of and/or actual injury, arrest or detention precipitated by their lender.”50

Humanitarian Intervention and the Rights Discourse The exploration to this point has, I hope, contributed to an understanding that a nuanced and inclusive approach is required to the operations of gender in cases of genocide and mass conflict—as well as to structural and institutional forms of violence. As I argued in 2002, “Only when a genderinclusive approach is adopted . . . can this important variable in mass killings worldwide be properly understood, and integrated into an overarching analysis of one of humanity’s greatest and most enduring blights.”51 Nearly two decades later, such an approach is somewhat better represented in the academic literature. But it remains mostly absent in international policymaking circles, both governmental and nongovernmental. There, the paradigm of gender-equals-women and male-equals-perpetrator has become suffocatingly institutionalized. As a result, “a great many males continue to suffer and die, unrecognized and unprotested by international organizations, as a result of precisely the[se] blinkered mindsets.”52 One of the most urgent requirements from a humanitarian-intervention viewpoint is to appreciate how the gender-selective targeting of males—their detention, “disappearance,” torture/persecution, and selective killing—serves as a harbinger or tripwire for more generalized campaigns of atrocity. The Rwandan genocide supplies a particularly trenchant example. The outbreak of full-scale genocide in April 1994 was preceded by years of smaller-scale atrocities by the nascent forces of “Hutu Power” against members of the Tutsi minority and Hutu opposition. Tutsis, for example, vividly recalled the October 1990 pogrom, which “had been a disaster for Tutsi men,” in

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one survivor’s recollection. “Thousands of them were arrested and thrown into prison. Some died.”53 At the outset of the 1994 genocide, Tutsi males understood that they were particularly vulnerable. “As soon as I heard that Habyarimana had been assassinated, I knew they would go for all Tutsis, especially Tutsi men,” survivor Emmanuel Ngezahayo related.54 “It was simply not safe for a Tutsi man to be visible,” another survivor, William Rutarema, told African Rights investigators.55 In general, there are few more reliable warning signs of impending genocidal outbreaks than these gender-selective strategies against males—and perhaps none to which the relevant authorities, both governmental and nongovernmental, are so willfully oblivious. The manifest likelihood of males to be targeted first, and often worst, in outbreaks of mass violence ought urgently to lead to a reexamination of how “vulnerable” groups are constructed. It would be disastrous to dispense with the vital insights into women’s and girls’ specific vulnerabilities that feministinformed criticism has generated. But it is discriminatory and inhumane to ignore how traditional patriarchal and feminist constructions of masculinityas-power and male-as-perpetrator have blinded us to the vulnerabilities and disempowerment of males in conditions of war and genocide. Intervention into male-specific “gendercidal institutions” is also required. It is again striking how inattentive international policymakers have been to these issues—or even supportive of the institutions in question. Consider the two gendercidal institutions examined in the previous section. With regard to forced labor, note that the leading international-legal instrument, the International Labor Organization’s Convention Concerning Forced or Compulsory Labor (1930), does not ban forced labor. Rather, its Article 11 limits the legal imposition of forced labor to one group alone: males between eighteen and forty-five years of age.56 One can easily imagine the atmosphere of crisis and sustained activism that would prevail in our gendersensitive age, if only females of a certain age were designated as legitimate targets of corvée. The 1930 Convention also grants an exemption for a particular institution of forced labor, indeed quasi-slavery: that of military conscription and impressment. The forced recruitment of children, overwhelmingly boys, has become a prominent human rights cause (albeit with the gender dimension muted). Certainly, such initiatives against the recruitment and exploitation of children should continue and be amplified. However, R. Charli Carpenter has challenged the exclusive focus on the forced recruitment of minors. She notes that “the forced recruitment of adults, a practice largely targeted at lower-class males, is still considered legitimate and is neither condemned nor addressed by civilian protection organizations. . . . The right not to be subject to the denial of fundamental human rights implicit in military service itself remains a gap in international law.”57 The need to reassess this normalizing of male quasi-slavery as legitimate “service” is made starkly plain by the comments of a UN Children’s Fund official whom Carpenter interviewed in 2002. “We don’t protect men from forced conscription,”

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the official blithely declared. “Forced conscription is not a human rights violation. Forced conscription of children is. We will advocate against the recruitment of children. But every government has a right to conscript men unless they have it in their laws that they shouldn’t.”58 Widespread sexual violence against men and boys also calls for attention and humanitarian intervention, including post-assault care and counseling. Doctoral research by Augusta Del Zotto in the early 2000s found that of “4,076 nongovernmental groups that address war rape and other forms of political sexual violence . . . only 3% mention the experiences of males at all in their programs and informational literature,” usually as a passing comment or afterthought. “About one quarter of the groups explicitly deny that male-on-male violence is a serious problem,” while “the entire issue of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] relating to war-related sexual violence omits men as victims and offers solutions/treatment programs focusing only on females.”59 Little has changed, in the estimation of researcher Lara Stemple, who describes a “constant drum beat that women are the rape victims,” while males are considered a “monolithic perpetrator class”: International human rights law leaves out men in nearly all instruments designed to address sexual violence. The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls. . . . Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates “female” with “victim,” thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability.60 This leads, in closing, to consideration of whether a discourse of human rights and gendered rights is appropriate to address the patterns of male/ masculine vulnerability outlined in this chapter. It will come as no surprise to readers that I believe it is. Unfortunately, though not always unfairly, the extension of a rightsbased discourse to male and masculine experience (“men’s rights”) tends to evoke images of macho breast-beating and reactionary backlash against women’s rights and feminist causes. When a field of profeminist masculinity studies emerged in the 1980s, it was careful to avoid a human rights discourse for men, focusing instead on males as perpetrators of violence and oppression (with some space granted to self-destructive male behavior under patriarchy). Contrary offerings tended to be scorned by feminists and men’s-studies exponents alike. Discussion in the intellectual/ academic sphere has since become substantially more inclusive and empathetic. Change in the all-important policy sphere, however—among both governmental and nongovernmental organizations and initiatives— has been much slower to arrive, reflecting both blinkered mindsets and well-entrenched interests.

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Surely, a discourse of gendered rights and vulnerabilities need not be a zero-sum game. To undermine feminists’ hard-won accomplishments in promoting women’s rights worldwide would be profoundly illegitimate. Indeed, further such initiatives should be welcomed and supported. “But it would be equally destructive to maintain the present state of affairs, in which violations of men’s human rights—and the very idea of men’s human rights—are either callously ignored or openly ridiculed.”61

Notes 1 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 9. 2 For an overview, see Adam Jones, “Gendercide and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 185–211. See also the case studies compiled on the Gendercide Watch website, http://www​.gendercide​.org. 3 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 118. 4 Harry Brod, “Introduction: Themes and Theses,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 2. 5 My preferred definition of genocide slightly adapts that of Steven Katz: “the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in whole or in part any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.” See the discussion in Jones, Genocide, 32–3. Crimes against humanity, according to the definition of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), comprise murder, extermination, torture, persecution, forced transfer of populations, rape and sexual violence, arbitrary imprisonment, and apartheid, when inflicted against civilian populations, as part of a “widespread or systematic” campaign of the same, when perpetrators are conscious of that wider campaign. For elucidation, see Adam Jones, Crimes Against Humanity: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: OneWorld, 2008). 6 For example, women from the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, interviewed by the activist Marsha Jacobs, expressed “a general concern that the issue of rape [of women] not be stressed at the expense of the alleged Serbian campaign of slaughter and genocide against the civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, male and female alike.” According to Jacobs, “They didn’t want in any way to let the rape overshadow the real problem, which is the extermination and execution of thousands and thousands of men and women”—overwhelmingly men. See Adam Jones, “Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 1 (1994): 119. 7 Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 22. 8 A very rare case in which women (and the elderly, and children) appear to have been killed, while adult males have been preserved, is worth citing. It

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shows that the “logic” of anti-male gendercide, so often cited as though it somehow excuses the crimes in question, can lead in an opposite direction. Shaka Zulu, leader of the expansionist Zulu kingdom in southern Africa in the nineteenth century, adopted a “novel” approach in “utterly demolishing” neighboring populations “as a separate tribal entity by incorporating all their manhood into his own clan or following.” His military forces were thereby bolstered; but Shaka “usually destroyed women, infants, and old people,” who were deemed of no military value. See Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 224–5; also Michael R. Mahoney, “The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c. 1810 to the Present,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (2003): 251–68. A more contemporary example, which carries its own evil gendered logic, is the practice often followed by Nazi mass-murderers in the death camps, of consigning all women (especially pregnant women) immediately to the gas chambers, while some men were preserved alive for a time as presumably stronger and more efficient slave-laborers. Thus the initial dynamic of the Jewish Holocaust, in which men were disproportionately the victims of the early phase of the “Holocaust by Bullets” on the Eastern Front (1941–3), was substantially offset by the disproportionate slaughter of females in its later stages. 9 See Jones, Genocide, 5. Note that the phrase “root-and-branch” is itself implicitly gendered, conveying that the killing has progressed beyond adult males to encompass women (the reproductive “root”) and children (the “branch”). 10 Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 2 (2002): 71–2. The quoted passages are drawn from reports by African Rights (see following note) and Human Rights Watch. 11 African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, rev. ed. (London: African Rights, 1995), 597–8. 12 Ibid., 815. 13 See the discussion of “multiple and overlapping identities” in Jones, Genocide, 45–8. Neither, it should be noted, does misogyny alone underpin most of the gendered atrocities inflicted upon women and girls. Genocidal killers and rapists do not kill, rape, and enslave women of their own group in like fashion—indeed, the atrocities are often presented as a means of protecting their womenfolk from external threats. Structural violence against females, such as female infanticide/neonaticide, genital mutilation, and other crimes, is likewise often influenced by variables of age, social class, religious and ethnic affiliation, and so on. 14 Sendashonga quoted in Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold, Volume 3, Part 3 (Video production, Ottawa: National Film Board, 1997). 15 Susan Thomson, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 63. 16 United Nations, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” adopted December 9, 1948. Text available online at http:​/​/www​​ .prev​​entge​​nocid​​e​.org​​/law/​​conve​​ntion​​/​text​​.htm.

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17 Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, “The Unequal Burden of War: The Effect of Armed Conflict on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 730–1, 732, 742. 18 Ibid., 748. 19 See Adam Jones, “Gendercidal Institutions against Women and Girls,” in Women in an Insecure World: Violence against Women: Facts, Figures and Analysis, eds. Marie Vlachová and Lea Biason (Geneva, CH: Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2005), 15–24. 20 Human Rights Watch, “You Will Be Punished”: Atrocities in Eastern Congo (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009), 54. The report is available online at http:​/​/www​​.hrw.​​org​/s​​ites/​​defau​​lt​/fi​​les​/r​​eport​​s​/drc​​1209w​​e​bwco​​ver2.​​pdf. 21 Ibid., 63. 22 Paula Drumond, “Invisible Males: A Critical Assessment of UN Gender Mainstreaming Policies in the Congolese Genocide,” in New Directions in Genocide Research, ed. Adam Jones (London: Routledge, 2012), 100–2. 23 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003, August 2010. Available online at http:​/​/www​​.ohch​​r​.org​​/Docu​​ments​​/ Coun​​tries​​/ZR​/D​​RC​_MA​​PPING​​_REPO​​RT​_​FI​​NAL​_E​​N​.pdf​. 24 For examples of these discursive strategies, see UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, ¶185, 209, 229, 230. 25 UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, ¶380. 26 See, for example, UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, ¶298, 299, 314. 27 UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, ¶32. 28 Ibid., ¶199. The acronym FAB refers to the Burundian Armed Forces, another key ally of Kabila’s AFDL. For further examples of the gendercidal targeting of males for mass execution, see elsewhere in ¶199; also ¶185, 218, 223, 275, 278, 320, 358, 375, 450, 451. More recent rounds of mass atrocity in the DRC have also featured gendercidal killing of males, as in May 2017 in the Kamonia territory along the Angolan border. According to a report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “men and boys from the village of Mudjadja were abducted from their homes by members of the Kamuina Nsapu militia and taken to the tshiota [ceremonial sacred fire] in Diboko, supposedly to be baptized. It became the scene of the beheading of at least 186 men and boys. Their bodies were buried in two mass graves by the Red Cross of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Situation in Kasaï,” report, A/ HRC/38/31, July 2018, 14. Available online at https​:/​/ww​​w​.rig​​ht​-do​​cs​.or​​g​/ dow​​nload​​​/7034​​1/. 29 Sexual violence may be defined as “any physical or psychological violence carried out through sexual means or by targeting sexuality and included rape and attempted rape, molestation, sexual slavery, being forced to undress or being stripped of clothing, forced marriage, and insertion of foreign objects into the genital opening or anus, forcing individuals to perform sexual acts on

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one another or harm one another in a sexual manner, or mutilating a person’s genitals.” Kirsten Johnson et al., “Association of Sexual Violence and Human Rights Violations with Physical and Mental Health in Territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 304, no. 5 (August 2010): 555. I am indebted to Elysia Ruvinsky for this source. Augusta Del Zotto and Adam Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime: Human Rights’ Last Taboo?” paper presented to the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), New Orleans, LA, March 23–27, 2002; available online at http:​/​/ada​​mjone​​s​.fre​​eserv​​ers​.c​​om​/ma​​ ler​ap​​e​.htm​. Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict,” European Journal of International Law 18 (2007): 253–76; Amalendu Misra, The Landscape of Silence: Sexual Violence Against Men in War (London: Hurst, 2015); Marysia Zalewski et al., eds., Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2018). See also Lara Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” Hastings Law Review 60 (February 2009): 605–46; Sarah Solangon and Preeti Patel, “Sexual Violence against Men in Countries Affected by Armed Conflict,” Conflict, Security & Development 12, no. 4 (2012): 417–42; Ellen Anna Philo Gorris, “Invisible Victims? Where Are Male Victims of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in International Law and Policy?” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 4 (2015): 412–27; “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Armed Conflict,” ch. 8 in Sara Meger, Rape Loot Pillage: The Political Economy of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 174–88; “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys,” ch. 17 in Sara Ferro Ribeiro and Danaé van der Straten Ponthoz, Best Practice on the Documentation of Sexual Violence as a Crime or Violation of International Law, 2nd ed. (UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, March 2017), 265–81. Available online at https​:/​/as​​sets.​​publi​​shing​​.serv​​ ice​.g​​ov​.uk​​/gove​​rnmen​​t​/upl​​oads/​​syste​​m​/upl​​oads/​​attac​​hment​​_data​​/file​​/5983​​35​/In​​ terna​​tiona​​l​_Pro​​to​col​​_2017​​_2nd_​​Editi​​on​.pd​​f. Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” 613–14. A paradoxical aspect of much male-on-male rape in patriarchal and homophobic contexts is that the humiliation and imputed feminization attaches only to the male who is forcibly penetrated—not to his male rapist, who instead sees his masculine prowess bolstered by the assault. As Lynne Segal described it, under these circumstances “A male who fucks another male is a double male.” Segal quoted in Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinity, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 78. For a further exploration, see Adam Jones, “Straight as a Rule: Heteronormativity, Gendercide, and the NonCombatant Male,” in Jones, Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009), 292–308. This dynamic is well understood in the case of women survivors of sexual violence who are ostracized by their communities and menfolk as “impure” or complicit in their own victimization. A similar dynamic operates in the case of male victims. Salome Atim, gender officer at the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, described the prevailing view in the African Great Lakes conflicts:

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“A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong.” Wives who learned their husband had been raped often “decide to leave them.” “They ask me: ‘So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this [victim] still a husband? Is it a wife?’ They ask, ‘If he can be raped, who is protecting me?’ There’s one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man’s heart.” Quoted in Will Storr, “The Rape of Men,” The Observer, July 17, 2011, http:​/​/www​​.theg​​uardi​​an​.co​​m​/soc​​iety/​​2011/​​jul​/1​​ 7​/the​​-​rape​​-of​-m​​en. 35 Elysia Ruvinsky, “My Heart Bleeds, But Where to Take My Grief Is Not There”: Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men in the Balkan and Great Lakes Regions (thesis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2012), 53–4. 36 Johnson et al., “Association of Sexual Violence,” 558–9. 37 Storr, “The Rape of Men.” Dolan’s perspective is available in Chris Dolan, “Into the Mainstream: Addressing Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Conflict,” briefing paper prepared for Overseas Development Institute, London, May 14, 2014, http:​/​/www​​.refu​​geela​​wproj​​ect​.o​​rg​/fi​​les​/b​​riefi​​ng​_pa​​ pers/​​Into_​​The​_M​​ainst​​ream-​​Addre​​ssing​​_Sexu​​al​_Vi​​olenc​​e​_aga​​inst_​​Men​_​a​​nd​ _Bo​​ys​_in​​_Conf​​lict.​​pdf. The paper includes discussion of a survey of Congolese male refugees in Uganda conducted by the Refugee Law Project and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which found that 38.5 percent of respondents had experienced sexual violence in their lives, 13.4 percent of them in the preceding year (4). 38 All quotes from Storr, “The Rape of Men.” 39 Human Rights Watch, “You Will Be Punished,” 75–6. See also UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, ¶636. 40 Mervyn Christian et al., “Sexual and Gender Based Violence against Men in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Effects on Survivors, Their Families and the Community,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 27, no. 4 (2011): 236. Available online at https​:/​/ww​​w​.tan​​dfonl​​ine​.c​​om​/do​​i​/pdf​​/10​.1​​080​/1​​36236​​9​9​ .20​​11​.64​​5144. 41 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 231–2. 42 Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 76. In the context of the historically unprecedented involvement of women as perpetrators at all levels of the Rwandan genocide, I have suggested “that a greater proportion of women than men participated voluntarily in the killings, since it was men, almost exclusively, who were forcibly conscripted into the ‘work’ of the roadblock [and other] killings, and who were exposed to suspicion or violent retribution if they did not take part. Evading direct participation was probably much easier for Hutu women (and children) than for Hutu men.” Ibid., 83. 43 United Nations, Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (S/2014/42), January 22, 2014, ¶157, 159. 44 Johnson et al., “Association of Sexual Violence,” 559.

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45 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 232. 46 All quotes from Human Rights Watch, “You Will Be Punished,” 108–10. 47 Free the Slaves, The Congo Report: Slavery in Conflict Minerals (Washington, DC: Free the Slaves, June 2011), 7–8. Available online at http:​//​www​​.free​​thesl​​ aves.​​net​/d​​ocume​​nt​.do​​​c​?id=​​243. The UNHCHR’s Mapping Report notes that “It has been estimated that several hundred miners died between 1993 and 2003, particularly following subsidence. The victims often included young children. According to experts, several thousand people [sic] are likely to have been exposed to radiation in the DRC’s uranium mines.” UNHCHR, Report of the Mapping Exercise, 764. The gender variable is all but invisible, except by inference, in the UNHCHR’s survey of abuses and atrocities associated with mineral extraction. 48 Free the Slaves, The Congo Report, 12. 49 Ibid., 14. 50 Free the Slaves, Congo’s Mining Slaves: Enslavement at South Kivu Mining Sites (Washington, DC: Free the Slaves, June 2013), 10, 17. Available online at http:​/​/www​​.free​​thesl​​aves.​​net​/d​​ocume​​nt​.do​​​c​?id=​​305. For a report, with powerful photos and video, of boys laboring in cobalt mines in the DRC, see Alex Crawford, “Cobalt-Mining Boys Given Hope—But Many Still Suffer,” Sky News, May 10, 2017. Available online at https​:/​/ne​​ws​.sk​​y​.com​​/stor​​y​/cob​​alt​ -m​​ining​​-boys​​-give​​n​-hop​​e​-but​​-many​​-stil​​l​​-suf​​fer​-1​​08713​​84. 51 Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 89. 52 Adam Jones, “Preface: A Pilgrim’s Progress,” in Jones, Gender Inclusive, xix. 53 Quoted in African Rights, Rwanda, 385. 54 Ibid., 587. 55 Ibid., 646. As an example of how gendered vulnerabilities of males and females are regularly intertwined, men of “fighting age” often seek to flee genocidal attackers—understanding that they are at primary risk, and expecting or hoping that members of traditionally “vulnerable” groups will not be targeted. The twentieth-century record is replete with instances in which such actions led to the consequent “root-and-branch” slaughter of the children, women, and elderly who remained in situ. 56 See the discussion in Adam Jones, “Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention: Incorporating the Gender Variable,” in Jones, Gender Inclusive, 278. Available online at https://www​.jha​.ac​/a080/. 57 R. Charli Carpenter, “Recognizing Gender-Based Violence against Men and Boys,” Security Dialogue 37 (2006): 91. Carpenter adds (93): The uncritical assumption that adult men should be required to fight for their country when asked raises questions about conflict-prevention policies, particularly in areas where the international community is attempting to prevent the violent outbreak of ethnic or civil war. If adult men are denied the right to remain in the civilian sector, they may have little choice but to join the armed forces. Moreover, if, as civilians, adult men are denied the protection afforded other demographic groups, they may reluctantly take up arms simply to protect themselves. Such policies are counterproductive to

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conflict-prevention strategies, which have a stake in reducing the number of individuals actively engaged in violent conflict. 58 Quoted in Carpenter, “Recognizing Gender-Based Violence,” 91. 59 Augusta Del Zotto, “Quantitative Inventory of Informational Materials of 4,076 NGOs Addressing Sexual Violence and Warfare,” cited in Del Zotto and Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence.” 60 Stemple quoted in Storr, “The Rape of Men.” In their survey of sexual assault in the Congolese conflict, Kirsten Johnson et al. noted that their “study is unique in that it evaluates the prevalence of sexual violence among men in the study area.” They concluded: “There is a need for inclusion of men in sexual violence definitions and policies in addition to targeted programs to address their needs. The protections of men and boys should be considered by the United Nations as it has with women and children” (emphasis added). Johnson et al., “Association of Sexual Violence,” 559. See also the critiques of United Nations policy discourses by Sandesh Sivakumaran and Paula Drumond: Sivakumaran, “Lost in Translation: UN Responses to Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Situations of Armed Conflict,” International Review of the Red Cross 92, no. 877 (March 2010): 259–77; Drumond, “Invisible Males.” 61 Adam Jones, “Of Rights and Men: Toward a Minoritarian Framing of Male Experience,” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 3 (September 2002): 399.

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PART II

Sexual Violence and Mass Rape 

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4 Exposed Bodies A Conceptual Approach to Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide Anthonie Holslag

[The corpses] were laid in such a position as to expose their persons to the ridicule of passersby, and on the abdomen of each was cast a large stone. They had evidently been murdered there at the noon hour and then the brutal guards had stopped to leave behind them the signs not only of violence but of mockery and insult (emphasis added).1

Introduction The aforementioned passage was written by an American missionary, Henry Riggs, who was an eyewitness during the First World War of the then-named “Armenian Catastrophe” in the Ottoman Empire.2 Riggs’s words underscore the brutality of the killing of Armenians and other Christian minorities and show how their bodies were used as a warning sign for passersby and how

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the violence against them was sexualized. Riggs’s use of “their persons” is a euphemism to describe the Armenians’ sexual organs exposed by the perpetrators. This act made a mockery of the Armenians’ deaths by insulting their corpses and inflicting shame on the Armenian culture of “honor.” The perpetrators used their victims’ bodies as a vehicle for showing their dominance, including sexual dominance, over Armenians. Sex crimes and genocide are intertwined in a complicated web. Genocide involves cultural and physical destruction, including mutilation and torture. The popular assumption that genocide is a crime of efficiency, a quick and effective way to annihilate a group of people, is fictitious when considering the sexual nature of genocidal crimes. It is not efficient to torture victims to death. It is not efficient to mutilate sexual organs; rape women, men, and children; and, in some cases, subject victims to forced assimilation and marriages. There is another driving force beyond the cultural and physical destruction of a people, and it is this driving force that is the focal point of this chapter. Legal scholar Doris Buss and political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood both argue that sexual violence—or, more accurately, the sexualization of violence—has been more prominent during ethnic cleansings and genocide than other forms of warfare.3 Examples include atrocious sexual experiments during the Second World War; the mass rape of Tutsi females by the Hutu majority, who not only abused the women sexually but also cut open their wombs during the Rwandan genocide;4 or the famous rape houses where Bosniak women were systematically abused during the Bosnian and Serbian conflict.5 These situations illustrate that rape and sexual violence are an integral part of genocide.6 This chapter explores the nature of sexual violence in the context of genocide. By doing so, I demonstrate how rape and other sex crimes are not separate and isolated forms of violence within the genocidal machinery but rather an integrated part of the whole genocidal spectrum of violence. I argue that sexual violence is more than a violent expression of dominance; it is more than simple opportunity. Sexual violence has symbolic meaning in a genocidal continuum. Or, as social anthropologist Anton Blok once observed: “To characterize violence as pointless or irrational is to abandon research at the point where it should start. . . . Violence as a cultural category or construction should be understood in the first place as a symbolic activity— not as meaningless, but as meaningful behavior.”7 The main questions this chapter will address are: how can we situate sexual violence in the genocidal intent and process, and furthermore, how can we understand and analyze sexual violence as a physical expression of the perpetrators’ social imaginaire?

Sexual Violence and Genocide: A Conceptual Approach Political scientist Elisabeth Wood argues that the use of sexual violence is interconnected with the intent of the violence itself.8 Or, to rephrase—sexual

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violence usually has either an opportunistic or a strategic purpose with a specific political and militaristic goal. For example, sexual violence occurs when “an armed group believes rape to be an effective form of terror against or punishment of a targeted group” (emphasis added).9 Rape can be used to humiliate and demoralize a group of people; it is a weapon against an entire community. Since women are often seen or visualized as “symbolic representations” of a culture or nation, they “become the embodied boundaries of the nation-state.”10 In this context, the intent of rape is not only to shame the woman but also to demean an entire culture.11 Nevertheless, intent can also restrain sexual violence. When a dominant group’s goal is to marginalize a particular ethnic group while simultaneously seeking the group’s cooperation (which is often the case in the first phases of ethnic cleansing and genocide), the dominant group refrains from sexual acts.12 However, and this is seemingly a paradox, sexual violence increases as the genocidal process unravels. Why does sexual violence, in the late phases of genocide, assume such a central place? To answer this question, it is important to understand that sexual violence during genocide is more complex and varied than is often represented or understood. Sexual violence conjures up images of rape, forced prostitution, and other forms of abuse against women. Yet sexual violence also includes forced marriages and assimilation and, in its most brutal form, sexual torture and the genital reconfiguration of victims, both men and women, who are “degenderized.” These acts should not be placed outside the symbolism, intent, context, and complexity of genocidal violence. Rather, we should study sexual violence as one form of violence in a barrage of violence that is often referred to as “genocide.” Genocide is a specific form of warfare that is highly symbolic. Genocide is not about conquering a country, gaining access to resources, repressing a population, or meeting specific political or militaristic goals, even though these elements are present during genocide. Genocide is first and foremost the destruction of an identity that occurs under the cloak of warfare. To comprehend this, we have to consider the perpetrators’ mind-set, or what sociologist and political scientist Jacques Sémelin considers their “imaginary constructs,” based on “identity,” “purity,” and “safety.”13 It is through a process of destroying a group’s identity and purifying the body politic (as defined by the perpetrators) that sexual violence gains a specific meaning, and this is where the analysis of sexual violence should start. By studying sexual violence within this continuum of destruction and placing it in the dialectic process of Othering, we can employ a new analytical point of view where even the most incomprehensible violent and sexual acts gain cultural meaning.14 This chapter focuses on the Armenian genocide to illustrate the aforementioned processes of identity destruction, purification, and selfreconstruction. It demonstrates how sexual violence acquires meaning in a particular historical and cultural context and how it is an interwoven part of genocidal intent and a genocidal continuum of destruction. Sexual

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violence is not a senseless and irrational act but, rather, a form of violence that is planned, sophisticated, and highly symbolic and is intertwined with a pathological fixation on identity by the perpetrators.

The Decline of the Ottoman Empire and the Struggle for Identity The Ottoman Empire, established in the fourteenth century, was from the outset multiethnic, multinational, multicultural, and multilingual. The driving force behind the empire was the Ghazi (warrior) tradition based on a pan-Islam ideology. This ideology placed the world in two “houses”: the House of Islam and the House of War. The House of Islam was inhabited by the true believers, the upright Muslims, who in an ideal future would coexist harmoniously in a large Islamic Empire. Nonbelievers occupied the House of War and were subordinated.15 According to this ideology, the Ghazis were justified in conquering nonbelievers’ land, thereby expanding both the House of Islam and the empire’s boundaries through military expeditions.16 At its height, around 1566, the empire included parts of present-day Hungary, Austria, and Egypt and extended to the Red Sea. In the sixteenth century, the empire was the dominant political and naval power in the region.17 The Ottoman Empire’s political interior was central, hierarchal, and patriarchal. The system was composed of several millets, groups of religious people with their own representatives who were given aman (mercy) by the Islamic elite. On the one hand, the millets were subordinated; on the other hand, since the millets practiced a monolithic religion, they were given some privileges within their own community. These privileges were extended to minority groups, like the Armenians, who could exercise limited political influence on both the state and community levels. Thus, various groups coexisted for centuries within the empire. At the top of this hierarchal system were the sultan and the Islamic elite. Although the Ghazi tradition and pan-Islam ideology constituted the main economic driving force of the Ottoman Empire, the state declined from the seventeenth century onward. The size and enormity of the empire made central governance of all provinces extremely difficult. Another reason for the decline was that other imperial powers in Europe—including France, Great Britain, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire, and the Persian dynasties in the Middle East—were competing with the geographical and political aspirations of the Ottomans. The diverse Ottoman Empire included Armenian, Assyrian, and Orthodox Greek Christian minorities, who in earlier times had been governed by the Persian Empire. These groups had specific ethnic identities based on religion, kinship, and trade relations. Their identity, since they were encapsulated by different empires, was not national. It is important to remember this in the genocidal processes in the nineteenth

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and twentieth centuries, when these groups, out of nationalistic motives, were branded as “enemies” within. The Ottoman Empire did not have a single national, cultural, or ethnic identity. Instead, there were several identities operating within its boundaries. This diversity posed challenges, especially in the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire operated under constant international threat from the other superpowers in Europe and the Middle East. From 1807 to 1829, the Ottoman Empire lost the regions of Abkhazia and Bessarabia to Russia. Between 1830 and 1878, the Ottoman Empire lost parts of Moldavia, Romania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary. Thus, the Ottoman Empire was in a rapid state of decline and was depicted in European and Russian newspapers as the “old sick man of Europe,” especially in the runup to the Crimean War in 1853. The waning power of the Ottoman Empire fostered anxiety and fear among top political leaders and others about the empire’s self-identity and future as a great power. This is significant because as social psychologist Ervin Staub explains, fear can provide a breeding ground for a pathological fixation on identity and therefore offers insight into how genocides can develop.18 He claims that genocide does not start with hatred, as is popularly argued, but rather with fear of what he considers the “self-concept”: All human beings strive for a coherent and positive self-concept, a self-definition that provides continuity and guides one’s life. Difficult conditions threaten the self-concept as people cannot care for themselves and their families or control the circumstances of their lives.19 Political scientist Robert Melson emphasizes that genocide occurs during moments of crisis and is, in essence, reactionary in nature.20 In the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire continued to decline as it lost more territory and grappled with economic and financial failure. Young intellectuals, called the “Young Turks,” sought answers in the national and democratic movements in Europe and staged a coup in 1908, turning the revolutionary organization, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), into a ruling political party. Intellectuals, including Ziya Gökalp (one of the major identity entrepreneurs of the Young Turks movement and committee), were looking for solutions to the Ottoman Empire’s political and social challenges.21 According to Gökalp and other Young Turks, the challenges the empire faced were not to be answered by reconfiguring the borders or halting its expansionist policies. Instead, the answers were sought within. During this time, the pan-Islam ideology slowly became obsolete. An influential article in 1904 by Yusuf Akҫura, “Three Types of Policies,” contrasted Islamism with Turkism and argued that Islamism and the Ghazi tradition were doomed to failure.22 Gökalp adopted these ideas and went a step further. Influenced by the national and secular movements in Europe and by Durkheim’s social scientific ideas of social cohesion, Gökalp maintained that if Turkey were to survive, a new national identity and a new pan

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ideology had to be constructed. He envisioned a pan-Turkish identity, not one built on the pillars of Islam but rather a “Turan” or “Turkish” identity based on the pillars of the Turkish culture.23 It was not only necessary to abandon pan-Islam, as Akҫura had argued, but also necessary to reconfigure the Ottoman Empire and socially engineer it as an explicitly Turkish, and not multiethnic, entity. Doing this, so the argument went, would make it possible to restore the Ottoman Empire to its former glory. It is important to understand the enormous social changes that these ideas implied. Abandoning the Ghazi tradition and the accompanying pan-Islam ideology was in fact abandoning the millet system and the multicultural and multiethnic character of the old Ottoman Empire. A new image of the “Self” had to be created. The Ottoman Empire had to become a monocultural and monoethnic nation-state. In this process of change and questioning of old beliefs, an “Other” had to be created—an “Other” that separated the old Ottoman elite from the new elite from 1908 onward. This is one of the key factors of the genocidal process—what the anthropologist Alexander Hinton considers “Othering.”24 Othering is a process by which a specific group within society is attached with negative connotations to differentiate the inner circle (e.g., the new political elite) from the outer circle (the outsiders). The purpose of Othering is to solidify the identity of the inner circle. In many cases, historically, these negative connotations have been attached first to the old governing elites, then to foreign powers and the external threat that they appeared to pose, and finally to the imagined “internal enemies.” In each step of this dialectic process, the Self is being established and solidified. Or, as the anthropologist P. Geschiere suggested, “To establish an identity, so it seems, smaller circles have to be drawn to seek out an ‘enemy within.’”25 Thus, in the Ottoman Empire the blame for the economic and political decline slowly shifted from the old Ottoman elite and the sultan to outside foreign forces and then to internal specified minorities. Significantly, these minorities posed not a physical threat but a psychological and imagined threat of the self-concept—an identity imagined to be endangered. This perceived threat to the self-concept allows the perpetrators of genocide to act on a sense of victimhood. (This is also why the process of Othering is considered to be “pathological”; it is based not on a positive selfimage but on a negative and fragile self-image.) The perpetrators imagine that they are the victims of a crisis and promote a narrative of victimization that justifies their actions. For example, Hitler repeatedly emphasized that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and later the German people, were victimized first by the politicians of the Weimar Republic, next by the European superpowers, and later by the intangible and imagined “Jewish conspiracy.” Similar processes were at work in the former Yugoslavia, when Milosevic emphasized Serbian victimhood over the poturice (Muslim “turncoats” and “traitors”),26 and in Rwanda when the Hutus imagined themselves to be the slow-witted victims of the hamite, the intellectual invaders (Tutsis).27

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This Othering also has another dimension that anthropologist Gerd Baumann considers “Selfing.” To Baumann, Othering is a dialectic process— a process of “reverse mirroring” where not only an “Other” but, more importantly, a new “Self” is created.28 Each time we attach a negative connotation to the “Other,” we are, in essence and implicitly, creating an imaginary positive “Self.” For example, if we perceive the “Other” as “backwards,”“conniving,” or “greedy,” we implicitly consider ourselves to be “progressive,” “technologically advanced,” “honest,” and “self-sacrificing.” We ascribe positive connotations to ourselves by degrading the other. Or, as Staub puts it: “Devaluation of a subgroup helps to raise low self-esteem.”29 Baumann considers this process of Othering and Selfing to be “normal,” a constituent part of day-to-day identification processes where a sense of collective identity is created. It is during genocidal processes, however, where Othering and Selfing are taken to a negative and pathological extreme. To Bauman, Othering is the most basic or primordial form of identification.30 When a state is politically and economically unstable, and the self-concept is conceived to be in danger, the Other becomes increasingly essentialized.31 At this point, the process of Othering, which starts in the social imaginaire of the new elite, becomes physical and tangible. For the Self to be constructed, the Other has to be solidified. The Other cannot only exist in what Sémelin considers a “mental construct”;32 it has to become visible and tangible in day-to-day interactions. As a result, the first phases of genocide begin by isolating and stigmatizing the out-group.33 This process is apparent at the onset of the Armenian genocide. After the CUP assumed power in 1908, the Ottoman Empire continued to decline. Defeat in the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 was the epitome of loss and failure. Some political leaders and opinion makers considered the Balkan War to be a punishment from Allah for not uniting the country and for failing to create a mononational and monoethnic or monoreligious society.34 Although the CUP was a secular and multiethnic political movement at first, by the end of the second revolution in 1913, it became a dictatorship largely run by three prominent individuals: Mehmet Talaat (interior minister), Ishmail Enver (war minister), and Ahmed Jemal (military general). At this time, other ethnic groups, Assyrians and secular Armenians, were excluded from the party, and the CUP’s Turkification program gained full momentum. Othering became a visible state policy. Armenians’ names had to be changed to Turkish names, properties were confiscated, all business transactions had to happen formally in the Turkish language, and all Armenians had to turn in their personal weapons. From 1913 onward, Christian traditions were forbidden in public life, and the only language allowed in schools was Turkish.35 These were major changes, especially in small towns in southeast Anatolia, where the Christian population was often a majority. It is important to emphasize that the Othering that occurred during this time was no longer an imagined or intellectual exercise in the mindset of the new political elite. Rather, this Othering was a political and physical exercise

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where a specific targeted group was no longer seen as part of the larger polity. As the newly constructed Ottoman Self was increasingly threatened, or perceived to be threatened, it used more and more extreme measures to protect itself. Ideas of social engineering took a new and prominent place in government policies. As stated before, genocide is not only a physical form of warfare or the destruction of a specific group; rather, it is the destruction of an identity in all its forms. That is why genocide includes a wide variety of violence—some physical and some symbolic. In the Ottoman Empire, languages were destroyed, identity indicators were destroyed, institutions were destroyed, churches were destroyed, and Armenian businesses were destroyed, and so on. From the perspective of the perpetrators, the country had to be purified and cleansed of all foreign and cultural influences in order for the in-group to exist.36 The start of the First World War only heightened tensions in the Ottoman Empire. The battle of identity became a battle of existence; as Gökalp stated in an article on the outset of the war, “only a State consisting of one nation can exist.”37 In the spring of 1915, Interior Minister Talaat spoke to a correspondent after he had received telegrams about the violence against Armenians in Erzurum: I received many telegrams about the Armenians and became agitated. I could not sleep all night. This is something that a human heart cannot bear. But if we hadn’t done it, they would have done it to us. Of course we started first, that is the fight for national existence (emphasis added).38 Not surprisingly, it was during the First World War—when the Ottoman Selfconcept was in even more danger—that social engineering policies gained full momentum, and genocidal processes unfolded. The Ottoman Empire had to be literally cleansed: the “Others” had to disappear both from the civic and the political body and from the public space. In 1914, Orthodox Greeks were forcibly deported. In 1915, the millet system was dismantled and prominent Armenians were captured and murdered on April 24.39 In May 1915, the first deportation orders for Christian minorities reached the southeast district of Van.40 In the summer of 1915, the first death marches of Armenians and Assyrians commenced.

The Symbolism of Sexual Violence during Genocide In the dialectic process of “Othering,” sexual violence plays a key role. Sexual violence allows the newly constructed Self to assert its identity over the Other; it allows the dominant group to express its “superiority”—in a very intimate way—over the targeted group. Moreover, this sexual violence enables the dominant group to attack the reproduction of the “Other’s” identity at its very core.

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According to Buss, as mentioned before, women are often seen or visualized as “symbolic representations” of a community. Raping women, and sometimes men, and penetrating a victim’s body is the aggressor’s ultimate act of physical dominance. Rape also degrades women and, by extension, their communities. In the framework of Othering, rape is a way to differentiate the dominant cultural group from the outsider.41 Rape, however, is only one horrific form of genocidal sexual violence. How do we explain other forms, such as torture, removal of genitals, and disregard of dead bodies with their most private and intimate parts exposed? What is the symbolism in these acts? In these instances, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai may give us insight.42 In his article “Dead Certainty,” he observes that violence is a symbolic representation of the Self and ideas of the nationstate and that the death of the Other actually solidifies the existence of the Self. The perpetrator not only eliminates the ethnic or national Other but also “establish[es] the parameters of this otherness, by taking the body apart, so to speak, to divine the enemy within” (emphasis added).43 Abstract notions of “Othering” are therefore translated into literal and physical acts during the violence. The Other is not only “constructed” and “deconstructed” in the imagination of the perpetrator but also physically constructed and deconstructed. The Other is subordinated, changed, stripped, and eventually killed. At each step the Self is established and further solidified, in flesh almost, as an entity. Perpetrators show their supreme dominance over the social body, national body, geographic body, and even sexual body, or what Foucault considers the ultimate form of power over people—the power over body politics through violence.44 Killing is an act where “constructed identities demand the brutal ‘creation’ of real identities.”45 The dominant group’s members safeguard and protect their “psychological selves” and, to achieve this, real people need to die: “Violent action can become one means of satisfying one’s sense of one’s categorical self.”46 In the context of genocide, therefore, the driving force behind sexual violence is not only to shame, dominate, repress, humiliate, or engage in “root-and-branch extermination” of a specific targeted group; nor is it only a result of opportunity, greed, or sexual and animalistic desires.47 The primordial aim of sexual violence, I argue, is to destroy the Other for the Self to exist. From this perspective, all sexual acts of violence— gendercide, rape, torture, and the removal of genitals—gain specific meaning if placed in the framework of genocidal intent. This is why sexual violence is more prominent and present during genocides and ethnic cleansings. Perpetrators engage in it to obliterate an identity, first by shaming and humiliating the targeted group and second by controlling and destroying reproduction. In the following paragraphs, I show examples of how these various forms of violence—gendercide, forced marriages, assimilation, sexual torture, and degenderization—occurred during what is now known as the first modern genocide, which was also a prototype of genocides to come, in the twentieth century.48

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Gendercide and Rape In the many eyewitness accounts, we see forms of what we now consider gendercide: the killing of one specific gender within the genocidal process. In most cases these were battle-aged young men, as the following narrative shows: Then the order came: “Men above the age of seventeen stand separately. Our country is in danger; it’s no time to walk with women,” repeated the gendarmes. Father kissed us in the morning, and together with my brother, Hovhannnes, went to join the men. Early morning the men moved in one direction, and after a while our caravan moved forward.49 What is noticeable about this eyewitness account is that Armenian men and women were separated at the early stages of the death marches. Indeed, in some cases, every male older than nine was taken away and killed on a nearby farm or hill, out of the females’ sight. The aforementioned account is also striking because of the implicit logic behind the order to separate the men, especially if we consider it in the context of the First World War and the perceived and increased threat of the “self-concept.” The statement “Our country is in danger; it’s no time to walk with women” underscores how, during this time of war, the enemy was not merely the Russians or the other European forces the Ottomans were battling; the enemy was also the Armenian population within. From the perspective of the aggressors, battle-aged Armenian men were enemies who had to be cleansed for the Self to survive. Killing them, moreover, would safeguard the Ottoman Self not only in the short term but also in the long term. By removing sexually active men from women, the perpetrators damaged the Armenian community’s reproductive capabilities. After the Armenian males over nine years of age were killed, the women and children were at the mercy of the gendarmes and/or the specialized paramilitary unit (the Shotas), composed mainly of criminals and Kurds whose sole aim was to attack and kill the Armenians in the caravans. Females were often targeted for their femininity, as the following eyewitness account shows: They drove us all: women, girls and children and forced us into the Armenian Church. They chose the pretty girls and took them away, in spite of the fact that the girls had rubbed mud on their faces. Then they brought petroleum tins and lined them up. My grandmother said: “For God’s sake, don’t burn us,” but they did not listen to that.50 This behavior was also a form of gendercide. The place where the perpetrators chose to perform the killings, an Armenian Church, was extremely symbolic. The Armenians were Orthodox Christians. By selecting the “prettiest girls” (therefore considered the most sexually attractive girls) to be killed in the face of their Christian beliefs, the perpetrators committed an act of

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aggression not only against the Armenian populace but also against the Armenian religion. The act was meant to convey the message: “Armenian Christianity will not survive.” Ottoman forces acted to prevent the religious and biological reproduction of the Armenian community. The killings by the Shotas were organized, planned, and ritualized. The violence also had a high level of sexual connotation. According to Ottoman Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas: When the first batches of the deported Armenians arrived at Gumush-Khana, all able-bodied men were sorted out with the excuse that they were going to be given work. The women and children were sent ahead under escort with the assurance by the Turkish authorities that their final destination was Mosul and that no harm will befall them. The men kept behind were taken out of town in batches of 15 or 20, lined up on the edge of ditches prepared beforehand, shot and thrown into the ditches. Hundreds of men were shot every day in a similar manner. The women and children were attacked on their way by the (“Shotas”) the armed bands organized by the Turkish Government who attacked them and seized a certain number. After plundering and committing the most dastardly outrages on the women and children, they massacred them in cold blood. These attacks were a daily occurrence until every woman and child had been got rid of. The military escorts had strict orders not to interfere with the “Shotas.”51 The comment about “the most dastardly outrages” being committed “on the women and children” likely refers to the act of rape. It also refers to the second wave of gendercide; where first the men were targeted, now the females became targets. By not only killing but also raping women in this second wave, the perpetrators asserted their control over the reproduction, and hence the identity, of the Armenians.

Gender, Enslavement, and Forced Assimilation Whereas the Holocaust was a genocide based on racial ideologies, the Armenian genocide was based on national ideologies. This difference shaped the acts of violence carried out against the targeted groups. Because the Ottoman authorities did not imagine Armenians’ “Otherness” to be in their blood, but rather in their ethnicity and culture, they used forced assimilation and enslavement as strategies for cleansing the empire of foreign “Armenian” elements. The gendered nature of forced assimilation and slavery is apparent in the following testimony: At midnight the wild gendarmes invaded our village. They proposed that they would “adopt” the boys from 9-13 and the women would be taken to serve in the houses of the Turkish beys [chieftains], which would be similar to the life of a harem.52

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While the “adopted” Armenian boys were used for labor and often forced to convert to Islam,53 females were often used as sex slaves and distributed to local populations in a wide network of “markets.” Outside of Mezreh, for instance, Armenian women and children were driven into a camp that also served as a slave market. Local Muslims bought the most appealing women (e.g., those from wealthier families) after doctors had examined them for diseases. If an Armenian female tried to resist her new fate, local authorities held her until she accepted her new “owner.”54 And, because Turks valued Armenian virgins more than nonvirgins, some doctors checked if the girls were virgins so that their sales price could be raised.55 The fact that females were sold and virgins were more desirable shows once again the importance of subordinating both the sexual and cultural reproduction of the Armenian populace. Virgins were young and considered influential and malleable. Females were seen as gatekeepers, mothers, and cultural representatives. Forcing the Armenian females to reproduce with the Turks was a way not only to subordinate but also to eliminate the Armenian culture through sexual acts. The goal was to cleanse the Ottoman political, national, and civic body, as well as the public space of Armenian culture, and to cleanse the Armenian populace of its Armenianness from within. There is another, and more fundamental, symbolism at work in the selling of female Armenians: the symbolism of the dehumanization and commercialization of the victimized group. We see this in other genocides. During the Holocaust, human hair was used for the war industry, and during the Rwandan genocide, victims’ bones were sold and resold. By commercializing victims and using them literally as a product, perpetrators transformed victims from humans into nonhumans. Victims essentially became cattle, whose bodies (or body parts) could be used in a variety of ways. Maria Jacobsen, an eyewitness to the Armenian genocide, speaks of this dehumanization when she described the following scene: “These poor people did not look like humans any more, not even animals could be found in this state, people would be merciful and kill them.”56 Another eyewitness account noted—and here we also see the commercialization of the violence—how female Armenian deportees at temporary camps were examined before rape and abduction and compared this action with butchers examining animals before slaughtering them.57 Slavery and forced assimilation were gender-based. The Armenian boys who were taken into Turkish households were often considered “young enough” to still be converted to Islam, while Armenian females were often, but not always, used as sex slaves. “Conversion” and “assimilation” were, however, the central themes. Armenians could survive only if they subordinated themselves completely to the will of the dominant culture group, which reaffirmed the supremacy of the Turkish identity. The cleansing had to be complete. Not only were the subjects forced into strange households, they were forced to become Turkified, and in many cases this Turkification process

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involved sexual subordination. Christian names were obliterated, conversion to Islam was forced, and children and parents were separated. Everything that made a victim an “Armenian” had to be stripped away. Sometimes, as the following eyewitness account shows, fictitious familial relationships were created: “The other man took my sister, Varsenik, by the arm and said: ‘Pretty girl, I’ll take you to my house: you’ll become our daughter.’”58

Sexualized Killings One of the most horrific, and most understudied, sides of sexualized violence is torture and genital removal, which I term “sexualized killings.” Of course, these violent actions are related to gender-based killings and have many similarities with gendercide. The only exception is that the sexual organs are specifically targeted within the violence of sexualized killings, as the following eyewitness account shows: In Dilman there is also the same amount of murdered Armenians, whose martyrdom was carried out in the most horrific manner. They cut off the feet of living people with saws, they cut their wrists in the same way, they cut noses, cheeks, and lips off with scissors. They burned those parts of the body which are more sensitive. Both the elderly and the young were killed by frightful tortures, without regard to gender. We saw the traces of boundless brutality, glowing skewers were run through genitals of both women and men, and they were put to death this way.59 Skewers were run through genitals, and everything that resembled Armenianness, including facial features, were cut off. The victims were not only made non-Armenian but also degendered. We see this even more in the following eyewitness account: For a whole month [during the summer of 1915] corpses were observed floating down the river Euphrates nearly every day, often in batches of two to six corpses bound together. The male corpses are in many cases hideously mutilated (sexual organs cut off, and so on), the female corpses are ripped open.60 According to Appadurai, the ripping and cutting open of human bodies has a specific symbolic meaning. The physical body becomes the “theater of the body” for politics. Cutting open a body is a symbol for making the inward outward and for making the invisible visible so as to overtly show the enemy within. Ottoman forces also degenderized the victims by removing their sexual organs. By making victim’s bodies nongender-specific, perpetrators stripped the victims of their identity and made them appear asexual and less human. Sexual violence such as this was also interlinked with ideas of femininity and masculinity:

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The gendarmes caught my sister-in-law who was pregnant, and made a bet: “What is—girl or boy—inside this gâvur’s belly?”61 said one of them. The other cut open her belly with a sword before our eyes and replied: “Gâvurs do not bear boys, see!”62 What is noticeable about this eyewitness account is that masculinity is placed higher up the hierarchy in the mind of the perpetrator. Gâvurs (infidels), after all, do not “bear boys.” They are incapable of doing so. Of course, boys symbolize the patriarchal character of the nation-state. Not being able to bear boys excludes females and their offspring from the political body; they are subordinated by the Ottomans, who can bear boys and thereby maintain the patriarchal structure and culture of the Turks. If we analyze these eyewitness accounts, we see multiple forms of sexual killings, all with a similar aim. By cutting open pregnant women, the aggressors confirmed their dominant status. By cutting open bodies, the aggressors made public the enemy within. By degenderizing their victims, especially the males, the aggressors solidified their masculinity, and therefore the patriarchy of the dominant culture group. The Armenian victims became nonsexual nonhumans; they became objects to confirm a newly constructed Self—a newly established national Turkish identity.

Closing Remarks For a topic of sexual violence, there is no “conclusion.” A conclusion implies closure, an ending, to a topic that is ongoing both on the ground and in scholarly inquiry. In this chapter, I have argued that the destruction of an identity plays a key role in the unfolding of genocidal violence, including sexual violence. Genocide, by definition, is aimed at obliterating an identity in the boundaries of (an imagined) nation-state or empire. The dominant culture group is faced with enormous political, social, and, often, economic crises wherein the identity of the dominant culture group is questioned. A new identity has to be established, and to do this the dominant culture uses “Othering” and “Selfing” to create a new sense of “we.” In each step of the violence, which Staub considers the continuum of destruction,63 a layer of identity— religious identity, economic identity, gender identity, and human identity—is stripped away from the victim group so that the identity of the dominant culture group can be solidified. First, the obvious and primary identity markers, such as names (kinship), language, collective history, and religion, are destroyed. In the physical destruction that follows, the violence is highly symbolic: “The victims are concentrated, overpowered, de-gendered, penetrated, and in the end dehumanized and slaughtered like animals.” This violence carries tacit and symbolic meaning as a cultural expression. As I have argued:

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By destroying the names of the victimized group, the perpetrators are confirming and solidifying their own kinship. By destroying the language of the out-group, the perpetrators are confirming the superiority of their own language. By making the collective history of the out-group subordinated to the nationalistic tale, the perpetrators are actually confirming their own history. By destroying the religion, the perpetrators are confirming the superiority of their own religion. Within each step of the violence, the pathological fixation on identity for the in-group is symbolically “resolved,” ending with the most gruesome acts by which the in-group confirms its masculinity, [reproductive prowess] and humanity over the out-group.64 My argument is that Othering does not stop with mental constructions alone but rather is translated into physical and violent sexual acts. By raping victims, selling them as slaves, forcing assimilation, and removing genitals, the in-group is showing not only its dominance and masculinity but also the power of the patriarchal nation-state or empire. The message is, “we control your lives” and “we control your identity.” Further, “we control those most intimate parts of your life: your sexuality and in the end your sexual reproduction. You are no longer allowed to procreate. Only we—the dominant culture group—are allowed to exist.” This message is the message of genocide—the intangible and symbolic battle of existence.

Further Consequences and Further Inquiries When survivors reached camps and areas of safety, all of their identity indicators had been destroyed. Political parties were dismantled, political and intellectual leaders were killed, the Armenian Church and the religious establishment were divided and scattered, businesses no longer existed, and even language became a point of contention. Children who had survived the genocide didn’t speak Armenian due to the firm Turkification laws before the genocide. Adult survivors often ended up in areas where Armenians spoke Eastern Armenian (in the Republic of Georgia, Armenia, or Iran), a dialect that historically developed to such a different extent from the Western Armenian language that Armenians from Turkey could not always understand it. This caused friction and even schisms in the host countries in which Armenian survivors resided.65 There was no precedent for how to situate the Armenian genocide in a collective history or in a contextual framework. Survivors, therefore, who were stripped of all identity indicators, had to create new narratives to ascribe meaning to this experience as well as their daily lives. They often attached meaning as we will see, to their sense of Self and to their identities. Anthropologist Carol Kidron speaks of narrative truths as narrations that give a group perspective on themselves, their place in the world, and

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their culture.66 The narratives do not constitute a factual reality (built on measurable facts), but a social reality built on ideas, norms, and values. These perspectives come forward in daily conversations, but also in art, music, literature, and other forms of expression in which narratives implicitly or explicitly construct “Armenianness,” both in terms of what is articulated and what is left unsaid, and in the silence itself.67 Armenians have developed narratives that amplify aspects of their identity that the Turkish aggressors wanted to destroy. For the Armenians, the genocide has become a vehicle to differentiate themselves from other groups. They identify Christian connotations of Suffering and Martyrdom as an intrinsic part of the Armenian character; they often speak of this suffering as if it is in their blood. At the same time, however, this Suffering also promotes Armenian Strength; only they, as a specific ethnic group, are capable of carrying this enormous pain of loss, injury, and injustice that they or their ancestors have endured. This pain is not metaphorical; it is physically felt by many Armenians. They suffered as Jesus suffered on the cross, but they have also been resurrected, and they have promoted an identity and culture in which the Armenian genocide is completely integrated in their narrative truths.68 We see this in the quantitative study of sociologist Anny Bakalian, who researched the ways that Armenians in New York described their identity, especially the youth in the early 1990s.69 Many made a distinction between “feeling” Armenian and “being” Armenian. This distinction was also evident in the life stories of Armenians, whom I interviewed in the Netherlands. The meaning of this distinction eluded me, however, until the end of my research, when I witnessed a very heated argument between an Armenian from Syria and an Armenian from Turkey. The first claimed that the other might feel like an Armenian and be an Armenian in essence, but that he wasn’t a “true” Armenian until he learned the language. The Armenian from Turkey replied that he didn’t see the value of learning the language in the Netherlands, and then asserted that he was more of an Armenian than his opponent for he had felt the deep repression of and discrimination against Armenians that still occurs in present-day Turkey. Here is where “feeling” Armenian and “being” Armenian collided. “Feeling” Armenian is an ascribed status, as Bakalian also explains. Everyone who is born as an Armenian feels the suffering of their people in their blood. “Being” Armenian was an achieved status. It meant that you learned Armenian language, history, and customs. This idea of Armenianness has frequently been propagated by the Armenian political Tashnak party, which is prominently active in diasporic communities. This party tries to create an Armenian (political) identity built on the old ideas of the nation-state, in which speaking one language and being active politically are central to “being” Armenian. What I actually witnessed, without realizing it at the time, was a discussion about Armenian identity and how the experience of genocide was completely engrained in the sense of Self. The Armenian from Syria basically stated that the Armenian from Turkey was Armenian in essence, for he felt the same pain they all felt, but was not actively Armenian, because

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he was not politicized. The response was maybe even harsher, even though it seems innocent at face value. The Armenian from Turkey replied that although he did not speak the language or abide by the political definition of what an Armenian was, he was more of an Armenian than his opponent for he had lost ancestors to the genocide and was a victim of the still existing discrimination laws in Turkey that made him a political asylum seeker in the Netherlands; in this context, he knew suffering much better than the Armenian from Syria did. This exchange between the two Armenians underscores how genocide and identity are played out on several levels. We see, even though this feels counterintuitive, that the experience of the genocide caused a common bond between and brought together Armenians with different backgrounds, but that it also served as a point of contention in conceptualizations of identity. The transformation of Armenianness from an ethnic identity under the Ottoman Empire to a racial identity today—to something that resides in the blood—informs women’s gender roles, sexual norms, and reproductive behavior in the Armenian Diaspora. Women are considered the gatekeepers of Armenian identity and culture, and as such, play an important role in maintaining and promoting the Armenian Self. Indeed, when I started my research, I received a stark warning from my first informant, who occupied an important position within the Dutch Armenian Diaspora. He said: “You can talk to anyone, but leave the females alone.” This comment surprised me at first, but I came to understand its importance later on as I conducted my research. The fear of an Armenian woman marrying an odar (nonArmenian) is a lasting source of anxiety and debate among and across generations of Armenians. There are strict endogamy rules, and Armenians go to great lengths to create couples among Armenian youths. As a matter of fact, Armenian foundations spend significant funds on organizing dance parties and other events that bring younger Armenians together. Family pressures can be such that women are ostracized if they marry an odar. These endogamy rules seem to be less strict for men, though male respondents often claimed that it is their ideal to marry a female Armenian. Despite this ideal, marriages with odars are increasingly common. In this context, an Armenian woman married to an odar plays a crucial role in transmitting Armenian identity and culture to her children. More than their male counterparts, female respondents told me that they actively speak Armenian and send their children to Armenian Sunday schools or Armenian gatherings. When I asked why, the answers I received were similar: “to awaken the Armenianness that is in the blood.” Male Armenians who married odars played a much lesser role in promoting “Armenianness,” though they still maintained the importance of endogamous marriages. However, they often considered their own relationships the exception to the rule. Therefore, the pressure to establish relationships with other Armenians is not equally dispersed. Women carry a greater responsibility to marry an Armenian and to preserve the next generation’s ties to their Armenian identity and culture. As a result, it is not uncommon for an

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Armenian female family member of a man who has married an odar to become a surrogate mother to the couple’s children. The racialization of Armenian identity, and women’s significance in replenishing the Armenian population and promoting Armenian culture, has produced a situation where men today are expected to protect women and Armenian identity by chaperoning them in public and safeguarding their sexual and reproductive behavior. The genocide has become an integrated part of Armenian essence. What makes this narrative so powerful is that it is both transgenerational and transnational: different diasporic communities, even if they vary in demographics and in the host country they live in, share a similar narrative about themselves. The similarities are traced to the genocide in their collective history, where Armenians were dispersed, killed, mutilated, and displaced from their homes and communities, and their identity indicators were destroyed. Armenian narratives today are intertwined with this violence that occurred and the intent of that violence that aggressors expressed to victims. It would be interesting in further inquiries to determine how survivors’ narratives might differ depending on how perpetrators communicated the intent of the genocide—based on racial beliefs, national sentiments, ethnic or religious ideas. If the narratives are different because the modes of violence and the cultural expression of violence were different, we could in hindsight explain, motivate, and clarify what this intent was and how it was manifested. This could lead to a greater understanding of the internal concepts that informed genocidaires and their actions.

Notes 1 H. H. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experience in Harpoot (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 1997), 57–8. 2 The word “genocide” was adapted in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Before this there was no word to describe the horrors that the Armenians experienced during the First World War. It is worth mentioning that Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), used the Armenian Catastrophe as an example of genocide in his earlier (personal) writings in 1943. He also made comparisons between anti-Armenianism and antisemitism, as quoted in D. J. Schaller, “‘La question arménienne n’existe plus’: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern während des Ersten Weltkriegs und seine Darstellung in der Historiographie,” in Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Fritz Bauer Institut (Hg) (Frankfurt, DE and New York: Campus Verlag, 2004), 113. 3 D. E. Buss, “Rethinking Rape as a Weapon,” Feminist Legal Studies 17, no. 2 (2009): 150; E. J. Wood, “Variation of Sexual Violence during War,” Politics and Society 34, no. 3 (2006): 327.

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4 Adam Jones, ed., “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 118–19. Rape was so extensive that the Trial Chamber at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda extended the definition of rape as “a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive.” Quoted in N. Pillay, “Sexual Violence in Times of Conflict: The Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” in Civilians in War, ed. S. Chesterman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 173. 5 Alexandra Stiglmayer, “The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. A. Stiglmayer (Lincoln: Nebraska Press, 1994). 6 This was performed to such an extent that it has even been taken into the legal definition of genocide, especially parts (d) and (e) of the adapted Article II of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. In this article, it has been specified that (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group are indeed (legal) genocidal acts. 7 A. Blok, “Zinloos en Zinvol Geweld,” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 18, no. 3 (1991): 203. 8 Wood, “Variation of Sexual Violence during War,” 325–7. 9 Ibid., 331. 10 Buss, “Rethinking Rape as a Weapon,” 148. For further examination, see also V. Das, “Language and the Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 67–91; V. Das, “Violence, Gender and Subjectivity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 283–99; A. Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Public Culture 10, no. 2 (1998): 225–47. 11 S. Banerjee et al., “Engendering Violence: Boundaries, Histories, and the Everyday,” Cultural Dynamics 16 (2004): 129. 12 Wood, “Variation of Sexual Violence during War,” 332. 13 J. Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst and Co, 2007), 22. 14 The continuum of destruction involves psychological changes where more extreme forms of violence become acceptable: “Initial acts that cause limited harm result in psychological changes that make further destructive actions possible.” E. Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17. 15 T. Zwaan, Civilisering en Decivilisering: Studies over staatsvorming en geweld, nationalisme en vervolging (Amsterdam, NL: Boom, 2001), 210. 16 Even though the Ghazi tradition in the Ottoman Empire had a definite Islamic dimension, the warrior tradition of expanding boundaries through conquest was actually older than this. The Ghazi tradition started to have Islamic connotations after Islam was established. See H. Y. Aboul-Enein and S. Zuhur, “Islamic Rulings on Warfare,” Strategic Studies Institute US Army War College (2004), 6.

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17 A. C. Hess, “The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century World War,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 55–76. 18 Staub, The Roots of Evil; Staub, “The Origins of Genocide and Mass Killing: Core Concepts,” in The Genocide Studies Reader, eds. S. Totten and P. R. Bartrop (New York: Routledge, 2009). 19 Staub, The Roots of Evil, 15. 20 R. F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 63. 21 “Identity entrepreneurs” are often politicians, but also intellectuals, poets, and social scientists who reconstruct identities, often through mythology and a specific interpretation of history. See Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, 16–21, 49. 22 D. Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 50. 23 See the writing of Gökalp, in U. Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London: Luzac & Company and The Harvill Press, 1950). 24 A. L. Hinton claims: “Genocides are distinguished by a process of ‘othering’ in which the boundaries of an imagined community are reshaped in such a manner that a previously ‘included’ group (albeit often included only tangentially) is ideologically recast (almost always in dehumanizing rhetoric) as being outside the community, as a threatening and dangerous ‘other’— whether racial, political, ethnic, religious, economic, and so on—that must be annihilated.” Alexander Hinton, ed., “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide,” in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. A. L. Hinton (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 6. 25 P. Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 27. 26 T. Bringa, “Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995,” in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Hinton, 215. 27 C. C. Taylor, “The Cultural Face of Terror in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994,” in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Hinton. 28 G. Baumann, “Grammars of Identity/Alterity,” in Grammars of Identity/ Alterity: A Structural Approach, eds. G. Baumann and A. Gingrich (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 20. 29 Staub, “The Origins of Genocide and Mass Killing,” 99. 30 This is also why he considers Othering a form of “baby-grammar.” He considers three forms of grammar on how groups create identities. One is called “segmentation,” inspired by the works of Evan-Pritchard; another is “encompassment”; and the third is the most basic and primordial: “babygrammar.” Baumann, “Grammars of Identity.”

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31 Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity.” 32 Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, 9. 33 G. H. Stanton, “Eight Stages of Genocide,” in The Genocide Studies Reader, eds. Totten and Bartrop. 34 See T. Akҫam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 84; and U. Ü. Üngör, “Seeing Like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–1950,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 1 (2008): 20. 35 H. M. Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death: The Memoirs of Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian (London: Taderon Press, 2003), 76, 100, 101. 36 See also Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, 38–9. 37 Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism, 131. 38 Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors, 70. 39 The millet system was a political system where specific groups had a certain amount of autonomy. This exceptional position was reserved only for dhimmis, an ethnic group who professed a monotheistic religion, which was acknowledged as such by the prophet Muhammad. Zwaan, Civilisering en Decivilisering, 217. 40 N. Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (London: Pimlico, 2001), 60. 41 Banerjee et al., “Engendering Violence,” 129. 42 Appadurai, “Dead Certainty.” 43 Ibid., 233–4. 44 M. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 137. 45 Appadurai, “Dead Certainty,” 242. 46 Ibid., 244. 47 A. Jones, “Gendercide and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 185, 193. Available online: http://www​.gendercide​.org​/gendercide_ and​ _genocide​_2​.h​tml. 48 R. F. Melson considers the Armenian genocide a prototype of other genocides in the twentieth century. See also Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” in Is the Holocaust Unique, ed. A. S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). 49 Testimony by Ashkehn Hakob Poghikian, in V. Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors (Yerevan, AM: Gitoutyoun Publishing House, 2011), 223. 50 Testimony by Dsirani Rafayel Matevossian, in Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide, 258. 51 Quoted in Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 20. As Bjørnlund notes, “The Shotas,

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or Chetes, were parts of the Special Organization, a secret organization created by the CUP leadership in order to wage guerilla warfare behind enemy lines, as well as to act as the main killer units massacring Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. The Chetes were usually made up of released convicts and/or Muslim tribesmen and refugees, and were led by officers or by CUP officials” (45, note no. 27). 52 Testimony of Harutyun Zakar Martikian, in Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide, 257. 53 See also K. T. Watenpaugh, “‘Are there Any Children for Sale?’: Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children (1915–1922),” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3 (2013): 283–95. 54 A. Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. O. Bartov and P. Mack (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 215. See also Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse than Dying,” 23. 55 S. H. Villa and M. K. Matossian, Armenian Village Life Before 1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 73; A. M. Benedictsen, Armenien— Et folks Liv og Kamp Gennem to Aartusinder (Copenhagen, DK: Gad, 1925), 254. For further information see Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse than Dying.” 56 M. Jacobsen, Maria Jacobsen’s Diary 1907–1919, Kharput–Turkey (Antelias, LB: Armenian Catholicosate, 1979), 270. For an English translation, see M. Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907-1919, trans. Kristen Vind (Princeton, NJ and London: Gomidas Institute, 2001). See also Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse than Dying.” 57 Khanum Palutian’s (Palootzian) testimony, KMA, 10.360, Pk. 15, “ArmenierMissionen, Diverse Skildringer vedr. Arminierne [sic] 1906-1927.” 58 Testimony by Ashkehn Hakob Poghikian, in Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide, 223. 59 Quoted from a contemporary Russian-Armenian newspaper article in E. G. Danielyan, The Armenian Genocide of 1894-1922 and the Accountability of the Turkish State (Yerevan, AM: Noyan Tapan, 2005), 32. 60 J. Bryce and A. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916, ed. A. Sarafian, uncensored ed. (Princeton, NJ: Taderon Press, 2000), 67. 61 Gâvur could be translated as “infidel.” 62 Testimony of Barouhi Silian, in Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide, 414. 63 Staub, The Roots of Evil, 17. 64 Anthonie Holslag, “Within the Acts of Violence: An Anthropological Exploration of the Meaning of Genocide as a Cultural Expression,” in The Crime of Genocide: Prevention, Condemnation, and Elimination of Consequences (Proceedings of International Conference, Yerevan, December 14-15, 2010) (Yerevan, AM: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, 2011), 139.

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65 See also Anthonie Holslag, The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 57–95. 66 Carol Kidron, “Towards an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2009): 5–27. 67 Ibid., 12. 68 For a more elaborate analysis, I refer to my book The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide, 193–240, where I triangulate interviews, life histories, literature, and film photography made and written by Armenians after the genocide. 69 Anny Bakalian, Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993).

5 An Exceptional Genocide? Sexual Violence in the Holocaust Zoë Waxman

On February 22, 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) declared rape to be “a crime against humanity.” Rape in this definition was not limited to forced penetration but was taken to cover sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, and any other form of sexual violence, including the forced undressing of women and parading them in public, humiliation, harassment (e.g., unwanted sexual comments or advances), and the intention to cause psychological harm. As we will see, sexual violence also includes forced impregnation and sterilization.1 Although a report by Medécins sans Frontieres from 1993 concluded that “[in] Bosnia systematic rape was used as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing,”2 Judge Florence Mumba of the International Tribunal warned: It is to some extent misleading to say that systematic rape was employed as a weapon of war. This could be understood to mean a kind of concerted approach or an order given to the Bosnian Serb armed forces to rape Muslim women as part of their combat activities in the wider meaning. There is no sufficient evidence for such a finding before the Tribunal. What the evidence shows is that the rapes were used as an instrument of terror, an instrument they were given free rein to apply whenever and against whomsoever they wished.3 While Serbian soldiers may not have acted in accordance with a specific order to rape and sexually abuse their Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) victims, they were nevertheless actively encouraged to use sexual violence to terrorize,

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humiliate, punish, and degrade the non-Serbian population. Rape was both legitimized and accommodated. What is more, the sexual violence was often used simultaneously with military action or attempts at ethnic cleansing. Sexual violence was widespread throughout all regions of Yugoslavia, especially in Croatia and Kosovo, but it appears to have been most prevalent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where tens of thousands of women were raped. The existence of mass rape and the intense suffering of Bosnian Muslims were broadcast by the international media and reached the television sets of millions of people around the world. By contrast, the mass rapes of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 attracted far less immediate attention. In the span of 100 days the ethnic Hutu majority had raped between 100,000 and 200,000 Tutsi women.4 Despite the rudimentary nature of the massacres—they were largely carried out by machete—it was the most rapid genocide in twentieth-century history. After the genocide ended, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 955 in November 1994 created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTR not only explicitly defined the crime of rape in international law but found an individual guilty of rape not just as a crime against humanity but also as an act of genocide. The Hutu mayor, Gen. Jean-Paul Akayesu, was found guilty of nine of fifteen charges, including genocide, incitement to genocide, and rape. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.5 The cases of Bosnia and Rwanda raise troubling questions for the historian of genocide in general, and the Holocaust in particular. On the one hand, it is clear that rape was committed, but on the other hand, we do not know how intrinsic it was to the genocidal process. Discovering occurrences of rape, which is a problem even when studying genocides as well documented as those in Bosnia and Rwanda, becomes an almost insuperable difficulty when confronting the events of the Holocaust. For despite the work of three generations of scholars, it remains the case that rape in the Holocaust is both hard to find and hard to define. This short chapter will counsel against reading rape back into the Holocaust, as though all genocides are the same and as though all genocides involve the same use of rape as a weapon of war. Instead, it will maintain the particularity of the Holocaust—not least, although not only—because rape, however conceptualized, appears to play such a limited role within it. In the Holocaust, rape was not absent but neither was it endemic, much less a key instrument of genocide. In light of the visibility and scale of the sexual atrocities committed in Bosnia and Rwanda, many scholars have been prompted to revisit earlier acts of war and genocide to also look for sexual violence. Nonetheless, even though increased awareness of rape and sexual abuse as tools of genocide is a crucially important legacy from Bosnia and Rwanda, we have to be cautious about reading sexual abuse back into all genocides without sufficient documentary evidence or reliable sources. I myself, a historian of the Nazi Holocaust, became very interested in the question of sexual

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violence and the Holocaust and have published on the topic.6 However, although I have used reports testifying the existence of sexual abuse, I have found them to be mostly ad hoc and opportunistic. Moreover, uncovering rape and sexual violence so many years after the event presents serious methodological challenges to the historian. For the most part we have to rely on the memories of survivors to uncover the existence of rape and sexual violence.7 Our reliance on survivors is made more problematic still, because experiences of rape and sexual abuse are mostly oblique or told through the lens of another person—a friend or a relative, for example. While these challenges mirror the difficulties of talking or writing about rape in civilian society, they nevertheless make it difficult to undertake a serious, considered analysis of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust. The organized rape of Jewish women was certainly not part of the official German genocidal policy. For rape to be genocidal—to be an integral element of ethnic cleansing—it has to be calculated. Men—for it is mostly men (or boys coerced as child soldiers) —do not rape solely as individuals acting on individual desire but as members of a specific race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality.8 They do not just sexually abuse individuals but members of a specific group.9 Rape during genocide is characteristically brutal, disrupting notions of acceptable behavior, and is often done in full view of children or other family members. As Catharine MacKinnon has so powerfully written: This is not rape out of control. It is rape under control. It is also rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It is rape as genocide.10 The problem of applying these notions of genocidal rape to the Holocaust in general—especially in Germany and German-controlled parts of Europe—begins with the Nazi prohibition on sexual relations between “Aryans” and Jews. “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” passed on September 15, 1935, applied to both marriage and extramarital affairs, as well as forced intercourse.11 Far from encouraging rape as something “to be seen and heard and watched and told to others,” this legislation in fact made any sexual contact—consensual or nonconsensual—a criminal offense, something to be concealed. Although it is difficult to gauge how completely individual soldiers, Nazis, and others adhered to this regulation as the Holocaust unfolded, there is little evidence to suggest that they transgressed in great numbers. To be sure, recent research has brought to light the fact that German soldiers serving on the Eastern Front did engage in sexual activity with local women— including some Jewish women—in both violent and consensual ways. Regina Mühläuser has uncovered documented cases of rape, gang rape, sexual torture—for example, the cutting off of a woman’s breast—sexual

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enslavement, and military and civil prostitution among German men and “ethnically alien women” of all ages, a category that includes Jews as well as the majority Slav population, Gypsies, and other minorities.12 Moreover, as Wendy Lower has argued, because actions on the periphery of the Nazi genocide were less scrutinized and therefore potentially more brutal, women were quite literally raped to death.13 This was particularly the case when German soldiers were engaged in looting and under the influence of excessive alcohol consumption. Although some soldiers were court-martialed for such undisciplined behavior, this appears to have been the exception rather than the rule, which suggests that such actions were tolerated as an unavoidable by-product of warfare or normal heterosexual activity rather than actively encouraged.14 Nonetheless, even this important analysis and scholarship is based on limited and sketchy sources. It remains the case that historians such as Mühläuser are unable—despite scrupulous research—to provide reliable data, and we simply do not know how many women suffered such a fate, much less whether Jewish women were disproportionately affected, much less whether they were raped despite rather than because they were Jewish. There is also evidence in the German satellites such as Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Lithuania, and the Ukraine, where it was the local authorities rather than the Germans who took responsibility for the persecution and murder of the Jews, that Jewish women were subject to forced sex and to the sort of sexual violence that we might term rape.15 However, in many of these places specific information about the fate of their Jewish populations was heavily censored and historiography on the Holocaust is still in its relative infancy. This means that historians such as Anatoly Podolsky, trying to find material relating to the specific fate of Jewish women in the Ukraine during the Holocaust, mostly have to rely on the memoirs of the few Jewish women who survived the war in the Ukraine, and the recollections of non-Jewish witnesses who survived the Nazi occupation recorded after 1991.16 This makes uncovering the rape and sexual abuse that Jewish women in occupied Ukraine suffered by both the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators extremely difficult. For example, in districts where there were no ghettos—such as the Kiev area where Jewish men, women, and children were made to undress before being shot by submachines and flung into mass graves—eyewitnesses remember that some women were raped but are unable to supply specific details. It is extremely unlikely, of course, that any of the raped women survived. Again, we have to rely on the testimony of the few survivors. Women such as Dina Pronicheva, who survived the terrible massacre at Babi Yar in September 1941 by hiding herself amid the dead and dying, witnessed the rape of two young Jewish women by a group of German soldiers.17 In the absence of further evidence, however, we cannot know how representative—or unrepresentative—her experience was. Thus, despite the importance of such testimony, it remains impossible to form any coherent analysis of the

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extent of sexual violence against Jewish women in the Ukraine and other areas of the Generalgouvernment. The situation for women detained within the concentration camps was different again, though still governed by the Nazi race laws. In the camps if an SS man was found to be having sexual relations with a Jewish woman, he would most likely be sent to the Soviet front. This obviously served as a strong deterrent and made it more probable that the SS would have made use of the concentration camp brothels and the non-Jewish women enslaved in them.18 It also means that any woman who was raped by an SS guard is likely to have been killed to ensure the cover-up of the guard’s violation of Nazi race laws. As such, very few accounts testifying the rape of Jewish women by German guards exist. The testimony of Laura Varon, a Greek-Jewish woman, who testified that she and a friend were raped by three SS officers at Auschwitz, is one of the few exceptions.19 Jewish women were far more likely to fall victim to sexualized violence perpetrated by the German civilians who ran the factories in which the prisoners worked or by so-called privileged prisoners, in particular by low-level prisoner functionaries such as the Kapos (leaders of work commandos). That other prisoners could be capable of such cruelty is not surprising. The brutality of the concentration camps and the extreme dehumanization that followed diminished sensitivity to human suffering. The sense of fatality—of there being no chance of survival—encouraged the fulfillment of immediate gratification. The existence of this type of abuse, however, was neither systematic nor controlled but was indicative that extreme deprivation increased women’s vulnerability. While it seems probable that Jewish women were not raped in great numbers in the concentration camps, nearly every woman entering the camps did experience sexual humiliation. On entering the concentration camps all women—from the mature to the barely pubescent; from the orthodox to the secular; the rich to the poor—were forced to undress in front of SS men making obscene comments and then suffer the indignity of having to spread their legs as part of the shaving process before being branded with tattooed numbers and drenched with delousing chemicals that burnt the skin. For many women, the brutal removal of their hair was repeated as a means of punishment throughout their incarceration. They also had to undergo painful examinations of their oral, rectal, and vaginal cavities, supposedly to check for the lice that were endemic in the camps or even concealed valuables. Women were also beaten on specifically targeted areas such as their buttocks, breasts, and pubic areas. However, again these are not necessarily examples of systematic, organized sexual violence but more of what the historian Doris Bergen has termed “horrific, taboobreaking sexual violence,”20 a toxic combination of what Dagmar Herzog has acutely observed as the boredom experienced by the concentration camp guards and the power they wielded over their prisoners.21 The sexual violence women suffered may have amounted to rape—but it scarcely suggests that rape was intended to be an instrument of genocide. The

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sexual violence deployed by the Nazis was different from that used by the Hutus and Serbians. In the concentration camps, the racism and sexism of the Nazis not only intensified the suffering of Jewish women, who occupied the lowest position in the hierarchy of prisoners and suffered particularly harsh conditions, but they also made these women especially vulnerable on account of their gender. The particular poverty of their conditions, with women housed in separate barracks and mostly prohibited from the better work commandos, meant that they were susceptible to engaging in “sex for survival.”22 Without anything else at their disposal, dire necessity drove some women to exchange sex for better food, clothing, or anything that might increase their chances of survival. The extreme power imbalances that generated this type of sexual exchange mean that it could never be described as consensual; it was, by definition, coercive. Nonetheless, this sex is not evidence of sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. It was in their reproductive capacity that thousands of women did experience targeted sexual violence during the Holocaust. As the World Health Organization states, forced abortion and sterilization are violent acts perpetrated against women as sexual beings.23 Experiments in mass sterilization took place at both the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps. While the majority of the victims of forced sterilization were Roma or Sinti women, Jewish men and women and children as young as twelve also suffered in this way as part of the Nazi commitment to prevent the birth of racially inferior children. X-rays, drugs, and surgery were all employed. Sometimes sterilization was achieved through a direct injection into the uterus. This was done without anesthesia, and many women died in agony. Other women were subjected to painful injections with sex hormones, which caused abscesses. Again, for many, these actions led to indescribably painful deaths.24 On arrival at the concentration camps pregnant women were encouraged to identify themselves with the promise of better living conditions and additional food. Those who failed to succumb to this ruse were liable to be sent to the gas chambers when their pregnancy was inevitably discovered.25 Alternatively, in Auschwitz, they were sent to the experiment block as the infamous Nazi physician, Dr. Josef Mengele, was particularly interested in both pregnancy and birth. When he was satisfied that his observations were complete, both mother and newborn baby were sent to the gas chambers— sometimes within an hour of the birth. Women who were able to conceal their pregnancy had secret abortions with the help of prisoner physicians. The Holocaust, then, presents serious problems for the historian of sexual violence in genocide. This is not just because of an absence of sources or the distance of time—although there is a notable absence of sources, which may partially be explained by the very different social mores of the midtwentieth century. More than this and more importantly than this, the nature of the Holocaust as a state-sponsored assault on a particular racial group

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with whom sexual relations were strictly prohibited makes the Holocaust different in kind from the genocides in Bosnia or Rwanda. Although at least some German soldiers and guards raped Jewish women and girls, it is therefore scarcely surprising that there are very few sources testifying to this. This is in stark contrast to Bosnia, where corroborating documentary evidence from multiple investigations shows that both military and paramilitary units of the Serb and Bosnian Serb nationalist forces repeatedly raped non-Serbian women and girls in former cafés, hotels, barns, garages, schools, and other public buildings.26 Muslim and Croat women interviewed by the UNSC were able to identify many of the men who detained and gangraped them. Documented cases reveal that the victims of rape ranged from children as young as three years of age to women as old as eighty-four. Describing her experience in a “rape camp,” a woman states: “I was one of 1,800 women kept as prisoners in Brocko. There were 600 women in my room. I was given a number—21. When they called your number you had to go.”27 Women have also testified that when they became impregnated, they were refused abortions.28 In other words, they were specifically raped with the goal of impregnation, although crucially the aim was not to produce Serbian children—as many have claimed—but to heap further shame on the raped women. In Bosnian society, where ethnicity is derived from the father, children born of rape are stigmatized as illegitimate.29 In many cases women were imprisoned to be raped until they became pregnant. Some women induced their own abortions while others were forced to make the choice of either abandoning or keeping their children. Young girls—assumed to be virgins—were especially targeted, as were particularly well-educated and prominent women. The aim was to destroy communities and to ensure that Muslims would leave and never return. Family members were made to witness the rape and murder of other family members. In addition, they were forced to rape each other. Evidence exists that some men were also subject to sexual violence; they were raped, compelled to perform fellatio, forcibly circumcised, and in some cases castrated.30 According to the Zagreb Medical Centre for Human Rights, approximately 4,000 Croat male prisoners were sexually tortured in Serbian detention camps.31 The purpose of this widespread sexual violence was to obliterate non-Serbian ethnicity and replace it with a dominant ethnically homogenous Serbian state. For the men who took part in the mass rapes, it also served to reinforce the masculine identity. Lisa S. Price writes that for the perpetrator the act of rape states: “I AM only to the extent that you are not—male because you are female, Serb because you are Muslim, soldier because you are civilian. Your absence makes, verifies my presence and your pain becomes my power.”32 The impact of sexual violence cannot be overstated. Human Rights Watch believes that in Rwanda every woman who survived the genocide experienced sexual violence.33 Girls as young as six years old were raped in front of their families. The perpetrators were ordinary men—fathers, husbands, and sons— who became implicated in the genocide: who became rapists as an instrument

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of war. Women had their breasts mutilated and their vaginas and pelvic regions penetrated with machetes, arrows, and other weapons such as sticks, broken bottles, knives, and gun barrels, before being forced into sexual slavery by the Hutu militia—to be sold, traded, or proffered as a reward—or dragooned into domestic servitude. They also had physical features that were said to look particularly “Tutsi,” such as long fingers or thin noses, disfigured or cut off. As in Bosnia, men and boys were also targets of sexual violence. In addition to suffering genital mutilation, they were forced to rape Tutsi women. While the vast majority of female victims were Tutsi, Hutu women married to Tutsi men, or those who tried to help their Tutsi neighbors, were not immune from sexual violence.34 In Rwanda—as in Bosnia—women were quite literally raped to death. Other women were left to be raped by yet more men or shunned and killed because of their status as victims of rape. The women who survived rape continued to suffer not only the physical harm meted out to them35 but also unwanted pregnancies and the stigmatization that followed: sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS; isolation; and all manner of mental health problems.36 Crucially, however, despite their horrific ordeals, victims of rape in both Bosnia and Rwanda have nonetheless battled social stigma and come forward to report the sexual violence they were forced to endure.37 The evidence from the Rwandan genocide raises important—and troubling—questions for the historian of the Holocaust. That large numbers of rape victims in the former have testified, while very few in the latter recorded an experience of sexual violence, is surely noteworthy at the very least. More than this, it casts into doubt the reasoning of Holocaust scholars such as Helene Sinnreich that the shame, fear, and embarrassment associated with rape have deterred serious research into the issue.38 It can be argued that the Holocaust happened over half a century ago, and researchers are now much more open to hearing stories of rape and sexual abuse. The impact of shame as well as the influence of religious or cultural taboos on talking about these issues, however, must not be overstated. Indeed, many of the most candid discussions of rape, sexual abuse, and “sex for survival” were published in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The Holocaust scholar Na’ama Shik argues that this is because survivors were not yet affected by the culture of “blaming the victim.”39 To some degree, this overlooks the extent to which women did encounter suspicion and unease at their very survival. Nonetheless, Sinnreich is right to highlight the importance of sociocultural factors in testifying to rape. For example, in societies such as Afghanistan and Iraq, women have been reluctant to reveal that sexual violence has taken place for fear of bringing shame on their entire family. Holocaust survivors— particularly those from an Orthodox Jewish community—might have shared similar concerns. A critical difference remains that most Holocaust survivors of sexual violence—unlike their Rwandan counterparts—did not have to live in close proximity to their abusers or their abusers’ families, nor did they continue to be economically dependent on them, after the mass atrocities ended. This reality has affected Rwandan rape survivors and is reflected in

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the ambiguity surrounding the exact number of victims; although many Tutsi victims of rape have testified to sexual violence, many more have stayed silent because the costs of breaking this silence are high. This was not true for women victims of sexual violence who survived the Holocaust. Crimes of sexual violence are rightly considered to be a key part of the genocides in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Importantly, the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals that followed the genocides importantly made rape prosecutable under humanitarian law. It is clear that much work remains to be done in bringing justice—any kind of justice—to the victims. Nevertheless, it is essential that rape and sexualized violence should not be overstated and allowed to overshadow the myriad of other sufferings endured by women during war and genocide.40 Strikingly, despite the appalling sexual violence endured by so many, women in the former Yugoslavia have complained that researchers are interested in their experiences only insofar as they testify to rape, forced impregnation, or prostitution and are not interested in hearing about the wider experiences of life as a refugee. Displaced women have to endure all manner of sufferings including forced exile, material losses, the loss of their husbands (and often the family breadwinner), the stress of waiting for the missing to return, and so on.41 Although there is now the presumption of sexual violence in war-torn countries such as Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria, we do not really know how widespread it is. Despite the many human rights organizations and women’s groups committed to compiling reports, in many instances we lack the crucial, hard documentary evidence needed to prove “genocidal rape.” Indeed, rape in and of itself is difficult to prove as victims are often unwilling or unable to report it. What we do know, though, is that women—like children—are most certainly particularly vulnerable when it comes to war and genocide. In most cultures it is women who suffer disproportionately in times of austerity—for example, eschewing food so that others can eat. This affects not only their health but also their chances of survival. Their predicament worsens when their men are forced to flee, conscripted into armies, or killed, and women are left alone to look after not only children but also the sick and the elderly. Forced displacement also means that women often lack the networks of support they have hitherto relied upon. In the Nazi ghettos, women were forced to engage in increasingly dangerous activities in order to support their families, including prostitution and smuggling. Reports from humanitarian camps following the latest wave of humanitarian and human-made disasters suggest that these survival strategies remain mostly unchanged. And, as recent history has demonstrated, the presence of peacekeeping troops and humanitarian agencies can be a double-edged sword. For example, in the former Yugoslavia, it is now clear that both peacekeepers and aid workers exploited women by supporting prostitution and encouraging human trafficking. Prostitution exposes women not only to sexual violence but also to diseases such as HIV/AIDS.42 Women in refugee camps are particularly

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vulnerable to infectious diseases as they often lack basic necessities such as clean water, nutritious food, and access to health care. It is perhaps unsurprising that the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have encouraged more Holocaust survivors to come forward and tell their stories. Furthermore, some of these more recent testimonies talk about rape and sexual abuse—although rarely in the first person. To what extent this is due to increased awareness and understanding of sexual violence is difficult to say. Certainly, it is only in the last twenty years or so that the shaving and tattooing of new inmates in the Nazi concentration camps have specifically been recognized as examples of sexualized violence. However, we do have to be careful about reading rape back into genocide— of appropriating experiences as examples of sexual abuse when this was not the case. While historians have to be able to read between the lines—to identify gaps and silences in the historical record and to speak for women whose experiences are often regarded as unvoiceable—we need to be sure that we do not impose our own concerns and preoccupations. Although it is very clear that some forms of sexual violence and degradation, as well as the dehumanization of women, were an essential part of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the actual physical act of raping Jewish women was not only not a specific genocidal policy; it was legislated against. Thus, any coherent analysis of sexual violence during the Holocaust remains elusive at best. Indeed, the Holocaust clearly remains one of the very few examples of war and genocide when rape was unequivocally not used as a deliberate strategy of warfare.

