Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice 9781503627574

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W O M E N

A S

W A R

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W O M E N

A S

W A R

C R I M I N A L S Gender, Agency, and Justice

I Z A B E L A

S T E F L J A

J E S S I C A

T R I S K O

A N D D A R D E N

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steflja, Izabela, author. | Trisko Darden, Jessica, author. Title: Women as war criminals : gender, agency, and justice / Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko Darden. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical ­references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029858 (print) | LCCN 2020029859 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613430 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503627574 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Plavšić, Biljana—Trials, litigation, etc. | Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline—Trials, litigation, etc. | England, Lynndie—Trials, litigation, etc. | Muthana, Hoda—Trials, litigation, etc. | War crime trials. | Women war criminals—Case studies. Classification: LCC KZ1168.5 .S74 2020 (print) | LCC KZ1168.5 (ebook) | DDC 341.6/90268—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029858 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029859 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover art: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, oil on canvas, 199 cm x 162.5 cm. Wikimedia Commons. Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

I ’ L L S H O W Y O U W H AT A W O M A N C A N D O. — A R T E M I S I A G E N T I L E S C H I T O GRAND DUKE COSIMO II DE’MEDICI.

JUDITH BEHEADING HOLOFERNES (C. 1620) BY GENTILESCHI DEPICTS THE MOMENT IN THE BOOK OF J U D I T H W H E N J U D I T H , A N I S R A E L I T E , A S S A S S I N AT E S T H E A S S Y R I A N G E N E R A L H O LO F E R N E S F O R L AY I N G S I E G E T O H E R C I T Y, E N S U R I N G A V I C T O R Y F O R H E R P E O P L E .

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CONTENTS

Introduction   1 1   The

President: Biljana Plavšić   17

2   The

Minister: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko   43

3   The

Soldier: Lynndie England   71

4   The

Student: Hoda Muthana   95

Conclusion   121 Acknowledgments    133 Notes    135

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INTRODUCTION

Zolja entered Trušina, a village roughly 50 miles from Sarajevo, for the first time on a spring morning in 1993. Trušina was a diverse community, home to Bosnians who were Muslim, Roman Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs and who shared a common language and history. Along with her fellow soldiers in the Zulfikar Special Purposes unit, Zolja had come to eliminate the village’s non-Muslims. That day, 22 unarmed Croats, including women and the elderly, were killed in cold blood. After a firing squad executed three civilians and three prisoners of war, Zolja shot each one a second time to make sure they were dead. Two decades later, Zolja—also known as Rasema Handanović and Sammy Rasema Yetisen—became the first woman sentenced for war crimes by a Bosnian court.1 To face trial, she was extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) by the United States, which had given her refugee status—as a victim of persecution—and 1

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then American citizenship after the war. In 2012, she pleaded guilty to charges of killing ethnic Croats. As a result of the Bosnian War, the ethnic composition of Trušina shifted from a prewar 54 percent Bosnian Muslim majority to an 89 percent majority after the conflict.2 Croats, who had been the target of Zolja’s war crimes, fell from 26 percent to 6 percent of the area’s population. Zolja’s narrative about her role in the ethnic cleansing that characterized the Bosnian War is emblematic of how many women war criminals are depicted: young, naïve, and controlled by men. “Yes, I was in the civil war . . . I was 20 years old and a female in an army of men when we went into Trušina,” she testified. “The government writes like I was giving orders but I was not, I did what the commander told us to do.”3 In emphasizing her gender and age, Zolja, like women war criminals before and after her, strategically used existing gender stereotypes to absolve herself of agency and responsibility in an attempt to avoid the consequences of her actions. In exchange for her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution, the court sentenced Zolja to five years and six months in prison. Her cooperation helped ensure the conviction of Edin Džeko, the leader of the firing squad, who received a 13-year sentence.4 After serving her time, Zolja returned to the United States and lived in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. However, her American Dream ended abruptly in March 2019 when the U.S. Department of Justice stripped her of American citizenship.5

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Zolja is one of the many uncounted and relatively unknown women who have committed acts during the conduct of war that violate international laws and principles: in other words, war criminals. Although there is no single legal document that definitively outlines war crimes, the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court all identify and prohibit behaviors in the conduct of international or domestic conflicts that transgress internationally accepted norms. Such crimes range from torture to forced displacement to genocide. Women war criminals go unnoticed because their very existence challenges our deeply held assumptions about war and about women. Yet women from vastly different walks of life, cultures, and communities have been implicated in war crimes across a range of national and international conflicts. For instance, recent reexaminations of women’s participation in the Holocaust find that Nazi women’s involvement and complicity in war crimes extended well beyond their visible roles as concentration camp guards.6 Nazi women were an integral part of the machinery of the Holocaust in their roles as investigators, guards, nurses, secretaries, and wives of top Nazi officials. While some Nazi women were prosecuted for their crimes, their accountability was spread unevenly across time and space. Roughly 13,500 members of the SS and