Notes 1 For a discussion of forced impregnation as an act of genocide, see Siobhán K. Fisher, “Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide,” Duke Law Journal 46, no. 1 (1996): 91–133. 2 See Amnesty International, “Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces” (1993). Available at: http:​/​/www​​.amne​​sty​.o​​rg​/en​​/libr​​ary​/ i​​nfo​/E​​UR6​3/​​001​/1​​993; Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). For a feminist perspective on women’s experiences of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, see Sara Sharratt and Ellyn Kaschak, eds., Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia (New York: The Haworth Press, 1999). 3 Cited in Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. Cynthia Schoch (London: Hurst & Company, 2005). See the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia website (judgment Kunarac et al.), available at: www​.un​.org​/icty. 4 For a thorough account of the genocide, see Alison Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). On the atrocities committed against Tutsi women during the

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genocide, see Binaifer Nowrojee, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996). Available at: http:​/​/hrw​​.org/​​repor​​ts​/19​​96​/09​​/24​/s​​hatte​​​red​-l​​ives;​ and Elenor Richter-Lyonette, “Women After the Genocide in Rwanda,” in In the Aftermath of Rape: Women’s Rights, War Crimes and Genocide, ed. Elenor Richter-Lyonette (Givrins, CH: Coordination of Women’s Advocacy, 1997), 119–23. For a discussion of the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, see Jessica A. Hubbard, “Justice for Women? Rape as Genocide and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” in Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, eds. Carol Rittner and John K. Roth (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2012), 101–16. See Zoë Waxman, “Testimony and Silence: Sexual Violence and the Holocaust,” in Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives, eds. Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson (London: Routledge, 2010), 117–29; Zoë Waxman, “Rape and Sexual Abuse in Hiding,” in Sexual Violence against Women during the Holocaust, eds. Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 124–35. See Annabelle Baldwin, “Sexual Violence and the Holocaust: Reflections on Memory and Witness Testimony,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 16, no. 3 (2010): 112–34. In Rwanda, however, there are recorded cases of women inciting men to rape. For example, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, former minister of the Family and Promotion of Women, was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for complicity in rape as a crime against humanity. See African Rights, Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers (London: African Rights, 1995); Tara McKelvey, ed., One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007); Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 387–99. More recently in Iraq, Guantánamo, and Afghanistan, US servicewomen were exposed as engaging in the sexual humiliation of prisoners. Private Lynndie England was famously photographed at the Baghdad Correctional Facility (Abu Ghraib) holding a naked Iraqi man on a leash. For more on this, see T. Osborn-Kaufman, “Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib,” Politics and Gender 1, no. 4 (2005): 597–619. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1949, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. Article 2 defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about is physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” See Catherine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 350; Christine Chinkin, “Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women in International Law,” European Journal of International Law 5, no. 1 (1994): 326–41; Christoph Schiessel, “An Element of Genocide: Rape, Total War, and International Law

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in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 2 (2010): 197–210. 10 Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17 (1994): 11–12. 11 See Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, 2nd edn (New York: Meier, 1985), 190–1. 12 See Regina Mühläuser, Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941-1945 (Hamburg, DE: Hamburger Edition, 2010). 13 Wendy Lower, “‘Anticipatory Obedience’ and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomer, 1941-1944,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 1 (2002): 8. 14 Regina Mühläuser, “‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 197–221. 15 Helen Fein, “Genocide and Gender: the Uses of Women and Group Destiny,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 1 (1999): 53. 16 Anatoly Podolsky, “The Tragic Fate of Ukrainian Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” in Sexual Violence against Women during the Holocaust, eds. Hedgepeth and Saidel, 94–108. 17 Ibid., 98–9. 18 There were official brothels in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Gusen, Dora-Mittelbau, Dachau, and Ravensbrück. 19 Cited in Helene J. Sinnreich, “The Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, eds. Hedgepeth and Saidel, 111. 20 Doris Bergen, “Sexual Violence in the Holocaust: Unique and Typical?” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Context, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 188. 21 See Dagmar Herzog, “Sexual Violence against Men,” in Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, eds. Rittner and Roth, 39. 22 The term “sex for survival” comes from Myrna Goldenberg. See Myrna Goldberg, “Rape during the Holocaust,” in The Legacy of the Holocaust: Women and the Holocaust, eds. Z. Mazur, J. T. Lees, A. Krammer, and W. Witalisz (Kraków, PL: Jagiellonian University Press, 2005), 159–69. 23 See World Health Organization, “Sexual Violence,” in World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva, CH: World Health Organization, 2002). 24 On this subject see, Ellen Ben-Sefer, “Forced Sterilization and Abortion as Sexual Abuse” in Sexual Violence against Women during the Holocaust, eds. Hedgepeth and Saidel, 156–75. 25 See the testimony of inmate physician Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York: International Universities Press, 1984), 80–2.

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26 Euan Hague, “Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and National Identities in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 50–63; Karen Engle, “Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” The American Journal of International Law 99, no. 4 (2005): 778–816; Cindy S. Snyder, Wesley J. Gabbard, Dean May, and Nihada Zulćić, “On the Battleground of Women’s Bodies: Mass Rape in BosniaHerzegovina,” Affilia 21 (2006): 184–95; Todd Salzman, “Rape Camps, Forced Impregnation, and Ethnic Cleansing,” in War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women, ed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow (Cleveland: Ohio University Press, 2000). 27 Grace Halsell, “Women’s Bodies a Battlefield in War for ‘Greater Serbia,’” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 11, no. 9 (1993): 9. 28 United Nations Security Council, “Rape and Sexual Assault,” in Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), S/1994/674/Add. 2. Vol. V (New York: United Nations, 1994), annex IX, IC. For further testimonies, see Seada Vranic, Breaking the Wall of Silence: The Voices of Raped Bosnia (Zagreb: Anti Barbarus, 1996). 29 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 294. 30 See Mladen Lonçar, “Sexual Torture of Men in the War,” in War Violence, Trauma and the Coping Process: Armed Conflict in Europe and the Survivor Response, ed. Libby Tata Arcel (Copenhagen, DK: University of Copenhagen Press, 1998), 45–79; Pauline Oosterhoff, Prisca Zwanikken, and Evert Ketting, “Sexual Torture of Men in Croatia and Other Conflict Situations: An Open Secret,” Reproductive Health Matters 12 (2004): 68–77. 31 Cited in Janie L. Leatherman, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 46. 32 Lisa S. Price, “Finding the Man in the Soldier-Rapist: Some Reflections on Comprehension and Accountability,” Women’s Studies International Forum 24, no. 2 (2001): 213. 33 Nowrojee, Shattered Lives. 34 Ibid. 35 For example, women who experience violent rape can be left with incontinence or “fistulas”—a rupture between the vagina, rectum, and bladder. Without complex reconstructive surgery some women are left permanently infertile. 36 It has been estimated that more than 67 percent of the women raped during the Rwandan genocide were infected with HIV and AIDS. Cited in Rittner and Roth, Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, x. 37 For testimonies of Rwandan survivors of sexual violence, see Anne-Marie de Brouwer and Sandra Ka Hon Chu, eds., The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence (Vancouver, CA: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009). 38 Sinnreich, “The Rape of Jewish Women during the Holocaust,” 8; idem, “‘And it Was Something We Didn’t Talk About’: Rape of Jewish Women during the

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Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 14, no. 2 (2008): 1–22; In a previous article I too have argued: “The mostly female [Holocaust] victims of sexual violence were not only unlikely to have survived, but the few that did have largely stayed silent about their experiences. This stems from cultural taboos regarding public discussion of rape and sexual abuse, and also because such experiences are not considered to be part of the narrative of the Holocaust.” See Waxman, “Testimony and Silence,” 118. 39 Na’ama Shik, “Sexual Abuse of Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in Brutality and Desire, ed. Herzog, 221–46. cf., Ralph Segalman, “The Psychology of Jewish Displaced Persons,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly 23, no. 4 (1947): 363–5. 40 On this subject, see Adam Jones, ed., Gender and Genocide (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). 41 The Serbian, anti-militarist feminist group “Women in Black” has published a collection of testimonies from Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and KosovarAlbanian women, which offers a wider account of women’s wartime experiences. See Lina Vušković and Zorica Trifunović, eds., Women’s Side of War, trans. Mira Janović et al. (Belgrade, RS: Women in Black, 2010). 42 See also Sarah Elizabeth Mendelson, Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans (Washington, DC: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2005).

6 Constructions of Identity and Sexual Violence in Wartime The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina Patricia A. Weitsman

Writing about birth in the face of mass death, or genocide, has an irony that should not be lost on anyone. In the face of mass slaughter, policies of sexual violence sometimes culminate in wide-scale rape as witnessed in Rwanda, Congo, and Bangladesh, as just a few examples. In the case of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, wholesale slaughter of identity groups went hand in hand with forced impregnation campaigns. These policies, undertaken for purposes of eliminating an ethnic or religious group, actually, biologically, culminate in the proliferation of said group, as identity is not strictly paternally given. So while it is counterintuitive to have a chapter on war babies in a book on gender and genocide, during these campaigns, frequently “genocidal campaigns” result in thousands of babies born of wartime, as many as 10,000 in Rwanda.1 In Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Serbian assault in the 1990s, forced impregnation camps gave rise to unknown thousands of children born of rape. The fate of these children is largely unknown, unspoken of, and relegated to an identity of shame. Making sense of wartime sexual violence is predicated on an understanding of identity. While contrary to perhaps foundational beliefs about rape, rape in wartime is often seen not solely as violence of man against woman but about one ethnic group against another. This chapter explores the notion

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of identity, its contextual nature, and then applies this understanding to the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I focus specifically on the Serb war against Bosnian Muslim women. I argue that just as scholars advance the idea that ethnic conflict may occur as a consequence of ethnic identities, sexual violence in such situations arises not only from these identities but also from local understandings of masculinity, femininity, and the patriarchal nature of social and political organization. Many ethnic identities contain within them understandings of matri-or patrilineal sources. This content is as important as the identities themselves in determining the nature and character of sexual violence in wartime.

Identity The concept of identity is as malleable and contextual as identities themselves. As James Fearon writes, “Our present idea of ‘identity’ is a fairly recent social construct, and a rather complicated one at that.”2 Despite the salience of identities and their power in producing action, sometimes violent, we are a ways from a universally accepted understanding of how we conceptualize and define them. Most definitions of identity assert a social category to which an individual may or may not belong.3 As Fearon and David Laitin helpfully distill, identity refers to a social category, which is groups of individuals who have labels, differentiated by two central characteristics: (1) rules of membership that decide who is and is not a member of the category; and (2) content, that is, sets of characteristics (such as beliefs, desires, moral commitments, and physical attributes) thought to be typical of members of the category, or behaviors expected or obliged of members in certain situations (roles). We would also include in content the social valuation of members of this category relative to others (contestation over which is often called “identity politics”).4 Moreover, in regard to ethnic identities, Anthony Smith writes, “there can be no identity without memory.”5 In other words, identities are constructed by substance and narrative, with rules that determine if one fits or does not fit into a particular group. The emphasis on identity and ethnic groups is important. Equally important, however, for understanding action is the content of those identities and the beliefs within them about social hierarchy and governance. In other words, we can delineate the identity of who is a Jew by examining the rules of who is and who is not a Jew—that is, the birth mother must be Jewish— and the substance of the beliefs in regard to being Jewish. What may be less obvious are the embedded beliefs about patriarchy and the value of women within the religious observances and practices even while understanding the role of gender in determining membership in this identity group. While

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these are nearly impossible to distill into a snapshot of the identity practices, they become important in the context of the nature of campaigns of sexual violence in wartime and the way in which the identity of the children born of rape in wartime is viewed. What is distinctive of the sexual violence campaigns in the wars in the former Yugoslavia is that they were undertaken with an eye to impregnating principally Bosnian Muslim women in order to force them to bear Serbian children.6 Such campaigns can result only when there is a particular construct of identity and a particular understanding of how identity is derived. In other words, the Serbian government and militias believed that impregnating Bosnian women would lead these women to bear Serb children, forced “occupation of the womb.”7 These narratives obviate maternal contribution to a child’s identity. In contrast, the Nazis believed that any drop of impure blood would culminate in an impure child, irrespective of which parent the taint derived. The beliefs about the biological roots of identity are essential for understanding state policies of sexual violence in wartime.8 Interestingly, there are voluminous literatures on identity, ethnic conflict, and growing literatures on women and war and sexual violence in wartime. Yet there are many unanswered questions. For example, how beliefs about gender—in terms of social and political hierarchy and in regard to identity formation—are important causal mechanisms in the way that sexual violence manifests in wartime.9

How Gender Matters When patriarchal beliefs about the role and status of women prevail in a nation under siege, rape during warfare culminates in shame, abandonment, and disenfranchisement of the women who have endured these assaults. Furthermore, children born of these rape campaigns are frequently shunned, abused, or abandoned.10 What this means is that rape campaigns during wartime are a highly effective means of disrupting and punishing an enemy population. The woman is assaulted, victimizing her, but her family is also victimized because of the shame brought upon them from the assault and from any progeny that result.11 A central point here is that ethnic identity matters powerfully—but within those social groups, gender does as well. There are circumscribed roles and understandings that go along with those gender roles within a particular social or ethnic group identity. That is to say, an identity such as American Jew is a distinct social grouping and identity, but within that group there are designated roles specifically for men and for women. The mikvah, for example, may be an essential component and practice of an American Jewish woman but not (at least in the same way) for an American Jewish man. So while the literature addresses ethnic identity and ethnic conflict, gender must be a part of these analyses, not only to understand those roles and

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their interplay but also to understand how war campaigns are conceived and executed. Policies of sexual violence in wartime are predicated on these conceptions of gender roles within the larger context of ethnic identity. The degree to which such campaigns are effective in destroying and degrading the adversary, and the reasons such policies are crafted in the first place, are based on an understanding of ethnic identity as seen through the prism of gender roles and social hierarchies. In the following sections of this chapter, I review the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina in regard to identity, gender roles, the policies of sexual violence in the war, forced impregnation camps, the status of the children born of rape, and the human rights of the child.

The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina The end of the Communist era in Eastern Europe brought turbulence and restructuring within the region that had been the “Eastern bloc” throughout the Cold War. The future of Yugoslavia in particular was uncertain and precarious. At the end of the Second World War, Josef Tito was instrumental in establishing the Yugoslav state. Under his governance, nationalism did not disappear but was tamped down effectively enough that peaceful coexistence prevailed. With the death of Josef Tito in 1980, no one capable of continuing this practice of unity came to the national fore. Instead, local parties vied for political power, many playing on nationalism and ethnic divisions to mobilize populations.12 This fostered the breakdown of the Yugoslav state. In July of 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, resulting in war between Croatia and the Yugoslav state and between Yugoslavia and Slovenia. By early 1992, a tenuous peace was forged, but shortly thereafter, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence. This brought about civil war among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina that lasted for several years. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 people died, two million people were left homeless, and tens of thousands of women and girls were raped. During the years of the civil war, there was no refuge—in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica alone more than 8,000 men and boys were massacred.13 Mass graves were uncovered for years after the violence ended. Bodies are still being exhumed and efforts to identify the victims continue.14

Ethnicity, Identity, and Gender The academic literature on the wars in the former Yugoslavia contests the “ancient hatreds” narrative that pervaded the media during the wars. This narrative stated that ethnic tension simmered beneath the surface and

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came to the fore with the death of Tito and the implosion of the Soviet Union.15 However, the facts remain that the violence in former Yugoslavia was targeted against specific social groups, and within those groups, women were targeted with a particular brand of violence. Even if the struggle in the former Yugoslavia was for political and economic power, political actions utilized ethnicity to incite violence. The fault lines of conflict fell along ethnic cleavages, and given the distinct nature of sexual violence in that war that is the focus of this chapter—namely, forced impregnation camps— there is clearly a gendered aspect to the way in which these identities were experienced and perceived by others. The way in which those identities were understood and the way in which gender played into those identities are central to understanding the nature and form this violence took. The nexus of gender and identity is explored by Cynthia Cockburn who writes of her research on the topic: As to identity, my hunch was quickly confirmed. The women were suffering a lot of what I came to think of as “identity hurt.” The pain occurred where there was friction and disjuncture between a woman’s sense of self and the identities with which she was labelled, that she was held to account for, or felt seduced by.16 As Cockburn asserts, the point of this chapter is to underscore the “connections between the oppression that is the ostensible cause of a conflict (ethnic or national oppression) in the light of another crosscutting one: that of the gender regime.”17 Once uncovered, it becomes clear that societal views of gender and gender roles are instrumental in policy formation regarding strategies of sexual violence in wartime, but more globally as well in regard to citizenship, nationality, and belonging.18 In the former Yugoslavia, as in other patriarchal societies, ethnic identity was viewed as imparted largely by the father. In mixed marriages, the identity of the child was most often dictated by paternity. This became highly problematic once war came—as their mothers were viewed as traitors by their own ethnic group and were rejected by the ethnic group of their husbands.19 Both groups similarly rejected the children of mixed heritage. Paradoxically, while women procreating to produce children in mixed marriages were marginalized, women were perceived as essential in bolstering the nation-state as mothers. As Julie Mostov underscores, state policy and edicts regarding a woman’s place in society highlight their centrality in national survival and the hazards of women being led astray from this crucial role of preserving and advancing the nation-state.20 Widespread patriarchal assumptions culminate in a perception that women are vessels for paternal identity; it also generates the view that women’s identities are inherently dictated by their relationship to men: as daughters, wives, and mothers. Serb women in Bosnia and Herzegovina married to Bosnian Muslim men were rejected by the Serbian state since

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they belonged to their husbands. These women faced repercussions from their own ethnic groups as well as the groups into which they married, even in the days leading up to the implosion.21 The malleability and manipulation of identity by governmental and social forces are remarkable. This is well illustrated by an anecdote Charli Carpenter reports. Carpenter writes of a social worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina who told the story of a Bosnian woman who was raped, fled to Serbia, and tried to pass herself off as Serb. The woman gave birth to a child whom she left at an orphanage. The orphanage returned the child to the mother saying the child could not stay because the child was not Serb. Upon returning to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the baby was labeled a “chetnik” and rejected. The woman ultimately brought the child to another orphanage in Sarajevo. At this point, the child, likely around age three, had been in the mother’s care and given up to orphanages twice.22 A Serbian institution deems a child not Serb, a child conceived of wartime rape from a campaign designed to bring Serbian children into the world. His mother’s community rejects the same child. And ultimately, the mother rejects the child, demonstrating in a profound way the abnegation of the child’s identity connection to his mother and the ambiguity of his identity. So what is ethnic identity? Is it constituted in the social beliefs of a community? Is it enshrined in national policy of citizenship? Does it form the foundation of nationalism? I would argue that identity is all of these things, but that it is experienced differently for women, men, and children. In the former Yugoslav case, identity of women who had been raped was derived from both nationality and the view of being a vessel for paternal identity. For men, identity was derived from nationality and being seen as the enemy. This is a classic wartime gender dichotomy—men as soldiers; women as mothers. The common identity of children born of rape was based on the circumstances of their conception; they were considered to be neither Bosnian Muslim nor Serb. Yet in reality, the offspring of the victim and perpetrator was both ethnicities, not neither. This socially constructed understanding of identity makes generalizing about it across gender and across age groups problematic. Gender stereotypes make a dramatic difference in how wars are experienced. As summarized in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgment against Kunarac et al., witnesses described what happened to the men after they were caught fleeing: the men, seven of them, were separated from the women. At some point, while they were being led away, the women were told to lie down and bursts of gunfire were heard coming from the place where the men had been detained. They later learnt that these men had been killed, and these witnesses never saw those men again.23 Men were massacred. Women were detained, often for long periods, subject to rape, sometimes forced impregnation and maternity.

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Policies of Sexual Violence and Forced Impregnation and Maternity There are a number of ways in which government “identity” policies became manifest during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These policies generally entailed limiting rights or civil liberties of some segment of the population, restricting their movement, or requiring them to bear some mark of their identity either on their persons or on their identification papers.24 In the case of Bosnian Muslims in the Foča municipality, for example, witnesses in the Kunarac et al. case at the ICTY testified that the: freedom of movement of Muslim citizens was increasingly restricted, their communication limited and their gatherings banned. Public announcements prohibiting gatherings and informing the Muslims that they were not free to move around their villages were made. Roadblocks were set up, Muslim villagers were prevented from moving around town, and were sometimes put under house arrest.25 During this time period, an increasingly aggressive and hostile propaganda campaign was launched via the media.26 In addition to policies that serve to make explicit the differences between the “self” identity and the “other,” government policies sometimes go further, by seeking to craft a national identity through invasive policies of social or genetic engineering. These efforts may include a policy of forced maternity, the production of new babies whose identities are connected to their fathers. Alternately, a government or military group may attempt to eradicate completely a group whose identity is constructed as the enemy. The two extremes in this regard were forced impregnation camps in the former Yugoslavia and forced sterilizations of impure women during the Nazi reign of terror and policies prohibiting sexual relationships between Aryan and non-Aryan populations. The way in which governments understand and manipulate identity culminates in dictates that have profound repercussions during war and its aftermath. In the case of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Serb militias directed substantial violence against Bosnian Muslim women.27 In August 1992, two reporters, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy, were able to gain access to the Omarska camp, located in the north of Bosnia and Herzegovina.28 They emerged with stories of the atrocities being committed in the camp, of torture, rape, castrations, and more; atrocities committed often against people known to the perpetrators.29 Extreme beatings took place, frequently to death.30 At this one camp alone, thousands perished the four months in 1992 that the camp was open. Camps of this kind were established throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina where women were segregated, held, and repeatedly raped day after day for months.

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Some camps were designated specifically as rape camps, such as the one at Foča, a small town in Bosnia. In the summer of 1992, dozens of women were held there. The camp procedure was to bring some of the women to a detention center, such as Buk Bijela, to be raped by soldiers. After this initial period, the women were then taken to one of the main rape camps, including the Foča High School, which served as a short-term detention facility, and the Partizan Sports Hall, which was a longer-term holding camp. Once in these camps, the women were raped repeatedly until pregnant, the idea being that these women would then produce “Serb” babies. At least forty women in Partizan became pregnant.31 Women were raped so many times by so many soldiers, they could not testify as to the exact number. One witness estimated that during her forty-day detention at Foča High School and Partizan, she was raped approximately 150 times.32 Mass rape and forced maternity were critical elements of the war in the former Yugoslavia. According to the Final report of the United Nations Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 789 (1992), there were about 162 detention sites in the former Yugoslavia where people were sexually violated.33 At rape camps across the country, Bosnian Muslim women were held, repeatedly raped by numerous men, and then either killed or detained for additional sustained sexual torture. Some women were raped by as many as forty men in one night; some women were gang-raped in this way day after day for months at a time.34 Serb authorities dictated the policy of mass rape and forced impregnation. Rape camps were established in nearly identical ways—even down to the layout of the camps—throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the patterns of rape were the same. The rapes occurred in noncontiguous sections of the country simultaneously.35 In the words of one survivor, Rasema, who identified her neighbor as one of the three men who raped her, “I said, ‘Sasha, remember your mother. Remember your sister. Don’t do it.’ He said, ‘I must. If I do not they will hurt me. Because they have ordered me to.’”36 During the onslaught, non-Serb men were beaten, frequently to death. Torture, particularly in ways that emasculated men, was widespread. For example, Serb paramilitary groups “cut off detainees’ penises and ears and forced other prisoners to ingest them. If a prisoner did not do so, he was killed.”37 Men who survived initial attacks were often detained and subsequently executed, or transferred to areas under control by the Bosnian government. The women and girls were held, then sent to rape camps, where conditions were appalling. Soldiers were ordered and granted access to these centers where they selected and took girls and women whom they raped and tortured. Some women were taken to different houses within Foča and often enslaved by Serb soldiers. Some of the women were sold and never seen again. Many of these women were detained, tortured, and raped daily for months on end. Some witnesses in the case against Kunarac et al. (IT-9623&23/1) testified that they had been raped so frequently that they were unable to determine how many times they had been violated.38

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The mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim men and women were undertaken with the intention of humiliating, degrading, and torturing the victims. They were also undertaken with the purpose of forcibly impregnating women and ensuring the children were carried to term. In her testimony against Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic in July 1996, Irma Oosterman, a member of the prosecution investigation team, said, “The soldiers told often that they were forced to do it. They did not say who forced them to do it, but they were ordered do it.” Her testimony continues, “They wanted to make Serb or Chetnik babies. The pattern was, yes, all over the same.”39 Further evidence that forced impregnation and maternity were goals of the Serbian authorities is provided by survivors’ accounts. Narratives given by hundreds of women held at camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina suggest that women were repeatedly raped and, then once impregnated, held until abortion was no longer an option. In the words of one survivor of the Doboj camp: They said that each woman had to serve at least ten men a day. . . . God, what horrible things they did. They just came in and humiliated us, raped us, and later they told you, “Come on now, if you could have Ustasha babies, then you can have a Chetnik baby, too.” . . . Women who got pregnant, they had to stay there for seven or eight months so they could give birth to a Serbian kid. They had their gynecologists there to examine the women. The pregnant ones were separated off from us and had special privileges; they got meals, they were better off, they were protected. Only when a woman’s in her seventh month, when she can’t do anything about it anymore, then she’s released. Then they usually take these women to Serbia. . . . They beat the women who didn’t get pregnant, especially the younger women; they were supposed to confess what contraceptives they were using.40 These accounts were repeated by many survivors. One survivor of a rape camp at Kalinovik where about 100 women were held and gang-raped recounted that the rapists continually told the women, “You are going to have our children—you are going to have our little Chetniks” and that the women who became pregnant were left alone.41 Serbian policies of forced impregnation were undertaken with the purpose of generating “Serbian” babies. Women detained and forced to endure repeated gang rapes with the intention of impregnating them were repeatedly told that they were being raped in order to “plant the seed of Serbs in Bosnia,” to give birth to little “chetniks,” to deliver a Serb baby, and so forth.42 The soldiers who participated in these rapes told their victims over and again that they would be forced to bear children of the enemy, abortion would be denied to them, they would be detained until termination of the pregnancy was out of the question, and that they were implementing these policies of forced impregnation and maternity on orders from their superiors.43

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It is widely accepted by scholars and practitioners of international politics that the use of mass rape, forced impregnation, and forced maternity were policies implemented as part of the broader Serbian goal of ethnic cleansing and even genocide.44 While policies of mass rape may be used to humiliate and degrade a population to such an extent that people leave en masse, thereby advancing the goal of ethnic cleansing, rape with the intent of forcing women to bear children cannot be similarly construed. To do so is tantamount to accepting the view of identity that is being perpetuated by the rapists—that it is paternally derived—and denying the cultural and genetic connection between mother and child. Forced impregnation and maternity are contrary to the ends of true genocide—eliminating the genus of a racial or ethnic group. The critical questions in this context are what constitutes identity and under what assumptions about identity were the Serbs operating? The most important set of assumptions is that identity is biologically derived, and that women are vessels for transmitting paternal identity. The belief that Bosnian Muslim women would give birth to little “chetniks” assumes away the maternal contribution to the child’s biological makeup, as well as her role in the child’s upbringing, should enforced maternity result, should the child survive, and should the child not be placed in an orphanage or abandoned. This gives rise to another assumption that pervades both the thinking about the policy of forced impregnation and enforced maternity and the representations of the policies in the media and beyond—namely, that biology trumps culture, nature over nurture. While hard data are scarce, in at least some of the cases of forced maternity, the mother of the child raises him or her. However, the learning and culture associated with the mother’s childrearing are allegedly negated by the biological fact of the child’s paternity. In many, if not most, cases of forced maternity, the identity of the father is unknown, either because the woman did not know her victimizer or, more likely, there were so many rapists that it is impossible to know who the source of the impregnation actually was. In such cases, it would be logical to see the maternal connection as paramount in forging the identity of the child. Yet this is generally not the case—these children are represented in their own countries and by the media as “genocidal babies,” little “chetniks,” “children of hate,” or “children of shame.”45 In other words, the identity of the children continues to be linked to their rapist fathers, even if the paternal identity is completely unknown, even if the child never meets the father, even if the child is cared for and raised by the child’s mother. This is a powerful message about identity, how it is perceived, constructed, and imagined. The ethnic identity of the father and the shame surrounding the conception are paramount. This reveals an additional assumption about identity that underpins the policies of mass rape, forced impregnation, and maternity: that women’s contributions to the makeup and raising of their children are rendered meaningless in the face of the act of sexual violation that took place at conception. The lifelong responsibilities of raising a child

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are in essence negated by the acts of violence that culminated in conception and the identity of the mother as a victim. This degrades both the experiences of women and the legacies of the violence, the war babies. This gives rise to egregious infringements on the human rights of these children from birth throughout their entire lives. These policies of enforced impregnation and maternity privilege biology; yet, the biological roots of identity that the policies are predicated on are actually socially constructed. Even if a child is born of and raised by a Bosnian Muslim, his or her identity nevertheless is linked inextricably to the biological father. Yet racially, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs are both Slavs and have virtually no genetic or biological distinctions. So in this case, even the construction of biological difference is social and not material.46 Further, once born, both communities, those of the rapist father as well as the biological mother, rejected these children.47 The assumptions that underpin the policy of rape warfare, forced impregnation, and forced maternity are that women’s worth derives from their relationships to men and that the shame of victimization is far worse than the perpetration of the crime. Many Bosnian Muslim women who were raped during the civil war, even if not impregnated, were shamed and outcast by their own families.48 This has important implications not only for identity but for gender politics as well. Shaming the victims more than the perpetrators indicates that women’s value derives from “purity,” in other words her relationship to men to the extent that she has not engaged in sexual intercourse, and that in the event of violation, again, her value is inextricably linked to the interposing of a man’s body onto her own. In essence, a woman’s identity never really stands alone; it is always juxtaposed by her sexual relationships to men, whether coercive or consensual. These assumptions must be in place to support a policy of mass rape—if not, this policy loses its coercive power and may not be as successful in driving families apart or securing the end of ethnic cleansing. Finally, the assumptions that are inherent in the policies of forced impregnation and maternity witnessed in the wars in the former Yugoslavia have a grave effect on the human rights of the babies born of the violence. This can be seen in a number of ways. First, the grievous impact on undermining the human rights of these children can be witnessed in the large incidence of infanticide and the acceptance of it as a natural product of the savagery of conception.49 Second, the language used to describe the children is all derogatory labels that are linked to the rapist fathers. These labels stay with the children throughout their lives—again, their identity is inextricably linked to their biological fathers. This means that a cloud of shame hangs over them by virtue of circumstances beyond their control. Third, in the aftermath of the civil war, the Bosnian government refused to allow these children to be adopted overseas since they were seen as an important means of repopulating the country.50 In other words, escape from the stigma of their birth was impossible.

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The assumptions that underpin policies of mass rape, forced impregnation, and forced maternity are important as they represent how identity is perceived and constructed. These assumptions also inform us about gender inequities and the ways in which the human rights of war babies are violated from the moment of their births.

Status of Children Born of Rape In the postwar countries of the former Yugoslavia, extensive efforts have been made to exhume the dead, extract DNA from bones, and identify the bodies taken from mass graves when found in an effort to bring closure to the families who may still be searching for their loved ones who disappeared during the war and were never seen again.51 Forensic investigations at exhumation sites have been undertaken by the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY.52 Further, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was created in 1996 with a mandate to locate and identify people who disappeared during armed conflict or as a consequence of human rights violations. By 2013, the ICMP operated the world’s largest “highthroughput” DNA human identification facility and had developed: a database of 89,086 relatives of 29,109 missing people, with more than 36,000 bone samples taken from mortal remains exhumed from clandestine graves in the countries of former Yugoslavia. By matching DNA from blood and bone samples, ICMP has been able to identify 16,289 people who were missing from the conflicts and whose mortal remains were found in hidden graves.53 In addition to the dedicated efforts to exhuming and identifying war victim remains, reburials of those remains have been a meaningful and sobering ritual. For example, on July 11, 2012, the seventeenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, more than 500 newly identified victims of the massacre were reburied at the Potocari memorial center in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 30,000 people came to the ceremonial reburial to heal from what has been called “the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.”54 The extensive efforts to memorialize the dead stand in dramatic contrast with the neglect of the children born of rape, who have been sold on the black market, abandoned, illegally adopted, abused, and marginalized. Very little systematic work to document their whereabouts and well-being has occurred. The exception to this is Medica Zenica, a nongovernmental organization that provides support to women and children victims of war, including rape survivors and human trafficking victims.55 The memorialization of the dead and the tributes to the victims who perished during the campaigns of violence are meaningful and important.

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Yet they highlight the lack of attention or documentation of the children born of sexual assault during war, that is, the lives that emerged from the devastation. These exhumations and reburials are important in healing and reconciliation. They honor the dead. The commemorations are symbolic. In the case of the children born of sexual violence in war, a concerted approach to tracking and assisting could have had material results, not merely symbolic ones. The marginalization of these children allowed the crimes of war to continue long after the fighting was done.

Human Rights of the Child The view that a child born of rape is a mirror of the rapist and takes on the identity of the rapist is pervasive. Given this, it is not a surprise that the rights of the child once born are nonexistent. Charli Carpenter’s path-breaking book, Forgetting Children Born of War, delineates the marginalization of children born of war, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She puzzles that while there is an increasing number of organizations that tend to the children in war-torn areas, these networks do not concern themselves with children born of wartime rape. Instead, the focus is on child soldiers, children caught in the crossfire; that is, war-affected children broadly, but not children born of rape specifically. In regard to children born of rape, the focal advocacy point, as Carpenter calls it, are the victims of rape, that is, their mothers.56 Anecdotes regarding the fate of the children born of rape pepper media reports of the war in the former Yugoslavia. One new mother threw her newborn child into the Sava river.57 Another snapped her baby’s neck.58 Many babies were simply abandoned at the hospitals where they were born; others were left in orphanages.59 The children born of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina are labeled, among other things, “a generation of children of hate.”60 These children take on the identity based on the circumstances of their conception, and as a result their quality of life, unless adopted out of the country, is severely compromised. The marginalization, abuse, neglect, and death of these children represent clear violations of their human rights. And yet, because they are born as a consequence of a human rights violation to their mother, their rights are largely compromised. As the ultimate weak and vulnerable actors, these children have no voice in the paths their lives take.61 According to the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), children have: the right to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life.

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Further, UNICEF highlights the core principles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: The four core principles of the Convention are non-discrimination; devotion to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and respect for the views of the child. Every right spelled out in the Convention is inherent to the human dignity and harmonious development of every child. The Convention protects children’s rights by setting standards in health care; education; and legal, civil and social services.62 Yet the challenges facing these children born of war go largely unassisted. This is in large part a consequence of the fact that the crime of forced maternity has been framed and viewed as a crime against the victim of the rape, that is, the mother. The children are simply evidence of the atrocity.63

Postwar Pronatalism The malleability of identity and gender politics is illuminated through the lens of the fate of children born of rape in wartime. The rape campaigns during the war were undertaken in order to produce more Serbs. Yet, in the aftermath of the war in the former Yugoslavia, international adoptions of children born of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina were highly restricted; these children were viewed by the state as a central means of repopulating the country.64 The view of women as vessels of the state was pervasive in the former Yugoslavia, with calls for women to bear as many children as possible in the postwar years. The media and religious leaders all undertook efforts and edicts to spur women on to bear more children.65 While these rallying cries are well documented in Serbian and Croatian communities, it is worth noting that during and after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Islamic clergy called for Bosnian Muslim women to produce more children, to legalize polygamy to increase the birth rate. Cash rewards were given to women for bearing their third and fourth children.66 Although these campaigns were largely ineffective at actually producing an increase in the birth rate, the manipulations of identity and gender in this way are important to note. They represent how identity can best be understood through the lens of gender.

Conclusion Eliminating the genus of a people—a complete destruction of an ethnic, racial, or social group—requires the destruction of life givers. And yet, in areas of mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, we frequently see mass rape. The outcome of these campaigns is the birth of hundreds, if not thousands, of children whose identities revolve around the circumstances of what gave them life.

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In cases such as the former Yugoslavia, one goal of Serb militias was to force Bosnian Muslim women to bear their children. This cannot constitute genocide—seeing it as such negates the maternal contribution to the child. Given that the pervasive understanding of these rape campaigns is in fact as a tool of genocide, this tells us much about the implicit understandings of identity and gender in societies where such narratives resonate. We see from the former Yugoslav case that the experience of genocide is markedly different for women than for men. In areas of the world where strong views on the role that women and men play in society exist, in times of conflict, those views will translate into particular policies of sexual violence. Tragically, this often results in grievous infringements on the human rights of not one but two principals, mother and child. It is a near-universal belief that children born of rape assume the identity of the father. Eve Ensler, feminist activist and author of the Vagina Monologues, wrote, “when it is born it has the face of your rapist, the face of the person who has essentially destroyed your being and you will have to look at the face every day of your life and you will be judged harshly if you cannot love that face.”67 Thousands of women in the former Yugoslavia were forced to bear these children. Constructing their identity as one with their rapist father provides a permissive environment for egregious abuse. Most of these children in the former Yugoslavia are, and will always be, unaccounted for, as the DNA matching for identifying the dead in the uncovered mass graves continues.

Notes 1 Patricia A. Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda,” Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2008): 573. 2 James D. Fearon, “What Is Identity (as We Now Use the Word)?” mimeo, Stanford University (November 1999): 2. 3 Kanchan Chandra, “What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?” Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2006): 400. 4 Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence,” 561–78; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organizations 54, no. 4 (2000): 848. 5 Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 2. 6 Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity,” in Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones, ed. Charli Carpenter (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007), 110–27; Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence.” 7 Siobhan K. Fischer, “Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide,” Duke Law Journal 46, no. 1 (1996): 91–133.

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8 Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity”; Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence.” 9 By gender I mean biological gender, female or male in regard to reproductive capacity. While clearly this is a simplification of gender—I myself am a bone marrow transplant recipient and carry the DNA of my male donor (any blood test will tell you I am male) despite being a female who has given birth to two children—but for my purposes here, I am simply invoking man or woman in regard to reproductive capacities. 10 Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity”; Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence.” 11 See, for example, Andrew Solomon, “The Legitimate Children of Rape,” The New Yorker Blogs, August 29, 2012. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.newy​​orker​​ .com/​​onlin​​e​/blo​​gs​/ne​​wsdes​​k​/201​​2​/08/​​the​-l​​egiti​​mate-​​child​​​ren​-o​​f​-rap​​e​.htm​​l. 12 Sabrina Stein, “The U.N. and Genocide: A Comparative Analysis of Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia,” in The Politics and Policies of Relief, Aid, and Reconstruction: Contrasting Approaches to Disasters and Emergencies, ed. Fulvio Attina (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 180. 13 Daniel McGrory, “Ten Years On, Sarajevo Mourns Forgotten Dead,” The Times (London), April 6, 2002. 14 Damir Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone: The Politics of Memory in Bosnia Herzegovina,” Journal for Cultural Research 15, no. 2 (2011): 193–205. 15 See, for example, V. Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 31–3. 16 Cynthia Cockburn, The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identity in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998), 9–10. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 Joyce Kaufman and Kristen Williams, Women, the State and War: A Comparative Perspective on Citizenship and Nationalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 17–18. 19 Ibid., 97–9. 20 Julie Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000), 89–112. 21 Kaufman and Williams, Women, the State and War, 99–100. 22 R. Charli Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 29–30. 23 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Judgment: Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, 20 (accessed May 20, 2013). 24 For an overview of the Bosnian civil war and its contemporary ramifications, see Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 25 Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, 16–17. 26 Ibid., 17, 204.

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27 It is important for me to note here that while my focus is on the rape and forced impregnation of Bosnian Muslim women, there were numerous rapes committed against women of other ethnic groups as well as of men. The principal targets of the sexual violence were Bosnian Muslim women, but by no means were they the only victims. 28 Kelly D. Askin, “Omarska Camp, Bosnia: Broken Promises of ‘Never Again,’” Human Rights Magazine (American Bar Association, 2003). 29 Ed Vulliamy, “Middle Managers of Genocide,” The Nation (Washington), June 10, 1996. 30 Ray Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993). 31 Joanne Barkan, “As Old as War Itself: Rape in Foca,” Dissent 49, no. 1 (2002), 61; Gutman, A Witness to Genocide, 164–7. 32 Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, 26. 33 Final report of the United Nations Commission of Experts established pursuant to security council resolution 789 (1992), Annex IX Rape and sexual assault, under the direction of M. Cherif Bassiouni, Chairman and Rapporteur on the Gathering and Analysis of the Facts, Commission of Experts, S/1994/674/ Add.2 (Vol. V) December 28, 1994, 4–5. This report details the sexual violence committed at fifty-seven counties across BosniaHerzegovina, nineteen counties in Croatia, and several in Serbia. 34 One woman who had been held at Bosanki Brod, a Croatian camp that held principally Serb women, described the experience of one woman who was raped by forty-one men before being shot in the head. Final report of the United Nations Commission of Experts, December 28, 1994, 13. It is also possible to read the narratives of the women who have testified at the International Criminal Tribunal Yugoslavia (ICTY). There were sixteen from Foča alone who testified in 2000. The documents and transcripts are available at www​.un​.org​/icty (accessed May 20, 2013). 35 Lisa Sharlach, “Rape as Genocide: Bangladesh, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda,” New Political Science 22, no. 1 (2000): 97. Even individuals who did not believe that the rapes were systematic, upon collecting statements from survivors, became convinced that it was indeed true; see “Mass Rape in Bosnia: Breaking the Wall of Silence, an Interview with Seada Vranic.” Available online: http:​/​/www​​.barn​​sdle.​​demon​​.co​.u​​k​/bos​​nia​/r​​​apes.​​html (accessed July 7, 2008). See also Todd A. Salzman, “Rape Camps as Means to Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia,” Human Rights Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1998): 348–78; Jennifer Scott, “Systematic Rapes,” Reuters, July 3, 1996; Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Mass Rape in Bosnia Took Place on Orders From Above,” July 2, 1996; Fischer, “Occupation of the Womb.” 36 George Rodrigue, “Women: The Targets of Terror, Serbs Accused of Systematically Raping Muslims in Bosnia,” Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1992. 37 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: Trial Chamber Judgment Summary for Mićo Stanišić and Stojan Župljanin. The Hague

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(accessed May 20, 2013). See also the treatment and execution of Bosnian Muslim men in UNICTY, “Judgment Summary for Zdravko Tolimir,” The Hague, December 20, 2012 (accessed May 20, 2013). 38 Matteo Fiori, “‘The Foča Rape Camps’: A Dark Page Read through the ICTY’s Jurisprudence,” The Hague Justice Portal, December 19, 2007, 2–3. 39 The International Criminal Tribunal Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-95-18-R61, Case No. IT-95-5-R61, Tuesday, July 2, 1996, 412. 40 Kadira quoted in Alexandra Stiglmayer, “The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 119. 41 Robert Fisk, “Rape Victims Say Serb Troops ‘Wanted Babies,’” The Toronto Star, February 8, 1993; Fischer, “Occupation of the Womb,” 110–11. 42 Fischer, “Occupation of the Womb,” 111. 43 Ibid., 133. 44 There is a voluminous literature that frames the issue in this way. See a discussion in Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity,” 178–206. There are a number of scholars who object to this language, myself included. See especially R. Charli Carpenter, “Surfacing Children: Limitations of Genocidal Rape Discourse,” Human Rights Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2000): 428–77. 45 Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity,” 178–206. 46 Lynda E. Boose, “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and the Serb Cultural Memory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 71–96. Boose’s argument is extremely interesting—that ultimately Bosnian Muslim identity was linked to the Turks by the Serbs despite the fact that in reality there is no connection. But the constructed memory and association of them by the Serbs culminated in the dreadful sexual violations witnessed in the war. 47 Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War, 29–30. 48 This was true for Kosovar Muslims as well. Carol J. Williams, “In Kosovo, Rape Seen as Awful as Death,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1999. 49 See Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity,” 110–27. 50 Ibid., 110–27. 51 See Arsenijević, “Gendering the Bone,” 193–205. 52 See, for example, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Office of the Prosecutor, Exhumations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (The Hague, 2000). 53 International Commission on Missing Persons, “About ICMP.” Available online: http://www​.ic​-mp​.org​/about​-icmp (accessed May 22, 2013). 54 “Srebrenica Victims Are Reburied,” BBC, July 11, 2012, sec. Europe. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.bbc.​​co​.uk​​/news​​/worl​​d​-eur​​ope​-1​​​87952​​03. On reburials see, Andrew A. G. Ross, Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 101–6. See also proof of death database, missing persons, and the documentation of

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the dead in International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, IT-0891-T Mićo Stanišić, Stojan Župljanin 3 (2013): 8–625. 55 Medica Zenica. Available online: http:​/​/med​​icaze​​nica.​​org​/u​​k​/ind​​ex​.ph​​p​?opt​​ion​ =c​​om​_co​​ntent​​&view​​=arti​​cl​e​&i​​d​=46&​​Itemi​​d​=28 (accessed May 22, 2013). See Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War, 152. 56 Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War, 42. 57 Belma Bercebasic, “Invisible Casualties of War,” BCR 383, Institute for War and Peace Reporting (2005). Available online: http:​/​/iwp​​r​.net​​/repo​​rt​-ne​​ws​/in​​ visib​​le​-ca​​sua​lt​​ies​-w​​ar. 58 Helena Smith, “Rape Victims’ Babies Pay the Price of War,” The Observer (London), April 16, 2000. 59 Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War, 42. 60 Louise Branson, “A Generation of Children of Hate: The Unwanted Children Conceived in the Rapes of some 20,000 Women May Be the Most Lasting Scar Left by Yugoslavia’s Bitter Civil War,” The Toronto Star, January 29, 1993. She describes one mother who calls her child a Chetnik baby. 61 Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War. 62 “UNICEF – Convention on the Rights of the Child,” UNICEF. Available online: http://www​.unicef​.org​/crc/ (accessed May 21, 2013). 63 Carpenter, Forgetting Children Born of War, 100–1, 108. 64 Carol J. Williams, “Bosnia’s Orphans of Rape: Innocent Legacy of Hatred,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1993. This was true in Kosovo as well. See “Americans Offer to Adopt War Child Born of Rape: A Home Must Be Sought in Kosovo First,” The Ottawa Citizen, May 11, 2000. See Weitsman, “Children Born of War and the Politics of Identity.” 65 Mostov, “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body Politics.” 66 Step Jansen and Elissa Helms, “The ‘White Plague’: National-Demographic Rhetoric and Its Gendered Resonance after the Post-Yugoslav Wars,” in Gender Dynamics and Post-Conflict Reconstruction, eds. Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert (Frankfurt, DE: Peter Lang, 2009), 223–5. 67 Eve Ensler, “Dear Mr. Akin, I Want You to Imagine . . . ,” Huffington Post, August 20, 2012. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.huff​​i ngto​​npost​​.com/​​eve​-e​​nsler​​/ todd​​-akin​​-rape​​_b​_18​​​12930​​.html​.

7 Rape as a Weapon of Genocide Gender, Patriarchy, and Sexual Violence in Rwanda Jennie E. Burnet

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda genocide planners and perpetrators used sexual torture, mutilation, and enslavement as weapons of genocide against Tutsi women and girls. An epidemiological survey of women in Rwanda in 1994 found that 49 percent of them had been raped.1 The genocide (April 6 to July 4, 1994) was an intense episode of violence that occurred during a decade of violent conflict, beginning with the civil war (1990–4), continuing with the exile of more than two million Rwandans in refugee camps in eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) and western Tanzania (1994–6), and ending with the insurgency in northwestern Rwanda (1997–2000). This decade was characterized by high rates of sexual violence and militarized sex, defined here as voluntary and coerced sexual relations between soldiers or members of paramilitary organizations and civilians, but the 1994 genocide constituted an abrupt break from social norms, especially in terms of sexual assault. Sexual violence in the genocide ranged beyond ethnic/racial dyads of Tutsi-victim and Hutu-perpetrator. Many Hutu women and girls also endured sexual violence in 1994, and an unknown number of women and girls of all ethnicities were pressured into sexual relationships with soldiers after they reached the safety of internally displaced persons camps in territory held by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Focusing solely on sexual violence committed by Hutu perpetrators

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against Tutsi victims obscures the complexity of sexual violence, sexual agency, and militarized sex during conflict. Research on sexual violence in Rwanda has emphasized rape and other forms of sexual violence as conscious strategies on the part of the perpetrators to terrorize and control women, girls, and other civilians.2 Adding to these important contributions, this chapter explores how pregenocide social contexts and the political economy shaped sexual violence during the genocide and influenced the impact of sexual violence on survivors, families, and communities in the aftermath of the genocide. This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in urban and rural Rwanda between 1997 and 2013, including more than a hundred formal interviews with leaders and members of women’s civil society organizations and several hundred ethnographic interviews with ordinary citizens in rural and urban Rwanda. This research focused broadly on changing gender roles in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide and did not focus exclusively on sexual violence or its legacies.3 The chapter is organized in five sections. In the first, I examine the political economy of everyday gender violence in Rwanda and the ways in which the decisions of women and girls have been shaped by, what Eric Wolf calls “a social field of action” that make some behaviors impossible and some behaviors more possible than others.4 Then I examine how women in conflict zones exercise sexual agency in ways that challenge distinctions between consensual and nonconsensual sex on which international-legal definitions of rape are based. Women’s choices are limited—sometimes impossibly limited—but they still exercise their agency to survive and to pursue life goals, such as education or a career, marriage, or motherhood. In the third section, I describe how perpetrators used rape as a weapon of genocide and explain the ways that the local political economy, cultural symbolism, Rwandan notions of sexual consent, and gender roles shaped sexual violence during the 1994 genocide. Then I explore the short- and long-term impact of sexual violence on survivors, their families, and their communities. In the conclusion, I discuss the ways in which certain sexual violence survivors have either been silenced or chose to remain silent about their experiences of sexual assault.

The Political Economy of Everyday Gender Violence In her groundbreaking study of Korean “comfort women,” C. Sarah Soh highlighted the importance of situating sexual violence associated with war within the context of “everyday gender violence” and the “structural power” of the political economy.5 With the exception of Meredeth Turshen’s comparative analysis of sexual violence in Rwanda and Mozambique, few

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works have situated the sexual violence of the 1994 genocide in this broader context.6 And yet, long before the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women and girls faced a great deal of gender violence, including physical violence (such as domestic abuse and sexual assault) and structural violence (such as gender discrimination). Patrilineage was the fundamental structuring element of society in precolonial Rwanda. Patrilineages operated as corporations that managed the economic and social well-being of its members, whether male or female. Widows, married women, and unmarried girls derived their social identities and rights to land from their male kin. A Rwandan proverb states, “Abagore ntibafite ubwoko”—wives have no identity; meaning an unmarried girl has the same identity as her father or brothers, and a wife takes on the identity of her husband and his patrilineage.7 In short, a woman’s membership in a lineage defined who she was as a social person. During precolonial and colonial times, a woman after her marriage would be called by a name derived from her husband’s name such as Mukamanzi (literally, “wife of Manzi”) or some other anonymous kinship terms such as umufasha (literally, “helper,” meaning wife) or mama/nyoko/nyina (literally, “my mother”/“your mother”/“his/her mother”). A woman’s given name was rarely used—a literal, as well as symbolic, erasure of her individuated personhood. These practices were not necessarily based on patriarchy. Rather, they reflected a Rwandan notion of personhood whereby a person’s kin relations, stage of life, and marital status constituted his or her social identity. Female labor was central to Rwandan agricultural production in the precolonial and colonial periods. With the exception of a few regional ethnic groups and the ruling elite, most households, whether Hutu or Tutsi, subsisted primarily from agriculture, with livestock supplementing agricultural production. Up until the recent past, wives cultivated food for the household on land owned by their husbands or their husbands’ families. Husbands produced cash crops, managed livestock, or migrated in search of paid labor. In the precolonial system, women and girls drew power from their productive and reproductive capacities and from the protection of their own patrilineage. In this system, women could carve out substantial spheres of power. Women also had land rights in their own lineages. A father could make gifts of land to a daughter; this land “remained the outright property of the woman and [was] inherited by her sons.”8 Should a woman never marry or should her marriage fail, she could return to her own patrilineage and be allocated a parcel of land.9 Bridewealth marriages were key to this social configuration and helped ensure protection for married daughters. The colonial period wrought many changes in Rwandan gender roles as the economy became monetized and the colonial state pushed husbands and men into the cash economy. These changes weakened the customary powers and rights of daughters and wives and increased the patriarchal nature of Rwandan society.10

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Although women gained some legal rights in the postcolonial period, they remained subordinated to men and largely excluded from nonagricultural, salaried work. The 1991 constitution guaranteed the equality of all people before the law regardless of race, color, origin, ethnicity, clan, sex, belief, religion, or social position, but numerous legal codes of the postcolonial period continued to subordinate women to men in the home and in the public sphere.11 For example, Article 206 of Law No. 42/88 stated that “the husband is the head of the conjugal community made up of man, wife, and their children.”12 This provision was inspired, according to Jean-Marie Kamatali and Philippe Gafishi, “by custom, which defines the husband in reference to his physical strength and his duty to provide for the family’s needs including their lodging.”13 At the time of the genocide in 1994, Rwandan women were technically, legally emancipated. In practice, however, they were perceived as legal “minors [under] the guardianship of fathers, brothers, husbands or sons.”14 Banking, commercial, and land ownership laws limited women’s ability to engage in the cash economy. Women told me in interviews that prior to 1994 they could not seek salaried work without the approval of their husbands, even though Rwandan law did not require employers to seek husbands’ approval.15 By law, women needed the signature of their husbands in order to open a bank account.16 This legal requirement was intended to protect the conjugal household as a single, economic unit. But, the provision made it easy for husbands to hide money from their wives or direct resources away from the conjugal household, since a husband did not require a wife’s signature to open or close a bank account but a wife did require a husband’s. While some women became successful entrepreneurs, their businesses were vulnerable to plunder by their husbands.17 Patriarchal ideas about the roles of women in society also led to an education system that limited girls’ access to secondary school. According to World Bank Development Indicators, in 1990 the proportion of female to male primary enrollment was 96 percent for primary school, 71 percent for secondary school, and only 22 percent for tertiary school. When faced with limited household resources, families chose to educate their sons over daughters for two reasons. First, girls provided significant labor in the household by fetching water, caring for young children, cooking, cleaning, and washing laundry. This time-intensive work required girls to miss school. On the other hand, boys’ labor, usually tending livestock or helping in the fields, could be accomplished outside school hours. Second, fathers often viewed educating daughters as “a waste,” since these daughters would leave to join their husbands’ patrilineage when they married. Thus, many institutional barriers prevented girls from achieving the levels of education necessary to secure salaried work in the private sector or in the government. This history of everyday violence that subordinated women to men, combined with a political economy that strongly favored men for salaried employment, limited women and girls’ choices. Despite laws that granted them individual rights and personhood, women and girls were viewed as

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dependent on men: as girls they were dependent on their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers and as women on their husbands, brothers-in-law, and adult male children. This systemic subordination increased women and girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence in the genocide.

Women’s Agency, Sexual Consent, and Conflict In the Rwandan context, the issue of sexual consent is a particularly thorny problem because Western legal definitions of consent are rarely appropriate.18 According to Sophie Day, rape is commonly defined as “nonconsensual sex” or “nonconsensual sexual intercourse.”19 This definition raises some significant conceptual problems when used in Rwanda (and many other African countries) because women in these cultures usually do not give explicit, verbal consent to sexual intercourse. Among Rwandans, as well as many other African groups, modesty is a feminine ideal and unmarried girls and women are expected to uphold a cultural model of the “modest virgin” devoid of any sexual knowledge or urges.20 Because explicit expressions of sexual desire are considered immodest, female consent is usually signaled implicitly through nonverbal cues or “situational consent,” that is, a woman or girl’s willingness to be in a particular place, at a particular time, with a particular person. For instance, a woman agrees to spend the night with a man in his home or a hotel. In the past, and even to a certain extent today, a married woman would also give subtle nonverbal cues to her husband to indicate her desire by cooking a special meal, wearing attractive clothing, attending to the husband’s physical comfort, or lighting a pipe of tobacco for him at bedtime.21 Rwandan cultural values precluded the notion of rape in marriage because a wife’s consent became an irrevocable fact upon wedding.22 Wives could refuse their husbands only due to illness or menstruation.23 Thus the emic Rwandan cultural models of sexual consent do not coincide with the European and American models of consent. Research on socially acceptable forms of domestic violence in India24 and on socially acceptable forms of domestic violence in the highlands of Peru suggests that many other cultures also reject a model of rape based on consent.25 Rwandan cultural models of sexuality and consent complicate investigations of sexual violence as a crime. For example, the lack of precise words for rape in Kinyarwanda (the local language) complicated research on sexual violence conducted in late 1994 and early 1995.26 Article 360 of the 1977 Rwandan penal code defined rape as a crime punishable by five to ten years’ imprisonment, but it did not delineate what behaviors constituted rape.27 In unpublished research on child sexual assault conducted in 2002 for CARE-Rwanda, I found that Rwandans usually expressed the concept of rape as gufata ku ngufu (to take by force), which suggests that rape is conceived of as involving physical force. A former military policeman confirmed this when he explained to me in 2002 that he usually

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looked for signs of physical violence on an alleged victim’s body in order to determine whether she had been raped. He said there was simply no other conclusive way to determine whether a woman alleging sexual assault was being truthful. Historically, Rwandan cultural models of sexuality did not prescribe remedies for rape; rather, they addressed improper sexual relations such as adultery—a man having sexual intercourse with an unauthorized woman such as the wife of a different patrilineage or an unmarried girl. In these instances, the offending man’s patrilineage would offer gifts such as beer and livestock to compensate the lineage to which the wife or unmarried girl belonged. A wife caught en flagrant délit with an unauthorized man was assumed to have consented to the sexual activity. Most likely she faced a severe beating at the hands of her husband, father-in-law, or brothers-in-law, and risked being sent back to her own patrilineage without her children. For an unmarried girl, a marriage might be arranged, but if not, she most likely faced a severe beating at the hands of her father or brothers for bringing shame to the family. Knowledge of her “mistake” would also lower the potential bridewealth that her lineage could seek during future marriage negotiations. All these instances assume the implicit consent of the women involved and preclude the possibility of rape defined as “nonconsensual sex.” These data suggest that Rwandan cultural models for coping with sexual transgressions, including situations that were potentially rape, robbed women of their agency. While a great deal of international attention has focused on sexual violence in conflict zones, few studies recognize that many different types of sexual encounters occur in war zones, including a great deal of consensual sex for pleasure and transactional sex that does not necessarily constitute harm.28 Many of these encounters, to be sure, are conditioned by the circumstances of violent conflict and the political economy of war and are therefore hard to define as noncoercive. Many young women exercise their sexual agency in conflict zones and trade sexual access to their bodies for the means of survival: food, water, clothing, money. The degree to which these women are making a “choice” is highly contingent on the structural factors determined by the conflict, and often they must choose between several terrible options— what Begoña Aretxaga called “choiceless decisions.”29 In Rwanda, the lack of explicit consent further complicated these distinctions: how do women and girls refuse sexual intercourse when the means of survival are bound up with implicit signs of consent, such as accepting food, clothing, shelter, and protection? R. M. Hayden critiques assumptions by human rights researchers that Rwandan women who married men in exchange for protection during the genocide were victims of rape or forced marriage.30 Indeed, it is plausible that some Rwandan women and girls exercised agency in the initiation of these relations, and it is highly likely that they have exercised agency in their continuation. Yet whether these relationships can be considered consensual or whether they constitute sexual harm is a much more difficult question to answer. If the only other option is death, is it really a choice at all?

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Sexual Violence during the 1994 Genocide Sexual assaults on women and girls increased dramatically following the advent of the civil war in 1990.31 While it is almost certain that rape and sexual violence existed before then, they were not widely recognized as problems, and women’s organizations did not mobilize on the issue. The civil war, the 1994 genocide, and their aftermath transformed aspects of Rwandan culture. In Rwanda in the 1990s, war became what Stephen Lubkemann called a “social condition,” meaning war became the normal context of daily life rather than a disruption of normal social relations.32 Before, during, and after the genocide, sexual violence was a common feature of a social landscape that already considered many forms of genderbased violence, such as wife-beating, normal. As the general state of security in the country declined, members of the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), and others took advantage of the chaotic conditions to commit acts of sexual violence with impunity. Local government officials advised women to wear both shorts and underwear beneath their skirts as an impediment to rape rather than wearing nothing per custom.33 While official reports of rape were almost nonexistent, Human Rights Watch reported in 1993, “Rwandan soldiers frequently rape women, but because they are never punished for the crime, victims rarely report the attacks. Women know that to accuse soldiers is futile and may well lead to further harassment or even death.”34 Many Rwandans, both male and female, told me that the FAR and the militias raped women during attacks on civilians in the civil war. While sexual violence escalated during the civil war, its ferocity and intensity during the genocide from April 6 through July 4, 1994, constituted an abrupt break with social norms. Rape and sexual violence became weapons of genocide used to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group as well as “to terrorize the community and warn all people of the futility of resistance— those targeted as victims as well as those who might wish to protect the intended targets.”35 Women faced brutal acts of sexual violence: individual rape, gang rape, rape with objects, sexual slavery or “forced marriage,” and sexual mutilation.36 Interahamwe militiamen often raped or sexually tortured Tutsi women before killing them. Perpetrators sometimes mutilated women during the rapes or before killing them by cutting off their breasts, puncturing the vagina with sharp objects, or disfiguring body parts that looked “Tutsi” such as long fingers or thin noses.37 In other cases, Tutsi women were gang-raped, sexually enslaved, or “married” by Interahamwe militiamen in exchange for having their lives saved.38 Although perpetrators in the 1994 genocide targeted victims based on ascribed identities, “age-old” ethnic hatred (or tribalism) was not the cause of the genocide.39 Rather, the killings were the result of political strategizing and conscious choices by a political and economic elite who desired to maintain their hold on power. At the local level, community members usually knew

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the ethnicity of their neighbors. At roadblocks on main roads, policemen, soldiers, and militiamen used national identity cards, which indicated ethnicity, to select targets. During the genocide, a man who presented an identity card marked “Tutsi” would be killed instantly along with any children accompanying him. Women with Tutsi identity cards would usually be killed immediately or raped and then killed. Sometimes they might be spared according to the whims of their attackers, held as sexual slaves by soldiers or militiamen, or taken as “wives” by individual soldiers, militiamen, or civilian perpetrators. Individuals presenting identity cards marked “Hutu” or “Twa” would often be physically examined or interrogated for other clues to determine if the card was accurate. Many people had changed the ethnicity on their cards from Tutsi to Hutu during the Habyarimana regime because doing so was advantageous under the “ethnic equilibrium” policy, which reserved 90 percent of all posts in the government and in secondary schools or universities for Hutus. Thus, genocide perpetrators relied in many instances on stereotypical physical markers of “Tutsiness,” which included a tall, slender frame; aquiline nose with small nostrils; long, narrow fingers or feet; dark gums in the mouth; and a tan skin tone on the palms of the hands or soles of the feet. For women, the rule of thumb was often beauty. Since colonial times, Tutsi (or Watussi) women were heralded as great beauties by European colonizers. Racist propaganda in the years leading up to the genocide further reinforced these stereotypes.40 Beauty as a marker of Tutsiness was so strong in the popular imagination that Hutu women and girls who were considered beautiful risked being mistaken for Tutsi and raped, sexually enslaved or taken as “wives,” sexually tortured, or killed.41 The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established sexual violence as an explicit strategy of the genocide and yielded the first judgment of rape as a genocide crime in an international court. The ICTR convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, Burgomaster (mayor) of Taba commune, of using rape as a weapon of genocide, even though he did not participate in sexual violence. Instead, he ordered others to rape and engage in sexual violence as part of the genocide.42 Other leaders ordered militiamen and other community members to rape and also committed rape themselves.43 In 2011, the ICTR found Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a woman and minister of women’s development in the interim government in power during the genocide, responsible for aiding and abetting rapes and ordering the rape of Tutsi women during the genocide.44 Unfortunately, due to errors committed during the trial by the prosecutor’s office, the court did not find her guilty of rape as a crime of genocide.45 Beyond physical brutality, sexual violence in the genocide consisted of symbolic and psychosocial violence. Perpetrators targeted the normally privileged role of Rwandan women as mothers. They disemboweled pregnant women while still alive and cut their fetuses out of their wombs.46 They raped and sexually mutilated women and then told them bullets should not be “wasted” on them because they would “die of AIDS,” presumably contracted

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during the rapes.47 Extremist rhetoric targeted Tutsi beauty and desirability— militiamen were promised the opportunity for sexual intercourse with Tutsi women as a reward for their “work”; that is, killing Tutsis and others identified as enemies of the state. Survivors frequently reported that perpetrators said that they wanted “to see if Tutsi women were like Hutu women.”48 Many perpetrators raped Tutsi women as punishment for “their supposed arrogance,” since Tutsi women were “said to scorn Hutu men.”49 Rape during the genocide also became a political economic weapon. The Rwandan state sought to eliminate the Tutsi ethnic group through the destruction or systematic stripping of their assets, such as the looting and burning of Tutsi homes and businesses. Soldiers, militiamen, and civilian perpetrators were “rewarded” for their work with property taken from Tutsis, including Tutsi women and girls, who were often treated as war booty.50 For example, Rwandan soldiers ordered the director of a nursing school to hand over female students and raped female employees of a Roman Catholic seminary as “a contribution to the war effort.”51 In some communities, local authorities worked to keep the Tutsi wives of Hutu men alive only because “depriving a man of the productive and reproductive capacities of his wife harmed his interests” and could diminish his willingness to support the genocide.52 Women’s land rights were sometimes part of the “reward” for militiamen. One survivor recounted how the head of the local militia gave her and her sisters to militiamen as “wives” and their father’s land was split among the “husbands.”53 Women’s and girls’ greater survival rates can in part be explained through this use of women and girls as economic pawns to acquire land and property through so-called marriage. After the genocide, sexual violence remained a problem. For Rwandans in refugee camps in eastern Zaire or western Tanzania, the former FAR soldiers and Interahamwe militiamen who controlled the camps remained a constant threat. Rape was common, and perpetrators faced no consequences. Young, single women and adolescent girls remained vulnerable to becoming “wives” under coercive circumstances.54 The FAR and Interahamwe in eastern Zaire organized incursions into Rwanda and attacked local communities, again using rape as a weapon. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the armed wing of the RPF that became the new national army following the RPF victory, was much more disciplined than the FAR had been. RPA soldiers did not engage in widespread rape, but two practices fall somewhere in the vicinity of coercive sex and definitely constitute militarized sex. In the internally displaced persons camps behind RPA lines, women and girls who had been saved by the RPA would often find themselves solicited by RPA soldiers for a “reward” (meaning sexual intercourse). This reward was often referred to as kubohoza, “to be liberated.” While these women and girls may have consented to these sexual encounters, it is difficult to discern whether they felt as if they had a choice. In a second practice, RPA soldiers asked Tutsi women married to Hutu men to leave their husbands, “saying those marriages must have been the consequence

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of rape.”55 If the women refused, their husbands would be arrested on accusations of genocide and imprisoned—an almost certain death warrant between 1994 and 1997 given the abysmal prison conditions. The women were then forced to marry RPA soldiers, who acquired their property.56 Little detailed information about sexual violence during the insurgency in northern and western Rwanda (1996–2001) is available because researchers had little access to these communities at the time. Survivors of attacks against civilians, particularly those perpetrated by the RPA, were reluctant to testify for fear of reprisals from the government. For several years after the end of the insurgency, Rwandan women in northwestern Rwanda cited rape as a pressing social problem for women and girls.57 These data suggest that sexual violence was a significant problem during the insurgency and in its aftermath. By 2009, women in the same community stated that local authorities had solved the problem by working closely with the population.58

The Aftermath of Sexual Violence Human Rights Watch published the earliest, in-depth, examination of sexual violence during the 1994 genocide and its aftermath.59 The report detailed the numerous economic, legal, and social problems faced by sexual violence survivors. Its analysis of the forms of sexual violence in the genocide helped establish that sexual violence was an intentional strategy of genocide. Research by Médecins sans Frontières also helped establish that sexual violence had been used as a weapon in the genocide.60 As a result of this groundbreaking work, an international coalition of feminist human rights lawyers, scholars, and activists petitioned the ICTR’s prosecutor’s office to pursue prosecution of rape and sexual violence as genocide crimes and crimes against humanity.61 Their advocacy and the amicus brief they filed led to the amendment of the charges against Jean-Paul Akayesu and the first successful prosecution of rape as a weapon of genocide under international law. Inside Rwanda, the Rwandan women’s movement advocated for sexual violence survivors. In 1995, the Rwandan Ministry of Justice circulated the first draft of the genocide statute. The law did not explicitly address rape, sexual torture, or sexual enslavement. A coalition of women civil society organizations, women parliamentarians, journalists, and lawyers advocated for rape to be added to the most serious category of genocide crimes, which included organizing and planning the genocide.62 In the final law adopted in 1996, article 2a included “persons who committed acts of sexual torture” among the most serious genocide crimes (Law No. 08/96). Ten years after Human Rights Watch’s report on sexual violence, the organization revisited the situation of sexual violence survivors and the obstacles that prevented them from seeking justice.63 The report acknowledged the important international legal precedents as well as

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improvements in national legal codes to protect civilians from sexual violence, but it made clear that numerous obstacles continued to prevent the prosecution of many cases of sexual violence. In Rwanda the issue of sexual violence largely faded from everyday discussion after the efforts to amend the genocide code until 2003 or 2004. Haguruka, a legal aid society for women that received countless victims of domestic violence and child sexual abuse who were seeking legal assistance, brought the issues to public prominence again.64 Other women’s civil society organizations joined in advocacy around this issue. This work resulted in a national conference on gender-based violence held in Kigali in 2005.65 After the conference, a group of parliamentarians drafted a new law on gender-based violence. They introduced the bill in early 2006. After two years of advocacy, amendments, and consensus building, the groundbreaking new law was adopted in 2008.66 Several foreign and Rwandan scholars have collected testimony or life history narratives from sexual violence survivors.67 These works have contributed to understanding some of the long-term consequences of sexual violence for survivors. Three significant themes that emerge from these studies are the psychosocial difficulties of raising children born of rape, the health consequences of living with HIV acquired through sexual violence, and the continuing economic struggles of rape survivors who are often living in poverty. Many women and girls who were raped became pregnant. While abortion was illegal in Rwanda in 1994, in some hospitals and medical clinics nurses and physicians quietly offered an unknown number of these women abortions as treatment for their physical and psychological trauma.68 Nonetheless, a significant number of women and girls gave birth to children who were commonly called “children of bad memories” in Kinyarwanda. Many of these women and girls faced extreme emotional difficulty. As one widow explained, “I can’t look in this child’s eyes.”69 Another woman, forced to marry an FAR soldier during the genocide and to accompany him into exile, explained, “I gave birth to a girl, but I hated her, because she was a constant reminder of what had happened to me. I didn’t breastfeed her because of that.”70 Some women left these children in orphanages, but thousands of others kept them. As Godelieve Mukasarasi, founder and coordinator of a Rwanda women’s organization dedicated to helping sexual violence survivors and their children, explains, “Children born of rape are stigmatized, hated even by their own mothers or by their mother’s kin.”71 These children remain as external embodied memories for their mothers who must face a lifetime of public shame because their kin and communities recognize the mother’s defilement in the face of the child. Attempting to disguise children born of rape as illegitimate children offers these women little advantage since having an illegitimate child drastically reduces the chance of a woman entering into a socially recognized marriage and social adulthood.72 Thus, women impregnated through rape during the genocide, the civil war, or their aftermaths found themselves with only terrible choices.

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Despite these obstacles, children born of rape became central to some sexual violence survivors’ agency: these survivors redefined themselves as mothers and made decisions to protect the well-being of their children. In Rwanda as elsewhere in Africa, motherhood is the best light in which a woman can be seen. By reinventing themselves as mothers, albeit single mothers, these rape survivors recovered their dignity and reclaimed their agency.73 The radically transformed social context wrought by the genocide made this option more practical. In the aftermath of the genocide, single motherhood became less stigmatized and parents became less willing to enforce customary sanctions, such as pregnant daughters’ banishment or sending the infants to orphanages. In the years that followed the genocide, the increasing difficulty for Rwandan youth to achieve socially recognized marriages resulted in increasing numbers of single mothers in Rwanda.74 Because families and communities have no other choice, they began to accommodate single mothers, including women raped in the genocide, by according them social adulthood. Nonetheless, sexual violence survivors impregnated through rape faced the additional challenge of learning to love children who embodied their physical and psychology trauma. As one rape survivor explained, “Learning to love the child of a killer is hard . . . SEVOTA [a women’s association] helped me learn to love him.”75 Not all women succeed in this endeavor. As one woman, who was only twelve years old at the time of her rape and sexual captivity during the genocide, explained, “I have never loved my daughter, who was born out of rape, and even though I try my hardest to love her, there is still a long way to go.”76 As children born of genocide rape have come of age, new research has focused on them. Eramian and Denov found that Rwandan youth born of genocide rape navigated difficult emotional, familial, and cultural terrain due to social stigma.77 As a result, they often chose to conceal their origin stories despite the rise of public testimonials about the genocide during their adolescence.78 Kamuzinzi focused on the impact of learning about their origins on identity formation among these youth.79 The long-term impact of sexual violence on these young adults’ lives will surely attract ongoing attention. Women and girls who contracted HIV/AIDS through sexual assault during the genocide were viewed and continue to be viewed today as tainted. During the genocide, men who knew they were infected with HIV raped women to inflict a delayed death.80 Beyond the public shame of their rapes, these women faced the structural violence of living with a devastating illness in a resource-poor setting where treatment was unavailable in the critical years after the genocide. As African Rights reported, “medical care for genocide rape victims in Rwanda can be summarized as ‘too little, too late.’”81 In the late 1990s through 2004, antiretroviral treatments (ARVs) available to people living with HIV/AIDS in North America and Europe were available only to the very wealthy in Rwanda as the medications’ monthly cost exceeded $400 whereas the per capita gross national income in Rwanda was $730 per year (or $60 per month) in 2004.82 The vast majority of people living with HIV/AIDS in Rwanda went untreated until the US President’s

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Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was created by President George W. Bush in 2003. Beginning in late 2004, ARV therapy began to be made accessible to poor Rwandans. Unfortunately, this treatment came too late for thousands of women who had already died of HIV/AIDS acquired through rape in the genocide. In 2009, genocide survivors living with HIV/AIDS still endured “trauma, stigma, social isolation, and economic hardship.”83 Nonetheless, in 2011 an estimated 61,900 Rwandans received ARV therapy, and 225,600 people living with HIV/AIDS received health care and other support through the PEPFAR initiative.84 Survivors of rape shared many of the same difficulties of genocide survivors in general: loneliness, social marginalization, depression, psychosocial trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder, and extreme poverty. In the aftermath of the genocide, survivors faced a country whose infrastructure had been destroyed. Perpetrators had targeted the economic lives of Tutsis by destroying their homes, slaughtering their livestock, and stealing their belongings. Thus, genocide survivors faced restarting their lives from “less than nothing.”85 In this context, survivors of sexual violence found their suffering intensified by the dire economic circumstances and poverty they faced. While the new Rwandan government eventually came to the assistance of genocide survivors through the Genocide Survivors’ Assistance Funds, known by their French acronym, FARG, survivors suffered for many years without the basic necessities such as clothing, shelter, basic household tools, or farming implements necessary to survive. For sexual violence victims, many of whom suffered health problems as a result of their attacks, this poverty made it extremely difficult to access basic health care. Despite these challenges, women survivors of sexual violence rebuilt their lives and began to seek meaning in their existence. Maggie Zraly and Laetitia Nyirazinyoye found that some genocide-rape survivors in southern Rwanda joined associations and deployed a variety of coping mechanisms to continue living despite their horrific experiences during the genocide.86 In my research with grassroots women’s organizations in southern Rwandan and national women’s organizations based in Kigali, I also found that joining women’s associations brought solace to many genocide survivors, genocide widows, and other women whose husbands had died.87 Some sexual violence survivors sought to have children outside of marriage as another form of consolation and as a way to normalize their situation in the community. In 2013, one genocide survivor in the late stages of her battle with AIDS acquired through rape in the genocide explained, “I knew no man could take me like this. But I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone in the world. So, I sought to have children through other means [than marriage].”88 Other sexual violence survivors rejected the idea of marriage because of a lingering distaste for men.89 These women sought to raise children as single mothers either through adoption or through sexual encounters with men.90

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Silenced Voices: Sexual Violence Survivors Omitted from the Public Discourse Social interventions in post-genocide Rwanda focused mostly on Tutsi victims leaving other rape survivors to cope on their own. Rape survivors who do not fit the Hutu-perpetrator/Tutsi-victim dyad remained mostly silent because their experiences did not fit the dominant paradigm of Rwandan history promoted by the RPF government.91 Hutu women raped by FAR soldiers or Interahamwe militiamen during the civil war or genocide did not dare speak out publicly because they risked not only disbelief (because Hutu women are not perceived as genocide targets) but also rejection by their husbands and families because of the “shame” of being raped. Tutsi women who were coerced into sex or forced into marriage with RPF soldiers had little or no access to social services for sexual violence survivors unless they adjusted their narratives and called the perpetrators “Interahamwe.” Finally, an unknown number of (Hutu and Tutsi) women have remained in marriages that began as “forced” marriages. These women dare not talk about how their relationships began for fear of being cast off by their husbands or husbands’ families. Like women in post-partition India and Pakistan, these women exercise their agency to remain in these marriages because they perceive it as the best option for themselves or their children.92 In Punjab, Veena Das found that the social fiction of “practical kinship” allowed raped or forcibly married women to be incorporated into families and communities when the women’s natal families and communities would have rejected them.93 Hayden found that raped women in Bosnia exercised similar agency to find a socially acceptable place for themselves and their children in the aftermath of the conflict.94 Notwithstanding the individual and social silence surrounding these issues, silence should not be mistaken for secrecy. Even though many rape survivors and women in “forced marriages” remain silent about their experiences, family and community members often know about these women and girls’ sexual assaults. Given the public nature of genocide rapes and sexual enslavement during the genocide, community members are often aware that certain women were raped or held in sexual slavery or that some women’s marriages began in questionable circumstances. Social silence on these matters helps preserve the women’s dignity on the one hand and avoids reopening familial and community conflict on the other hand. Yet silence may also increase or prolong rape survivors’ suffering. The voices of sexual violence survivors who have not sought support through associational life have rarely been heard. Researchers use convenience samples drawn from associations whose membership is pre-identified as sexual violence survivors as a way to conquer the nearly insurmountable challenge of recruiting research participants into a study with numerous privacy, confidentiality, and psychological risks. Most studies conducted on

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sexual violence during the genocide in Rwanda relied on this strategy to recruit interviewees.95 Despite its benefits this recruitment strategy creates a sampling bias due to the de facto exclusion of sexual violence survivors who are not members of associations. In addition, it creates an artificial situation where interviewees may feel compelled to explain or justify their membership in these associations while giving their testimony.96 In The Men Who Killed Me, Anne-Marie de Brouwer, Sandra Ka Hon Chu, and Samer Muscati’s study, these kinds of assertions appear frequently in the published narratives.97 While this theme can be identified as an artifact of their sampling strategy, it is impossible to detect other ways that the narratives or testimony of sexual violence survivors may have been influenced by a sampling bias or the research context. Ethnographic research can sometimes overcome this obstacle. Some advantages of ethnography are the long-term presence of the researcher in the field and the more open-ended inductive research questions that can open doors to harder to detect phenomenon. In the course of fieldwork over a fifteen-year timespan, a handful of sexual violence survivors (or their families) shared their stories, or parts of their stories, with me. Most of these survivors do not belong to associations. Their experiences of sexual violence remained an individual (or family) secret. A striking common theme of their narratives is that they do not position themselves as a member of one or more groups; rather, their individual stories serve as “a counter memory to official hegemonic history,” as Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith describe some women’s memory narratives.98 These survivors’ narratives emphasized sexual survivors’ existence at the margins of social acceptability. Yet, rather than remain captives of a gendered social classification system that defines sexual violence survivors as morally tainted, these survivors refocused their lives and agency on their children, including those born of rape. An ethnographic approach allows researchers to explore the ambiguity of sexual violence during conflict by uncovering survivors hidden by hegemonic public discourses about conflict and by gathering data on female sexual agency and consensual sexual activity in conflict zones. Since the majority of post-genocide interventions for sexual violence survivors in Rwanda assisted mostly Tutsi victims or Hutu genocide widows, many (perhaps even most) sexual violence survivors remained hidden by the public discourse on sexual violence, by their own shame, and by the cultural requirement for silence in matters of sexual violence. The assumption that European or North American models of sexual consent are relevant to other contexts ignores significant differences in the social construction of sexuality and marginalizes emic cultural models. As Dianne Otto asserts, conflating all forms of sex in conflict zones as harm undermines women’s and children’s rights because it reinforces “conservative hierarchies of gender and sexuality” and “diverts attention . . . from the searing poverty that characterizes transitional postconflict societies.”99 Initiating sexual encounters can be a matter of rational choice, a coping strategy in the difficult economic circumstances that arise

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in the aftermath of violent conflict and genocide. Furthermore, it can be argued that the question of sexual consent and rape in Europe and North America still remains unresolved.100 In conflict zones, some women and girls initiate sexual relationships out of sexual desire, as a means to secure their own or their families’ survival, or because they face a choiceless decision whereby other options either do not exist or are less desirable. Finally, many of the dominant research methods on sexual violence during conflict detach the question of female sexual consent from the cultural historical context and political economy of poverty that structures women’s agency and limits their options. This case study points to the need for more open frameworks for confronting instances of sexual violence during violent conflict, ones that make it possible for more victims to come forward for medical, psychological, and social support. Furthermore, it points to the need to address the structural violence of wartime political economies that leave poor women and girls vulnerable to sexual exploitation and trafficking because they face choiceless decisions involving their or their families’ survival. As Soh pointed out in the case of Japan’s comfort stations during the Second World War, “the comfort system encompassed both commercial and criminal sex” (emphasis in original).101 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on gender-based and sexual violence in conflict zones as well as the UN Secretary-General’s 2003 Bulletin on the sexual conduct of peacekeepers are important steps in the right direction.102 Yet as Otto notes, the directives outlined in the secretary-general’s bulletin rob women, as well as male peacekeepers, of their sexual agency.103 Otto further argues there is a need to examine the real differences between women’s “experiences of consensual and nonconsensual sexual conduct, no matter how fine those distinctions are.”104 Thus, human rights lawyers and academic researchers should investigate in a systematic fashion the degree to which all militarized sex encompasses this divide.

Acknowledgments This chapter draws from data collected during dissertation research in Rwanda between 1997 and 2001, during consultancies for CARE-Rwanda in 2002, and from research trips in 2007, 2009, and 2011. I would like to thank the Government of Rwanda and the Ministry of Gender and Women in Development for authorizing and facilitating my dissertation research and the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education for authorizing more recent research. The research was funded by the University of Louisville, by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by the United States Institute for Peace, by the United States Department of Education, and by the National Science Foundation.

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Notes 1 Mary Fabri, Jianhong Lu, Agnes Binagwaho, Kathryn Anastos, Mardge Cohen, Davis Kashaka, and Henriette Kukayonga, “Chronic PTSD and HIV in Rwanda” (paper presented at the Politics, Policy, & Public Health Conference, Washington, DC: APHA, 2007), 5. 2 See, for example, Catherine Bonnet, Le viol comme arme de guerre au Rwanda: du silence à la reconnaissance (Paris, FR: Médecins Sans Frontières, 1995); Ariane Brunet and Isabelle Helal, “Monitoring the Prosecution of Gender-Related Crimes in Rwanda: A Brief Field Report,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 4, no. 4 (1998): 393–7; Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996); Human Rights Watch, Struggling to Survive: Barriers to Justice for Rape Victims in Rwanda (New York: Humans Right Watch, 2004); Donatilla Mukamana and Petra Brysiewicz, “The Lived Experience of Genocide Rape Survivors in Rwanda,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship 40, no. 4 (2008): 379–84; Françoise Nduwimana, The Right to Survive: Sexual Violence, Women and HIV/AIDS (Montreal, CA: International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2004); Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (London: Berg Publishers, 1999); Meredeth Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape: An Analysis of Systematic Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women during Armed Conflict in Africa,” in Victims, Perpetrators, or Actors?: Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence, eds. C. O. N. Moser and F. C. Clark (London: Zed Books, 2001), 55–68; Clotilde Twagiramariya and Meredeth Turshen, eds., “The Sexual Politics of Survival in Rwanda,” in What Women Do in Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa (New York: Zed Books, 1998), 101–21; Maggie A. Zraly, “Bearing: Resilience Among Genocide-Rape Survivors in Rwanda” (PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve, 2008); and Maggie A. Zraly and Laetitia Nyirazinyoye, “Don’t Let the Suffering Make you Fade Away: An Ethnographic Study of Resilience Among Survivors of GenocideRape in Southern Rwanda,” Social Science & Medicine 70, no. 10 (2010): 1656–64. 3 This research was published as Jennie E. Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). For detailed information on research methodology, see 23–8. 4 Eric Wolf, “Facing Power: Old Insights, New Questions,” in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, ed. Robert Borofsky (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 219. 5 C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3. 6 Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape.” 7 Today in Rwanda, the standard translation for this proverb is “wives have no ethnicity.” The Kinyarwanda word translated here as “ethnicity,”

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ubwoko, literally means “sort” or “type” and can be applied to monkeys, trees, or bananas as easily as to people. Before the 1950s, ethnicity was not the primary way that Rwandans classified each other. At that time, the term ubwoko, when referring to human beings, meant the combination of a person’s social attributes and their relevance in a given context. Hence I translate ubwoko in this proverb as “identity.” 8 Jennie E. Burnet and Rwanda Initiative for Sustainable Development, “Culture, Practice, and Law: Women’s Access to Land in Rwanda,” in Women and Land in Africa: Culture: Religion, and Realizing Women’s Rights, ed. L. M. Wanyeki (New York: Zed Books, 2003), 176–206, 188. 9 Catherine Andre, “Terre Rwandaise, accès, politique et reforme foncières,” L’Afrique des Grands lacs annuaire (1997-1998): 141–73; Danielle de Lame, A Hill Among a Thousand: Transformations and Ruptures in Rural Rwanda (English Translation: Une colline entre mille, ou, le calme avant la tempête) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005 [1994]). 10 Villia Jefremovas, “Loose Women, Virtuous Wives and Timid Virgins: Gender and Control of Resources in Rwanda,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 25, no. 3 (1991): 378–95; Villia Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002). 11 Jean-Marie Kamatali and Philippe Gafishi, Situation des enfants et des femmes du Rwanda: survie, développement et protection (Kigali: Gouvernement de la République Rwandaise et UNICEF, 2000), 188. 12 Ibid. Author’s translation from the original French. 13 Ibid., 124, author’s translation from the original French. 14 Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape,” 60. 15 Author interviews, 1997, 1998, 1999. 16 Kamatali and Gafishi, Situation des enfants et des femmes du Rwanda, 188. 17 Jefremovas, “Loose Women, Virtuous Wives and Timid Virgins,” 97–108. 18 For some other examples see Sophie Day, “What Counts as Rape? Physical Assault and Broken Contracts: Contrasting Views of Rape among London Sex Workers,” in Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, eds. Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow (New York: Routledge, 1994), 172; and Robert M. Hayden, “Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts: Sexual Violence in Liminalized States,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2001): 27–41. 19 Day, “What Counts as Rape?” 172. 20 Jefremovas, “Loose Women, Virtuous Wives and Timid Virgins”; Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards. 21 Gaspard Musabyimana, Pratiques et rites sexuels au Rwanda (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 79. 22 The Rwandan parliament passed a gender-based violence law in 2008 that criminalized rape in marriage. Republic of Rwanda, “Law No 59/2008 of 10/09/2008 law on Prevention and Punishment of Gender-Based Violence,” Official Gazette of the Republic of Rwanda 48, no. 14 (2008): 81–105.

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23 Musabyimana, Pratiques et rites sexuels au Rwanda, 79. 24 Vivian F. Go, Sethulakshmi C. Johnson, Margaret E. Bentley, Sudha Sivaram, A. K. Srikrishnan, David D. Celentano, and Suniti Solomon, “Crossing the Threshold: Engendered Definitions of Socially Acceptable Domestic Violence in Chennai, India,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 5, no. 5 (2003): 393–408. 25 25. Penelope Harvey, “Domestic Violence in the Peruvian Andes,” in Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience, eds. Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–89. 26 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 39. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 For example, see Hayden, “Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts”; Gretchen Borchelt, “Sexual Violence Against Women in War and Armed Conflict,” in The Handbook of Women, Psychology, and the Law, ed. Andrea Barnes (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons), 293–327; Claudia Card, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (1996): 5; Veena Das, “National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children,” in Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, ed. Veena Das (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 55–83; Veena Das, “Sexual Violence, Discursive Formations and the State,” Economic and Political Weekly (1996), 2411–23; Soh, The Comfort Women; Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror; Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape”; Turshen and Twagiramariya, What Women Do in Wartime. 29 Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 30 Hayden, “Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts,” 36. 31 This assessment is based on information gleaned during interviews with Rwandans conducted between 1995 and 2011. Official statistics of sexual assaults in Rwanda before 1994 are not available. 32 Stephen C. Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 33 Interviews by author 1998, 1999, 2002. 34 Human Rights Watch, Beyond the Rhetoric: Continuing Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), 11. 35 Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape,” 59. 36 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 39. 37 Alison L. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 215. 38 Anne-Marie de Brouwer, Sandra Chu, and Samer Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence (Vancouver, CA: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009); Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives. 39 Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

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40 Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, 170–1. 41 Interviews by author 1997, 2001, 2002. 42 Christopher Mullins, “‘He Would Kill Me with his Penis’: Genocidal Rape in Rwanda as a State Crime,” Critical Criminology 17, no. 1 (2009): 15–33, 23–4. 43 Ibid., 24. 44 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Nyiramashukuko, Ntahobali, Nsamimana, Nteziryayo, Kanyabashi, Ndayambaje (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 2011), 6–7. 45 Ibid., 7–8. 46 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives. 47 Interviews by author 1997, 2002; de Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me. 48 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 42–3; Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (1999): 387, 394. 49 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 215; Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 18; Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 394; and Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: where Taylor, an anthropologist, analyzes the symbolic discourse of sexual violence in extremist Hutu rhetoric leading up to the genocide and in certain practices of sexual violence during the genocide. 50 Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape.” 51 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 494. 52 Ibid., 296. 53 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 59–60. 54 Interview by author 2009. 55 Turshen, “The Political Economy of Rape,” 63. 56 Twagiramariya and Turshen, “The Sexual Politics of Survival in Rwanda,” 112. 57 Interviews by author 2000, 2001, 2002. 58 Interviews by author, North province, Rwanda, 2009. 59 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives. 60 Bonnet, Le viol comme arme de guerre au Rwanda. 61 Miriam Sapiro and Patricia V. Sellers, “Arriving at Rwanda: Extension of Sexual Assault Prosecution Under the Statutes of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals,” American Society of International Law, Proceedings 90 (1996): 605–11; J. Birenbaum, L. Wyndel et al., “Amicus Brief Respecting Amendment of the Indictment and Supplementation of the Evidence to Ensure the Prosecution of Rape and other Sexual Violence within the Competence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Case of Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu” (1996). 62 Jennie E. Burnet and Jeanne d’Arc Kanakuze, “Political Settlements, Women’s Representation and Gender Equality: The 2008 Gender-Based Violence

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Law and Gender Parity in Primary and Secondary Education in Rwanda,” Effective States and Inclusive Development Working Paper, no. 94 (2018): 17–18. https://doi​.org​/10​.2139​/ssrn​.3123023. 63 Human Rights Watch, Struggling to Survive. 64 Burnet and Kanakuze, “Political Settlements, Women’s Representation,” 22. 65 Elizabeth Powley and Elizabeth Pearson, “‘Gender is Society’: Inclusive Lawmaking in Rwanda’s Parliament,” Critical Half (Winter 2007): 19. 66 Official Gazette of the Republic of Rwanda, Law No. 59/2008 of 2008 on Prevention and Punishment of Gender-based Violence, September 10, 2008. 67 Nduwimana, The Right to Survive; de Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me; Zraly and Nyirazinyoye, “Don’t Let the Suffering Make You Fade Away.” 68 Author interviews, Kigali, Rwanda 1998, 2000, 2013 and North Carolina, USA, 2004. 69 “SEVOTA Imageclip visualizing the activities of the Rwandese women’s rights NGO,” Solidarity for the Development of Widows and Orphans to Promote Self-Sufficiency and Livelihoods (SEVOTA, http://vimeo​ .com​/11660854 (accessed March 29, 2012). Author’s translation from Kinyarwanda. 70 De Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me, 122. 71 “SEVOTA Imageclip.” Author’s translation from Kinyarwanda. 72 Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us, 42–3; Marc Sommers, Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 194. 73 De Lame, A Hill Among a Thousand, 385; David L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998), 151–4. 74 Sommers, Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood. 75 “SEVOTA Imageclip.” Author’s translation from Kinyarwanda. 76 De Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me, 116. 77 Laura Eramian and Myriam Denov, “Is It Always Good to Talk? The Paradoxes of Truth-Telling by Rwandan Youth Born of Rape Committed during the Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 3 (2018): 372–91. 78 Ibid. 79 Masengesho Kamuzinzi, “Identity in Adolescents Born From Genocidal Rape,” Identity 16, no. 3 (2016): 169–81. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​080​/1​​52834​​88​ .20​​16​​.11​​90727​. 80 Bonnet, Le viol comme arme de guerre au Rwanda, 20. 81 African Rights, Rwanda-Broken Bodies, Torn Spirits: Living with Genocide, Rape, and HIV/AIDS (Kigali, RW: African Rights, April 2004), 51. 82 Data taken from the World Development Indicators in the World Bank’s World DataBank, http:​/​/dat​​abank​​.worl​​dbank​​.org/​​data/​​ho​me.​​aspx (accessed December 12, 2013).

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83 Susan Garnett Russell, Sanaya Lim, Paul Kim, and Sophie Morse, “The Legacy of Gender-Based Violence and HIV/AIDS in the Postgenocide Era: Stories from Women in Rwanda,” Health Care for Women International 37, no. 7 (July 2016): 721–43. 84 US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, “Partnership to Fight HIV/ AIDS in Rwanda” (PEFAR, 2013), http:​/​/www​​.pepf​​ar​.go​​v​/doc​​ument​​s​/org​​ aniza​​tion/​​1​9959​​8​.pdf​. 85 Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us, 76. 86 Zraly and Nyirazinyoye, “Don’t Let the Suffering Make You Fade Away.” 87 Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us. 88 Author interview, West Province, Rwanda, 2013. 89 African Rights, Rwanda-Broken Bodies, 75. 90 Ibid., 75–6. 91 Burnet, “Whose Genocide? Whose Truth? Representations of Victim and Perpetrator in Rwanda,” in Genocide: Truth, Memory and Representation, eds. A. L. Hinton and K. O’Neill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 80–110. 92 Das, “National Honour and Practical Kinship”; Das, “Sexual Violence, Discursive Formations and the State.” 93 Das, “National Honour and Practical Kinship.” 94 Hayden, “Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts.” 95 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives; Human Rights Watch, Struggling to Survive; F. Nduwimana, The Right to Survive; de Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me; Zraly and Nyirazinyoye, “Don’t Let the Suffering Make You Fade Away.” 96 This theme fits the model described by Hirsch and Smith in their critique of many studies of feminism and cultural memory: women’s “stories . . . represent individual identity as shaped by members in one or several groups.” Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 28, no. 1 (2002): 7. 97 De Brouwer, Chu, and Muscati, The Men Who Killed Me. 98 Hirsch and Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory,” 7. 99 Dianne Otto, “The Sexual Tensions of UN Peace Support Operations: A Plea for ‘Sexual Positivity,’” Finnish Yearbook of International Law 18 (2007): 33–57, 38. 100 John F. Decker and Peter G. Baroni, “‘No’ Still Means ‘Yes’: the Failure of the ‘Non-Consent’ Reform Movement in American Rape and Sexual Assault Law,” Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 101, no. 4 (2011): 1081– 1169. 101 Soh, The Comfort Women, 108. 102 United Nations Secretary-General. “Special Measures for Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse: What You Need to Know,” published by Inter-Agency Standing Committee Task Force on Protection from Sexual

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Exploitation and Abuse, ST/SGB/2003/13. Published electronically October 9, 2003 on www​.un​.org. 103 Otto, “The Sexual Tensions of UN Peace Support Operations,” 35. 104 Ibid., 34.

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PART III

Gender and Complicity 

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8 Ordinary Masculinity Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship Stephen R. Haynes

At an academic conference on the Holocaust in 1997, I attended a panel discussion concerned with “women’s voices in the Holocaust.” During the question-and-answer period that followed, I asked the panelists, all of whom were women, whether they saw their work as opening the way for a consideration of men’s experience in the Holocaust. I did not intend to be radical or provocative. I knew, as the panelists did, that under the influence of academic feminism, scholars in the humanities and social sciences had emphasized the gendered character of all human experience. Nonetheless, the women’s responses indicated that they regarded my question as a threat, as one more in a series of male attempts to silence or marginalize their voices. This anecdote is representative of a wider problem in the field of Holocaust studies, one evident in journals, monographs, and textbooks1 as well as in conference presentations: scholars who study the Nazi “Final Solution” professionally are ignorant of or reluctant to acknowledge insights from the burgeoning discipline of men’s studies. The relatively recent emergence of men’s studies in popular culture does not fully explain this phenomenon. For masculinity has been a subject of scholarly analysis for nearly a century.2 It emerged in the theories of Sigmund Freud and his associates, particularly Alfred Adler; and by the middle of the twentieth century, considerable scholarly attention was being directed at the “male sex role”

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and the prescriptive pressure it exerts upon male behavior. Furthermore, contemporary interest in masculinity dates to the late 1970s, the very period in which Holocaust studies became a discrete field of academic inquiry. In recent years, the scholarly study of masculinity (sometimes called the “new men’s studies”) has exploded among anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of religion. Emphasis is placed on the social construction of masculinity (“shaped by historical circumstances and social discourses, and not primarily by random biology”),3 on multiple “masculinities” (“hegemonic” and “nonhegemonic,” for example)4 and the dynamics among them, and on the relationship between maleness, masculinity, and the exercise of social power.5 Of course, not all scholars concerned with gender have welcomed this new emphasis on masculinity in scholarship and popular culture. Some express concern that the new men’s studies is only a kinder, gentler strategy for reiterating male-biased scholarship and retaining male privilege. Advocates counter that the contemporary study of masculinity is new, inasmuch as it is rooted in an examination of men’s experience as specifically male rather than generically human. Following feminist scholars who observe that Western discourse tends to treat male experience as universal and ungendered and that women’s experience must be understood as departing from this putative “human” standard, scholars of masculinity argue that men’s experience also fails to conform to the “male” universal. That is, masculinities are perceived not as generic norms, but as objects of study on a par with femininities. In an oft-cited formulation of this assumption, Harry Brod writes: Like women’s studies, men’s studies aims at the emasculation of patriarchal ideology’s masquerade as knowledge. Men’s studies argues that while women’s studies corrects the exclusion of women from the traditional canon caused by androcentric scholarship’s elevation of man as male to man as generic human, the implications of this fallacy for our understanding of men have gone largely unrecognized. While seemingly about men, traditional scholarship’s treatment of generic man as the human norm in fact systematically excludes from consideration what is unique to men qua men.6 Thus, the argument goes, if women have been obscured from scholarly view by being relegated to the background of the Western imagination, men have been distorted by being thrust into the foreground.7 If this is the perspective animating “the new men’s studies,” it would appear to be quite compatible with—and a natural complement to— the gender scholarship that has made such a signal contribution to our understanding of women’s experience in the Holocaust. Why, then, has the study of masculinity achieved so little scholarly recognition in the interdiscipline of Holocaust studies?

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Men’s Studies and the Holocaust It must be kept in mind that feminist perspectives did not begin to affect mainstream Holocaust scholarship until the 1980s, and it was not until the 1990s that academic conferences regularly featured sessions devoted to “women’s experience” in the Shoah. Yet now that the salience of gender analysis for interpreting female experience in the Holocaust has been established, it is curious that the door has not opened more widely to considerations of masculinity.8 There remain several sources of indifference and resistance to the study of men’s experience among scholars of the Holocaust. First, unlike feminism, which promises to expose and liberate women from an oppressive patriarchy, the “liberation” offered by men’s studies holds little appeal for many of the male scholars who dominate the discipline. Given their positions of relative power in society and the academy, just what are male scholars to be liberated from? In what sense have they been victimized by male gender roles? As the female panelists by whom I was rebuffed hastened to point out, scholarship—like most forms of public discourse— has always been about men, for men, and by men. Second, Holocaust scholarship has been dominated—both numerically and in terms of professional clout—by historians. While they have much in common with scholars in other fields of the humanities, historians tend to be more traditional methodologically than practitioners in religion, sociology, anthropology, or literature. Generally speaking, they are more resistant to “postmodern” attacks on Enlightenment epistemology and less receptive to claims that their discipline is blind to crucial aspects of human existence. Because most historians pursue “scientific” objectivity (whether or not they believe it is attainable), and because “the guiding metaphors of scientific research . . . all stem from the social position of dominant men in a gendered world,” historians (particularly male historians) tend to eschew methodologies that are implicitly critical of their privileged social location.9 This may explain why recent scholarship on masculinity has emerged among sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion and has not achieved the level of acceptance across the scholarly spectrum enjoyed by academic feminism. Third, high-profile attempts to apply the study of masculinity to the Holocaust have had limited scholarly impact. An instructive example is Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume Männerphantasien (1977, 1978; English translation Male Fantasies 1987, 1989). Theweleit’s remarkable study of Weimar Freikorpsmen became an instant classic among feminists and neo-Freudians, but it has had little influence on mainstream Holocaust scholarship. In fact, one looks in vain for references to Male Fantasies in standard textbooks on the Final Solution. This is, in part, because the book has little to say about the Holocaust per se (focusing as it does on the German “soldier males” who were active between 1918 and 1923) and because it is so inaccessible

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(over 1,000 pages long in translation, the book must remain opaque to any who lack a thorough knowledge of psychoanalytic theory and familiarity with post-structuralism). But Male Fantasies’ failure to affect Holocaust scholarship may also be related to its claim that a deep misogynist strain is constitutive of male subcultures. The reasons for resistance to gender analysis in Holocaust studies remain obscure; but its applicability to interpreting men’s experience in the Holocaust can be easily demonstrated. I will establish this applicability by approaching male Holocaust perpetrators with a series of assumptions that emerge from contemporary gender analysis: (1) all human beings are gendered, historical subjects as well as the scholars who study them; (2) men’s experience is as gendered as women’s, though in different ways; (3) masculinity and femininity are inherently relational concepts, which take on meaning only in reference to each other; (4) the behavior of male combatants during wartime represents an unparalleled laboratory for the analysis of masculinity, since “the socialization of the soldier is simply an exaggeration of typical masculine socialization in [a] society”;10 (5) ignoring the role of gender in determining attitudes and behavior only enhances its capacity to structure and distort human interactions; and (6) although gender dynamics operate largely unconsciously, they can be traced through analyses of language. Working from these assumptions, this essay develops a case for applying gender analysis to the behavior and verbal self-justifications of a variety of male Holocaust perpetrators—including death camp commandants, specially selected killing-unit personnel, members of the armed forces, and reservists. Analysis of gender clues in the testimony of the men who perpetrated crimes against Jews and others during the Third Reich will illumine a fundamental tenet of men’s studies: in Western societies, masculinity is often constructed around images of strength, hardness, firmness, etc., and this has the effect of normalizing conformist, aggressive, and asocial behavior. We begin by examining the experiences of death camp supervisors, turn briefly to SS men and Einsatzgruppe officers, and conclude by discussing German reserve policemen.

The Elite: Camp Commandants One of the earliest autobiographical accounts by a Holocaust perpetrator was Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss, first published in 1951 and appearing in English in 1959.11 When read with an eye for gender, Höss’s autobiography offers an illuminating introduction to the dynamics of masculinity among Nazi true believers who became perpetrators of genocide. Early in the autobiography, Höss characterizes his previous military experience as a rite of male passage: “The upshot of my army service [during the First World War] was that I had reached manhood,

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both physically and mentally, long before my years. . . . The frightened schoolboy who had escaped from his mother’s care and fought his first action against the enemy had become a tough and hardened soldier.”12 Here and throughout his autobiography, Höss narrates his path toward genocide as a process of replacing weakness with “hardness.” One such passage concerns his stint as a guard at Dachau under Theodor Eicke, who taught him that: any show of sympathy [toward prisoners] would be regarded by the enemies of the state as weakness, which they would immediately exploit. Furthermore, it was unworthy of an SS man to feel pity for “enemies of the state.” [Eicke] had no room for weaklings in his ranks, and if any man felt that way he should withdraw to a monastery as quickly as possible. Only tough and determined men were of any use to him. It was not for nothing that they wore the death’s head badge and always kept their weapons loaded.13 In another passage, Höss describes Eicke’s attitude toward guards who fraternized with prisoners: such emotions were “a sign of weakness and sentimentality,” a “weak-kneed attitude” unbefitting men who were “unconditionally tough.”14 Interestingly, his Dachau experience led Höss to conclude that he was thoroughly unsuited for service in a concentration camp: “I did not want to make a laughingstock of myself,” he writes. “I did not wish to reveal my weakness.” On the other hand, he was unable to admit that he was “too soft” for an SS job.15 According to Höss’s narrative, the line at Dachau separating acceptable from unacceptable models of masculinity—the demarcation between the regions of softness and hardness, emotion and performance—was extraordinarily clear: on one side were the “weak-kneed,” “sentimentality,” “sympathy,” “pity,” “soft[ness],” “weakness,” “weaklings,” and the “monastery”; on the other side were the “unconditionally tough,” the “tough and determined men,” who kept their “weapons loaded.” By his own account, Höss gradually internalized this camp masculinity. For, despite overseeing the deaths of millions of Jews by 1945, he claimed never to have “personally hated” his victims, “the emotion of hatred” being foreign to his nature.16 Throughout his autobiography, Höss describes normative masculinity in the language of hardness while portraying its threats with images of softness and penetrability. As gender theorist James Nelson observes, these images are typical of the “erection mentality” men unconsciously project upon the world and what is valuable in it: Consider hardness. In the male world of achievement, hard facts mean more than soft data. Men listen more readily to data from the “hard sciences” than to the soft, seemingly mushy information and theories of

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the people sciences. . . . Consider upness. Computers are “up” when they are functioning “down” when they are in trouble.17 Höss invokes another image that is common in the writings of male Holocaust perpetrators when he places masculinity in dialectical relationship with family, particularly motherhood and childhood. Claudia Koonz elucidates this dialectic in her book Mothers in the Fatherland, where she notes that Nazi wives who wished to share in their husbands’ work were rare. Quite typical, however, were spouses who helped sustain their husbands’ psychological balance by maintaining a safe domestic world in which they found refuge emotionally, if not physically.18 In Höss’s story, as in the language of perpetrators at every level of the Final Solution, maleness is consistently defined over against what is soft and emotional. But while masculinity must eschew the maternal and the feminine, it cannot survive (or even be described) without them. As R. W. Connell notes, “Masculinity as an object of knowledge is always masculinity-inrelation.”19 The complex relationship between masculinity and family in the lives of Holocaust perpetrators is foregrounded when Höss describes his days at Vernichtungslager (“extermination camp”) Auschwitz. Though his wife and family are well provided for and happy there, Höss reports an enduring tension created by his identities as family man and death camp supervisor.20 In one passage, he highlights the contradiction between his impassive commandantself and his need to connect emotionally with his wife and children: I withdrew further and further into myself. I hedged myself in, became unapproachable, and visibly harder. My family, and especially my wife, suffered on account of this, since my behavior was often intolerable. I had eyes only for my work, my task. All human emotions were forced into the background. My wife was perpetually trying to draw me out of my seclusion. She invited old friends from outside the camp to visit us, as well as my comrades in the camp, hoping that I would be able to relax in their company. She arranged parties away from the camps with the same end in view.21 Despite his need for family members’ acceptance, Höss remains acutely aware that softening his masculine shell could have fearful consequences: “I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I might not even look away when afraid lest my natural emotions get the upper hand. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas chambers.”22 If Höss was “deeply affected” by some incident, he would not immediately return home, but mount his horse and ride, or “walk through the stables and seek relief among [his] beloved animals.”23

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To the very end of his life, Höss strove to maintain this barrier between his public deeds and his private world. Awaiting execution, he wrote: “Whatever use is made of what I have written, I beg that all those passages relating to my wife and my family, and all my tender emotions and secret doubts, shall not be made public.”24 In his final days, Höss confessed that he was “securely anchored” to his family and to the farm “that was to become their permanent home.” His real aim in life, he concluded, was to provide his children a “stable home.”25 Recorded twenty-five years later, the story of Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, reveals the very same gender dynamics at work in Höss’s autobiography. Journalist Gitta Sereny’s biographical account in Into That Darkness elucidates how Stangl relied on his family for psychic balance during his stint as a death camp supervisor and how his wife and daughters sheltered him from the emotional consequences of the Final Solution following his postwar arrest. “Did you want your family to come visit you in Poland,” Sereny asked Stangl in the early 1970s. “I was so glad to have them there,” he replied. “I found rooms for us on an estate just a few kilometers from Sobibor camp, near the village.”26 But as much as he needed his family to shelter him from the reality of his work, the arrangement carried risks. When Frau Stangl learned from a German officer the true nature of her husband’s job, Stangl feared that his happy domestic existence was at an end. But after a temporary emotional crisis, Frau Stangl allowed herself to be convinced that Franz’s role at Sobibor was “purely administrative.” Afterward she did not inquire too much about her husband’s work and remained fiercely loyal to the end. Her role as shield from the actuality of Stangl’s horrific acts remained intact through postwar accusations and legal proceedings. According to Sereny, although he refused to discuss with her the charges against him, Stangl desperately wanted his wife present during his internment and trial: “The only thing that mattered to him was her and his children’s continued loyalty and love.”27

The Middlemen: SS and Einsatzgruppe Personnel What of male perpetrators who were not afforded the luxury of having families present to buffer them from the unpleasant reality of their professional lives? If the gender dynamics operating in the stories of Höss and Stangl were at work among the male perpetrators in the middle regions of the Nazi hierarchy, we would expect to see evidence of this in the letters, interviews, and court depositions that document their experiences. And indeed we do. In a series of letters written during the fall of 1942 to his wife and children, SS-Obersturmführer Karl Kretschmer assures his family that, although hundreds of miles away, they remain “the very substance of [his] private life.”28 In this and other missives from the front, Kretschmer indicates that

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preserving his identity as an honorable father and husband is essential to rationalizing his participation in Einsatzgruppe murders. In one letter to his family, Kretschmer reveals the extent to which “camp masculinity” has come to inform his identity in the field: We have got to appear to be tough here or else we will lose the war. There is no room for pity of any kind. . . . I have already told you about the shooting—that I could not say “no” here either. . . . It is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people; the best way of overcoming it is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit.29 Dozens of similar statements from members of Nazi killing squads indicate that within the ranks there prevailed a masculinity rooted in the opposition of courage/hardness/performance on one hand, and cowardice/softness/ inability to perform on the other. “It’s almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work down there . . . it was horrible,” recalled one Einsatzgruppe member following the war. Another remembered his commanding officer warning his unit that they: would have to conquer [their] weaker selves and that what was needed were tough men who understood how to carry out orders. . . . Any officer who had declared that he was too weak to do such things [participate in shootings of Jews] would have been considered unfit to be an officer.30 Many SS men who in various ways helped execute the Nazi Final Solution later recorded self-justifications in which the language of hardened masculinity predominates: The officer shot the people himself as the others refused. He swore at us and said we were cowards. The reason I did not say to Leideritz that I could not take part in these things was that I was afraid that Leideritz and others would think I was a coward. I was worried that I would be affected adversely in some way in the future if I allowed myself to be seen as being too weak. I did not want Leideritz or other people to get the impression that I was not as hard as an SS man ought to have been. [Raschwitz] ordered me to go to the grave and to shoot Jews there with my pistol. I, however refused to comply with this order. . . . Raschwitz then hurled some abuse at me . . . he . . . used the term “coward” and other terms of abuse.31 The recurring images and themes in these passages communicate some­ thing fundamental about the parameters of masculine identity among

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Nazi perpetrators. But did the same conceptions of masculinity inform perpetrators who were less Nazified, who were neither true believers nor volunteered for actions against Jewish civilians? In other words, do we find among the “ordinary men” who became killers largely by chance the same constructions of masculinity evident among those who were ideologically prepared for murder? Was conformity to the masculine ideal a source of motivation for male Holocaust perpetrators, no matter their experience, rank, or task?

Ordinary Men/Ordinary Germans: The Goldhagen-Browning Debate To answer this question we will attend to seminal work by Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning, scholars who have painstakingly studied the ordinary perpetrators who made the Nazi Final Solution a near reality. Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners has proved a magnet for attention and controversy since its publication in 1996, and the so-called Goldhagen debate turned out to be the affair of the decade in Holocaust studies. The participants in the “debate” were Goldhagen and his advocates, who claimed the book had effected a revolution in our understanding of German perpetrators and bystanders, and Goldhagen’s detractors (led by the scholars whose work he summarily dismisses), who rarely overlooked an opportunity to attack Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Several years before the appearance of Goldhagen’s book, Christopher Browning published an important study entitled Ordinary Men that focused exclusively on the wartime activities of Order Police Battalion 101. In part to refute Browning’s interpretation of the battalion’s career, Goldhagen dedicated a 100-page section of his book (Police Battalions: Ordinary Germans, Willing Killers) to reassessing the archival evidence. In two chapters devoted to the activities of Battalion 101 in Poland, Goldhagen fashioned a thorough repudiation of Browning’s interpretation of these German perpetrators. Understandably, Browning did not concede defeat. In the revised edition of Ordinary Men and in shorter pieces published since the appearance of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Browning offered a spirited response to Goldhagen’s reinterpretation of the career of Battalion 101. Despite their sharp differences, however, Goldhagen, Browning, and most other students of perpetrator behavior remain in implicit agreement on one thing: when interpreting the actions of “ordinary” German men who perpetrated crimes against Jewish civilians during the Holocaust, questions of gender are irrelevant. Is this assumption justified? Or is there evidence that the construction of gender played a role in the self-understanding and self-justification of these unlikely killers?

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The Evidence for Gender Browning’s Ordinary Men, first published in 1992, is a detailed and compelling study of the composition, activities, and motivations of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 who operated in the Lublin District of Poland in 1942 and 1943. While Browning does not regard the social construction of masculinity as a fruitful field of interpretation, he cannot help but illuminate the role of gender in his subjects’ behavior. For instance, on the very first page of Ordinary Men, Browning notes that at the time of their service in Poland his subjects were “middle-aged family men of working- and lowermiddle-class background.”32 Yet while he makes much of the men’s age, class, and occupation, Browning says very little of their identity as “family men.”33 This despite the fact that the designation “ordinary” is based in part on the men’s identity as husbands and fathers. While Browning remarks that some of those who “stepped out” of the battalion’s killing actions did so because they were “fathers with children and could not continue,” he does not pursue the possible links between his subjects’ identities as family men and their refusal to kill Jews.34 Browning notes in passing that one motivation for enlisting in the Order Police was the prospect of serving “closer to home,” no doubt a reference to the psychic benefit of proximity to family and friends.35 In fact, home and family recur throughout the study as sources of cognitive dissonance for the battalion’s men, but Browning fails to note their significance. For instance, despite paying special attention to the moral reasoning of those who “stepped out” before or during battalion actions, Browning overlooks the fact that the men’s justifications for inaction often featured references to women and children. Typical in this regard was Heinz Buchmann, who communicated to his commanding officer that he “would in no case participate in such an action, in which defenseless women and children are shot.”36 The prospect of killing children seemed a particularly strong deterrent for some of those who opted out of the killing operations. According to one eyewitness, “Almost tacitly everyone refrained from shooting infants and small children.”37 For instance, when confronted with a ten-year-old girl who had survived the Jozefow massacre, Major Wilhelm Trapp embraced her, promising “you shall remain alive.”38 Browning’s sources demonstrate that the men’s perceived roles as protectors of women and children could play a paradoxical role in their thinking about murder. On one hand, Major Trapp sought to aid his men in overcoming their qualms about killing Jews by reminding them that “in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.”39 On the other hand, psychic conflict between the duty to kill and respect for the sanctity of family was sometimes projected upon the battalion’s Jewish victims. Browning quotes a letter asking that its author be spared “without fail from this police battalion,” since “almost all [Jewish] families have been torn apart.”40

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In his analysis of individual decisions to comply with or resist killing orders, Browning records dozens of references to mastery, strength, and weakness, often setting them off with quotation marks to emphasize that the words are his subjects’ own.41 Browning does not perceive in this language any clues to the killers’ state of mind. Read with an eye for gender, however, this language reveals that images of weakness proliferated in the testimony of men who refused to comply with killing orders. When a driver assigned to carry Jews to the forest during the Jozefow massacre asked to be relieved, he explained that “his nerves were not strong enough.”42 In order to forestall criticism from their comrades, nonshooters claimed they were “too weak” rather than too good to kill.43 Finally, when battalion veterans attacked each other in postwar legal testimony, their aspersions trafficked in images of softness such as “weakling” and “shithead.” Browning does note the deterrent effect on moral courage of perceptions that a man was “too weak,” was “cowardly,” or might “lose face.” He states that those who evaded action by intentionally misfiring risked being called “traitor and coward” if discovered.44 He also reports that even after being warned to “become tougher,” some men simply ignored orders to shoot Jewish women and children.45 Furthermore, Browning observes that not everyone was strong enough to be considered weak and that conformity increased with the likelihood that weakness would be exposed. But Browning fails to appreciate the centrality of the strength/weakness dichotomy in the perpetrators’ mental world and thus fails to recognize what this dichotomy indicates about the construction of masculinity among both shooters and nonshooters. The most obvious clue to these gender dynamics is the way participation in killing actions became a test of manhood that effectively bifurcated the battalion into the “tough” and the “weak.” As one soldier put it, “No one ever approached me concerning these operations. For these actions the officers took ‘men’ with them, and in their eyes I was no ‘man.’”46 According to Browning’s own text, the physical and psychological reactions of the men who murdered civilians reveal a complex interplay of weakness and strength. At one point, in response to the constant need to display strength, Major Trapp wept “like a child.”47 Physical illness, another form of weakness, was common among the men, and often became an excuse for failure to participate in battalion “actions.” Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea were varieties of temporary weakness that spared the men from having to prove their “strength”; and, of course, the temporarily weak were further emasculated by the “strong.” When a suspicious “irritable colon” put Captain Hoffmann out of action, his men began referring to him derisively as Pimpf, or “Hitler cub scout.”48 In response, Hoffmann desperately sought to reaffirm his manhood by invoking his “honor as an officer and soldier.” Thus, in the construction of male behavior that held these perpetrators together, the “strong” masculine was consistently identified through negative evaluation of the “weak” nonmasculine (or feminine).49

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Browning’s book contains other clues that, in the context of a masculine fraternity competing to demonstrate strength, possess unmistakable gender connotations. First, like male sexuality, perpetrator masculinity was linked to performance; that is, it was established by taking part in battalion operations. Further, when Major Trapp announced that older men who were not “up to the task” of murder could step out of formation, we see how job performance and sexual virility are intimately connected in the battalion’s vision of masculine behavior.50 In fact, Trapp’s offer to the older men who were not “up,” taken in conjunction with Captain Hoffmann’s reduction to the status of cub scout, indicate that in the battalion’s collective psyche those who did not conform and perform were regarded as either too young or too old to be considered real men. Despite this proliferation of evidence for what theorists call “genitalization”—a thought pattern leading men to prize the qualities of hardness, upness, and linearity—Browning does not tell us whether impotence was a problem in the battalion, as it apparently was among other groups of male killers during the Holocaust.51 The strange case of Captain Wohlauf and his expectant wife is yet another aspect of Battalion 101’s wartime career that cries out for gender analysis. According to Browning, the men of the battalion were appalled when Wohlauf’s “young bride—four months pregnant, with a military coat draped over her shoulders and a peaked military cap on her head” climbed aboard one of the trucks headed for a killing action.52 Browning surmises that the captain was seeking to impress his wife by demonstrating that he was a “master” over Polish Jewry, but also notes that Wohlauf’s men reacted with “indignation and outrage that a woman was brought to witness the terrible things they were doing.”53 This reaction only intensified when Frau Wohlauf witnessed the deportation of Jews to Treblinka in August 1942. Because Goldhagen also emphasizes the men’s reaction to Frau Wohlauf’s presence with the battalion, we shall wait before commenting on its significance for gender analysis. Finally, Browning records without comment several peculiarly male responses to the battalion’s involvement in the murder of civilians. While the reservists performed guard duty around the Lodz ghetto, the company recreation room assumed a locker-room atmosphere: “A mark was made on the bar door for each Jew shot, and ‘victory celebrations’ were reportedly held on days when high scores were recorded.”54 Neither this masculine integration of alcohol and sport nor the association of the term “Jew-hunt” (Judenjagd) with an age-old male pastime receives any attention from the author. In the final chapter of Ordinary Men, Browning considers a series of possible explanations for the behavior of the “ordinary men” of Battalion 101—wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization, special selection, careerism, obedience, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity. While his analysis is impressive in its thoroughness, his conclusions would certainly be affected by acknowledgment of the gender clues that proliferate the evidence he reviews.55 For one thing, Browning would be more reluctant to discount the role of ideological

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indoctrination in explaining the men’s wartime behavior. According to Browning, Battalion 101’s ideological training was brief and cursory, contained relatively little explicit antisemitism, and was utterly ineffective at “brainwashing” the men. But he underestimates the extent to which ideological education, even when it did not speak of killing Jews, could reinforce attitudes regarding strength and masculinity to which the men were already receptive. While their propaganda training did not make them kill, it no doubt fortified would-be killers by applying masculine values to the war and their role in it. For the ideological literature they encountered trafficked in the very vocabulary of strength and mastery, which the men themselves relied on when describing their activities. Browning summarizes the message of one ideological pamphlet assigned to Order Police: Shaped by a severe northern climate that ruthlessly eliminated weak elements, the Nordic race was superior to any other in the world, as could be seen from German cultural and military achievements. The German Volk faced a constant struggle for survival ordained by nature, according to whose laws “all weak and inferior are destroyed” and “only the strong and powerful continue to propagate.”56 Another pamphlet delivered a similar message regarding partisans: “The incessant decision over life and death posed by the partisans and suspects is difficult even for the toughest soldier. But it must be done. He behaves correctly who, by setting aside all possible impulses of personal feeling, proceeds ruthlessly and mercilessly.”57 It is true, as Browning argues, that this literature did not include a call to eliminate racial enemies; but by serving to make the policemen “hardened killers” and encouraging them to segregate feeling from performance, it no doubt contributed to their fear of appearing “soft” or “weak” before their comrades.58 Commenting on the nonshooters’ claim that it was weakness rather than moral superiority which led them to opt out of battalion killing actions, Browning comes close to elucidating the language of gender in which the behavior of his “ordinary men” is inscribed: Insidiously, therefore, most of those who did not shoot only reaffirmed the “macho” values of the majority—according to which it was positive quality to be “tough” enough to kill unarmed, noncombatant men, women and children—and tried not to rupture the bonds of comradeship that constituted their social world. Only the very exceptional remained indifferent to taunts of “weakling” from their comrades and could live with the fact that they were considered to be “no man.”59 Yet Browning fails to develop these insights, and near the end of Ordinary Men, he insists that “this story of ordinary men is not the story of all men.”60

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However, much of the evidence he has cited suggests that it could well be the story of most men, at least where masculinity is similarly defined.

Goldhagen’s Revision In Chapters 7 and 8 of Hitler’s Willing Executioners—“Police Battalion 101: The Men’s Deeds” and “Police Battalion 101: Assessing the Men’s Deeds,” respectively—Daniel Goldhagen offers a major reconsideration of the behavior and motivations of Browning’s “ordinary men.” Goldhagen places special emphasis on their willingness to comply with orders to kill—as evidenced by their “incessant volunteering,” their “failure to avail themselves of opportunities to avoid killing,” and the enthusiasm and brutality that accompanied their murderous deeds.61 Goldhagen differs from Browning mainly in his explanation of these behaviors. For Goldhagen, the members of Battalion 101 are representative not of soldiers under the pressure of conformity but of Germans influenced by cultural antisemitism and Nazi propaganda. Accordingly, Goldhagen refers consistently to the men of Reserve Battalion 101 as “the Germans.”62 But in his careful reassessment of the wartime career of Battalion 101, Goldhagen pays no attention to the gender clues that punctuate the men’s testimony. In some cases, he passes by the same patterns of masculinity that are ignored in Browning’s text. 63 For instance, Goldhagen notes that of those men for whom family information exists, 99 per cent had wives and 75 per cent had children. But he fails to relate this demographic data to the men’s behavior or thought processes. For instance, in considering an episode in which Major Trapp assembled the battalion and asked his men “to think of our women and children in our homeland who had to endure aerial bombardments,” Goldhagen writes that Trapp’s justification was emblematic of “the Nazified German mind.”64 But he ignores the version of masculinity invoked by Trapp’s words, in which maleness is judged in terms of one’s ability to protect women.65 Similarly, Goldhagen remarks that following the Jozefow massacre the men were sickened, vomited, and lost their appetites. But he overlooks these signs of temporary physical weakness, since “no one suffered any significant emotional difficulties” afterward. At a few points, Goldhagen strains to find significance in testimony Browning has passed over. He observes, for instance, that the Germans in Battalion 101 “tellingly” referred to their search-and-destroy missions as “Jew hunts.” He then writes: The Germans’ use of the term “Jew-hunt” was not casual. It expressed the killers’ conception of the nature of their activity and the attendant emotion. Theirs was the exterminatory pursuit of the remnants of a particularly pernicious species that needed to be destroyed in its entirety.

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Moreover, the word “Jagd” has a positive Gefühlswert, a positive emotional valence. Hunting is a pleasurable pursuit, rich in adventure, involving no danger to the hunter, and its reward is a record of animals slain—in the case of the men of this police battalion and other German “Jew-hunters,” a record of Jews ferreted out and killed.66 This insightful paragraph is the kind that has made Goldhagen’s book popular despite its length and density; but it misses the significance of the very language it seeks to illuminate. Yes, the men of Battalion 101 referred to their searches as “hunts”; yes, this term has a pleasurable connotation in cultures where one hunts for sport rather than survival. But even more important is the fact that in these same cultures, hunting is something men do with one another, away from family and society, in part to demonstrate their manhood. Goldhagen makes much of the way German perpetrators sought to “master” their Polish victims, for instance, by cutting off their beards. But once again Goldhagen approaches an important gender clue only to misapprehend its significance. He writes that “the Jew, a grown man, had no choice but to stand by as another abridged his sovereignty over his own body by cutting away his beard, a symbol of his manhood.”67 He fails to imagine, however, why a group of men might develop this ritual of asserting mastery over other men before killing them. Goldhagen applies the dynamics of honor and shame to the encounter (citing Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death) but ignores the fact that in most cultures honor is a gender-specific concept. Goldhagen is correct in his belief that removal of Jews’ beards was fraught with symbolism. But rather than an emblem of the “limitless power” Germans wished to exercise over Jews, it was more likely a symbolic exercise in emasculation that allowed the killers to compensate for their own barely repressed impotence and fear. The most glaring example of Goldhagen’s failure to grasp the play of gender in the career of Battalion 101 comes in his discussion of the men’s wives. Like Browning, Goldhagen comments specifically on the presence of Frau Wohlauf, who “stayed with the battalion for at least several weeks and several killing operations, and participated in one, if not two, of the large ones.”68 While in Poland, Vera Wohlauf and other women “got to observe firsthand how their men were purging the world of the putative Jewish menace.” Goldhagen notes that this is how the pregnant Frau Wohlauf spent her honeymoon and, to illustrate the incongruity of her attendance at the battalion’s killing actions, includes a photograph of the lovely Frau Wohlauf posing by the seaside.69 Also like Browning, Goldhagen observes that many of the men considered Vera Wohlauf’s presence in the field inappropriate, particularly because she was pregnant. Their chief reaction, according to Goldhagen, was anger— at Frau Wohlauf and her husband alike. Goldhagen asks whether the men

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were concerned that Frau Wohlauf would discover the deeper nature of their activities. Hardly, he answers, since she had already accompanied her husband at some of the battalion’s most brutal “actions.” Goldhagen concludes thus: Their objections bespeak no shame at what they were doing, no desire to conceal from others their contribution to mass annihilation and torture, but rather a sense of chivalry and propriety that Frau Wohlauf’s presence violated, particularly since this ghetto clearing was, even by their standards, unusually brutal and gruesome.70 Goldhagen’s reference to chivalry is not so much inaccurate as it is misleading, for it ignores what the work of Claudia Koonz and other scholars sensitive to gender have made so clear: that the men of Battalion 101 were reacting to an impingement on their professional domain of the private domestic sphere in which male perpetrators desired their women to remain. Goldhagen notes correctly that Frau Wohlauf’s expectant state caused her to arouse the men’s ire. Even Major Trapp complained before a large gathering of men and a few visiting wives that it was “outrageous that women who are in a state of pregnancy should witness” such things.71 But Goldhagen mistakenly supposes that references to her pregnancy make it “clear that the men were agitated because of possible damage to her sensibilities and person.”72 Much more likely, her pregnancy and her extended stay with the battalion combined to make Frau Wohlauf a walking symbol of confusion between the public and domestic spheres that perpetrators desired so assiduously to keep apart. Goldhagen remarks on the irony that the men of Battalion 101 expressed more discomfort with the presence of women than they did with the heinous nature of their own deeds. But there is more to be gleaned from this fact than “the perpetrators’ obvious approval of their own historic deeds.”73 Widespread outrage at the presence of an officer’s pregnant wife is meaningful in itself, as it indicates the role “family” played in the men’s efforts to maintain psychic equilibrium in the killing fields of Poland. Goldhagen himself notes that “during their time as genocidal killers, the men of Police Battalion 101 went home on furloughs, lasting weeks.”74 Yet the point to be noted about these furloughs is not that time “in the bosom of their families” should have allowed them to consider their horrendous deeds but that whoever granted these furloughs regarded them as a boon to the men’s long-term performance. Unknowingly, Goldhagen includes a variety of clues that indicate the importance of family in emotionally sustaining members of police battalions caught up in murder. For instance, in a chapter entitled “Police Battalions: Lives, Killings and Motives,” he notes that policemen did not perform their duties in a social or cultural vacuum. He details the German cultural life that battalion members created for themselves in wartime Poland and places this in “stark, even jarring, contrast to their apocalyptic deeds.”75 Sanctioned cultural events included religious services, theater productions, opportunities

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for swimming and tennis, athletic competitions, musical afternoons, and “social evenings.” But Goldhagen perceives in these activities nothing more than cruel irony and must conclude that the men’s sensibilities did not “remotely approximate our own.”76 Yet the consistent provision of such diversions in the periods between genocidal killing sprees only confirms the role of domestic life—real or contrived—in maintaining the sanity of perpetrators. Obviously, the men in these battalions desperately needed the illusion of normalcy provided by the sorts of leisure activities they might pursue at home. They engaged in them not because they were unaffected by their murderous activities but precisely because they were. The fact that wives and children were encouraged to join their husbands in battalionsponsored events suggests that those who planned them understood the importance of providing time and space for the men to express their private family selves—selves based in emotion rather than performance.77

Conclusion: Gender and Holocaust Scholarship The issues raised in the Goldhagen-Browning debate continue to provoke discussion in Holocaust studies. In an article entitled “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men?: Another Look at the Perpetrators,” Christopher Browning surveys the behavior of non-German perpetrators and confirms that “situational” rather than ideological or national factors best explain the conduct of the men in Battalion 101. Browning thus reasserts his original claim with regard to perpetrators in general. “In trying to understand the vast majority of perpetrators,” he writes, “we are dealing not with ‘ordinary Germans’ but with ‘ordinary men.’”78 Other scholars have joined the fray. Inga Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust takes Goldhagen to task for his lack of curiosity (“He is not curious about these men and what they did, because he believes he already knows why”) and applauds Browning’s study as “more penetrating, more subtle, and more interesting both methodologically and morally.”79 But while such judgments point out Goldhagen’s flaws, they also obscure those he shares with Browning, particularly the tacit assumption that the dynamics of masculinity possess no explanatory value for interpreting the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators. Thus Browning’s response to Goldhagen—and Clendinnen’s defense of Browning—only confirms the failure of all three to take into account the function of gender in the career of Battalion 101. In terms of gender analysis, it is not necessary to take sides in the GoldhagenBrowning debate; for both scholars are right, and both are wrong. The men of Battalion 101 were “broadly representative” of German society, as Goldhagen maintains, and in this sense should be viewed as “ordinary Germans.” And, as Browning reminds us, they were indicative both of other Holocaust perpetrators, regardless of nationality, and the perpetrators of other crimes— real and experimental. Yet both men fail to identify the various expressions of

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the perpetrators’ identities as men that permeate the records they assess. How do we explain this failure of otherwise incisive students of human behavior to perceive the play of gender in the subjects they have analyzed so carefully? It is not that they are unaware of recent scholarship or suffer from disciplinary tunnel vision. Goldhagen in particular represents an academic generation socialized since the advent of feminism, and his magnum opus is otherwise impressively interdisciplinary. Furthermore, he advocates a mode of analysis called “thick description,” which seeks to create as rich as possible a background for interpretation by “setting down the meanings particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are.”80 Yet despite his intention to attend as closely as possible to the perpetrators’ own Lebenswelt (“life world”), Goldhagen, as inexplicably as Browning, overlooks the gender dynamics that animate the eyewitness accounts he painstakingly analyzes. Nor are these scholars devoid of historical imagination. For instance, when discussing the men’s willingness to murder Jewish children, Goldhagen imagines them walking “through the woods with their own children by their sides, marching gaily and inquisitively along.”81 Did they remember these walks as they accompanied young Jewish children to the killing sites, Goldhagen asks rhetorically? It is a powerful passage that gives the reader pause. But it also heightens our disappointment with the things the author cannot—or will not—imagine. Even Browning, whose style is more traditional, occasionally comments on the symbolic meaning of the language used by the perpetrators. He notes, for instance, that “the full weight” of one perpetrator’s statement cannot be appreciated without the knowledge that erlösen, the German word for “release” (in the sense of a release from suffering through murder) also means “redeem.” Browning is generally aware when repression and projection have distorted the language of the men whose testimonies he is reading. But he has no ear for gender. An important factor appears to be the methodological assumptions of the scholars who study perpetrators. In addition to the notion that gender analysis has nothing to contribute to the study of Holocaust perpetrators, Browning, Goldhagen, and most of those who study the Holocaust share the view that the behavior of men like those in Battalion 101 resulted from the special circumstances in which these men found themselves. Browning and Goldhagen both emphasize that “environment” offers the key to understanding these ordinary perpetrators, though Browning refers to the various situational factors that came to bear upon them in Poland, while Goldhagen has in mind an anti-Jewish German culture. But in focusing on these environmental factors, these scholars unconsciously assume a univalent notion of masculinity—one that is heterosexual, misogynist, and hegemonic, one represented by the male who defines himself over and against women and is determined to prove his strength by dominating and, if necessary, eliminating others. As Browning himself observes, “Other historians looking at the same materials would retell these events in somewhat different ways.”82 But gender

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consciousness—as opposed to gender theory—should not be regarded as a matter of style, methodology, or advocacy but as a kind of vision developed by interpreters of history, a way of seeing that emerges as men and women engage in conversation. This essay has sought to indicate the dynamics of masculinity in the experiences and testimonies of male perpetrators active at every level of the Nazi Final Solution, and in the process, to suggest how a wider recognition of the gendered character of male experience may enrich scholarly understanding of Holocaust perpetrators.

Postscript I am gratified that the editor of this volume decided to include my study of masculinity in the experience and self-understanding of male Holocaust perpetrators, which is now more than two decades old. When I wrote the article in 1999, I was concerned that it would not find a warm reception in Holocaust studies. The fact that the field was only just beginning to incorporate the insights of feminism suggested not only that gender analysis was still viewed with some skepticism, but that the scholars most likely to recognize gender’s explanatory value might be concerned that a focus on masculinity would eclipse the light so recently shed on women’s experience. So I submitted the article to The Journal of Men’s Studies, a fairly new organ at the time (it had been founded in 1992), but one with a reputation for publishing research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. I reasoned that although it might be too soon for Holocaust Studies to embrace the insights of “men’s studies” in the ways I was implementing them, a published article in a respected journal article might draw the attention of scholars who were curious about the ways concepts of masculinity could illuminate perpetrator behavior. But I was exploring new ground and it would be several years before others in the broad field of Holocaust studies began to cultivate this ground in a systematic way. One method for gauging the influence of gender analysis on Holocaust studies in the decade after my article appeared is to peruse The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010), a landmark resource that sought to be “an authoritative, up-to-date guide to both the state of the interpretive art and the salient issues and debates that have driven research about the Holocaust to date and are likely to do so in the future.”83 Given the editors’ stated goals for the book, the Handbook’s contents are a useful way of assessing the shape of the field in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Indeed, many of the book’s articles reflect themes that had come to dominate Holocaust studies since the 1980s—the experiences of women, children, bystanders, and non-Jewish victims; the importance of contemporaneous documents, diaries, and chronicles; the analysis of recorded and archived survivor testimonies; and burgeoning research in areas such as punishment, plunder and restitution, and Holocaust denial.

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Disappointingly, however, attention to gender was quite limited in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. According to the book’s index, the Handbook’s forty-eight articles included eight references to “women” and four to “gender” (three of these being confined to Lenore Weitzman’s article on women). The only other mention of gender came in the book’s introduction, where editors John K. Roth and Peter Hayes acknowledged that Holocaust studies had “recognized only haltingly the impact of gender differences on the roles of Jews as protagonists during the genocide, and correcting this shortcoming remains a work in progress.”84 Significantly, the book’s index did not include the terms “male,” “masculine,” or “masculinity,” and none of the articles foregrounded the identities of male perpetrators or victims as men.85 In the years since the Handbook’s appearance, the situation in the field has evolved to the point that if the book were published now, it would no doubt reflect greater attention to gender, particularly the role of masculinities in illuminating perpetrator behavior. The last several years in particular have seen a spate of published studies on the Third Reich and the Holocaust that have the construction of masculinity directly in view. Several of these appear in edited volumes, for example Robert Sommer’s 2014 study of “situational homosexual relationships” among heterosexual men and women in the Nazi camps, a 2016 study by Franziska Karpiński and Elysia Ruvinsky demonstrating that “hegemonic masculinity in National Socialism emphasized the sexual expression of violence,” and Waitman Wade Beorn’s 2018 study on “sexual violence in the Nazi East,” which expands the spectrum of male-perpetrated atrocities to include “sexualized violence”— an often equally traumatic and brutal form of sexual harm.86 But the most compelling evidence for growing recognition of masculinity among scholars of the Third Reich and the Holocaust appears in a 2018 issue of the journal Central European History. This special issue which carries the title “Masculinity and the Third Reich,” explores the “intertwined and paradoxical ways hegemonic, nonhegemonic, defiant, deviant and suppressed masculinities . . . shaped and were shaped by state and society” under Nazism. In his introduction, Thomas Kühne notes with surprise “that the Third Reich and the Holocaust . . . have attracted only rarely the interest of students of masculinities” and that major scholarly debates on the Third Reich and the Holocaust since the 1990s “have taken place with no or only marginal reference to the concept of gender, or to masculinities and men as gendered subjects.”87 The studies in this special issue address this scholarly lacuna by helpfully expanding our understanding of how existing notions of “soldierly masculinity” were radicalized during the Third Reich and linked with Härte (“hardness” or “cruelty”), nationalism, racism, hyper-militarization, and physical aggression; how masculinity was “performed” by soldiers and other perpetrators (e.g., in sexual and sexualized violence, brothel visits, accounts of sexual escapades, and celebratory singing and drinking rituals); how hegemonic masculinity was challenged and nuanced among various

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groups of men (for instance, by homosexual veterans of the world war in search of a place in the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, by those who were “too weak” to participate in murder operations, and by those who under the stress of war sought “feminine” forms of emotional and physical support). Particularly notable are the articles that reveal how seemingly rigid expressions of “militarized” or “martial masculinity” were far from monolithic. The inclusive nature of military masculinity in the Third Reich is indicated by Thomas Kühne’s concept of “protean masculinity,” which refers to the way soldierly “comradeship” could be adjusted to include moments of tenderness generally reserved for the home front or the company of women. As Kühne writes, “the act of soldiering provided men with a male identity that was ultimately not defined by the repudiation, but the integration, of what was (and is) often coded as feminine.” A tough soldier could adopt feminine roles without undermining his manliness, Kühne argues, through “Kameradschaft,” which “allowed hard men to recharge their batteries, so to speak, by indulging in softness.” In this sense, “protean masculinity . . . did not undermine the hegemony of hard martial masculinity; it made it livable.”88 In his commentary on this special issue of Central European History, Christopher Dillon notes that today “a sophisticated interdisciplinary literature has rendered men legible as gendered subjects, rather than as an unmarked norm.” But he also sounds a note of frustration: “It is remarkable that advocacy is still necessary here,” Dillon writes. “Even now, it seems, the history of gender struggles to escape bureaucratic specialization as a research specialism.”89 To confirm Dillon’s reading of the situation, we need only revisit the “ordinary men” of Reserve Police Battalion 101 twenty-five years after their career was first analyzed by Christopher Browning. In 2017 Browning published a new edition of Ordinary Men that included a 70-page afterword titled “Twenty-Five Years Later.” In it Browning reviewed explicit criticisms of his work, as well as scholarship that had contributed to his evolving understanding of ordinary perpetrators of Nazi crimes. While discussing new insights on perpetrator “motivation,” Browning mentions in passing Klaus-Michael Mallman’s work, which emphasizes “notions of manliness based on toughness and an overriding fear of being perceived as weak or cowardly.” But otherwise there is no indication in his 2017 afterword that Browning has himself come to acknowledge the explanatory value of masculinity construction in perpetrator behavior.90 One also perceives mixed signals in the annual and semi-annual conferences on the Holocaust held in the United States. During the past few years, these gatherings have featured more papers and panels on masculinity than previously. For instance, the 2014 Lessons and Legacies Conference, a semi-annual gathering sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University, included a panel on “The Impact of Feminism and Gender Studies on Holocaust Studies” that featured Björn Krondorfer, a leader in the study of masculinity, the 2016 conference contained a paper by Monika Rice of Seton Hall University titled “Male and Female Doctors

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Facing Destruction: A Gendered Analysis of Physicians’ Experiences during the Holocaust,” the 2018 conference included a panel on the Holocaust and masculinities as well as three additional papers that focused on men’s gendered experiences and sexuality, and the 2019 conference contained two papers on men as gendered subjects. But such papers and sessions are still rare. As for the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust (the conference described at the beginning of my original article), a perusal of recent conference programs reveals several references to “women,” but none to “gender,” “males” or “masculinity.” The theoretical literature on masculinities has expanded greatly over the past two decades, and will no doubt continue to do so. It also appears that its influence on the field of Holocaust studies will grow. Also, just as the application of feminist insights to the Third Reich and the Holocaust have revealed breadth and ambiguity in women’s experience, the same promises to be the case for men’s experience moving forward.

Notes 1 A recent collection of “interpretive essays from the field’s leading scholars” provides compelling evidence of the problem. Editors Helen B. Mitchell and Joseph R. Mitchell address “gender” in a chapter dealing exclusively with women’s experience in “Women and the Holocaust: Gender as Holocaust Issue” in The Holocaust: Readings and Interpretations, eds. Helen Mitchell and Joseph R. Mitchell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 363–409. 2 R. W. Connell writes that “in the course of the twentieth century there have been three main projects for a science of masculinity. One was based in the clinical knowledge acquired by therapists, and its leading ideas came from Freudian theory. The second was based in social psychology and centered on the enormously popular idea of ‘sex role.’ The third involves recent developments in anthropology, history and sociology.” See R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 7. For an excellent introduction to the historical development of this field, see Connell’s chapter entitled “The Science of Masculinity,” 3–44. 3 Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds., Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 4 “To recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination. These relationships are constructed through practices that exclude and include, that intimidate, exploit, and so on. There is a gender politics within masculinity” (Connell, Masculinities, 37). 5 “Gay theory and feminist theory share a perception of mainstream masculinity as being (in the advanced capitalist countries at least) fundamentally linked to power, organized for domination, and resistant to change because of power relations. In some formulations, masculinity is virtually equated with the exercise of power in its most naked forms” (Connell, Masculinities, 42).

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6 Cited in Stephen B. Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark W. Muesse, Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1996), xiv. See also James B. Nelson, The Intimate Connection: Male Sexuality, Masculine Spirituality (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1988), 18. 7 Harry Brod, ed., “The Case for Men’s Studies,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 40–1. 8 Among the major scholarly works that address the topic are Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); John K. Roth and Carol Rittner, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 1993); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 9 Connell, Masculinities, 6. Connell does point out, however, that by the end of the 1970s some scholars were calling for a “men’s history” analogous to “women’s history.” 10 Nelson, The Intimate Connection, 42. Nelson continues: “Steeling the recruit against his emotions, hardening his willingness to exercise violence and inflict death, works best on young men still unsure of their own identities . . . During basic training, he is continually threatened by the awesome, intimidating drill instructor, who screams into his face epithets identifying him as homosexual or feminine, while he must remain utterly passive under threat of physical violence. When sexual identity is sufficiently threatened, psychological control is achieved and the young man’s sexuality is linked with military functions of aggression and dominance” (71). 11 Rudolf Höss, Commandant in Auschwitz, trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (Cleveland, OH and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1959). 12 Ibid., 42. In the Freikorps, Höss rediscovered the purpose of military life: “I found a home again and a sense of security in the comradeship of my fellows. Oddly enough it was I, the lone wolf, always keeping my thoughts and my feelings to myself, who felt continually drawn toward that comradeship which enables a man to rely on others in time of need and of danger” (44). 13 Ibid., 73. 14 Ibid., 94. 15 Ibid., 87. 16 Ibid. Höss writes: “I must emphasize here that I have never personally hated the Jews. It is true that I looked upon them as the enemies of our people. But just because of this I saw no difference between them and the other prisoners, and I treated them all in the same way. I never drew any distinctions. In any case even the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature” (146). 17 Nelson, The Intimate Connection, 37. 18 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland. 19 Connell, Masculinities, 44. 20 “My family, to be sure, were well provided for in Auschwitz. Every wish that my wife or children expressed was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers. The

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prisoners never missed an opportunity for doing some little act of kindness to my wife or children and thus attracting their attention” (Höss, Commandant in Auschwitz, 174). 21 Ibid., 124. 22 Ibid., 170. 23 Ibid., 172. 24 Ibid., 201. 25 Ibid., 200. “Since returning from the war to which I went as a youngster and from which I came back a man, I have had two lights to guide me: my fatherland and, later, my family . . . My second worship was my family. To them I was securely anchored. My thoughts were always with their future, and our farm was to become their permanent home. In our children both my wife and I saw our aim in life. To bring them up so that they could play their part in the world, and to give them all a stable home, was our one task in life.” 26 Roth and Rittner, eds., Different Voices, 278. 27 Ibid., 283. 28 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, eds., The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen through the Eyes of Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Free Press, 1994), 171. 29 Ibid. 30 A member of Sonderkommando 4a; a member of Einsatzgruppe A. In Klee et al., eds., The Good Old Days, 62, 80. 31 SS-Oberscharführer Wilhelm Findeisen; an SS-Scharführer and KriminalAssistant; an SS-Hauptscharführer and Kriminalangestellter. In Klee et al., eds., The Good Old Days, 67, 72, and 79. 32 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1. Page numbers hereafter refer to the first edition. 33 Ibid., 47–8. 34 Ibid., 62, 113. 35 Ibid., 5. 36 Ibid., 56. 37 Ibid., 59. 38 Ibid., 69. 39 Ibid., 2, 73. 40 Carl to Kube, October 30, 1941 in Browning, Ordinary Men, 22. Recognition of the need to maintain psychic balance among the rank and file is suggested in a July 1941 directive from the Police Regiment Center, which stated that “the battalion and company commanders are especially to provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this [killing] action” (14). 41 Browning, Ordinary Men, 56, 72. One Order policemen described his breakdown during the Jozefow Massacre, saying “I thought I could master

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the situation . . .” (72). When officers wished to pressure their underlings to conform, it was typically by calling them “cowards” (56). 42 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, 63. 43 Ibid., 185. 44 Ibid., 116. 45 Ibid., 130. 46 Ibid., 129. 47 Ibid., 58. 48 Ibid., 118. 49 Nelson, The Intimate Connection, 42. 50 Browning, Ordinary Men, 57. 51 One SS officer reported that “a very common manifestation in members of these firing-squads was temporary impotence,” and that “a number of SS officers and men were sent back to serve at home ‘on account of their great weakness.’” Statement by SS-Obersturmführer (and Catholic priest) Albert Hartl. In Klee et al., eds., The Good Old Days, 81–2. 52 Browning, Ordinary Men, 91. 53 Ibid., 93. 54 Ibid., 41. 55 In this section of the book, Browning does consider the role of self-interest and careerism among his Ordinary Men, particularly in officers such as Captain Hoffmann. He also notes the desire to appear “manly and tough” before one’s peers (although in relation to subjects in the Milgram experiments, not to the men of Battalion 101). 56 Browning, Ordinary Men, 180. 57 Ibid., 183. 58 Ibid., 87. 59 Ibid., 185. 60 Ibid., 189. 61 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 250. Page numbers hereafter are to this edition. For critical responses to Goldhagen’s book, see Franklin H. Littell, ed., Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen (East Rockaway, NJ: Cummings & Hathaway, 1997); Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, NY: Holt, 1998); Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans?: The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Geoff Eley, The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 62 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 206. Goldhagen stresses that very few (4 per cent) of the men in Battalion 101 were members of the SS and most were no more Nazified than the general German population. They hailed from an area (Hamburg) that was not a Nazi stronghold, and a few of them had

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even shown hostility to the regime. As relatively mature men with families and children, they were “the least likely to be martial in spirit and temperament.” 63 Goldhagen uses the murder of one of the men by partisans in September 1942 and the retaliatory killings it provoked to emphasize how differently the “Nazified German mind” viewed the murder of Poles and Jews. But the language used to describe the incident—Major Trapp referred to it as a “cowardly murder” (feige Mordtat)—actually conforms to a gender-informed view of the battalion’s activities. 64 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 212. 65 Goldhagen also quotes Trapp’s offer of release to older battalion members who did not “feel up to it.” Whether or not younger men believed they had been invited to step forward as well, as Goldhagen argues, it is significant that the invitation was couched in terms that made a concession to weakness in general and male impotence in particular. 66 Ibid., 238. 67 Ibid., 246. 68 Ibid., 241. 69 Ibid., 242. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 243. 72 Ibid., 242. 73 Ibid., 245. 74 Ibid., 254. 75 Ibid., 264. 76 Ibid., 269. 77 As Goldhagen writes, “Some significant number of perpetrators must have had their family members with them, as the invitation to the evening with the theater troupe suggests, by explicitly stating that families were welcome” (267). 78 In Donald G. Schilling, ed., Lessons and Legacies, Volume II: Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 54. 79 Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 118, 119. 80 Ibid., 117. 81 Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 218. 82 Browning, Ordinary Men, xix. 83 Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 84 Ibid., 8. 85 The lone exception to this assessment appears in Edward Westermann’s article on “killers,” which includes a reference to nascent scholarship on masculinity in Holocaust studies and cites Thomas Kühne’s 2006 work on male “Kameradschaft” as exemplary of this trend.

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86 Robert Sommer, “Pipels: Situational Homosexual Slavery of Young Adolescent Boys in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, eds. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 86–104; Franziska Karpiński and Elysia Ruvinsky, “Sexual Violence in the Nazi Genocide: Gender, Law, and Ideology,” in Genocide: New Perspectives on Its Causes, Courses and Consequences, ed. Uğur Ümit Üngör (Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 155; and Waitman Wade Beorn, “Bodily Conquest: Sexual Violence in the Nazi East,” in Mass Violence in NaziOccupied Europe, eds. Alex J. Kay and David Stahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 195–216. 87 Thomas Kühne, “Introduction: Masculinity and the Third Reich,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 355, 361, 362. 88 Thomas Kühne, “Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity: Soldiers in the Third Reich,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 390, 408. 89 Christopher Dillon, “Commentary: Masculinity and the Racial State,” Central European History 51, no. 3 (2018): 513, 521. 90 Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 2017), 237.

9 Women as Perpetrators Agency and Authority in Genocidal Rwanda Nicole Hogg and Mark Drumbl

Introduction Although much of the literature on gender and armed conflict focuses, appropriately, on women as victims of violence, women also act as agents of violence in armed conflicts and mass atrocities. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, women participated both at the local level and through leadership roles. Sometimes they directly joined in the killings, but more often women incited others to violence, denounced victims to the killers, and pillaged their dead neighbors’ property. In these ways, women helped feed the genocidal machine, while largely (but not always) conforming to gender expectations. The reality of women’s experiences is, of course, diverse and complex— as, no doubt, is men’s. As this chapter will discuss, female perpetrators also sometimes rescued individuals, while some extraordinary “ordinary” women were among the heroes who stridently opposed the genocide. While the vast majority of Rwandan women probably neither actively participated in the killings nor actively resisted them, ignoring, overstating, or minimizing their roles in the genocide does a disservice both to history and to efforts to prevent mass atrocities in the future.1 This chapter considers two broad categories of women. The first section explores the involvement of “ordinary” women in the genocide, which, consistent with distinctions made under Rwandan law, broadly encompasses

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all those who were not in positions of authority and leadership at the time.2 This section discusses women’s roles in killing, exposing Tutsis to the killers, and looting, but also considers their capacities for resistance, either within the family or on a wider scale. The second section discusses the roles of women in positions of authority, leadership, and influence. In the face of a purportedly “genderless” criminal justice system, the deeply gendered discourse surrounding the prosecutions and trials of many of these women, as well the accused’s own portrayals of themselves, is a recurring theme. By way of background, it is important to note that at least four different levels of criminal justice processes have been mobilized to prosecute individuals in relation to the Rwandan genocide. The first of these, and by far the most widely known outside Rwanda, is the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which was established by the United Nations (UN) in 1994 and targeted the alleged ringleaders of the genocide. The ICTR has now completed its work. Although the ICTR only tried some eighty individuals, its work has served as an important benchmark. Second, a small number of trials have taken place domestically (and continue) in various countries against Rwandan nationals who fled Rwanda after the genocide and who have often sought asylum abroad. In Rwanda, criminal trials have proceeded in the national courts, including for the planners, organizers, and leaders of the genocide who were not pursued by the ICTR. In light of the enormous caseload faced by the national courts, a local neotraditional system of justice called gacaca prosecuted over one million suspects for genocide-related crimes, while aiming to achieve justice and reconciliation.3 In this chapter, we explore the intersection of women perpetrators with each of these four levels of legal process.

Women as “Ordinary” Perpetrators Female Killers The difference is that men killed, women didn’t.4 Women represent 6 to 7 percent of persons prosecuted for serious genociderelated crimes in Rwanda.5 With important exceptions, women are more likely to have acted as accomplices rather than as principal offenders.6 The low rate of women’s direct involvement in the genocide, relative to men, at a time when “participation in the genocide had become the dominant social norm” can be primarily attributed to the persistence of traditional gender roles, even during the atrocities.7 As noted by Donna Maier, “Women in Rwandan society . . . as in other traditional societies [were] expected to be submissive, subservient to men, compliant, and hard-working farmers and homemakers, not warriors.”8 In line with these traditions, it has been observed that “men wanted women to stay at home and not to participate in the killings.”9

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For a variety of reasons, some “ordinary” Rwandan women nevertheless did directly participate. For example, in August 2009, twenty-seven Rwandan women were convicted by a gacaca court and sentenced for between nineteen and thirty years for having stoned Tutsis to death in a parish in the Cyangugu prefecture.10 The gacaca courts have also heard cases of women’s involvement in acts of rape and sexual torture, including a group of women who raped a priest before his death.11 In 2001, researcher Nicole Hogg interviewed a number of women who had been either personally involved in individual killings or complicit in larger-scale massacres. At one extreme was a young woman whose brother was a local Interahamwe (militia) leader.12 Fifteen years old at the time of the genocide, she said she participated in “countless killings,” because “it was fun, like playing a game.”13 After she had a child of her own, this woman began to deeply regret her role in killing other children. She returned to Rwanda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) specifically to confess and face her punishment. At the other extreme was a woman who poisoned her own four children. Although she was Hutu, her children were deemed to be Tutsi on account of their father’s ethnicity.14 After Hutu relatives had consistently refused to protect the children, and fearing the Interahamwe would otherwise kill them with a machete, she felt she had no choice but to kill them herself in a more kindly way. This woman also took poison herself but survived. She admitted: “I know I am a sinner but I also loved my children. I did not want to kill them . . . I cannot sleep at night.”15 Between these two extremes, several other interviewed women had confessed to clubbing Tutsi neighbors to death or taking people to be killed. Such active participation was often motivated by the genocidal propaganda, which pitted Hutu against Tutsi and Hutu women specifically against Tutsi women.16 As one female detainee commented, The leaders told us that the Tutsis had prepared graves to put the Hutus in and that we had to kill the Tutsis first before they killed us. We believed them because they were educated people. . . . I believed them, and that is why I killed that woman.17 At least in some cases, therefore, the effect of the propaganda overrode traditional gender expectations and created new behavioral norms, which induced women to kill. In other cases, women were killed under pressure from the Interahamwe or from other family members, often due to their special relationship with the victim. Thus, the wife of a Tutsi man who “finished off” her sister-in-law with a hoe handle under pressure from three Interahamwe claimed, “I was only a woman and they were three men so I had no power over them. And I wasn’t myself by then. My whole family had been killed. . . . I wasn’t scared. I was just being used.”18 Another young woman charged with killing nine people, including three babies, admitted to her involvement in one incident. She said she took an

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old woman to be killed by the Interahamwe after being threatened by one of its members that if she did not do so he would murder two girls she was protecting in her home. She decided that the life of an “old woman, who was already sick and might not have survived anyway” should be sacrificed, as she “wanted to protect the two girls, and besides, I couldn’t protect all the Tutsis around.”19 She later said, I regret a lot what happened, what we did to that old woman. Even if she was an old woman, she was still God’s creation, and even if I couldn’t have saved her, I shouldn’t have accompanied [him] to kill her. If he had then killed the two girls, at least it wouldn’t have been my responsibility.20 This very brief overview demonstrates that just as “women” are not a homogenous group, the reasons why they killed cannot always be neatly categorized. As Cohn has noted, gender is one important system that influences women’s behavior, including during armed conflicts (and mass atrocities), but it is not the only one. Women’s actions are also shaped by an array of factors such as age, economic class, social position, ethnicity, religion, culture, and personal relationships.21 While gender expectations largely discouraged “ordinary” women’s direct involvement in the killings, the given examples confirm that individual circumstances were also critical to determining the choices women made. Another observation—which needs to be tested on a broader sample—is that where women did participate directly in the killings, it appears that they rarely, if ever, used a machete, despite this being the principal weapon of the Rwandan genocide.22 Rather, female killers used clubs, hoes, blocks of wood, stones, and poison. Since almost all rural households owned at least one machete,23 and others were distributed to the Interahamwe in the lead-up to the genocide,24 this suggests either that the machetes remained primarily in the hands of men throughout the violence or that killing by machete was more abhorrent to women than by other means.25

Exposing Victims to the Killers Women knew a lot. Their eyes were open.26 If the genocidal killings were predominately a male affair, anecdotal evidence suggests that women were often complicit in them by exposing Tutsis to the killers. As explained by one female detainee, “It is true that it was mostly men who killed, but women who were out in the fields and saw Tutsis hiding called out their hiding spots.”27 Bernadette Kanzayire, a Rwandan lawyer, similarly contended that “some women played an active role . . . but the majority played a passive role, in refusing to hide their neighbours, and in particular, in showing the hiding places of Tutsis.”28

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“Refusing to hide their neighbours” has not been deemed a punishable offense in the aftermath of the genocide, despite the existence of the crime under Rwandan law of failing to assist a person in danger.29 According to the National Service of Gacaca Courts, the reason for this is that “it would be unjust to punish an ordinary citizen for not daring to step forward, under risk of death, and attempt to stop acts that were planned and put into action by the government.”30 However, people who showed the hiding places of Tutsis are, at least in theory, punishable as accomplices to genocide and subject to the same punishment as principal offenders. The Gacaca Law contains a broad definition of accomplice as “the person who has, by any means, provided assistance to commit offenses.”31 Yet, this provision has proven difficult to implement in practice. On the one hand, the gacaca courts have sometimes interpreted it too expansively—in one case convicting a woman to twentyfive years’ imprisonment for having given food to the Interahamwe.32 On the other hand, the relatively small number of women prosecuted for genocide, compared with the common view that women were regularly involved in exposing the victims to the killers, suggests that a large number of cases have not been pursued. Significantly, no woman that Hogg met in the Rwandan prisons in 2001 admitted to having willingly committed such crimes.33 One reason is that female detainees attached little moral responsibility to (merely) revealing the hiding places of Tutsis to the killers. As one woman commented, “women have this feeling that they did not kill because they only called out,”34 while another specifically concluded that “women did not carry machetes so they were not as involved as men.”35 A strong social aversion to accepting that women can be killers36 has also apparently encouraged both denials of criminal responsibility on the part of women who were complicit in the genocide and acts of “chivalry” on the part of male prosecutors and judges toward women.37 Combined with the difficulty of prosecuting “indirect” crimes, these factors may have resulted in the underrepresentation of women before the Rwandan courts. Some women have confessed to exposing Tutsis to the killers, but claim to have acted out of fear. One woman, for example, recounted: I tried to stop them, by telling them not to take her, to let me keep her, but they threatened to throw a grenade at me. My husband was dead, my son was in France, so I couldn’t do anything to stop them.38 Another woman said that she told two ringleaders of the Interahamwe where a boy was hiding after “they took out their machetes,” because these were very violent men. . . . They had been killing people and telling us in the community to kill as well. They had also been saying that if they

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found anyone hiding a Tutsi they would kill him [sic]. So, I thought they would hurt me if I did not cooperate, even though I cannot say if they would have killed me. I did not believe this child had to die. I was just scared.39 It is difficult to evaluate the actual risk that women would have faced had they refused to cooperate. On the one hand, some women Hogg interviewed said they were able to continue protecting people in their homes by bribing the Interahamwe to turn a blind eye. Penal Reform International (PRI) has similarly found relatively few cases of people who were actually killed or seriously injured for resisting the genocidal ideology but have noted the “formidable effectiveness of fear” in such circumstances.40 On the other hand, a detailed report by the survivors’ organization Ibuka found that in addition to a few well-known cases of Hutus who were killed with the Tutsis they were protecting, among 372 people who were reported to have helped save Tutsis during the genocide, almost 10 percent had been beaten by the killers, 16 percent had been “attacked,” and 9 percent had their houses or goods destroyed.41 In addition, in light of a culture of physical and sexual violence against women, the question arises as to whether “ordinary” women such as those in the aforementioned examples had an additional reason to fear the Interahamwe, even though women were probably under less pressure overall than men to participate. Raising such questions is not an attempt to minimize the complicity of women in the genocide, as it seems that many women were active agents in it. Moreover, as the violence amplified, even people who had initially tried to help Tutsis often ended up handing them over to the killers. Josée Mukandamage, former vice president of the Rwandan Supreme Court, described the situation as follows: Women were not usually part of the death squads, but they only went so far for others. Women had been conditioned by then to think it was normal for Tutsis to die. So, even if they tried to help someone, they would not resist if someone came searching for that person, and they would not risk their lives for others.42 This statement is probably largely true, though there are cases of women who did risk their lives for others, to which we will shortly return.