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Gestapo were exempt from indictment by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg, which decided that clerks, secretaries, and other low-level support staff were not threats to postwar German society.7 Women, as a category, were assumed not to be a risk. Nazi women were prosecuted for murder or accessory to murder in East Germany, but they numbered only 220 during the 45 years preceding reunification.8 The few women who were prosecuted were judged on the emotional nature of their responses. According to historian Wendy Lower, “Court officials noted when women cried during questioning or proceedings. Such a display of emotion seemed to indicate humanity, sensitivity, and presumably an empathy that was consistent with the nature or instinct of female innocence and caring.” 9 When female perpetrators appeared in war crimes trials, gendered assumptions about them took center stage. Despite the lack of accountability for most female perpetrators of the Holocaust, women war criminals from all over the world continue to be found and brought to justice. In 2007, a researcher found Erna Wallisch, an atlarge Nazi war criminal, living in a comfortable apartment in Vienna.10 In 2011, Azra Bašić, a nursing home assistant and factory worker, was arrested in Stanton, Kentucky, four years after the United States received a formal extradition request from her native BiH.11 Bašić was sentenced to 14 years in prison by a Bosnian court for the murder, torture, and inhumane treatment of Serb civilians and prisoners of war while she was serving in the Croatian

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Defense Council during the Bosnian War.12 In 2013, a U.S. District Court judgment stripped Beatrice Munyenyezi of American citizenship and sentenced her to 10 years in prison for intentionally lying about her involvement in the Rwandan genocide. The prosecution argued she concealed that “she had aided and abetted in the genocide and persecution of Tutsis, including the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Tutsis, at a roadblock outside of her residence.”13 While jurisdictional limitations prevented her prosecution for genocide in U.S. courts, Munyenyezi’s sister, Prudence Kantengwa, was found guilty of immigration fraud, perjury, and obstruction of proceedings before an immigration court.14 In 2015, 260,000 counts of accessory to murder were brought against a 91-year-old German woman for her role in the Auschwitz death camp as a 20-year-old telegraph operator.15 In 2018, Ranka Tomić, a former captain of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Petrovac Women’s Front, received a five-year sentence for the assault and murder of a captured Bosnian army nurse. Her sentence was reduced to three years on appeal.16 In 2019, a 27-year-old woman was charged in Germany with murder, war crimes, and membership in a foreign terrorist organization for her alleged role in the death of an enslaved Yazidi girl that she owned while a member of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.17 These cases signal a growing awareness of women’s direct involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. This awareness stems in part from the burgeoning scholarship on women as perpetrators of terrorism

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and political violence. Taken as a body of work, the existing research addresses when, why, and how women participate in political violence, including sexual violence and terrorist acts.18 However, when examining how female perpetrators of violence are treated when war ends, researchers tend to focus primarily on women’s postconflict reintegration rather than questions of accountability and justice. How women as perpetrators—as opposed to victims— of wartime violence are treated by legal systems, both domestic and international, has received only limited attention. Suzannah Linton correctly argues that the topic of female perpetrators of extreme crimes “cannot but challenge the dominant contemporary dogmas in the international arena” and has largely been avoided in scholarship.19 That avoidance stems from the concern that emphasizing women’s war crimes detracts attention from the regularity with which men commit such crimes, as women are indeed more likely to be victims of wartime violence, commit violent crimes at lower rates than men, and constitute a minority of those accused of war crimes. It has also been common practice during war to assume that the only clear civilian deaths are those of women and children, enshrining all women as civilians and, by extension, victims.20 The routine identification of women as civilians is based on an unfounded assumption that women do not have the same opportunities and motives to participate in warfare.21 Similar to Zolja’s experience in

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the United States, African and European officials assumed that women could not be perpetrators of mass violence and automatically granted refuge to women who fled Rwanda during and after the genocide. Only later did it become clear that some women fled in order to avoid genocide-related charges.22 This tendency has been reinforced by the passage of United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1325, which emphasizes that women and children are the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict and that women have an important role in preventing and resolving conflict and building peace.23 Subsequent Security Council resolutions, national-level action plans on Women, Peace, and Security, and an emergent body of scholarship have reinforced the “women as peacemakers” narrative.24 The evidence shows that women’s social, cultural, and political incentives and constraints for participating in warfare are highly contextual, leading researchers to call for the recognition of the multiple and varied roles women hold in armed conflict.25 The underrepresentation of women as perpetrators and supporters of violence reinforces the absence of violent women from our understandings of conflict. Women’s participation in violence is often perceived as implausible, thereby reducing women’s accountability for their wartime actions. When women’s violence is recognized, the focus moves to understanding why women (rather than individuals in general) commit violence. The motivations for women’s violence are explained very differently than those of men. Women’s