Women and Property Crimes Property crimes have been included under Rwanda’s Gacaca Law,43 as the looting and destruction of Tutsi property were part of the genocidal plan and were encouraged by the administrative and military authorities.44 According to a report by PRI, “[t]he large-scaled looting which took place during the

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1994 tragedy and which, to a large extent, was organized from the top down, constitute a complex set of events [in which] many people were involved in one way or another.”45 Women’s involvement in these crimes can be largely attributed to jealousy, greed, and opportunism, which in turn were fueled by the anti-Tutsi propaganda. According to one female genocide suspect, “Hutu women were jealous of Tutsis’ wealth. Women wanted their goods.”46 The following stories by women who had confessed to property crimes speak for themselves: I did not even need the blankets. It was like the devil had got into us. We saw that those people were not there and that others were looking for them to kill, so we women went to take their property to sell and buy beer. I took ten blankets.47 I was at home making beer when my neighbours were killed in their home. That night I went with two other women and a man to take their property. Their bodies were still there. . . . I took a blouse and a skirt; the other woman took a wrap and shoes. The man found a pig in another house and slaughtered it and we shared the meat. I looted because others were doing it and because those people did not need their belongings anymore since they were dead. But it was bad. I sinned, and that is why I had to ask for forgiveness from all Rwandans.48 Another woman went the extra step and looted clothing off the bodies of dead Tutsis following a massacre in the local parish. As she said, People started looting the belongings of Tutsis who had been killed in the Parish. . . . I do not know what made me go there because I already had everything I needed. I took three wraps from the bodies. . . . There were other women there, also taking things. I have confessed to looting, but that is the only thing I did.49 Property offenses committed during the genocide are not punishable by prison sentences. Instead, perpetrators and victims (or their families) have been expected to try to reach an amicable solution for reparations. When this was not possible, the lower-level gacaca courts could hear the case and order perpetrators to pay compensation in monetary terms or in kind, such as through agricultural work.50 It has, however, proven to be very difficult to enforce both the amicable agreements and gacaca court decisions, and a large percentage of orders have not been honored, partly due to a widespread incapacity to pay.51 Many survivors consider the lack of reparations for property damage as an obstacle to reconciliation.52 Others say that material compensation for property crimes, even if provided, will never be sufficient.53

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Resisting the Genocide: Family Relations and Women among Rwanda’s “Righteous” As emphasized previously, the majority of “ordinary” Hutu women did not “actively” participate in the genocide (nor did the majority of men).54 Yet they did not actively resist it either. When questioned about their capacity to act against the genocide, female genocide suspects consistently responded that it was impossible, especially when their husbands were involved. They often referred to their husbands as “beasts,” and several said they feared their husbands would have hurt or killed them if they had tried to intervene. One woman recounted that after her husband had killed their Tutsi neighbors, “when I told him he had done a bad thing, he looked at me with eyes like an animal and told me it was not proper to speak to him like that.”55 According to another woman: I was hiding a Tutsi woman in our house. He [my husband] was always arguing with me, telling me not to feed her. . . . Because I was hiding her, I couldn’t argue with him about what he was doing during the day.56 Another commented that “women couldn’t stop their husbands from going to kill because women didn’t have any power. Women could only sometimes convince their husbands to let someone hide in their house; they couldn’t stop a whole group.”57 Some observers are unsympathetic to the argument that women were powerless in the face of the genocide. Rakiya Omaar of African Rights, for example, maintained that “women were not helpless.”58 A female detainee agreed. She said: Women assisted the killers by preparing the meals, fetching drinks and encouraging their men. Women brought provisions to the roadblocks and fed their men at home. No women criticised their men for being killers. This was not because they feared their husbands but because they believed in the need to kill Tutsis.59 Kanzayire expressed a more nuanced view, suggesting: Before the genocide, women . . . followed the orders of their husbands and their families. But . . . women could have advised their husbands and sons or refused to prepare meals for them. Even if women did not have much power in Rwandan society they should have at least tried to do something.60 In fact, a number of women and men did try to do something, to the extent that “the majority of the survivors of the genocide benefited in one way

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or another from the aid of a Hutu.”61 Over recent years, often as part of reconciliation efforts, increasing attention has been paid to Hutus who tried to save Tutsis from the slaughter. For the most part, these people were “ordinary” Rwandans and not authority figures. Given the title of the “Righteous,” they are seen as “living proof that a choice was possible” not to participate in the genocide.62 Among the criteria for securing a place among the “Righteous” is that the person acted without any expectation of personal benefit. Those who assisted only family members, or who rescued some people but also participated in the genocide, have also been denied the title. In the most extensive survey to date, conducted by the National University of Rwanda under sponsorship of the survivors’ organization Ibuka, 372 individuals were initially identified as “Righteous,” although this number was eventually reduced to 265 after applying the above criteria. The study showed that the motives for assisting Tutsis varied, but that friendship accounted for almost 31 percent, sympathy for the victim represented 25 percent, family ties motivated 17.5 percent (with these people being immediately disqualified from the list), while “categorical refusal of the genocidal ideology” accounted for only 3.5 percent of cases.63 Just over 20 percent of the 372 identified cases were women. However, the report emphasizes that “these figures must be nuanced, as we have noticed that in the majority of cases, the whole family participated in the act of rescue. . . . In this case, in accordance with Rwandan matrimonial law, which places the husband as the head of the family, it was him who was retained [by the survey team] to represent the household.”64 The 20 percent thus represents only women who acted against the will of her husband or children in the face of “enormous difficulties,” women who were not married, or women who acted alone. It is therefore impossible to say if women were less, or more, inclined than men to have come to people’s aid. Female heroes have nevertheless emerged. The most well known is Sula Karuhimbi, a Hutu peasant and traditional healer who was almost seventy years old at the time of the genocide, and who died in December 2018.65 She saved up to 100 Tutsis, Twa (Rwanda’s third ethnic group), and 3 white people by hiding them on her own property or elsewhere. She challenged the Interahamwe when they came to search her house, braving gunfire and threats. She remained a staunch opponent of the genocide, testifying against the perpetrators before the gacaca courts. Her source of inspiration, she said, were her parents, who also protected Tutsis from attacks when she was a child.66 According to one of the survivors that Sula rescued: She made everyone welcome, even strangers. Karuhimbi found different hiding places for us all. . . . All the people she hid are alive today. I find her

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an amazing old lady. Her courage during the genocide was unequalled. Very few people could have done what she did.67 A Kigali midwife named Thérèse Nyirabayovu has also earned a place among Rwanda’s “Righteous.” Aged sixty-seven at the time of the genocide, she hid eighteen people in her house and took food to others staying at a nearby church, out of a belief that she had “a duty to save fellow human beings in danger.”68 She was questioned repeatedly, her home was searched, and a grenade was thrown at it. She was also under constant threat from the Interahamwe in the refugee camps in the DRC after the genocide. In the words of one of the survivors she helped: Thérèse has always been well known for her courage, her generosity and her skill as a midwife. She has always been poor, especially since she was widowed and had so many children to look after. But. . . . Thérèse and her children hid us for nearly two months, knowing very well they were risking their lives.69 A third example of a “Righteous” woman is Félicitée Niyitegeka, a church assistant in the province of Gisenyi, who protected a group of girls staying in the diocese when the genocide erupted in April 1994. She searched for medicine to treat wounded Tutsis and began evacuating the most vulnerable across the border into the DRC when her plans were discovered. Refusing an opportunity to evacuate, she was murdered along with her protégés. One among the few survivors of this massacre said she should be proclaimed a saint.70 A number of men among the “Righteous” have also acknowledged the active contribution of women to their efforts to save Tutsis during the genocide. According to one man named Célestin, “If my wife had not been there they would all be dead. She helped me. Those children . . . who took people over by canoe, they nearly gave up once. It was that old woman who begged them to continue their work. . . . She said ‘We have always been friends with their families. It is not now that you will let them die.’”71 In sum, “ordinary” women’s desire to actively oppose the genocide was severely curtailed by their belief in the genocidal ideology, jealousy, greed, and fear. Their ability to take a stronger stance against the violence, including within the family, was also undoubtedly limited by gender dynamics. Yet, among the positive examples that have come to light are a number of “ordinary” Hutu peasant women who demonstrated that resistance was possible but required character and courage. Moving from the participation of “ordinary women” in the genocide to that of women in leadership roles and positions of authority, the following section focuses on the imagery surrounding the trials of “powerful women” and the gendered tropes that emerged in this context.

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Women as Authority Figures Three Ministers: A Martyr and Two Convicts Three women were in Cabinet at the outbreak of the genocide, but one did not survive to see it unfold. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana had previously served as Minister of Education and pushed merit-based approaches to school admission as opposed to ethnic quotas (which in colonial times had favored the Tutsi but following independence favored the Hutu).72 A political moderate, and perceived as a foil to the genocidal movement, Uwilingiyimana was tracked down, sexually assaulted, and murdered by Rwandan army personnel (including members of the Presidential Guard) on April 7, 1994—the very start of the genocide. Her brutal execution allowed the most extreme group of génocidaires to cement their grip on the highest levers of power and permitted genocide to metastasize. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko served as Rwanda’s Minister of Family and Women’s Development immediately prior to and during the genocide. She remains the highest-profile woman implicated in the genocidal violence. On June 24, 2011, Trial Chamber II of the ICTR convicted her of conspiracy to commit genocide and genocide; the crimes against humanity of extermination, rape, and persecution; and the war crimes of violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity.73 She was sentenced to the harshest punishment possible, namely, life imprisonment.74 At the time of her conviction, she was sixty-five years old. The proceedings against Nyiramasuhuko were among the most complex ever undertaken by the ICTR. She was prosecuted, as the lead defendant, jointly with five other defendants, including her son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali (who was also given a life sentence). All the defendants were from Butare, a prefecture in southern Rwanda.75 These defendants became colloquially known as the “Butare Group” or the “Butare Six.” The other four defendants received sentences of twenty-five years, thirty years, thirty-five years, and life imprisonment. The Butare Six case went to the Appeals Chamber. It was the last of the ICTR’s judgments, delivered in December 2015. At the appeals stage many convictions were affirmed but a small number for certain defendants were not. The Appeals Chamber also found that the defendants’ right to be tried without undue delay had been violated. It reduced the life sentences imposed by the Trial Chamber on Nyiramasuhuko (and two others) to forty-seven years of imprisonment. It reduced the term sentences, as well, to eighteen, twenty-five, and twenty years respectively. Nyiramasuhuko was the ICTR’s only female accused. She is, moreover, the only woman tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal for the specific crime of genocide and the only woman tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal for rape as a crime against humanity.76

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Overall, the trial judgment diligently pursued a neutral approach to Nyiramasuhuko’s gender. Her gender, in fact, was never discussed. On the one hand, this deliberate silence avoids sensationalizing Nyiramasuhuko or scandalously accentuating her guilt just because she was a woman. And, arguably, this silence reflected what a criminal court is supposed to do—that is, microscopically assess the guilt or innocence of the person in the dock on the basis of what that person is alleged to have done. The degendering of the lead perpetrator might additionally have permitted a clearer assessment of the criminal responsibility of the five other accused, all men. This silence also brought into sharper relief the judgment’s vivid exposition of the gender-based nature of many of the crimes, in particular the mass rape of Tutsi women. On this note, trial testimony, authenticated by the text of the judgment, demonstrated how Nyiramasuhuko ordered the rape of those “arrogant” Tutsi women who, alternately, tempted and stole Hutu men (an image aimed at galvanizing female support for the rapes) or spurned and humiliated them (an image aimed at encouraging men to commit acts of rape).77 On the other hand, this conscious textual gender neutrality also presents shortcomings and lost opportunities. It skipped over the reality that, when disaggregating the multiple motivations that prompt a person to commit atrocity, it is somewhat stilted (perhaps even scripted) not to consider the role of gender in that process. Moreover, degendering runs the risk of glossing over the acute etiological need to better understand the role of femininities and masculinities in how mass atrocity emerges and, by logical extension, the cultivation of more effective reintegration and preventative efforts in its aftermath. Public representations of the Nyiramasuhuko trial, in any event, were rife with problematic essentialisms of femininity and motherhood. She has been cast as a “mother hen” type of character; media reports obsessed over her clothing and appearance; she was depicted as controlling her son; and articles and media reports about her were festooned with titles such as “A Woman Scorned,” “Mother of Atrocities,” and “A Woman’s Work.”78 These caricatures informed the way in which the media expressively telegraphed the trial to the public. Essentialisms also suffused the strategic discourse of those invested in Nyiramasuhuko’s conviction and, conversely, of those invested in her acquittal (including Nyiramasuhuko herself). Although the trial lawyers refrained from such discursive strategies in the courtroom, focusing instead on Nyiramasuhuko’s presence (or not) at various crime scenes, they did pursue these strategies in the media. Within this public arena, those who condemned Nyiramasuhuko’s conduct, including victims, turned to her status as woman and mother to underscore her personal culpability and individual deviance (viz., she was a worse perpetrator because she was a woman, mother, and grandmother). Those who defended her conduct, including Nyiramasuhuko herself, invoked tropes of womanhood and motherhood to emphasize the impossibility of her culpability (viz., she could not be a perpetrator, in particular of rape, because she was a woman, mother, and grandmother) and the utter

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implausibility that a mother could exhort her own son to rape.79 Either way, however, sensationalizing her conduct led to troublesome outcomes—gender became a proxy for her helplessness or a proxy for her aberrant, deviant evil.80 The relationship between “mother and son génocidaires”81 has attracted greater media fascination than the relationship between another parentchild duo convicted, inter alia, for genocide at the ICTR, namely, Rev Elizaphan Ntakirutimana (father, a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor) and Gérard Ntakirutimana (his son, a physician), who were sentenced to ten and twenty-five years’ imprisonment, respectively, in 2003 and whose sentences were affirmed on appeal in 2004.82 Whereas the Ntahobali and Nyiramasuhuko proceedings tended to become diffused to the public as “mother and son,” the proceedings concerning the Ntakirutimanas tended to become diffused as “pastor and son.”83 When it came to the elder parent figure, Ntakirutimana was reduced to his profession, not his fatherhood. Nyiramasuhuko, on the other hand, was reduced to her motherhood, not her profession. Her case was not presented as “minister and son génocidaires,” nor was his case presented as “father and son génocidaires.” Nyiramasuhuko, however, was not the only female minister in the genocidal government. Agnès Ntamabyaliro served as minister of justice. Earlier in her career, she had “directed an NGO that raised micro-finance loans for poor Rwandan women.”84 She was one of the first women in Africa to serve in Parliament, but according to Jacqueline Novogratz, who had known her personally, “Agnes stood as a reminder that power corrupts on an equal-opportunity basis. Agnes loved the trappings of power, and when all was said and done, she’d traded integrity and whatever good she’d built for glitter and gold.”85 Ntamabyaliro was captured in Zambia and tried in Kigali—the only minister from the genocidal government tried before the Rwandan courts. In 2009, she received a life sentence in isolation for planning and inciting genocide, complicity to murder, and conspiracy, that was confirmed on appeal.86 Ntamabyaliro’s case barely received any mention in the international media, even though, exactly like Nyiramasuhuko, she was a high-profile minister and another woman in the Rwandan Cabinet. Undoubtedly, the fact that she was prosecuted in Rwanda, as opposed to at the ICTR, contributes to this disparate reaction, but the disproportionate attention given to Nyiramasuhuko obfuscates the fact that many other Rwandan women, including authority figures, have been prosecuted, convicted, or acquitted or are serving sentences for genocide-related crimes.

Other Influential Women Perpetrators Looking beyond the kernel of national political power, other women of prominent social status participated in the genocide. Upon apprehension or investigation, some (but certainly not all) of these women turned to gender

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to explain away their behavior. In some cases, similarly, although not as acutely as was the case with Nyiramasuhuko, media reports about these women were burdened with gender-based essentialisms. These female perpetrators came from all walks of life, which underscored how génocidaires were unhindered by occupation or socioeconomic status. Euphrasie Kamatamu, a local political official in Kigali, was convicted in 1998; she was handed the death penalty, but ultimately died in prison three years later of natural causes.87 Anne-Marie Nyirahakizimana, a major in the armed forces and a physician, was convicted in 1999 by a military court and sentenced to death.88 She was retried a decade later—after the death penalty had been abolished in Rwanda—by a gacaca court and sentenced to life imprisonment in isolation.89 Dr. Jeanne-Marie Nduwamariya, a physician in Butare, “held meetings at her home to draw up lists and identify Tutsi to be killed”; she was tried in absentia by a gacaca court and sentenced on appeal in 2009 to life imprisonment.90 Other prominent women génocidaires include Rose Karushara (a local official in Kigali), Odette Nyirabagenzi (known as “the terror of Rugenge,” a secteur of Kigali), and Athanasie Mukabatana (a nursing school teacher).91 Valérie Bemeriki was a high-profile star journalist who worked for the notorious RTLM radio station, known for its dissemination of hate propaganda. During the genocide she reported on the progress of the genocide, read off lists of Tutsis to be hunted and killed, and congratulated the killers for their efforts. She was seen dressed in Interahamwe attire. Late in December 2009, a gacaca court in Rwanda sentenced her to life imprisonment for planning and inciting genocide and complicity in murder.92 She had been arrested in 1999 in the DRC. Donna Maier, citing RTLM transcripts archived at the ICTR, reports that Bemeriki exhorted listeners to cut the cockroaches (the infamous code word for Tutsi) to pieces with a machete and that she had been told by the Virgin Mary that the Hutu will have the victory.93 A week prior to her conviction, she publicly requested forgiveness for her actions and blamed her anti-Tutsi childhood socialization for her conduct.94 A few Rwandan women have also faced, and continue to face, legal process at the national level outside of Rwanda. Sister Gertrude (Consolata Mukangango) and Sister Maria Kizito (Julienne Mukabutera) were initially convicted in Belgium in 2001 for their role in the murders of thousands of Tutsi refugees in a monastery in Sovu, Butare, in 1994. Both nuns had sought asylum in Belgium. They were sentenced to fifteen and twelve years’ imprisonment, respectively. Their unsuccessful defense was that they were terrified bystanders who lacked control over the circumstances at Sovu. Arsène Shalom Ntahobali’s wife, Béatrice Munyenyezi, moved to the United States in 1998, where she claimed asylum and became a citizen in 2003. In 2010, US prosecutors indicted her for allegedly falsifying her refugee and citizenship application by covering up her role in the 1994 genocide. Prosecutors “produced witnesses from Rwanda who testified that Munyenyezi was a Hutu extremist who helped orchestrate the rapes and

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killings . . . at a roadblock near her home.”95 The jury, however, deadlocked; a mistrial was declared. A new trial was set. The defense presented a number of unpersuasive arguments, including a belligerent reference to the superiority of US courts in which they implored that the jurors acquit insofar as “this is not a Rwandan kangaroo court.”96 Ultimately, on February 21, 2013, jurors convicted Munyenyezi of lying to obtain US citizenship by denying her role in the Rwandan genocide (she was not tried for genocide or war crimes).97 She was sentenced on July 15, 2013, to the maximum term of ten years’ imprisonment. After losing her appeal and serving her sentence, Munyenyezi was deported to Rwanda in April 2021. Munyenyezi’s sister, Prudence Kantengwa, was also convicted in Boston—on charges of visa fraud, fraud in immigration documents, perjury, and obstruction—for lying about her role in the Rwandan genocide to gain US citizenship.98 In October 2012, Kantengwa was sentenced to twenty-one months’ imprisonment.99 In another case, Marie Claire Mukeshimana, who had been convicted by a gacaca court in Rwanda to serve a nineteen-year prison sentence, was deported by US authorities to Rwanda in December 2011 after attempting to enter the United States on a travel visa.100 Agathe Habyarimana (Kanziga), whose influence greatly catalyzed Nyiramasuhuko’s own political ascent, continues to elude criminal prosecution, despite her apparent place at the very heart of the extremists who incubated the genocidal campaign. She was the wife of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, whose assassination was the trigger event of the genocide. Kanziga, who was airlifted out of Rwanda only days after her husband’s death and brought to France, was allegedly the pivot of an extremist clique of northern Rwandan Hutus known as the Akazu, believed to have hatched the plans for genocide. She was investigated by the ICTR prosecutors, but no indictment was ever issued. Now in her seventies, Kanziga still lives in France. She brought an asylum claim in France in early 2007, which was rejected on the basis of a serious belief that she had been involved in the commission of an international crime in Rwanda and hence excludable under the Refugees Convention.101 In December 2009, Rwandan prosecutors requested her extradition back to Kigali to face seven counts of genocide.102 In 2010, however, the extradition request was dismissed by an appeals court in Paris on the basis that Rwandan courts did not satisfy international due process standards. In June 2013, her residence permit request in France was rejected anew.103 In her pleadings before the French Refugee Commission, Kanziga invoked gender essentialisms: she “stressed her role as mother of eight children,” she “claim[ed] to have passed her time preparing meals for her family and taking care of the garden and livestock,” and she “argued . . . she never listened to the radio or read newspapers, and never discussed politics with her husband.”104 The image thus presented was of a simple woman—a motherly figure—who was ignorant of political affairs. In many ways, this posture is similar to that advanced by Nyiramasuhuko at her criminal trial.

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Gender discourses similarly informed the case brought against Yvonne Basebya (Ntacybatabara), aged sixty-six, who was convicted by the Hague District Court in March 2013 of inciting genocide. Basebya—a Rwandanborn Dutch citizen—was sentenced to six years and eight months’ imprisonment, which was the maximum term available at the time.105 Basebya was found to have “led meetings in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, of a radical Hutu party” and to have sung “a song that called for the murder of all Tutsis.”106 She was, however, acquitted of the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide and the charge of genocide. Somewhat similar to the press coverage of the Nyiramasuhuko trial, news reports mention—rather gratuitously—her fashion preferences, often in stereotypical language.107 Both prosecutorial and defense strategies, moreover, also evoke gendered tropes. While “[t]he prosecutors say she was a ‘General Mother’ . . . and ‘genocide cheerleader,’” in response, “her defence paints a picture of a dedicated mother: married to a respectable MP.”108

Conclusions and Areas for Further Research This chapter has demonstrated that “ordinary” women participated in the Rwandan genocide, though their involvement was characterized, most often, by acts of complicity rather than the wielding of weapons. Some acted impulsively or out of fear, others after closely assessing their options, while many were simply persuaded by the genocidal ideology that had swept the country. Simple greed and opportunism were other factors at play. A complex and uncomfortable reality is that sometimes the same individuals were both complicit in the violence and helped others to survive. Women in leadership positions apparently participated as enthusiastically in the genocide as their male counterparts. (The one exception, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, paid for her moderate views with her life.) Nonetheless, the unashamed sensationalism and stigmatization by the media of Nyiramasuhuko during her trial before the ICTR, as well as the gendered arguments used to defend many women accused of genocide-related crimes, demonstrate that gender stereotypes are rife around cases involving female perpetrators even while the law adheres to gender “neutrality.” As Uwilingiyimana’s case demonstrates, moreover, unremitting portrayals of women as victims nourish prejudicial stereotypes of helplessness and, thereby, gloss over the reality that some women are victimized precisely because they exercise resistance and, thereby, threaten the normalization of massacre. Ultimately, a need arises to examine women perpetrators without the “tabooification” that currently pervades media accounts, the essentialisms that emerge in trial strategies, and also the forced invisibility of gender that emerges from, for example, the ICTR’s judgment in the Nyiramasuhuko

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conviction. As Maier notes, “Many women, both humble and powerful, deliberately chose to embrace the genocidal ideology of hate and violence, and even chose to participate with enthusiasm and dedication.”109 Justice for their victims, many of whom also are women, requires a temperate, yet rigorous, approach shorn of stereotypes. To develop a better understanding of women perpetrators and their treatment before the law, now that the gacaca trials as well as the vast majority of trials in the national courts in Rwanda have ended, a comprehensive research could be conducted into the types of crimes for which women have been prosecuted, the arguments used in their defense, and their acquittal rates relative to men. Research could also explore if women’s complicity in the genocide was adequately captured by the various criminal justice systems created in its aftermath, although this will always probably remain a matter of perception. This exercise is particularly relevant as the efforts of activists have succeeded in bringing the horrors of sexual violence, rape, forced marriage, and sexual slavery—crimes that affect both men and women, although women disproportionately—into the judicial frame. If both international criminal law and Rwandan law have managed to better cover crimes against women over recent years, have those systems done as well at capturing the crimes committed by women, especially without demonizing them or ignoring gender-specific circumstances? Connections could also be explored between the situation of Rwandan women perpetrators and women perpetrators in other conflicts. The penal and rehabilitation needs of women convicted in Rwanda for genocide-related offenses also warrant consideration. Not only do women face particular problems in prison; Mark Drumbl notes that female ex-detainees face steep reintegration challenges and are among the most isolated demographic segments in contemporary Rwanda.110 The families of imprisoned men also face ongoing stigma and are often in a precarious economic situation.111 To be sure, emphasizing the obstacles confronting female perpetrators and the families of male perpetrators should not come at the expense of redressing the challenges that victims of the genocide continue to face. Genocide destroys but, in the Rwandan case, it also ironically generated new socioeconomic possibilities, including for women. In post-genocidal Rwanda, women play more prominent roles in public life than they ever have historically. Customary land laws and practices that discriminated against women have been scaled back. Yet, many challenges remain, and one of those, as Rwanda looks to its future, is ensuring due recognition for the “Righteous” whose position in society often remains ambiguous and contested, including by survivors.112 In terms of preventing future mass atrocities, it is crucial to better understand what distinguished these people from the masses and enabled them to defy the genocide. Twenty-eight years after the genocide, there is not indefinite time for exploring all of these issues. Accordingly, efforts should now be expanded to gain a more profound understanding of both women’s involvement in mass atrocities and their capacities for good.

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Notes 1 Parts of section II are drawn from N. Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide: Mothers or Monsters?” International Review of the Red Cross 92, no. 877 (2010): 81–2; parts of section III are drawn from M. A. Drumbl, “‘She Makes Me Ashamed to be a Woman’: The Genocide Conviction of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 2011,” Michigan Journal of International Law 34, no. 3 (2013): 586–93. Appreciations to Cody Phillips and Laura Durin for research assistance. The views expressed in this chapter reflect the authors’ opinions and not necessarily those of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). 2 See the categorization of genocide-related crimes in Organic Law no 13/2008 of 19/05/2008, art. 9. 3 The gacaca trials commenced in June 2002 and finished in June 2012. “Genocide: le Rwanda clot officiellement ses jurisdictions populaires ‘Gacaca,’” Le Monde, June 18, 2012; Ligue Rwandaise Pour la Promotion et la Defense des Droits de l’Homme (LIPRODHOR), Situation des droits de la personne au Rwanda (Kigali, RW, 2013), 16–17. See also J. Rafferty, “‘I Wanted Them to Be Punished or at Least Ask Us for Forgiveness’: Justice Interests of Female Victim-Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and Their Experiences with Gacaca,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 3 (2018): 95–118; P. Clark, The Gacaca Courts: Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); A. Chakravarty, Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4 Female (Tutsi) genocide suspect Butare Prison (respondent #50), personal interview, July 24, 2001. 5 Women represented on average 7 percent of suspects (102 of 1,435) in gacaca trials at Sector and Appeal level observed by Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF) Belgium from October 2005 to March 2010. See ASF, Rwanda: Rapport analytique des juridictions gacaca (2006), 54; Ibid. (2007), 66; Ibid. (2009), 54; Ibid. (2006), 84. The ASF data is just slightly higher than the proportion of women among persons detained in Rwanda for genociderelated crimes as at February 2008 (almost 6 percent, or 2,133 from a total of 37,213). Among these, 1,738 women had been convicted of genociderelated offenses and 395 still awaited trial. LIPRODHOR, Rapport de monitoring des prisons au Rwanda. Periode: 1er timestre 2008 (Kigali, 2008), 17. 6 According to ASF: “The participation of women is very marginal compared to that of men and often concerns acts of complicity or non-intervention.” ASF, Rwanda: Rapport analytique des juridictions gacaca (2006), 32. 7 Penal Reform International (PRI), “The Righteous: Between Oblivion and Reconciliation? Example of the Province of Kibuye,” Report on Monitoring and Research on the Gacaca (2004), 7.

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8 D. J. Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide: When Women Choose to Kill,” Universitas 8 (2013): 2. 9 Female genocide suspect, Nsinda Prison (respondent #65), personal interview, August 6, 2001. 10 “Gacaca: 27 femmes condamnées à de lourdes peines à Cyangugu, Porte Voix,” August 21, 2009. 11 National Service of Gacaca Courts, Gacaca Courts in Rwanda (Republic of Rwanda, 2012), 218. 12 The Interahamwe, meaning “those who stand together” in Kinyarwanda, was a militia formed in the period leading up to the genocide and which led many of the killings during it. 13 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #37), personal interview, July 18, 2001. 14 Since colonial times, “customary rules existed in Rwanda governing the determination of ethnic group, which followed patrilineal lines of heredity.” Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment (September 2, 1998), 171. 15 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #23), personal interview, July 6, 2001. 16 Stereotypes about Tutsi women were also used to incite rapes. For example, see Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko, Case No. ICTR-98-42-T, Judgment and Sentence, June 24, 2011, 2268, 2764, 4985. 17 Woman convicted of genocide, Gitarama Prison (respondent #10), personal interview, July 17, 2001. 18 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #46), personal interview, July 19, 2001. 19 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #21), personal interview, July 6, 2001. 20 Ibid. 21 C. Cohn, “Woman and Wars: Toward a Conceptual Framework,” in Woman and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures, ed. Carol Cohn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 2. 22 A study on the weapons used to conduct the genocide in Kibuye province found that out of 59,050 victims of the genocide, 53 percent were killed by machete. See P. Verwimp, “Machetes and Firearms: The Organization of Massacres in Rwanda,” Journal of Peace Research 43, no. 1 (2006): 13. 23 Ibid., 7 (citing a National Agricultural Household Survey [1984]). 24 Ibid. 25 This was confirmed by at least one woman convicted of genocide. Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #43), personal interview, July 19, 2001. 26 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #13), personal interview, July 3, 2001.

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27 Woman convicted of genocide, Gitarama Prison (respondent #10), personal interview, July 2, 2001. 28 Bernadette Kanzayire (lawyer, Kigali), personal interview, June 12, 2001. 29 Rwandan Penal Code, 2012, part 570. 30 National Service of Gacaca Courts, Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, 201–2. 31 “Gacaca Law,” (2004), 53. 32 Nyirabapfizina, cited in ASF, Rwanda: rapport analytique des juridictions gacaca (2005), 20. 33 Virtually none of the hundreds of detainees Drumbl interviewed in Kigali prison in 1998 (men and women, though the vast majority were men) revealed that they believed they had done anything “wrong” or that anything really “wrong” had happened in the summer of 1994. Those who recognized they had engaged in violent conduct never called it genocide or saw their involvement as willing but considered it as politically necessary self-defense in light of the war that was taking place at the time. M. A. Drumbl, “Rule of Law Amid Lawlessness: Counselling the Accused in Rwanda’s Domestic Genocide Trials,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 29 (1998): 604–9. 34 Woman convicted of genocide, Gitarama Prison (respondent #10), personal interview, July 2, 2001. 35 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #43), personal interview, July 19, 2001. 36 Rakiya Omaar (codirector, African Rights, Kigali), personal interview, June 13, 2001. According to feminist criminologist Francis Heidensohn, “Women reject a criminal identity with especial rigour,” in line with “appropriate” gender-role behavior. F. M. Heidensohn and M. Silvestri, Women and Crime, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 19. 37 Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” 81–2. 38 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #19), personal interview, July 5, 2001. 39 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #30), personal interview, July 16, 2001. 40 PRI, “The Righteous,” 8. 41 J. M. Kayishema and F. Masabo, Les justes Rwandais “Indakemwa” (Kigali, RW: Ibuka, 2011), 20. 42 Josée Mukandamage (former vice president of the Rwandan Supreme Court), personal interview, July 23, 2001. 43 “Gacaca Law,” 2004, art. 51. 44 Center for Conflict Management, Research on Gacaca (Ministry of Justice, Republic of Rwanda, 2013), 138. 45 PRI, “Trials of Offences against Property Committed during the Genocide: A Conflict between the Theory of Reparation and the Social and Economic Reality in Rwanda,” Report on Monitoring and Research on the Gacaca (2007). Summary; as of October 2008, there were 612,151 people accused of property offenses, of whom 609,144 had been tried by that date. PRI,

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“The Settlement of Property Offense Cases Committed during the Genocide: Update on the Execution of Agreements and Restoration of Condemnations,” Report on Monitoring and Research on the Gacaca (2009), 35. 46 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #13), personal interview, July 3, 2001. 47 Female genocide suspect, Butare Prison, personal interview, July 24, 2001. 48 Female genocide suspect, Nsinda Prison, personal interview, August 6, 2001. 49 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison, personal interview, July 19, 2001. 50 Ministry of Justice, Republic of Rwanda, CCM Research on Gacaca (2013), 140. 51 Ibid., 139. 52 “Trials of Offences against Property Committed during the Genocide,” 16. 53 J. Schurr, “Rwandan Genocide Survivors Still Waiting for Reparation,” Pambazuka News 547 (2011). 54 Based on the National Service of Gacaca Courts’ data, PRI has estimated that at the national level, 13.5 percent of the adult population in 1994, or approximately one-quarter of the adult male population, were “real” genocide killers. PRI, “The Righteous,” 8. 55 Female genocide suspect, Nsinda Prison (respondent #70), personal interview, August 7, 2001. 56 Female genocide suspect, Gitarama Prison (respondent #34), personal interview, July 16, 2001. 57 Female genocide suspect, Nsinda Prison (respondent #65), personal interview, August 6, 2001. 58 Rakiya Omaar (codirector, African Rights, Kigali), personal interview, June 13, 2001. 59 Female genocide suspect, Kigali Central Prison (respondent #13), personal interview, July 3, 2001. 60 Bernadette Kanzayire (lawyer, Kigali), personal interview, June 12, 2001. 61 Hildebrand and Omar, in Kayishema and Masabo, Les justes Rwandais “Indakemwa,” 7. 62 PRI, “The Righteous.” 63 Kayishema and Masabo, Les justes Rwandais “Indakemwa,” 16. This “pilot” survey was conducted in all districts of Rwanda but only in two sectors (eight cells) per district. 64 Ibid., 13. 65 See: https​:/​/qz​​.com/​​afric​​a​/149​​8815/​​rwand​​an​-he​​ro​-su​​la​-zu​​la​-ka​​ruhim​​​bi​-de​​ad​ -at​​-106/​ 66 Genocide Archive Rwanda, Oral Testimony of Sula Karuhimbi. 67 African Rights, “16 Stories from ‘Tribute to Courage,’” in Reconciliation in Rwanda—Stories of Rescue (London: African Rights, 2002).

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68 Ibid. See also, “Profile of Zura Karuhimbi, Candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize,” BeneRwanda (2010). 69 African Rights, “16 Stories.” 70 Ibid. 71 PRI, “The Righteous,” 17–18. 72 P. R. Bartrop, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 320. 73 Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko, Case No. ICTR-98-42-T, Judgment and Sentence, June 24, 2011. 74 When it came to sentencing, Trial Chamber II emphasized the vast number of victims and Nyiramasuhuko’s abuse of her superior position. 75 H. Jallow, Lecture notes distributed at Seventh Annual Humanitarian Law Dialogs at Chautauqua, NY, on August 26, 2013. 76 The only other woman convicted by an international criminal tribunal (in this case, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) is Biljana Plavšić, a leading Bosnian Serb politician. Plavšić pleaded guilty in 2002 to one count of persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds as crimes against humanity. She was sentenced in 2003 to eleven years’ imprisonment, which she served in Sweden. Plavšić was released in 2009, pursuant to early release guidelines, after completing two-thirds of her term. 77 Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko, 2011, paragraphs 2268, 2764, 4985. 78 G. Lombart, “Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, une criminelle aux airs de ‘mere-pule,’” Le Monde International, June 24, 2011. For a lucid overview and incisive commentary regarding academic and media representations of Nyiramasuhuko up until 2007, see L. Sjoberg and C. E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007), 158–71. For further and detailed discussion of these media depictions, including following 2007, see Drumbl, “‘She Makes Me Ashamed to be a Woman:’” 586–93. 79 Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” 82, 100; B. Sperling, “Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwanda Genocide,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 33 (2006): 652–3. 80 Cf. Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide,” 12–13. 81 E. Barad, “Mother and Son Genocidaires,” Arusha Times 683 (2011). 82 Prosecutor v. Elizaphan & Gerard Ntakirutimana (2003), 919, 22. 83 See, for example, M. Simons, “Rwandan Pastor and His Son are Convicted of Genocide,” New York Times, February 20, 2003, A3; “Hutu Pastor on Trial for Genocide,” CNN World, September 17, 2001, 1; “Pastor Aided Rwanda Genocide,” BBC News, February 19, 2003. 84 Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide,” 9. 85 J. Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2009), 163. 86 LIPRODHOR, Situation de droits de l’homme au Rwanda rapport 20072008 (2010), paragraph 2.2.1; “Former Rwandan Justice Minister Sentenced to Life Imprisonment,” Hirondelle News Agency, January 20, 2009.

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87 During her trial, Kamatamu specifically argued she had no power to prevent the genocide. Kamatamu Euphrasie et al., Decision July 17, 1998. 88 Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” 96. 89 Ibid., 156. 90 Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide,” 12 (also discussing other women convicts who had played notorious roles in the genocide). 91 African Rights, Rwanda, Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers (London: African Rights, 1995), 27, 60, 67. 92 J. P. Chretien, “Prison a vie pour une journaliste: Valerie Bemeriki etait une journaliste vedette de RTLM et y a encourage le genocide,” Ibuka, December 15, 2009. 93 Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide,” 10. 94 Ibid. 95 T. Susman, “Jury Deadlocks in Case of Rwandan Immigrant Accused of Genocide,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2012. 96 T. Haines, “Did this New Hampshire Woman Take Part in the Rwandan Genocide?” The Atlantic, February 20, 2013. (This article noted also that Munyenyezi “dressed sharply and wore black-framed glasses. On some days her hair was pulled back tight.”) 97 L. Tuohy, “Jury: NH Woman Lied About Role in Rwanda Genocide,” Associated Press, February 21, 2013; Haines, “Did this New Hampshire Woman Take Part in the Rwandan Genocide?” (“Witnesses flown from Rwanda testified that Munyenyezi shot a nun in the head, fed men hungry from hours of raping women, and more.”) 98 K. Marchocki, “Boston Jury Convicts Sister of NH Woman Accused of Rwanda Genocide Role,” New Hampshire Union Leader, May 7, 2012. 99 T. Andersen, “Woman Gets 21 Months for Lying About Ties to Rwandan Genocide,” Boston Globe, October 12, 2012. 100 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “ICE Deports Convicted Rwandan to Serve Sentence for Role in 1994 Genocide,” December 21, 2011. 101 Arrêt no. 311793 du Conseil d’État—October 16, 2009. 102 “France Will Not Extradite Agathe Habyarimana,” Hirondelle News Agency, September 28, 2011. 103 Plainte Avec Constitution de Parti Civile, Collectif des Parties Civiles Pour Le Rwanda v. Habyarimana, 2007. 104 Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” 91. 105 Associated Press, “Rwandan-Born Dutch Woman Jailed for Inciting Genocide,” Guardian, March 1, 2013. 106 Ibid. 107 See for example, ibid. (noting that Basebya was “wearing a pink top and earrings of small crosses at the end of long chains”); “Pastor Aided Rwanda Genocide,” BBC News, February 19, 2013 (noting that “Basebya wore a pink jacket, black trousers”); B. Czerwinski, “Dutch Citizen in the Dock for

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Rwandan Genocide,” Daily Star, October 22, 2012 (noting at the start of her trial that Basebya was “[d]ressed in a cream jacket and black trousers”). 108 T. Bouwknegt, “Hague Court to Decide on Rwanda Genocide Case,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, September 27, 2012. 109 Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide,” 14. For discussion of women perpetrators in other conflicts, see Helen Epstein, “I was a Nazi, and Here’s Why,” The New Yorker, May 29, 2013; Olivera Simic, “Would Do the Same Again: In Conversation with Biljana Plavšić,” International Criminal Justice Review 28 (2018): 317–32. 110 M. Drumbl, “The ICTR and Justice for Rwandan Women,” New England Journal of International and Comparative Law 12 (2005): 115. 111 PRI, “The Righteous,” 28. 112 Ibid., 23. The Rwanda genocide memorial includes testimonies of rescuers. See http:​/​/gen​​ocide​​archi​​verwa​​nda​.o​​rg​.rw​​/inde​​x​.php​​/Cate​​go​ry​:Umwimanyi. A recent study of “the Righteous,” which gives some insights, is: D. Rothbart and J. Cooley, “Hutus Aiding Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide: Motives, Meanings and Morals,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10, no. 22 (2016): 76–97.

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PART IV

Gendered Genocidal Trauma and Its Aftermaths 

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10 The Biopolitics of “Rescue” Women and the Politics of Inclusion after the Armenian Genocide1 Lerna Ekmekçioğlu

Introduction The once-glorious seat of the Ottoman Empire resembled a sprawling refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Several tragedies pulled groups of Greeks, Turks, Russians, Armenians, and others to Constantinople/Istanbul from various locations including Thrace, Anatolia, Levant, Mesopotamia, and southern Russia. Among the camps that sheltered the survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the one in Galata served as the makeshift home of a teenaged girl who had spent the war years among Muslims. Like many of her counterparts, she had been kidnapped and raped. After the Ottoman defeat was sealed by the Mudros Armistice in October 1918, an unknown set of developments had led her to the capital. She may have been rescued by the Armenian relief organizations, or freed by her abductor, or perhaps she had escaped. Be that as it may, she was heavy with child, conceived by the man who had first forced her former fiancée, an Armenian, to witness her violation and had then killed him. In Allied-occupied Istanbul and under the institutional care of fellow Armenians, she tried every means possible to terminate the pregnancy. Sometime in her first trimester she reached the house of a fellow Armenian

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woman, Zaruhi Kalemkiarian, who would later tell of her in her memoirs.2 I will refer to this “girl” as X, since Kalemkiarian did not provide her name. X pleaded with Kalemkiarian to help her get an abortion (vizhoum), but despite her deep sympathy for the girl, Kalemkiarian refused to help, even after X began visiting her house every day, banging her head on the wooden floor in an attempt to injure herself since “her soul was fired up with the need to curse and take revenge.”3 X sought out Kalemkiarian’s help because she was one of the founders of the Armenian Red Cross, which operated a hospital where X could possibly get an abortion. Instead, alarmed that X might commit infanticide, Kalemkiarian and other khnamagal diginner (female relief workers) ordered her incarcerated in the maternity ward of the Armenian Red Cross Şişli branch hospital. This ward only housed “forlorn young mothers” (anderunch yeridasart mayrer)—refugees expecting babies of Muslim fatherhood.4 In that “special” ward, within hours of giving birth to a healthy boy, X committed suicide. Despite the customary practice of the shared nursing of infants, other mothers cursed the newborn by collectively refusing to nurse him. Kalemkiarian does not record the baby’s fate. Why did the Armenian authorities deny X an abortion?5 Why did the expectant mother’s perception of the fetus as “the continuation of the vojrakordz (criminal)” conflict so profoundly with what Kalemkiarian and other relief workers saw in such babies, whose “chirping cries elevated [their] souls.”6 At first glance, Kalemkiarian’s view may seem puzzling because both Muslims and Christians had long believed, and the law endorsed, that a baby belonged to its father and his group. Yet the Armenian National Relief Committee, the umbrella organization in charge of providing relief to refugees in Istanbul, referred to babies of Muslim fatherhood as “our orphans” (mer vorpere). What conditioned the decision to render fatherhood irrelevant in determining Armenianness? I answer this question in the context of immediate postwar-era Istanbul (1918-22). My research is grounded in institutional reports, Ottoman state and Armenian Patriarchate archives, writings in the Armenian and Turkish press, unpublished private papers of intellectuals, and memoirs. During these immediate postwar years, the Ottoman capital was under the Allied occupation. When the Great Powers convened in Paris to redraw the world map, one section on that map was claimed by Armenians and Turks alike. International diplomacy, revolving around the Wilsonian principle of selfdetermination, inextricably linked territorial claims to demographics, and this led Armenians and Turks to take all possible measures to increase their ranks. The intersection of this political context with the shared symbolic and functional importance of women and children for each group engendered not only a postwar Armenian effort to rescue the abducted but also fierce fights about who belonged where. The rescue effort was sometimes aggressive, and rape victims and babies of Muslim fatherhood were officially welcomed into the new coordinates of Armenian collectivity. I will demonstrate that

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these actions, in addition to exemplifying a common post-genocidal victim response, were intended to reverse the results of extermination campaigns and also represented a conscious choice on the part of Armenian leaders striving to revive their nation and their state.7 This analysis of a metamorphosis of rules of ethnoreligious belonging provides a striking example of how, under certain circumstances, patriarchy may relax one of its central tenets—the primacy of paternity over maternity. But this did not translate into women’s agency in determining group belonging. On the contrary, Armenian rescue efforts left the target population with few options for controlling their own lives and bodies, and far from subverting patriarchal norms they reproduced patriarchal hierarchies and left intact long-established assumptions about women’s nature, culture, and potential.

The Armenian Rescue Effort (Vorpahavak) in Istanbul During the First World War, the ruling Young Turk party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), openly tolerated and even encouraged the transfer of Armenian children and women of childbearing age into Muslim households, orphanages, and shelters, thus creating what I previously called “a climate of abduction.”8 Integration of Armenian females and minors into Muslim contexts was part of the genocidal policy of eliminating Armenians as a people, thus eliminating the threat of the establishment of an independent Armenian state by seizing “Ottoman” territory. The signing of the Mudros Armistice on October 1918 sealed the Ottoman defeat and initiated a new political climate in which Armenians could rescue or be rescued. It stipulated the release of Ottoman prisoners of war, a clause that everyone interpreted to include Islamized women and children. Deported Armenians were given the right to return to their original hometowns. Soon after, the Allies occupied Istanbul and parts of Anatolia. The exiled Patriarch Zaven Der Yeghiayan returned to the capital in February 1919 and resumed his duties as the head of the Armenian millet (ethnoreligious community). The Armenian National Assembly, a semi-autonomous parliament composed of elected clerics and laymen that had overseen Armenian affairs since the 1860s, reopened. One of the first responsibilities that the Patriarch took upon himself was the liberation (azadakrum) of Islamized Armenians. Armenians’ campaigns to find, liberate, and reintegrate children and women sequestered in Muslim households and orphanages were collectively called “vorpahavak”—“the gathering of orphans” in Armenian. Here the term “orphan” (vorp) referred to not only children without one or both parents but also women who lacked a surviving male family member. Rather than age or sex, orphanhood connoted the absence of a dependable male

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relative and was thus translated to and from Turkish as bi-kes, kimsesiz, or sahipsiz (unprotected, unclaimed, or forlorn), in addition to yetim (fatherless orphan) and öksüz (motherless orphan). In Istanbul, the Patriarchate created and financially supported an Orphan Gathering Agency (Vorphavak Marmin) composed of a supervisor—Arakel Chakerian, a Paris-educated professor of chemistry at the University of Istanbul—and four young men personally known to and trusted by the Patriarch.9 Some young girls and women were also employed to facilitate easier and more respectful access to Muslim places.10 The British Embassy gave each vorpahavak agent a letter of introduction addressed to the Allied police force asking them to provide assistance if needed. According to the memoirs of the patriarch, until the end of 1922 vorpahavak agents in Istanbul retrieved about three thousand of the five thousand kidnapped Armenians.11 The Sèvres Treaty, the first postwar peace treaty the Ottomans signed with the Allies (later superseded by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty), further boosted vorpahavak efforts. It not only annulled all conversions to Islam between 1914 and 1918 but also required the Ottoman-Turkish government to assist in all efforts to find those concerned and deliver them back to their original communities. The newly formed League of Nations, too, became involved in uniting Near-Eastern families torn apart by the war.12 Beginning in 1922, the League’s Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East carried out rescue operations in Istanbul and Aleppo and opened shelters; from 1922 to 1926, it rescued four thousand adults and four thousand children, the majority of them Armenians.13 Especially in the months immediately following the Mudros Armistice and the de jure occupation of Istanbul, the Ottoman government remained supportive of the vorpahavak.14 During the first months after the Armistice, some Turkish/Muslim families voluntarily gave their Armenians to the Patriarchate.15 However, as 1919 unfolded, the government’s support of vorpahavak diminished, and at times it turned openly hostile to it. Many Armenians now had to be extracted forcibly. The Turkish nationalist movement in Anatolia, which had been growing since the Armistice, was now organized around the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) and was growing increasingly anti-Armenian and anti-Greek. A problem that deeply troubled both Greek and Armenian rescue efforts was those persons who refused to be rescued. Many “captives” wanted to remain where they were. Research conducted in different parts of the world suggests that abducted people often resist being forcibly returned to their natal communities. This is most common when they have assimilated relatively well into the abductors’ group and suffer no severe discrimination there, when they have spent several years away, and when they foresee being stigmatized if they return. Many abducted women in both India and Pakistan resisted efforts to “liberate” them from households into which they were forcibly integrated during the 1947 partition. Similarly, many white women and children held captive by Native Americans were reluctant to return to white society. These

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situations contrast sharply with those conflicts, such as in Central and West Africa, in which kidnapped girls have been isolated and confined in huts to serve as sex slaves and have usually welcomed rescue efforts.16 We can begin to understand why some women and children resisted reArmenianization through eyewitness testimonies, memoirs, and oral history interviews, and also a report prepared in March 1919 for the Armenian National Delegation in Paris.17 Their abduction, loss of chastity, abuse at enemy hands, or bearing of a child by an enemy man constituted such deep disgrace that many married women did not want to leave their relatively bearable situations for lives of certain stigmatization back in their native communities.18 Those who had converted to Islam, even at gunpoint, and even men, were seen to have blackened their group’s name.19 Some assumed that Armenians would refuse to accept their “Muslim” children and did not want to leave them behind. Most knew they had no family to return to. Many had been purchased or saved from the gendarmes by “peaceful Muslims who ensured them a relatively tolerable life,” for which the women remained grateful.20 Some loved and were loved by their husbands.21 Some women in unhappy marriages before the war may have found life with their new families an improvement and abduction to have bettered their lots as wives.22 Children were even less willing to return, and many younger returnees escaped back. By the time of their rescue they had spent an average of four to five years in their new households or institutions, and many knew no other life. Especially in cases where a child was happily integrated into a household, vorpahavak felt more like abduction than redemption. There were also cases where children were simply too afraid to admit their Armenianness.23 The Patriarchate’s and the Ottoman government’s policies of handling the reluctant abductee differed. In general, Armenians of all strands agreed that all Armenian children, regardless of their wishes or whether or not they claimed to be faithful Muslims, had to be returned to the nation’s bosom. Ottoman regulations supported this policy by ordering that all former Armenians below age twenty, irrespective of their inclinations, be presumed to have converted to Islam by force—thus their conversions were annulled automatically.24 Where the two centers of authority diverged was on the question of how to deal with people older than twenty. The Ottoman government decreed that such individuals had the right to choose what was best for themselves. The main problem here was married women—the November 28, 1918 order to the provinces maintained “the constitution commands freedom of conscience” and that married women over twenty be free to re-Armenianize, in which case both their conversion to Islam and their Muslim marriages would be annulled. If they wished to return to their original religion but not divorce their Muslim husbands, they had to apply to the courts.25 Married women under twenty, even though their conversions to Islam were considered invalid, would not be forced to re-Armenianize and divorce; their cases, the government said, would be resolved in court, in the presence of

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members of their natal family (if they had any), church authorities, Christian missionaries (or other Westerners), and Ottoman officials.26 The Patriarchate took a different stance, and insisted that irrespective of their age, choice, marital status, or self-identification, every former Armenian had to be reclaimed, and if they insisted on escaping, they would be imprisoned.27 It is important to note that not every Armenian who took part in the vorpahavak initiatives agreed with this position. Some—including Avedis Aharonian, a member of the Armenian Republic’s Parliament and the cochair of the Armenian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference—thought those women who lived with “relatively bearable Muslims,” had children, and were accustomed to their way of life should be left where they were. Aharonian did not believe that women who were fine in the Muslim homes would be able to successfully reintegrate among Armenians. He emphasized that Armenians should spare no effort to rescue each and every Armenian girl and woman who was suffering at the hands of “savage races” (vayrak tsegh), then cautioned that if a woman chose the new Muslim family, to aggressively seize her against her husband’s wishes would agitate such “savage races,” who were Armenia’s future neighbors with whom the survivors had to live. For others, like Zaruhi Bahri, considerations of individual happiness occasionally demanded a respect for personal wishes. She was a colleague of Zaruhi Kalemkiarian, the recorder of X’s story in this chapter’s opening vignette. Like Kalemkiarian, she was a native Constantinopolitan from an elite intellectual background. During the Armistice era she remained very active by directing an orphanage/shelter, penning articles in periodicals, and working for the Armenian Red Cross, which she had helped found in Istanbul. The patriarch personally asked her for assistance in directing a Neutral House orphanage/shelter across from her house in Şişli, where women and children of contested identities were sheltered until their true identities were determined. In her memoirs, Bahri took a cautiously critical tone when detailing how the Patriarch himself never sympathized with liberated women who wanted to go back to the homes they had been abducted to. Bahri herself was clearly a tough inspector, who more than once brought out the Armenianness of children and women who veraciously and for days denied their origins, but in at least two cases she begged the patriarch to let captives go. In the first case, the patriarch suspected that Bahri might help the escape of a certain Aghavni Kazazian (who had already tried to run away twice) and so ordered Aghavni declared mentally ill and institutionalized in the Armenian National Hospital. This, even though Aghavni showed no signs of an illness except for longing for her husband and her son, whom Bahri defined as “a Turk, yes, but of her own blood and ultimately her very own child.”28 In the second case, a young Armenian woman was happily married to an Iranian who had saved her during the deportations. Though National Assembly officials forbade this woman returning to her husband, as Bahri bitterly noted, at about the same time her husband’s equally Iranian brother was in the process of marrying an Armenian girl in Istanbul, freely and with the full

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consent of both parties.29 The patriarch’s memoir includes detailed passages on the Neutral House but is silent on the topic of orphans and women who preferred to stay among Muslims. Turkish officials and the broader public were disturbed by news of such cases as well as by the many complaints that vorpahavaks were retrieving true Muslims, both mistakenly and intentionally. As women and children were transferred from one group to another, they found themselves caught up in fierce debates over who had kidnapped whom.30 Turks accused Armenians of being baby snatchers “who hoped to replenish their wartime losses from the Muslim pool.”31 Government-led Turkish newspapers claimed that Armenians were beating and threatening Muslim children to make them “admit” their Armenian origin.32 Armenian editors responded by accusing the Turkish press of maintaining the genocidal mentality by blaming victims for the perpetrators’ crimes. One Armenian editor ended his piece about the issue with: “It would be naïve to talk about colors with a blind person, about sounds with a deaf person, and of conscience with a perpetrator [of massacres].”33 In the Ottoman lands, political competition over the redefinition of children’s true belonging has a history reaching back to the late nineteenth century. Notwithstanding that children are allocated powerful symbolic roles by collectivities that imagine themselves as nations, the late-Ottoman battle over “nobody’s children” expressed also the demographic concerns of a crumbling empire. These concerns, combined with the changing urban fabric of a fast-modernizing Istanbul, led to a competition over foundlings and abandoned children waged between the state, non-Muslim civil and religious leaders, and missionaries.34 While the central state and the municipality wanted to assume all foundlings’ Muslimness, non-Muslim leaders argued that at least those who were left in front of churches and synagogues should be taken in by the respective communities. Greek and Armenian patriarchates were alarmed at Catholic missionaries’ active roles in foundling care, because the missionaries, who were forbidden to convert Muslims, continued to take in Christian children and convert them to Catholicism. In immediate postwar Istanbul, the fights between opposing parties escalated to the degree that when the British occupying forces intervened, “Neutral Houses” were opened to determine which children or women belonged to which group. In Istanbul, the Neutral House (Chezok Dun in Armenian, Bitarafhane in Turkish) was established in Şişli, close to the Armenian Red Cross’s special maternity ward that I described earlier in this chapter. It was managed by a joint committee composed of one Turk, one Armenian, and one American female director. There, children and young women who claimed Muslim identity but were suspected of hiding their Armenian identity out of fear of Muslim retaliation or simply due to brainwashing, were isolated from their Muslim families. After a few weeks’ stay at the house, surrounded by Armenians, most admitted they were Armenian.35 During this process, the Turkish director resigned in protest, claiming that Turkish Muslim children were being Armenianized.

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Available evidence indicates that the vorpahavak initiative did not employ a conscious, widespread Armenianization policy, and some mistakes were corrected by returning children or women to their families.36 They were corrected not only to straighten out the record, but also because Armenian authorities were wary of what they believed were Turkish plans to present Armenians to the occupation forces and the League of Nations as kidnappers of Turkish children. In a March 1922 internal report, Arakel Chakerian cautioned the patriarch that if Turks found even one Turkish child in an Armenian orphanage they would make a serious issue of it. He strongly advised letting go from Armenian orphanages the few children who still insisted that they were Turks. We do not know if this was done.37 Even though Armenianization was not the general policy, vorpahavak agents’ criteria for considering someone Armenian were very broad: if a suspect did not protest otherwise, and if no other party claimed him or her, persons were considered Armenian whether or not they remembered their previous language, family, or location. Zaruhi Bahri narrated how a certain Zekiye, a Turkish woman who had introduced herself as an Armenian, was easily sheltered in Armenian orphanages despite the fact that she neither knew Armenian nor “looked like an Armenian.”38 Aghavni Kazazian’s Muslim husband had hired Zekiye to enter the shelter and convince his wife to return to him. In addition to always erring on the side of the potential Armenianness of any orphan, authorities at times forced confessions (true or possibly false), and they did occasionally Armenianize Muslim children or ignore when others did.39 Aram Haygaz, a teenager at the Yesayan orphanage at the time, in his memoirs told of a ten-year-old boy who, unlike many others in a similar situation, would not admit his Armenianness and, even after some time at the orphanage and suffering threats and pressure, continued to insist that he was Turkish. Ultimately, Haygaz and his friends believed him, but they decided that “even if he was a pure-bred (zdariun) Turk, we would keep him to Armenianize him gradually (asdijanapar hayatsnenk).”40 Haygaz’s explanation of why they kept this boy, who they knew had a Turkish mother and father outside the orphanage walls, leads us to ask why this rescue effort was at times so aggressive, passionate, and determined. One of the orphans who worked on this “case” with Haygaz maintained, “They Turkified thousands from among us. Now it is our turn to at least Armenianize one among them.”41 Haygaz, the sole survivor in his family, who had spent the war years in Ottoman Kurdistan where he was converted and adopted by Muslim families, noted that the issue here was one of reprisal (pokhvrej). Revenge was definitely part of the story, but it was only one part. To understand the whole we must understand the contemporary international political framework and the fight over territory that was ongoing.

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Reclaiming People, Reclaiming Land The fight at this time over women and children epitomized the larger, ongoing conflict between Armenians and Turks. It centered on a piece of land, today within Eastern Turkey, that Ottomans referred to as their “Eastern Provinces” and Armenians as “Western Armenia.” As with the minors and women, each side claimed and reclaimed the land as its own and fought for it militarily, or diplomatically, or both. Around the same time that the story of X was unfolding in Istanbul, the Great Powers gathered at Versailles to redraw the world map. Armenians sent a well-equipped delegation to the Paris Peace Conference to lobby for their entitlement to a share of the soon-to-be-dismembered Ottoman Empire. The goal was to expand the tiny Republic of Armenia in Transcaucasia (established in May 1918) to include the western parts of the Armenian historical homeland that had been under Ottoman rule since the sixteenth century. The establishment of Greater Armenia or United Armenia would not only realize Armenians’ “age-old dream” but would also gain revenge against “the Turk” who had recently attempted to exterminate the whole Armenian nation.42 Yet, having just survived this annihilation campaign, Armenians lacked the numbers needed to people the land—a particularly harsh challenge in the immediate postwar era. The Paris Peace Settlement negotiations, with their emphasis on Wilsonian “self-determination,” came to an agreement that the nationality of a region was to devolve to that community that made up the majority of the population.43 Armenians had to come up with numbers—and quickly. Patriarch Zaven learned about the intricacies of international diplomacy firsthand during his European tour in support of the Armenian Delegation. In London, the commission charged with Armenia’s future borders told him, “The more people you have the more land you will get.”44 British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon’s assistant also advised the Patriarch to “hearten the dispersed Armenians to immediately return and populate Armenia.”45 Both the Armenians and the leaders of the Kemalist movement anticipated the unleashing of a “war of statistics.”46 One of the most important tasks of the emerging defense committees was to prove, by “scientific means,” that Muslims had always constituted the majority in the regions that Armenians claimed to be their historical homelands; places that the Armenian delegation in Paris attempted to prove, also statistically, had to belong to Armenians. Armenian populations away from Paris were clearly aware of the link between numbers and territory. In December 1919, the editor of Hay Gin (Armenian women), the prominent Armenian women’s journal of the time, edited by Hayganush Mark (a colleague of Zaruhi Kalemkiarian and Zaruhi Bahri), wrote with alarm that Islamized Armenians had to return to their natal religion so that “we get our Armenia.”47 In order to accumulate

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statistical numbers and create the necessary demographic profile, Armenians launched a worldwide pronatalist campaign, which was part of a broader campaign called “National Revival/Rebirth” (Azkayin Veradznunt).48 Their goal was to raise the Armenian population, Armenian landholdings, and Armenian life generally back to, or beyond, their prewar levels. Predictably, this campaign placed women at the heart of the Armenian state-building project, both as real actors and as objects of discourse. To lower infant and juvenile mortality, columns in Armenian periodicals urged mothers to employ scientific childrearing practices. The pages of the press poured out detailed information on topics such as babies’ breastfeeding, getting enough fresh air, and wearing proper clothing. Women’s journals organized “pretty baby” contests to encourage mothers, while journalists and professionals urged young women and men to marry early and produce many children.49 Abortion became tantamount to treason. The medical journal Hay Puzhag (Armenian Healer), which published regular reports on how many marriage certificates the Patriarchate had issued, characterized abortionseeking women as “egoist and undutiful.” Equating abortion with infanticide, it addressed the Armenian woman: “Keep away all thoughts and principles of degeneration and devote yourself to your procreation, which is your sole duty. It is the complete fulfillment of this duty that will realize our ideal.”50 The push to realize this “ideal” justified policies that would have been nearly unthinkable before the war. Most significantly, Armenian authorities— political and religious leaders as well as intellectuals and professionals— were willing to change the coordinates of legitimate belonging. Both the administrative practices toward and discourses about rescued pregnant women and their offspring reveal that, facing a perceived existential crisis, Armenian authorities changed the criteria for inclusion in the national collectivity by making room for one group that would otherwise have been excluded—babies of Muslim fatherhood.51 In the summer of 1920, Dr. Yaghoubian, in charge of the Armenian Red Cross hospital where X was incarcerated, delivered a lecture at the center of the Armenian Women’s Association. The doctor argued that depopulation was the “worst enemy of a nation’s development” and therefore had to be fought with every medical, social, and material effort. After emphasizing mothers’ unique role in realizing this national goal, he encouraged nonrefugee women and girls to become nurses and midwives so that they could prevent abortion and infanticide among refugees, especially rescued women and girls. He stated: We respect the offspring of lawful marriages and curse free love. The Armenian baby has to be parented by those who have been lawfully married in the Armenian Church. But we cannot dismiss some unfortunate realities of life; many of our deported sisters and wives became mothers by force, with the fear of the knife or death; many in half-dead state have become victims of savage races’ pleasures. . . . A smart midwife

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knows how to support and console such poor women and will try to conceal [dzadzgel] their shame; more importantly, she will hinder them from aborting their unlawful baby. Big governments build special shelter houses for such unlucky people and they protect the children born out of wedlock [aboren] with special laws. We, however, as the tiniest of small nations, how can we exterminate our fetuses, even though they may be out of wedlock?52 That Yaghoubian considered products of rape to be “our fetuses” is telling, especially since it follows his statement that the fathers of these babies belonged to a “barbarian race.” Given that Muslim and Christian traditions as well as law asserted that progeny was made up primarily of a fathers’ substance and thus belonged to him, Yaghoubian’s statement, like many vorpahavak practices, stood in stark contrast to established practice. Women were now seen to have a creative and not just a receptive role in procreation; they were assumed to have engendered, not simply contributed to, their progeny. This response to rape babies of mixed heritage has by no means been the universal one in similar cases. For instance, in Bangladesh during the 1971 War of Independence, Pakistani army personnel raped about two hundred thousand women. In the war’s aftermath, the Bangladeshi state elevated the rape victims to the status of “war heroines” but excluded their children by categorizing them as Pakistani. It was decided that the presence of these babies would adversely affect the country’s social structures and perpetuate painful memories of the war, and abortion and foreign adoption, once criminal and unaccepted, were made legal.53 In contrast to the Armenian case, where women were not allowed to abort their rape babies, Bangladeshi women were “de-kinned” from their offspring by coerced abortions or forced surrender of their babies for adoption. What is perhaps most unique about the Armenian case is the lack of discussion of, let alone opposition to, the changed paternity rules. A contrasting case is that of the enfants du barbare, children of French women raped by Germans during the First World War. There were fierce debates in France over how to handle their situation: what to do with the babies, where they belonged, and to whom, and so forth. Some people, including even Catholic priests, advocated abortion in the name of racial purity. Others remained antiabortionists and argued that women’s contribution to procreation was greater than men’s; that, in any case, French “civilization” in a child would triumph over its German barbarism; and that France needed nationals.54 The lack of Armenian opposition to the Patriarchate’s policies might be explained by the felt immanency of the realization of the “national ideal.”55 Perhaps the establishment of Mayr Hayasdan (Mother Armenia) justified these extraordinary measures. Moreover, the genocidal nature of the conflict might have influenced both the policy and the absence of discussions.

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We know, for another comparative instance, that after the Rwandan genocide the state forbade the international adoption of rape babies. Rwanda needed citizens, yes, but it did not go so far as to ban abortions. In fact, the former ban on abortions was temporarily relaxed so rape victims could obtain them. The Armenian administration’s attitude regarding abortion, then, stands in contrast to comparable cases.

Marriageability and Re-Masculinization The alarmist tone of the above quotation from Dr. Yaghoubian reveals that not all refugees shared “the national agenda.” Many of those on whom motherhood was forced simply did not want to have the babies, which, again, is a common response among genocidal rape survivors. Among the Bosnian Muslim and Rwandan Tutsi women, scholars documented soaring rates of self-induced abortion, infanticide, neglect, and child abandonment.56 For Armenians, the rare anecdotal evidence comes from the writings of Constantinopolitan women, both Armenian and American, who worked with the rescued. They recount how some rescued pregnant women, like X, were relieved when their newborns died (and may have neglected them intentionally)57 and that some explicitly asked orphanages to take their Muslim children from them so that they would not kill them as a rapist’s offspring.58 One, after being told that she was at an early stage of pregnancy, responded to her American doctor simply, “Very well, I will send it to its father.”59 Under vorpahavak policy, authorities would not allow the baby to be sent to the father; it would be sheltered in an orphanage and baptized by the church.60 Clearly, the “half-caste” progeny represented radically different things for their mothers, for their surviving maternal relatives, and for Armenian leaders. The Turkish state and public seem to have overlooked the issue, focused as they were on the threat of losing fully Muslim orphans, and integrated women, to the enemy. Available evidence indicates a general pattern of surviving Armenian relatives being eager to get back their kidnapped women and children, whether or not they had been raped, or wanted to return, or had given birth to “wrong children.” Indeed, they insisted on their return. But relatives sometimes did not want to bring “the enemy’s children” into their midst. One survivor in an interview recalled a woman who had been abducted at age twelve, was married to a Turk, and had two children by him. After the genocide, her father found out where she was and wrote to her to say that he wanted her to rejoin him but did not want her children, “who belonged to a Turk.” “She kept crying and crying, not knowing what to do. Finally she decided to leave and went to Beirut; once in Beirut, she could not take it without her children but was too afraid to return. . . . She was miserable.”61

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Some mothers chose, and managed, to escape with their children. One of these women lived in the same refugee camp as Kerop Bedoukian, who was then a young boy. In his memoirs Bedoukian recalled that this 22-year-old’s one-year-old son not only made impossible her marriage to an Armenian but “also branded her as a whore.” This did not prevent the woman’s skillful mother from marrying her to a handsome Armenian man from America, who had arrived in Istanbul to find a wife. The American was first engaged to his future wife’s sister, a pretty eighteen-year-old who the mother apparently used as bait. Bedoukian told the story of the family sleeping in the next blanket in the refugee camp: “Their mother arranged it that he should go to America with the older girl and the child, to help them get settled or possibly find her a husband, before he sent for his own bride. Three months later, the bride-to-be flew into a great rage on receiving the news that her fiancé had married her sister. The mother tried to explain that it was easy to find her a husband, but for her sister it was another matter. If she loved her sister, she should be glad. Well! She did not love her sister and she did not mind telling the world about it!”62 For many rescued women and refugees, a proper marriage represented the most viable way to exchange the transient life for some sense of stability and security.63 Here the goals of the rescued and their rescuers converged. For the vorpahavak agenda, marrying younger women and girls to Armenian men and placing their children with Armenian families as foster children or adoptees represented an ideal solution: they retrieved what the Turks had stolen and employed them to reproduce Armenianness. Given the pre-genocide ideas about purity and propriety, Armenian leaders had their work cut out for them in packaging rescued women as proper marriage candidates and future mothers. As early as 1916, Hairenik (Fatherland), a daily of Boston, announced, “An Armenian man should not reject a woman who has been abducted since she is an innocent victim who cannot be held morally responsible for her condition.”64 A contributor to Hay Gin warned that victims should not be blamed for the actions of “bestial packs of wolves that deflowered and mutilated Armenian virgins.”65 As norms regarding paternal lineage were suspended, so too did ideas about proper marriageability change, at least temporarily. But unlike the new lineage norms, changing conceptions of marriageability seem to have been shared by the mass of the people—and for good reason. Men in the diaspora, at least, were eager to marry rescued women. In 1919, out of the seventy women sheltered in the Scutari Women’s Shelter for the Rescued, twenty-one married within their first year there.66 Most went to America, many as picture brides. Many of the grooms had settled in North America before the war and had lost their families in the Ottoman lands during the war. A survivor observed that men “returned from America for the sole purpose of marrying orphans and widows to help heal and make them forget their tragic past, to give them a new home, and to create new hope—this was the least they thought they could do for those who had survived.”67 Even

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the tattoos that many of the rescued bore on their faces and hands (an Arab and Kurdish tradition) did not necessarily leave them unmarriageable.68 Understandably, many of these women hated their tattoos, and some disfigured themselves trying to burn them away with acid.69 There were various reasons that men living abroad, many of them disempowered labourers, might want to marry rescued orphans, including a desire to partner with someone in their daily struggles and for someone to help them overcome the loss of their families. At the same time it was a way to re-masculinize. This was true for those men who rescued women, ordered their rescue, fathered them, married them, or married them off. Armenian men who were made to witness violations of their families, or were away when they were violated, now had a chance to do what they felt they should have been doing before: protecting their women and minors. While saving them, either literally or by marrying them despite their defiled state, they also saved themselves from feelings of guilt and emasculation. In addition to the chance to regain people and land, vorpahavak offered a chance to reclaim manhood. The relevant discourse employed not an explicit language of masculinity but rather a vocabulary of protection (der ganknil in Armenian, sahip çıkmak in Turkish), benevolence, honour, and revenge.70 For instance, when in 1921 the Armenian Church in Baghdad received hundreds of recently reclaimed children, among them many girls tattooed according to Bedouin traditions, the priest collectively baptized them “Vrezh” (Vengeance).71 The patriarch himself, suiting his function as parens patriae, took the guardianship of his unprotected flock quite seriously.72 All the rescued, even the prostitutes that he had saved in Mosul where he had been exiled, were the nation’s “unfortunate sisters” (darapakhd kuyrer) and, crucially, they still represented the honour of the nation, the precious Armenian national honour that men had to protect by marrying them.73 The first such wedding in Istanbul was narrated by Anayis (Yeprime Avedisian), another prominent native Armenian woman of Constantinople, an activist and writer, and a colleague of Kalemkiarian, Bahri, and Hayganush Mark. The wedding celebration took place nowhere other than in the Neutral House, and the patriarch presided over the church ceremony, which Anayis described: Only rarely has a wedding ceremony been this serious and impressive. When the priest, amidst the smell of incense, was blessing the young groom and the bride in white, we felt as if we recognized the smells of martyrs’ souls, who (forgetting their tortures, the suffering of exile, the blood-filled lakes that they had seen, and the whip of the merciless Turkish sergeant) came, with the company of little angels, to witness the wedding of a sweet budding flower who was going to sprout on top of embellished mountains and give beautiful flowers so that the nation/race [tsegh] continues invincibly.74

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The passage is striking from a number of perspectives. The bride wore the colour of purity despite having been rescued from a Muslim household where she probably served as a wife or concubine. Her dressing in white negated her previous experiences, thus denying, both literally and figuratively, the rapist or perpetrator the right to violate an Armenian girl’s virginity and, by extension, to dishonour what she represented: the honour of her male relatives and her nation. This was also a retaliation ceremony which the martyred dead would have watched with satisfaction: the wedding of two Armenians, including one who could have been lost to Turks forever, meant that Armenianness would continue despite the Turks. That this sweet budding flower was going to sprout atop “embellished mountains” takes us directly to the issue of land. Given that the ultimate territorial symbol of the Armenian historical homeland had long been Mount Ararat, the reference to mountains connected the reclamation of land to the reclamation of people: the two sides of the overall Armenian project.

Conclusion Subsequent historical developments soon revealed that this Armenian project had failed: no Greater United Armenia was ever established, and the independent republic in the Caucasus lasted only twenty months until its Sovietization in December 1920. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty not only did not grant Armenians any territory, but also declared a general amnesty for war crimes, effectively pardoning the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. Turkey, including the territories that Armenians claimed was part of their own homeland, was declared a republic that October, ending the rule of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. The vorpahavak ended in the autumn of 1922, when the first Turkish officers victoriously entered Istanbul, and the Allied evacuation began. Many people associated with the vorpahavak, including the patriarch, Zaruhi Bahri, Anayis, Arakel Chakerian, and others who had worked in collaboration with the occupation forces, fled the country in panic or were expelled.75 The League of Nations’ rescue effort ended in Istanbul in 1926 and in Aleppo in 1927. Thousands of Armenian women and children who continued to live in Muslim households or orphanages, by their choice or against it, lived and died as Turkish citizens of Muslim religion. Some found ways to resume relationships with their former Armenian relatives, exchanging letters, money, or even visits.76 Their stories remained mostly silent and silenced in Turkey until recently, when their memories began to resurface via their grandchildren.77 For Armenians, orphans and orphanhood have remained central both to a defining national discourse and as a focus of humanitarian and charitable giving. By contrast, the attention given to the rescued girls and women slowly receded.

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This chapter has remembered them as policy objects of a post-genocide nation that badly needed to people a promised land. Females were incredibly valuable assets both during the war—for the perpetrator group and afterward for survivors—because of not only what women possessed but also what they lacked. Wombs reproduced the group physically while their holders reproduced it socially. However, what rendered women golden for opposing nationalists with similar goals was the perceived female deficiency for naming: while performing these vital functions for each group’s present and future, women could define neither the group nor their progeny. The same nationalist ideology that portrayed women as the national core, the nation’s essence and critical difference, remained patriarchal at all times, denying women any creative potential. Perceived genetic ineffectiveness, then, needs to be added to the list of reasons why women may matter to national, ethnic, and state projects. Herein lies the central problematique of this chapter: why a patriarchal structure like that of the Armenian community in Istanbul, led literally by a patriarch, reversed these assumptions in order to make space for those who would have otherwise been left out. Like many other states or statelike structures facing real or imagined existential crises, Armenians passed emergency laws and crafted new technologies with gendered implications. The temporary change in Armenian descent rules led to many children of Muslim fatherhood growing up Armenian. While some “hidden Armenian” grandparents in contemporary Turkey have become publicly visible, we have yet to learn the story of X’s baby boy who, if he survived without breast milk, would have continued life as an Armenian.78

Notes 1 This is a shortened version of my earlier article: Lerna Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 1 (2013): 522–53. 2 Kalemkiarian’s piece, “Badmutiun me Tornigis Hamar, Yerp vor Medznas,” written in New York in 1927, is included in her Giankis Jampen (Antilias, LB: Dbaran Gatoghigosutian Giligio, 1952), 293–8. 3 Ibid., 296. 4 Yergamia Deghegakir H. G. Khachi Getr. Varchutian, 1918 Noy. 18-1920 Teg. 31 (Biennial report of the Armenian Red Cross in Constantinople covering the years from November 18, 1918 to December 31, 1920) (Constantinople, Ottoman Empire: M. Hovagimian, 1921), 30. 5 We lack studies of Armenian abortion laws, practices, and rates in the Ottoman Empire that would allow us to fully assess how unprecedented the relief workers’ attitude was. 6 Kalemkiarian, “Badmutiun,” 297.

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7 This paper refutes Vahé Tachjian’s claim that responsible Armenian leadership displayed “opposing forms of prejudice towards two integral components of . . . nation: positive towards orphans one the one hand, and negative towards some abandoned women and girls on the other hand.” Vahé Tachjian, “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 1 (2009): 60–80, here 65. 8 See Ekmekcioglu, “A Climate for Abduction, A Climate for Redemption,” 525–34. 9 Zaven Der Yeghiayan, My Patriarchal Memoirs (Barrington, RI: Mayreni Publishing, 2002), 181–2. 10 One such girl, then nineteen, remembered how, with two male guards, she would go to Muslim households, and even when the lady of the house claimed that there were no “infidels” (non-Muslims) in the house she would forcibly enter the household and find children hidden in basements. Eliz Sanasarian, “Gender Distinction in the Genocidal Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 4 (1989): 449–61, here 455. Oral history interviews conducted with survivors in their old age, mostly in the United States, have not been explored with regards to vorpahavak efforts. 11 Der Yeghiayan, My Patriarchal Memoirs, 185. According to an April 1921 report prepared by the Patriarchate in Istanbul, the total number of kidnapped Armenians reached 63,000 out of which 6,000 were in Istanbul and its environs. Hikmet Özdemir, Ermeniler: Sürgün ve Göç (Ankara, TR: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2004), 123. A similar table was reproduced in Amenoun Daretsuytse 15 (1922): 261–5. 12 Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 19201927,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1315–39, here 1315. 13 Vahram Shemmassian, “The League of Nations and the Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors,” in Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 94. 14 İbrahim Ethem Atnur, Türkiye'de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi (1915-1923), (Ankara, Turkey: Babil, 2005). 15 The patriarch mentions this but provides no numbers. Der Yeghiayan, My Patriarchal Memoirs, 181. 16 For a comparative discussion, see Andrea Parrot and Nina Cummings, Sexual Enslavement of Girls and Women Worldwide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). 17 The March 1919 report, “La liberation des Femmes et Enfants Nonmusulmans en Turquie,” was prepared by Zabel Yeseyan, the most distinguished Armenian female writer and activist of the time, for the Armenian National Delegation in Paris; Nubarian Library, National Delegation archives, 1–15, correspondence February–March 1919, report titled 1919, 9. 18 One interviewed survivor said that a few Armenian men who had been in the United States during the war returned to Adana (in southern Turkey) to search for their wives. They found their wives, but all had married Muslim men. The

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interviewee described the meeting of these women with their former and new husbands: “[The former wives] all came dressed like Turks with veils on their heads. [Their Muslim husbands] told [their Armenian husbands] that anything can happen during wartime. . . [The Armenian women] would not leave— one of them said that if they returned, people would say that they have been Turks’ wives and would mock them. [The Armenian husbands] all gave up. . . . They remarried. And all of them returned to the U.S.” Katherine Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 13. 19 Aram Haygaz, Bantog (Beirut, LB: Mshag, 1967), 157. 20 Yesayan, “La liberation.” 21 See my points regarding Zaruhi Bahri’s cases in this article. 22 The Turkish press of the time and subsequent Turkish nationalist historiography interpreted Armenian women’s reluctance as proof of their initial consent or eventual happiness, thus implying that women were happier among Muslims than among Armenians. Armenian historiography, on the other hand, has simply ignored reluctant women and children, reflecting the biases of male memoirists. 23 Zaruhi Bahri, “Inch er Chezok Doune?” Aysor, May 3, 1953. 24 From February 8, 1919, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, DH-ŞFR, 96/100, quoted in Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları, 174. 25 Ibid., 180. 26 Ibid., 181. 27 Based on research on refugee women’s memoirs, and Karen Jeppe’s reports of incoming women refugees to her Reception House in Aleppo, Victoria Rowe reached a similar conclusion to mine, that the “Armenian and international community made it a policy to offer women the chance to return to the Armenian community.” Victoria Rowe, “Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival,” in Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, eds. Panikos Panayi and Pipa Virdee (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 164. 28 Zaruhi Bahri, Giankis Vebe (Beirut, LB: n.p., 1995), 189. 29 Ibid., 191. 30 Halide Edib Adıvar accused Armenians of brainwashing Muslim children; The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halidé Edib (London: Century Co., 1928), 17. Armenians, though, accused her of Islamizing Armenian children. For an example, see Aghavnie Yeghenian, “The Turkish Jeanne D’Arc: An Armenian Picture of Remarkable Halide Edib Hanoum,” New York Times, September 17, 1922. Edib herself fostered a Kurdish (or possibly Armenian) war-orphan girl at home. İpek Çalışlar, Halide Edib: Biyografisine Siğmayan Kadın (Istanbul, TR: Everest, 2010), 158. 31 Even though written from a markedly Turkish nationalist perspective (Armenians are the only kidnappers of the story), the following work remains informative: Funda Selçuk, “Türk Basınında Ermeni Sorunu (Mayıs 1919-Aralık 1920)” (MA thesis, Ankara Üniversitesi, 2003).

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32 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 760–2. 33 Dikran Zaven, “Miamedutiun E Khosil Kuynerou Vra Guyri Me, Khghji Vra Chartarari Me,” Zhoghovurti Tsayne, June 26, 1919. 34 Nazan Maksudyan, “The Fight over Nobody’s Children: Religion, Nationality and Citizenship of Foundlings in the Late Ottoman Empire,” New Perspectives on Turkey 41 (Fall 2009): 151–80. 35 Anahid Tavitian, Yergo Dziranner (Arvesde yev Engerayin Dzarayutiune) (Beirut, LB: [published by her family], 2006), 168. 36 Chakerian personally returned the daughter of a certain Tevfik Efendi, whose daughter was mistakenly retrieved by vorpahavaks and kept for four days. Though Chakerian apologized to Tevfik Bey, another vorphavak agent named Garabed subsequently took the daughter away again, and again Chakerian returned the daughter to her father. Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları, 165. 37 Archives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, PCI Bureau, 3d report, March 6, 1922. 38 Bahri, Giankis Vebe, 187. 39 Even discussions within the National Assembly confirm this point, but only additional study will give us a deeper understanding of the policy. Armenian critics, including the assembly’s chairman, Tavit Der Movsesian, accused the Neutral House for acting like an “inquisition court,” selling the orphans or taking bribes from their Muslim families. A Patriarchal commission found these accusations unfounded, but this did not prevent T. Der Movsesian from repeating them in his memoirs: T. Der Movsesian, Kaghutahayutian Hamar Yelits Miag Aghake (Paris: Jarian, 1935), 196–207. 40 Haygaz, Bantog, 138. Responsible authorities’ memoirs either refute the accusations or remain silent on the topic. The head of the Armenian National Relief Committee in his memoir italicized the following: “I affirm that we had no wish to Armenianize any Turk’s child.” Madteos Eblighatian, Giank Me Azkis Giankin Mech: Aganadesi Yev Masnagtsoghi Vgayutiunner 1903–1923 (Beirut, LB: Antilias, 1987), 185. 41 Haygaz, Bantog, 138. 42 See Haroutioun Khachadourian, “Hayun Vrezhe,” Amenun Daretsuytse 15 (1921): 134–5, here 135. 43 Eric Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1313–43. 44 Der Yeghiayan, My Patriarchal Memoirs, 205. 45 The patriarch assured him that the survivors living in foreign lands intended to return to the fatherland at first opportunity, and did not even try to improve the condition of their (temporary) homes (ibid., 207). 46 Fatma Ülgen, “Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian Genocide of 1915,” Patterns of Prejudice 44, no. 4 (2010): 369–91, here 376. 47 Hayganush Mark, “Khmpakragan: Hay Ellank,” Hay Gin 1, no. 3 (December 1, 1919).