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choice to commit violence is often presented as forced upon them, a result of victimization at the hands of men. For instance, female suicide bombers are often attributed personal histories involving sexual violence or personal trauma.26 Such explanations often assume that women’s motivations are distinct from men’s, without accounting for the different opportunity structures that female perpetrators encounter.27 Women who commit violence are distinguished not only from their male counterparts, but also from other women—“normal” women—who are peaceful, nurturing, virtuous, dignified, and restrained. These gendered assumptions alienate women who commit violence from the rest of society. As Laura Sjoberg explains, “Because their stories do not resonate with these inherited images of femininity, violent women are marginalized in political discourse. Their choices are rarely seen as choices, and, when they are, they are characterized as apolitical.”28 But the commission of war crimes and the decision to prosecute (or not) perpetrators of war crimes are inherently political acts. War criminals are both political and social actors. To understand how the actions and trials of women war criminals are both political and politicized, we draw on Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg’s identification of three (nonexclusive) narrative frames used in literature, media, and society to marginalize and differentiate violent women: Mother, Monster, and Whore.29 In the Mother narrative, a violent woman is protecting or nurturing

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(symbolic or real) sons or becomes violent because she has lost her (symbolic or real) sons. In the Monster narrative, a violent woman is psychologically unstable, a deviant whose actions are driven by an insane, socially unacceptable version of femininity. In the Whore narrative, a violent woman is driven by disturbing, inappropriate sexual desires that stray from traditional feminine sexuality. Mother, Monster, and Whore are frames which simultaneously locate violent women as transgressive, anomalous, and irrational.30 However, focusing solely on these frames neglects other important identities and constructed categories, including age, race, religion, nationality, and rank. We therefore focus on how social and political contexts influence the construction of gendered arguments. The gendering of violence is directly connected to legal responses to crimes committed by women. Analyzing academic, media, and literary sources, Sabrina Gilani illustrates “the permanence and influence of [gendered] perceptions not only in how we conceptualize women’s engagement in violent behavior, but also how we legally and publicly manage and respond to such conduct.”31 Courts have routinely rejected women’s guilt or have given women disproportionately lighter sentences than men who committed similar acts of violence. Given this context, Gilani concludes that violence by women should be studied as an “autonomous choice clearly indicative of the human capacity for violence”—an objective that we endorse.32 This book provides a more holistic approach to women and justice.

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WOMEN WAR CRIMINALS: T H E P R E S I D E N T, M I N I S T E R , S O L I D E R , AND STUDENT

Studies on the role and magnitude of individual power and autonomy for women war criminals are almost nonexistent. Yet, gender affects every aspect of postconflict justice—from the indictments that are issued to the sentences that are handed down. Justice for war crimes can be conceptualized in different ways. For instance, transitional justice involves retributive and restorative, as well as judicial and nonjudicial measures.33 We focus our analysis on formal and legal justice, as adjudicated by courts. In the chapters that follow, we confront the reality of women war criminals by profiling and analyzing the legal cases of three women convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, or wartime abuses, and one who stands accused of inciting violent acts against civilians: Biljana Plavšić, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Lynndie England, and Hoda Muthana. These women’s cases reflect the global nature of war crimes and the domestic, international, and transnational conflicts where war crimes are committed. Their cases engage the different legal systems available for war crimes prosecutions—international tribunals, domestic courts, and military courts—allowing us to assess how far gender-based arguments can be used to mitigate or exacerbate culpability in these different legal environments.

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The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in May 1993 as the first UN war crimes court and the first international war crimes tribunal since the end of World War II. Biljana Plavšić, former co-president of Republika Srpska (one of two constituent parts of BiH) and the only woman convicted of war crimes by the ICTY, behaved differently from the tribunal’s male defendants who defied and ridiculed it as the enemy of their nation. Her compliance with the court involved a guilty plea and statement of remorse. At her trial, Plavšić performed for an international audience, submitting to the tribunal and presenting herself as the Mother of the Serb nation who led the Serbs toward amenable relations with rival groups and Western nations. By contrast, in her memoir and interviews after the trial, Plavšić performed for a domestic Serb audience. She reinforced the Mother narrative but demonstrated disregard for the ICTY, displayed racist beliefs against rival groups, and criticized the West. Comparing the two performances reveals that Plavšić used gender norms to dilute her agency in war crimes and negotiate preferential treatment at the ICTY, which was under political pressure to find a remorseful and reconciliatory figure. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was founded in November 1994 specifically to prosecute persons responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Rwanda’s former Minister

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of Family and Women’s Development, was its only female defendant. Nyiramasuhuko has the dubious distinction of being the only woman tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal for the crime of genocide and for rape as a crime against humanity. Nyiramasuhuko’s adoption of a gendered defense at the ICTR—as a pious and devoted mother—was ultimately unsuccessful. Despite a very gendered approach by her public accusers and defenders, the ICTR overexerted itself in its commitment to gender-neutrality and gave Nyiramasuhuko a life sentence, which was later reduced to 47 years. The failure of Nyiramasuhuko’s defense lies at the intersection of her gender and her race, including ingrained institutional biases about how Black African actors behave in conflicts, as well as political pressure on the ICTR to affirm rape as a crime against humanity and as genocide in international criminal law. Lynndie England, a reservist in the U.S. Army, became the focus of intense national and international attention for her role in the torture of Iraqis by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison. Although she was one of several soldiers to be court-martialed for the abuse, England became the focal point of media coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Her military lawyers adopted a gendered defense, arguing that England’s intellectual disability impaired her decision-making and that she had only been trying to please her boyfriend, who was older, higher in rank, and the ringleader of the abuse. A jury of male Army officers found England guilty of conspiracy,

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maltreating detainees, and committing an indecent act. She was dishonorably discharged and sentenced to three years in prison. England’s case demonstrates how the strategic use of gender can be a double-edged sword that can both benefit and harm women war criminals by reinforcing gendered assumptions about their behavior. England’s own abusive behavior and sexual improprieties were brought into direct conflict with her narrative of victimhood and status as a young, single mother. This tension between gendered assumptions and actual behavior was accentuated in the military justice context, which relies on a code of conduct developed for and largely enforced by men. Hoda Muthana, a business student at the University of Alabama, traveled to Syria to join ISIS in the fall of 2014. Calling herself “Mother Jihad,” Muthana allegedly went on social media to urge men and women to kill their fellow Americans and assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama. After more than four years in the group, Muthana was among the thousands of women who fled ISIS’s collapse in late 2018 and early 2019. As of our writing, Muthana is detained by Kurdish opposition forces in northern Syria. Without a passport and with the U.S. government denying that she is entitled to American citizenship, Muthana is fighting a legal battle to return to the United States. Knowing that she will face prosecution in U.S. courts if she returns, Muthana has repeatedly stressed her youth, her status as a mother, and her suffering during the Syrian war. Her case highlights the potential limitations

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of a gendered defense for terrorism-related crimes in a post9/11 American political culture that politicizes race, ethnicity, and religion. The strategic use of gender is what renders our chosen cases exceptional in a historical context. The trials of Plavšić and Nyiramasuhuko were conducted as part of postwar ad hoc international tribunals established by the UN to assign responsibility for war crimes in an unbiased fashion. These tribunals reflected the 1990s emphasis on the promise of international law as a mechanism for postconflict justice. Plavšić’s trial was held in the Netherlands, while Nyiramasuhuko’s took place in Tanzania. Both women held senior posts in governments that actively victimized their compatriots, who were constructed as ethnic “others.” There are also notable similarities between the cases of England and Muthana. Born in the United States, England and Muthana were in their early 20s at the time of their crimes and held low-ranking positions within their respective armed groups. Both women committed crimes against individuals labeled as “the enemy” while participating in armed conflict abroad. However, as a servicewoman, England was subject to the United States’ Uniform Code of Military Justice, while Muthana has yet to face accountability for her actions. Together, these four cases demonstrate how women war criminals and their legal teams actively manipulate gendered assumptions about women’s roles in war to fight for better conditions, reduced charges, and shorter sentences. Adopting gender stereotypes can actually be a powerful form of agency.

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As war crimes perpetrators, these women complicate the civilian-military divide that characterizes most scholarship on women and war. Their cases raise important and neglected questions about how gender affects agency in wartime as well as accountability and justice when war ends. We draw on legal testimony, opinions, and verdicts as well as interviews, first-person sources, media reports, and academic studies to analyze the legal and public defenses that female perpetrators employ. Adopting a transdisciplinary and interpretivist approach in our analysis, we identify and examine the relationships among gender and ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, socioeconomic status, position or rank, age, and parental status that affect how women are treated by criminal justice systems. Whenever possible, we directly compare the cases examined here to similar trials with male defendants to clarify how women’s treatment can differ from men’s and illuminate why. The court of public opinion matters as well, and we explore the media’s depiction of women war criminals and their parallel attempts to manage their own public images through interviews, memoirs, and biographies. We conclude by considering the implications of our cases for legal bodies and justice more broadly defined. In addition to unsettling assumptions about women as agents of peace and reconciliation, this book highlights the gendered dynamics of law.34 Social perceptions significantly affect legal practice. Gendered assumptions about women are entrenched within international and domestic legal frameworks and affect international criminal trials, military

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justice, and domestic prosecutions. The strategic use of gender has hampered postconflict justice by helping to ensure that the vast majority of women involved in war crimes have not been held to account. A gender-based disparity in prosecution and sentencing impedes justice and gender equality in postconflict societies by refusing to acknowledge women’s agency and, by extension, culpability.