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48 My discussion here excludes psychological dimensions of achieving or trying to achieve recuperation by physically reproducing; that is, substituting the dead with the living. We lack numbers to assess whether a “baby boom” occurred among Armenians following the genocide. 49 A contributor to Hay Gin proposed that the Armenian Patriarchate should collect extra taxes from singles and decrease taxes on families with multiple children. Armenag Salmaslian, “Pnagchutiun Yev Amurineru Vra Durk,” Hay Gin 1, no. 21 (September 1, 1920). 50 Original emphasis. Dokt. Derorti, “Ur Gertas Hay Gin,” Hay Puzhag 3, no. 9 (July 1922): 150. 51 If need be, Armenian spokespersons could even make room for Muslims in new definitions of Armenianness. See Sam Kaplan, “Territorializing Armenians: Geo-Texts and Political Imaginaries in French-Occupied Cilicia, 1919–1922,” History and Anthropology 15, no. 4 (2004): 399–423. 52 Dr. Yaghoubyan, “Hay Gnoch Aroghchabahagan tere Hayasdani Mech III,” Hay Gin 1, no. 19 (August 1, 1920). 53 Nayanika Mookherjee, “Available Motherhood: Legal Technologies, ‘State of Exception’ and the Dekinning of ‘War-Babies’ in Bangladesh,” Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research 14, no. 3 (2007): 339–54. 54 Ruth Harris, “The ‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War,” Past and Present 141 (1993): 170–206. 55 The rare intellectual who refused to consider Armenian motherhood sufficient for eligibility for national belonging received little attention and no corresponding policy. For instance, “Yeghernayin Harsanik,” in ‘Yerevan’i Daretsuytse (Constantinople, Ottoman Empire: n.p., 1920), 32. 56 Patricia Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda,” Human Rights Quarterly 30 (2008): 561–78. 57 Kohar Mazlmian, “Prni Mayrutian Bardatrvadz Teradi Mayreru Hokegan Vijage Yev Anonts Yerakhanerun Zrganknere,” Hay Gin 1, no. 11 (April 1, 1920). For interviews with survivors who had to neglect or abandon their rape babies, see Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 101–2. 58 Zaruhi Kalemkiarian, “Zavage,” in her Giankis Jampen (Antilias, LB: Dbaran Gatoghigosutian Giligio, 1952), 272. 59 Mabel Elliott, Beginning Again at Ararat (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1924), 25. 60 For example see Varteres Garougian, Destiny of the Dzidzernag: Autobiography of Varteres Mikael Garougian (Princeton, NJ: Gomidas Institute, 2005), 96. 61 Quoted in Derderian, “Common Fate,” 14. 62 Kerop Bedoukian, Some of Us Survived: The Story of an Armenian Boy (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 201. 63 See Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Armenian Refugee Women: The Picture Brides 1920–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 3 (1993): 3–29, here 3.

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64 Ibid., 22, fn. 54, 29. 65 Nargiz Kipritjian, “Goch Me Hay Mayrerun,” Hay Gin 1, no. 10 (March 16, 1920). 66 Yergamia Deghegakir H. G. Khachi Getr. Varchutian. 67 John Minassian, Many Hills Yet to Climb: Memoirs of an Armenian Deportee (Santa Barbara, CA: J. Cook, 1986), 236. 68 This does not mean that everyone accepted them wholeheartedly. Yet various survivors and Western social workers mention how tattoos did not pose a fundamental obstacle to integration. See Mae M. Derdarian and Virginia Meghrouni, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide (Los Angeles, CA: ATMUS Press, 1997), 249. For a narrative construction of a tattooed woman’s attempted return to her original family after thirty-seven years, see Hourig Attarian, “Lifelines: Matrilineal Narratives, Memory and Identity” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2009). 69 A recent documentary, despite its ungrounded overgeneralizations, provides a glimpse into the life of a tattooed woman who continued her life as an Armenian. Suzanne Khardalian, Grandma’s Tattoos (New York: Cinema Guild, 2011). 70 The best-remembered precedent for such an attitude was Kegham Der Garabedian’s marriage to Gulizar, a young girl who had recently rescued herself from the household of the Kurdish Musa Bey, into which she had been absorbed in 1893. For a sample of how Armenians remembered the case in postwar Istanbul, see “Musa Bey yev Gulizar,” Amenoun Daretsuytse 10–14 (1916–20): 151–2. 71 Sahag Mesrob, “Yegherni Hushartsan, Anonts Anune,” Aravodi Darekirk 1 (1921): 83–6 (this is an almanac). 72 The patriarch would not easily give away orphaned girls; even to their Armenian relatives, even when they provided extensive proof of their relationship. Haygaz, Bantog, 133. 73 Hayganush Mark, “Khmpakragan: Angial Gineru Hamar,” Hay Gin 3, no. 4 (December 16, 1921). 74 Anavis (Yeprime Avedisian), Hushers (Paris, FR: [published by her family], 1949), 264. 75 Fifty thousand Greeks and Armenians left the city between October and December of 1922. Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974 (Athens, GR: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1983). 76 For a collection of interviews with their grandchildren, see Ayse Gül Altinay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar (Istanbul, TR: Metis, 2009). 77 It should be noted that among Turkish Muslim citizens in Turkey, having Armenian ancestry is still widely considered shameful and the person potentially disloyal. “Ermeni dölü” (“Armenian sperm”) is still used as an insult. 78 The only known past case that acquired public attention, to a certain extent, was in 1962. A certain Ms. Pilibosian, born as Muslim but raised in Armenian orphanages in Istanbul and France, visited Turkey from France and found her Turkish siblings. The case was the lead story in a popular Turkish daily: Esin Talu, “Akşam Köşesi/ Madam Pilibüsyan’ın Macerası,” Akşam, December 17, 1962, cover page and 5.

11 Wartime Rape and Its Shunned Victims Olivera Simić1

“Sexual violence in conflict knows no geographical borders. From Colombia to Bosnia, from Cambodia to Democratic Republic of Congo; it knows no gender or age limits. Men and boys have also been victims, and I have met survivors as young as six months and women as old as 70 years.”2 “There are certain things you just don’t believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s.”3 “That night they came again. They separated fathers from their sons. They took us on the podium and told us to strip off our clothes. I cannot tell you what they forced us to do to each other . . . they were particularly excited to see father and son doing it.”4

Sexual Abuse of Men: Mapping the Problem Over the past two decades, sexual violence in war against women has become a focus of feminist scholarship, policymaking, legal proceedings, and global media coverage. The first international reports on rampant sexual abuse of women and girls in armed conflicts emerged in the 1990s. Soon after, rape and sexual violence in war were recognized in gender-neutral terms for the first time in history as crimes against humanity and war crimes.5 That is, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) acknowledged that such violence was not merely a by-product of war but that it could constitute genocide and that it could be carried out against women and men.6 Such

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recognition was unprecedented and represented a legal victory partially won due to the world attention to rape on a mass scale during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Ever since this legal recognition, feminists scholars and activists have been preoccupied with reminding governments around the world that they need to prosecute those accountable for sexual violence. The recent Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in War7 repeated (yet again) that the plethora of United Nations (UN) resolutions promulgated in the past decade with an aim to combat sexual violence in war still need to be acted upon.8 While these efforts are welcomed and long overdue, they have focused almost exclusively on female sexual abuse in warfare, while male experiences of sexual assault have, for the most part, been ignored and silenced.9 This form of violence against males, as some scholars argue, is still surrounded by “a wall of silence.”10 So far this issue has not attracted much academic, policymaking, or media attention. Sporadic and scant literature has not succeeded in generating wider interest in this topic. Sexual violence in which males are victims, rather than perpetrators, has not attracted many feminist researchers either.11 Dubravka Zarkov was among the first feminist scholars to analyze maleon-male rapes in the context of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). In her groundbreaking paper, published in 1997, Zarkov notes that the number of scholarly papers that analyze males as victims of sexual violence “could be counted on the fingers of one hand”: People who have lived through armed conflicts around the globe know that sexual violence against men, even if random and with fewer victims than violence against women, has been a fact of war for hundreds of years. In the contemporary wars, however, it is a rather well-hidden fact. Experts in the field of conflict studies, or aid workers, may know about it. But a war rape of a man was never a major story in the press, nor castration in a war camp on the evening television news. I had hardly heard of it myself.12 Male rape in a wartime context is still a taboo subject that is little understood and largely underreported, undertheorized,13 and underinvestigated.14 As Adam Jones argues, this issue “has barely begun”15 to receive sustained attention, although the practice “is old as history itself”16 and occurs regularly in armed conflicts.17 While recent international attention to male sexual violence in war18 may attract more scholarly interest into this topic, the popular belief that only women can be raped seems to be widespread.19 Sexual violence against women has been “normalized,” but sexual violence against men is not. This normalization of violence against women has had consequences, because, as David H. J. Morgan argues, such a process may be so effective that violence against women “disappears” and is ignored since it is taken for granted.20 On the other hand, the protection of strong traditional gendered norms and the reluctance to disrupt them have fostered a culture of silence

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surrounding sexual abuse of men. Elizabeth Stanko argues that popular images of violence thus rest upon unquestioned (normalized) understandings and constructions of gender, and of masculinity in particular, that perpetuate a myth of the inevitability of men’s violence and, conversely, the abnormality or pathology of violence by women.21 This chapter is concerned with the male victims of sexual abuse and torture in the Bosnian War, which became notorious for the rape of women. The international and local media, researchers, and scholars widely reported on sexual violence against women by all warring parties, in particular by Serb soldiers. Although the Bassiouni Report, the first comprehensive report on sexual violence in war in BiH, acknowledges widespread sexual abuse and torture of Bosnian men, too, this topic has not attracted considerable interest.22 The “rape victim identity” is exclusively reserved for women; the gender stereotypes that portray women as rapable and powerless, and men as un-rapable and powerful, were (as in other armed conflicts) firmly embedded in the tale of the Bosnian War.23 This chapter aims to unpack the silence surrounding men who were sexually abused in Bosnian detention during the war (1992–5). It raises questions of silence and denial when it comes to male rapes and the consequences and effects that disinterest in this form of sexual violence produce in the long term in the lives of survivors. This chapter will first provide a brief overview of masculinity studies and theorize connections between hegemonic masculinities, power, and domination, in which hegemonic and victorious masculinities (in the context of the Bosnian War) utilized sexual torture to subordinate camp detainees’ masculinities.24 This chapter will then turn to an analysis of the local Bosnian grassroots initiatives to assist male survivors. Although there is acknowledgment that men and boys have been subjected to sexual violence during the war, a strong patriarchal culture in BiH and societal unwillingness to recognize male survivors as “victims” of sexual torture has resulted in no ongoing and long-term programs or assistance for this category of victims. This chapter will draw on an interview with Midheta Oruli, a general secretary of the Association of Camp Inmates in BiH (Savez logoraša u Bosni i Hercegovini), undertaken in Sarajevo in July 2014. The chapter will argue that sexually tortured men have not been recognized as “victims” and, as a consequence, have not received either material or symbolic reparation.

Hegemonic Masculinities and Maleon-Male Sexual Abuse Although the international human rights community developed set concepts and norms that defined sexual violence as an instrument of armed conflict, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide,25 the current recognition and

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construction of sexual war crimes in humanitarian, legal, and scholarly circles are typically gendered.26 Constructions of wartime sex crimes have been highly gendered, with analysis of wartime rape focusing solely on the victimization of women while leaving men visible only as agents of violence. This essentializing of gender roles that fails to recognize males as victims of sexual violence in armed conflicts27 has been analyzed and problematized in scholarly literature.28 Dubravka Zarkov argues that portraying men only, and always, as offenders and never as victims of rape (and other forms of sexual violence) is a very specific gendered narrative of war, which eventually labels who “can or cannot be named a victim of sexual violence.”29 Any attempt to dismantle this gender power dynamic (in which women are victims and men are perpetrators) may threaten to dispel firmly established gender stereotypes. So, even when sexual violence in war against men and boys has been briefly mentioned, males are often juxtaposed to female victims and brushed over with the usual conclusion that “women much more than men”30 suffer gender-based violence.31 Due to the sheer number of women who experience sexual violence, coupled with the little material that exists on male-on-male violence, the issue tends to be “relegated to a footnote.”32 According to Nancy Dowd, while feminist theory “has been increasingly critical to differentiate among women”33 and to examine the intersectionality of gender with race, class, age, and/or sexual orientation, male victims are presented in much legal theory largely as a group that is universal, almost undifferentiated.34 As such, the men who are sexually abused are not only virtually ignored as victims, but they are also homogenized. According to Adam Jones and Augusta Del Zotto, the elite discourses and practices that exclude men’s experiences overall are reproduced by the nongovernmental sector too. According to their study, in 2001, there were 4,076 nongovernmental groups that addressed war rape and other forms of political sexual violence.35 Out of this number, only 3 percent mentioned the experiences of males at all in their programs and informational literature.36 Such disinterest in the topic stands in sharp opposition to recent data on this form of abuse. Sexual violence against men and boys, including rape, sexual humiliation, sexual torture, mutilation of the genitals, sexual enslavement, and forced incest, has been reported in at least twenty-five recent armed conflicts across the world.37 Male rape, according to Lara Stemple, “flourishes” in peacetime (prisons) and in armed conflicts (detentions).38 For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 23.6 percent of men in the eastern region of the country have been the victims of sexual violence.39 The prevalence of rape of men is underreported partly due to the extreme stigma and humiliation attached to sexual abuse of males.40 It is also concealed by victims’ shame in speaking out and by a society that is not willing or prepared to listen.41 Men who have been raped are seen as weak and less than men. They risk not only ostracism by their community but also criminal prosecution

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because they may be seen as homosexual, which is a crime in thirty-eight African countries.42 Male victims are less likely to appear in court, and those who do are cast away in their villages and called “bush wives.”43 Mukuli, a male victim from Congo reported, “I’m laughed at. The people in my village say: ‘You’re no longer a man. Those men in the bush made you their wife.’”44 Despite growing empirical evidence that sexual violence against men and boys is used for strategic purposes during armed conflict, such offences have not yet become visible in transitional justice processes.45 Hilmi Zawati argues that male rape in wartime is not about satisfying the perpetrator’s sexual desire but is primarily an assertion of power, dominance, and aggression.46 This is because masculinity is not only about men’s relationships with women but also about men’s relationships with other men. The key thread in theories of masculinity is that masculinity is not unitary but diverse; hence, it is necessary to use the plural masculinities. Michael Kimmel argues that “all masculinities are not created equal,”47 and that a dominant, “hegemonic” heterosexual masculinity is at the top of a hierarchy. More dominant masculinities must have a subordinate in order to thrive. Raewyn Connell, the leading scholar in masculinities studies, argues that masculinity is practiced in a way that embodies dominance and inequality.48 Being a man is defined in opposition to others; it is produced and reproduced in relation to the “Other,” women in particular.49 The so-called “feminized” male “Other” is likewise vital to the construction of modern masculinities, especially hegemonic ones.50 Scholars have observed that the construction of gender identity is never fully achieved; thus, masculinity needs to be constantly proved and reasserted through male affirming practices.51 Criminologists, such as James W. Messerschmidt, have argued that crime is an extension of “normal” masculinity. Messerschmidt sees the overrepresentation of men among perpetrators of crimes as explained by crime being another way of “doing gender.” He also notes how gender intersects with class and race.52 In his view, “[c]rime by men is not simply an extension of the ‘male sex role.’ Rather, crime by men is a form of social practice invoked as a resource, when other resources are unavailable, for accomplishing masculinity.”53 In other words, the men who perform their masculinity by engaging in crime are often (but not always) unable to realize their masculinity in more traditional ways. In the military context, male rape is about the final act of an enemy’s defeat and control.54 Historically, when a dominant, victorious soldier sexually penetrated his enemy, it was believed that the victim would lose his manhood and could not be a ruler or a warrior anymore.55 In times of war and/or conquest, women have been raped to humiliate the men they are related to, who are often forced to watch the assault.56 Men are also raped in order to humiliate and emasculate not only the victims but their ethnic group as well.57 Through this emasculation, the male victim is deconstructed as male and constructed as a woman. As Skjelsbæk argues, an important aspect of conquest involves turning male enemies into feminized subjects.58

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Male rapes in armed conflict usually include rape in detention camps or prison-like conditions.59 In these camps, inmates are often forced to penetrate each other or, less commonly, inmates are raped by opposite warring party soldiers. The gendered positioning of rapists and victims is something that Jones finds worthy of analysis; it allows a rapist to be confirmed in his active, hegemonic, and heterosexual masculinity while victims who are in the “passive” (receptive) role are feminized.60 Traditionally, in a military male environment, male-on-male rape has long been accepted and even celebrated.61

Surviving the Silence According to the Association of Camp Inmates (ACI) in BiH, approximately 1,350 detention camps and other detention facilities existed during the war: 656 for Bosniaks, 523 for Serbs, and 173 for Croats.62 Thousands of male inmates passed through these camps, and, according to some reports, several hundred men were subjected to sexual violence, including sexual assaults and castrations.63 Due to such infamous evidence of abuse, the BiH war resulted in a groundbreaking and thorough accounting of sexual violence against males during conflict.64 While case law has been scattered when it comes to male rape, there have been several cases that detail sexual abuse, torture, and mutilation that occurred in Serb camps for Bosniak camp inmates and, in two cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in Bosniak camps for Serb inmates.65 Zarkov argues that sexual assaults against men in war in the Balkans “were committed mainly in detention, and by all warring sides.”66 The Bosnian War was also the first armed conflict for which an international body, the Commission of Experts created by the UN Security Council, was formed in order to investigate sexual violence.67 The Experts’ Final Report, commonly known as the Bassiouni Report, published in 1994, is perhaps the most extensive source of information on male sexual victimization during the Balkan Wars: Sexual assaults were also practised against men: one witness saw prisoners forced to bite another prisoner’s genitals. In addition, 10 of those interviewed had witnessed deaths by torture and seven of the group had survived or witnessed mass executions (there or in other camps). . . . Another ex-detainee told of suffering electric shocks to the scrotum and of seeing a father and son who shared his cell forced by guards to perform sex acts with each other.68 In 1993, Amnesty International confirmed the evidence collected in the Bassiouni Report:

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It should . . . be mentioned that Amnesty International has received allegations of instances of male prisoners in detention under the control of both Serbian and Bosnian Government forces being made to perform sexual acts with each other. However, these reports are few in comparison with the numerous reports and allegations of rape or sexual abuse of women.69 The ICTY also instituted a Sexual Assault Investigation Team, which included investigations into the rape of men during armed conflict.70 The team reported that men were castrated and otherwise sexually mutilated, forced to rape other men, and forced to perform fellatio and other sex acts on guards and one another.71 Accounts of sexual abuse were often graphic and included severe torture, genital mutilation, and forced incest.72 These acts were performed not only to inflict enormous pain but also as a concerted attempt to humiliate the victims73 and destroy their reproductive role, heterosexual activity, and identification.74 Undermining or rather destroying male victims’ identification with hegemonic forms of masculinity further disempowered and feminized them. Alongside these reports, the first international war crimes trial involving charges of sexual violence included sexual violence against male prisoners in the Omarska concentration camps in 1995.75 Acts of rape and sexual violence were recognized as forms of torture in the Tadic76 and Celebici77 judgments by the ICTY. In terms of domestic prosecutions involving sexual violence against males, the BiH court has finalized only four cases so far.78 In all four cases, the accused either ordered or forced the camp inmates themselves to perform sexual acts on each other. For example, Zijad Kurtović, a member of the Bosniak army, was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison for, among other things, forcing two brothers and members of the Croatian Defence to strip naked and have oral sex.79 Still, as of today, there have been no reports or research that have identified the approximate number of male victims or the needs and challenges this group of survivors has encountered in postwar BiH. While it is known that the abuse was “significant and widespread,”80 it is not known how many men survived sexual abuse in Bosnian War camps. Like women, men who survive sexual torture may experience shame and humiliation and, due to their gender, are largely discouraged from talking about their emotions. Since they may find it even more difficult than women to acknowledge what has happened to them, it is suspected that the reported cases of sexual violence against males are a fraction of the true number of cases.81 Men in BiH do not talk about these experiences publicly, and only a small number of them have registered as victims of sexual abuse with the ACI in BiH. The ACI has around 55,000 members, but this number is not final since former camp inmates still come to the office to register. A few men have been willing to come forward about sexual abuse and torture they survived, and some of these testimonies have been collected in the book Torture in Bosnia

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and Herzegovina During the War 1992-1995.82 Oruli noted that since 2006, when she first met a Bosniak man who survived sexual rape and torture in a Serb camp, around 100 men have come to register with the association and to ask for assistance in receiving a status of “civil victim of war.”83 According to Oruli, male sexual torture is: still a taboo topic in BiH . . . and in the first few years after the war I never met such survivors. . . . As a victim of war, I heard stories and rumours about it but never met anyone in person . . . and then I met a man whom I befriended as a fellow camp inmate. I was curious why he did not marry, why he does not have a girlfriend and after two years he confessed to me. He was one of around 86 [Bosniak] men according to our data who survived sexual abuse in Dom Kulture in Zvornik . . . he never shared this info with anyone . . . he told me that he was haunted by his memories of that event; that he had no one to talk to about it and that he could not form any sexual relationship with women. . . . According to our experiences men survivors of sexual abuse who were married could not engage in sexual intercourse for at least 4, 5 years after that event. Such physical and psychological damage to men is inflicted intentionally so they can no longer play their role in group reproduction.84 Male survivors encounter profound psychological difficulty in expressing their masculine sexuality,85 and some describe impotence and difficulty in establishing relationships and trusting others.86 Often they do not ask for psychological or psychiatric assistance for a long time or do not seek help at all.87 But when they do open up, health workers may be the first to hear their stories, rather than lawyers. However, many trained health workers, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, have not been trained to recognize male sexual abuse or are not aware of it.88 This complexity is often compounded by the fact that sexual torture may not leave visible scars, which may further divert the attention of medical workers from this type of brutalization.89 As Zihnija, a Bosniak ex-combatant and survivor of sexual abuse, recently reported: “When you lose your arm or leg that is something you can see. But, no one can see when your soul hurt. Maybe I look strong as a rock, but I am only a wreck. Just a wreck.”90 While some authors, such as Zawatti, argue that the civilian community ought to encourage male survivors of rape to break their silence and address their specific needs,91 Bosnian civil society activists are cautious and aware that by speaking up male survivors will not necessarily achieve anything else other than stigma and ostracism. Edin Ramulić, from the Association of Women in Prijedor, “Izvor,” stated: The victims of such crimes do not expect anything positive to happen to them if they speak up. First, perpetrators probably won’t be punished,

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or won’t be punished enough. For example, Dragan Kolumdžija, a guard in the notorious camp in Omarska who was present when the majority of camp inmates were sexually abused and then later killed, got only 3 years imprisonment in ICTY and he returned to live in his home in Prijedor. Second, there is no one to help these people and at the same time they will be exposed to bullying and psychological abuse from all those who did not survive it, who do not understand it, from their own community—we will all look at them with suspiciousness and pity. Simply, the community is not ready to listen to them and that is the reason why they are silent—because we are not ready to listen and do anything for them.92 Why would men tell the truth about sexual abuse if they are stigmatized for doing so? Trauma healing goes beyond alleviation of personal traumas and includes not only the mending of social relationships and divisions between communities but also the validation of experience and reparation.93 As Naomi Aratza argues, truth telling without reparation or prosecution seems “meaningless for victims.”94 Male survivors cannot be expected to reveal their intimate suffering and pain without any mechanisms in place to deal with the effects of such violations and without proper reparation and rehabilitation measures.95 This is so because the aim of reparation programs is not only to validate experiences and confirm that offences have occurred but also to assist victims in coping with their impact by providing concrete programs and measures.96 Lack of community concern, along with male victims’ hesitancy to report the crimes, makes reporting and making any assumptions about numbers of males assaulted almost impossible. Due to the stigma attached to sexual violence, it is highly unlikely that males would be willing to identify themselves or to organize or mobilize themselves publicly to claim reparations.97 According to Murat Tahirović, former president of the ACI: It is difficult to talk about this topic. You know how the society we live in operates. It is shaming and embarrassing to talk about it. It is difficult for women and let alone for men to talk about it. In patriarchal society as in ours, people are bullied. So, it is hard to know how widespread it was and that is the problem. In longer and more amicable conversation, they [men] will admit that [sexual abuse]. But very rarely anyone talks about it.98 One of the former camp inmates who witnessed the sexual violence and castration of his fellow inmate reported how difficult it is to talk about this issue: All of us, 200 men who heard this horrific human wail cried . . . when I think of that day I cannot sleep . . . it is extremely difficult to talk to those

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who survived a torture especially when we know that no one cares about us . . . what we survived was worse than hell . . . feelings of humiliation are forever with you and are killing you slowly.99 Sexual torture of males during the war in BiH is not understood and lacks an effective healing response and communal intervention. Male victims are not encouraged to talk; on the contrary, due to a lack of any state or NGO attention, they may be encouraged to infer that their experiences are “unworthy of redress.”100 In BiH there are no programs developed for male survivors of rape, and there is currently no law for victims of torture.101 The associations of camp inmates have given their inputs in draft law on torture which, among other things, requests free legal aid, free health assistance, and the establishment of state funds for reparation for each day spent in camp.102 Apart from material reparation, the associations request symbolic reparation, such as marking and remembering dates and places where crimes took place. According to Jasmin Mešković, the president of the ACI in BiH, the request to mark and remember dates and places where crimes were committed “does not cost the government anything . . . that is important to all former camp inmates—that they can go and visit places of crimes and pay their respects without any troubles.”103 Material and symbolic reparation, restitution, and rehabilitation are all-important and, as Ruth Rubio-Marín argues, assume that harm has been done and that loss has unreasonably happened.104 Reparations are possibly “the most victim-centered justice mechanism available and the most significant means of making difference in the lives of victims.”105 So far, the government of BiH has been reluctant and unwilling to accept to meet the ACI demands for material and symbolic reparation. A handful of NGOs, such as the Center for Victims of Torture and the Association, have offered ad hoc material, legal, or health assistance to former camp inmates. As the World Health Organization has reported, while legal and social networks often do exist in local communities for women and girls who have been victims of sexual torture, there is hardly anything comparable for male victims.106 In BiH, some local women’s organizations, such as “Medica Zenica” and “Žena žrtva rata” (although specialized to support women) offer legal and psychosocial support to male victims of sexual torture too.107 A number of male rape survivors have received a status of civilian victim of war under its category of “sexual violence victim” with the help of local women’s NGOs.108 Some countries, such as Peru and Guatemala, have had debates about whether reparations for victims of sexual violence should be reserved for women only. While Peru eventually decided to include both genders equally, in Guatemala, it was decided that only female victims of sexual abuse would qualify.109 Such a decision is not only discriminatory but reinforces the popular notion that only females can be subjected to such offences,

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underscoring gender stereotypes in which women are victims and men can be nothing but perpetrators.110 A victim-centered and harm-centered reparation agenda cannot ignore the fact that men and boys are often victims of sexual violence and that their victimization deserves unequivocal acknowledgment.111 In BiH there was no debate as to whether both genders could qualify for and laws that enable civilian victims of war to apply for reparation (thus making them gender-neutral).112 By December 2013, 770 victims of sexual violence had been registered in the Federation of BiH.113 Although it is not cited in NGO reports, among those registered civilian victims of sexual violence, 114 are males.114 The fact that this is not an insignificant number and has not been publicly reported confirms the reluctance of local community organizations as well as government institutions to recognize sexual violence against men as a legitimate issue in their reports and activities. As Susanne Buckley-Ziestel argues, the status of “ideal victim” has been preserved for women, who have the opportunity to use the victim position to speak up but also to claim a number of benefits, rights, and entitlements.115 They can qualify for reparation—material and symbolic.116 Women can acquire the identity of victim, which is an important step in gaining control over one’s life, and making sense of crime.117 They are seen as vulnerable, passive, helpless, inferior, and in need of protection, which is in line with traditional models of passive femininity and active masculinity. Indeed, acknowledging males as “victims” would go contrary to such models and dispel popular gender stereotypes. The BiH society is not ready to disrupt this view and fails to acknowledge male victims of torture; more importantly, it fails to accept their vulnerability and need for reparation for the harm they suffered. The ACI is one of three local NGOs in the Federation of BiH118 that the BiH government has authorized to grant individuals the status of “camp inmate” and “sexually abused and tortured person” during the war in 1992–5. Upon receiving such status, individuals can apply for monthly compensation. During my visit to the ACI office, Oruli showed me a few thick folders, each containing the personal files of men who came to seek assistance in obtaining a status of victim of sexual torture. Each file has full medical documentation, a personal testimony, and other relevant documents. All these files have been archived according to date and year, starting from 2006, when the ACI encountered its first case of sexual abuse and torture. Oruli explained the difficulties that male victims faced in seeking assistance: When they come to our office, we ask them to tell us their stories. I type up each of them and file them in. Sometimes, our clients would cry and could not tell the story and then I would tell them to go home and write it on a piece of paper and then bring that paper to me . . . I recently had a man who was sobbing uncontrollably and we had to stop the interview. I told him and others who cannot tell their story to ease their soul and

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write up everything that happened to them at their own home . . . it is very hard to tell these stories. But, people find strength to tell them so such evil never happens to anyone again.119 The people who work for the ACI invest significant emotional labor in registering and uncovering cases of male wartime sexual abuse. The private and confidential interviews are held in one of the three ACI rooms. Each new member has to fill in a form with personal details and details of the torture they survived. In order to avoid burying issues such as sexual assault and rape under the general rubric of “abuse” or “torture,” the ACI asks members to tick the box if they experienced sexual abuse.120 Under the rubric “the Type and Form of Torture in Camp,” men can choose to circle “sexually abused” among other options such as “physically tortured,” “beaten,” “psychologically tortured,” “deprived of food,” “robbed,” and “used as a living shield.”121 The new male members of the ACI are composed of both locals and nonresidents. Currently, the ACI is processing more nonresident cases than local cases. According to Oruli, these men may have a greater interest in receiving the status of civilian victim of war, and they often seek assistance with full medical documentation. Oruli reported that if these men receive this status, “it increases men’s benefits for early retirement by twenty percent in their countries of residency, so there is an incentive to come and open up about it.” The recognition of male victims therefore has important psychological aspects as well as material ones. The recognition of this status also affords male victims health and housing support, which are crucial for men’s recovery and rehabilitation. Although the ACI does such vital and unique work, it struggles with funds, as do many other NGOs in BiH. When finances permit, the ACI provides legal aid and assistance with finding employment, housing, or food. The association has recently applied for government funds to open the “Psycho-Legal Center.” However, the association has received no response to their application. The needs of male victims are great, since many of these people are not fit for work, are disabled, are elderly, have no health insurance, are often returnees, and have psychological disorders. The grassroots initiatives in BiH are vital for the male survivors as they are often the only service providers men can turn to for help. The BiH government is long overdue in supporting local associations that provide assistance to male survivors. Still, even if the state does support the ACI, it has a larger obligation to provide legal material and other assistance to its most vulnerable population—whether female or male.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that male rape is a marginalized topic at best and utterly neglected at worst. Victims of male rape are shunned, and

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the crimes against them are not fully recognized as violations and crimes against humanity that need to be prosecuted and punished. There seems to be a lack of willingness to accept the fact that male-on-male rape, as Janine Natalya Clark argues, “is no less a crime than the rape of wom[e] n.”122 This chapter has offered some reasons why such a crime may be viewed as less of a crime. Recognizing male survivors of sexual torture as victims may disrupt gender power dynamics in which women are seen as victims and men as perpetrators. Societal unwillingness to abandon gender norms and stereotypes and to accept males as victims of sexual torture needs to be systematically addressed. Only such willingness can bring visibility to the victims and their rehabilitation. Sexual torture leaves males, as is the case with female victims, with lifelong trauma. However, it triggers some specific gender traumas that are unique to men, such as feeling emasculated, feminized, and stripped of their sense of manhood. It is very important to understand how the performance of masculinities in a wartime context contributes to male-on-male violence but also to its denial and cover-up. Victorious masculinities and subordinated masculinities are the main protagonists of violence and victimhood. Male rape is about power and control, and each group that is in a position to exercise it will use that opportunity to exert its dominance. Seen as protectors and warriors, males who survive some form of sexual torture will rarely publicly confess what happened to them. Not allowing men to express their vulnerability brings stigma and shame and results in silence and denial. Governments, policymakers, communities, and scholars have the responsibility not only to encourage men to talk about their difficult experiences in a space free of stigma and shame but also to guarantee recovery and reparation for the victims of this heinous crime.

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editor, Professor Amy Randall, for her thoughtful and valuable comments on previous drafts of this chapter. My thanks also are due to Ms. Zoe Rahtus, Dr. Karen Crawley, and Dr. Kylie Burns for their insights and comments. 2 Zainab Bangura, “History’s Greatest Silence,” in Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict (London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, November 2013). Available online: http:​/​/pre​​vents​​exual​​viole​​ncein​​confl​​ict​.t​​umblr​​.com/​​post/​​ 68968​​72147​​5​/his​​torys​​-grea​​test-​​s​ilen​​ce​-un​​-spec​​ial (accessed June 13, 2014). 3 Will Storr, “The Rape of Men: the Darkest Secret of War,” The Guardian, July 17, 2011. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.theg​​uardi​​an​.co​​m​/soc​​iety/​​2011/​​jul​ /1​​7​/the​​​-rape​​-of​-m​​en (accessed July 6, 2014). 4 Nidžara Ahmetašević, “Zločin o kojem se ne govori,” H-Alter, April 20, 2006. Available online: http:​/​/h​-a​​lter.​​org​/v​​ijest​​i​/lju​​dska-​​prava​​/zloc​​in​-o-​​kojem​​​-se​-n​​e​ -gov​​ori (accessed June 2, 2014).

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5 Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic, Case No. IT—96-23T, Judgement, February 22, 2001. This was the first indictment in history of international war crimes prosecutions with charges based solely on crimes of sexual violence against women. 6 The Akayesu case was the first conviction ever for genocide and it was the first time that an international tribunal ruled that rape and other forms of sexual violence could constitute genocide. It was also the first conviction of an individual for rape as a crime against humanity. Prosecutor v Jean-Paul Akayesu, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Trial Chamber I, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement, September 2, 1998, ¶ 731. 7 The Summit was held in London in June 2014. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​ .gov​​.uk​/g​​overn​​ment/​​topic​​al​-ev​​ents/​​sexua​​l​-vio​​lence​​​-in​-c​​onfli​​ct. 8 Such as, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, S/Res/1325 (2000); United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820, S/Res/1820 (2008); United Nations Security Council Resolution 1888, S/RES/1888 (2009). 9 N. King, Speaking Our Truths: Voices of Courage and Healing for Male Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). 10 Augusta DelZotto and Adam Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime: Human Rights Last Taboo?” paper presented to the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (New Orleans, LA: ISA, March 23–27, 2002). Available online: http:​/​/ada​​mjone​​s​.fre​​eserv​​ers​.c​​om​/ma​​​ lerap​​e​.htm​ (accessed May 5, 2014). 11 On the contrary, some argue that acknowledgment of male rape victims, with respect to lobbying for more inclusive policies and laws, “is part of the backlash against feminism.” See Phillip Rumney and Martin Morgan-Taylor, “The Construction of Sexual Consent in Male Rape and Sexual Assault,” in Making Sense of Sexual Consent, eds. Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 12 Dubravka Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media,” in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, eds. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (London: Zed Books, 2001), 72. 13 Adam Jones, “Straight as a Rule: Heteronormativity and Gendercide, and the Noncombatant Male,” Men and Masculinities 8 (2006): 462. 14 Eric Stener Carlson, “Sexual Assault on Men in War,” The Lancet 349 (1997): 129; Heloise Goodely, “Ignoring Male Victims of Sexual Violence in Conflict is Short-Sighted and Wrong,” Chatham House, January 10, 2019. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.cha​​thamh​​ouse.​​org​/e​​xpert​​/comm​​ent​/i​​gnori​​ng​-ma​​le​-vi​​ ctims​​-sexu​​al​-vi​​olenc​​e​-con​​flict​​-sho​r​​t​-sig​​hted-​​and​-w​​rong. Jane Freedman, Gender, Violence and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo (London: Routledge, 2016). 15 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 458. 16 DelZotto and Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime.”

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17 Pauline Oosterhoff, Prisca Zwanniken, and Evert Ketting, “Sexual Torture of Men in Croatia and Other Conflict Situations: An Open Secret,” Reproductive Health Matters 12 (2004): 75. 18 See, for example, the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in War (held in London, UK in June 2014) that had a separate panel on men and boys in war. 19 Carlson, “Sexual Assault on Men in War,” 129. 20 David Hopcraft John Morgan, “Masculinity and Violence,” in Women, Violence and Social Control, eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (London: McMillan, 1987), 180–3. 21 Elizabeth A. Stanko, Louise Marian, and Debbie Crisp, Taking Stock: What Do We Know About Interpersonal Violence? (Surrey: ESRC Violence Research Programme, Royal Holloway University of London, 2002), 33. 22 United Nations Security Council, Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), S/1994/674 (May 27, 1994). 23 Dubravka Zarkov, “War Rapes in Bosnia: On Masculinity, Femininity and Power of the Rape Victim Identity,” Tijdschrift voor Criminologie 39, no. 2 (1997): 140–51. 24 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 454. 25 B. Allen, Rape Warfare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 26 DelZotto and Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime.” 27 Lara Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” Hastings Law Journal 60 (2008–9): 612. 28 Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, “Introduction,” in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors?, eds. Moser and Clark, 3; Elise Feron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones (Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018); Maria Eriksson, Defining Rape: Emerging Obligations for States under International Law (Leiden, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2011). 29 Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man,” 69. 30 E. Rehn and E. J. Sirleaf, Women, War and Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peacebuilding (New York: UNIFEM, 2002), 10. 31 The intention of the author here is not to deny this well-established fact but to emphasize some possible reasons why this issue has not attracted much scholarly (or other) attention. 32 Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict,” The European Journal of International Law 18 (2007): 253. 33 Nancy E. Dowd, “Masculinities and Femininities Legal Theory,” Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender and Society 23 (2008): 203. 34 Ibid., 204. 35 DelZotto and Jones, “Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in Wartime.” 36 Ibid.

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37 Wynne Russell, “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys,” Forced Migration Review 27 (2007): 22. See also, Sarah K. Chynoweth, Julie Freccero, and Heleen Touquet, “Sexual Violence against Men and Boys in Conflict and Forced Displacement: Implications for the Health Sector,” Reproductive Health Matters: An International Journal on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights 25, no. 1 (2017): 90–4. 38 Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” 605. 39 L. Melhado, “Rates of Sexual Violence Are High in Democratic Republic of the Congo,” International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 36 (2010): 210. 40 IRIN, “Analysis: Rethinking Sexual Violence in Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Integrated Regional Information Networks, August 6, 2010. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.unhc​​r​.org​​/refw​​orld/​​docid​​/4c64​​f10​71​​e​.htm​l (accessed February 18, 2013). See also Refugee Law Project, “Gender against Men” (Refugee Law Project, Video Advocacy Unit, May 2012). Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=mJS​​​l99HQ​​YXc (accessed May 30, 2014). 41 G. G. Mezey and M. B. King, eds., Male Victims of Sexual Assault (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2000). 42 Amnesty International, “Making Love a Crime: Criminalization of Same-Sex Conduct in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Amnesty International USA, June 24, 2013. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.amne​​styus​​a​.org​​/rese​​arch/​​repor​​ts​/ma​​king-​​love-​​a​ -cri​​me​-cr​​imina​​lizat​​ion​-o​​f​-sam​​e​-sex​​-cond​​uc​t​-i​​n​-sub​​-saha​​ran​-a​​frica​ (accessed June 2, 2014). 43 Dunia Prince Zongwe, “The New Sexual Violence Legislation in the Congo: Dressing Indelible Scars on Human Dignity,” African Studies Review 55 (2012): 44. 44 Jeffrey Gettleman, “Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims,” The New York Times, August 4, 2009. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.nyti​​ mes​.c​​om​/20​​09​/08​​/05​/w​​orld/​​afric​​a​/05c​​​ongo.​​html?​​_r=0 (accessed August 14, 2014). “Bush wives” has a particular meaning and weight in African countries, and is used to refer primarily to women who were abducted and forced to be “spouses of soldiers.” In the landmark verdict against members of the Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front, the court found all three men guilty of “forced marriage.” Prosecutor v Brima, Kamara, and Kanu, Appeal Judgement (February 22, 2008). Special Court for Sierra Leone, ¶ 184 (finding that forced marriage is “not predominantly a sexual crime” and overruling the Trial Chamber’s conclusion that forced marriage may constitute the crime against humanity of sexual slavery). Also, Ms. Zainab Hawa Bangura stated that “wives were constantly sexually abused, physically battered during and after pregnancies, and psychologically terrorised by their ‘husbands’ who thereby demonstrated their control over their wives.” Prosecutor v Brima Ors, Special Court for Sierra Leone Trial Chamber Judgement. Partly Dissenting Opinion of judge Doherty, ¶ 15. This marks the first time that anyone has been convicted of “forced marriage” as a crime against humanity in an international criminal tribunal. 45 Susanne Buckley-Ziestel, “Redressing Sexual Violence in Transitional Justice and the Labelling of Women as ‘Victims,’” in Victims of International Crime:

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An Interdisciplinary Discourse, eds. T. Bonacker and C. Safferling (The Hague, NL: Asser Press, 2013), 98. 46 Hilmi Zawait, “Impunity or Immunity: Wartime Male Rape and Sexual Torture as a Crime Against Humanity,” Torture 7 (2007): 33. See also Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict,” 270. See also, Philipp Schulz, “Gendered Postconflict Justice: Male Survivors of Sexual Violence in Northern Uganda,” in New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art, and Memory, eds. Arnaud Kurze and Christopher K. Lamont (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 92. 47 Michael Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of a Gender Identity,” in The Masculinities Reader, eds. Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank Barrett (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 271–2. 48 Raewyn W. Connell, Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 49 Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia.” 50 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 453. 51 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1999). 52 James W. Messerschmidt, Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 185. 53 Ibid., 85. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 34. 56 Ibid. 57 Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man,” 78. 58 Inger Skjelsbæk, “Sexual Violence in Times of War: A New Challenge for Peace Operations?” International Peacekeeping 8, no. 2 (2001): 69–84; L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave 2001). 59 Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” 611. 60 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 459. 61 Ibid. 62 Center for Democracy and Transitional Justice, “Mapping Detention Camps in BiH: 1992-1995” press release, February 2014. Available online: http:​/​ /cdt​​p​.org​​/en​/d​​okume​​ntova​​nje​-l​​ogora​​-drug​​ih​-za​​tocen​​ickih​​-o​bje​​kata-​​u​-bih​/ (accessed March 14, 2014). 63 Nela Porobic Isakovic, “UN Action Against Sexual Violence: MPTF Office Generic Final Programme 1 Narrative Report Reporting Period: From 11.2010 to 06.2013,” Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office. Available online: http:​ /​/mpt​​f​.und​​p​.org​​/docu​​ment/​​downl​​​oad​/1​​1738 (accessed March 18, 2014). 64 M. Cherif Bassiouni and Marcia McCormick, “Sexual Violence: An Invisible Weapon of War,” Occasional Paper No. 1 (Chicago: International Human Rights Law Institute, DePaul University College of Law, 1996), 2.

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65 Prosecutor v Delalic et al., Judgement, Case No IT-96-21, November 16, 1988. In the Celebic prison camp, on one occasion guards put a burning stick in the genitalia of Vukasin Mrkojevic and Dusko Bendzo. On another occasion, inmates were forced to perform fellatio on each other. Vaso Dordjic described an event when Esad Landzo forced him and his brother to fellate each other in camp before the other inmates. In the Naser Oric case, on one occasion a guard, after torture, urinated in Nedeljko Radic’s (a Serb inmate) mouth, forcing him to swallow urine (Prosecutor v Naser Oric, Judgement, Case No IT-03-68-T, June 30, 2006, 154–5). There are other documentary testimonies and personal narratives in which Serb inmates testify about sexual violence and torture performed by Bosniak and Croat soldiers; see for example, Obrad Bubić, Ljetovanje na Golgoti (Prosvjeta, 2004) and Strahinja Živak, Logor Čelebići: 1992-1995 (Edicija Srpske, 1997). 66 Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man,” 71. 67 Ibid. 68 United Nations Security Council, Final Report of the Commission of Experts. See IV, Sec F: “Rape and Other Forms of Sexual Assault.” 69 Amnesty International, “Bosnia-Herzegovina: Rape and Sexual Abuse by Armed Forces,” Report No. EUR 63/001/1993 (January 21, 1993), 3. 70 Carlson, “Sexual Assault on Men in War,” 129. 71 Ibid. 72 Prosecutor v Dusko Tadic, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber Judgement, Trial Chamber II, Case No. IT-94-1-T, May 7, 1997, ¶ 198, 206, 238. A prisoner in a Bosnian Serb prison camp was forced, in front of other detainees, to bite off another prisoner’s testicle. See also, M. Olujic, “Embodiments of Terror: Gender Violence Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12 (1998): 31–50. 73 Bassiouni and McCormick, “Sexual Violence: An Invisible Weapon of War,” 18. 74 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 455. 75 In the Omarska camp, held by Serb forces, one of the detainees was forced by uniformed men, including Duško Tadić, to bite off another detainee’s testicles. See Prosecutor v Dusko Tadic (Trial Chamber Judgement) (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber II, Case No. IT94-1-T, May 7, 1997). 76 Prosecutor v Dusko Tadic (Trial Chamber Judgement) (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-94-11, February 10, 1995). 77 Prosecutor v Delalic, Mucic, Delic, and Landzo (Trial Judgement) (International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber, Case No. IT-96-21-T, November 16, 1998), ¶ 770. 78 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Combating Impunity for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Progress and Challenges: An analysis of criminal proceedings before the Court of

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Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2005 and 2013 (Sarajevo, BiH: OSCE, 2014), 42. 79 Prosecutor v Zijad Kurtović, Case No. X-KR-06/229, Second Instant Verdict, March 25, 2009 (Kurtović Appeal Judgement). 80 According to Senadin Ljubović, a psychiatrist from Sarajevo who treated a number of male survivors; see Žana Kovačević, “Silovani muškarci rijetko progovore o svojoj trauma,” Radio Slobodna Evropa. Available online: http:​ /​/www​​.slob​​odnae​​vropa​​.org/​​conte​​nt​/pl​​p​_sil​​ovani​​_musk​​arci_​​rijet​​ko​_go​​vore_​​ o​_svo​​joj​_t​​​raumi​​/2239​​393​.h​​tml (accessed July 22, 2014). 81 World Health Organization, “Reproductive Health During Conflict and Displacement,” Report no. WHO/RHR/00.13, ch. 17. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.who.​​int​/r​​eprod​​uctiv​​e​-hea​​lth​/p​​ublic​​ation​​s​/RHR​​_00​_1​​3​_RH_​​ confl​​ict​_a​​nd​_di​​splac​​ement​​/RH​_c​​​onfli​​ct​_ch​​apter​​17​.en​​.htm(accessed March 20, 2002). 82 The book is published only in its local language. The original title is Torture u Bosni i Hercegovini za vrijeme rata 1992-1995 (Sarajevo, BiH: Savez logoraša BiH, 2003). 83 Author interview, Sarajevo, July 9, 2014. Midheta’s story is also one of victimization, as her own mother and brother were killed in front her and their home in Goražde in 1992. 84 Jones, “Straight as a Rule,” 461. 85 Ibid. See also Janine Natalya Clark, Rape, Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice Challenges: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 86 For more on consequences, see Oosterhoff, Zwanniken, and Ketting, “Sexual Torture of Men in Croatia and Other Conflict Situations,” 71. 87 Kovačević, “Silovani muškarci rijetko progovore o svojoj traumi.” 88 Carlson, “Sexual Assault on Men in War,” 129. 89 A. Burnett and M. Peel, “The Health of Survivors of Torture and Organised Violence,” British Medical Journal 322 (2001): 608; M. Peel, “Men as Perpetrators and Victims,” in Rape as a Method of Torture, ed. M. Peel (London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004), 55, 65. 90 Bojan Arežina, “Pretukli su me, razderali mi hlače i zabili lopatu u mene,” Vecernji List April 1, 2014. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.vece​​rnji.​​hr​/ba​​lkan/​​ pretu​​kli​-s​​u​-me-​​razde​​rali-​​mi​-hl​​ace​-i​​-zabi​​li​-lo​​​patu-​​u​-men​​e​-930​​412 (accessed April 13, 2014). 91 Zawatti, “Impunity or Immunity: Wartime Male Rape and Sexual Torture as a Crime Against Humanity,” 40. 92 Kovačević, “Silovani muškarci rijetko progovore o svojoj traumi.” 93 Mark Forshaw, ed., “Global Trauma and Scripture Engagement,” Report (Wayne, PA: Global Scripture Impact, May 2012), 27. 94 Naomi Aratza, “The New Landscape of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century—Beyond Truth versus Justice, eds. Naomi

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Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. See also, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone (Accra, Ghana: Graphic Packaging, 2004): “Truth telling without reparations could be perceived by the victims as an incomplete process in which they revealed their pain and suffering without any mechanism in place to deal with the consequences of that pain or to substantial alter the material circumstances of their lives . . . without adequate reparation and rehabilitation measures, there can be no healing or reparation.” Ruth Rubio-Marín, “The Gender of Reparations in Transitional Societies,” in The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations, ed. Ruth Rubio-Marín (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 89. Ruth Rubio-Marín, “Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual and Reproductive Violence: A Decalogue,” William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 19, no. 1 (2012): 81. Ahmetašević, “Zločin o kojem se ne govori.” Blog, Sefik Kilic comment, December 17, 2006. Available online: http:​/​/koz​​arac.​​ba​/mo​​dules​​.php?​​name=​​ News&​​file=​​artic​​le​​&si​​d​=163​​2. Ibid. Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” 637. It was rejected by Parliament in February 2014. Zoran Matkić, “BiH još uvijek bez zakona o žrtvama torture,” Slobodna Evropa, March 31, 2013. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.slob​​odnae​​vropa​​.org/​​ conte​​nt​/pl​​p​-bih​​-jos-​​uvije​​k​-bez​​-zako​​na​-o-​​pravi​​ma​-zr​​tava-​​to​rtu​​re​/24​​94330​​6​ .htm​l (accessed June 2, 2014); see also note 108. Ibid. Rubio-Marín, “The Gender of Reparations in Transitional Societies,” 89. UN Secretary-General, “The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies,” Report, UN Doc.S/2011/634 (October 12, 2011), ¶ 26. The report calls upon the Security Council to “encourage further attention to the rights of victims to a remedy and reparations, in particular the victims of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence.” World Health Organization, “Reproductive Health During Conflict and Displacement,” 111. This is true for neighboring Croatia, where male victims of wartime sexual abuse use programs and assistance for female rape survivors organized and offered by NGOs for women. See, Snježana Vučković, “Poniženi i osramoćeni: Muškarci silovani po srpskim logorima- žrtve su o kojima se ne rado govori,” Dnevno, March 17, 2014. However, this has been possible for men who live in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is one of two BiH entities. The other entity, Republika Srpska (RS), does not recognize victims of sexual violence during the war as a special category of victims.

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109 Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, “Guatemala: Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations,” in What Happened to Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations, eds. Ruth Rubio-Marín and International Center for Transitional Justice (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2006), 106–7. 110 Colleen Duggan and Ruth Jacobson, “Reparation of Sexual and Reproductive Violence: Moving from Codification to Implementation,” in The Gender of Reparations, ed. Ruth Rubio-Marín, 138. 111 See UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “Working with Men and Boys Survivors of Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Forced Displacement,” Guidelines (July 2012), 10; Rubio-Marín, “Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual and Reproductive Violence: A Decalogue,” 87. 112 “Persons who have suffered sexual assault and rape are defined as a special category of civilian victims of war”: International Commission on Missing Persons et al, “Guide for Civilian Victims of War,” in International Commission on Missing Persons (Sarajevo, BiH, 2007), 5. 113 Data is from December 2013. On file with the author. 114 Document is on file with the author. 115 Buckley-Ziestel, “Redressing Sexual Violence,” 95. 116 Ibid. 117 C. G. Davis, S. Nolen-Hoeksema and J. Larson, “Making Sense of Loss and Benefiting from the Experience: Two Construals of Meaning,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 561–7. 118 The local women association “Žena žrtva rata” [Women Victim of War] and camp inmate association “Hrvatska udruga logorasa domovinskog rata u BiH” [The Croatian Association of Former Detention Camp Prisoners of the Homeland War in BiH] are the other two NGOs that can issue certificates. The Law on principles of social protection, protection of all civilian victims of war and protection of families with children (Official Gazette of the FBiH 36/99). The RS has a similar law, but determination of status of civilian victims of war is preserved for the government institutions only. 119 A written statement by male victims of sexual abuse is used in the courtrooms too. The protected witness RM-081 in Ratko Mladić trial has provided a written statement about sexual abuse and torture that he and his family survived in Rogatica Serb camp. He witnessed the sexual abuse of his then thirteen-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. He said he could never “summon up the courage” to ask his wife whether she was raped too since they were held in the same camp. FENA, “Svjedok: Nisam imao snage da pitam suprugu da li je silovana,” Oslobođenje, October 5, 2012. 120 Carlson, “Sexual Assault on Men in War,” 129. 121 The blank sample of the form that each new member needs to fill in is called “Komplet dosije” and is on file with the author. 122 Janine Natalya Clark, “A Crime of Identity: Rape and Its Neglected Victims,” Journal of Human Rights 13, no. 2 (2014): 153.

PART V

Gender, Memory, and Narratives about the Past 

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12 Memory, Gender, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma among Daughters and Granddaughters of Holocaust Survivors   Janet Jacobs

The study of the cross-generational transmission of trauma has become an increasingly important area of research as scholars of genocide and mass violence seek to explain and understand the effects of political and social catastrophe on descendants of survivors. Beginning with early studies of children of Holocaust survivors, the research in this field originated out of psychological and psychiatric investigations into the effects of genocidal trauma on children of survivors living in Israel and North America.1 These early studies looked to the ways in which descendant generations appeared to “inherit” what psychologists have termed the “survivor syndrome,” a plethora of psychosocial characteristics, including anxiety, fear, and mistrust that was conveyed to the children of traumatized parents within a tightly knit and closed family system.2 Embedded in a deeply psychological framework, the early theoretical models of traumatic transmission highlight a psychoanalytic approach that focuses on two fundamental aspects of traumatic inheritance: (1) a psychodynamic in which the child internalizes the emotions and behaviors of a traumatized parent and (2) a process whereby the child “unconsciously absorbs the repressed and insufficiently worked through Holocaust experiences of survivor parents.”3

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Building on the foundational scholarship in the field of trauma and genocide studies, the work that is presented here considers the role that gender plays in the process of traumatic inheritance, particularly with regard to daughters and granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Within this gendered analysis, the memory frames of survivors provide the socioemotional context through which daughters and granddaughters become the bearers of Holocaust memory and the descendants through whom the trauma of genocide is conveyed and re-experienced. More specifically, the chapter will examine three significant social dynamics that underlie the gendered transmission of genocidal trauma: the role of witnessing among daughters and granddaughters of survivors; the effects of postmemory on women Holocaust descendants; and the role of daughters and granddaughters as trauma carriers in public memorialization.

Research Methodology and Descendant Population The research for this chapter is based on a qualitative study of thirty-three daughters and eighteen granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Participants were drawn from Children of Survivor Organizations and referrals through snowball sampling. Although the majority of respondents were raised in the United States, five of the participants were born elsewhere and emigrated to the United States during early childhood or adolescence. Two participants were Israeli, both of whom were living in the United States at the time of their interview. While all of the participants identified as descendants of survivors, the nature of survivorship varied across families. In a small number of cases, family members survived through immigration, escape, hiding, and passing as non-Jews. In a larger number of cases, family members had been incarcerated in labor and/or death camps. Differences among the participants were also evident in the many nationalities that were represented by the families of the descendants. The parents and grandparents of the respondents included Jews from Poland, Russia, Germany, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Italy. In conducting the interviews, I used a life history approach. Following a semi-structured interview format, the interview schedule included openended questions surrounding family history and the transmission of knowledge about the Holocaust. Respondents were asked how they first learned of their family’s survivor background and who in their family passed on the knowledge and memories of the Holocaust to them. Other questions focused on their perceptions of themselves as Holocaust descendants and their connection to the traumas of their parents and grandparents. All of the interviews were conducted in confidence, taped, and then transcribed for analysis. The majority of the interviews took place in the homes of

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the participants. Because of the familial location of the interview sites, the respondents frequently shared photographs, family documents, and family artifacts that had survived the war. In some instances, the process of sharing led to tours through the participant’s home, as a daughter or granddaughter pointed out framed photographs of their parents or grandparents before and after the war and of other family members who did not survive. Thus, the settings of the interviews were, in many cases, field sites in and of themselves—spaces of memory that recalled the respondents’ ties to the family’s loss, survival, and catastrophe. In addition to the in-depth interviews, I also conducted participant observation at Holocaust commemorative events. I attended these events both as a participant and as a researcher interested in the structure of the commemorations. Other sources for this chapter include published memoirs and documentary films. Finally, it is important to note that the nomenclature surrounding descendants of survivors varies, with some individuals choosing to identify as second- and third-generation survivors and others as Holocaust descendants. For the purposes of this chapter, respondents will be referred to as children, grandchildren, and/or descendants of survivors except in those cases where the respondent has used other terms or language to describe themselves or their descendant cohort. My analysis of the intergenerational transmission of trauma begins with a discussion of the role of daughters and granddaughters as witnesses to trauma.

Witnessing Holocaust Trauma: Daughters and Granddaughters and the Transference of Memory Within genocide studies, the concept of witnessing has become an important analytic tool for assessing the multiple ways in which trauma is experienced, re-experienced, and integrated among a diverse group of archivists, documentarians, and clinical professionals who seek to revisit and record the traumas of the past. Among the most important work in the field of witnessing is that of Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and child survivor of the Holocaust.4 As a central figure in the establishment of the Fortunoff Holocaust archive at Yale University, Laub identified the importance of the listener as witness and the impact of listening on those who hear and record the traumas of others: The testimony of the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time. . . . The listener therefore by definition partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his or her traumatic past. . .

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. By extension, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a coowner of the traumatic event.5 In this way, Laub describes a process of witnessing whereby the traumatic past is transferred from the survivor to the witness/listener who then, in part, experiences the horrors and atrocities that the testimonies reveal. Although Laub’s work on witnessing and traumatic transfer is focused on the act of archiving among “professional” listeners (researchers, clinicians, and ethnographers), his insights provide an important starting point from which to consider how children and grandchildren of survivors are often the first witnesses to a terrible past. As the previous scholarship on survivor families has shown, it is often the post-genocide generations who become the “blank slate” upon which the traumatic memories are first inscribed. In her work on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Dina Wardi identifies the child/listener as the “memorial candle,” the descendant to whom a painful and traumatic past is entrusted.6 Further, the literature in the field, as well as my own study, also highlights the importance of gender in the selection of the child/listener by a survivor parent. Frequently mothers and fathers confide their traumatic histories to daughters, albeit at times through different modes of transmission, because of girls’ gender socialization.7 Here a daughter recounts a childhood filled with stories of the Holocaust: [My mother] would talk about living in the barracks and makeshift soap, what they wore, how cold it was in Poland in those night shirts. And other things. I remember being five years old [and] thinking, you shouldn’t be telling me this, I’m a little kid. Similarly, another daughter, whose mother survived Auschwitz, reported: My mother’s stories played over and over in my mind. Sometimes she would recount the same stories, adding details as she remembered them. It always gripped me as she spoke in a sad and tearful voice: “I have to tell you,” was how her stories often started. The listening sessions were not held on any regular schedule but occurred sporadically over a fifteen-year period so I must have been six or seven when they began. The stories were realistically painted and gave me the sense that I was living through them. In a somewhat different act of witnessing, a father who had survived numerous labor camps, conveyed his testimony through a means of transference that spoke, not of his experience, but that of Jewish girls and women. Although this survivor rarely spoke directly of his own traumatic past, the memory of the Holocaust was pervasive in the emotional culture of the family and in the references to things that could not be spoken. Thus, he chose a sexually explicit “story book” to convey perhaps what he had witnessed as a camp prisoner:

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We were in a used bookstore. He handed me this book, this used book. My dad said, “read this.” He never said that about any other book in my life. I usually read more than he wanted me to read so it was like, this is a strange reversal. I remember specifically what the book was called. It was pornography, I think. I was a little kid, eight or nine. Maybe it was about the camps. It was about this Jewish girl and what the Nazis did to her. It was all about sexual torture. Horrific. I remember the specific scene there about eyes being used as jewelry, blue eyes on Jews particularly being used in rings, and I’m thinking, “Oh my God. Why did my Dad give me this book? I have blue eyes. What was he telling me? Oh my God, what would have happened, that could be me?” This book captured so much of the stories that people were saying, so much detail and I felt so unprotected. For this young daughter, her role as listener was informed by a written text of gendered trauma in which sexual assault and violence became the memory frames through which the act of witnessing was carried out. Other daughters reported similar, if less explicit, experiences of child witnessing in which the content of the survivor’s memory invoked the sexual threat that surrounded women’s lives in the camps: The story that horrified me most as a young girl was my mother’s description of filing past the guards, suffering the looks, smirks, and comments exchanged among the Nazi soldiers. Because Yiddish and German are similar languages, Mother understood what was being said. “I cowered and stooped as I walked past the guards, trying to make myself unattractive so I wouldn’t be chosen for pleasure.” She noticed that a few of the prettier women had been singled out and they would disappear. What is especially important about these accounts is the references to sexual violence, memories that were rarely shared and when conveyed were treated as shameful secrets.8 In the following account, a granddaughter describes how, over time, she learned this “terrible secret” of her grandmother’s past: As long as I can remember the Holocaust has just always been something that my family knows. I think it was because my grandparents, they talk about it a lot. Like I knew Hitler from two years old. I think it wasn’t until fourth grade or something that my dad sat me down and actually explained it to me, as much as you could tell a fourth grader, what it was. And I remember breaking down and crying. I was so upset, and I still didn’t even understand the whole story. I knew something bad had happened to them. . . . My Nana [grandmother] couldn’t really talk about what happened to her. It was always just a mystery that something terrible happened and I honestly think it was my senior year in high

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school that my Dad finally told me. They beheaded my Nana’s grandpa in front of her when she was 17 or 16, around the age she was sent to the concentration camp and then she never saw anyone else in the family. She is the only survivor in her side of the family, and I know that during the camp she was raped multiple times. My dad told me because my Papa [grandfather] told him that sexual things like that happened. So we know she was raped. . . . She would never speak about it, so it was hard. As this account and others illustrate, the memory of rape and its traumatic transference takes on a secretive and hidden meaning within survivor families and, as such, rarely becomes part of the more visible family narrative of Holocaust remembrance. The invisibility of these narratives within the survivor family mirrors the erasure of memories surrounding the sexual abuse of Jewish women more broadly. Only recently has the abuse of Jewish women during the Holocaust become an important area of scholarship. Challenging the erroneous historical view that Jewish women were “spared” rape because of the Nazi criminalization of sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews,9 the current literature in the field documents violence against Jewish women and girls in hiding, in camps, during massacres in Eastern Europe, and in ghettos.10 Yet, in comparison to sexual abuse, other gendered experiences have been more openly acknowledged and therefore more easily shared with descendants. Among the most tragic and common of these recollections were those testimonies that recall the memory of loss and separation, especially between mother and child. Here a daughter recalls her mother’s arrival at Auschwitz: One of the saddest stories my mother told me was her initial arrival at Auschwitz. On the first day, she and her mother were forcibly separated, never to see each other again. Younger children were taken from their mothers and elderly women were ordered to stand with young mothers, holding their crying babies. “We pretended we didn’t know why we were separated,” my mother told me, “but we put two and two together. The elderly, feeble young mothers and babies and young children grouped together to be killed. My heart was torn out to see my mother in that group and I was never the same after that.” Similarly, a granddaughter recounts a narrative of child loss that was embedded in the tragic history that her grandmother conveyed: My grandparents didn’t talk with my mom. My mom always asked a question and my grandmother was like, no no no. I am the first grandchild. My grandmother just always talked to me. We’d be sitting at the table and she’d talk with me. I knew something had happened to my grandmother. I know her face and she’d be tense and suddenly the story would jump. She was a child and then suddenly in the forest she found a

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little girl crying and she just took her and then suddenly after like months and months they were traveling and found her aunt and she gave the child to her aunt and she said, “I don’t know if she’s still alive. I don’t know what happened to this little girl.” These memories have many tragic undertones. Although this story does not identify the grandmother as the lost young girl, her granddaughter believes that her grandmother in reality is the child who was lost, frightened and alone in the forest. Having heard this story over many years, the granddaughter developed a deep empathic attachment both to the elderly survivor and to the lost little girl that her grandmother had once been. The importance of empathy to the intergenerational transmission of trauma further helps to explain why survivors tended to turn to young girls in the family when choosing with whom to share their most painful memories.

Empathic Connection and Caretaking among Child Witnesses Research on gender and empathy provides a backdrop in which to consider the gendered aspects of traumatic transference. This research, which is most closely associated with the work of Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow, laid the foundation for self-in-relation theory.11 Central to this theoretical model is the significance that empathic attachment plays in girls’ development and especially the importance of the mother-daughter bond: Here we are describing the girl’s open relationship with the mother and the mother’s open relationship with the daughter as the beginning stage for the development of the self-in-relation. The second key aspect of this relationship is the child’s increasing capacity for mutual empathy, developed in a matrix of emotional connectedness. . . .Through the girl’s awareness and identification with her mother as the “mothering one” and through the mother’s interest in being understood and cared for, the daughter as well as the mother becomes mobilized to care for, respond to, or attend to the well-being and development of the other.12 In applying the self-in-relation model to the findings on gender and witnessing, the research on daughters and granddaughters suggests that, under conditions of memory and traumatic transfer, the act of listening creates a relational space where the exchange of memory is imbued with the exchange of emotion. Witnessing among children therefore is a multilayered process where in the events of history are transmitted through the emotions and feelings that remembrance invokes. As “the blank slate” on which the past is rewritten, the child not only records the texts of the trauma but also

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absorbs the pain and suffering that is embedded in the memory of survival. Here a daughter describes the interchange between traumatic witnessing and the transmission of feeling states between the child listener and survivor parents: As a young child, what I lived was the emotional pain in my body that I was receiving from them. Children pick up everything. My parents lived in so much grief. How can you even imagine them emotionally surviving all that suffering? I intuited the pain that they lived in and that was in their bodies. I didn’t know how to separate myself from it. In this account, the emotional boundaries between the child and the feeling states of her survivor parents become blurred. As a result, the daughter embodied both the physical and emotional pain of her survivor parents. Another powerful example of the exchange of emotion between survivors and daughters is found in the writings of Wendy Joy Kuppermann, who identifies as “a second generation ‘witness appointee’ of the Holocaust.”13 In this excerpt from her memoir, she describes through a third-person point of view, her twelve-year-old self as witness to her father’s memories: When she was twelve her father ushered her into his musty leather-bound study and bade her for once sit still, saying, “I came from a place of chill and ash, of burning dreams and limestone powder. . . .” He said, “I was barely a man, I was precisely human. I was just thirteen when my hair turned white. It was a clear crystal night when they took my mother. They took my mother with a goose step rhythm, with a heavy accent, with uniform madness. They took my mother, I heard a scream of ghosts. They took my mother, they uncovered her head, then they shot her. . . .” She looked up then, her young eyes filled with tears. She saw her lonesome father, his broken back, his open arm, his death camp devil’s tattoo, its chilling numerical sequence. She saw her brave father . . . she saw though his barbeque terror. . . . She saw his heart broken wide open to embrace all creation, and she understood him, the way a child understands intuitively without questions or answers.14 As this and other narratives reveal, the act of child witnessing among daughters and granddaughters creates a deep empathic attachment to the survivor and to the memory of pain and suffering that atrocity recollections recall. Such empathic attachment often leads to an identification with the trauma of survivorship, informing the child witness’s sense of self and imagined victimhood.

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Gender, Postmemory, and the Imagined Survivor Thus far, the chapter has considered the important role that daughters and granddaughters assume as child witnesses in post-Holocaust families and the empathic attachment that witnessing engenders. Returning once again to Laub’s exploration into the dynamic of traumatic transmission, Laub suggests that through the process of empathic listening, the trauma of the survivor is transferred to the emotional memory of the listener,15 leading to a confusion between Self and Other in which the child/listener may come to feel as if they too had lived through a difficult past that is not their own. The feminist scholar Marianne Hirsch has conceptualized this aspect of witnessing as the development of postmemory among descendants of survivors. According to Hirsch, postmemory is “a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove.”16 Further, Hirsch suggests that while this knowledge may be one generation removed, the effect of childhood witnessing carries with it an intensity that threatens to replace the child’s memories with those of the survivors.17 For daughters and granddaughters, these “inherited memories” therefore lead to a deep identification with victimhood through which the descendant becomes the imagined survivor of genocide atrocities, some of which were gendered. Accordingly, it was not uncommon for respondents to imagine themselves as prison inmates, as rape victims, and as captives of sadistic Nazi perpetrators. A daughter explains: I think the stories opened me up to being vulnerable to anything that happened. There was so much detail, gore and death. I could not tell where his life [father]ended and mine began. It was like I was there in my imagination and my dreams. This dynamic was particularly true for anxiety and fears surrounding rape and sexual threat, as the following example illustrates: I used to have bad dreams. Totally about being captured, I have to tell you that I still have Holocaust dreams from time to time, about being raped, about being rounded up, about being imprisoned. In a somewhat different expression of inherited anxiety, a granddaughter recounted stories about her survivor grandparents and the dreams of fear and victimization that haunt her: I remember when I used to go with my grandmother to see her friends, she would tell me if the person was a Holocaust survivor or not. It was like, be careful what you say, they are survivors. They had a number,

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these friends. Then I learned in increments about my own family. First, my grandfather told us that his mother died in the Holocaust and then I found out that all of his family died in the Holocaust. And then it hit home for me. This was not just something sad but a deeply personal connection. It was something I felt a very, very strong connection to always. I guess maybe I took it from them, who knows? Somehow it was in me. I was more affected by it emotionally, even among my family and my friends. I had many many nightmares on this. Until two or three years ago I can remember just being hunted by human beings, exterminated, looked for, just running away to the Swiss border, trying to pretend that I’m Christian because I have a Catholic father. In addition, the effects of postmemory were especially pronounced in those families where descendants visited sites of Nazi terror that were associated with the trauma of childhood witnessing. This phenomenon is powerfully illustrated in the account of an adult daughter who visited Bergen-Belsen with her mother during a commemorative event sponsored by the German government: It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, without comparison. It was a surreal experience. The German government took all these survivors and carted us around in tour buses and did a sightseeing trip. We went to the train tracks where they were all brought in and where their stuff was taken from them. We went to the fields where the bunkers, the mass graves are and the cemeteries. It was suspended disbelief. It’s like you want not to believe any of this is real, but you know that you have to believe it’s real even though your self protection mechanisms are saying, “this can’t be real.” . . . They had to feed five hundred of us all at one time and they rarely had five hundred chairs which meant survivors and us [the children] were sitting on the floor in places that we weren’t being managed. Frequently, I was separated from my mother, whether intentional or not, but frequently we lost each other. Then I got the hint of what it’s like to lose your mother in a crowd of strangers where they’re speaking a hundred different languages and it’s scary. I went through some of my own feelings that might have been similar to my mother’s and I know how scary it was, really scary, to the point where you just have to go someplace else in your head or you can’t survive. It is not possible. As described above, daughters who accompany their parents on such journeys become both physically and emotionally situated in the past, taking on the identity of a traumatized parent as they become immersed in a history of terror that is reenacted and preserved in these memorial spaces. Visits to these sites therefore result in a particularly powerful act of witnessing that creates a social context through which the postmemory of childhood is re-created and re-experienced in adulthood. While daughters of survivors

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were particularly vulnerable to this type of postmemory, granddaughters also reported a confusion between their own life experiences and their grandparents’ traumatic memories at sites of terror. Here a granddaughter describes a family trip to Treblinka with her grandmother: We went to Treblinka. The first night we went to Treblinka, the city. We went to the hotel. When we went out in the morning, we were in the car, my grandmother did not look out the window, she was reading a book. Then we came to the camp. I remember, you are there and you feel the dead people around you. You just do. You can smell it. . . . You go in the forest and then you come to the stone with the sign and you go in. The minute you go in and you see the memorial, I saw them, the three of them together, my grandmother, my dad and my mom. We found the stone from my grandmother’s village. We had candles. My Dad was crying and I was crying. It was very hard. Being there with my grandmother was really hard. It was not like before. I could see her pain and feel her fear. I just wanted to leave. She [grandmother] said, “No more, it’s enough for me. Let’s go.” I felt the same way. I just wanted to get out, to leave. Finally, in addition to visiting sites of Nazi terror, descendants have also explored other paths that reveal the effects of postmemory on succeeding generations. In one unique and somewhat controversial practice, children and grandchildren of survivors have chosen to modify their bodies with the numbered tattoo that marked a parent or grandparent who had been incarcerated at Auschwitz.18 This phenomenon is documented in the 2012 documentary film Numbered, which follows the lives of a group of Auschwitz survivors who recall their past through the tattoo that marked them as Jewish prisoners. A portion of the film focuses on descendants who have tattooed the numbers onto their own bodies, an act that symbolizes their deep emotional connection to a family member’s past suffering and victimization. Among these descendants is a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor who explained her choice to obtain a tattoo following the death of her father: I just wanted the number etched on to me after the shiva [the traditional Jewish mourning period] ended, I drove to a tattoo shop downtown. I walked in and asked to have my dad’s number tattooed on my leg. It was a very emotional day.19 Soon after the tattoo was completed, the descendant realized that the tattoo she had chosen was in fact incorrect; the numbers were not the same as her father’s tattoo. The film then documents her decision to have the incorrect tattoo covered up and a second tattoo placed below the blackened mark. As the daughter endures the erasure of one tattoo and the reinscription of another, the film remains focused on her painful facial expression while the

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tattoo artist reapplies the new Auschwitz number. Here the film conveys both the symbolic tie that the act of tattooing represents between survivor and descendant and the reproduction of a bodily pain that signifies the suffering that her father experienced and the ways in which postmemory has shaped her identity. A second example of memorial tattooing is found in the performative life of the photographer Marina Vainshtein, a granddaughter of a Soviet survivor of the Nazi pogroms. In expressing her ties to her grandparents’ past, Vainshtein chose a more radical approach to replicating the horrors of the Nazi regime. As a young adult in the 1990s, Vainshtein reclaimed the dehumanization of Nazi “branding” with tattooed body imagery that represented the atrocities of the Nazi regime, including images of Zyklon B gas, corpses, and the ashes of the crematoria. On her right breast, she imprinted the visual memory of Jewish victims whose deaths are captured in the moments of gassing. As such, Vainshtein’s tattooed body became a memorial space for the remembrance of Jewish genocide, the history of suffering made visible in the pictorial representations that have been inscribed onto her arms, her legs, her back, and chest.20 Accordingly, Dora Apel concludes that Vainshtein’s tattoos function as “a form of memory in which the Jew as always—already dead or victimized—is imprinted on the living body, it is not only a representation but, in a sense, a continuous performance of memory and difference.”21 The performance of memory and difference to which Apel refers has also become part of the life of other descendants who, rather than choose tattoos as an identifier, take on the role of trauma carrier in national and local events that commemorate the Holocaust.

Memory, Trauma, and the Engendering of Holocaust Carriers For many women descendants in post-Holocaust families, the interrelated experiences of witnessing and postmemory have together created generations of culture carriers whose responsibility is to preserve and retell the traumas of an ancestral past.22 In their roles as trauma carriers, daughters and granddaughters are frequently called upon to engage with and participate in public commemoration ceremonies that facilitate the creation of global, national, and community collective memories that surround the Holocaust. The most well known of these commemorative events in the United States is Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah).23 Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as survivors became central actors in the construction of historical and cultural memory, these events were organized around the presentation of survivor testimonies. Through the recitation of trauma narratives, the accounts of

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survivors served to connect the audiences at Holocaust commemorations to the suffering, loss, and victimhood of Jewish genocide, solidifying Holocaust remembrance within the larger society. Since the 1990s a new form of trauma carrying has emerged within this commemorative sphere. Increasingly, with the aging and loss of the survivor population, Holocaust Remembrance Day, while continuing to proliferate,24 has expanded to include the descendants of survivors who are either joining or replacing their parents and grandparents as social actors in remembrance events. In communities across the United States, Holocaust ceremonies now include descendants whose own stories have become intermingled with that of their parents and grandparents. In the United States, the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day often takes place within synagogue settings. These events are typically sponsored by the Jewish community and include programs where survivors and their families testify to the horrors and tragedies of the past. Increasingly, these acts of remembrance have become gendered, with daughters and granddaughters often joining or replacing the survivor as the carrier of genocidal memory. The significant role that succeeding generations of women have come to play in these events can in part be explained by their desire to fulfill their role as culture bearers and the responsibility they feel to commemorate the suffering of the survivor generation. This engendering of commemorative ceremonies has transformed the transmission of Holocaust trauma in two significant ways: first by placing women’s accounts at the center of the testimonial events and second by bringing in the gendered generational links among women in post-Holocaust families. A recent ceremony that took place at a suburban synagogue in the United States is illustrative of these changing gender norms of Holocaust Remembrance Day. In this commemoration, women were the central actors in the performance of memorial rites and remembrance. To this end, six women survivors were called to light one candle for each of the six million Jewish victims who died in the Holocaust. Once the candle lighting ceremony was completed, three of the elderly women survivors were asked to testify to their experiences and survivorship. As each survivor took her turn in telling her story, the narratives reflected the diversity of traumatic events that characterizes Holocaust testimonies. Accordingly, one survivor described the violence of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), another the deprivations of ghetto life, and a third the atrocities that were endured in concentration and death camps. After each survivor spoke, their daughters were then asked to reflect on what it was like to be a descendant of a survivor. Here too the accounts were varied. While all of the daughters spoke of the strength and survivorship of their mothers, they also revealed the struggles of a childhood in which they were sometimes lonely, in which fear and anxiety permeated the household, and in which the pressure for Jewish survival was palpable.

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In the weeks following the ceremony, a number of daughters shared their experiences of both witnessing and testifying in a public and open commemorative space. One daughter offered this account of her decision to join her mother on the women’s “survivor panel”: When the rabbi asked me to do it, I realized that I have a story to tell, and my mother is 90 and who knows how long she will be here, and she wanted me to do it. So, when the rabbi first asked, he said please ask your siblings too, and I did and one sister said, tell him no, we all have PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Prior to this commemorative ceremony, the daughter had never spoken to groups or at community venues about her family or her mother’s history. Because her other siblings would not participate, she felt an obligation both to her mother and also to the Jewish community to speak openly and honestly about the suffering that the Holocaust had caused and the tensions of her own traumatic inheritance. She described how the responsibility for carrying the memory of the Holocaust into the public sphere involved a competing set of obligations in which she felt both the need to be true to herself as a daughter of a survivor and, at the same time, to shield her mother from the pain that total honesty would bring. Here she explains the conflicted feelings that emerged following her testimony at the commemorative event: You know afterwards I was embarrassed because I said some things that sounded like that, you know, I didn’t want to date Jewish boys and I was like, I can’t believe you said that—you just said that out loud. I think I also said I just wanted to be me, not her, and that was a little embarrassing, and I felt selfish when I was saying it out loud. But, on the other hand, it was true. But I didn’t know if it sounded hurtful. I didn’t want it to be hurtful. And so I wasn’t quite sure, if when I left and I was reflecting, I was hoping what I said wasn’t hurtful. Concerns over speaking out at Holocaust ceremonies were also expressed by other respondents who wrestled with their role of trauma carrier and the content of their message for a public discourse. Daughters were especially concerned about the social meanings that their message brought to Holocaust Remembrance Day. In their accounts, they discussed the tensions over the obligation to represent the travails of their parents and the equally significant responsibility to educate the public on the multigenerational effects of mass trauma, including the difficulties of growing up in survivor families. Thus, many women descendants were torn between telling their own stories as children of survivors (stories that frequently reveal the problematic familial dynamics of traumatic inheritance) and the obligation to publicly honor the suffering of their traumatized parents.

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In addition to synagogues Holocaust ceremonies, tensions around trauma carrying have also emerged in secular spaces such as schools and universities where Holocaust Remembrance Day is recognized and observed. In these settings as well, daughters and granddaughters grapple with the emotional demands and tensions that arise out of their responsibility to represent the Holocaust and the trauma of their family’s past. Granddaughters in particular expressed the emotional strains they experienced as secondgeneration carriers of Nazi atrocity memory. A granddaughter of survivors thus recalled her role in a Holocaust program after returning to Israel from a school trip to death camps in Eastern Europe. Here she recounts the emotional difficulties of representing the Holocaust and her sense of personal obligation to educate and to remember for the community: When we came back to Israel, it was very close to Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was a program at the kibbutz on Holocaust Remembrance Day and they asked me to read something. I was still emotionally numb from the trip but then I thought of my grandparents, all their relatives and all these Jews that died in the Holocaust and I knew I should do it. As the siren went off that day, I felt myself going, like everything hit home. I was the first one to read and somehow, I made it through the readings. As this account illustrates, the role of carrying among descendants is often a difficult task, particularly in public settings where retelling a grandparent’s trauma gives rise to deep emotions that are heightened by the descendant’s identification with the traumas of the past. Further, descendants (both daughters and granddaughters) who participate in school events also report feeling conflicted about openly acknowledging the impact of survivor suffering on successive generations. In their role as trauma carriers within the school settings, these descendants, like those at the multigenerational synagogue commemoration, grapple with the obligation to recount the survivor’s tragic history and the competing responsibility to tell their own story as a descendant of historical tragedy. To resolve the dilemma, a number of daughters have turned to documentary filmmaking as the vehicle through which their role of trauma carrier is conveyed to the wider society.

Women as Trauma Carriers and the Cultural Production of Holocaust Memory The use of film as a medium of Holocaust carrying is a widespread pheno­ menon with a diverse range of representations that have been created and produced by children of survivors.25 Within the descendant documentary film genre, “carrier” films tend to fall into one of two categories of filmmaking: those that celebrate the survival and hardships of their parents and grandparents and those that address the inheritance of trauma across

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generations. With respect to the first approach, that of preserving and telling the survivor’s story, a daughter of a survivor produced an awardwinning documentary film in which she returned to the rural area of France where her father, as a young German child, had been sent into hiding. The film was inspired by her father’s recollections of the kindness and courage of a French village whose teachers educated the hidden children and whose caretakers concealed them from the Nazi occupiers. As a descendant narrative, the film reveals her father’s history through interviews with survivors, village residents, and two sisters who were the village school teachers during France’s occupation by Germany. In making this film, the descendant recalled that it was “a chance to make a beautiful film, different than films like the Sorrow and the Pity or Night and Fog, to present a different side.” Here she explained: I learned about his stories as a child. Our family was not like other Holocaust survivor families. We always talked about what happened to him and his family. He does not consider himself a survivor but I do. The Holocaust is really central to my identity and the film came out of that identity. The centrality of the Holocaust to this descendant’s identity provides the backdrop against which her film was made. Although she provides narration for the documentary, it is the survivors and the villagers whose voices are the strongest and whose memories frame the narrative of French resistance to the Nazis and the children’s debt to the village. In the film, the respondent rarely speaks of herself except to say that her father frequently commented on her resemblance to his mother, a grandmother she never knew. Toward the end of the film, the descendant uses the documentary to convey her father’s message and thus her own, that there is both good and evil in the world and that survivors and their children should always seek to do what is right. For this descendant, the intergenerational transmission of trauma became a path to promoting values of social justice. In this regard, her film pays homage to the morality and goodness of those who resisted and risked their lives for others. By comparison, other daughters of survivors offer a very different type of video representation in which children of survivors tell their unique stories as trauma carriers. Among the first of these filmmakers was Eva Fogelman, a psychologist and child of survivors. Her film Breaking the Silence was produced in 1984 as a documentary and draws on the experiences of children of survivors who formed a support group in adulthood. The goal of the film was to explore the unique position and perspectives of first-generation descendants. Initially intended to facilitate and foster communication between children of survivors and their parents, the video is currently available for educators and Holocaust programs. To this end,

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the film’s website describes the video as “a healing encounter between two generations” and promotes the documentary as a moving story of personal growth as the children of Holocaust survivors find the strength to confront their painful legacy and overcome the barriers of unasked and unanswered questions that separate them from their parents. As the young adults connect with their parents, the second generation discovers its own voice and grapples with the question of how to bear witness to their own children.26 Viewing the film as a vehicle for the transmission of trauma to a wider audience, a number of significant themes emerge out of this documentary that provide insight on the difficult family dynamics that shape descendant populations. Among the most important messages that this film conveys is the acknowledgment of an emotional divide that separates the child from the traumatized survivor and which remains a source of pain, confusion, and anger for adult daughters. As a teaching tool and Holocaust lesson, the film highlights for the audience that the descendant story is a narrative of deep family bonds as each generation, the survivor parents and their children, confront the rawness of Holocaust memories and the unmet needs of a generation who was born into the post-traumatic culture of Holocaust survivorship. What is perhaps most revealing about this film, especially in comparison with the intergenerational dialogues that more recently characterize Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the openness and candor with which the daughters in the film address their parents on camera, in some cases angrily demanding answers and in others softly admonishing the survivors for withholding information. In this retelling of the trauma, it is not the survivors whose accounts are privileged but the descendant daughters who are seeking to speak the truth and to find a path toward healing through a filmed confrontation with a difficult childhood. More than a decade after the making of Breaking the Silence, another support group for descendants sought a similar medium of communication to preserve and tell the generational story. Members of this group were part of a children of survivors group that met regularly and that provided a basis for a collective identity of descendancy that informed their presentations at schools and other venues for Holocaust remembrance. Seeking to convey the group’s message in a compelling format, a daughter of a survivor (and a videographer by profession) volunteered to create a documentary that would testify to the experiences of the intergenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. Unlike Breaking the Silence, this documentary did not include survivor testimony. Although the descendants often referred to and told their parents’ stories, they saw the film as an opportunity to speak about themselves and, as Robert Lifton observed, to become part of a “social movement by children of survivors toward being heard.”27 As one daughter

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explained, “the good thing that came out of the film was giving us a chance to reflect on our lives in retrospect.” As these three documentaries show, daughters of Holocaust survivors have become part of the vast cultural production that makes visible, through art, memoir, and film, the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of trauma is informed by the gendered relations of postHolocaust families.28 As daughters and granddaughters assume the role of trauma carriers in the arts and in the public sphere, they have become central to the construction of a collective memory of Jewish genocide in which the importance of inherited trauma lies at the core of future representations of this terrible past. This shift in cultural memorialization expands upon the extensive and more traditional memory frames that are found in the vast majority of Holocaust museums and memorials where the predominant memory is that of women’s annihilation and death.29 The recollections of descendants thus bring a more nuanced understanding to gendered genocide through preserving the stories and meaning of women’s survival under the most horrific of circumstances.

Conclusion This study of the intergenerational transmission of trauma has sought to explore the multiple ways in which genocidal trauma is transferred across generations in post-Holocaust families. In particular, this research has focused on the gendered dynamics of memory, witnessing, and traumatic inheritance among daughters and granddaughters of survivors. Taken together, the work reveals a number of important findings that bring further insight into the process of traumatic transference, highlighting three significant social dynamics: the role that daughters and granddaughters assume as listeners/ witnesses; the effects of postmemory on the child listener; and the ways in which daughters and granddaughters become trauma carriers within both the private sphere of family life and the public sphere of commemoration and cultural production. Although this work focuses on inherited trauma among girls and women, it is significant to point out that sons and grandsons in post-Holocaust families also acted as listeners/witnesses in childhood, absorbing the pain of survivor parents and conveying that pain to future generations. In fact one could argue that within the public sphere of post-Holocaust representation, the life of Art Spiegelman, a son of survivors and the author of the graphic autobiographical novels Maus and Maus II, is perhaps the most widely known story of growing up in a survivor family.30 These memoirs, which are centered on a father-son relationship, highlight a father’s story of adaptivity and survivorship through preserving, in text and illustrations, a father’s survival narrative in which Jews are represented by mice and where a mother’s painful suicide is recalled through the psychological damage

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that she visited upon her son. While Spiegelman’s work is compelling, deeply truthful, and informative, it is important that his story of traumatic inheritance and family remembrance become part of a larger memorial landscape in which the perspectives and experiences of daughters and granddaughters contribute to a more complex and complete picture of the gendered aspects of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Hopefully, this chapter, by offering a broader understanding of the relationship among gender, memory, and traumatic inheritance, has helped to create a more inclusive space to consider and reflect on the diverse and multilayered effects of the intergenerational transmission of trauma on descendants of the Holocaust.

Notes 1 Dan Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Alan Berger, Children of Job: American Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Aaron Hass, In The Shadow of the Holocaust: The Second Generation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 2 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 3 Jeremy Holmes, “Ghosts in the Consulting Room: An Attachment Perspective on Intergenerational Trauma,” Attachment and Human Development 1 (1999): 115–31; Natan Kellerman, “Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Integrative View,” Psychiatry 64 (2001): 260. 4 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5 Ibid., 57. 6 Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of Holocaust Survivors (New York: Routledge, 1992). 7 Shamai Davidson, “The Clinical Effects of Massive Psychic Trauma in Families of Holocaust Survivors,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 6 (1980): 11–21; David Heller, “Themes of Culture and Ancestry among Children of Holocaust Survivors,” Psychiatry 45 (1982): 247–61; Miriam Vogel, “Gender as a Factor in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma,” Women and Therapy 15 (1994): 35–47. 8 Joan Ringelheim, “Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory,” in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1997). 9 These laws are codified in the Nuremberg laws of 1935. See The Holocaust A Reader, eds. Simone Gigliotti and Berel Lang (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 82–3. 10 See Beverly Chalmers, Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women’s Voices under Nazi Rule (Surrey: Grovesvenor House Publishing, 2015); and Sexual Violence against

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Jewish Women during the Holocaust, eds. Sonia Hedgepeth and Rochelle Seidel (Waltham, MA: Brandies University Press, 2010). 11 Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 12 Janet Surrey, “The Self in Relation: A theory of Women’s Development,” in Women’s Growth in Connection, eds. Judith Jordan, Alexandra Kapan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene Stiver, and Janet Surrey (New York: Guilford, 1991), 56. 13 Wendy Kupperman, “The Far Country Memoirs: Four Excerpts from a Work in Progress,” in Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors & Perpetrators, eds. Alan Berger and Naomi Berger (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 14 Ibid., 56–7. 15 Laub, “Bearing Witness.” 16 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 9, no. 1 (2008): 106. 17 Ibid. 18 According to traditional Jewish law, tattooing the body is prohibited. 19 Numbered, directed by Dana Doran and Uriel Sinai (Israel, 2012). 20 Dora Apel, “The Tattooed Jew,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 300–20. 21 Ibid., 317. 22 For a discussion of carrier generations in ancestral communities, see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). 23 In Britain, Germany, and Spain, for example, Holocaust International Remembrance Day is commemorated on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the United States this date has also been incorporated in some communities as a Remembrance Day, although the spring commemorative event is more commonly observed across the country. 24 Hilene Flanzbaum, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 1 (1999): 91–194. 25 Berger and Berger; Arlene Stein, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 26 The National Center for Jewish Film, n.d. 27 Berger, Children of Job, 144. 28 For writings by daughters of Holocaust survivors, see Rona Lentin, ed., Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000) and Mindy Weisel, ed., Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss (Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2001). 29 The one exception to this trend in Holocaust memorialization, in which death and destruction are the predominate motifs, is the women’s memorial at Ravensbrück where the memory of women survivors exists alongside

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side the memory of torture and murder. See Janet Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 30 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1986); idem, Maus II: A Survivors Tale and Here My Troubles Begin (New York: Pantheon, 1992). For a discussion of Spiegelman’s work, see Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Zelizer, 215–46.

13 Gendered Silences, Gendered Memories New Memory Work on Islamized Armenians in Turkey Ayşe Gül Altınay

Since 2004, more than forty books (across the genres of memoir, fiction, social sciences, and the humanities) have been published in the Turkish language on the Islamized Armenian survivors of the 1915 genocide and the (post) memories of their “Muslim” grandchildren.1 This emerging body of memory work poses significant challenges to Turkish national self-understanding, the official politics of genocide denial, as well as to the growing scholarship on 1915. It also calls for a critical analysis of the nine decades of silence on Islamized Armenians in all historiographies. This chapter aims to discuss the need for a feminist perspective to make sense of both this silence and the recent process of unsilencing. In what follows, I first provide a brief overview of the emerging literature on the predicament of the Ottoman Armenians who survived the 1915 genocide through (forced) Islamicization and the (post)memories of their grandchildren. Since the main concern of this chapter is the major historical silence that this new memory literature has unraveled rather than the literature itself, I will confine myself to a general overview except for a brief discussion of the groundbreaking memoir Anneannem [My Grandmother]. In the second section, I examine the making of the historical silence on Islamized Armenians and how nationalist and post-nationalist

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scholarship on 1915 has approached this group of survivors. In the third section, I analyse the gendered aspects of both the predicament of Islamized Armenians and their historical silencing in society and scholarship. In my concluding remarks, I argue for the need to work at the intersections of gender studies and post-nationalist genocide studies in order to develop a nuanced understanding of the historical (un)silencing of Islamized Armenians.

The “Discovery” of Armenian Grandmothers and Grandfathers “How can our albums and archives gesture toward what has been lost and forgotten, toward the many lives that remain obscured, unknown and unthought?” asks Marianne Hirsch in her latest book on postmemory.2 In the past decade, a number of creative responses to this question have surfaced in Turkey with regard to the “obscured, unknown and unthought” lives of Ottoman Armenians who survived the massacres and death marches of 1915 by converting to Islam and taking on Turkish, Kurdish, or Arabic names. Although it is impossible to know the exact figures, the estimates of those who survived the 1915 genocide through conversion to Islam are around 200,000.3 If this figure is accurate, it would imply that several million Muslims in Turkey today are in some way affiliated (as children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, in-laws, etc.) with converted Armenian survivors. Yet, sheer numbers are not enough to disturb deep nationalist silences. Before discussing the historical dynamics behind these lives becoming “obscured, unknown and unthought,” I would like to provide an overview of the ongoing moment of uncovering, getting to know, and making intelligible. I have argued elsewhere that 2005 was a turning point in the debate on 1915 in at least two ways. Firstly, for the first time in Republican history, a national public debate, with genuinely different perspectives, on 1915 and the fate of Ottoman Armenians emerged. Secondly, it became recognized that a significant number of Armenians had survived the massacres and death marches of 1915 by converting to Islam.4 As Armenians in Armenia and across the diaspora were organizing events commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the genocide, a small group of academics in Turkey prepared to host the first critical academic conference in 1915. After much public controversy, the conference was finally held in September 2005 at Istanbul Bilgi University. Although its full title was “Ottoman Armenians during the Demise of the Empire: Responsible Scholarship and Issues of Democracy,” the conference was referred to as the Genocide Conference in the mainstream media.5 A key panel, titled “Tales of Tragedy and Escape,” included Fethiye Çetin, a human rights lawyer whose book Anneannem had become a bestseller in the previous year, and İrfan Palalı, a surgeon who had

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recently published a novel titled Tehcir Çocukları: Nenem bir Ermeniymiş [The Children of Tehcir: My Grandmother turned out to be an Armenian . . .] based on his Armenian grandmother’s story.6 Both grandmothers had survived the catastrophe of 1915 as children aged eight or nine. They were adopted by Muslim families, were given Turkish names, and “passed” as Muslims for the rest of their lives.7 By the time the conference panel took place, drawing a large and engaged audience, Fethiye Çetin’s memoir Anneannem had already raised significant public interest going through five editions in its first six months. As of August 2020, it is in its twelfth edition and continues to be read and discussed widely, not only in Turkey but also internationally through its translations into Arabic, Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, German, Greek, French, Hungarian, Italian, Persian, and Polish. The book starts with the grandmother’s funeral. We read how Fethiye Çetin bursts out when her grandmother’s parents are named Hüseyin and Esma: “But that’s not true! Her mother’s name wasn’t Esma; it was İsguhi! And her father wasn’t Hüseyin, but Hovannes!”8 Hence, at the outset, we are confronted with the first public outburst of a grandchild against the “obscuring” of the Armenian names of her beloved grandmother and her parents. The moment of death marks the beginning of the process of reckoning with a violent past and its ongoing effects. The book moves between three intersecting storylines. The first is the narrative of Heranush/Seher, as conveyed by her granddaughter, on Armenian life in the village of Habab9 before 1915, on the death march of 1915, and on Heranush’s journey to becoming Seher first as the adopted daughter of an Ottoman corporal and then as the wife of a Muslim man from the neighboring town of Maden with whom she has five children. The second storyline is that of the author telling us about her grandmother’s life and relations with different members of the family. The third storyline is Fethiye Çetin’s own struggle with the story of her grandmother, her unsuccessful efforts to establish a relationship with her grandmother’s Armenian family in the United States while Heranush/Seher is alive, her protest at the funeral, and finally, her trip to New Jersey to visit the graves of her grandmother’s parents and to meet the American members of the Gadarian family. The last photograph, which is also on the cover of the book, portrays the graves of Ovannes and Esquhe Gadarian with the pink roses brought to them by Fethiye Çetin, who asked for their “forgiveness” when she placed the roses at their graves. Çetin’s story would inspire others to “ask for forgiveness” as well. A columnist in a popular daily, Milliyet, for instance, wrote an essay in 2006 titled “I apologize!” extending an apology for what had happened to Armenians in 1915 after having read Anneannem: “stories can do what large numbers or convoluted concepts cannot do [. . .]. Concepts are cold, stories can touch you inside.”10 My own presentation at the critical conference

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on Ottoman Armenians in 2005 discussed Anneannem as a powerful example of what Hannah Arendt had called “critical storytelling,” a kind of storytelling that (in Lisa Disch’s terms) “serves not to settle questions but to unsettle them and to inspire spontaneous critical thinking in its audience”11 and becomes a powerful tool in confronting totalitarian narratives. For Fethiye Çetin, the critical storytelling that materialized in the book has a long and troubled personal history. Çetin remembers her years in military prison after the 1980 coup d’etat where she faced weeklong torture, daily beatings, and solitary confinement because she would not reveal anyone else’s name of her leftist organization or because she refused to partake in the militarist rituals of prison life. And yet, she says, “when I was telling my friends in prison about my grandmother, I would speak in a whisper.”12 For years, a “socialist revolution” was more imaginable to her than a public sharing of her grandmother’s story of survival. Marianne Hirsch’s generative concept of “postmemory” tackles the relationship that “the generation after” has with “the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”13 In the case of Fethiye Çetin, the fears, anxieties, and careful silences that shaped the stories of her grandmother had obviously left deep marks on the postmemories of the “revolutionary” granddaughter. The transformation of these postmemories into publicly shared stories would take almost thirty years, culminating in the publication of Anneannem in November 2004, only months before the ninetieth anniversary of 1915. As I have noted earlier, 2005 marked a turning point in the Turkish public debate in 1915. Since 2005, the stories of Islamized Armenian survivors have become publicly visible through memoirs, novels, documentary films, theatre plays,14 as well as historical and anthropological research.15 With more than forty books published on Islamized Armenians, we can consider it as a “moment of public discovery” regarding the presence and cultural legacy of Islamized Armenians. Using Marianne Hirsch’s terminology, we can also conceptualize it as a moment of “postmemory” when secondand third-generation family members use a variety of different forms to express their (post)memories, challenging the historical silence on Islamized Armenians through an affective engagement with their own family “albums and archives.” In November 2013, the Hrant Dink Foundation hosted an international conference on Islamized Armenians in Istanbul, the first major conference to be held on this topic anywhere in the world.16 In the meantime, Anneannem has been translated into thirteen languages; our coauthored book Torunlar [Grandchildren] into three languages;17 several books on Islamized Armenians have been published in Armenian, English, and French by Armenian and international researchers; and others seem to be on their way.

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This new wave of cultural and academic production on Islamized Armenians raises questions about the absence of this particular group of survivors in the scholarly and popular histories of 1915 for almost nine decades. This absence marks not only Turkish scholarship and public debates but international (including Armenian) academic and popular histories of 1915 as well. In other words, the stories of Islamized Armenian survivors of the genocide of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 have been silenced by all historiographies, either in the form of complete erasure or of serious trivialization.18 In what follows, I will focus briefly on how Turkish nationalist—as well as the recent post-nationalist—historiography has approached the issue of Islamized Armenians. I will then discuss the making of a historical (and historiographical) silence.

Where Are Islamized Armenians in Turkish Nationalist and Post-Nationalist Historiography? Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who analyses the silencing of the Haiti Revolution, suggests that there are four moments when silences enter the process of historical production: “the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”19 He also identifies two formulas for silencing: formulas of erasure and formulas of banalization (or trivialization).20 Using Trouillot’s terminology, it can be argued that in the making of sources, archives, and early narratives of 1915 in Ottoman-Turkish sources, neither the Armenian massacres of 1915 nor the survival of women and children through Islamization was silenced in the form of total erasure (although they are at times banalized and legitimized). Yet silence as erasure did occur in the moment of “retrospective significance,” that is, in the making of history in the final instance. In her analysis of how Ottoman and Turkish historiography describes what happened to Ottoman Armenians in 1915, Müge Göçek identifies three historical periods marked by distinct narratives: the Ottoman Investigative Narrative (1910s), the Republican Defensive Narrative (1953 onward), and the Post-Nationalist Critical Narrative (1990s onwards).21 Written around the time of the events of 1915, works that Göçek classifies as the Ottoman Investigative Narrative are based on a recognition of the Armenian “massacres.” According to Göçek, “the central tension in the Ottoman investigative narrative regarding the Armenian deaths and massacres in 1915 is over the attribution of responsibility for the crimes”22 rather than their existence. Recent studies on the various texts of this period (1915–20)—from the memoirs of Cemal Pasha and Halide Edib to Ottoman newspapers, magazines, and archival records—suggest that one can also find a wide range of narratives on the

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different fates of Armenian women and children during the deportations.23 These narratives point to the survival of significant numbers of women and children through Islamization and adoption into Muslim families.24 After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, both the Armenian massacres and the fate of the Islamized women and children became “a page of human history that is best forgotten.”25 This strategic “forgetting,” which characterizes the national curriculum from primary school to university, is accompanied by the development of what Müge Göçek has called the “Republican Defensive Narrative.” After the 1950s, and more intensely after the Armenian armed group ASALA’s (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) deadly attacks against Turkish diplomats and institutions in Europe and North America in the 1970s, a limited number of books (written mostly by diplomats) appeared that challenged the emerging claims of “genocide.” In this body of work, the size of the Armenian population before the war and the numbers of casualties during the war were minimized, wartime Muslim losses were emphasized, “massacring” of Armenians was denied, and the main responsibility for the tehcir (translated as relocation or deportation in some text sources) was placed on the Armenians themselves and on the Great Powers by representing the Ottoman state/Muslims/Turks as “victims” rather than perpetrators. One of the deep silences of the Republican Defensive Narrative is the silence over Islamized Armenian survivors. Not only does their existence remain unmentioned in canonical works, but this particular group of survivors is also treated as a nonentity in the “number-crunching” regarding the total Armenian population and casualties, which is central to this narrative. In other words, they are not only “obscured” but also “unthought” and, indeed, “unthinkable.” For instance, one of the key texts of Turkey’s official narrative of 1915, Kamuran Gürün’s 1983 book Ermeni Dosyası [The Armenian File],26 includes several telegrams sent from the Ministry of the Interior to various provinces claiming that “the Government particularly emphasized the protection of life and property, and continually gave instructions for necessary measures to be taken.”27 Gürün also cites telegrams conveying government orders for Armenian orphans to be adopted by Muslim families, but they are listed merely as “evidence” for his general claim about the “protection of life and property” by the Ottoman government.28 Nevertheless, these references make it clear that Gürün is aware of the conversion and adoption of Armenian children. In fact, he seems to generalize from these specific telegrams and presents such conversions and adoptions as a measure for “the protection of life.” Yet, how does he account for this “life” when it comes to his “computations” of losses? Although Gürün never mentions Islamized Armenians in his “computations” (his terminology), the only category where they would fit seems to be among the “dead.”29 In other words, Armenian converts and adoptees are not regarded by Gürün (or by others contributing to Turkish nationalist historiography who have used Gürün as their main source) as “survivors” of the tehcir.

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The first book in Turkish nationalist historiography that focuses specifically on Islamized Armenian survivors is a detailed 300-page study by historian İbrahim Ethem Atnur.30 In line with mainstream nationalist historiography, Atnur regards tehcir as a legitimate measure in response to the rebellious acts by Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the book, Atnur recognizes the great suffering of Armenian women and children, who, “despite their innocence, constituted the main body of victims.”31 Yet he blames Armenian nationalists, the Western powers, who aided their aim of establishing “Great Armenia,” and American Protestant missionaries for their suffering. Atnur seeks to demonstrate the Ottoman government’s “resolve to administer and implement the relocations in humane fashion,”32 although he repeatedly notes the practical difficulties of realizing this aim in conditions of war. Interestingly, Atnur also recognizes the occasional acts of “sexual violation” targeting young girls and women but emphasizes the “immediate interventions” of the Ministry of the Interior when such incidences occurred. A central concern for Atnur is the question of whether acts of conversion (by women and children alike) constitute an effort to assimilate. His answer is a cautious no. Large sections of Atnur’s book are dedicated to postwar efforts by the Armenian Church, missionaries, foreign consuls, and, in particular, by the Near East Relief to “gather” Armenian girls, women, and children from orphanages and Muslim homes. In the case of children, he discusses the government’s strict orders to give Armenian children to their families, relatives, the Armenian community, or missionaries and describes the diligent (even aggressive) efforts of Armenians and missionaries to retrieve the children. His conclusion is that the Near East Relief had taken “a great majority” of the Armenian orphans out of the country by the end of 1922.33 In the case of women, the story is quite different. According to Atnur, women who married Muslim men “mostly” stayed with their husbands instead of reclaiming Armenian lives for several reasons: “because they loved their husbands, because they had children, because they feared the breakup of their families, and because of their anxieties about how they would be received by their own communities.”34 In this discussion Atnur ignores the issue of “forcefully married” women claiming that they had already left these marriages during the Armistice. He also acknowledges the possibility that “under the conditions of the time” some women may not have been able to leave their husbands despite wanting to do so.35 What became of these women who stayed behind with their Muslim husbands? What about the children who remained with their adopted families? Atnur leaves these questions virtually unexamined. His historical account ends with Armenian orphans leaving the country with Near East Relief and other missionaries in 1922 and 1923, together with large portions of the remaining Armenian population. There are no references throughout the entire book to the emerging memory literature, apart from a footnote in which he politically distances himself from the authors of these works and cautions against “propaganda in between the lines.”36

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The “propaganda” Atnur refers to in this text is presumably the politics of genocide recognition, which he overtly opposes in his book. While elaborating on the suffering of “women and children as innocent victims,” Atnur builds his main argument around the claim that the Ottoman state did not employ a systematic policy of assimilation—in fact, that it took painstaking measures to prevent such assimilation. Atnur’s “defense” is clearly addressing the UN definition of such policies as part of genocide, since Article 2 of the UN Convention of Genocide refers to forcibly transferring children of one group to another group as a genocidal act. This is a clear example of the ways in which the issue of Islamized Armenians causes nationalist anxieties vis-à-vis the politics of genocide recognition. In short, within the mainstream (nationalist) Turkish historiography since the early years of the Republic, Armenian converts and adoptees have been either erased from the historical record altogether or treated as examples of Ottoman government efforts to “protect life.” In the “computations” regarding the remaining Armenian population after the tehcir, the only category reserved for them (indirectly) has been among the “dead.”37 How has this silence been challenged by post-nationalist critical scholarship in recent years? Müge Göçek identifies the 1990s as a period when the “postnationalist critical narrative” of 1915 emerged in Turkish scholarship and public debates.38 Ironically, the 1990s also mark the peak of a civil war between Kurdish militants and the Turkish State that ended up claiming the lives of at least 40,000 people between 1984 and 1999. Despite (or perhaps given impetus by) the ongoing civil war, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed a major transformation in Turkish society, politics, and scholarship whereby a number of taboo issues (including militarism, conscientious objection, religious, sectarian and ethnic exclusions, feminism, sexual orientation, and sexual identity) became subjects of academic research, political activism, and public debate. In relation to the Armenian issue, the founding of Aras Publishing House in 1993 (publishing Turkish and Armenian literature and memoirs); the founding of the Turkish–Armenian weekly newspaper Agos under the editorship of Hrant Dink in 1996; the publication of historian Taner Akçam’s critical books on the Armenian genocide (1992, 1999), as well as other academic and (auto)biographical books by Armenian and international scholars in the 1990s (by Belge Yayınları and others); public statements made by Turkish historians (especially by Halil Berktay) in daily newspapers and weekly magazines starting in the 2000s; the appearance of Armenian intellectuals (Hrant Dink in particular) in TV debates; and the first critical conference on 1915 organized by three universities in 2005—all these aspects contributed to the creation of alternative narratives of and a critical debate on what happened to Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and beyond. As I have discussed earlier, this critical debate has also included the converted Armenians, particularly after the publication of Anneannem in 2004. The more than forty books of literature, memoirs, and research that

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have been published since 2004 and their enthusiastic reception point to the growing public interest in this issue. Yet, this interest is only recently being translated into historical and anthropological/sociological research. In other words, in the case of Islamized Armenians, it is fair to say that it has been memory work and literature that has pushed the limits of the existing postnationalist scholarship and paved the way for a new research field. How can we understand the nine decades of silence on Islamized Armenians in Turkish scholarship? First, the hegemonic nationalist narrative that constructs the Turkish nation as a primordial, homogeneous entity defined through Sunni Islam and an ethnicized (and at times racialized) understanding of Turkishness must have played a key role in the silencing of Islamized Armenian survivors. Until recently, any mention of “other” identities has been regarded as a “divisive threat” and the discussion of any difference from the Turkish-Sunni-Muslim norm has been silenced in various ways. Against this background, voicing Armenian heritage or affinity or conducting research on this topic would have been considered risky. After all, Islamized Armenians (and their offspring) threaten the homogeneity and ethnic identification of the Turkish nation. Second, this silence needs to be read as part of the general silence on the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915. The public taboo around this issue has had its impact on Turkish historiography and social science literature. Moreover, the 1980 coup d’etat and the subsequent changes in the Turkish higher education system have put further restrictions on academic research on any politically sensitive topic, including the fate of Ottoman Armenians.39 Third, with the advent of the concept of “genocide” in the latter part of the twentieth century and of an international politics of genocide recognition, reinforced by the violent attacks by ASALA in the 1970s, this issue became a matter of “national security” and “defense.” I have discussed elsewhere how, until recently, the hegemonic framework of the Turkish debates on 1915 has been shaped by a “war of theses” with two clearly distinguishable sides: the Turkish thesis on the one hand and the Armenian thesis on the other. In this war it is alleged that objectivity, true scholarship, and scientific evidence are the strength of the Turkish side (which basically claims that the events of 1915 do not constitute genocide), whereas the Armenian side (in this view represented by the Armenian Diaspora as the key player or the main “enemy”) lacks these qualities. The dichotomies such as honorable versus disgraceful nationhood, heroism versus treason, friend versus enemy, and victory versus defeat are commonplace in nationalist scholarly and popular literature that participates in this “defence” of the nation, resulting in a fetishization and militarization of the “nation.”40 Islamized Armenians pose major challenges to this “war of theses.” Not only do Islamized Armenians blur the boundaries between the neatly defined “Turkish” and the “Armenian side,” but, as I have shown above, their presence also creates anxieties in view of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention which refers to forcibly transferring children of one group to another group as a genocidal act.

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For these reasons, it is not surprising that the silence on Armenian grandparents has been broken with the advance of what Göçek calls the “post-nationalist critical narrative.” Yet these reasons do not explain the relatively late and still inadequate engagement with Islamized Armenians in the emerging post-nationalist scholarship, particularly in historiography. If one reason for this has been the silence on Islamized Armenians in the international genocide literature,41 another reason, I argue, is the ongoing lack of a critical gender lens in current post-nationalist scholarship. In the next section, I discuss the ways in which both the experience of Islamized Armenians and their (post)memories are deeply gendered and argue for the need to work at the intersections of post-nationalist genocide studies and critical gender studies in order to understand the gendered silencing and unsilencing of Islamized Armenians.

Gendering Silences and (Post)Memories Both historically and presently in recent literature in Turkey, the issue of Islamized Armenians has largely been about “women and children.” Even a cursory look at the titles of the emerging memory literature suggests an almost exclusive emphasis on “grandmothers”: “Nenemin Masalları” (My Grandmother’s Tales), “Anneannem” (My Grandmother), “Nenem bir Ermeniymiş” (My Grandmother Was Armenian), “Ermeni Kızı Ağçik” (Ağçik, the Armenian Girl), “Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermeni Kadınların Dramı” (The Tragedy of Islamized Armenian Women). We are yet to see memoir, fiction, or academic research that focuses specifically on Islamized Armenian grandfathers or on Islamized Armenian adult men.42 There are several important reasons for this that reflect the gendered nature of the genocidal process and the patriarchal organization of OttomanTurkish society. As Arlene Avakian observes: The genocide was very clearly gendered. Men were killed, and women and children were sent on forced marches. Women and girls were raped and abducted, some were forced into prostitution, both during the genocide and in its aftermath, as a way to survive. These aspects of the genocide were recognized by contemporary observers, but until very recently there has been very little scholarly attention to this central feature of the genocidal process.43 Some historians claim that Muslim families who adopted children in this process preferred girls over boys and that boys who remembered their Armenian families had the relative freedom of mobility to leave and search for their families once they were old enough to travel on their own, whereas girls, as soon as they reached puberty, were married off, and often became

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young mothers.44 Yet, my joint research with Fethiye Çetin on second- and third-generation family members showed that quite a few men, and in more exceptional cases whole families or neighborhoods and villages, had become Islamized in the early stages of the war and that many Muslim families tried match-making between Islamized girls and boys when they reached puberty. Hence, Islamized Armenian children from different families, often from different villages and towns, would get married among themselves. In other words, the absence of Islamized Armenian grandfathers in the emerging literature cannot be explained solely by the gendered nature of the genocidal process and its aftermath. One also needs to look at the gendered process of transmission across generations, at the possible effects of patriarchal inheritance practices, at the predominance of a patrilineal pattern of descent, as well as the gendered construction of historiography and scholarship in general. From storytellers in families to authors of books, women come across as key actors in the process of transmission. Even in those cases where men as grandchildren have written memoirs or given interviews, it is mothers who constitute the majority of second generation storytellers. And the stories these mothers convey are often those of grandmothers rather than of grandfathers. Among the twenty-five grandchildren whose stories we present in our book Grandchildren only four are grandfather stories (despite the fact that they are published anonymously), and only a couple of grandmother stories have been told by fathers.45 In other words, in the first two generations, women come across as the predominant storytellers who share their own or their mothers’ stories of survival. Why has this been the case? Several of our research participants in the Grandchildren project reflected on this peculiarity and highlighted the gendered approach to descent in their communities. With patrilineality providing the predominant framework for understanding descent across Turkey, grandchildren with Armenian grandfathers might be finding it more difficult to share their stories. Zerdüşt, for instance, referred to the widespread practice in his small town to call only those children with Armenian fathers and mothers “Armenian,” whereas others like him who had Armenian grandmothers or mothers were regarded as Kurdish.46 Salih also mentioned the use of “Armenian children” as a humiliating term especially during fights and quarrels among children or teenagers, but only for those who were Armenian from their father’s side: “They never used it against me because my father’s side is not Armenian.”47 Accordingly, Turkish kinship terminology differentiates between maternal grandmother, anneanne, and paternal grandmother, babaanne, and indeed, most published stories are about maternal grandmothers. In other words, within the patrilineal understanding of descent prevalent in most local communities across contemporary Turkey, having an Armenian grandfather, father, or even a paternal grandmother seems to characterize a person as “more Armenian” than having an Armenian maternal grandmother or mother. Consequently, this leads to the silencing of

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stories of survival and descent regarding Islamized Armenian grandfathers, fathers and—although perhaps to a lesser extent—of paternal grandmothers. A related issue is connected to material inheritance practices and fears of economic marginalization: With men constituting the overwhelming majority of property owners and women being a negligible minority in the labor force and in professional life,48 particularly in the first two generations, men may have felt that they—and their families—had more to lose if their Armenian heritage became publicly known, which prevented them from sharing this knowledge even with their children and grandchildren. It is not only the local and familial memory and postmemories of 1915 and the genocidal process that is gendered but historical and other scholarship as well. The same year Cynthia Enloe published her insightful analysis that “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope,”49 a feminist Armenian scholar, Eliz Sanasarian, problematized the gendered nature of research on the Armenian genocide: “Despite a wealth of literature on the Armenian genocide, little research has been done on women who made up the mass of the deportees. The significance of gender differences in the genocidal process has been neither empirically conceptualized nor systematically analyzed.”50 According to Sanasarian, Armenian women have been absent not only in genocide literature but also in post-genocide analyses of Armenian life. Until recently, the scholarship on the Armenian genocide has typically treated women as undifferentiated victims, as opposed to historical actors. In both Turkish and Armenian, the term that is most frequently used for single women without a husband or father, or other male relatives who act as their guardian, is sahipsiz/anter (both terms translate literally as “without an owner”).51 Not surprisingly, women are often discussed in the same sentence as “property” and defined as “their women” or “our women” underscoring the construction of women as commodity (under patriarchal ownership). [Armenians settling in the Southern provinces under French rule in 1919] began to take back property that had been confiscated or seized, and to take the women who had been forcibly converted to Islam and reconvert them to Christianity.52 [During the Lausanne peace talks:] The Turkey delegation was uncompromising in its opposition to any article in the peace agreement regarding the search for lost women and children or the return of confiscated property.53 These two quotes from Taner Akçam’s 2006 book highlight both the gendered narratives in historical sources and the uncritical use of such narratives in post-nationalist genocide scholarship. In this framework the nation is masculinized, with “women and children” often falling under the same category. This resonates with Cynthia Enloe’s critique of militarized

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discourses of national honour that place “womenandchildren” (as one entity) under the custody of men.54 In both Armenian and Turkish scholarship, “womenandchildren” are treated as passive beings in need of male protection and guidance without which they become sahipsiz/anter, without an owner. Moreover, this patriarchal framework defines women’s bodies as “fields” to be sown by men, and hence as vehicles of masculinized honour. Historian Vahé Tachjian discusses the marginalization of women who were raped and those who became prostitutes, in both the post-genocide Armenian nationbuilding process and Armenian scholarship since.55 According to Tachjian: The typical Armenian heroine is often considered to be the woman who taught her child the Armenian alphabet in the sands of the desert; or the woman who, weapon in hand, defended Urfa against the executioner at the cost of her life; or else the one who threw herself into the River Euphrates from a high cliff so as not to fall into the hands of the Turks and be raped.56 Instead, Tachjian proposes a framework where women are regarded as historical actors who have used various forms of resistance in the face of a “machine of destruction and eradication” to survive, including marriage, prostitution, and conversion to Islam.57 Arlene Avakian, who has been a pioneering feminist voice in the diaspora Armenian memory literature, links this absence of women in historical and historiographical literature to “the absence of a feminist voice in both scholarship and community debate” in the Armenian-American context. Avakian argues that this absence has been detrimental for both scholarship and the Armenian community.58 According to her, researching Islamized Armenian survivors in Turkey from a feminist perspective is crucial for the diaspora Armenian community and scholarship as well: They are also victims and survivors who ought to be honored, and researching them from a feminist and ethnic perspective can provide vital insights into how post-genocide efforts to rebuild the nation and Armenian identity were gendered and how those conceptions continue to shape both our ethnic and gender identities.59

Concluding Remarks Since 2004, the public in Turkey has been going through a period of “discovery” regarding the fate of Armenians in general and Islamized Armenians in particular. What makes the current moment particularly noteworthy is that it follows nine decades of absolute public silence and that, in the case of Islamized Armenians, it is the (post)memory literature that is shaping the public debate and emerging scholarship. This chapter aimed to show that a critical understanding of gendered silencing and

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unsilencing of Islamized Armenians will not be possible unless we work at the intersections of post-nationalist genocide studies and critical gender studies.60 In the case of Islamized Armenians, this new framework has the potential to unsettle some of the founding blocks of contemporary politics and scholarly frameworks of analysis. The stories of Armenian converts who have spent their lives in Muslim families or Muslim towns open up Pandora’s box of gender and national identifications for both Turkish and Armenian nationalists as well as for scholars of genocide. Who belongs to the nation? Who is an “Armenian” and who is a “Turk”? Whose lineage matters? If genocide is defined as the eradication of a racial, cultural, national group, then who qualifies as a “survivor” in genocide? Are Islamized Armenian women, men, and children “survivors” of the Armenian Genocide? Can we, responding to Vahé Tachjian’s call, consider their survival as an act of resistance? This chapter has argued that the emerging memory literature on Islamized Armenians in Turkey poses several difficult questions regarding the gendered nature of the genocidal process, the gendered embodiment of race/ ethnicity/nation, gendered memories of the genocide, the presumed purity or exclusivity of predominant understandings of the nation, the easy equation between nation and religion as well as the prevalent conceptions of who qualifies as a “survivor” of a genocide. A feminist lens, enriched by critical race studies and post-nationalist genocide studies, is key to unraveling these questions.61 This chapter was originally published in L’Homme: European Journal of Feminist History 24, no. 2 (2013): 73–89. No changes have been made, except for some updates on the literature. It derives from earlier work with Fethiye Çetin and Yektan Türkyılmaz, whose knowledge, observations, and wisdom are interwoven into the analysis here. Versions of this chapter have been presented at conferences and talks in Turkey and abroad. I am grateful for all comments and criticism I have received in these presentations. I am grateful to Amy Randall for including it in this important volume and her patient perseverance as I went through the challenges of life and politics in the process of updating it.

Notes 1 For a comprehensive list of books published until 2015, see Altuğ Yılmaz, ed., Müslümanlaş(tırıl)mış Ermeniler: Konferans Tebliğleri, Kasım 2013 (Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları, 2015). The list also includes books published in Kurdish, Armenian, English, and French. 2 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 247. 3 Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York: Metropolitan Books,

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2006), 183; Sefa Kaplan, 1915’te Ne Oldu? [What Happened in 1915?] (İstanbul, TR: Doğan Kitap, 2005), 107f. (Interview with Etyen Mahçupyan.) 4 Ayşe Gül Altınay, “In Search of Silenced Grandparents: Ottoman Armenian Survivors and Their (Muslim) Grandchildren,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, die Türkei und Europa – The Armenian Genocide, Turkey and Europe, eds. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Elmar Plozza (Zürich, CH: Chronos, 2006), 117–32. 5 Fahri Aral, ed., İmparatorluğun Çöküş Döneminde Osmanlı Ermenileri: Bilimsel Sorumluluk ve Demokrasi Sorunları [Ottoman Armenians during the Demise of the Empire: Responsible Scholarship and Issues of Democracy] (İstanbul, TR: Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi Yayinlari, 2011). 6 Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem [My Grandmother] (İstanbul, TR: Metis Yayınları, 2004); İrfan Palalı, Tehcir Çocukları: Nenem Bir Ermeniymiş . . . [The Children of Tehcir: My Grandmother turned out to be an Armenian . . .] (İstanbul, TR: Su Yayınları, 2005). Although the earliest example of this body of literature was Serdar Can’s Nenemin Masalları [My Grandmother’s Tales] (İstanbul, TR: Umut Yayımcılık, 1991), it had reached only a limited audience. 7 My own presentation at the conference also focused on Islamized Armenians through an analysis of Anneannem and its reception. In the same year, Fethiye Çetin and I started doing in-depth interviews with other “Muslim grandchildren” with Armenian grandparents, which culminated in our coauthored book in 2009; see Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar [Grandchildren] (İstanbul, TR: Metis, 2009). Torunlar is based on the reflections of twenty-five grandchildren on the lives of their Islamized Armenian grandmothers and grandfathers as well as their own lives as grandchildren. 8 Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Verso, 2008), 2. 9 Historically (and colloquially) known through its Armenian name Habab or Havav, Heranush’s village is currently named Ekinözü and is located in the Elazığ province in Eastern Turkey. 10 Tuba Akyol, “Özür Dilerim” [I Apologize], Milliyet Pazar, March 25, 2006. Available online: http://www.milliyet. com​.tr​/2006​/03​/25​/pazar​/yaztub​a​.html. 11 Lisa J. Disch, “More Truth Than Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 665–94, 665. 12 Fethiye Çetin, personal communication with author, May 2012. 13 Hirsch, Generation, 5. 14 A select list of the documentaries that focus specifically on Islamized Armenians include Nahide’nin Türküsü/Hush! directed by Berke Baş (2009); Anadolu’dan Fısıltılar/ Whispering Memories (2008) & Konuşan Fotoğraflar/ Talking Pictures (2009) directed by Mehmet Binay; Habab Fountains: The Story of a Restoration (May 2009-November 2011) directed by Dilek Aydın (2012); Diyar directed by Devrim Akkaya (2013); Meğer/Pure State of the Soul directed by Uğur Egemen İres (2013); Turkey: The Legacy of Silence/ L’heritage du Silence directed by Guillaume Clere and Anna Benjamin (2015);

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Kader Komşuları: Üçüncü Kuşak/Neighbors by Destiny: Third Generation directed by Suren Deheryan; Vank’ın Çocukları/The Children of Vank directed by Nezahat Gündoğan (2016); Saklı Haç/Hidden Cross directed by Altan Sancar and Serhat Temel (2019). Since 2011, an international documentary on the topic has also been screened in Istanbul multiple times: Grandma’s Taboos, directed by Suzanne Khardalian (2011). Two theatre plays have used Anneannem and Torunlar as texts: Anneannem [My Grandmother], directed by Seyyar Sahne (2010); Geçmiş Zamanın Rivayeti [Rumors from the Past], İTÜ Sahnesi, 2010. 15 A comprehensive bibliography is available on the Hrant Dink Foundation website. Available at: http://hrantdink. org/picture_library/tr​.pd​f. 16 Conference on Islamized Armenians organized by the Hrant Dink Foundation, November 2–4, 2013. Available at: https​:/​/hr​​antdi​​nk​.or​​g​/en/​​activ​​ities​​/proj​​ects/​​histo​​ry​-pr​​ogram​​/230-​​islam​​i​zed-​​ armen​​ians. The conference book was published in 2015: Yılmaz, ed., Müslümanlaş(tırıl) mış Ermeniler: Konferans Tebliğleri, Kasım 2013. 17 It has been translated into Eastern Armenian, French, and English. Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of Lost Armenians in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 2017; first publication by Transaction Publishers in 2014). 18 For a discussion of silencing through “total erasure” and “trivialization,” see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). 19 Ibid., 26, italics in the original. 20 Ibid., 96. 21 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on the Armenian Deportations and Massacres of 1915,” in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century, eds. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 101–27. For a more recent and comprehensive analysis of the “habitus of denial,” see Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics, and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016). 22 Göçek, “Reading Genocide,” 111. 23 Hülya Adak, “‘Ötekileştiremediğimiz Kendimizin Keşfi’: Yirminci Yüzyıl Otobiyografik Anlatıları ve Ermeni Tehciri” [The Discovery of Ourselves, That Which We Could not Make Other. The Armenian Deportations and Autobiographical Narratives of the Twenty-First Century], Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklaşımlar 5 (Spring 2007): 231–53; Yavuz Selim Karakışla, “Savaş Yetimleri ve Kimsesiz Çocuklar: Ermeni mi, Türk mü?” [War Orphans and Destitute Children: Armenian or Turkish?], Toplumsal Tarih 12, no. 69 (1999): 46–55; Ferhunde Özbay, “Milli Mücadele Döneminde Öksüz ve Yetimler: 1911–1922 Yıllarında Anadolu’nun Kimsesiz Kız Çocukları” [Orphans During the Period of National Struggle: The Destitute Girls of Anatolia during 1911– 1922], in Savaş Çocukları, Öksüzler ve Yetimler [War Children and Orphans], eds. E. Gürsoy-Naskali and A. Koç (İstanbul, TR: Marmara Üniversitesi,

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2003), 105–15; Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeniler (1915–1920) [Armenians in Ottoman Documents (1915–1920)] (Ankara, TR: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 1994); İbrahim Ethem Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi (1915–1923) [The Issue of Armenian Women and Children in Turkey (1915– 1923)] (Ankara, TR: Babil, 2005); Hans-Lukas Kieser, Iskalanmış Barış: Doğu Vilayetlerinde Misyonerlik, Etnik Kimlik ve Devlet 1839–1938 [Missed Peace: Missionaries, Ethnic Identity and the State in the Eastern Provinces, 1839–1938], trans. Attila Dirim (İstanbul, TR: İletişim Yayınları, 2005); Nazan Maksudyan, “Foster Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21, no. 4 (2008): 488–512; Selim Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (July 2013), 522–53; Taner Akçam, Ermenilerin Zorla Müslü manlaştırılması: Sessizlik, İnkar ve Asimilasyon (İstanbul: İletişim, 2014). 24 For a more extensive discussion, see Ayşe Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling Layers of Silencing: Converted Armenian Survivors of the 1915 Catastrophe,” in Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Amy Singer, Christoph Neumann, and Selcuk Aksin Somel (London: Routledge, 2010), 25–53. 25 Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Suyu Arayan Adam [The Man Searching for Water] (1965; repr., İstanbul, TR: Remzi, 2003), 121, quoted in Adak, “Ötekileştiremediğimiz kendimizin keşfi,” 248, my translation. On the Republican silence and the impact of continuity in the ruling elite in the perpetuation of this silence, see Erik Jan Zürcher, “Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 306–16. For an insightful analysis of the articulations of this silence at the local as well as the national level, see Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 26 Kamuran Gürün, Ermeni Dosyası (Ankara, TR: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983); Kamuran Gürün, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). 27 Gürün, File, 212. 28 Ibid., 211f. For a critical reading of these telegrams, see Akçam, Act, 175. 29 For a detailed discussion, see Altınay and Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling.” 30 Atnur, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi (1915–1923). 31 Ibid., 293. 32 Ibid., 27. 33 Ibid., 284. 34 Ibid., 186.

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35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 68. 37 Armenian historiography is not in the scope of this chapter, but I would like to emphasize the need to review Armenian historiography of 1915 within the same light. Many Armenian historians of genocide also refer to the converted Armenian women and children as representing the “eradicated nation.” For a detailed discussion, see Altınay and Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling.” For a critical reading of Armenian (as well as Turkish and international) historiography of 1915, see Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Jin Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 38 Göçek, “Reading Genocide,” 121. 39 The researcher who has suffered the most from research taboos is İsmail Beşikçi, the first social scientist to write books on the Kurds. Beşikçi spent seventeen years of his life in prison and thirty-two of his thirty-six books have been banned. 40 For a more detailed discussion see Altınay, “Search.” 41 For a brief overview of the silence in Armenian genocide literature see Altınay and Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling.” 42 Several books touch upon the stories of male children adopted by Muslim families. For instance, Altınay and Çetin, Torunlar, and the orally recorded memoir of M. K. who later escaped and settled in Australia: Baskın Oran, ed., “M. K.” Adlı Çocuğun Tehcir Anıları: 1915 ve Sonrası [The Tehcir Memories of a Child Named “M. K.”: 1915 and Its Aftermath] (İstanbul, TR: İletişim Yayıncılık, 2005); the grandfather depicted in Filiz Özdem, Korku Benim Sahibim [Fear Rules Over Me] (İstanbul, TR: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007); and the stories of two “hidden” Armenians, interviewed by Kemal Yalçın in Kemal Yalçın, Seninle Güler Yüreğim [You Rejoice My Heart] (İstanbul, TR: Birzamanlar, 2006). 43 Arlene Avakian, “A Different Future? Armenian Identity through the Prism of Trauma, Nationalism and Gender,” New Perspectives on Turkey 42 (2010): 203–14, 208f. 44 For an analysis of the different treatment of women and men during the genocidal process see Akçam, Act, 174–83; Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 16–58; Ara Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, eds. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 209–21; Katharine Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 1–25; Vahé Tachjian, “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 1 (2009): 60–80. More research on the gendered aspects of genocide is underway. The 2012 conference “Gendered

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Memories of War and Political Violence” included a panel titled “Gendering the Armenian Genocide,” with contributions from Anna Aleksanyan, Hourig Attarian, Doris Melkonian, Arlene Avakian, and myself. (Available at: http:// myweb​​.saba​​nciun​​iv​.ed​​u​/gen​​derco​​nf​/fi​​les​/2​​011​/0​​8​/14-​​May​%C​​4​%​B1s​_​-Pro​​ gram.​​pdf.)​ Our joint research with Andrea Petö explores the similarities and differences between the gendering of genocide and its representations in the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust literature. See Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Petö, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (London: Routledge, 2018). In 2015, The European Journal of Women’s Studies published a special issue on Gendering Genocide that brought together feminist scholarship on the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the Assyrian Genocide (Seyfo), among other genocides of the past century. Ayşe Gül Altınay and Andrea Petö, eds., “Gendering Genocide,” Special Issue, European Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no.4 (Fall 2015). 45 The grandchildren who tell their Armenian grandfather’s stories are Henaramın, Nükhet, Aslı, and Elif. See Altınay and Çetin, Torunlar. 46 Zerdüşt is a pseudonym. All but two of our research participants appear in the book under pseudonyms rather than under their real names: see Altınay and Çetin, Torunlar. 47 Altınay and Çetin, Torunlar, 146 (from the story of “Salih”). 48 According to a January 2013 report, men own 65 percent of the real estate property in Turkey, and in certain provinces such as Hakkari, Mardin, and Siirt, this figure reaches 80 percent; see “Tapuda Kadının Adı Yok!” [In the Deeds, Women Have no Name!], Habertürk, January 22, 2013. Available at: http:// ekono​​mi​.ha​​bertu​​rk​.co​​m​/eml​​ak​/ha​​ber​/8​​13703​​-tapu​​da​-ka​​​dinin​​ -adi-​​yok (accessed August 22, 2013). Women’s employment rate in 2012 was 28.7 percent, the lowest among OECD countries: OECD, “Employment Rate of Women,” Employment and Labour Markets: Key Tables from OECD 5 (2013): doi: 10.1787/emp-fe-table-2013-1-en. 49 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 44. 50 Eliz Sanasarian, “Gender Distinction in the Genocidal Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 4 (1989): 449–61, 449. 51 Altınay and Türkyılmaz, “Unraveling.” 52 Akçam, Act, 340. 53 Ibid., 281. 54 Cynthia Enloe, “‘Women and children’: Making Feminist Sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis,” The Village Voice, September 25, 1990, 29–32. 55 Tachjian, “Gender.” 56 Ibid., 76f. 57 Ibid., 77. Historian Keith David Watenpaugh’s insightful analysis of the gendered development of humanitarianism is also geared toward the effort to

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“recover women and children survivors as discrete historical actors”: idem, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1315–39, 1337. 58 Avakian, “Future,” 203. Also see Avakian’s groundbreaking feminist memoir: Arlene Voski Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993). 59 Avakian, “Future,” 209f. 60 For a more comprehensive discussion, see Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser, “Multiple Histories? Changing Perspectives on Modern Historiography,” in Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons, ed. idem (Frankfurt, DE: Campus Verlag, 2009), 7–23. 61 For a self-critical reading of my scholarly and personal journey in relation to the Armenian genocide and its gendered legacies, see Ayşe Gül Altınay, “Undoing Academic Cultures of Militarism: Turkey and Beyond,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (February 2019): S15–S25.

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PART VI

International Law and Genocide Studies Prevention 

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14 Making Sense of Genocide, Making Sense of Law International Criminal Prosecutions of Large-Scale Sexual Violence Doris Buss

As the chapters in this volume make clear, there is a growing recognition that gender plays a role in shaping the conditions, mechanisms, and representations of large-scale violence. As a crime committed against a group, genocide invariably engages issues of gender. Gender ideologies, symbols, and norms often feature in the ways group membership is marked and regulated. The gendered roles of women and men are targeted for genocidal violence precisely because those roles are seen as crucial to the group’s ability to constitute itself, whether culturally or biologically. Gendered social structures, meanwhile, can shape the conditions that lead to vulnerability or survivability, while gendered access to postconflict power can impact the accounts of genocide that emerge as authoritative.1 While gender seems so obviously core to the modalities and representations of genocidal violence, the particularly gendered harms experienced by women and men during times of large-scale violence are surprisingly difficult to unravel. Prior to the 1990s, scholarship excavating the role of gender in shaping the trajectories of genocidal violence was minimal, and the legal and policy architecture pertaining to international crimes was largely gender

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blind (hence gendered male). This situation has changed substantially since the 1990s, when the wars and atrocities committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia sparked international outrage and mobilized legal and scholarly responses. The field of genocide studies has grown significantly since then, though gender remains underexamined, and new institutions, particularly international criminal courts, have been built to respond to and, hopefully, prevent genocide.2 But even these institutions have been slow to explore the range of gender harms experienced during large-scale violence. Feminist transitional justice scholars have argued persuasively that naming and officially recognizing gendered forms of harm is essential to the postconflict transitional constitution of social and political order.3 International criminal courts have become a key site where this process of recognition unfolds. While other transitional justice mechanisms, such as the gacaca courts in Rwanda, also provide some accountability for gendered forms of genocidal violence, international criminal courts have emerged as the most authoritative site for the production of official knowledge about what happened to women and men during large-scale violence, like genocide, and hence what harms need to be addressed as part of the transition from atrocity to “peace.”4 In this chapter, I consider the role of international criminal prosecutions in feminist efforts to secure legal recognition of the gendered harms that accompany genocide. My focus is on the prosecution of sexual violence crimes by the Rwanda and Yugoslav war crimes tribunals. While sexual violence is only one dimension of gendered harm, it has become the most common form recognized as an international crime and the crime of genocide in particular. For good reasons, feminist scholars have raised concerns about the overattention to sexual violence and the presumption that this form of harm is most definitive of women’s experience of genocide and other large-scale atrocities.5 I analyze the prosecution of sexual violence harm as genocide precisely because it has become emblematic of gendered harm more generally. Gendered dimensions of violence accompanying genocide are both revealed and obscured by the prosecution of sexual violence as a genocide crime. The Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, both established in the 1990s, have generated the most significant legal precedents on sexual violence as genocide. As I write this chapter in 2014, both tribunals are in the process of winding up their work, but they have established important precedents in exploring the gendered contours of contemporary genocide and large-scale atrocity. These two tribunals were the focus of feminist activism around the legal recognition of gendered forms of harm in the last two decades, and their judgments remain among the most comprehensive and groundbreaking. My interest in this chapter is on the role of law in advancing understandings of, and international responses to, large-scale violence. The limits of law in the field of genocide are well known. The legal definition of genocide has been much analyzed and critiqued for its narrow focus on state-planned

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genocides, aimed at the biological, rather than cultural, existence of a community and with a high threshold for determining genocidal intent.6 The international criminal trial, meanwhile, with its formal processes, constraining rules of evidence, and vulnerability to political interference, is seen as ill-suited to a thick accounting of the causes and circumstances of genocide. But, these accounts of the limits of law have not been entirely borne out by the operation of international criminal courts, some of which have provided detailed, contextual accounts of genocide, and its social and political contexts. While the legal definition of genocide can constrain an accounting of genocide as a crime, in this chapter I suggest that some of the limits encountered in the criminal prosecution of genocide may reflect contemporary dynamics around dominant conceptions of the causes and solutions to large-scale violence. International criminal prosecutions are sites where various narratives about conflict, atrocity, and justice are shaped and given expression. This expressive capacity of international criminal law is equally as important in understanding the limits, and the possibilities, of law in securing an accounting of the complexity of genocide. In both the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals, conceptions of the violence have been shaped by a particular “interpretive narrative” in which the atrocities in each of Rwanda and Yugoslavia are understood solely as the product of elite-orchestrated, ethnically inflected violence.7 Sexual violence, in this account, is similarly reduced to a single causation—rape as an instrument of the genocide. These “meta-narratives,” I argue, produce a number of troubling omissions that make a full accounting of gendered forms of harm difficult, even within the legal limits of the crime of genocide. The final section of the chapter examines the ways in which international genocide prosecutions remain, despite these limitations, an important arena for the recognition of gendered forms of harm. International criminal law serves to express symbolic condemnation and “forg[e] an emerging consensus regarding international norms.”8 Law thus occupies a contradictory place: most scholars bemoan its limitations yet see it as offering a political opening for transformation unavailable elsewhere. In this chapter, I explore in more detail how international criminal law, and the prosecution of genocide crimes, in particular, can be both these things—limited and open. The first part of my analysis begins with a discussion of political and legal campaigns by feminists to secure legal recognition of rape as genocide. Here, I provide some introduction to the historical context in which a feminist “politics of presence” emerged, and I then highlight some of the important legal decisions by the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals on rape, genocide, and crimes against humanity that resulted.9 The second section investigates the “meta-narrative” of the violence in Rwanda and Yugoslavia that structured the work of the tribunals, particularly in the early stages of their operation. The third section addresses how this metanarrative is found also in the dominant political and legal conceptions of rape “as a weapon of war.”

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Seeing Rape as Genocide When war broke out in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, reports of violence revealed that civilian populations were being specifically targeted for acts of brutality. The widespread use of rape against women, in particular, received significant press coverage. These rapes were described by international and local observers as a targeted policy to force or coerce civilians from one group to leave a geographical area claimed by another.10 Women from particular ethnic or national communities were often publicly raped as a means to terrorize local populations. Later reports would document the rapes of women held in prison camps in different locations in Bosnia.11 These and other atrocities appeared to be unfolding along “identity” lines. That is, women from one “nationality” or ethnic community were being targeted for sexual and other violence by the men from another. The work of feminist sociologists, such as Floya Anthias and Nira YuvalDavis, has mapped the ways in which “nation” is often understood in highly gendered terms: nation as mother; language as mother tongue; women as guardians of custom and national memory; and, finally, women as keepers of the “home-fires” in times of war.12 Mass rape of women in Yugoslavia was a phenomenon where gender, sexual violence, and nationalism were woven together.13 The atrocities, like the conflicts themselves, seemed to confirm that the world was witnessing a war that was identity-based, where nationalism as an expression of identity had reached a tragic extreme.14 Leading feminist analyses published in the 1990s, such as Alexandra Stiglmayer’s edited collection Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia,15 came to focus on rape as a weapon of war.16 Other terms found in this literature include rape as an “instrument” of genocide,17 an “engine of war,”18 a “war tactic,”19 and so on. Like “rape as a weapon of war,” these expressions reflect a conception of rape as having a function20 or use21 in, for example, furthering militaristic, masculinist, and/or nationalist goals, such as the destruction of a community.22 The ethnic contours of the conflicts in Yugoslavia were central to this conception of rape as a “weapon” used by one side against the other. In the logic of ethnic difference, so went the argument, the attack of a woman was an attack on the community. Rape was widespread precisely because it was being used to achieve a goal in the conflict: the humiliation, forced removal, or even the destruction of the “other” group. This understanding of rape served, in turn, to highlight the utter inadequacy of international law and policy in addressing this violence. To the extent that rape was recognized as violating international law, it was characterized as a lesser offense and one linked to a woman’s honor.23 In this context, feminist scholars, activists, lawyers, and politicians lobbied to ensure that women’s experiences of conflict violence would be recognized as an international crime, worthy of prosecution and condemnation. The focus of that effort was on

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including rape in the list of crimes that could be prosecuted by the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The overall results were mixed, and the statutes establishing the legal reach of the tribunals do not make much reference to rape or sexual violence. But subsequent judgments, and extensive feminist lobbying, began to deepen and extend the legal recognition of sexual violence and rape as international crimes, including the crime of genocide. The question of whether rape could be a component of genocide surfaced as an issue among feminists in the early 1990s, and Catherine MacKinnon’s 1993 article in Ms. Magazine24 was an early intervention arguing strongly that rape in Bosnia should be seen as genocide.25 While feminists themselves were divided about the tactical wisdom of arguing for rape as genocide (would this serve simply to make invisible rapes that did not fit the definition of genocide?), the legal case for recognizing rape as genocide was also not straightforward. Genocide—like its close, legal neighbor “crimes against humanity”—has two main parts: first, the underlying, intentional criminal act (“killing,” for example) that is committed; second, the intent to “destroy in whole or in part” a group. The Rwanda tribunal statute, as one example, defines genocide as the commissioning of certain listed acts with the intent of destroying a “national, ethnical, racial or religious” group. The list of acts that can form the underlying basis for genocide is not open-ended and includes only “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring” children of the group to another group.26 The problem facing those who argued that rape constituted genocide was that rape and sexual violence are not specifically included in this list. Compounding the omission, the drafts of the 1945 Genocide Convention, on which both the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunal definitions are based, also did not include any mention of rape or sexual violence.27 In order for rape to legally constitute the crime of genocide, then, judges would need to make an innovative ruling that sexual violence could be read into one of the five underlying acts listed earlier. The first Rwanda tribunal decision in Prosecutor v. Akayesu made exactly this ruling, but only after prompting by feminist activists.28 The Akayesu trial got under way in 1997 with the defendant, a mayor of Taba commune, charged with genocide but not with rape or sexual violence crimes. Two witnesses who were testifying during the trial “spontaneously” spoke of rapes they had experienced or observed. The judges questioned the witnesses further about the rapes, and more evidence came to light. In the vacuum created by a prosecutor’s office seemingly disinterested in pursuing rape charges, an NGO—The Coalition for Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations—stepped in and submitted an amicus curiae (friends of the court) brief calling on the Trial Chamber judges to amend the indictment to include rape charges and, further, to investigate why rape charges were not being properly charged in the first place.29 The Office of the Prosecutor apparently

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relented and brought its own motion requesting permission to amend the indictment to include charges of rape or sexual violence, including rape as genocide. The chamber agreed, the indictment was amended, evidence and argument were presented about rapes that took place in Taba commune, and Jean-Paul Akayesu was eventually found guilty of genocide, including rape as genocide. The Trial Chamber ruled that the rapes committed in Taba commune were part of the genocidal violence and constituted serious bodily or mental harm to the Tutsi group, and thus fit the crime of genocide. In making this determination, the Trial Chamber highlighted a number of factual elements about the rapes: they were widespread;30 they were often public, including acts intended to humiliate the women;31 they were frequently accompanied by mutilation of sexual organs, with women often killed after the rapes;32 and, crucially, they were systematically targeted at Tutsi women “and solely against them.”33 The Trial Chamber concluded that rape and sexual violence could: constitute genocide in the same way as any other act as long as they were committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group, targeted as such. Indeed, rape and sexual violence certainly constitute infliction of serious bodily and mental harm and are even . . . one of the worst ways of inflict [sic] harm on the victim as he or she suffers both bodily and mental harm.34 The Trial Chamber’s judgment was upheld on appeal, and the Akayesu ruling that rape and sexual violence stands as one of the oft-cited achievements of the Rwanda tribunal. Akayesu was followed by several other judgments that also established legal precedent in recognizing that harm in conflict can take on gendered qualities that are instrumental to the commission of international crimes. The decision by the Yugoslav tribunal in Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic35 was the first case where the charges related solely to sexual violence crimes, though genocide charges were not pursued.36 The Trial Chamber found the three defendants guilty of rape and torture, as constituting both a crime against humanity and a war crime, and two of the defendants guilty of enslavement (for exercising de facto ownership and power over women in their custody) as a crime against humanity. In Prosecutor v. Krstic the Yugoslav tribunal also made an innovative ruling, not on sexual violence this time, but on the gendered social relations that influenced how genocidal violence was planned and then impacted the surviving community.37 The Trial Chamber ruled the Bosnian Muslim community in eastern Bosnia was patriarchal in nature, which meant the community was effectively destroyed, in whole or in part, as a result of the Srebrenica massacre which killed 7,000–8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. The chamber further ruled that Serb forces were aware of the patriarchal nature of the community and the devastation that the deaths of the men would have on the surviving women, children, and elderly.38 The

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chamber determined that the Srebrenica massacre constituted the crime of genocide.39 These and other decisions have begun to offer a more detailed accounting of how gendered norms, beliefs, and practices are implicated in large-scale violence, in understanding both the types of violence used and its effect on victims. The commitment to prosecuting sexual violence crimes dropped off substantially after these cases, and the overall record of rape and sexual violence cases in international courts is dismal.40 While these landmark cases, and a few others, have established important precedents for the legal recognition of the gendered harms caused by international crimes, there is another reason to be cautious. Daniel Bloxham and Dirk Moses have argued that genocide studies need to move beyond simply considering the outcomes deemed to constitute “upper case Genocide” and broaden the analysis to consider the “context in which genocide occurs.”41 The same is true of legal decisions adjudicating genocide charges. While written judgments, including precedent-setting decisions like Akayesu and Krstic, are important to consider, it is equally imperative to place those decisions in their particular historical and institutional context. In the following discussion, I argue that these notable decisions unfolded in a context where violence and its causes were understood almost exclusively in terms of identity-based conflict, where violence was understood as resulting from elite orchestration of latent ethnic grievance. This framework, I argue herein, has exerted a powerful conceptual pull on the work of the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals and has implications for how, and in what terms, gendered harms are recognized as aspects of genocide and other international crimes.

Making Sense of Violence In the mid-to-late 1990s, when both the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals were beginning their work, there was a growing consensus in some international policy and scholarly circles that the conflicts in these two regions were problematically portrayed as resulting from tribal, atavistic hatreds. Scholars and policy practitioners began emphasizing the conflicts as constructed, elite-driven, modern, and intentional.42 Robert Hayden, a US-based scholar of the Balkan region and two-time expert witness at the Yugoslav tribunal, describes Western state and institutional responses to the war in Yugoslavia as “informed by a particular teleology—in which the demise of Yugoslavia was an aberration, a disaster caused by evil politicians, whose culpability needs to be shown so that normalcy can be obtained.”43 Scott Straus, writing on the Rwanda genocide, refers to a “new consensus” about Rwanda that emerged in scholarly and activist work in the 1990s. “Rather than seeing the violence as chaotic frenzy, as state failure, or an explosion of atavistic animosities, scholars and human rights activists alike stress the violence was modern, systematic and intentional.”44

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The “new consensus,” as Straus calls it, emerged partly in response to simplistic characterizations by Western media, and some political leaders, of the conflicts as “ethnic” or “tribal” violence. Warren Christopher, then secretary of state of the United States, described the violence in the Yugoslav regions in 1993 as a “problem from hell”: “The hatred between all three groups . . . is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old.”45 Christopher’s phrase—“a problem from hell”—became the title of Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which was a strongly argued tour de force about US government failure to officially recognize and respond to genocide and mass violence in various non-US locations, including Yugoslavia and Rwanda. For Power, Christopher’s comment reflected a US government strategy to absolve itself of responsibility by characterizing the violence in Yugoslavia as an amoral mess; centuries-old grievances that were beyond US intervention.46 Against the powerful trope of “tribal violence,” the new consensus was, in some respects, an attempt to insert complexity and responsibility (of local leaders but also Western decision-makers) into the discussions about mass atrocity. Within this framing, identity markers such as ethnicity and race remain important, but not as leading inevitably to violence. Rather they are understood as devices, or cultural codes, that could be manipulated by criminal elites to foster fear and violence. For example, in the Rwanda tribunal case Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze the three defendants, all charged with multiple counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, were depicted by the prosecution as ideologues of the Hutu power movement and as instigators of a propaganda campaign waged on radio, in print, and through the extremist political party, the Coalition pour la defense de la république (CDR), to incite ethnic fear, hatred, and then violence against Rwandan Tutsi.47 In its judgment, the Trial Chamber found that the radio station RTLM and the newspaper Kangura did engage in incitement to ethnic hatred and violence. It ruled that RTLM broadcasts “exploited the history of Tutsi privilege and Hutu disadvantage, and the fear of armed insurrection, to mobilize the population, whipping them into a frenzy of hatred and violence that was directed largely against the Tutsi ethnic group.”48 The three defendants, including in their roles as leaders and managers of RTLM, Kangura, and CDR, were found guilty of multiple genocide charges, including direct and public incitement to genocide.49 The Trial Chambers’ determinations in this and other cases are not, in my view, necessarily inaccurate. My point here is that the careful depiction of the violence as resulting from elite manipulation of ethnic identities (rather than inexplicable atavistic hatred) is itself an epistemological claim that serves, among other things, to make it possible to conceive of international criminal prosecutions as a justifiable international response to large-scale violence. If the conflicts are understood as resulting from the actions of rational, calculating individuals, then it is possible the events in Rwanda

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and Yugoslavia were “not tribalism run amok” but, instead, international crimes, like genocide.50 The understanding of large-scale violence as resulting from cynically contrived, local, elite-orchestrated ethic conflict, I suggest, exerted a powerful conceptual pull at least in the early days of the tribunals. The lawyers, judges, and clerks hired to work at the tribunals were drawn from various regions across the globe, and almost none of them had any working knowledge of the conflict regions or even the local languages. Faced with the enormity of prosecuting the most serious of international crimes—genocide and crimes against humanity—the judges and lawyers sought a framework within which they could explain what had happened. According to Robert Donia, a fourteen-time expert witness at the Yugoslav tribunal, “What they [ICTY judges] pretty much all feel is a need for a vehicle to frame the alien world they are being asked to render judgments on.”51 Navanethem Pillay, former judge of the Rwanda tribunal, described the approach of judges in the first Rwanda tribunal case of Akayesu in similar terms: “We judges agreed that you can’t avoid this question of history of Rwanda, otherwise it’s just one ethnic group killing another ethnic group with no reason why. History is necessary for an understanding of why the conflict occurred. Our first judgment—Akayesu—did this.”52 The prosecutors Robert Donia encountered at the Yugoslav tribunal were not looking for just any kind of historical narrative, he found, but “one that could be inserted in indictments, could impute motivations of actors as rational rather than crazed and wild; in general, that could make some sense.”53 Making “sense,” for both Donia and Judge Pillay is rooted in a dichotomous way of conceiving the violence: as tribal or atavistic hatred on the one hand, or as intentional elite orchestration on the other. Within the logic of this dichotomy, the tribunals’ focus on elite responsibility is not seen as a “version” of what happened but simply as common sense; a laudable rejection of the “ancient ethnic hatreds” characterization. Once again, and to be clear, there are many aspects of this account of the violence that I find persuasive, particularly as it pertains to the Rwanda conflict and genocide. But the “new consensus,” as a type of “master narrative,” also offers an additional “level of information” about the conditions in which certain (gendered) accounts of the causes and consequences of violence are possible at a given time.54 Attending to master or meta-narratives also helps reveal the true effects that result when a particular framing of events exerts such comprehensive explanatory power. The difficulty, I suggest, is that forms of violence, and categories of perpetrators and victims that do not fit within the common sense understanding of the violence, are simply disregarded or otherwise dismissed. In the following section, I focus on the judgments of the Rwanda tribunal in particular, to argue that the legal recognition of gendered harms, including sexual violence, has been constrained by the gravitational pull of an understanding of the violence in terms of elite manipulation of ethnic identities.

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Making Sense of Rape An understanding of rape and sexual violence as a means to target a community of people for violence and destruction fits well within the “new consensus” that emerged to explain the violence in Bosnia and Rwanda. In many of the feminist accounts discussed earlier, the significance of women’s cultural location as the symbols of the nation was emphasized. In the political and scholarly context of the 1990s, these arguments were important to make. Women were largely excluded from discussions about war and its effects, except when they were seen as the wives and mothers of brave soldiers.55 Emphasizing the sexual victimization of women disrupted some of the dominant narrative scripts about war and its location, participants, and effects. Placing women’s (violated) bodies into policy and legal discussions about war highlighted that women were a part of war, that the violence against them was not incidental and minor, and that women were targets for violence because of, for example, the gendered norms of motherhood and marriage.56 Fionnuala Ní Aoláin refers to feminist activism of this period as engaging in a “politics of presence,” that sought to move “women into view as relevant actors.”57 This was a “hard-headed” feminist activism, she argues, that emphasized women as victims and strategically highlighted women’s roles as mothers and wives in structuring their violence and suffering.58 In many ways, this was also a successful feminist intervention. The recognition of rape as a “weapon of war” or an “instrument of the genocide” took hold in legal, policy, and public consciousness. It has become the dominant frame within which the gendered nature of conflict violence is understood. The United Nations Security Council has passed six landmark resolutions recognizing the impact of armed conflict on women and the need for women’s participation in peacebuilding activities. A significant theme throughout these “women, peace and security” resolutions, as they are known, is the recognition of women’s experience of sexual violence in armed conflict.59 Similarly, in the legal prosecution of war crimes, including genocide, rape as a weapon of war or an instrument of the genocide has also become the dominant explanatory framework within which discussions of sexual harm are placed.60 While these political and legal developments are important in making visible and taking seriously conflict sexual violence, they also portray violence and its effects in narrow ways that produce some troubling omissions. Rape as a “weapon of war” or “instrument of the genocide” has resulted in a disproportionate focus on both sexual violence and sexual violence in connection with orchestrated atrocities that fit the model of the “new consensus.” That is, conflict rape is predominantly, almost exclusively, now understood as an instrument wielded by militias and armies against the women of a different community in order to harm or destroy that community.

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But this narrative, while an important explanation of some sexualized violence, is not accurate for all rapes and all conflicts. Some research has begun to challenge the too-easy assumptions about the perpetrators, victims, and contexts of conflict sexual violence woven into assertions about rape as a weapon of war.61 Elisabeth Wood, for example, broke important ground by specifically challenging assumptions about the inevitability of rape in war.62 She studied examples of armed conflicts where rape was “rare,” revealing a “neglected fact” that rape is not always a substantial feature of conflict, and, by closely examining when and in what contexts conflict rape is widespread, we can help identify conditions that impact its prevalence.63 Other researchers have revealed the different kinds of rape and different categories of perpetrators and victims omitted from accounts premised on the singular explanation of rape “as a weapon of war.”64 “Everyday” rape, rape in “peace” time, rape by civilians, and rape against certain kinds of victims may be overlooked or minimized when “rape as a weapon of war” is the dominant lens.65 Genocide prosecutions, particularly of rape as genocide, tend to exacerbate these omissions. In an understanding of conflict and violence as emanating from elite manipulation of ethnic identity designed to destroy a group within the polity, legal attention is focused on the elite and their (criminal) responsibility. Evidence that will demonstrate this responsibility, such as chains of command but also continuity in the types and mechanism of violence, are prioritized. The resulting “top down” focus on violence perpetuates the omission of the range of harms suffered by women and men and the complexities of the labels “perpetrator” and “victim.” In the Rwanda tribunal, for example, the focus of many of the sexual violence determinations by Trial Chambers was on the patterns of rape. In Akayesu, the Trial Chamber’s assessment of the genocidal nature of the rapes was underpinned by the conclusion that in “most cases” Tutsi women were raped and then killed.66 In other cases, the Trial Chambers emphasized that the rapes were highly public, often occurring at roadblocks.67 And throughout, there was particular attention to the deemed ethnic identities of the victims and perpetrators. In this emphasis on patterns and commonalities, acts of violence that do not fit within larger patterns can be too easily discounted as idiosyncratic, or as not sufficiently systematic to warrant prosecution. For example, “forced marriage”—or “forced enslavement” as it is sometimes called68— has not been prosecuted by the Rwandan tribunal, even while there is some evidence that women were “married” or held in sexual servitude during the genocide.69 Given the disappointing record of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on sexual violence prosecutions generally, this particular omission on its own is not too surprising.70 But “forced marriage” or “sexual enslavement” also does not fit well within the depiction of rape as genocide outlined by the Trial Chamber in Akayesu and other cases, where

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the patterns of the rapes are identified as a prelude to killing and as taking place in very public surroundings. Certain categories of perpetrators and victims who do not fit the dominant account of rape as genocide can also be difficult to see. In Akayesu, the Trial Chamber concluded that rape was “perpetrated against all Tutsi women and solely against them.”71 This same determination can be found in the dissenting judgment in Kajelijeli, in which Judge Ramaroson concluded that “rape and sexual violence were exclusively perpetrated against Tutsi women (of which only some cases were reported to us) and were committed on grounds of their ethnicity.”72 Yet, Hutu women were also raped and killed, particularly in the early days of the genocide, because of their presumed political opposition to the Habyarimana government and/or extremist Hutu elements.73 Hutu women married to Tutsi men were likewise targeted for rape, as were Hutu women accused of helping Tutsi to escape. But the violence surrounding the genocide made all women, irrespective of their deemed ethnic identity or political affiliation, vulnerable to rape.74 Just as Hutu women were hard to see as victims of the genocide, so too were the men subjected to rape and sexual violence. The ICTR did not prosecute any sexual violence cases where men were the victims, though there is evidence that sexual violence, including rape and forms of sexual slavery against men, was a feature of the genocide.75 Finally, rape as genocide may also have an impact on how other gender harms are not seen as part of genocidal violence. Ní Aoláin has argued that international criminal law has, for the most part, ignored the experiences that women might describe as most damaging . . . [such as] harms to their children, destruction and insecurity to their private spaces, humiliation and discrimination based on sex, economic deprivations, and the range of sex-based acts that constitute violent experiences to the female person but are not formally acknowledged as such by international or domestic law.76 Further, Ní Aoláin notes that the dominant focus on the violence experienced by specific individuals overlooks the ways in which families and communities who are “emotionally tied to the victim or in a relationship of co-dependency with them” are also affected.77 These “connected harms” are largely invisible within a legal framework preoccupied with the civil and political harms experienced by individual men and women. The Krstic decision on the Srebrenica genocide stands out as a notable exception in this regard. The Trial Chamber in this case gave substantial consideration to evidence about the ways in which the surviving members of the community of Bosnian Muslims were impacted by the killings of large numbers of men and boys. The chamber, for example, recognized the existence of “Srebrenica syndrome,” a “new pathology category” that refers

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to the unique difficulties arising from the (then) large number of unconfirmed deaths of the Muslim men from Srebrenica. The 7,000–8,000 men killed in Srebrenica had been buried and then moved out of mass grave sites, making identification of their bodies difficult. At the time of the trial, many of the men were still classified as “missing.” The suffering caused by this uncertainty posed a particular problem for this community, the chamber ruled, because “for Bosnian Muslim women it is essential to have a clear marital status.”78 For this and other reasons connected to the patriarchal nature of the affected community, the Trial Chamber concluded that “by killing all the military aged men, the Bosnian Serb forces effectively destroyed the community of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica as such and eliminated all likelihood that it could ever reestablish itself on that territory.”79 These acts constituted the crime of genocide.80 But the decision in Krstic has been criticized by legal scholars for overreaching in its analysis of genocide and for a “patronizing” speculation about the effects of the Srebrenica massacre on the surviving community.81 While I share some of these critiques, the legal judgment in Krstic, despite its limitations, remains a rare exception to the rule that gendered harms of genocide are most likely to be seen as rape and related forms of sexual violence and that these acts are understood as a highly efficient “instrument” by which the genocide was enacted.82 The account of rape as an “instrument of the genocide” has epistemological effects, I argue, much like the “new consensus” outlined earlier. In addition to producing a range of omissions in the types of harms and victims that can be recognized, this instrumentalized account of rape also limits the questions that are asked about sexual violence and about the range of harms and violence that accompany genocide. “Rape as an instrument of the genocide” leads away from questions about why rape (or other modalities of violence) happened. Violence is understood exclusively as the product of a two-sided, identity-based conflict, minimizing, in turn, the social, political, and economic structures within which genocide and other large-scale atrocities unfold.

Making Sense of Law The limitations that result from criminal prosecutions of rape as an instrument of genocide reflect what Ní Aoláin refers to as the “capture problem”; the difficulty that transitional justice institutions, such as international criminal courts, have in accounting for the range of conflict harms that women experience.83 The “capture problem” is found in multiple areas of law, not just genocide prosecutions, and feminist lawyers and academics have long been wary about criminal prosecution of sexual violence crimes even in national legal contexts. British sociologist Carol Smart, for one, writing in the 1980s, warned about the limits for feminists in seeking to better use law for women’s benefit. She argued that law gives itself the sole authority to determine “the

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truth of things,” disqualifying, in turn, feminist knowledges that fall outside law’s truth. The rape trial exemplifies this power, she said, and demonstrates the enduring authority of phallocentric sexuality. Women’s accounts of sexuality and violence are “strained” through the legal form of the trial, with the result that law “consistently fails to ‘understand’ accounts of rape which do not fit with the narrowly constructed legal definition (or Truth) of rape.”84 While Smart’s account of the limits of the rape trial is somewhat overdrawn, her analysis of law’s power holds some lessons for contemporary feminist engagement with international criminal law. International criminal prosecutions, and the focus on prosecuting genocide crimes in particular, may be a limiting forum within which to seek a full accounting of women’s experiences of large-scale violence. Other transitional justice mechanisms such as reparations and lustration should be explored as additional, important sites to bring about a more gender-sensitive account of conflict and harm.85 Yet, as Smart herself noted, law may have its limits, but it is also a powerful arena. For all its limitations, international criminal law is not a forum that feminists can easily dismiss. Smart urged feminists to revisit their strategic goals in light of law’s power. As a tool to promote women’s interests, law can be limiting and produce effects antithetical to feminist goals. But precisely because law has the power to “redefine the truth of events” it “cannot go unchallenged.”86 The post-genocide, transitional period, as is now widely recognized, is a time of great flux, where political, social, and economic institutions are being rebuilt and often transformed. Transitional justice processes, in this period of change, are important sites at which the terms of postconflict public life and citizenship are constituted. The criminal trial, for all its deficiencies, has become the most important of the transitional institutions—truth commissions, memorialization, and the like—that are deployed in transitioning countries.87 For reasons too complex to develop here, international criminal trials offer an authoritative arena in which internationally agreed norms and values are given expression.88 In the important performative space of the international criminal trial, a feminist “politics of presence,” even with all the reservations noted earlier, is still required. The legal recognition of gendered forms of harm, and particular categories of victims and perpetrators, provides an important basis for claims to full inclusion in both the accounting of large-scale atrocity and the social rebuilding that follows.89 The dismissal or exclusion of women’s experiences of large-scale crimes can be seen as a form of “misrecognition” and social subordination.90 In this context, the demand for recognition of the full range of gendered harms experienced by women and men, for example, is a means to “overcome status subordination by changing the values that regulate interaction.”91 International criminal prosecution as a form of recognition is arguably even more crucial in the area of genocide crimes. Genocide is generally considered the “crime of crimes,” and as occupying a higher status in

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the list of crimes prosecuted by international courts.92 Both the Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals have prioritized genocide convictions over the prosecution of other crimes, for example, and the label “genocide” is often sought after in other contexts to secure heightened attention to situations of mass atrocity.93 As Payam Akhavan notes, the label “genocide” offers the prospect of “meta-legal recognition.”94 In this context, the legal recognition of the gendered dimensions of genocide is particularly important, even while the legal arena offers a mixed, and at times limiting, space for this to happen.

Conclusion Contemporary understandings of genocides in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries have highlighted the significance of the “body politic” to the rationality and mechanisms of orchestrated violence.95 Gendered norms, relations, and beliefs are important devices by which the very idea of the body politic coheres. Women’s bodies, in particular, often figure in representations of the borders of the political unity of a given population. It is perhaps not surprising that violence against women, and sexual violence against women and men, can sometimes feature as mechanisms by which communities are targeted for harm and possible destruction. What is more surprising is how difficult it is to “capture” the ways in which gender and gendered forms of harm are woven into genocidal violence. In this chapter, I have explored international criminal prosecutions as one setting in which the role of gender in some contemporary examples of genocide has been examined. I have argued that international law offers a paradoxical site for this exploration. It is a limited arena, and the legal definition of genocide further constrains the types of harms that can be visible as linked to genocide. But even within these restrictions, I have argued, more attention is needed on the dominance of meta-narratives about contemporary forms of identity-based conflicts and the role of instrumentalized sexual violence—rape as a weapon of war—within that framing. Yet, I conclude by noting that law offers the possibilities for pushing the range of voices and knowledges that can be placed before it, even with its tendency to dismiss or colonize dissonant accounts. It remains an important arena, for all its limitations, within which to contest and, hopefully, expand official accounts of the gender dimensions of contemporary forms of genocide and other large-scale violence.

Notes 1 A. Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs 38, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 503–33.

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2 A. Curthoys and J. Docker, “Defining Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. D. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 F. Ní Aoláin, “Emerging Paradigms of Rationality: Exploring a Feminist Theory of Harm in the Context of Conflicted and Post-Conflicted Societies,” Queen’s Law Journal 35, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 219–44; F. Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning in the Field of Transitional Justice,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 2 (2012): 205–28; D. Buss, “Performing Legal Order: Some Feminist Thoughts On International Criminal Law,” International Criminal Law Review: Special Issue on Women & International Criminal Law 11 (2011): 409–23. 4 D. Buss, “Knowing Women: Translating Patriarchy in International Criminal Law,” Social & Legal Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 73–92; P. Dixon and C. Tenove, “International Criminal Justice as a Transnational Field: Rules, Authority and Victims,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 3 (2013): 393– 412. 5 For a more detailed discussion, see N. Henry, “The Fixation on Wartime Rape: Feminist Critique and International Criminal Law,” Social & Legal Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 93–111. 6 W. Schabasl, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); for an overview see Curthoys and Docker, “Defining Genocide.” 7 P. Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law: Definition, Meaning and the Ultimate Crime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 108. 8 D. Bloxham and D. O. Pendas, “Punishment as Prevention? The Politics of Prosecuting Génocidaires,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. D. Bloxham and A. Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 617–35. 9 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning.” 10 See, for example, R. Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia (New York: MacMillan, 1993); Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, vol. I (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992). 11 Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic, Case nos ICTY-IT-96-23-T and ICTY-IT-96-23-1-T, Judgment (February 22, 2001). 12 F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (London: Routledge, 1992). 13 D. Buss, “Women at the Borders: Rape and Nationalism in International Law,” Feminist Legal Studies 6, no. 2 (1998): 171; S. A. Sofos, “Inter-Ethnic Violence and Gendered Constructions of Ethnicity in Former Yugoslavia,” Social Identities 2, no. 1 (1996): 73; J. Mertus, “‘Women’ in the Service of National Identity,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5 (Winter 1994): 5. 14 M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); M. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journey into the New Nationalism (Toronto, CA: Penguin Canada, 1994).