1   T H E P R E S I D E N T: B I L JA NA P L AV Š I Ć

The conflicts that tore Yugoslavia apart were marked by politically motivated violence, sexual violence, and war crimes. Neighbors who had lived peaceably for decades were transformed into historical enemies as Yugoslavs splintered by ethnicity, religion, and language. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the three main groups—Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians1 (also known as Bosniaks)—formed militaries, paramilitaries, and self-defense units. Between April 1992 and December 1995 these groups waged a devastating war with one another. War crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by armed forces on all three sides: massacres, executions, rape, concentration camps, forced population displacement, and the pillaging of towns.2 A program of ethnic cleansing was devised to ensure that all Serbs in the former Yugoslavia would remain in a common state. The Bosnian Serb forces, along with Yugoslavia’s army 17

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and Serb paramilitary units, forcibly expelled and killed non-Serb civilians. They destroyed property and religious buildings; they operated detention centers where prisoners were beaten, raped, and illegally confined. Approximately 850 Muslim and Croat villages in BiH were destroyed and, in many municipalities, virtually all nonSerbs were forced to flee or were killed. When brought to account for their crimes, high-­profile defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) theatrically defied and ridiculed it as the ultimate enemy of their people. Of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, the only woman indicted—former president of Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavšić—behaved differently from the male defendants, who appropriated the tribunal to express extreme nationalist narratives. She complied with the ICTY, surrendering to a warrant. Her subsequent acts bordered on submission, including a guilty plea and statement of remorse. Plavšić was a dynamic and strategic political actor who employed her gender as armor against the war crimes charges brought against her. In doing so, she was influenced by both Serb and international gender norms. Plavšić performed for an international audience during her trial, emphasizing solidarity with and support for the tribunal. She used this platform to effectively frame herself as Mother of the Serb nation, responsible for leading her people toward reconciliation with rival groups and a rapprochement with the West. This performance successfully distanced Plavšić

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from her crimes and diluted her agency in the war. Her subsequent memoir—written while in prison—was intended for a domestic Serb audience. It reinforced the Mother narrative but, instead of supporting reconciliation, showed disregard for international criminal law and painted the West as the enemy of the Serbs. Her extreme nationalist and anti-Muslim beliefs were on full view. WHO IS BILJANA PLAVŠIĆ?

Born on July 7, 1930, in Tuzla in the then-Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Biljana Plavšić is among the most highly educated war criminals on record. Raised in a family of intellectuals and a Fulbright scholar and scientist in her own right, Plavšić earned a PhD in botany at the University of Zagreb. Prior to her political career, she led the Department of Biology at the University of Sarajevo. Her research focused on the microbiology of agricultural products, including spinach, sugar cane, and pork, and was published in scientific journals and by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Plavšić married a criminal lawyer in 1963, was divorced in 1976, and had no children.3 Plavšić was just as successful in her political career as she was in her scientific one. As co-founder of the Serb Democratic Party, she was elected to the presidency of the Socialist Republic of BiH, then a constituent part of Yugoslavia, in multiparty elections in 1990. Two years later, she became one of two acting presidents of Republika Srpska, one of

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the two political entities in the newly independent BiH. Along with her co-president, Radovan Karadžić, Plavšić was the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb indicted by the ICTY at The Hague. As a member of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Republika Srpska, Plavšić worked alongside Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, army chief of staff. However, unlike Karadžić and Mladić, both of whom went into hiding when their indictments were issued, Plavšić voluntarily surrendered in January 2001 after receiving a sealed indictment from the ICTY. Plavšić was not the only high-profile Serb to voluntarily surrender to The Hague—the leader of the Serb Radical Party, Vojislav Šešelj, did so in February 2003. Yet, their respective decisions were driven by very different motives. Šešelj openly stated that he wished to manipulate his trial for propaganda purposes and relished the prospect of an international audience for his denunciations of Western policy in the Balkans.4 For Plavšić, voluntary surrender was the beginning of her uniquely compliant relationship with the ICTY and a major point of contrast to the Yugoslav manhunts documented in Julian Borger’s The Butcher’s Trail.5 Plavšić was indicted on nine counts including: genocide; complicity to commit genocide; persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds; extermination; deportation; inhumane acts; murder as a crime against humanity; willful killing as a breach of the Geneva Conventions; and murder as a violation of the laws of war.6 Her indictment states that Bosnian Serb forces killed approximately 50,000 non-Serbs,

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held roughly 1,000 people captive in 400 detention facilities, and destroyed more than 100 mosques and Catholic churches. Plavšić initially pleaded not guilty on all counts in 2001 but then, before her trial began in 2002, she agreed to plead guilty to one count of persecution on political, racial, and religious grounds, for the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs.7 The prosecution dropped the remaining charges, which included genocide.8 Her guilty plea was followed by a statement of remorse and testimonies in her favor by such influential international figures as Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Carl Bildt, the European Union’s Special Envoy to the former Yugoslavia, co-chairman of the 1995 Dayton Peace Conference, and High Representative for BiH. Plavšić was sentenced to 11 years in prison minus the 245 days she spent in detention.9 She was released in October 2009 for good behavior, after serving two-thirds of her sentence. Victim’s rights groups, scholars, and legal specialists have harshly criticized this relatively lenient sentence. They point to the disparities between the powerful Plavšić, who gave orders during the conflict, and minor players like Duško Tadić, a prison camp guard who received a 20-year sentence.10 Pascale Chifflet and Gideon Boas also highlight the discrepancy between the sentencing of Plavšić and military policeman Miroslav Bralo; they find that Bralo’s good character before and after the crimes and his cooperation with the prosecution had little bearing on his sentence.11 One could argue that a guilty plea,