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15 A. Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 16 See, for example, B. Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in BosniaHerzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); R. Seifert, “War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis”; C. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights”; and R. Copelon, “Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes Against Women in Time of War,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. A. Stiglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 54–72, 183–95, 197–218, respectively; E. A. Kohn, “Rape as a Weapon of War: Women’s Human Rights During the Dissolution of Yugoslavia,” Golden Gate University Law Review 24 (1994): 199–223; Hastings Law Symposium, “Rape as a Weapon of War in the Former Yugoslavia,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 5, no. 1 (1994): 69–88. 17 K. D. Askin, “Prosecuting Wartime Rapes and Other Gender-Related Crimes under International Law: Extraordinary Advances, Enduring Obstacles,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 21, no. 2 (2003): 288–349. 18 Copelon, “Surfacing Gender,” 205. 19 T. L. Tompkins, “Prosecuting Rape as a War Crime: Speaking the Unspeakable,” Notre Dame Law Review 70 (1995): 859. 20 Seifert, “War and Rape,” 55. 21 C. MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide,” Ms. Magazine 5, no. 1 (July/August 1993): 24–30. 22 Copelon, “Surfacing Gender,” 206; MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” 75; Seifert, “War and Rape,” 62; Kohn, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 203. 23 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning,” 205–28. 24 MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography,” 24–30. 25 For a discussion, see Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Gender and Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. Bloxham and Moses, 69–71; D. Buss, “Sexual Violence, Ethnicity, and the Limits of Intersectionality in International Criminal Law,” in Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, eds. E. Grabham, D. Cooper, J. Krishnadas, and D. Herman (London: Routledge, 2008), 105–23. 26 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Article 2:2, ICTR Statute. 27 For a discussion, see A. L. M. de Brouwer, Supranational Criminal Prosecution of Sexual Violence: The ICC and the Practice of the ICTY and the ICTR (Antwerp, BE: Oxford Intersentia, 2005), 43. 28 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, Case no. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment (September 2, 1998). 29 For a discussion, see B. Van Shaack, “Engendering Genocide: The Akayesu Case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” in Human Rights Advocacy Stories (Law Stories), eds. D. R. Hurwitz, M. L. Satterthwaite, and D. B. Ford (New York: Foundation Press, 2008). 30 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, ¶ 706.

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31 Ibid., ¶ 731. 32 Ibid., ¶ 733. 33 Ibid., ¶ 732. 34 Ibid., ¶ 731. 35 Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic, Case nos. IT-96-23-T and IT-9623-1-T (February 22, 2001). 36 Genocide charges were rarely pursued by the ICTY for reasons too complex to discuss here. 37 Prosecutor v. Krstic, Case no. ICTR-IT-98-33-T, Judgment (August 2, 2001). 38 Ibid., ¶ 595. 39 For further discussion see Buss, “Knowing Women.” 40 D. Buss, “Rethinking Rape as a Weapon of War,” Feminist Legal Studies 17, no. 2 (2009): 145–63; K. Campbell, “The Gender of Transitional Justice: Law, Sexual Violence and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 1, no. 3 (2007): 411–32; Henry, “The Fixation on Wartime Rape.” 41 Bloxham and Pendas, “Punishment as Prevention,” 8. 42 See, for example, African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, rev. ed. (London: African Rights, 1995); A. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Papermac, 1998). The discussion in this section is narrowly focused on what I see as a meta-narrative about these conflicts as elite-orchestrated. A close reading of the vast scholarly literature that provides detailed analyses of the contexts of the violence in these two regions is beyond the scope of this chapter. 43 R. M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 155–6. 44 S. Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 33. 45 Interview with Warren Christopher, Face the Nation, CBS, March 28, 1993, cited in S. Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 306. 46 Ibid. 47 Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze, Case no. ICTR-99-52-A, Sentence and Judgment (November 28, 2007) (“media” case). 48 Ibid., ¶ 488. 49 Several of the convictions were, however, reversed on appeal, a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. 50 Straus, The Order of Genocide, 33. 51 Interview with author via Skype, December 8, 2010. 52 R. Wilson, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 72.

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53 Interview with author via Skype, December 8, 2010. 54 See also Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide,” 504. 55 J. B. Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 56 For further discussion, see D. Buss, “Seeing Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: The Limits of Visibility,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts, eds. D. Buss, J. Lebert, B. Rutherford, and D. Sharkey (London: Routledge Press, 2014). 57 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning,” 220. 58 Ibid., 219. 59 L. J. Shepherd, “Sex, Security and Superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and Beyond,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 4 (2011): 507. 60 Buss, “Rethinking Rape”; Buss, “Seeing Sexual Violence.” 61 See for example, C. Dolan, “War Is Not Yet Over”: Community Perceptions of Sexual Violence and its Underpinnings in Eastern DRC (London: International Alert, 2010); Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam International, “Now the World is Without Me”: An Investigation of Sexual Violence in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (April 2010); J. Kelly,” Rape in War: Motives of Militia in DRC,” Special Report: United States Institute of Peace (2010), 243. 62 E. Wood, “Variations in Sexual Violence During War,” Politics & Society 34, no. 3 (2006): 307–41; E. Wood, “Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?” Politics & Society 37, no. 1 (March 2009): 131–62. 63 Ibid., 132. 64 M. E. Baaz and M. Stern, “The Complexity of Violence: A Critical Analysis of Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),” Working Paper on Gender Based Violence (Uppsala, SE: Swedish International Development Agency, 2010), 1–70; J. Boesten, “Analyzing Rape Regimes at the Interface of War and Peace in Peru,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 4, no. 1 (2010): 110–29; Kelly, “Rape in War”; K. Theidon, “Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War,” Journal of Human Rights 6 (2007): 453–78; J. True, The Political Economy of Violence Against Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 65 M.E. Baaz and M. Stern, “Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC),” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2009): 495–518; Baaz and Stern, “The Complexity of Violence”; Boesten, “Analyzing Rape Regimes”; Dolan, “War Is Not Yet Over”; Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, “Now the World is Without Me”; Buss, “Rethinking Rape.” 66 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, ¶ 733. 67 See, for example, Prosecutor v. Bagasora, Case no. ICTR-96-7-T (December 18, 2008), ¶ 1728. 68 A. Bunting, “‘Forced Marriage’ in Conflict Situations: Researching and Prosecuting Old Harms and New Crimes,” Canadian Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (2012): 165–85.

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69 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996). 70 Buss, “Rethinking Rape.” 71 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, ¶ 732. 72 Prosecutor v. Kajelijeli, Case no. ICTR-98-44A-T, Dissenting Opinion of Judge Arlette Ramaroson (December 1, 2003), ¶ 97. 73 Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives, 40–1. 74 Ibid., 40. 75 Interview with Florida Kabasinga, Assistant Appeals Counsel, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, May 6, 2008. 76 Ní Aoláin, “Emerging Paradigms of Rationality,” 23. 77 Ibid., 25. 78 Prosecutor v. Krstic, ¶ 93. 79 Ibid., ¶ 597. 80 For a more detailed discussion, see Buss, “Knowing Women.” 81 See, for example, Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 881. 82 Buss, “Knowing Women.” 83 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning,” 224. 84 C. Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law: Sociology of Law and Crime (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26. 85 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning.” 86 Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law, 164. 87 Dixon and Tenove, “International Criminal Justice,” 393–412. 88 J. B. Elander, “The Victim’s Address: Expressivism and the Victim at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 1 (2013): 95–115; D. M. Amann, “Group Mentality, Expressivism, and Genocide,” International Criminal Law Review 21, no. 2 (2002): 92–143; M. A. Drumbl, Atrocity, Punishment and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 89 Ní Aoláin, “Advancing Feminist Positioning.” 90 N. Fraser, “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (May/June 2000), 113; Henry, “The Fixation on Wartime Rape,” 106. 91 Ibid., 114–15. 92 For a discussion, see Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law. 93 M. Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency,” London Review of Books 29, no. 5 (March 2007): 5–8. Available online: http:​ /​/www​​.lrb.​​co​.uk​​/v29/​​n05​/m​​ahmoo​​d​-mam​​dani/​​the​-p​​oliti​​cs​-of​​-nami​​ng​-ge​​nocid​​e​ -civ​​​il​-wa​​r​-ins​​urgen​​cy. 94 Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law, 147. 95 M. Fleming, “Genocide and the Body Politic in the Time of Modernity,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, eds. R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–113.

15 Representing Gendered Violence in Democratic Kampuchea Maria Elander

Introduction In the face of unspeakable atrocity, law provides a promise of intelligibility. By translating and categorizing the messiness of life, violence or trauma is registered in language. As Panu Minkkinen puts it, law makes even seemingly meaningless suffering and violence come to “serve[] a purpose in the rectification of wrongs by assigning responsibility.”1 In this way, law “constitutes a world of meaning and action.”2 Through its ability to translate suffering into crime and to allocate responsibility, law provides a promise of meaning. For feminist scholars and activists, international criminal law is a contradictory site of engagement.3 On the one hand, law’s promise of translation makes it a powerful site through which gendered violence and suffering may be recognized. There is power in saying that rape during conflict is not simply an unfortunate side effect of conflict but a crime. There is power in turning the violence of rape into the violence of judgment and sentencing.4 On the other hand, law has often been a site, even cause, of gender oppression. International criminal law is no different. It follows that “breaking the silence” is also here a familiar feminist aim/trope, and “searching for the silences”5 a well-established feminist methodology.6 On November 17, 2018, the Trial Chamber in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, or here simply the Court) held Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan responsible for crimes they had committed as senior leaders of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).7 Between April 17, 1975, and January 6, 1979, the CPK, colloquially known as the Khmer Rouge

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or “Angkar”—“the organization,” controlled the capital Phnom Penh in the state they called Democratic Kampuchea.8 Its revolution was radical, overturning everything from the traditional structures of society to the role of religion to the organization of family life. By the time they were ousted from Phnom Penh in 1979, somewhere from 22 percent to 28 percent of the population had perished through persecution, starvation, and lack of medicine.9 Much has been written on the period, and survivors, historians, anthropologists, and others have done much to shed light on the causes and consequences of the regime’s actions.10 With the ECCC came a joint effort by the Cambodian government and the United Nations to further elucidate on the period through the particular lens of international criminal law and for the purposes of accountability.11 In a massive case against the highest-ranking surviving leaders that covered the whole time period and raised important and long-disputed questions regarding the relationship between the core CPK leadership and the manifold suffering experienced across the country, the ECCC Trial Chamber held the two surviving former leaders responsible for the most serious of international crimes: genocide, a range of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity, constituted by offences such as persecution, slavery, torture, and other inhumane acts through the conduct of forced marriage and rape.12 After more than a decade of proceedings, much has also been written on the ECCC’s poor record on prosecuting gender- and sexual-based violence (SGBV).13 In the case against the leaders, the charges relating to the regulation of marriage were the only ones directly encompassing sexual violence. Hence, the charges and the finding came to hold particular symbolic purchase for all forms of SGBV committed during the regime. Before the judgment, Phnom Penh–based academic Theresa de Langis described the charges as: the Court’s best last chance to contribute to the ever-evolving body of law aimed at better responding to perpetually neglected sexual and other gender-based crimes in times of conflict and atrocity globally. Above all, by including forced marriage in Case 002/02, the ECCC will finally be in a position to explain to survivors—who have courageously broken decades-long silence despite the risk of social stigma and censure—how gender-based violence was a feature of the general mass violence of the catastrophic Khmer Rouge regime.14 Theresa de Langis’s description is typical of much feminist engagement with SGBV in international criminal law and the ECCC. Here, SGBV figures as in spite: charges stand in spite of the passing of time, in spite of “social stigma and censure,” in spite of “perpetual[] neglect[].” In a companion piece, I describe how spite has structured testimonies on SGBV during Democratic Kampuchea.15 There is power in spite. A testimony in spite breaks a powerful silence, marks in language that which has been seen or experienced. Law provides a promise to enable such a mark by translating the experience into a

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recognizable language. Yet, spite also suggests a dichotomy, an either/or, and a temporal split between the past in which silence prevailed and the present in which recognition triumphs. Here, the framing devices that structure “the spite” disappear from the analytical framework, as if they have somehow been overcome. This is problematic, as Wendy Brown writes, “breaking the silence” may “carry its own techniques of subjugation—that it converges with non-emancipatory tendencies in contemporary culture . . . that it establishes regulatory norms . . . in short, feeds the powers we meant to starve.”16 In this chapter, I explore the relationship between spite, SGBV, and the promise of law. On the basis of a close reading of how SGBV figured in the case against the former leaders, I seek to demonstrate how the desire for law to “break the silence” underestimates and ultimately fails to sufficiently capture the complexity of legal translations. Paying attention to the practices of translation and categorization within law thus complicates the simplicity in the promise. This insight builds on generations of feminist scholarship on law, war, and SGBV. Take the example of how rape figures in discourses on war. As Cynthia Enloe argued twenty years ago, sometimes making rape visible (a similar trope to “breaking silence”) can be “dangerously easy.”17 At other times, the way rape is conceptualized is too narrow, occluding its diversity in terms of contexts and occurrences. At international criminal courts and tribunals, as Doris Buss argues, “[r]ape as a ‘weapon of war’ or ‘instrument of the genocide’ has resulted in a disproportionate focus on . . . sexual violence . . . now understood [almost exclusively] as an instrument.”18 Likewise, Judith Gardam has problematized the focus on sexual violence in international criminal courts as this has come at the expense of a wider range of gender-based violations experienced during conflict.19 More importantly, as these and other feminist scholars have argued, the emphasis on rape as the crime of SGBV has narrowed the scope of how gender is part of the commission, experiences, and responses to atrocity. Thus, my argument that translations of SGBV in international criminal law are complex and only partially capture experiences of harm is not breaking any silences. Moreover, my examination of the proceedings in relation to SGBV reinforces this overemphasis on certain kinds of harms as “gendered.” Yet, over the course of the proceedings at the ECCC, I have been struck by the strength in the promise of law and the corresponding anger when the ECCC fails to capture the highly variegated experiences of suffering during Democratic Kampuchea. Decades of feminist scholarship questioning the wisdom of turning to international criminal law as a salve for SGBV seem not to have tempered expectations. Hence, in this chapter, I describe how claims of sexual and gendered violence during Democratic Kampuchea were adjudicated at the ECCC, in order to unpack their contestations and to show how judicial findings can both reinforce and problematize preconceptions, feminist or otherwise, of the events and suffering of the regime. My main argument is that the very strength of the promise of international criminal law of intelligibility often occludes more diverse sets of experiences that fail to be heard.

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The chapter proceeds in two parts, followed by a conclusion. The first part examines the way that rape and sexual violence were excluded from the charges against the CPK leaders. I begin with sexual violence both because it was dealt with early in the proceedings, thereby providing background to later findings, and because of its symbolic significance in much commentary. However, whereas scholars have heavily criticized the ECCC for silencing experiences of sexual violence, I demonstrate that the decision to not include rape at security centers and worksites had less to do with silencing particular experiences and more to do with the decision to structure the case on policies, thus the chosen mode of liability, and to the structure of international criminal law. The second part attends to the recent finding that the Khmer Rouge marriages constituted inhumane acts of crimes against humanity. While the charges came to symbolize any and all gendered experiences of harm during the regime, I hesitate to hail the findings as I worry that it is flattening what is possible to hear of how the imposition of marriage was experienced.

Translating Sexual Violence at the ECCC The way that SGBV has been treated at the ECCC appears as a classic “in spite” narrative structure: initially ignored by the investigators,20 charges of SGBV were finally laid in the case against the leaders thanks to repeated requests from the civil parties, via their lawyers, to expand the investigations.21 Yet, despite the fact that both researchers and investigators found ample evidence that sexual violence had been prevalent during the regime at work sites, cooperatives, and security centers, the charges that were laid were limited to rape within the context of marriage. The reasons for this omission reflect how and when international criminal law engages with conflict-related SGBV. The case against the former leaders was based on the Co-Investigating Judges’22 (CIJ) factual finding that the CPK leaders had a “common purpose . . . to implement rapid socialist revolution in Cambodia through a great leap forward and defend the Party against internal and external enemies, by whatever means necessary.”23 This common purpose was evidenced by four sets of policies, which also organized the case: the establishment of worksites and cooperatives, the movement of the population from cities to the countryside, the targeting of specific groups such as the minority Cham and ethnic Vietnamese, and the regulation of marriage. In the translation from event to crime, it is the existence of policy—its design and implementation— that links the acts that caused suffering with the accused persons in this case. Yet in searching for a link between the accused persons and the rape and sexual violence at worksites, cooperatives, and security sites, the CIJ found nothing. Notably, they found enough facts to establish that the crime against humanity of rape had been committed at security centers during the regime, but these could not, according to the CIJ, be attributed to the CPK

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leaders, that is, the accused persons.24 Not only did the CIJ fail to see a link that would have evidenced the leaders’ responsibility for the rapes, a kind of responsibility I will shortly return to, but the CIJ even considered that “the official CPK policy regarding rape was to prevent its occurrence and to punish the perpetrators.”25 Structuring the case on the existence of policies that led to the various crimes, the CIJ here instead found a policy to prevent rape. According to the CIJ, this policy was evidenced by two Moral Codes issued for Party and the Armed Forces.26 These Moral Codes operated under a Constitution that stipulated equality: There must be complete equality among all Kampuchean people in an equal, just, democratic, harmonious, and happy society within the great national solidarity for defending and building the country together. Men and women are fully equal in every respect.27 This emphasis on equality was seemingly reinforced in the Moral Codes. The English version of the Closing Order—the legal document by which the CIJ either dismiss a case or charge accused persons and, if so, decide on the scope of the trial—used a translation of the Codes conducted by prominent NGO DC-Cam.28 According to this translation, one of the Codes states, “Do not take liberties with women” and the other “We must not do anything detrimental to women.”29 Disregarding that only women would have been protected by the Codes, and that the translation is only partially correct,30 the CIJ read them as emphasizing gender equality and morality, and as demonstrating that the CPK considered all intimate relations outside of marriage “immoral.” And given that “people who were suspected of ‘immoral’ behavior were categorized as ‘bad-elements’ or ‘enemies,’ and were often either re-educated or killed,”31 the CIJ concluded “that the official CPK policy regarding rape was to prevent its occurrence and to punish the perpetrators.”32 This did not mean no rapes were committed, but that “it cannot be considered that rape was one of the crimes used by the CPK leaders to implement the common purpose.”33 Feminist scholars and activists responded with outrage to the decision to not include rape in security centers in the charges. Disregarding the fact that the CIJ did not dispute that rape had occurred, but whether they were linked to or evidenced a policy, the dismissal was read as reinforcing silences regarding SGBV more broadly during conflict. Then UN Special representative of the secretary-general on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallström, lamented and warned: The Court, which was created to give justice to survivors, is faced with a pool of victims without recourse to justice—and the accountability and acknowledgment it brings—for the crimes they experienced as part of the general atrocities. Unless the Court finds a way to address this issue, it will be perceived as implicitly re-enforcing the silence about conflict-related

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sexual violence, and not providing a counterbalance to the impunity that has prevailed.34 For Wallström, the Court was not created to “bring to trial senior leaders and those most responsible,” which is how the ECCC Agreement and ECCC Law stated its authority, but rather to “give justice to survivors.” And if the Court has a responsibility to bring justice to survivors, rather than finding ways to “bring to trial senior leaders,” the Court needs to give an “address” to avoid “re-enforcing the silence.” Wallström’s own address demonstrates the tension between the desire for law to fulfil a promise and the difficulties to adequately translate and categorize events and experiences. The CIJ questioned neither the occurrence nor the gravity of rape, but that the leaders had had a policy to rape. To elaborate on the implications of such framing: For the CIJ to charge the leaders, rape would have needed to constitute an instrument of the leaders’ common purpose. That is, rape would have needed to have been conceptualized as a weapon. Perhaps the problem, then, is not that the Court “silenced” rapes, since with a statement that “it is clearly established that under the Democratic Kampuchea regime crimes against humanity of rape were committed in diverse circumstances,”35 it seems like “conflict related sexual violence” is noted rather than silenced. Instead, the problem is that “rape as a weapon of war” has become a dominant36 understanding of the crime (or constitutive offence) of rape that it occludes alternative forms and contexts in which rape is committed during conflict. This emphasis on rape as a weapon of war provides another example of how law does not necessarily or always organize responsibility but also deflects it.37 While the ECCC stipulates a range of forms of responsibility under which a person can be held to account, including ordering, instigating, aiding or abetting, and superior responsibility,38 the discursive strength of rape as a weapon of war, a conception of rape that also would have fitted within the case as based on policy, occluded other forms of responsibility that may have been available. Forms that may have attributed responsibility to the leaders even if there was no policy, such as under superior responsibility or joint criminal enterprise, were either not considered or directly ruled out.39 Here, then, the emphasis on policy as evidencing responsibility provides an example of how legal mechanisms “play a key role in organizing irresponsibility.”40 By requiring that rape is used as an instrument in order for it to constitute a crime, the CIJ contributed to law’s irresponsibility.

Regulating Marriage While the CIJ found no policy to rape, they did find a policy relating to marriage. In November 2018, the ECCC Trial Chamber found Nuon Chea

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and Khieu Samphan responsible for the crimes against humanity of other inhumane acts committed through conduct characterized as forced marriage and as rape in the context of forced marriage.41 Eight years after charges had been laid, and after having excluded rape outside of marriages, the finding was described as “a sliver of justice.”42 At least there was something. During the trial, the charges and the characterization of the marriages were fiercely contested, and the finding has been appealed by both the defense and the prosecution. The contestations were rich and varied, and by disentangling them I hope to demonstrate how translating an event like the Khmer Rouge marriages into criminal law is not simply about “breaking a silence.” In international criminal justice scholarship, “forced marriage” has come to figure as the latest of gender-based crimes that needs to be recognized by international criminal courts. For something to be a crime in international criminal law it must meet both the chapeau elements of, say, crimes against humanity, and the elements of a constitutive offence, say, rape, enslavement, or torture. Exactly what offences are recognized as constitutive continue to evolve, but the residual category of crimes against humanity, “other inhumane acts,” is included to ensure that the list of offences is not exhaustive and the laws of humanity are avoided.43 Nevertheless, several academics44 have argued that either “forced marriage” or “forced conjugal association” needs to be recognized in international criminal law as a distinct offence and as such enumerated separately and on par with other constitutive offences. For example, Silke Studzinsky, who as civil party lawyer at the ECCC was instrumental in ensuring the marriages were investigated, has lamented the lack of “concise and universally valid definition of the crime of forced marriage”45 and argued that international criminal law needs to develop “a fuller definition of forced marriage, that encompasses all of its aspect.” For her, establishing such a definition is important as it would “increase the chances that such a crime be included in the investigations and jurisprudence of future cases.”46 Others have emphasized the significance of a definition as a way to ensure its distinctiveness is properly conceptualized. As Annie Bunting and Izevbuwa Kehinde Ikhimiukor suggest, “forced conjugal association” is different from closely related offences such as enslavement and/or sexual slavery, yet there are elements shared across the globe.47 The question is what those elements are. By the time the ECCC heard the charges relating to the Khmer Rouge marriages, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) had issued four judgments that dealt with forced conjugal association. Hence, in discussions on the potential criminality of the Khmer Rouge marriages, reference has been made to the SCSL jurisprudence. Yet, rather than providing clarity through definition, the SCSL judgments demonstrate how international criminal law struggles to identify and translate the harm of the imposed relations. For example, is it a distinct “other inhumane act” or is it subsumed under slavery or even sexual slavery? The findings differed. In the AFRC case, the SCSL Trial Chamber held that forced marriage was subsumed under the crime of sexual slavery, but the

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Appeals Chamber reversed this characterization and held instead that it was a distinct other inhumane act. This characterization was then reiterated by the Trial Chamber in the RUF case; however, in the case against Charles Taylor, the Trial Chamber combined the element of forced conjugal association with an understanding it was slavery, calling it “conjugal slavery.” These different categorizations reflect differing understandings of the harms involved: Is the crime exclusively sexual or does it also encompass imposed duties that are associated with a status (e.g., “wife”)? Does the status cause harm in and of itself (e.g., stigma for having been a spouse)? And did the perpetrators exercise a right of ownership (as in slavery) or impose forced conjugal association or marriage on the victims?48 These slippages across the categorizations and the conceptualizations they reflect are useful to consider when attending to the Khmer Rouge marriages. At the same time, the associations imposed in Sierra Leone differ from those in Democratic Kampuchea: In Sierra Leone, women and girls were forced into conjugal association by either their future husbands or their leaders, whereas in Democratic Kampuchea, both men and women were targeted and instructed to wed by Angkar. And whereas in Sierra Leone, the labeling of the associations as “marriage” has been disputed, there has been no questioning in Cambodia as to whether the relationships imposed during Democratic Kampuchea were “marriages.” Instead, the contestations over the Khmer Rouge marriages have concerned whether they are most appropriately understood as “forced,” how to characterize the harm, and whether there was a central policy on the marriages.

Characterizing the Harm Like the SCSL, the ECCC has struggled with how to characterize and categorize the harm. Initially, the CIJ charged the former leaders two counts of crimes against humanity: (1) “rape” in the context of forced marriage and (2) forced marriage as an “other inhumane act.” However, in response to an appeal to the charge, the Pre-Trial Chamber held that rape had not been a distinct constitutive act of crimes against humanity during the 1970s when the crimes were committed, and therefore recharacterized “rape” from constitutive act to conduct evidencing an “other inhumane act.”49 Thus, the leaders were charged with two sets of “other inhumane acts,” both in relation to the marriages, one focusing on the conduct of rape and the other the imposition of conjugal association. While the Closing Order includes two charges, it struggles to hold onto the harm of imposed association, which instead consistently slips into descriptions of the sexual harms.50 Here, the gendered harm of conjugal association seems harder to articulate than sexual harms. This tendency to emphasize rape and/or sexual violence over other gender-based harms has also been evident in activities by nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia, where the focus has tended to be on women who experienced

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rape. This includes a series of “Women’s Hearings” organized by the NGO Cambodian Defenders Project, two of which were funded by UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, and an exhibition at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum entitled “Sorrows and Struggles: Women’s Experience of Forced Marriage during the Khmer Rouge Regime.” While these have provided important spaces for women to share their experiences, something that has been framed as “breaking the silence,”51 it has also led to an association between the marriages and violence against women, excluding the experiences of the husbands and of more variegated experiences of gendered harms. The conflation between gender/sexual violence and between gender/women means that much less is documented regarding the experiences of the husbands. The overemphasis on rape in the Closing Order is not evident in the Trial Chamber judgment. Instead, the judgment deals extensively with a broader range of conduct, harm, and experiences of suffering that were caused by the imposition of marriage. The Chamber describes how wedding ceremonies were often collective and involved everything from one to eighty couples.52 During the ceremony, the couples would be instructed “to commit to and love each other,” “work hard for the Party and the people,” and to either “produce children for Angkar” or help “increase the population.”53 Importantly, the weddings were not in accordance with Khmer traditions and rituals, and parents and Buddhist monks were rarely present.54 Yet, when the Trial Chamber is faced with providing a legal finding on the basis of these facts, it resists providing one regarding “forced marriage, as such.” Because the term “forced marriage” has been used to describe a range of events, the Chamber finds that whether or not the conduct before them is “forced marriage” is simply not an issue on which to decide. Against the calls to name and define, the Chamber stresses conduct as the relevant issue of which to decide and whether this “rises to the level of other inhumane acts.” So did it? The Trial Chamber finds that the absence of rituals and of parents at the ceremony inflicted longlasting pain on those who wed.55 Together with threats of force to marry “someone that they did not know” and “the fear instilled to pressure them to consummate the marriage,” this caused such severe mental suffering that when taken holistically it was of similar gravity as other enumerated crimes against humanity.56 Here, the Trial Chamber provides a recognition of the significance of rituals and tradition in the formation of subjects and in the gendered practice of turning persons into husband and wife. It does not need to provide a finding on “forced marriage” to do so. Instead, it provides a gender-sensitive recognition of the harms of having to become something not desired. While the Trial Chamber provides a gender-sensitive finding in relation to the gendered harm of marriage, its finding on “the conduct characterized as rape in the context of marriage” is deeply problematic. After the wedding ceremony, couples would spend one or several nights together for the purpose

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of consummating the marriage. During this time, they were monitored by militiamen who would eavesdrop from beside or under their house. Some individuals and couples who refused to consummate their marriage were punished.57 Yet, although the Chamber finds that both men and women “felt compelled to have sexual intercourse with their new spouse,”58 it finds that only women were victimized by a crime as what men experienced did not meet the elements of neither “rape” or “other inhumane act.” The Trial Chamber defines rape as “a physical invasion of a sexual nature against a victim in coercive circumstances in which the consent of the victim was absent.”59 So while it resists to define “forced marriage, as such,” it finds a need for a definition of rape. Even so, it is not consistent as in discussing the evidence, the physical act of “invasion” instead becomes “penetration.”60 The consequences of this switch comes to the fore when, without clear reasoning, the Chamber finds that “having regard to the definition of rape . . . men could not be the victims of rape.”61 That is, the Chamber finds that men cannot be “raped.” Not even can men not be “raped,” the Chamber finds there would be no point in recharacterizing it into “sexual violence” as what men experienced would not meet the required elements of gravity in an inhumane act.62 Indeed, the Trial Chamber finds that it lacks any evidence that would demonstrate the required level of seriousness and impact of forced consummation on men.63 The rejection that men suffered as a consequence of forced consummation feeds into the stereotype of women as the only victims of rape and sexual violence. Although sexual violence against men is frequently committed in conflicts, it suffers from underreporting and under-prosecution.64 This is not isolated to the case of Cambodia/Democratic Kampuchea. International criminal courts and tribunals often fail to translate evidence regarding conflict-related male sexual violence into crime as they seem reluctant to see it as sexual or as causing harm.65 But the ECCC also fails to hear enough testimonies of suffering by men. As noted earlier, there is much more research on women’s experiences and most of the civil parties who testified regarding their experiences of the marriages were women. Although the few men who did testify described the pain of having to marry someone they didn’t love, choose, or even understand,66 the Trial Chamber in discussing the impact of forced sexual intercourse on male victims instead turns to expert witness Kasumi Nakagawa’s claim that men who were forced to rape their wives “suffered greatly.”67 Even so, the Chamber situates this in relation to notions of purity and virginity, as it notes how in Cambodia, “‘daughters’ are regarded as important property of the parents and women should be pure and keep their virginity until marriage.”68 While the claim about purity and property is utterly problematic for how it reinforces gender stereotypes, the Chamber is also bound to decide only on the evidence presented. Most of the civil parties who testified to their suffering caused by marriage were women. Hence, I worry that the Trial Chamber judgment simply reflects a broader emphasis on women as the victims of the marriages, an emphasis reflected in the Closing Order, during the trial, and in civil society activities.

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While it may be that there simply was too little evidence on the experiences of men, the difficulty the ECCC Trial Chamber has to see the potentially gendered harms of the marriages comes to the fore in relation to the evidence by Sou Sotheavy, a prominent third gender activist. While trials are often criticized for silencing experiences, the ECCC is noteworthy for twice having called Sotheavy.69 During her testimonies she describes how she “had to hide it [her identify],”70 but nevertheless continued to be targeted due to her “transgender nature.”71 As a man, she was forced to marry and take a wife, something that she found profoundly distressing. As she later described it, for heterosexual peoples, “forced marriage implies pain alone. However, for homosexual people . . . it became an impossible thing.”72 Yet, while the trials provided for her testimony to be recorded, the judgment fails to capture and translate the harms associated with conforming to certain gender norms. The judgment oscillates between using the pronouns he and she for Sotheavy, without commenting on its implications; it relies on Sotheavy’s testimony to evidence that “men also could not refuse to consummate marriage”73 and makes no finding in relation to her testimony on having been targeted due to gender. While the trial provided a space for her testimony, the Chamber failed to listen and to translate the gendered violence. The way the ECCC Trial Chamber translates and categorizes the harm of the marriages is in this way deeply gendered. The translation of the harm of the consummation of marriage conforms with gender stereotypes of what a “rape” is (“penetration”) and who suffers from it (the woman). Even as it broadens what forced marriage involves by including the wedding ceremony, it fails to capture the harm of imposed gender roles and of being a wife or husband. The question of how to capture the harm of the imposition of marriage has also been deeply contested.

Coercion, Force, and Law Coercion is a central element of both rape and “forced marriage,” and the translations of the charges relating to the Khmer Rouge marriages depend on how the context in which the marriages took place is understood. To begin with, it is worth noting that the question whether rape is best characterized by an absence of consent or an existence of coercion has long been debated, and international criminal courts have provided alternating definitions.74 For instance, the ICTR, in the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, defined rape as “a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive,”75 and a Trial Chamber at the ICTY in the case against Anto Furundžija found on the basis of a survey of major criminal systems that “all jurisdictions surveyed . . . require an element of force, coercion, threat, or acting without the consent of the victim.”76 The ECCC in the 002 Closing Order includes both coercion and lack of consent in its definition, defining rape as an act that takes place within “coercive

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circumstances in which the consent of the victim was absent.”77 Thus, both the context (coercive circumstances) and the mindset of the victim (absence of consent) need to be established. The Trial Chamber, however, pays little heed to the question of consent. Instead, it finds that under the circumstances, “a woman’s lack of physical resistance does not indicate consent but a mere appearance of acquiescence due to coercion or coercive circumstances.”78 Apart from reiterating the gender bias in that only women can be “raped,” it signals that consent is not an issue under coercive circumstances. In establishing coercion or coercive circumstances, the Chamber draws on testimony from women who were threatened by cadres, and men and women who were monitored by militiamen. It finds that that couples who refused “were re-educated or threatened with being killed or receiving punishment,” and “[b]oth men and women felt compelled.”79 In a climate of widespread fear and where couples “had not consented” to wed,“genuine consent to consummation of a marriage was not possible.”80 Thus, rape and wedding ceremonies were conducted under the same coercive circumstances. These coercive circumstances are what distinguish the Khmer Rouge marriages from traditional arranged marriages. Both accused persons contested their distinction, claiming that by charging the Khmer Rouge marriages as forced marriage, “the entire practice of arranged marriage [is effectively put] on trial.”81 The Chamber rejects this conflation, finding instead that during Democratic Kampuchea, there was an element of force and an absence of “mutual trust” such as that between parents and children in arranged marriages.82 Moreover, the marriages in Democratic Kampuchea took place within “a widespread climate of fear” in which any “consent purportedly given either before or during the wedding ceremonies did not amount in most cases to genuine consent.”83 In this finding, it seems to draw on the jurisprudence from the Akayesu case in which the Chamber held that “coercive circumstances need not be evidenced by a show of physical force” but “can be inherent in circumstances like armed conflict or military presence.”84 This climate of fear was, according to the Chamber, evident across the nation. The characterization of the marriages as “forced” was disputed during trial by expert witness Peg LeVine. With over a decade of experience from research in Cambodia, LeVine has consistently argued that the term “forced” is an inappropriate epithet for the Khmer Rouge marriages. In doing this, she is not arguing—like Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan did in their defenses—that they do not differ from arranged marriages. This is not LeVine’s point, and she agrees with the Chamber’s finding that the Khmer Rouge marriages differ from traditional Cambodian arranged marriages. Rather, she rejects the term “forced.” According to her, “forced” does not capture their distinctiveness, and they should instead be conceptualized as “conscripted.” A conscripted marriage is one to which the couple has been enrolled, written together, as part of one’s service to the nation: “Conscripted weddings became part of one’s duty to propagate (literally) the Communist state.”85 And just as in

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conscription to the army, there are example of “consciences objectors” who appealed on the basis of hardship or family responsibilities.86 Importantly, LeVine argues the marriages must be understood within the broader context of a regime in which Angkar was considered all seeing power. This context was one of ritualcide, in which the lack of rituals and rejection of spirits had caused a fundamental sense of loss and dread. Within this context, the connotation of the marriages as “forced” misconstrues both the marriages and the context. At the ECCC, she was extensively challenged on this refusal to use the term “forced” and, as became clear in the judgment, the Trial Chamber was not convinced by her argument for “conscription” instead of “forced” either. Indeed, her argument is challenging and clearly goes against grain. So why not use what is becoming the lingua franca of international criminal law? LeVine stresses that her choice of terminology is based on her sample of respondents and on how they described their experiences. For a decade, she studied weddings and birthing rituals in Democratic Kampuchea, a study for which she interviewed 192 men and women. In her book and during her testimony, she describes how her participants talked about tragedies, deception and trickery, deaths of loved ones, and a fundamental sense of dread. She finds it telling how the couples themselves contextualized their marriages. When asked about how they met, many would begin by describing the evacuation from Phnom Penh ordered by the Khmer Rouge—“as if this was part of their meeting story.”87 And in this context, many expressed a sense of relief in having been assigned a spouse. Being called could mean being killed or being wed, and in that context, being called to wed provided a sense of hope.88 Marriage was understood as an indication that Angkar had other plans for them, or that they would be sent for less harsh work.89 Here, the epithet “forced” does not seem to capture the nuance of how the marriages operated during the regime. But is this where coercive circumstances come in? Does the fundamental sense of dread—caused by the ritualcide—reflect the legal concept of “coercive circumstances”? I think it potentially could. But as seen previously, for the ECCC, a finding of “coercive circumstances” is used to counter claims of consent90 and, as such, removes the possibilities for consenting to marriage. Here, I am reminded of Karen Engle’s argument regarding presumptions of non-consent. In Kunarac, the ICTY Appeals Chamber held that certain circumstances, such as detention centers and military headquarters in which women were detained, “amount to circumstances that were so coercive as to negate any possibility of consent.”91 For Engle, this means that when circumstances are coercive and those individuals are of warring sides, consensual sex becomes legally impossible.92 While presumptions of nonconsent in coercive circumstances remove the risks of a defense that the victim actually consented, it simultaneously removes the possibility for diversities within those circumstances. Legal translations are in this way blunt. While the finding on coercive circumstances recognizes the force of Angkar during the regime, it also flattens out any difference. Thus, the ECCC provides a

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welcomed recognition of suffering for those who suffered specifically as a consequence of being wed, but at the same time, it fails to recognize how the marriages for others provided hope in a larger context of suffering.

Translating Suffering into Law To conclude, I return to the questions of translation and spite, with which the chapter began. One take on the way SGBV figures at the ECCC and in particular in the case against the former leaders is as in spite: In spite of an early “lack of interest” in investigating SGBV and a decision to ignore rape outside of marriage, charges were brought in relation to the marriages and a conviction finally entered. Yet such a take is too simple. Over the course of the proceedings, there have been contestations that are not only or even necessarily between silence and recognition. Paradoxically, the emphasis on “policy” both assigned responsibility and irresponsibility. Paradoxically, the Trial Chamber judgment both provides a language through which experiences can be shared and shuts down any multiplicity or difference in experiences. Paradoxically, the ECCC both captures and rejects how atrocities are gendered. These paradoxes are inherent in the way international criminal law and atrocity interrelate. Indeed, caution is needed. Legal cases like that against the former leaders of the CPK are massive. They promote a flurry of activities: legal inves­ tigations, academic studies, and community dialogues. Rather than expecting a judgment to provide a complete articulation—a perfect translation—of the harms and suffering experienced during a regime, the case produces an archive, a resource for further research, for further insights into the way atrocities occur. This chapter has focused specifically on the charges relating to the marriages and on how rape outside of it was foreclosed. Yet gender dynamics figure in many more of the charges and findings. Take the recent finding in the same judgment as discussed earlier that the killings of members of the Vietnamese minorities amounted to genocide. As Rosemary Grey argues, this finding shows how something that is seemingly gender-neutral, such as killings, contains gendered dimensions.93 The CPK considered Vietnamese ethnicity to be matrilineal, that is, inherited through the mother. In families where one parent was Vietnamese and the other Khmer, whether or not the children would be considered Vietnamese thus depended on whether it was the mother or father who was of Vietnamese ethnicity.94 Or take the proceeding relating to forced evacuation in the first trial in this case. By approaching the evacuation through the lens of a social understanding of harm, Diana Sankey95 unfolds how experiences of forced movement are also gendered, emphasizing its interrelational aspects in splitting the families and seeing family members starve. While we have come some way in recognizing the harms of rape when used as an instrument of war, the

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gendered dimensions of atrocity are more than sexual violence against women.

Notes 1 Panu Minkkinen, “The Expressionless: Law, Ethics, and the Imagery of Suffering,” Law and Critique 19, no. 1 (2008): 65. 2 James Boyd White, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xiv; see also Penny Crofts, “Monstrous Bodily Excess in The Exorcist as a Supplement to Law’s Accounts of Culpability,” Griffith Law Review 24, no. 3 (2015): 373; and Marriane Constable, “Law as Language,” Critical Analysis of Law 1, no. 1 (2014): 63. 3 See, for example, Doris Buss, “Making Sense of Genocide, Making Sense of Law: International Criminal Prosecutions of Large-Scale Sexual Violence,” in Gender and Genocide in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. Amy Randall (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 4 As Robert Cover famously stated: “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death. . . . A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life.” Robert Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 96 (1985–6): 1601. 5 Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 60. 6 See N. Henry, Chapter 3: “A History of Silence,” War and Rape (London: Routledge, 2012). 7 Co-Prosecutors v Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, Case No 002/19/09-2007/ ECCC/TC, Case 002/02 Judgment (November 16, 2018). 8 The “Khmer Rouge” was a name accorded to the CPK by Prince Sihanouk. In the West, it has been the main name used for the group, yet during the regime, most people referred to them as “Angkar.” 9 Ewa Tabeau and They Kheam, Demographic Expert Report: Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia, April 1975 – January 1979 – A Critical Assessment of Major Estimates (ECCC, Doc No D140/1/1, September 30, 2009), 19. 10 See, for example, David Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics War and Revolution since 1945, 2nd ed. (1991; repr., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993 [first published 1991]); idem, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot rev. edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999 [first published 1992]); idem, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial, and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008); Luong Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of

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Cambodia Remembers (New York: Harper Collins, 2000); Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975-1982 (Chiang Mai, TH: Silkworm Books, 1984). 11 This was not the first criminal trial against Khmer Rouge leaders. In 1979, a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal tried Pol Pot and Ieng Sary in absentia for crimes that included genocide. See H. De Nike, J. Quigley, and K. Robinson, eds., Genocide in Cambodia, Documents from the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); see also Rachel Hughes, “Ordinary Theatre and Extraordinary Law at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 4 (2015): 714. 12 Four persons were charged in Case 002, but proceedings were concluded against Ieng Sary upon his death in 2013 and Ieng Thirith was found unfit for trial in 2012. Due to its complexity, the case was severed into two trials. 13 Rachel Killean, “An Incomplete Narrative: Prosecuting Sexual Violence Crimes at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 13, no. 2 (2015): 331–52; Theresa de Langis, “A Missed Opportunity, a Last Hope? Prosecuting Sexual Crimes under the Khmer Rouge Regime,” Cambodia Law and Policy Journal 2 (2014): 43; Valerie Oosterveld and Patricia Viseur Sellers, “Issues of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence at the ECCC,” in The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, eds. Simon M. Meisenberg and Ignaz Stegmiller (The Hague, NL: TMC Asser Press, 2016), 321; Silke Studzinsky, “Neglected Crimes: The Challenge of Raising Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” in Gender in Transitional Justice, eds. Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Ruth Stanley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 97; Sarah Williams and Emma Palmer, “The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: Developing the Law on Sexual Violence,” International Criminal Law Review 15, no. 3 (2015): 452. 14 de Langis, “A Missed Opportunity,” 43. 15 Maria Elander, “In Spite: Testifying to Sexual and Gender Based Violence during the Khmer Rouge Period,” in Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks, ed. Dianne Otto (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2018). 16 Wendy Brown, “In the ‘Folds of our Own Discourse’: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,” The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable 3, no. 1 (1996): 186. 17 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 109. 18 Buss, “Making Sense of Genocide.” Italics added. 19 Judith Gardam, “A New Frontline for Feminism and International Humanitarian Law,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory, eds. Margaret Davies and Vanessa Munro (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 217. 20 Silke Studzinsky, “Challenges to a Successful Prosecution of Sexualized and Gender-Based Crimes” (Paper presented at the International Conference

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on Bangladesh Genocide and the Issue of Justice, Heidelberg, Germany, July 4–5, 2013). http://www​.civilparties​.org/​?page​_id​=48. According to then International Co-Prosecutor Caley, rape was never neglected by the prosecution. 21 See Decision on Appeal of Co-Lawyers For Civil Parties Against Order Rejecting Request To Interview Persons Named In The Forced Marriage And Enforced Disappearance Requests For Investigative Action (ECCC, Pre-Trial Chamber, July 21, 2010). 22 As Cambodia is a civil law country and the ECCC operates within the Cambodian judicial system, investigations are initiated by the prosecution but mainly conducted by impartial and independent investigating judges. At the end of their investigation, these issue a Closing Order, which either dismisses a case or decides on its scope and sends it trial. See ECCC, Office of the CoInvestigating Judges, www​.e​​ccc​.g​​ov​.kh​​/en​/o​​rgans​​/offi​​ce​-co​​-inve​​stiga​​ting-​​judge​​s. 23 Prosecutors v Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Thirith, Case No 002/19-09/2007-ECCC-OCIJ, Closing Order (September 15, 2010) ¶ 157. 24 Ibid., ¶ 1426. 25 Case 002 Closing Order, ¶ 1429 (emphasis added). 26 When the CPK took control over Phnom Penh, they abolished the existing legal system and instead ruled primarily through party decrees and policies that were interpreted by local representatives. See, for example, Suzannah Linton, “Putting Cambodia’s Extraordinary Chambers into Context,” Singapore Year Book of International Law and Contributors 11 (2007): 198–9. 27 The Cambodian Constitutions (1953–93), ed. Raoul Marc Jennar, ECCC Doc E3/259, Art 13. 28 Youk Chhang, “The 6th Code of Conduct,” Searching for the Truth, no. 15, March 2001, 1. 29 Closing Order 002, ¶ 191. 30 Theresa de Langis, “‘This Is Now the Most Important Trial in the World’: A New Reading of Code #6, the Rule against Immoral Offences under the Khmer Rouge Regime,” Cambodia Law and Policy Journal 3 (2014): 61. 31 Closing Order, ¶ 191. 32 Ibid., ¶ 1429. 33 Ibid. 34 Margot Wallström, “The Forgotten Khmer Rouge Victims,” Phnom Penh Post (online), May 29, 2012. http:​/​/www​​.phno​​mpenh​​post.​​com​/n​​ation​​al​/fo​​rgott​​en​ -kh​​mer​-r​​​ouge-​​victi​​ms. 35 Case 002 Closing Order, ¶ 1426. 36 See Buss, “Making Sense of Genocide,” 287. 37 Scott Veitch, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering (Abingdon, VA: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 7; see also Penny Crofts, “Legal Irresponsibility and Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse,” Law in Context 34, no. 2 (2016): 79.

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38 At the ECCC, the forms under which an accused can be held responsible include commission, planning, instigation, ordering, aiding and abetting, and superior responsibility (ECCC Law (2004), Article 29; ECCC TC Case 002 Judgment Paragraph 3702). 39 In 2010, the Pre-Trial Chamber rejected the somewhat controversial Joint Criminal Enterprise III under which responsibility is attributed for crimes that were “natural and foreseeable consequence of implementing a common design.” Case No 002/19-09-2007-ECCC/OCIJ (PTC38), Decision on the appeals against the Co-Investigative Judges Order on Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE) (May 20, 2010); Case No 002/19-09-2007-ECCC/SC, Appeal Judgment 002/01 (November 23, 2016). 40 Veitch, Law and Irresponsibility, 7; see also Crofts, “Legal Irresponsibility and Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse.” 41 Case 002/02 Judgment, paragraphs ¶ 3694, 3700. 42 Theresa de Langis, “A New History for Old Crimes: Sexual Violence during the Khmer Rouge Regime,” ASIA Dialogue, January 10, 2019. https​:/​/th​​easia​​ dialo​​gue​.c​​om​/20​​19​/01​​/10​/a​​-new-​​histo​​ry​-fo​​r​-old​​-crim​​es​-se​​xual-​​viole​​nce​-d​​uring​​ -​the-​​khmer​​-roug​​e​-reg​​ime/ 43 At the ECCC, the Supreme Chamber has held that acts that are tried as “other inhumane acts” must be “similar in nature and gravity” to those listed and as such cause “serious mental or physical suffering or injury or constitute[] a serious attack on human dignity.” ECCC SCC Judgment 002/01, ¶ 576–8, 580. 44 Neha Jain, Amy Palmer, Micaela Frulli, Krista Stout, and Cameron Christensen, “Forced Marriage at the Cambodian Crossroads: ECCC Can Develop a New Crime against Humanity,” Brigham Young University Law Review 2015, no. 6 (2016): 1825. 45 Studzinsky, “Neglected Crimes,” 97. 46 Ibid., 98. 47 Annie Bunting and Izevbuwa Kehinde Ikhmiukor, “The Expressive Nature of Law: What We Learn from Conjugal Slavery to Forced Marriage in International Criminal Law,” International Criminal Law Review 18 (2018): 331–53. 48 Ibid. 49 Case No 002/19-09-2007/ECCC/OCIJ (PTC 145 & 146), Decision on appeals by Nuon Chea and Ieng Thirith against the Closing Order (February 15, 2011), ¶ 154; see also Williams and Palmer, “The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” 452. 50 I elaborate on this in Maria Elander, Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice: The Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2018), 87–95. 51 See, for example, Alison Barclay and Beini Ye, eds., Women’s Hearing: True Voices of Women under the Khmer Rouge, Report on the Proceedings of the 2011 Women’s Hearing on Sexual Violence under the Khmer Rouge Regime (Report, Cambodian Defenders Project, May 2012); Theresa de Langis, Asia-

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Pacific Regional Women’s Hearing on Gender-Based Violence in Conflict: Report on the Proceedings 2012 (Report, Cambodian Defenders Project, December 2012). 52 ECCC TC Case 002 Judgment, ¶ 3632. 53 Ibid., ¶ 3635. 54 Ibid., ¶ 3640, 3638. 55 Ibid., ¶ 3681–2. 56 Ibid., ¶ 3692. 57 Ibid., ¶ 3658. 58 Ibid., ¶ 3696. 59 Ibid., ¶ 3695, ECCC Case 002 Closing Order, ¶ 1431. 60 The Chamber concludes that although “in-court statements were not always necessarily explicit in describing the penetration of the vagina by the penis of the husband,” the conduct constituting rape has been established as “the circumstances such as the pain, the bleeding for a long time thereafter, or the explicit reference to forced penetration allow the Chamber to conclude that such penetration occurred.” ECCC TC Case 002 Judgment,¶ 3697. 61 Ibid., ¶3701. 62 Ibid., ¶ 3698. 63 Ibid., ¶3701. 64 Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence against Men in Armed Conflict,” European Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (2007): 253. 65 Patricia Viseur Sellers and Leo C. Nwoye, “Conflict-related Male Sexual Violence and the International Criminal Jurisprudence,” in Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics, eds. Marysia. Zalewski, Paula Drumond, Elisabeth Prugl, and Maria Stern (Abingdon, VA, New York: Routledge, 2018), 211. 66 ECCC TC Case 002/02 Judgment ¶3679 and 3680 w associated footnotes. 67 Ibid., ¶3684 w associated footnotes. 68 Ibid., ¶3685. 69 I discuss her testimony in Elander, “In Spite.” 70 Sou Sotheavy, ECCC Trial transcript (May 27, 2013), 11–12, 15, 18. 71 Sotheavy, ECCC Trial transcript (August 24, 2016), 70. 72 Interview with Sotheavy (Phnom Penh, June 4, 2016). On file with author. 73 ECCC TC Judgment Case 002/02, ¶3701. 74 For an overview, see Eithne Dowds, “Towards a Contextual Definition of Rape: Consent, Coercion and Constructive Force,” The Modern Law Review (2019). DOI: 10.1111/1468-2230.12461. 75 Prosecutor v Jean-Paul Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment (September 2, 1998), ¶ 688. 76 Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija, Case No. IT-95-17/1-T, Judgment (December 10, 1998) ¶180; see also Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic, Case nos

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IT-96-23 & IT-96-23/1-A, Appeals Judgment (June 12, 2002), ¶127 which in quoting the above italicized the element of consent. 77 ECCC TC Case 002/02 Judgment 3695. 78 Ibid., ¶h 3697. 79 Ibid., ¶3696. 80 Ibid., ¶3661. 81 Ibid., ¶3687. 82 Ibid., ¶3688–9. 83 Ibid., ¶3690. 84 Akayesu Judgment, ¶688. 85 Peg LeVine, Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010), 29. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 37. 88 Ibid., 79. 89 Ibid., 16. 90 ECCC TC Case 002/02 Judgment: Not having physically resisted does not mean having consented “but a mere appearance of acquiescence due to coercion or coercive circumstances” (¶3697) and that any “consent purportedly given either before or during the wedding ceremonies did not amount in most cases to genuine consent” (¶3690). 91 Kunarac Appeals Chamber, ¶132. 92 Karen Engle, “Feminism and Its (Dis)Contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” American Journal of International Law 99, no. 4 (2005): 804. 93 Rosemary Grey, “Seen and Unseen: Sexual and Gender-Based Crimes in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’s Latest Judgment,” Australian Journal of Human Rights 25, no. 3 (2019): 466–87. 94 ECCC TC Case 002/02 Judgment, Section 13.3.6. 95 Diana Sankey, “Recognition of Gendered Experiences of Harm at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: The Promise and the Pitfalls,” Feminist Legal Studies 24 (2016): 7.

16 Beyond the Binaries Gender and the Future of Genocide Studies and Prevention Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

When Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century was first published, it offered a groundbreaking compendium of work demonstrating that gendered violence is a central defining component of the crime of genocide, contributing to the increasing interest among scholars, lawyers, and activists in the significance of gender-based violence during genocidal processes. The publication of the second edition of Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century comes at a critical moment in the field, when humanity is threatened with the potential global generalization of genocidal destructive tactics while efforts at prevention appear to have reached a stalemate. An increasingly integrated global elite is grappling with the perceived and real challenges to their power brought about by the dislocations of neoliberal economic policies and climate change, both of which already render societies more vulnerable to genocide. Moreover, as history has shown, in such contexts of threatened elites, genocide can suddenly take on a real strategic logic, to use Benjamin Valentino’s term.1 Some of the most compelling aspects of genocidal ideology, some of the most effective tropes in genocidal propaganda, and some of the most devastating techniques of destruction have all relied on gendered discourses, so it is imperative that we understand gender’s contribution to genocide’s logic. Recent genocides against national and religious minority populations in the Middle East (including Yazidis, Iraqi Christians, Kakay, Shabak-Shia, Kurds, and Copts), as well as

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genocides against the majority Sunni population in Syria, the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the Uighurs in China, have all involved strikingly gendered symbolic and physical violence. The perpetrators of these genocides share with people committing violence against indigenous, poor, and LGBTQIA+ people the world over an obsession with destroying cultural, symbolic and physical reproduction as well as an instrumentalization of the gender binary as a tool for persecution. Rising global fascist movements and their local, culturally specific variations fuel these patterns with a core misogyny and sexism through which racism and xenophobia—the fear of the Other—are expressed. The second edition of Gender and Genocide in the Twentieth Century helps us think through some of our present dilemmas. One of the most important points made by the book is that genocide is so gendered that it cannot be properly understood without the use of a gendered lens. This is a critical challenge to existing mainstream scholarship on genocide. Despite increasing interest in gender, the insights of gendered analysis have yet to significantly impact the hegemonic and masculinist view of the crime as principally defined by mass murder rather than by both lethal and nonlethal gendered assaults on the bodies and life worlds of targeted groups. As a consequence, we are learning that as we gender genocide, we must also gender Genocide Studies, that is, pay closer attention to the academic environment in which genocide scholarship is operating. As is the case in other fields, the continued marginalization of women scholars and feminist scholarship, including such factors as lower citation rates for female authors,2 has contributed to the containment of gendered scholarship within traditional ghettos of women’s studies and studies of sexual violence. Equally important in explaining the limited impact of gender studies in genocide studies in general has been the enduring power of patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny the world over, including the recent backlash against feminism and women’s rights that has found a powerful home in the global white nationalist and “meninist” movements as well as in academia. These factors have prevented a full appreciation of the wide-ranging implications of gender scholarship for our understanding of the crime and our prevention protocols.

Beyond the Competitive Framework As Lisa Pine’s chapter in this volume details, the study of gender and genocide began in the 1980s with the study of women in the Holocaust. The ongoing struggle to have women’s experiences recognized has been met with sometimes surprising levels of resistance, even to the point that feminist scholars have been accused of ignoring the suffering of men and boys.3 Unfortunately, the critiques of feminist approaches have tended to place gender analysis within a “competitive framework,” where the fates of men and women too often become weighed in accordance with their perceived severity.

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The microdynamics of the “competitive framework” within the field is in part fueled by a lack of theoretical analysis of patriarchy within the subfield of gender and genocide studies as well as within the international law and the international community. It is also fueled by the fact that feminist scholarship is often not read by genocide scholars, including genocide scholars who examine the role of gender in genocide. In such a context, feminists and feminism erroneously become identified as the source of enduring patriarchal attitudes about men and masculinity that emphasize strength, violence, and the gender neutrality of male experience, to the point that the power dynamic of modern institutions can be represented as flipped, with women, and especially feminist women, carrying the greatest power to inform norms. For example, Adam Jones in this volume speaks of “traditional patriarchal and feminist constructions of masculinity-as-power and male-as perpetrator” that have “blinded us to the vulnerabilities and disempowerment of males in conditions of war and genocide.” Stephen H. Haynes, in his chapter, gives voice to the frustration of male scholars of gender when he relates the story of an academic conference in 1997 in which he asked a panel of women scholars presenting on “women’s voices in the Holocaust . . . whether they saw their work as opening the way for a consideration of men’s experience in the Holocaust.” He suggests that the defensive response of these scholars to his question is “representative of a wider problem in the field of Holocaust studies,” which is that “scholars who study the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ professionally are ignorant of or reluctant to acknowledge insights from the burgeoning discipline of men’s studies.” While it is true that male scholars of the Holocaust have been resistant to using a gender lens to understand the event, this fact cannot be placed at the feet of women or feminist scholars. In fact, the same scholars who criticize feminists for allegedly ignoring men often are themselves guilty of ignoring women and the contribution of feminist scholarship to the surfacing of men as a gender in the first place. There are several trajectories in feminist thought that have emphasized the multifaceted nature of patriarchal oppression, particularly socialist and intersectional approaches. In fact, women scholars should not be held responsible for the hostility of the male-dominated fields of Holocaust studies and international humanitarianism to the insights of gender scholarship and to the gendering of men’s experiences. Patriarchy—or “rule of the fathers”—prioritizes, as feminist inquiry has shown, very specific senior men in its allocation of real power and relies on concepts that mask its own operations and naturalize its structures, including the concept that men are the gender-neutral arbiters of reality and the gender-neutral agents of history. Critiques of feminist inquiry into genocide have had a tendency to reject or ignore the gendered relations of domination that permeate all levels of patriarchal societies and lay blame on women thinkers and activists for the global resistance to recognizing men as a special class of victims. The problem becomes more acute when the argument is either that women are responsible for the fact that civilian men suffer the supposedly

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“worst fate” of genocide (direct killing) due to the power of global feminists in international humanitarian circles, or that men as such are in need of a human rights agenda specific to their sex and gender (“men’s rights”) as opposed to arguing for a more gendered appreciation of universal human rights, which is what many feminists have been fighting for since the advent of modern human rights discourse (“women’s rights are human rights”). In genocide studies, the competitive framework casts men and women as opposing sides within a victim group, prioritizes male suffering, and misses a key characteristic of genocidal violence: its targeting, through various means, of gendered relations of affinity within victim groups in order to render these groups vulnerable to eventual elimination as historical agents. Focusing on men, then, can and often does have the effect of marginalizing women’s experiences once again or denying their shared centrality and importance within universal approaches to the crime, leading to definitions of genocide that prioritize the “strictly murderous dimension,” usually understood as outright massacre, above all else.4 Prioritizing mass killing obscures women’s experiences of genocide, re-enforcing masculinist definitions of the crime that masquerade as gender-neutral. It also seriously underestimates the intentional destructive severity of rape and other forms of sexual torture during genocide, its lifelong effects, and the number of women, men, girls, and boys who die over time as a consequence of sexual violence. The reluctance in international law to seriously examine the complexities of gender-based violence during genocide has led to considerable confusion across international tribunals about the meaning of rape and other gender-based crimes, as Maria Elander discusses in this volume with respect to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. She shows, among other things, not only how the Chambers defined rape in such a way that it could not be tried as such under their mandate, but also how their operating definition excluded men as victims of Khmer Rouge “forced marriages.” The main problem in international law, in the EEOC and beyond, is an insufficient appreciation of the central role played by gender in the genocidal process. As I have argued elsewhere, “forced marriages” are part of a much larger system of genocidal practices that aim to destroy the social fabric of the target by usurping gendered institutions of familial and community unity and therefore controlling physical and cultural reproduction.5 A good contemporary example of the pitfalls involved in ignoring the central place of gendered violence in genocide is the argument put forth by lawyers representing the government of Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 11, 2019. The Government of Gambia argued that there was a “plausible claim” of genocide requiring “provisional measures” to protect the Rohingya. This conclusion was reached in part because a research team sent to refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2018 observed a similarity in patterns of atrocity between what was happening to the Rohingya in Myanmar and what

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had happened to Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. His Excellency Mr.Abubacarr Marie Tambadou, the agent of the Gambia, testified before the ICJ that: [I]n early 2018, I visited the refugee camps in Bangladesh as part of a delegation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. As I listened to the stories of the refugees at the camp, I could smell the stench of genocide from across the border in Myanmar; stories of helplessness in the face of mass killings, of mass rape, and mass torture, and of children being burnt alive in the sanctuary of their homes and places of worship; stories all too familiar to me from a decade and a half of interaction with surviving victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in my capacity as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.6 In response, Myanmar’s legal defense team presented a case that failed to mention the gender-based “life-force atrocities” mentioned by Mr. Tambadou, referring to previous ICJ rulings that also failed to take seriously widespread sexualized violence as evidence of the crime of genocide.7 Lack of precedent within the ICJ gave the Myanmar defense team the room to argue that the scope of the violence was not genocidal in nature and that the state actors did not intend to commit genocide. They could ignore widespread sexualized and gender-based violence as compelling evidence of genocide. Dominant scholarship has largely accepted the reasoning of international legal thinkers such as William Schabas, who was on Myanmar’s legal team, in accepting as evidence of genocide primarily, if not solely, the presence of intentional mass murder. One side effect, then, of a “competitive framework” can be the failure to apprehend genocidal processes, especially in cases where there is insufficiently sizable mass murder; it can also unproductively muddy the waters in cases where women and children were “allowed” to continue living after suffering severe trauma that was intended by the perpetrators as part of an overarching agenda to destroy a group.

Women and Men It has been crucial, of course, to unearth men as gendered subjects in order to understand the complex ways in which gender informs the genocidal process. Stephen Haynes demonstrates in his chapter a deep entanglement of masculinist norms within explanations of male perpetration during the Holocaust. I have argued that these norms can take on a form of masculinity that is genocidal in nature.8 The development of genocidal masculinity must be understood as part of the genocidal process itself; it is widely imbricated with the development of genocidal ideologies and worldviews. Equally important to the field of gender and genocide has been the attempt to bring to light the ways in which women are perpetrators of genocide.9 Wendy Lower’s work on ordinary German

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women perpetrators of the Holocaust has demonstrated, for example, that “the totality of genocide requires that otherwise harmless activities [such as administrative assistance and domestic duties] become criminal and lethal.”10 She frames ordinary women in the Nazi East as “auxiliaries” of the misogyny and patriarchy of the Nazi system, and shows how they participated in the killing process, from direct perpetration to translation to typing up reports. Sara Brown’s recent study of women’s agency during the Rwandan genocide argues that such perpetration in the context of patriarchy and patriarchal ideology is evidence of a “constrained agency,” that is, evidence of women’s creative abilities to act in a semi-autonomous fashion within a wider social and political world dominated by patriarchal structures and norms.11 As Nicole Hogg and Mark Drumbl point out in their chapter, this “constrained agency” sometimes allowed women to participate directly in killing, for a host of reasons similar to those found among male perpetrators, including adherence to genocidal ideology, but more often in supportive roles as accomplices to the killing that was largely driven and perpetrated by men. Some women, like some men, found themselves in genuine “grey zones” that are more suggestive of victim status than that of perpetrator: One case they studied was of a Hutu woman who poisoned her children (and herself) because their father was Tutsi and she feared Hutu power killers would subject the children to a much more painful death by machete. Whether Hutu women were more likely to be intimidated into killing in this fashion than Hutu men is unclear, but previous studies of male perpetrators have demonstrated how important coercion (often under threat of death) was to the decision of many ordinary Hutu men to kill. The stakes of unpacking conventional patriarchal notions of women as victims and men as perpetrators during times of conflict and times of peace goes beyond recognizing that women can also be complicit in the operation of genocidal programs, but also in recognizing the complexities of women’s victimization. Hogg and Drumbl offer the important example of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu who was sexually assaulted and killed along with her whole family at the start of the genocide because she publicly opposed and resisted the discriminatory aims of previous Hutu-dominated governments and was a known opponent of Hutu power extremists. If we immediately assume women as victims, we risk ignoring the important contours of Uwilingiyimana’s tragic case as a voice of moderation and humanity amid genocide. Her gender was important to the way she was targeted, but it is not sufficient to explain why she was targeted. An unquestioned assumption of patriarchal gender norms can also leave female perpetrators without access to demobilization and reintegration programs, which are almost always confined to male combatants. Researching and writing against the grain of patriarchal essentialisms helps us interrogate how gender identity—concepts of femininity and masculinity—can either

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drive or impede genocidal processes as well as how they change through the genocidal process and its aftermaths.12 Unpacking patriarchal notions of women as victims and men as perpetrators has also been essential in the surfacing of male victimhood as such during genocide. Genocide scholar Adam Jones argues in this volume that the “gender-selective targeting of males . . . serves as a harbinger or tripwire for more generalized campaigns of atrocity”; his point has had a profound effect on the thinking about genocide and humanitarian intervention, though his insights are yet to be fully appreciated by and incorporated into policy.13 What becomes clear in reading gendered research into the genocidal process is that people are targeted according to their perceived position within an identify group’s biological, social, and cultural reproductive structure. This violence is relational in that it aims to destroy an identity group in its totality, so each member is targeted as part of that whole. In one of the most common patterns of genocide, men and older boys are often the only group slated for outright massacre while women and children suffer a range of fates involving murder, rape, sexual exploitation, torture, forced maternity, forced labor, and expulsion, all of which should be considered part of the genocidal process when the intent to destroy a group is present. I have suggested eight common patterns of genocide, all of which are gendered in different ways and some of which do not rely on mass murder or massacre as a primary tactic of destruction.14 If we do not recognize the important role played by gender in genocide, we miss many of its forms and are left without the tools necessary to prevent and respond to it effectively.

Beyond the Gender Binary Although it is often assumed that gender research is limited to the stories of women, or to sexual violence, the “gender question” in genocide goes well beyond the experiences of women and girls, the perpetration of genderbased crimes (against both men and women), or even the comparative study of the experiences of men and women.15 It involves examining the network of gendered relationships that go into creating groups, whether in the objective world or in perpetrator subjectivity, and how ideas about creative power inform annihilatory violence. Gender follows the crime from its long-term origins, to short-term facilitators, to immediate indicators, to intervention, to justice, and to reconstruction after the fact. Two chapters in this volume, by Janet Jacobs and Ayse Gül Altınay, emphasize the role gender plays in the construction of postmemory and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. The gendered study of genocide therefore involves considering the simultaneous operation of gender within several different layers that contribute to the perpetration of the crime: the gendered concepts through which perpetrators understand power; the gendered ways in which

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they define their own group and the group(s) they are targeting; the gender dynamics that organize the economic, political, social, and familial spheres within perpetrator and victim societies; the gendered strategies pursued in the course of group destruction; the influence of gender on conceptions of self and on experiences of conflict among perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and witnesses; the gendered nature of international representations of and responses to a conflict; the use of gender in propaganda and in denial strategies; the gendered inflection of justice systems; the gendered nature of memory and cultural transmission; and so forth. With the exception of extensive studies on the Holocaust, most of these topics have yet to be researched in great detail for the majority of cases of genocide. One way in which reliance on the gender binary has skewed scholarship on genocide is the case of mass rape, a focus of much research on women and genocide. The genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur have changed how the international community views mass rape, since in each case mass rape was clearly used systematically as a tool of war and genocide. The ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, after much lobbying by feminists and women’s NGOs, such as the authors of the CUNY Clinic Memorandum and the participants in the Women in the Law Project of the International Human Rights Law Group, began to take rape seriously and prosecute it as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and, less commonly, as a crime of genocide, establishing important legal precedents that were incorporated into the statute of the ICC. The full and dramatic story of the “surfacing” of rape as a serious international crime in the past two decades has still to be written, but several shorter studies have sketched its general outline.16 Doris Buss’s chapter in this volume, “Making Sense of Genocide,” offers a valuable feminist analysis of the master narratives and case law that grew from the international tribunals. The identification of rape as a possible crime of genocide constitutes a still underappreciated paradigm shift in our ability to prevent, identify, and adjudicate genocide, but it has sometimes dwarfed the totalizing destructive narrative of which rape is a critical part. In conversations with female Yezidi survivors of ISIS captivity, for example, I found that rape was one of many genocidal atrocities that they endured, and not necessarily the one they prioritized at the time we were speaking. They were often more concerned with the murder of their children in retaliation for trying to escape, the continued captivity of their young sons, the unknown fate of their missing husbands and family members. The fullness of their stories was lost within international reporting on rape and sexual slavery, which reduced young Yazidi women to violated bodies, oversexualizing an ordeal that is complex and multifaceted. Also lost in this narrative were their heroic efforts to keep family members alive, their struggles in IDP camps, and the complete lack of services that existed for them in the camps. Many rescued young women stayed in their tents 24-hours a day—due to the effects of trauma but also due to the fear of social ostracism when in public. In the latter

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case, the press’s near-exclusive focus on sexualized violence unintentionally reinscribed patriarchal dynamics involving shame and pollution. Feminist scholar Dubravka Zarkov considers the association of rape with female bodies to be one of several “fatal linkages” within dominant thinking on the subject of rape.17 As the example from northern Iraq above demonstrates, when individuals are reduced to their sex, and specifically to a crime that is supposed to rely on their sex for its meaning, the complexity of identity, and the web of interrelations that comprise it, are erased. Not only are the depredations against other people who are a composite part of their stories ignored, but also the struggles that had no immediate relationship to their sex. The results are analyses and narratives that are so reified from victim experiences and victim narratives that their relationship to reality becomes tenuous. Furthermore, the close association made between rape and the female sex can simultaneously hide sexualized violence against men, rates of which are high in most genocidal violence, and normalize the atrocities experienced by women in the same way that rape during peacetime is normalized. An illustrative example of this problem of gender and sex reductivism is the social reception of male victims of rape in war and genocide. The scant research that exists on male victims of wartime (and genocidal) rape and sexual torture suggests that the post-genocide experiences of these men are very similar to those of women victims. They are often rejected from their families and communities and suffer deep humiliation in silence. As discussed by Olivera Simic in this volume, because sexualized violence against men is not recognized as a common practice during conflict, men often have no resources in IDP and refugee camps and have to use women’s centers for rape-related medical care.18 In post-genocide societies, their experiences are rejected, denied, erased. Furthermore, the invisibility of male victims of sexualized violence in conflict hampers genocide early warning systems, since it is likely, given the nature of genocidal violence, that men experience higher rates of sexualized violence during conflicts that have turned genocidal. A 2010 study of rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, determined that 23 percent of the men in the study and 40 percent of the women had experienced rape, a much narrower statistical gap than is often assumed. As Adam Jones points out in this volume, sexualized violence against men is an “ancient phenomenon,” particularly during wartime, as a form of torture, and in detention. It was the research on the mass rape of women during conflict, and the attention now being paid to this by policymakers and NGOs, that has gradually also brought out evidence of the frequency of rape, sexual exploitation, and sexual torture of men, a victim group less visible. Treating women as gendered subjects of history has amplified attention to men as gendered subjects as well. This has made it possible to “see” male civilians as victims in entirely new ways, outside of the image of impregnability favored by militarized masculinist and nationalist narratives.19 Rape’s utility as a weapon of mass destruction may have less to do with specific sex and gender roles and more to do with the intensity and longevity of its torture,

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humiliation, and existential erasure. While women are more often raped in genocide than men (following peacetime norms), sexualized violence is often widespread across victims of various genders and sexualities. Clearly, we need to factor male, female, and nonbinary survivors of rape into our understanding of the role played by sexualized violence during genocide and into the protocols we devise to address its long-term effects. The near ubiquity of mass rape during genocide raises important questions about its historical origins, its perpetrator intent, and, ultimately, what constitutes the crime of genocide. As Cynthia Enloe pointed out almost two decades ago, “We cannot completely understand any war—its causes, its paths, its consequences—unless male soldiers’ sexual abuse of women on all sides is taken seriously, described accurately, explained fully, and traced forward and backward in time.”20 As Jennie Burnet discusses in this volume, sexualized violence during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda was, on the one hand, informed by previous cultural approaches to and beliefs about sex, while, on the other, it “constituted an abrupt break with social norms.” Evidence of the coming “break” was widespread between 1990 and 1994, when members of the Interahamwe militias and the Rwandan Armed Forces, which were to drive the genocide in 1994, committed vicious sexualized violence across the country with impunity. Literature on femicide, or feminicide, especially in Latin America, offers scholars of gender and genocide insights and theoretical approaches that lend themselves to deeper analysis of the long-term imbrication of gender norms and gender violence in genocidal processes.21 Mexican feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde y de los Río’s work on feminicidio (feminicide) emphasizes specifically the genocidal aspects of the phenomenon, that is, that women are being targeted for destruction because of their membership in a genderdefined social group and that their targeting is part of a larger destructive process against this group.22 The term feminicidio calls attention to the structural and systemic dynamics that create a society in which the destruction of women—and “the feminine” as such—is naturalized and accepted.23 In this way, feminicide resembles arguments about structural and systemic genocide and “genocidal societies.”24 The overlap between processes of feminicide (directed at women, girls and female-identifying persons) and genocide (directed at other groups) raises the possibility that examinations of “peacetime” gender dynamics can offer important insights into the development of genocidal ideology, genocidal concepts, genocidal institutions, and, eventually, large-scale genocidal processes. In and of itself, the crime of rape, which feminist philosopher Ann Cahill defines as “a sexually specific act that destroys . . . the intersubjective, embodied agency and therefore personhood of woman,” shares with genocide the intentional destruction of identity.25 In the book Sex and World Peace, Valerie Hudson and her co-editors demonstrate statistically that there is a direct relationship between levels of gender equity in nations and their vulnerability to internal and inter-state conflict.26 States

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that tolerate greater levels of gender inequity have a greater propensity to domestic conflict and international war. The authors argue that given the primacy of gender as a sign of difference in basic units of social organization, such as the family, inequalities between genders, and especially violence against women by men, can feed directly into the way that people approach difference later in life. Applying this insight to the precursors to genocide, high levels of annihilative violence against women clearly could set the stage for annihilative projects against other marginalized groups. Although we commonly refer to “rape” in the singular, there are many differing crimes of rape.27 In genocidal processes especially, rape occurs alongside so many forms of degradation and torture that considering its contours as a singular crime is analytically problematic. The growing literature on conflict rape recognizes several different forms of the crime: There are those rapes that are not part of an overarching plan and are the consequence of opportunity and impunity (often referred to as wartime rape); there is systematic mass rape, forced maternity, rape as a means of murder, sexual torture, gang rape, coerced rapes between family members, sexual mutilation, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, rape in rape camps, women forced to “marry” génocidaires, and so forth. We need to be specific in the way that we speak of sexual violence during genocide, examining each case and each type for its particular relationship to genocidal intent, in order to avoid the “capture problem” discussed by Doris Buss in Chapter 14. The purpose would not be to rank types of rape in terms of degrees of severity but rather to better understand and interpret rape’s multiple functions. For example, to the extent that it has been addressed, it is generally assumed in cases of genocide that the rape of women and girls in the targeted victim group is a secondary phenomenon to the ideological hatred of the group. Genocidal ideology came first, followed by the use of rape as one tool among many—or so the logic goes. But gender is much more deeply imbricated in the historical processes that drive societies towards genocide. As Patricia Weitsman writes in this volume, “Once uncovered it becomes clear that societal views of gender and gender roles are instrumental in policy formation regarding strategies of sexual violence in wartime, but more globally as well in regard to citizenship, nationality and belonging.” In many cases, such as Bosnia and Rwanda, mass rape was indeed systematic and intentional—implemented from the top down for the purposes of destroying, respectively, the Bosniak and Tutsi communities as such. In other cases, such as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, sexual violence during genocide was not centrally directed or part of a genocidal plan. Zoe Waxman warns us in her chapter not to project current preoccupations of rape as a tool of war and genocide onto a case, the Holocaust, where the perpetrators specifically forbade the rape of Jewish women by German soldiers. Although sexualized violence against Jewish women appears to have been widespread, it cannot be explained as a matter of official policy. In the Armenian case, there is evidence that certain perpetrators may in fact have joined in the killing of Armenians

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primarily because it gave them license to commit rape. According to Henry Theriault, in certain cases “rape was not a tool of genocide; genocide was a tool of rape.”28 This would mean that a violently masculinized atmosphere of impunity is a potentially strong recruitment strategy available to génocidaires. If some (and the Armenian case would suggest many) men can be recruited to commit genocide because it gives them a chance to commit rape and other sexual tortures against women and girls for an extended period of time, then the history of genocide will also have to be written within the framework of violent masculinity and patterns of violence against women more generally. Whereas Waxman argues that “for rape to be genocidal . . . it has to be calculated,” Anthonie Holslag calls attention to the importance of the symbolism of rape during genocidal processes. Examining the Armenian genocide, he shows us how rape can express genocidal aims without having to be ordered from above. As Catherine MacKinnon has argued, rape during genocide, whether committed as a matter of policy or not, targets women both as individual women and as members of a specific group.29 Two threads from peacetime thus weave their way into the tactic of mass rape: group hatred and misogyny. The history of genocide should, therefore, explore the contribution made by each to genocidal ideology and implementation.30 But there is another apparent target to genocidal rape: reproduction. My most recent research treats genocide as a subcategory of reproductive violence. The elaborate rape rituals and ritual rape spaces that perpetrators create are potent symbolic spaces in which to enact the annihilation of a people. Usually going beyond the rape and gang rape of individual women, genocidal rapists prey on the social context in which they find women and men, exploiting the symbols and the relationships available to them in order to exert maximum damage to the victim, to the community, to the group’s regenerative capacity, and perhaps even to that metaphysical dimension that they believe accounts for the group’s existence. In genocidal contexts we frequently see public rapes, particularly rapes in front of family members, rapes coerced between family members, rapes involving sexual mutilation and torture, and rapes attended by the murder of the victim’s family members. The intention seems to go well beyond compromising the physical and psychological ability of women and men to create children. It seems to be to puncture, to wound, that invisible space that is the source of the group in the first place. Reproductive violence during genocide is highly symbolic and communicative, drawing on cultural and physical representations of the life force of the group. It should not be understood in purely biological or physical terms. Reproductive violence can include the destruction of invisible relations of affinity—connections to family, community, nation, land, and the spiritual realm through semiotic violence. It can include the desecration of important cultural and religious objects—such as books—and places, such as houses of worship, cemeteries, monuments, libraries, and even theaters, pubs, and dancehalls. It can also be understood to apply to groups that do not reproduce themselves biologically, such as political groups, gender groups

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and groups defined by sexual identity. The National Socialists, for example, sought to destroy male homosexuality as an identity by destroying knowledge about it and cultural spaces created and frequented by gay men.31 Nazi attacks on gay men instrumentalized relations of affinity in a similar way to their attacks on Jews and other groups, as Amy Randall shows in her chapter in this volume. In a recent article on global violence against transgender women, Haley Marie Brown argues that the murders seek to completely annihilate the transgender woman’s body as the location of her identity and the source of trans generative power.32 Because génocidaires attack according to subjective conceptualizations of groups, their theories about the reproduction of Others play a central role in determining how they go about destroying those Others. It is worth analyzing whether not only unequal gender relations of patriarchy, but also the gender binary itself—its imposition and the forms of social meaning that revolve around it—is an important incubator of genocidal potential. The binary, what R.W. Connell calls “the reproductive arena,”33 a cisgender, heteronormative space that has been globalized as a preferred social reality, is also the vehicle for the development of genocidal ideology due to its impact on perceptions of borders, belonging and sustainability. For example, much of the social violence against transgender men and women and gender variant people in the United States is happening against a backdrop of official identity denial, which itself points to the genocidal nature of transphobia.34 In such annihilative violence, commitment to the binary itself is the ideological driver of genocidal violence, which plays itself out through the imposition of the binary on all social bodies. The instrumentalization of constructs of reproduction by génocidaires to pursue genocidal ends is often mirrored within targeted communities themselves after genocide during efforts to reconstitute themselves by salvaging what is left. As Lerna Ekmekcioglu shows us in this volume, the “biopolitics of rescue” that we see after the 1915 Armenian genocide can amount to coercive policies towards surviving women and girls, including refusals to grant requests for abortion, pressure to marry within the group, and coercive pronatalism to support claims to land and assert biopower. Genocide can re-entrench gender inequalities within victim groups, jeopardizing a lasting peace for female members of the group. The re-entrenchment—and sometimes the strengthening—of pre-genocide patriarchy can also threaten lasting peace for the society at large. The long-term physical, psychological, and sociopolitical effects of reproductive violence are well known, though still in need of further study, particularly in terms of remediation.35 Specific protocols need to be created to address the specific circumstances of “genocidal rape” and related atrocities. Victims of sexualized violence are often rejected by their families and communities, unable to find work, and left to raise children born of war alone and in abject poverty. Women, and gender and sexual minorities, in postconflict societies often face increased vulnerability to abuse and violence from their old tormenters, from other perpetrators who are still walking

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free, from international peacekeepers, from liberating armies, and from men in their own communities and families. There is even some evidence that the sexual abuse of children increases after genocide.36 Explanations for this trend range from wartime brutalization and humiliation of men, to the persistence of patriarchal dehumanization of women, to the culture of impunity that comes with the breakdown of traditional social institutions, and more. All of these explanations suggest a different shape and chronology to genocide than what we assume when we do not take women’s stories into consideration. This is especially true of where we decide to place the “end” of the crime in our narratives. Survivors of genocidal reproductive violence often die long after genocide from suicide, “honor killings,” and HIV and other illnesses that are the direct result of genocidal atrocities. They are often ostracized, alone, lacking in access to jobs, resources, land, and basic services. As Choman Hardi has observed, for the women survivors of the Anfal genocide of Iraqi Kurds “the aftermath of this catastrophe is as much a part of the Anfal story as the facts and figures that make up the grand narrative.”37 To include women’s experiences in our definition of genocide is to surface something that the perpetrators have known for centuries: that one can destroy a group by destroying that group’s ability to reproduce. What that means in each instance will differ according to cultural beliefs about reproduction and the perpetrators’ understanding of their target group, but it is not unthinkable that future genocides could be committed solely through the use of sexual violence and related atrocities. Some of the fighting forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo seem to be using strategies that come close to genocide-by-rape.38 Including women’s experiences and taking them seriously as evidence of genocide open up to analysis a host of ongoing forms of genocidal violence that otherwise are very hard to explain, such as the similarity across cultures in the forms taken by murder of transgender women. The “social” aspect of genocide thus takes on an added importance when we consider the way that so many women and other marginalized groups of victims have experienced it. Definitions that include concepts like “social death” (Claudia Card), the destruction of “social power” (Martin Shaw), and “the interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members” (Helen Fein) incorporate the ground-level realities of this crime for men and women, boys and girls, individuals, families, and collectivities much better than ones that get caught up in the numbers and the identities of those killed.39 They come closer to capturing what this crime essentially is and arguably remain, as Martin Shaw has argued, more true to the spirit of the Genocide Convention and the work of Raphael Lemkin.40 All of this points to a key feature of sexual violence during genocide: that it is intended to desecrate the ways that members of collectivities are bound together and thereby destroy permanently their capacity to rebuild themselves as stable and active collective agents in human history.