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compliance with the tribunal, and cooperation with the prosecution are more momentous in the cases of those who engineered the crimes. Plavšić’s sentencing judgment contains 15 paragraphs emphasizing the reconciliatory benefit of her statement of remorse and nine paragraphs on her exemplary postwar conduct.12 Such arguments were not, however, considered mitigating factors in the sentencing of high-profile defendants at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). For example, Jean Kambanda, prime minister of the interim government of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, pleaded guilty and cooperated with the prosecution yet still received a life sentence.13 Instead, Kerstin Bree Carlson argues that the ICTY judgment actually rewrote Plavšić’s role in the war, minimizing it from one of instigating, ordering, and planning the violence to one of participating in the cover-up and making public statements of denial.14 The ICTY’s decision to portray Plavšić as remorseful in order to encourage reconciliation in BiH was an important political factor in the judgment and sentencing. However, underlying gender stereotypes of women as victims and peacemakers in conflict also contributed significantly to the legal outcome in this case. Transcripts from Plavšić’s trial, material from the memoir she wrote while serving her sentence, and local media interviews she gave after her release, all illustrate how Plavšić used her gender to her advantage in subverting an international process of justice.

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N AT I O N A L I S M A N D P E R F O R M A N C E AT T H E I C T Y

High-profile defendants on trial at the ICTY, including Slobodan Milošević,15 Radovan Karadžić,16 Vojislav Šešelj,17 and Ratko Mladić,18 appropriated the international tribunal as a platform for national myth- and groupmaking.19 They gained a powerful following among Serbs in Serbia and in BiH by collectivizing guilt, portraying the international tribunal as the ultimate enemy of their nation, and portraying their group as a victim of international justice. They presented themselves as martyrs burdened with defending the Serbs’ collective dignity. The result was the creation of a cult of the war criminal, which revitalized nationalist sentiment.20 Proclamations of innocence, hours-long historical lectures, defiance and ridicule of the tribunal, and amusing theatrics were the norm among high-profile defendants at The Hague. The ICTY became a theater for evoking a variety of emotional responses.21 Marlies Glasius and Francesco Colona present the ICTY courtroom as a legal theater, conceptualizing the space in terms of stage, actors, and audiences. The messages the audience received from ICTY “plays” were contingent on several factors, including disruptions by defendants who wished to teach their own lessons to the local population and to manipulate postconflict settings for their own political goals. When trying to understand how war criminals performed at The Hague, Plavšić stands out as an exception.

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Using this venue, Plavšić’s defense paved the way for her return to the status of a “normal” woman—a peacemaker rather than a warmonger—who supports reconciliation. Plavšić framed herself as Mother of the Serb nation, emphasizing solidarity with the tribunal and a willingness to comply with and support its pedagogical messaging. Implicitly, this narrative weakened the more damaging characterization of women’s participation in the war through Monster or Whore narratives. This process effectively, but problematically, distanced Plavšić from her crimes and diluted her agency in the war. Prior analyses of Plavšić rarely treat her as an autonomous political actor motivated by self-interest. Rather, she is portrayed as acting out of a maternal desire to serve the nation and her symbolic sons. She is cast as Mother of the Serb nation, who coached and encouraged soldiers and paramilitaries—“real” men—to serve Republika S­ rpska.22 The most obvious example of this phenomenon was captured in a 1992 photograph taken in Bijeljina: Plavšić called Željko “Arkan” Ražnjatović—a notorious paramilitary leader implicated in numerous atrocities that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia—her child before stepping over the corpses of Bosnian Muslims to kiss his cheek in approval of his service to the Serbs.23 Much has been made of this incident. In addition to offering so-called evidence of Plavšić’s maternalism, it is used to support the characterization of Plavšić as sexually deviant. Gentry and Sjoberg point out the disproportionate attention to Plavšić’s sexuality: “Though Plavšić appar-

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ently gave several hundred racist speeches, the most often quoted were ones which emphasized either her sexuality or that of her victims.”24 Plavšić is consistently called “Mrs. Plavšić,” yet the photograph with Arkan prompted widespread speculation about her possible sexual involvement with a man 22 years her junior. Some authors point out Plavšić’s calls for Serb racial purity and opposition to intermarriage, but many others emphasize her sexuality over her racism.25 Stacy Sullivan claims that when Plavšić was asked about kissing Arkan she replied, “I always kiss Serbian heroes.”26 Portraying Plavšić as a sexual predator shifts focus toward her supposedly extraordinary sexual desires and away from her extraordinary crimes. For example, Samantha Power calls Plavšić “Miss Necrophilia,” a name allegedly given to her by liberal Serbs.27 Such accounts ascribe Plavšić’s motivation to sexuality, not political agency. They also serve to protect the sexual boundaries traditionally assigned to women: that women should not be older than their male partners, be more sexual than their male partners, or have sex outside of marriage. This leads arbiters to focus more on irrelevant allegations of traditionally inappropriate sexuality than the crimes committed by the accused. Other ICTY defendants, including Šešelj, capitalized on this fascination with Plavšić’s sexuality. During his trial, Šešelj stated that Plavšić took advantage of a “young boy,” Momčilo Krajišnik, by serving as a witness against him.28 Krajišnik was in fact a senior member of the Serb administration in BiH: he co-founded the Serb Democratic

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Party with Karadžić and was a Serb member of the Presidency of BiH. Accounts of Plavšić also evoke the Monster narrative, painting her as a violent madwoman and marginalizing her from peaceful, “normal” women. Numerous sources hint that Plavšić is mentally unstable. Interestingly, some authors cite Šešelj, Milošević, and Milošević’s wife, Mirjana Marković, as legitimate sources for this information. Power suggests that Milošević questioned Plavšić’s mental health and was unable to “tame” her.29 Power also cites Milošević’s observation about Plavšić that, “Such people, if they are not put in the hospital, must be kept from occupying any public function.”30 Šešelj claimed that Plavšić’s views were more extreme than his and Marković called Plavšić a “female Mengele,” referring to the infamous Nazi torturer-doctor.31 Milošević, the most powerful war criminal tried at the ICTY and one found guilty of the most heinous crimes, and Šešelj, the most manipulative defendant at the ICTY and an extreme narcissist, are deemed by Power and others as qualified arbiters of Plavšić’s character. Plavšić’s nicknames—“Iron Lady” and “Ice Queen,” alluding to her cold heart lacking in feminine warmth and capable of committing appallingly violent acts—are also used to illustrate her monstrous character.32 Perhaps the most malicious attack on Plavšić’s character was a joke that allegedly circulated around Belgrade: Plavšić [was] climbing Mt. Everest in a party with six Serbs and six non-Serbs. When the group reaches the top, she

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whips out a gun and kills all the Serbs. The non-Serbs are shocked: “Why did you kill the Serbs?” they ask. “Because,” Plavšić answers, “they are Serbs—and any land which contains dead Serbs automatically becomes Serb territory. Mt. Everest is now the highest peak in Greater Serbia.”33

This degree of fanaticism identified Plavšić as an unstable madwoman, not a rational political actor. The portrayal of Plavšić as Mother, Whore, and Monster provided the opportunity for Plavšić and her legal team to choose the most advantageous image—that of Mother of the Serb nation—and build her ICTY defense around it. THE TRIAL

In stark contrast to all other high-profile Serb defendants at the ICTY, Plavšić was compliant—not defiant—during her trial.34 Peter Murphy, representing Plavšić, emphasized, “It is our intention to respond positively, as I believe that Plavšić has always demonstrated . . . Your Honour, the Plavšić Defense will comply with whatever date the Court decides.”35 The defense overemphasized her willingness to comply, as if seeking to prove that Plavšić was an obedient and virtuous woman. Unlike her compatriots, Plavšić respected the stage—the tribunal. She took on the role of a main character in a globally televised event, putting on a performance that stressed solidarity with the ICTY. Her legal team acknowledged the tribunal’s value, noting that it was created “to restore peace and security to the region by establishing

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accountability and promoting reconciliation.”36 Bearing in mind that legal professionals bring their personal convictions and societal influences to The Hague, Plavšić decided to play to the tribunal and the international community. Rather than associating the ICTY and the international community with enemy forces as Šešelj and Karadžić would,37 Plavšić stated in her guilty plea that during the conflict she wrongly believed that “the international community was [the] enemy [of the Serbs]” but later came to realize that “[the Serbs] must live in the world and not in a cave.”38 She went a step further by calling out and condemning Serb leaders who gained power by “provoking fear and speaking half-truths in order to convince our people that the world is against us.”39 According to Plavšić, she was a victim not of The Hague nor the international community but of the political elite in Republika Srpska. Plavšić’s defense placed the blame on the other Serb leaders in Republika Srpska, a tactic that the court accepted. Both she and the people of Republika Srpska were victims of a rogue leadership that she left: “I think it is clear that I have separated myself from those leaders, but too late. Yet, this leadership, without shame, continues to seek the loyalty and support of our people.”40 Carl Bildt was among the crucial witnesses who abetted the defense in distinguishing Plavšić from the Serb criminal collective stating, “It was obvious to me that she had not been a real part of the [Republika Srpska] leadership for that entire time period because she had never been brought in any of the discussions and any of the