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Reading Genocide from the “Bottom Up” One thing that becomes apparent when we centralize gender-based violence during genocide is just how multifarious (and creative) are the means by which perpetrators go about destroying a group. Culture-specific studies of all of the tiny but essential details of the crime scene need to be undertaken in order to round out our understanding of genocide. As this discussion has indicated, the rape of women during genocide is attended by multiple other crimes committed against the women themselves and their family members, many of whom are men. Taken together these make up what I have called “life-force atrocities,” that is, ritualized atrocities that target the life force of a group by destroying the physical integrity and the emotional and spiritual bonds of family members and of other strong symbols of group cohesion, such as religious and intellectual leaders.41 If we understand genocide as the intent to destroy a group specifically by destroying its source of life, the shared pattern of cruelties that we see across genocides begins to make more sense. Gendered studies of genocide must therefore go beyond gender-based violence—including rape and sexselective massacre—to truly grasp the extent to which ideas about gender are implicated in the crime. When communities are assaulted by forces with genocidal intent, individual members are usually targeted based on their (perceived) symbolic status within the forces of social and biological group reproduction. These perceived statuses are unequivocally gendered: men are assaulted as protectors, fathers, husbands, heads of families, political leaders, religious icons, leading intellectuals; past, present, and future patriarchs. Women are assaulted as mothers, wives, daughters, bearers of future life, protectors of children, cultural educators, providers of food, and so forth. Gay partners are used against one another in similar ways. Transgender people are targeted as self-regenerating, inasmuch as transgender identity is still emerging in the world and transgender targets are therefore seen as the living creators of future identity. The stereotypical gender roles that determine the exact nature of life-force atrocity will vary with respect to the cultures committing the genocide, and perpetrators will draw on their own emotional and social experiences when devising ritual tortures, but by and large we can identify patterns across various different instances of the crime. By giving us the means to begin to identify some of these “gender relational” atrocities during genocide, research on gender has also given us powerful tools to read genocide from the “bottom up.”42 A “bottom up” contextualized approach was taken by the US Atrocities Documentation Team (ADT) that was sent in 2004 to refugee camps in Chad to document the experiences of survivors of the violence in neighboring Darfur, Sudan.43 A granular understanding of the microdynamics of atrocity in Darfur evinced a genocidal process, at least for the investigators and US lawyers making the determination. In 2016 the International Association of

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Genocide Studies also used gender-sensitive models to determine that ISIS was committing crimes of genocide against ethnic, national, and religious minorities in northern Iraq.44 In 2020 the IAGS used similar approach to determine that Myanmar was committing genocide against the Rohingya.45 Former US Secretary of State John Kerry used gender-sensitive language in his first public statement about ISIS genocide in 2017.46 The United Nations Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes, published in 2014, also incorporates gender-sensitive indicators into one of its risk factors related to genocide.47 Still, we need to get better at identifying and recording these atrocities and the patterns they bring to light. To this end, I have incorporated these insights into a gender-sensitive genocide prevention toolbox designed specifically for human rights workers in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the South Caucasus region, which can be adapted to other situations.48

Gender and Genocide Determinations The price of an exclusive focus on large-scale, elite, largely male, and highly reified phenomena is that the substantive experience of the victims—who occupy the space in which genocide occurs and are the bodies on whom the crime is committed—becomes lost in a sea of abstractions. As a consequence of this form of debate, the term “genocide” often is treated as little more than a political or legal “label” rather than something substantive in and of itself, as seen in the legal defense of Myanmar at the ICJ in 2019.49 The logic of localized life-force atrocities, which seek to destroy a deep cohesion within family units that, during genocidal processes, stand in for the cohesion of a more extensive group, can help us begin to go about making genocide determinations by starting with the “facts on the ground,” using the Genocide Convention as a guide in deciding how these facts should best be organized while not relying solely on our abstract interpretations of its wording to make the case. The job becomes one of figuring out what the perpetrators are telling us about what they think they are doing by their behavior. Daniel Feierstein made this point quite elegantly when he wrote, regarding the question of genocide against “political” groups, that “the crime is not defined by the identity of the victim . . . but by the characteristics of the material action which is carried out.”50 A good deal of pertinent information about this “material action” can be unearthed through gender-sensitive research that creates maps of affinity and atrocity to help us understand what perpetrators might have thought they were doing. Even in cases where the objective target of genocide was a political, social, or economic group, we know that génocidaires tend to view their victims as organic collectivities and persecute families based on the alleged status of one of its members.51 In Argentina (i.e., during “The Dirty War,” which has only recently been investigated a case of genocide), for

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example, the interior minister from 1976 to 1995, General Diaz de Bessone, framed the target of state violence in the following way: Founding a new republic is no easy matter. . . . The armed forces must be sufficiently alert, determined and resourceful to act simultaneously as an efficient fighting force against guerrillas and terrorists; an efficient surgeon that will remove the evil from all social classes and walks of life; and last but not least, parents of the new republic, strong, united, just, free, supportive of others, clean, exemplary. . . . But it is only fair to point out that since no national project was outlined beforehand, little has been achieved so far to accomplish the remaining objectives, which are to defeat not only the guerrillas but subversion “in totum,” so laying strong foundations for the birth of the new republic.52 As Feierstein points out, the general is here framing the counterinsurgency as a war on the “forces of evil,” as “a clearly defined ‘surgical operation’ on previously defined sections of the population whose disappearance is meant to have an ‘irreversible’ effect on Argentinean society.”53 There is a gendered link between the plan of achieving the partial destruction of the Argentinean national group by carving out its “evil” and “subversive” elements and the atrocities committed against “suspect” families and networks.54 Judging from Diaz de Bessone’s understanding of the conflict, these families were the cosmic and reproductive opponents of the new national family to which the armed forces—“parents of the new republic”—were supposed to give birth. The torture of family members was a way for junta members to perform in a sitespecific, localized way the broader genocidal intent to excise the generative units of opposition from the nation. It is as if annihilating one family makes room for the birth of the new, national family. The coincidence of statements like the aforementioned and a pattern of life-force atrocities strongly suggests genocide, even when all the reports have yet to be written; all the individual human lives have yet to be murdered; all the bodies have yet to be buried and, if found, exhumed and identified and counted. It is one way to identify a genocidal pattern within what is thought to be a brutal counterinsurgency. In other cases of genocide we can also identify a perpetrator preoccupation with family dramas, with the generative power of violence; an understanding of their own actions in familial terms, whereby the armed forces, or the party, or the executive branch of the state, or the individual torturer are the generative unit—the parents—giving birth to something new and better through the total destruction of other generative units, not simply in physical terms but affectively and spiritually as well.55 A benefit of focusing on the presence of gendered atrocities and identifying those patterns in them that are correlated most directly with genocide is that it would give us another empirical means of identifying situations in which “genocidal” violence is threatened without having to make an airtight argument for the presence of genocide. We may even be able to identify

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potentially genocidal cadres within armed forces, or potentially genocidal supporters of specific political parties, by documenting who has engaged or is engaging in ritual atrocities that appear to target a group’s life force. If, during occupations, riots, and communal violence—more limited patterns of warfare—a small group of people, as part of an armed force or not, commits life-force atrocities, that tells us something important about how things might progress and offers up new and crucial research agendas involving chains of command. At the very least we will know better who to watch in order to prevent a generalization of those atrocities into genocide somewhere down the road.

Gender and Genocide Denial: Darfur and Bosnia Apart from the clear benefit of gender analysis to genocide prevention mechanisms, rethinking genocide in gendered terms can help cut through some of the ideological layering that has made genocide determinations so particularly fraught since the 2003 US war in Iraq. The current political debate about the use of the term tends to cluster around a few controversial cases, notably Bosnia and Darfur. These cases are accepted as genocides by most genocide scholars, but opposition to the use of the term has come from high places and has been quite visible and vocal. Much of this opposition is coming from the left of the political spectrum and is a direct response to what is considered to be a double standard used by the United States and its allies in their deployment of the term.56 These works show little concern for the evidence and none for the experiences of the many victims. Genocide is merely a label here. More seriously, the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, in his work on Darfur, has argued against the applicability of the term genocide largely because he believes that the advocates for its applicability to the situation there are not using the term consistently; if they did, he argues, they would also use it with reference to Iraq and Afghanistan. There are many threads to his argument, and in making it he offers a serious and enlightening study of the historical dynamics of identity and conflict in Sudan, but his analysis is surprising in its failure to take seriously the atrocities suffered by the victims of Janjaweed attacks. He writes, for example, that “[t]o claim that ongoing rape in the [internally displaced person] camps is the result of official government policy is to ignore the simple fact that rape occurred in all camps, those controlled by the government and by the rebels.”57 When we begin to look at the nature of the atrocities committed in Darfur, the differences between counterinsurgency as such and genocide become clear. What matters so much is not the objective or even the subjective definition of the groups of people involved but rather the excruciating detail with

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which perpetrators go about destroying everything sacred and meaningful among the victims, particularly family bonds.58 This takes Darfur beyond any reasonable characterization as counterinsurgency and generalized atrocity. In Darfur, as in Bosnia, the death toll may fall well short of the mass killings that attended the key twentieth-century genocides; nevertheless, the focused assault on generative symbols, relations of affection and loyalty, all those deep recesses of the human heart and soul—this is the evidence of genocide that I think is most difficult to refute and that ultimately makes the case for genocide in both these instances. These types of atrocities are common to all other genocides and place Darfur clearly within the ranks of genocidal violence. These atrocities share a “genealogical” link with the type of violence that has attended every other known case of genocide in past centuries. When such atrocities all begin to point toward the five elements of the crime enumerated in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, then a working genocide determination seems entirely reasonable. The key to understanding how gendered violence and life-force atrocities work together in a genocidal strategy is, of course, to examine how they contribute to the destruction of the group as such. A recent work in criminology, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide, makes fruitful use of the ADT interviews to reconstruct the crime scene in several settlements in Darfur, generating data for shifts in the family size of respondents as a consequence of the attacks and creating charts of the age and gender of people killed and missing. On this latter point, the authors discovered that the groups with the greatest number killed (and missing) were comprised of young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine and girls between the ages of five and fourteen. They note “about a third of both the young adult males and the preadolescent girls are represented among the dead or missing.”59 This suggests that young men were not simply being killed as potential combatants, a common defense against genocide charges; the presence of such a high number of young girls alongside the high number of young men seems to point to an attempt to destroy the ability of the group to organize and reproduce itself in the future. When placed along other evidence of atrocity patterns and more macro-level indications of intent, such crime scene statistics are invaluable. Gender data underscore the importance of empirical evidence in making genocide determinations. Overarching schemas and analytical abstractions cannot replace this evidence in our attempts to understand the genocidal process and make determinations about its existence. Legal, political, and rhetorical arguments can be made to support all sorts of positions in regard to the crime. The debate about its nature goes right back to the debates about the wording of the Genocide Convention. This is why the ADT’s “atrocity statistics” are such an important innovation in the struggle against the crime. They allow us to navigate through the heavy storm of ideology and politics and enter the moment of victimization. By categorizing crimes that together

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are suggestive of genocide, they offer us an empirical means of determining whether what we see could in fact be or become the crime of crimes. Studies that have considered the experiences of women and girls alongside men and boys have shown that a common pattern in the early stages of genocide is the systematic execution of male members of a community alongside the terrorization, sexual exploitation, torture, and expulsion of women, children, and the very old. When we limit our definitions to killing, we can end up artificially separating processes that are part of the same phenomenon. The consequence of this can be that massacres of men and boys are defined as genocide, while the attendant rape, torture, and expulsion of the women and girls who were their mothers, wives, children, girlfriends, colleagues, and so forth are either ignored entirely or described as something other than genocide, such as “ethnic cleansing,” crimes against humanity, war crimes, or uncategorized “atrocities.” This approach is clearly inadequate and inaccurate, for it is unlikely that perpetrator intent can be broken up in a similar fashion. Furthermore, the evidence contained within witness testimony shows time and again that perpetrators understand quite well the meaning and function of people’s family and community relationships and that they appear to intend to use these relationships in gender-determined ways in order to destroy the group. The best example of a case that has raised the two issues above is the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladić. These massacres were determined by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to constitute genocide. Its finding was upheld by the International Court of Justice.60 Like Darfur, most genocide scholars view the Serb war in Bosnia to have been a genocidal assault on Bosniaks. Even when the status of the war as a whole is in doubt, scholars tend to accept Srebrenica as an instance of genocide. However, because the ICTY has been conservative in its use of the term, and because the nebulous concept of “ethnic cleansing” has confused characterizations of the war in Bosnia as a whole, the Serbian attacks on Bosnian populations between 1992 and 1995 have not been determined in a court of law to fit the definition of genocide. This has opened up ample space for confusion, and one rarely sees reference to the “Bosnian genocide.” The conflict in general is instead referred to as ethnic cleansing and civil war. With the exception of the massacres at Srebrenica after July 13, 1995, most of the atrocities committed by Serbs in the course of the war have been punished as crimes against humanity and war crimes, and public perceptions follow suit. Paying attention to the experiences of women and to the gendered dynamics of the Serb onslaught on the UN safe haven can help us maneuver this difficult definitional terrain. When we examine, from a gendered perspective, what went on in Srebrenica from the fall of the enclave on July 11, 1995 to the forced relocation of women, girls, and very young boys two days later (an occurrence that directly preceded the start of

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the massacres), we can see that there are several threads that connect the massacres at Srebrenica in 1995 to a systematic Bosnian Serb policy that had been pursued since the outbreak of war in 1992. The case of Srebrenica in fact demonstrates how important it is that we consider the testimony of women survivors of violence in making our determinations about what is and what is not genocide and in thinking about which conflicts are likely to have genocidal outcomes. Their testimonies, because they are often the lone survivors of a given massacre, offer us evidence that is just as important as body counts in establishing genocide and genocidal intent. Specifically, their testimonies can establish a systematic pattern of atrocity aimed directly at the institutions, symbols, and relations of reproduction as well as the biological capacity to reproduce. Ramiza Gurdić gave the following testimony to the Dutch law firm Van Diepen/Van der Kroef, which is representing the surviving victims of the Srebrenica massacres in a suit against the government of the Netherlands and the UN for failing to protect civilians in the UN “safe haven”: At one time, I saw how a young boy of about ten was killed by Serbs in Dutch uniform. This happened in front of my own eyes. The mother sat on the ground and her young son sat beside her. The young boy was placed on his mother’s lap. The young boy was killed. His head was cut off. The body remained on the lap of the mother. The Serbian soldier placed the head of the young boy on his knife and showed it to everyone. The woman was hysterical and began to call out for help. The Serbs forced the mother to drink the blood of her child. Chaos broke out among the refugees.61 Another survivor, Munira Šubašić, tells us: There was a girl, she must have been about nine years old. At a certain moment some Chetniks recommended to her brother that he rape the girl. He did not do it and I also think that he could not have done it for he was still just a child. Then they murdered that young boy.62 These are just two of the many stories of specific atrocities witnessed by survivors of Srebrenica. But rarely do such stories work themselves into narratives and analyses of the crime. Certainly they are still not part of dominant images of the Srebrenica massacre. The fact is that during the two days preceding the “evacuation” of an estimated 23,000 women and children, many women and girls as young as nine were raped by Serb forces; frequently they were killed afterward; small girls and boys, including infants, were murdered, often by having their throats cut in front of their families; pregnant women were eviscerated; and boys and men were seemingly randomly picked out of crowds of families and dragged off, never to return.

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These atrocities, targeted as they were at family bonds, need to find their way into scholarly, legal, and public images of Srebrenica. The reason that we need to know the details surrounding the separation of women and men before the Srebrenica evacuations and deportations are that they demonstrate the extent to which people were being persecuted relationally, specifically as members of families. This, in turn, suggests that Bosnian Serb forces were seeking to compromise and destroy the most important unit of group cohesion, the family. Rather than being instances of random and excessive violence in a madhouse, the atrocities committed against family members, in front of one another, are some of the strongest indicators of genocidal intent. They suggest something much more malicious than attempts to rid Serbian forces of a military foe. Indeed, they conform to several elements of the crime as articulated in the Genocide Convention. These atrocities only come to light in the testimony of those who survived, the majority of whom are women and girls. The stories, and their implications, are not considered by legal scholars who argue against the genocide finding in the Prosecutor v. Krstic case tried by the ICTY.63

Conclusion: Toward Prevention The types of atrocities committed in Argentine prisons, the Srebrenica enclave, and within villages in Darfur could serve to further specify exactly those limited crimes that we would consider to be “atrocity crimes” with a high risk of turning into genocide.64 The Srebrenica massacres, for example, came on the heels of over three years of violence and “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnian Muslims perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces, including several “special forces” that seem to have operated with orders from Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade.65 We can trace back from the atrocities committed in Srebrenica on July 11–12, 1995 to similar atrocities committed in eastern Bosnian towns from April 1992 through July 1995. The atrocities we see in Srebrenica also can be linked to atrocities in the various Serbcontrolled concentration and rape camps that operated in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. When we draw lines from one atrocity to another, across time and space, we begin to see the dense tapestry of genocide in Bosnia above and beyond the evidence of single cases of massacre, murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. It therefore becomes difficult to cordon off the Srebrenica massacres as the only case of genocide within a wider war that was characterized by other things.66 Atrocity statistics that are sensitive to the contextual frame in which discrete crimes are committed point to the usefulness of an approach to genocide that understands the crime spatially, not only in terms of the geography of the attacks, but also in terms of the geography of atrocity. Data and maps could be created for those specific types of atrocities that have a high correlation with the crime of genocide. If early on in a conflict

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we could see a map of specific types of atrocities reported by witnesses, this would contribute to determining if a conflict is threatening genocide and, if so, which group or cadre is of particular concern. If we could begin to correlate the specific types of atrocities that are highly suggestive of genocide with specific ways of envisioning reproduction, the gender binary, women’s sexuality, men’s power, and so forth, we may begin to tease out the very specific types of thinking—genealogies—of atrocity that can lead to genocide way down the road. In our new century most of us will probably be drawn into the terrible position of witnesses to genocide, if only by virtue of the international media. Current, on-going processes of genocide in Myanmar, Chechnya, Xinjiang (China), Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Sudan, Ethiopia, as well as continuing genocidal structural assaults against Palestinians, indigenous peoples in North and South America, Africa, and Asia, and global anti-black racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and antisemitism that act as permanent threats of genocide against millions of people, seem to herald an era in which genocide becomes the preferred mechanism for dealing with economic, political, social, and environmental disarray and collapse. The most fundamental question we can ask is how we can prevent genocide before it announces itself with mass graves. To do that, we must not only take gender into consideration, but we must also keep it at the forefront of research in genocide studies.

Notes 1 Benjamin Valentino, “The Strategic Logic of Mass Killing,” in Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 2 Michelle L. Dion, Jane Lawrence Sumner, and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, “Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields,” Political Analysis 26, no. 3 (July 2018): 312–27; Troy Vettese, “Sexism in the Academy: Women’s Narrowing Path to Tenure,” n+1 Magazine 34 (Spring 2019). 3 For an overview of the development of gender research within Holocaust studies, see especially Zoë Waxman, Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel (eds.), Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2010); Lisa Pine, “Gender and the Family,” in Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 364–82; Atina Grossmann, “Women and the Holocaust: Four Recent Titles,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 94–108; Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Gender and Genocide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 2nd edn (London: Oxford, forthcoming 2020). For a particularly bellicose example of the backlash against gender

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studies in Holocaust scholarship, see Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary 105, no. 6 (1998): 42–7. More moderate critiques of gender analysis are discussed in Roger Smith, “Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8, no. 3 (1994): 215–334. See also: Adam Jones, “Does Gender Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations,” Review of International Studies 22, no. 4 (1996): 405–29; Adam Jones, “Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ExYugoslavia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 1 (1994): 115–34. Although Jones is sensitive to and aware of the multifarious ways in which women are victimized in genocide, his definition of the crime, based on Steven Katz’s, depends on the crime of murder and therefore does not incorporate mass rape as a central element: See Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 210), 18. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 467. Joeden-Forgey, “Gender and Genocide.” International Court of Justice, Sitting held on Tuesday 10 December 2019 in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar), Verbatim Record (The Hague: Peace Palace, 2019), 17, available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.icj​​-cij.​​ org​/p​​ublic​​/file​​s​/cas​​e​-rel​​ated/​​178​/1​​78​-20​​19121​​0​​-ORA​​-01​-0​​0​-BI.​​pdf (accessed December 17, 2020). International Court of Justice, Sitting held on Wednesday 11 December 2019 in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar), Verbatim Record (The Hague: Peace Palace, 2019), 22–4, available at https​:/​/ ww​​w​.icj​​-cij.​​org​/p​​ublic​​/file​​s​/cas​​e​-rel​​ated/​​178​/1​​78​-20​​19121​​1​​-ORA​​-01​-0​​0​-BI.​​pdf (accessed December 17, 2020). Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Genocidal Masculinity,” in New Directions in Genocide Research, ed. Adam Jones (New York: Routledge, 2012), 76–95. The study of women perpetrators is most developed for the Holocaust. See Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); Claudia Koontz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Smith, “Women and Genocide,” Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, “Gendered Perpetrators of Genocide,” in Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007), 141–73; Christina Herkommer, “Women under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action and the Issue of Gender,” and Irmtraud Heike, “Female Concentration Camp Guards as Perpetrators: Three Case Studies,” in Ordinary People as Mass Murderers, eds. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 99–119, and 120–44, respectively; Wendy Adele-Marie Sarti, Women and Nazis: Perpetrators of Genocide and Other Crimes During Hitler’s Regime, 1933-1945 (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2010). Wendy Lower, “German Women and the Holocaust in the Nazi East,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018), 130.

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11 Sara Brown, Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Routledge, 2018), 10. 12 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Gender, Sexualized Violence, and the Prevention of Genocide,” in Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention, eds. Sheri P. Rosenberg, Tibi Galis, and Alex Zucker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 125–50. 13 Adam Jones, ed. Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). See also: Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985). 14 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Patterns of Genocide: A Critical Tool for Genocide Prevention,” On Genocide, 6 December 2019. Available at: https​:/​/on​​genoc​​ide​ .b​​log​/2​​019​/1​​2​/06/​​patte​​rns​-o​​​f​-gen​​ocide​/. 15 For important works that address various genocides, see the volume’s selected bibliography. 16 Janet Halley, “Rape at Rome: Feminist Interventions in the Criminalization of Sex-Related Violence in Positive International Criminal Law,” Michigan Journal of International Law 30 (2008–9): 1–123; Mark Ellis, “Breaking the Silence: Rape as an International Crime,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 225 (2006): 225–47; Karen Engle, “Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” The American Journal of International Law 99, no. 4 (2005): 778–816; Kelly Dawn Askin, “Prosecuting Wartime Rape and Other Genocide-Related Crimes under International Law: Extraordinary Advances, Enduring Obstacles,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 21 (2003): 349. 17 Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 181. 18 Will Storr, “The Rape of Men,” Observer, July 17, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian. co​.uk​​/soci​​ety​/2​​011​/j​​ul​/17​​/the-​​ra​pe-​​of​-me​n (accessed December 17, 2020). Thanks to Adam Jones for drawing my attention to this article. 19 Along these lines, Dubravka Zarkov, in an essay on male victims of rape in the Yugoslav war, has shown how a masculinist construction of national identity can have the effect of erasing men’s sexual exploitation precisely because such exploitation feminizes the victim. Dubravka Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media,” in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, eds. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001), 75. 20 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 240. 21 Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, Crimes against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (Berkeley, CA: Russell Publications, 1990). Subsequent works have expanded the definition of femicide to include the killing of females by other females to serve the interests of men. 22 Feminicidio resembles the concept of “gendercide” as developed by Mary Ann Warren and Adam Jones.

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23 In common parlance, the terms femicide and feminicide are often used interchangeably to mean simply the “the killing of females.” 24 For example, Tony Barta, “Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia,” in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, eds. I. Wallimann and M. N. Dobkowski (New York: Greenwood, 1987). 25 Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 13. 26 Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett, Sex and World Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 27 Rhonda Copelon, “Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in Time of War,” in Mass Rape: The War against Women in BosniaHerzegovina, ed. Alexandra Siglmayer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 197–218. For a discussion of the difficulty in defining “rape,” from the field of philosophy, see Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 28 Henry Theriault, “Gender and Genocide: New Perspectives for Armenian Genocide Research,” paper presented at the Armenian Genocide Workshop, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, April 8–10, 2010. 29 Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 209–36. 30 One of the few studies to do this to date is Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford/New York: Berg, 1999). 31 Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: The History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. For a legal analysis of Nazi policies toward the LGBTQ community as a form of genocide, see Matthew Waites, “Genocide and Global Queer Politics,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 1 (2018): 44–67. 32 Haley Marie Brown, “The Forgotten Murders: Gendercide in the 21st Century and the Destruction of the Transgender Body,” in Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide?, eds. John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2021). See also: Jeremy Kidd and Taryn Witten, “Transgender and Transsexual Identities: The Next Strange Fruit—Hate Crimes, Violence and Genocide against the Global Trans Communities,” Journal of Hate Studies 6 (2007–2008): 31–63. 33 R. W. Connell, Gender: In World Perspective, 3rd ed. (Cambridge and New York: Polity, 2014). 34 Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear, “Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence under Trump Administration,” New York Times, October 21, 2018. 35 On the social and economic impact of rape on women after genocide, see for example, Samuel Totten, ed., “The Darfur Genocide: The Mass Rape of Black African Girls and Women,” in Plight and Fate of Women during and Following Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 137–68.

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36 See, for example, Human Rights Watch, Struggling to Survive: Barriers to Justice for Rape Victims in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, September 2004). 37 Hardi, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan- Iraq, 7. 38 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Sexual Violence and Genocide in the DRC,” Institute for the Study of Genocide Newsletter 45 (Winter 2010). Available online: http:​/​/www​​.inst​​itute​​forth​​estud​​yofge​​nocid​​e​.org​​/news​​lette​​rs​/is​​​g45​/I​​ SG45.​​pdf (accessed July 22, 2011). 39 Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18, no. 1 (2003): 63–79; Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? 2nd ed. (Malden, MA and Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); Helen Fein, “Genocide: A Sociological Perspective,” Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (1990): 1–126. See also: Daniel Feierstein, “Political Violence in Argentina and Its Genocidal Characteristics,” in State Violence and Genocide in Latin America, eds. Marcia Esperanza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein (London: Routledge, 2010), 44–63. 40 Shaw, What Is Genocide? 17–36. 41 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (April 2010): 1–19. 42 I am borrowing the “relational” designation from Adam Jones, “Gendering Genocide,” in Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 464–98. 43 For a longer discussion of this subject, see my version of this chapter in the 2015 edition of this volume. See also: Gregory Stanton, “Proving Genocide in Darfur: The Atrocities Documentation Project and Resistance to Its Findings,” in Genocide in Darfur: Investigating Atrocities in Sudan, eds. Samuel Totten and Eric Markusen (New York: Routledge, 2006), 181–8, and Jonathan P. Howard, “Survey Methodology and the Darfur Genocide,” in Genocide in Darfur, ed. Totten and Markusen, 69. For an analysis of the gendered violence documented by the ADT, see Kelly Dawn Askin, “Prosecuting Gender Crimes Committed in Darfur: Holding Leaders Accountable for Sexual Violence,” in Genocide in Darfur, ed. Totten and Markusen, 141–62. 44 International Association of Genocide Scholars, Resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars concerning crimes of ISIS, March 18, 2016. Available at: https​:/​/ge​​nocid​​escho​​lars.​​org​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ ds​/20​​19​/04​​/IAGS​​-Reso​​lutio​​n​-on-​​ISIS-​​passe​​d​​-18-​​March​​-2016​​_1​.pd​f (accessed January 15, 2021). 45 International Association of Genocide Scholars, Resolution to Declare the Rohingya Persecution a Crime of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, April 21, 2020. Available at: https​:/​/ge​​nocid​​escho​​lars.​​org​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​ /20​​20​/04​​/IAGS​​-Rohi​​ngya​-​​Resol​​ution​​.pdf (accessed January 15, 2021). 46 John Kerry, “Remarks on Daesh and Genocide,” March 17, 2016, https​:/​/20​​09​ -20​​17​.st​​ate​.g​​ov​/se​​creta​​ry​/re​​marks​​/2016​​​/03​/2​​54782​​.htm (accessed December 17, 2020).

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47 United Nation’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes (New York: United Nations, 2014), https​:/​/ww​​w​.un.​​org​/e​​n​/gen​​ocide​​preve​​ntion​​/docu​​ments​​ /abou​​t​-us/​​Doc​.3​​_Fram​​ework​​%20of​​%20An​​alysi​​s​%20f​​or​%20​​At​roc​​ity​%2​​ 0Crim​​es​_EN​​.pdf. 48 This toolbox can be accessed at the website of the Iraq Project for Reconciliation, Conflict Resolution, and Peacebuilding at www​.iraqproject​.org​ /toolbox (accessed December 17, 2020). 49 As we know, Raphael Lemkin understood genocide in highly contextualized terms. Much of his thinking about the crime was clearly formed by the attention he paid to the (generally assumed) familial composition of the groups being targeted. See, for example, Raphael Lemkin, “Biological Techniques of Genocide,” in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Analysis, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 86–7. For a discussion of Lemkin’s contextual approach, see Shaw, What Is Genocide?, 17–36. Shaw rightly credits Helen Fein with continuing Lemkin’s tradition of incorporating a wide range of destructive social and biological policies and actions into a definition of genocide. 50 Feierstein, “Political Violence,” 154. 51 Family members of men determined to be “kulaks” in the Soviet Union under Stalin were often executed or sent to the gulag alongside them. See Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 52 Daniel Feierstein, “National Security Doctrine in Latin America: The Genocide Question,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. Bloxham and Moses, 504–5. 53 Ibid. 54 See, for example, atrocities witnessed by Jacobo Timerman and related in Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 146–58. 55 For a rudimentary treatment of this theme, see my Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “Genocidal Masculinity,” in New Directions in Genocide Research, ed. Adam Jones (New York: Routledge, 2011), 76–95. 56 An example of this tendency is Edward Herman and Scott Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010) and Edward Herman and Phillip Corwin, The Srebrenica Massacre (Montreal: Centre for Research on Globalization, 2011). For cogent critiques of these works see Martin Shaw, “Left Wing Genocide Denial.” Available online: http:// martinshaw​.org/ (accessed July 11, 2014); George Monbiot, “Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers,” Guardian, June 13, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian. co​.uk​​/comm​​ entis​​free/​​2011/​​jun​/1​​3​/lef​​t​-and​​-libe​​rtari​​an​-ri​​​ght​?I​​NTCMP​​=SRCH​ (accessed July 7, 2014); and Adam Jones, “On Genocide Deniers: Challenging Herman and Peterson,” Pambazuka News 490 (July 15, 2010). Available online: http:​/​/pam​​ bazuk​​a​.org​​/en​/c​​atego​​ry​/fe​​atu​re​​s​/659​​77 (accessed July 7, 2014). See also: Adam Jones, “Chomsky and Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 14, no. 1 (2020): 76–104. 57 Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 271–2.

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58 There are many reports on the specific atrocities committed by the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan in Darfur. See, for example, Human Rights Watch, “Darfur in Flames: Atrocities in Western Sudan,” in Sudan 16, no. 5 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004). 59 John Hagen and Wenona Rymond-Richmond, Darfur and the Crime of Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 212. 60 ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, April 19, 2004. Available online: www​.un​.org​/icty/ krstic/Appeal/judgement/index​.ht​m; ICJ, Press Release, February 26, 2007. 61 Van Diepen/Van der Kroef, Writ of Summons, The Hague, Netherlands, 2007. Full text, with witness testimonies. Available online: http://www/vandiepen. com/uploads/media/1376917704​_issuu​.​pdf (accessed July 7, 2014). 62 Ibid. 63 See, for example, William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 221–34; Katherine Southwick, “Srebrenica as Genocide? The Krstić Decision and the Language of the Unspeakable,” Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal 8 (2005): 188–227. 64 David Scheffer, “Genocide and Atrocity Crimes,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 3 (2006): 229–50. 65 Norman Cigar, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 72–8. 66 Two recent works by Bosnian scholars argue that the Srebrenica massacre was a culmination of a genocidal policy toward eastern Bosnia pursued by Serb forces since the conflict began in 1992: Daniel Toljaga, “Prelude to the Srebrenica Genocide: Mass Murder and Ethnic Cleansing of Bosniaks in the Srebrenica Region During the First Three Months of the Bosnian War (April– June 1992).” Available online: http:​/​/www​​.bosn​​ia​.or​​g​.uk/​​news/​​news_​​body.​​cfm​ ?n​​​ewsid​​=2771​ (accessed July 7, 2014); Edina Bećirević, Genocide on the Drina River (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014).

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Appendix

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by General Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948 Entry into force: January 12, 1951, in accordance with article XIII The Contracting Parties Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (I) dated December 11, 1946, that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world, Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity, and Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required, Hereby agree as hereinafter provided: Article I The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish. Article II In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

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APPENDIX

Article III The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide. Article IV Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals. Article V The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III. Article VI Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. Article VII Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition. The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force. Article VIII Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III. Article IX Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

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(Please note that articles X-XIX are not included in this excerpt. They include discussion of signatures, ratifications, entry into force, accessions, notifications, and denunciations of the Convention as well as its possible abrogation.) “From Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” by the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly, © 1948 United Nations. Reprinted with the permission of the United Nations.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ayşe Gül Altınay is Professor of Anthropology and former director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence at Sabancı University. Having published extensively on militarism, memory, violence, and gender, her recent work focuses on transformative activism. Among her books are: The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education in Turkey (2004); The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of “Lost” Armenians in Turkey (coauthored with Fethiye Çetin, 2017); Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (coedited with Andrea Petö, 2018); and Women Mobilizing Memory (coedited with Maria Jose Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, 2019). Jennie E. Burnet is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University in Atlanta in the United States. Her research explores the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of war, genocide, and mass violence and the micro-level impact of large-scale social change in the context of conflict. Her award-winning book, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda, was published in 2012 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her research on gender, women, and politics has appeared in Politics & Gender, African Affairs, African Studies Review, and Women’s Studies International Forum. She is currently writing a book, To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue during the Rwandan Genocide, which examines how and why some Rwandans risked their lives to save Tutsi from the carnage. From January through July 2019, she was the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Doris Buss is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, with over twenty years of experience researching in the areas of international law and human rights, women’s rights, sexual and genderbased violence, and transitional justice. Her current research examines gender and resource governance in sub-Saharan Africa with a specific focus on women’s artisanal and small-scale gold mining livelihoods in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique. Buss is the author (with Didi

CONTRIBUTORS

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Herman) of Globalizing Family Values: The International Politics of the Christian Right (2003), coeditor (with Ambreena Manji) of International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (2005), and coeditor (with Joanne Lebert, Blair Rutherford, and Donna Sharkey) of Sexual Violence in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies: International Agendas and African Contexts (2014). Her most recent publications include “Conflict Minerals and Sexual Violence in Central Africa: Troubling Research,” Social Politics 25: 4 (2018). Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1974 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the Transnational Law Institute. He has held visiting appointments with a number of law faculties, including Oxford, Paris II (Pantheon-Assas), Trinity College-Dublin, Melbourne, Monash, and Ottawa. His scholarly interests include public international law, international criminal law (including specifically within the Rwandan context), and the role of masculinities and femininities in transitional justice. His books Atrocity, Punishment and International Law (2012) and Research Handbook on Child Soldiers (2019, coedited with Jastine Barrett) have been widely reviewed and have earned critical acclaim. He holds degrees in law and politics from McGill University, University of Toronto, and Columbia University. Maria Elander is a senior lecturer at La Trobe Law School, La Trobe University. Her research is primarily in the broader field of international criminal justice and engages with theories in cultural and feminist legal studies. She is particularly interested in questions of representation and its limits as they relate to victimhood, crime, gender, and the visual and has to date focused mainly on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. Her monograph Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice, the Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (2018) won the 2019 Penny Pether Prize (Early Career Researcher), awarded by the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program. Together with Melissa Bilal, Ekmekçioğlu is the coauthor of the 2006 book in Turkish titled A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862–1933). Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out in 2016. Currently, she is collaborating with Melissa Bilal for a book and digital humanities project titled Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive, which focuses on the life and works of twelve pioneering women intellectuals from the 1860s to 1960s.

446

CONTRIBUTORS

S​ tephen R. Haynes is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Liberal Arts in Prison Program at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He is the author of several works related to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump (2018). He has also written about the American South, slavery, and the civil rights movement, including The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (2012). Haynes teaches courses on theology, the Holocaust, and religion and racism. Nicole Hogg is an international lawyer, specializing in international humanitarian law. In 2001, she conducted extensive research on women’s role in the Rwandan genocide, including interviews with seventy-one female genocide suspects in Rwandan prisons. Since 2003 she has worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in various positions in the field, in Geneva and in Washington, DC, and most recently became the Deputy Head of Law at the ICRC. She holds a Master of Laws from McGill University, Canada, and a Bachelor of Laws and a BA from Melbourne University, Australia. Anthonie Holslag is a lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology who teaches at several institutions: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the process of identity making through identity destruction at the core of the genocidal process. He has published several articles and essays on the Armenian genocide and Armenian Diaspora, including “The Process of Othering: From Social Imaginaire to Physical Acts,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: 9, no. 1 (2015): 96–113; “Within the Acts of Violence: An Anthropological Exploration on the Meaning of Genocide as a Cultural Expression,” in The Crime of Genocide: Prevention, Condemnation, and Elimination of Consequences (Yerevan: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, 2011); “Ik zag ze gaan: een analyse van de relatie tussen minderheidsgroepen en volkerenmoord in het Ottomaanse Rijk 1915-1917,” Leidschrift 29:1 (2014). He is the author of The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat? (2018). Janet Jacobs is Professor of Distinction of Women and Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious violence, gender, mass trauma, and collective memory. She is author of five books, including Hidden Heritage; The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews, for which she received the outstanding book award from the Society for the Society Scientific of Religion (2003): and The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance among Descendants of Survivors (2017), which was awarded the Outstanding Book Award by the

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 447

American Sociological Association section on War and Peace (2017). She is also the author of Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Mass Trauma (2010) and numerous articles and book chapters. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey is the Endowed Chair in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. Before this, she was the Marsha Raticoff Grossman Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, where she also directed the master’s program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and founded the world’s first academic, graduate-level Genocide Prevention Certificate Program. She is former president of Genocide Watch, former first vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and founder of the Iraq Project for Genocide Prevention (IPG). She has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the Holocaust, comparative genocide, gender, sexual violence, war, human rights, imperialism, and genocide prevention at several universities and has lectured and published widely on these topics. Her most recent publication is the edited volume The Cultural History of Genocide, Vol. 5: The Era of Total War, forthcoming in 2021 from Bloomsbury Publishing.  Adam Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (3rd edition, 2017) and author or editor of over a dozen other books, including Gender Inclusive: Essays on Violence, Men, and Feminist International Relations (2009). He has worked as an expert consultant with the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Lisa Pine is Associate Professor of History at London South Bank University, UK. She is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science and obtained her doctorate from the University of London in 1996. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her main research interests are the social history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. She is the author of Nazi Family Policy, 1933-1945 (1997), Hitler’s “National Community”: Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (2007; 2017), Education in Nazi Germany (2010) and Debating Genocide (2018). She is the editor of Life and Times in Nazi Germany (2016) and The Family in Modern Germany (2020).  Amy E. Randall is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department and Associate Director for the Center for Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. Randall is the author of The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s (2008). She has published several articles as well as chapters in edited collections on Russia and the Soviet Union. Recent

448

CONTRIBUTORS

Soviet scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality in the post-Stalin era, including “Soviet and Russian Masculinities: Rethinking Soviet Fatherhood after Stalin and Renewing Virility in the Russian Nation under Putin,” The Journal of Modern History 92, no. 4 (2020). Randall is also the editor of and contributing author to the first edition of Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey (2015). Olivera Simić is Associate Professor with the Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Australia. Her research is in the field of transitional justice, international law, gender, and crime. Olivera’s latest edited collection (with Barbora Hola),  ICTY Celebrities: War Criminals Coming Home, was published by International Criminal Justice Review in 2018. Her latest monograph Silent Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence was published in 2018. Olivera is currently writing a monograph about the only woman prosecuted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Biljana Plavšić. Zoë Waxman is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She is the author of Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History (2017), Anne Frank (2015), and Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (2006). Her scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides has also appeared in numerous academic journals and chapters in edited collections. She teaches courses on the Holocaust, memory, trauma, and gender and genocide. Patricia A. Weitsman was Director of War and Peace Studies at the Center for International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio University. She passed away in 2014 after struggling with a long and difficult illness. Patricia coauthored The Politics of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs (1993) and coedited Towards A New Europe: Stops and Starts in Regional Integration (1995) and Enforcing Cooperation: “Risky” States and the Intergovernmental Management of Conflict (1997). Her first book, Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War (2004), was a finalist for several major book awards, and her second book, Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence (2013), was completed even as Weitsman struggled with her health. Weitsman’s work was published in numerous edited volumes as well as journals in the field. Weitsman was a talented professor and won several awards for her teaching. She was also a very active member of the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association and served as its chair from 2011 to 2013. Patricia (Patty) Weitsman was a wonderful scholar, teacher, and mentor as well as a loving wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend, and she is missed by many.

INDEX

abduction  122, 248–52, 258, 259, 321 abortion  4, 11, 39, 44, 59, 85, 139, 140, 156, 177, 248, 256–8, 387 Armenian attitude  248, 256–7 female infanticide and sexselective  85 forced  4, 11, 39, 139 Rwandan attitude  177, 257–8 self-induced  258 Adelsberger, Lucie  71 AFRC case  361 Africans  33 enslavement of  34 Aharonian, Avedis  252 Akayesu, Jean-Paul  135, 174, 176, 339, 340, 343, 365 Akçam, Taner  319, 323 Akçura, Yusuf  115, 116 Akhavan, Payam  349 Algeria  30 Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) militia  90, 103 n.28 Altınay, Ayse Gül  14, 312, 381. See also memory; trauma, gendered and intergenerational transmission Anfal genocide of Iraqi Kurds  388 “Angkar.” See Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust  214 anti-Blackness  45–7 anti-gay laws  42, 43 antisemitism  1, 27, 28, 35, 36, 42 Apel, Dora  302 Appadurai, Arjun  119, 123

Appeals Chamber  230 Aras Publishing House  319 Arendt, Hannah  31, 315 Aretxaga, Begoña  172 Argentina’s “Dirty War” and genocide  390 Armenian church and missionaries  318 Armenian Diaspora  127, 313, 320, 324 Armenian genocide  5, 9, 14, 111–28, 247, 261, 319, 323, 325, 385–7 Armenians from Syria and Turkey  126–7 conversion to Islam  122–3 enslavement and forced assimilation  121–3 gendercide  120–1 identity of Armenians  125–8, 324 insulting of corpses  112, 123 rape  120–1 selling of female Armenians  122, 125 sexualized killings  123–4 survivors of  125, 128 victims’ bones and hair, selling of  122 women (see women and Armenian genocide) Armenianness  11, 122, 123, 126, 127 Armenian Red Cross  248, 252, 253, 256 Armenian rescue efforts (Vorpahavak) in Istanbul  249–54 marriageability and remasculinization  258–61 Orphan Gathering Agency (Vorphavak Marmin)  250

450

Paris Peace Settlement negotiations  255 problems with  250, 251 reclaiming people, reclaiming land  255–8 reintegration of women and children  5, 13 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA)  317, 320 Arusha Accords peace process  94 Association of Camp Inmates (ACI) Atlantic slave trade system  32–4, 47 Atnur, İbrahim Ethem  318–19 Auschwitz  294, 296, 301, 302 Auschwitz, privations and experiences of male and female internees at  62–5. See also sexual identity and behavior, in context of Auschwitz coping strategies  69, 70 death marches  64 ersatz family relationships  68, 71, 75 family relationships  70 female bonding at Auschwitz  60 incidences of extreme violence and brutality  68 kitchen memories and women  69 Liana Millu’s narratives  68–73 men engaging in food talk  63 menstruation issues  66–8 references to close relationships and social bonding  58, 63, 64, 71, 72, 75 “ritual cleansing” of lice  68 ritual of shaving inmates  65 sexual abuse and violations  59, 67 sharing of food  69 sterilization experiments on women  68, 139 subject of survival in camps  63 Avakian, Arlene  324 Axis armed forces  40 Aztecs  28 Baartman, Saartje (Sarah Bartmann/ Hottentot Venus)  34

Index

Bahri, Zaruhi  252, 254, 255, 260, 261 Bakalian, Anny  126 barbarism  27, 31 Baro Porrajmos (Great Devouring/ Romani Holocaust)  40 Bassiouni Report  270, 273 Bauer, Yehuda  59 Baumann, Gerd  117 Bedoukian, Kerop  259 Behrendt, Johannes  41 Bemeriki, Valérie  233 Beorn, Waitman Wade  212 Bergen, Doris  138 Berktay, Halil  319 Bettelheim, Bruno  63, 75 biological differences  34 biological reproduction  27, 29, 32–8 biopolitics  10, 27, 36, 47 Bitton-Jackson, Livia  65, 66, 68, 70, 72 Black bodies  33, 34 Black Germans  40, 46 blackness  34 “Black peril” discourses  36 Blok, Anton  112 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich  33 boomerang effect of  31 Bos, Pascale  59, 60 Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide  4, 101 n.6, 394–6 children born of rape  153, 159–60, 177, 178 concentration camps  272, 396 concept of identity  149–50 emasculation  155, 207, 272, 280 ethnic identity  151–3 incidence of infanticide  158 Kunarac et al. case  153–5 male-on-male sexual abuse and rape  91, 268–73, 280 nexus of gender and identity  152–3, 274, 338 paternal identity of child, issues of  157 policies of sexual violence  154–9

Index

postwar pronatalism  161 rape camps  140, 155–6, 385, 396 Srebrenica massacre  151, 159, 269–70, 273–6, 340–1, 346, 347, 394–6 Breaking the Silence (1984)  306, 307 British colonial forces  30 Brod, Harry  83, 194 Brouwer, Anne-Marie de  181 Brown, Haley Marie  387 Brown, Sara  380 Brown, Wendy  357 Browning, Christopher  201–7, 209, 210, 213, 217 n.55 Ordinary Men  201, 202, 204, 205, 213, 217 n.55 Buchmann, Heinz  202 Buckley-Ziestel, Susanne  278 Bunting, Annie  361 Burnet, Jennie E.  12, 167, 384. See also mass rape; Rwandan genocide, sexual violence bush wives  272, 283 n.44 Buss, Doris  14, 112, 119, 335, 357, 382, 385. See also international criminal prosecutions of sexual violence Butare Six case  230 bystanders  4, 7, 12, 201, 211, 233, 382 Cahill, Ann  384 Cambodian Defenders Project  363 Cambodian genocide  9, 14. See also Democratic Kampuchea Cambodian government  356 Can, Serdar Nenemin Masalları (My Grandmother’s Tales)  321 Card, Claudia  388 Carey, Maddy  61 Carpenter, R. Charli  99, 153, 160 Forgetting Children Born of War  160 Caucasians’ skulls  33, 34

 451

Cemal Pasha  316 Central European History  212, 213 Césaire, Aimé  31 Çetin, Fethiye  312–15, 322, 325, 326 n.7 Anneannem (My Grandmother: A Memoir)  312–15, 319, 321 Chakerian, Arakel  250, 254, 261, 265 n.36 Chea, Nuon  355, 360, 366 Chechen women  9 children born of rape  153, 159–60, 177, 178 empathic connection and caretaking  297–9 “euthanasia” program  39 forced labor of  95–8, 381 as Holocaust carriers  302–5 of Holocaust survivors  125, 291–302, 304–8 human rights of child victims  160–1 identity issues after genocide  152–9 mixed-race  36 reintegration of  5, 13, 231, 236 sterilization of Afro-German  46 transferring  29 witnessing among  297–300, 302, 304, 308 Children of Survivor Organizations  292 Chodorow, Nancy  297 Choko, Isabelle  65, 66 Christopher, Warren  342 Chu, Sandra Ka Hon  181 Closing Order  359, 362–5 Cockburn, Cynthia  152 Co-Investigating Judges (CIJ)  358–60, 362 colonialism/colonization  31 colonized people  10, 27, 32, 35, 36 commemorations  3, 6, 160, 293, 300, 302–5, 308, 310 n.23, 313 Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East  250

452

Index

Communist era in Eastern Europe  151 Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK); aka “Angkar” and Khmer Rouge  14, 355–6, 358, 359, 362, 363, 367, 368, 369 n.8 Congolese genocide forced labor  84, 95–8 “gendercidal” killing  84 mass rape of women and girls in  88, 91–4, 148, 384 military conscription in  93–5 prevalence of male sexual violence (MSV) during  10, 91–3, 271, 384 Congo Wars, mass atrocities during  90 “conjugal slavery”  362 Connell, R. W.  198, 214 n.2, 272, 387 Convention on the Rights of the Child  161 corporal punishment  33 Crimean Tatars  9 cultural production  305–8 CUNY Clinic Memorandum  382 Cuvier, Georges  34 Czellitzer, Margaret  62

conscripted marriage  366–7 forced marriage  14, 15, 356, 360–6, 378 Moral Codes  359 murderous policies and mass killings  14, 88, 355–6, 358, 361–3, 365–7, 378 sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)  356–60, 368 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)  10, 84, 87–90, 93, 95, 103 n.28, 167, 222, 229, 233, 383, 388 conscription of men and boys  95 Denov, Myriam  178 Deportation  7, 8, 9, 41, 119, 204, 252, 317, 396 Der Yeghiayan, Zaven  249, 263 n.11 de Wijze, Louis  63 Dillon, Christopher  213 Dink, Hrant  319 Dolan, Chris  92 Donia, Robert  343 Dowd, Nancy  271 Drumbl, Mark  12, 220, 236, 380. See also women as perpetrators, in Rwandan genocide Drumond, Paula  89

Dallaire, Roméo  92 Darfur and the Crime of Genocide  393 Darwin, Charles  35 Das, Veena  180 DC-Cam  359 de Beauvoir, Simone  84 degenderization  11, 113, 119, 123, 124 dehumanization and commercialization of victimized group  34, 122, 138 of women  143, 388 dekulakization  7, 8 de Langis, Theresa  356 Delbo, Charlotte  71 Del Zotto, Augusta  91, 100, 271 Democratic Kampuchea, genocide in characterizing harm  362–5 coercion, force, and law  365–8

East Pakistan/Bangladesh, genocide in  148, 257, 378, 379 Eicke, Theodor  197 Ekmekcioglu, Lerna  13, 14, 247, 387. See also Armenian rescue efforts Elander, Maria  14, 378. See also Democratic Kampuchea, gendered violence in; Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) Engle, Karen  367 Enlightenment  32–4 Enloe, Cynthia  323, 357, 384 enslavement and forced assimilation  9, 11, 29, 34, 112, 121–3, 137, 167, 176, 180, 271, 340, 345, 361, 362 Ensler, Eve  162 Vagina Monologues  162 Enver, Ishmail  117

Index

Eramian, Laura  178 Ermeni Kızı Ağçik (Ağçik, the Armenian Girl)  321 Eugenics  37, 38, 39, 47 Europe  35, 39–41, 47, 136, 159, 178, 317 Eastern  28, 30, 32, 151, 296, 305 imperial powers in  114–16 Nazi-occupied  49 n.22 rape in  182 Western  60 European imperialism and genocide  10, 27–32, 36, 47 European Journal of Women’s Studies  2 extermination  29, 30, 41, 46, 85, 86, 88, 91, 101 n.5, 119, 198, 230, 249 Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) Trial Chamber  14, 355–68, 378 Fearon, James  149 Fein, Helen  388 femicide/feminicide  384 feminism  193, 195, 210, 211, 319, 376, 377 feminist activism  176, 269, 336, 338, 339, 344, 355, 359 feminist scholarship  377 First World War  28, 31, 46, 47 Fogelman, Eva  306 forced collectivization  7, 8 “forced conjugal association”  361, 362 forced deportation. See deportation forced impregnation and maternity  4, 134, 142, 150–3, 381, 385 Serbian policies of  135, 140, 148, 154–9, 161–2, 164 n.27 wartime sexual violence, case of Bosnia-Herzegovina  154–9 forced labor of children  30, 95–8, 381 in Congolese wars  96–7 and exposure to pervasive sexual predation and servitude  97 humanitarian intervention into  100 Human Rights Watch report  96

 453

forced marriages  4, 5, 14, 15, 103 n.29, 113, 119, 172, 180, 236, 283 n.44, 345, 356, 361–7, 378 forced sterilization  4, 11, 38, 39, 41–2, 46, 68, 134, 139, 154 Fortunoff Holocaust archive, Yale University  293 Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes  390 Frankl, Victor  62, 63, 76 Free State of Congo (1885–1908)  30 Free the Slaves  97, 98 French Congo  30 Furundžija, Anto  365 gacaca courts  222, 224, 226, 228, 233, 234, 336 Gacaca Law  224, 225 Gafishi, Philippe  170 Gardam, Judith  357 Gelissen, Rena  65–73 gendercidal institutions  84 intervention into  99 against men and boys  93–5 gendercide(s)  11, 84, 85, 102, 119–21, 123 “gendered concept of power”  29 gendered dimensions of genocide  1–3, 9–15, 57–60, 308, 340, 344, 375–9, 381, 382, 389, 391–3 in Argentina  390–1 Armenian genocide  11, 13, 111–14, 118–24 (see also Armenian rescue efforts) Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide  91, 101 n.6, 135, 140, 152–3, 268–79, 338, 392, 394–6 contribution to genocide prevention in Darfur  7, 14, 87–91, 393 in Darfur  389, 392–4 genocide determinations  15, 390–2 in Holocaust studies  58, 60–71, 135–40, 152, 195–6, 209–11 justice  5, 14, 347–9 leaders and perpetrators of genocide  2–4, 7, 8, 10–15, 57, 84, 91–2, 98, 100, 111–13, 116,

454

118–24, 140, 154, 158, 167–8, 173–6, 180, 196–201, 203, 207–9, 221–9, 343, 345–6, 348, 378–94 in postgenocidal BosniaHerzegovina  5, 151–4, 161, 236 pronatalism of Bosnian Muslim women, postwar  150, 161 role in memory and commemoration  3, 6, 160, 293, 300, 302–5, 308, 313 in Rwandan genocide  10, 11, 12, 14, 168–75 study of sexual violence  2–5, 10–14, 84, 91–3, 100, 112–15, 118, 173–82, 268–80, 336–41, 379–80, 389–90 (see also rape; sexual violence) women’s testimonies in international criminal prosecutions  5, 10, 336, 337, 348 gender equity/inequity  384–5 gender norms  6–10, 12, 13, 36, 37, 42, 44, 58, 63, 71, 72, 280, 303, 365, 380, 384 gender socialization  294 Geneva Conventions  46–7, 356 génocidaires  387 genocidal rape  136, 142, 258, 382, 383, 386, 387 genocidal sexual violence  2–5, 10–14, 84, 91–3, 100, 112–15, 118, 173–82, 268–80, 336–41, 379–80, 389–90. See also sexual violence; sexual violence against males conceptual approach  112–14 enslavement and forced assimilation  9, 11, 34, 35, 59, 60, 112, 113, 119, 121–3, 125, 137, 167, 176, 180, 250, 271, 318, 319, 340, 345, 361 gendercide and rape  120–1 sexualized killings  123–4, 384 symbolism of sexual violence  118–19

Index

genocide, defined  28, 29, 101 n.5, 325, 339, 394, 405–6 genocide and Soviet Union  7–9, 28, 30, 32, 41 genocide prevention and gender  14, 390, 392 genocide studies  23 n.61, 31, 292, 293, 313, 321, 325, 336, 341, 375, 378, 390, 397 gender and  1, 14, 15, 57, 376, 377 gender binary  15, 381, 382 life force atrocities  389–93 reading genocide from the “bottom up”  389 German armed forces  40 German colonial policies  29, 30 German imperialism  30 German South West Africa (GSWA)  10, 29, 30, 49 n.22. See also Herero-Nama genocide German women perpetrators of Holocaust  379–80 Glazar, Richard  63, 64 Göçek, Müge  316, 317, 319, 321 Gökalp, Ziya  115, 118 Goldenberg, Myrna  59, 60, 76 Goldhagen, Daniel  201, 204, 206–10, 218 n.63 Hitler’s Willing Executioners  201, 206 Goldhagen–Browning debate  201, 209 Government of Gambia  378 grassroots initiatives and organizations Bosnia-Herzegovina  270, 279 Rwanda  179 Grey, Rosemary  368 Gurdić, Ramiza  395 Gürün, Kamuran  317 Ermeni Dosyası (The Armenian File)  317 Gutman, Roy  154 Gypsies. See Romanies Habyarimana, Agathe  234 Habyarimana, Juvénal  99, 174, 234, 346 Haguruka  177

Index

Haiti Revolution  316 Halide Edib  316 Hancock, Ian  40 Hardi, Choman  388 Hardman, Anna  59 Hayden, Robert M.  172, 180, 341 Hayes, Peter  212 Haygaz, Aram  254 Haynes, Stephen H.  12, 57, 377, 379. See also Holocaust; masculinity/ masculinities Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld  72 Herero-Nama genocide  10 concentration camps  29, 30 experiments  29, 30 sexual violence  29 Shark Island  29, 30 Herzog, Dagmar  138 Hilberg, Raul  58, 61 Himmler, Heinrich  44 Hinton, Alexander  116, 130 n.24 Hirsch, Marianne  3, 181, 188 n.96, 299, 313, 315 Hirschfield, Magnus  43 Hitler, Adolf  30, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 116, 203, 295 Hochschild, Adam  95, 96 King Leopold’s Ghost  95 Hogg, Nicole  12, 222, 224, 225, 380. See also women as perpetrators, in Rwandan genocide Holocaust  1, 2, 10, 29–31, 40, 42, 58, 376, 382, 385 behavior in female narratives  71–4 commemorative events  293, 300, 302–5, 308 experiences  214, 291, 292, 299 female bonding at Auschwitz  60 female prisoners at Auschwitz  59–62, 65–9, 140 film as medium of  305–8 gendered responses before 1939  60–2 historiographical developments, in study of  3, 4, 58–60, 194–6, 201

 455

male perpetrators  211, 212 masculinity/masculinities  57–8, 62, 194–6, 211, 212, 377 memories of  292–8, 301–9 privations and experiences of male and female internees at Auschwitz  62–5 sexual violence against Jewish women  59, 65, 67, 136–9, 143, 385 “sexual” vulnerability of women  59 survivors of  6, 141–3 victims, gender and gendered expectations of  58–9 Holocaust Education Foundation  213 Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah)  302–5, 307 Holslag, Anthonie  11, 386. See also Armenian genocide; sexual violence homosexuality  42–4, 212, 387 honor killings  388 Horowitz, Sara  59 Höss, Rudolf  196–9 Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Höss  196 relationship between masculinity and family  198 Hrant Dink Foundation  315 Hudson, Valerie  384 Sex and World Peace  384 human diversity  33 humanitarian intervention and rights discourse against vulnerabilities in genocide  98–101 humanity  2, 14, 29, 64, 83, 84, 88, 98, 125, 134, 135, 176, 230, 268, 280, 337, 339, 340, 342, 343, 356, 358, 360–3, 375, 380, 382, 394 Ikhimiukor, Izevbuwa Kehinde  361 Incas  28 indigenous people  28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 376, 397

456

infanticide  41, 85, 93, 102 n.13, 158, 248, 256, 258 Institute for Sexual Research  43 Interahamwe militias  94, 173, 175, 180, 222–5, 228, 229, 384 International Association of Genocide Studies  389–90 International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP)  159 “high-throughput” DNA human identification facility  159 International Court of Justice (ICJ)  378, 379, 390 international criminal law  355–8, 361, 367, 368 international criminal prosecutions of sexual violence Akayesu ruling  339–41, 343–6, 366 in feminist efforts  336 Krstic decision on Srebrenica genocide  346 legal contexts  347 legal recognition of gendered forms of harm  336, 348 limits of rape trial  348 Prosecutor v. Krstic  340, 396 Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic  340, 367 Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze  342 Rwanda and Yugoslav tribunals  5, 142, 336, 337, 339–43, 345, 349 transitional justice processes  5, 272, 348 Trial Chamber’s assessment of genocidal nature of rapes  345 understanding of rape and sexual violence  344 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)  14, 135, 144 n.8, 174, 176, 221, 230, 232–5, 268, 345, 346, 365, 379 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)  14, 134, 153, 154, 159, 164 n.34, 241 n.76, 273, 274, 276, 365, 367, 394, 396

Index

international eugenics movement  37, 38, 47 international humanitarianism  377, 378 International Rescue Committee (IRC)  89, 90 interracial marriage  30 Isaacson, Judith Magyar  67 ISIS genocide  390 Islamization/Islamicization  14, 312, 316, 317 Islamized Armenians in Turkey  312– 25 adoption of Armenian children  317, 321 gendered aspects  313, 321–5 historical silencing  312, 313, 315–17, 320–4 Islamized Armenian women  122, 255–6, 261 memories  312, 315, 321–4 nationalist and post-nationalist historiography  313, 316–21, 323, 325 overview  312–13 post-genocide efforts  323–5 survivors of Armenian genocide  312–18, 320, 323, 324 women and children  312, 317, 318, 319, 321–4, 329 n.37 Israel  291, 305 Istanbul Bilgi University  313 Jacobs, Janet  13, 14, 291, 381. See also memory; trauma, gendered and intergenerational transmission Jacobsen, Maria  122 Jemal, Ahmed  117 Jews  27, 28, 30, 40, 42, 43, 47, 292, 295, 308 genocide and persecution  1, 10, 27, 28, 30, 38, 39, 58–71, 302, 303, 308 (see also Holocaust; National Socialism) identities  61 men and women  1–2, 35–6, 296 Nazis’ view of  32

Index

Joeden-Forgey, Elisa von  15, 47, 375. See also genocide prevention and gender; genocide studies Johnson, Kirsten  92, 104 n.29, 107 n.60 Jones, Adam  10, 11, 57, 269, 271, 273, 377, 381, 383, 398 n.3. See also male/masculine vulnerabilities in genocide Journal of Men’s Studies, The  211 Judeo-Bolshevism  28 Kagame, Paul  87 Kalemkiarian, Zaruhi  248, 252, 255, 260 Kamatali, Jean-Marie  170 Kamatamu, Euphrasie  233 “Kameradschaft”  213 Kamuzinzi, Masengesho  178 Kantengwa, Prudence  234 Kanzayire, Bernadette  223, 227 Kaplan, Marion  61 Karadzic, Radovan  156 Karpiński, Franziska  212 Karuhimbi, Sula  228 Karushara, Rose  233 Katz, Stephen  101 n.5, 398 n.3 Kazakh famine (1931–3)  8 Kazazian, Aghavni  252, 254 Kemal, Mustafa  250 Kerry, John  390 Khmer Rouge. See Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) Khmer Rouge Tribunal. See Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) Trial Chamber Kidron, Carol  125 Kimmel, Michael  272 Kizito, Maria (Sister)  233 Kolinsky, Eva  65 Koonz, Claudia  198, 208, 215 n.8 Mothers in the Fatherland  198 Korean “comfort women”  168 Kosovo genocide 1999  85, 135 Kretschmer, Karl  199–200 Krondorfer, Björn  213 Kühne, Thomas  212, 213 Kuper, Leo  83

 457

Kuppermann, Wendy Joy  298 Kurtović, Zijad  274 Lagarde y de los Río, Marcela  384 Laitin, David  149 Landau, Edwin  61 Laub, Dori  293–4, 299 Lausanne Treaty (1923)  250, 261, 323 Lebensraum (living space)  30, 32 Leitner, Isabella  71 Lemkin, Raphael  28, 45, 128 n.2, 388, 402 n.49 Lengyel, Olga  66–9, 72–4 Leopold (King of Belgium)  30, 85, 95 lesbianism  45, 72–3, 75 Lessons and Legacies Conference (2014)  213 Levi, Primo  64, 65 Survival in Auschwitz  65 LeVine, Peg  366, 367 life force atrocities  15, 379, 389–93 Lifton, Robert  68, 307 Linnaeus, Carolus  33 Lower, Wendy  137, 379 Lubkemann, Stephen  173 MacKinnon, Catherine  136, 339, 386 Maier, Donna  221, 233, 236 male/masculine vulnerabilities in genocide  10, 83–5, 100. See also masculinity/masculinities; Rwandan genocide; sexual violence against males AFDL/APR/FAB killings  90 context of mass killings by Laurent Kabila  90 in feminist studies of violence  84 forced labor  95–8 “gendercidal institutions” of military conscription  84 humanitarian intervention and rights discourse against  98–101 selective (“gendercidal”) killing of males  84, 98, 381 social-economic-political elite status and  87 targeting of males for sexual violence  10, 91–3, 100, 268–79

458

male-on-male rape  100, 104 n.33, 269, 270–3, 277, 279, 280, 281 n.11 Mallman, Klaus-Michael  213 Mamdani, Mahmood  393 Männerbund  43 Mapping Report  90, 106 n.47 Marital Health Law  38 Mark, Hayganush  255, 260 masculinity/masculinities  377. See also male/masculine vulnerabilities in genocide Armenian genocide  124–5 camp commandants  196–9 emasculation and feminization  46, 155, 194, 203, 207, 260, 272, 280 in field of Holocaust studies  194–6 hegemonic  212, 270–3 Holocaust  59, 75, 213, 214 male Holocaust perpetrators  2, 4, 195–201, 204, 207, 209–11, 379–81 military  213 normative  197 as object of knowledge  198 Order Police Battalion  201 ordinary men/ordinary Germans  201 protean  213 scholarly study of  1, 57, 75, 83–4, 94, 100, 194–6, 210, 272 in scholarship and popular culture  193 social construction of  202–6 SS and Einsatzgruppe personnel  199–201 victorious and subordinated  280 Massaquoi, Hans  56 n.126 mass killings  1, 5, 28, 29, 38–40, 46–7, 85, 89, 90, 98, 378, 379, 393 mass rape  4–5, 11, 91, 112, 135, 140, 155, 384. See also rape; sexual violence of Armenian women  385–6 of Bosnian Muslim women  135, 140, 155–9, 161, 270–3, 385

Index

in Congolese genocide  91 in Darfur  392–3 in former Yugoslavia  155, 338 during genocide  379, 382–6 policies of  157–9 in Rwandan genocide  91, 135 Serb policy  155, 157–9 of Tutsi women  112, 231, 385 Mayans  28 Medicine, Conflict and Survival  93 Melson, Robert  115 memorial culture  6, 159–60, 308 memorialization of dead  159–60 memory  3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 59, 69, 93, 136, 177, 181, 257, 261, 275, 292–9, 301–9, 312, 315, 320–5, 338, 382 men as gendered subjects  1, 3, 10, 12, 212, 379, 383 Mengele, Josef  139 Mešković, Jasmin  277 Messerschmidt, James W.  272 Meth, Rose  65, 71 Miller, Jean Baker  297 Millu, Liana  68–73 Minkkinen, Panu  355 miscegenation  30, 37, 46 Mladic, Ratko  156, 288 n.119, 394 modern race thinking  10, 27, 28, 31–8, 45, 47 Montesquieu, Baron (Charles Louis de Secondat)  34 Mostov, Julie  152 Mudros Armistice (1918)  247, 249, 250, 252, 318 Mühläuser, Regina  136, 137 Mukandamage, Josée  225 Mukangango, Gertrude (sister)  233 Mukasarasi, Godelieve  177 Mukeshimana, Marie Claire  234 Munyenyezi, Béatrice  233, 234 Muscati, Samer  181 Muselmänner  2 Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermeni Kadınların Dramı (The Tragedy of Islamized Armenian Women)  321 Myanmar, genocide in  379 Myrttinen, Henri  3

Index

Nakagawa, Kasumi  364 national citizenship  35 nationalism  28, 30, 32–8 National Socialism/Nazism, 27, 212 Afro-Germans and Black soldiers  40, 45–7 Aryan Germans  40, 41, 46 Decree on Crime Prevention (1937)  41 “disabled” people  38–9 Einsatzgruppe/Einsatzgruppen  2, 12, 40, 196, 199, 200 Eugenics and the T4 program  39 “Final Solution” (to the Jewish Question)  60, 62, 193, 195, 198–201, 211, 377 “Final Solution to the Gypsy Question” (1938)  41 French resistance to  306 “Gypsy Clean Up Week” (1938)  41 “Gypsy plague”  41 homosexuals/Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBQT+) communities  42–5, 212, 213, 387 Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals (1933)  40 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (1933)  38, 40, 46 Nazi Office of Racial Hygiene  41 Nuremberg Laws (1935)  30, 38, 40, 46, 309 n.9 Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion  44 Reich Central Office to Combat the Gypsy Menace  40–1 Reserve Police Battalion  101, 202, 213 Romanies/Romani people  10, 38–42, 139 “scientific”/”medical” experiments  44, 47, 68, 112, 139 Stormtroopers (SA)  43

 459

victims of  1, 27, 31, 32, 37–47, 212, 213, 295, 296, 299–302, 305, 306, 380 (see also Jews) Native Americans  33 natural selection  35 Nazi genocides  31, 40. See also Jews; Nazism, victims of Nazi Germany  1, 30, 32, 40, 47, 49 n.22 Nazi persecution, gendered responses before 1939  60–2 assimilation of Jewish women into German society  60–1 living conditions of Jewish people  60 in terms of anticipatory reactions  61 testimonies of men and women  62 Nazi regime  12, 40, 42–5, 61, 62, 302 Nduwamariya, Jeanne-Marie  233 Near East Relief  318 Nelson, James  197 Neumayer, Eric  88 “New World”  28, 32, 33 Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala  344, 346, 347 Niyitegeka, Félicitée  229 non-judicial transitional justice processes  5–6 North America  34, 178, 181, 182, 259, 291, 317 Ntahobali, Arsène Shalom  230, 232, 233 Ntakirutimana, Elizaphan  232 Ntakirutimana, Gérard  232 Ntamabyaliro, Agnès  232 Numbered (2012)  301–2 Nyirabayovu, Thérèse  229 Nyirahakizimana, Anne-Marie  233 Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline  144 n.8, 174, 230–6 Nyirazinyoye, Laetitia  179 odar (non-Armenian)  127–8 Ofer, Dalia  59 Omaar, Rakiya  227 ordinary masculinity  57. See also masculinity/masculinities

460

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation  379 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt)  31 Othering and Selfing, process of  117, 125–7 Otto, Dianne  181, 182 Ottoman Armenians. See Islamized Armenians in Turkey Ottoman Empire  127, 318 Ottoman Empire decline and struggle for identity  114–18 CUP’s Turkification program  117 diversity issues  115 pan-Islam ideology vs. pan-Turkish identity  115–16 process of Othering and Selfing, issues with  116–17 refugee camps  247 violence against Armenians  114, 118, 121–4, 249, 255 Ottoman genocide of Christian minorities  85, 111, 114, 118 Ottoman government  250, 251, 317–19 Ottoman Investigative Narrative (1910s)  316 Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, The (Hayes and Roth)  211–12 Palalı, İrfan  313 Tehcir Çocukları: Nenem bir Ermeniymiş (The Children of Tehcir: My Grandmother turned out to be an Armenian . . .)  314, 321 Paragraph 175 44, 45 patriarchal organization of OttomanTurkish society  321, 322, 324 patriarchal societies blame on women thinkers and activists  377 women’s identities in  152 patrilineality  149, 169, 170, 172, 322 Penal Reform International (PRI)  225, 239 n.45 Perl, Gisella  67, 69, 74 physical and mental health issues  93

Index

Pillay, Navanethem  343 Pine, Lisa  10, 11, 376. See also Auschwitz, privations and experiences of male and female internees at Plümper, Thomas  88 Podolsky, Anatoly  137 political economy of everyday gender violence  12, 168–71 population management  37 post-Holocaust families  299, 302, 303, 308 postmemory  3, 14, 292, 299–302, 308, 315, 321–4, 381 Post-Nationalist Critical Narrative (1990s onwards)  316 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)  304 post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS)  93 Price, Lisa S.  140 pronatalism, postwar  161 Pronicheva, Dina  137 prostitution  29, 38, 74, 75, 93, 97, 113, 134, 137, 142, 321, 324, 385 psychoanalytic approach  291 psychosocial characteristics  291 race  32–3, 35, 47 Aryan  38, 40, 41, 43 biologization of  27, 47 degeneration  27, 35–8, 46 disparities  33 mixing  36, 46 purity  36, 38, 41, 43, 46 white  36, 46 racialization of Armenian identity  128 of gender  27, 32–8 of Jews  32 of sexuality  43 racialized heteronormativity  44, 45 racial “Others”  10, 27, 30, 33, 36, 47, 320 racial worldview  32, 38–47 racism  1, 42, 139, 204, 212, 376 scientific  10, 16, 27, 35–7, 42, 47

Index

Ramulić, Edin  275 Randall, Amy E.  1, 27, 325, 387. See also imperialism; modern race thinking rape  4, 29, 33, 44, 113, 118–21, 134, 296, 299, 362–3, 365, 385–6. See also mass rape during armed conflict  270–3 in Article 360 of 1977 Rwandan penal code  171 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda  135 common identity of children born of  153 in context of forced marriage  361 defined  171–2, 364, 365 and female sex  383 as genocide  321, 324, 338–41 HIV/AIDS  5, 88, 141, 142, 146 n.36, 174, 177–9 of Hutu women  167, 180, 346 as instrument of genocide  5 of Jewish women  136–9 of men  100, 104 n.33, 269–73, 277, 280, 281 n.11, 383 notions of genocidal  136, 142, 258, 383, 385–6 as political economic weapon  175 rituals  386 in Serbian detention camps  140, 142, 155, 159, 178–81, 258, 273–4, 276–7 status of children born of  159–60 survivors of  141, 159, 177–80, 258, 277 as weapon in Rwanda genocide  167–8, 173 as weapon of war  355–60, 368 rape campaigns during wartime  150, 161, 162 rape camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina  155, 385, 396 Rassenschande (racial shame)  30 Reading, Anna  59 Refugee Law Project  92, 104 n.34, 105 n.37 reproductive violence  386–8

 461

Republican Defensive Narrative (1953 onward)  316, 317 rescue efforts  13, 248, 251, 254, 261. See also Armenian rescue efforts “Righteous” woman  227–9, 236 Ringelheim, Joan  59 ritualcide  367 Rohingya in Myanmar  378–9, 390 Rohm, Ernst  43, 44 root-and-branch genocide  85, 89, 91, 106 n.55, 119 FDLR’s attacks on town of Busurungi and adjacent villages  89 Roth, John K.  212 Rutarema, William  99 Ruvinsky, Elysia  91, 92, 212 Rwanda agricultural production, precolonial and colonial periods  169 cultural models of sexuality and consent  171–2 customary powers and rights of daughters  169 patrilineages of  169 personhood, Rwandan notion of  169 roles of women in society  170 Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance  86 Rwandan Armed Forces  384 Rwandan genocide  4, 10, 85, 90, 141. See also women as perpetrators, in Rwandan genocide atrocities against Hutu civilians  87, 380 ethnographic studies  168 gender-indiscriminate massacres in  85–6 HIV/AIDS in  141, 146 n.36, 177–8 under “Hutu Power” forces  89, 94–5, 98–9, 112, 141, 167 issue of sexual consent  171–2 masculine vulnerabilities in  10 mass rape of women and girls  12, 91, 135

462

military conscription in  93 murder of Tutsi boys  86, 94 political economy of everyday gender violence  168–171 pregenocide conditions  94, 168–71 sexual atrocities in  88–9, 91–2, 96, 98–9, 102 n.13, 135 sexual violence during  91–3, 173–7 sexual violence survivors in  100, 141, 142, 175–82, 225, 227–8, 258 social aspect of killings  94 Tutsi women, case of  174–5 women as “Righteous”  227–9 Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)  90, 175, 176 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)  86, 87, 167, 175, 180 Samphan, Khieu  355, 361, 366 Sanasarian, Eliz  323 Sankey, Diana  368 Schabas, William  379 Schloss, Eva  65, 67, 72, 75 scholarship on gender and genocide  1, 5, 7, 10, 137, 193–6, 209–10, 376, 377. See also Holocaust men as gendered subjects  1, 2, 3, 10, 12, 212, 379, 383 Schweitzer, Paul  60 Scientific Revolution  32, 33 Second World War  8, 27, 30, 38–40, 42, 45 self-in-relation theory  297 Semelin, Jacques  113, 117 Sendashonga, Seth  87 Serbian policies against Bosniak women  154–9, 164 n.27, and forced maternity 11, forced impregnation, of mass rape pronatalism, postwar  150, 161 Sereny, Gitta  199 Sèvres Treaty  250 sex reductivism  383 sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)  356–9, 368

Index

sexual differences  27, 33–6, 42 sexual identity and behavior, in context of Auschwitz  71–4 concealment of pregnancies  74 fight for survival and women’s sexual conduct  73 killing of newborn children  74 lesbianism  72–3, 75 moral choice  76 Puffkommando (brothel), existence of  74 women in position of “double jeopardy”  76 sexuality  10, 27, 32–8, 42, 45, 47, 59, 125, 397 sexualized killings  123–4 eyewitness account of  123 interlinked with ideas of femininity and masculinity  123–4 sexual violence  2, 3, 4, 78, 93, 212, 356, 357, 358, 362–4, 376, 383, 385. See also forced impregnation and maternity; forced sterilization; genocidal sexual violence; mass rape; wartime sexual violence, case of aftermath of  159–61 based on ascribed identities  173 in concentration camps  62–71 conceptual approach  112–14 in conflict zones  84, 88, 91–2, 95, 97–8, 172 defined  103–4 n.29 during genocide in BosniaHerzegovina  135, 140, 148–9, 269–70, 273–9 during genocide in Rwanda  173–6 at ECCC  358–60 escalation during civil war  335 ethnographic research  181 Human Rights Watch report  176–7 impact of  140 Meredeth Turshen’s comparative analysis, in Rwanda and Mozambique  168–9

Index

and Nazi prohibition on sexual relations between “Aryans” and Jews  67, 136, 139, 154 rape survivors, status of  180–2 survivors of  141–3, 177 Tutsi women, case of  174–5 sexual violence against males  91–3. See also male/masculine vulnerabilities in genocide; women and genocide in contemporary instances of genocide and waruntogenocide  91 in Democratic Kampuchea  364 in detention camps and other detention facilities  273–9 male-on-male sexual abuse  2, 91–3, 100, 104 n.33, 271, 273, 280 male rape  91–3, 100, 268–73 male survivors of rape  277–9, 383 reports of mutilation and subsequent public display of male genitalia  20, 70, 71, 89, 99, 101, 240, 242, 243, 273–4, 340, 385 study of conflict-associated sexual violence  92 testimonies  275–6 victims seeking assistance  278–9 Shark Island  29 Shaw, Martin  388 Shik, Na’ama  141 Shoah (Hebrew word for calamity denoting the genocide of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and collaborators during WWII)  85, 88, 195 Sierra Leone  362 Simić, Olivera  13, 268, 383. See also sexual violence against males Sinnreich, Helene  141 Sivakumaran, Sandesh  91 Smart, Carol  347, 348 Smith, Valerie  181 Social Darwinism  35, 36 Soh, C. Sarah  168, 182 Somerville, Siobhan  42

 463

Sommer, Robert  212 “Sorrows and Struggles: Women’s Experience of Forced Marriage during the Khmer Rouge Regime”  363 Sotheavy, Sou  365 Soviet Germans  8–9 Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)  361–2 Spiegelman, Art  308, 309 Maus  308 Maus II  308 Srebrenica genocide, survivors of  394–5. See also BosniaHerzegovina genocide Bosniaks, experiences of  269–70, 273–6 Stalin’s genocides  7, 8 Stangl, Franz  199 Staub, Ervin  115, 117, 124 Stemple, Lara  91, 100, 107 n.60, 271 Stiglmayer, Alexandra  338 Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia  338 Stone, Dan  31 Storr, Will  92 Straus, Scott  341, 342 structural violence against females  102 n.13, 169, 178, 182 “struggle for existence”  35 Studzinsky, Silke  361 Šubašić, Munira  395 Sunni Islam  320 survivor syndrome  291 symbolism of sexual violence  118–19, 122, 386 Tachjian, Vahé  324 Tahirović, Murat  276 Talaat, Mehmet  117, 118 “Tales of Tragedy and Escape”  313 Tambadou, Abubacarr Marie  379 Tashnak party  126 tattoo and tattooing  301–2 Taylor, Charles  362 Tedeschi, Giuliana  60, 71 Tehcir (deportation) and Armenian genocide  317, 318, 319

464

Theriault, Henry  386 Third Reich  30, 39, 41, 45, 46, 212–14 Thomson, Susan  87 Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace  87 Tito, Josef  151, 152 Torture in Bosnia and Herzegovina During the War 1992– 1995  274–5 Torunlar (Grandchildren, Altınay and Çetin)  315, 322 totalitarianism  31 trauma gendered  41–2, 295, 297, 299 intergenerational transmission  3, 6, 291–9, 302, 303, 305–9, 381 traumatic inheritance  291, 292, 299, 304, 305, 308, 309 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph  316 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum  363 Turkification laws  125 Turkishness  320 Türkyılmaz, Yektan  325 Ukrainian-Kuban Holodomor (1932–3)  8 United Nations  356, 390 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948)  87, 319, 320, 339, 388, 390, 393, 396, 405–7 United States  14, 16, 29, 37, 39, 213, 233, 234, 292, 302–3, 314, 342, 387, 392 universal human rights  378 UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women  363 US Atrocities Documentation Team (ADT)  389 Uwilingiyimana, Agathe  380 Vainshtein, Marina  302 Valentino, Benjamin  375 Vangroenweghe, Daniel  95 Varon, Laura  138 Versailles Treaty  46

Index

victimization  1–3, 10, 14, 40, 89, 93, 96, 116, 122, 125, 150, 158, 195, 235, 271, 273, 278, 299, 301, 302, 344, 364, 380, 393 Vietnamese ethnicity  368 vilification  10, 40, 42 violence against transgender men and women  387, 388 Volk  32, 44 Volksgemeinschaft  213 Voltaire, pseudonym for FrançoisMarie Arouet  34 von Trotha, General Lotha  29 Vulliamy, Ed  154 Wallström, Margot  359, 360 Wardi, Dina  294 Warren, Mary Anne  84 Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection  84 Waxman, Zoë  11, 59, 134, 385, 386. See also rape of Jewish women; women and Holocaust Weimar Germany  43 Weitsman, Patricia  11, 148, 385. See also Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide; gendered dimensions of genocide, Bosnia-Herzegovina Weitzman, Lenore  59, 212 Wermuth, Henry  64 White women’s purity  36 Wiesel, Elie  64 Wilsonian principle of selfdetermination  248 Winterfeld, Hans  64 witnessing, concept of  293–300, 302, 304, 308 Wolf, Eric  168 women abuse  29, 296 and Armenian identity  127–8 Black and white bodies  34 European  36 Holocaust descendants  292–4, 296, 299, 300–5, 309 same-sex activities  44–5 sexual violence against Romani  41 sterilization  38, 41–2 as trauma carriers  305–8

Index

women, views about abortion-seeking  256 patriarchal beliefs about role and status  150 in policy of rape warfare, forced impregnation, and forced maternity  158 sterilization  4, 68, 139, 154 as vessels of state  161 women and Armenian genocide  5, 120–3, 247–9, 258. See also Armenian rescue efforts dehumanization and commercialization of  122 mass rape  112, 113, 119–22, 248, 257, 258 rehabilitation of  276 sexualized killings  123–4 survivors of sexual violence  247, 258–61, 263 n.18 Turkification process and  122–3 women and Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide  112, 134–5, 139–42, 148, 180, 258. See also BosniaHerzegovina genocide forced impregnation and maternity  148, 154–9 patriarchal beliefs and role and status of women  150–1 sexual violence during  135, 140, 141, 149, 155–9, 161, 268–70, 273–9, 338–40, 344, 385 social status of women  153–4 Yugoslavian women, mass rape of  338 women and Holocaust. See also Holocaust Auschwitz, privations and experiences of at  65–71 enslavement of women and children  112–13, 121–3, 136–8, 140–1, 167, 180, 271, 340, 345 Holocaust studies  11, 59–62, 65–71, 194–6, 203, 207–9 mass rape  91, 112, 135, 156–9, 231, 383–4

 465

Nazi persecution, testimonies of women  62 rape against Jewish women  67, 136–9 women and Rwandan genocide  11, 89–95, 101–2 n.8, 116, 134–5, 139–43, 258. See also Rwanda; Rwandan genocide; women as perpetrators, in Rwandan genocide mass killings  90, 135 rape and sexual violence  91–2, 112, 141, 149, 173–6, 344, 385 survivors of sexual violence  99, 141–2, 168, 175–82, 225, 227–8, 258 testimonies in international criminal prosecutions  5 Yugoslavian women, mass rape of  338 women as perpetrators, in Rwandan genocide  236, 380 as authority figures  230–5 exposing victims to killers  223–5 female killers  221–3 to gain US citizenship  233–4 in property crimes  225–6 Women in the Law Project of the International Human Rights Law Group  382 “Women’s Hearings”  363 women’s Holocaust studies  11, 59–62, 65–74, 194–6, 203, 207–9 Wood, Elisabeth Jean  112, 345 Yaghoubian, Dr.  256–8 Yayınları, Belge  319 Yazidi women  382 Yugoslavia (former), war in  155 Zarkov, Dubravka  269, 271, 273, 383 Zawati, Hilmi  272 Zraly, Maggie A.  179 Zulu, Shaka  102

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