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decisions and any of the meetings that had been asked to deal with critical issues of war, peace, and power.”41 The court accepted that Plavšić fell prey to the “bad guys” in Republika Srpska and attributed to her a lesser role. “She did not conceive the plan which led to this crime, and had a lesser role in its execution than others,” said Chief Judge Richard May.42 All this diminished Plavšić’s individual responsibility and, despite her intelligence and education, she was presented as a woman who was duped by her male peers. This interpretation portrays Plavšić as reactive and negates any direct and active culpability. The trial proceedings and Plavšić’s performance therefore present women as incapable of perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity. That Plavšić’s defense also sought to smooth her relationship with the international community was evident from the witnesses called to the stand. Elie Wiesel— author, moralist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient—was asked to speak on behalf of both the prosecution and the defense. His reaction to Plavšić’s crimes was filled with gendered assumptions: How could a woman like her, a renowned intellectual, undoubtedly intelligent and gifted, how could she remain silent in the face of so many violations, so much humiliation, so many crimes, so much spilled blood, and so many summary executions ascribed to the servants of the government of which she was one of the leaders? How did she hope to remain at peace with herself while forging an alliance with that part of some people which is ignominious and shameful?43

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Wiesel’s testimony implies that Plavšić should be more disturbed by spilled blood, disgrace, and shame than her male compatriots, who are also highly educated and accomplished. Plavšić was expected to know better than to condone atrocities, while Šešelj’s intelligence was perceived as an explanation for his crimes and a show of superiority.44 No one used Šešelj’s intelligence to question his choice to commit crimes; in fact, his intelligence was why he was considered a criminal mastermind. For Plavšić, the trial was not a vehicle for addressing her domestic audience the way it was for Karadžić, who often spoke directly to the Serb people during his trial.45 For both Karadžić and Šešelj, the goal of their trial performances was a display of heroism and superiority for the Serb audiences watching the televised proceedings at home.46 Plavšić did not attempt to disrupt the pedagogical messaging of the ICTY. As such, Plavšić portrayed herself as a good student who applied her education and intelligence to learn the lessons the court sought to teach. Wiesel praised Plavšić for her guilty plea arguing, “The fact that she is the only accused to have freely and wholly assumed her role in the wrongdoings and crimes set out in the indictment, even though she once moved in the highest circles of power in her country, could and should make her an example for similar cases.”47 Albright, who was also invited to speak for both the prosecution and defense, emphasized Plavšić’s public commitment to the Dayton Peace Agreement, “which was not easy in the

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Republika Srpska, given the fact that the more radical elements of the Bosnian Serbs were very much around and were also running for office,” as well as Plavšić’s attention to the plight of victims that were Serb.48 Albright’s testimony painted Plavšić into the role of a peacemaker and humanitarian.49 She commended Plavšić’s character, calling her “a woman of her word” who, to Albright’s surprise, wanted to go about Dayton in a “democratic way” and “was doing it at some risk to herself.”50 This image was very different from Šešelj’s boasts about his satisfaction in shooting at the enemy from the front lines.51 Albright was pleased that Plavšić recognised the authority of the court, whereas other high-profile Serb leaders refused to do so. Bildt likewise confirmed that “credibility is not something that Mrs. Plavšić lacks in her convictions” and argued that even her wartime opponents, senior Bosnian Muslim leaders, found her reliable during the conflict.52 Another aspect of Plavšić’s allegedly virtuous character was her fight against corruption and, ironically, wartime criminality. Robert Frowick, U.S. Secretary of State for the implementation of the Dayton Accords, stated, “I have thought of her as, in a way, attacking corruption, injustice, and becoming the champion within Republika Srpska of a struggle against criminality.”53 Plavšić alluded to her fight against corruption and rogue actors in BiH in her guilty plea, arguing, “I believe that we must put our own house in order.”54 Plavšić took an opportunity to reinforce the gendered assumptions expressed during

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her trial, implying that it took a woman to right the ship while men were left to criminal exploits. Judge May acknowledged the importance of the internationally respected witnesses stating, “The fact that these witnesses, all of high international reputation, came forward and gave such evidence adds much weight to the plea in mitigation put forward in this regard.”55 Even Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte recommended a reduced sentence.56 By eagerly supporting Plavšić’s narrative of remorse and reconciliation, the ICTY implied that a female perpetrator of war crimes could become remorseful and strive to promote peace for her nation in a matter of a few years. The ICTY’s press release on Plavšić’s behalf spoke of her accepting responsibility, expressing her remorse fully and unconditionally, and encouraging her people to reconcile with their neighbors and to restore their dignity as a respected people.57 The tone of this press release was more enthusiastic than Plavšić’s statement of guilt, which made no reference to full and unconditional remorse nor to reconciliation. Instead, her guilty plea explained that she neglected and denied the inhuman conduct against non-Serbs because she was immersed in “addressing the suffering of the war’s innocent Serb victims.” The closest that Plavšić came to mentioning reconciliation was expressing her hope that her statement would “help the Muslim, Croat, and even Serb innocent victims not to be overtaken with bitterness which often becomes hatred and is in the end self-destructive.”58 Not being overtaken by bitterness does not mean reconciling with one’s enemies.

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Even though Plavšić never mentioned reconciliation in her plea, her defense team gave the tribunal what they wanted to see, highlighting her courage in pleading guilty and contributing to reconciliation. Witnesses reinforced this narrative. Bildt noted that Plavšić’s guilty plea was a significant contribution to reconciliation, and Frowick stated that Plavšić always had political courage.59 Milorad Dodik, an ally of Plavšić who would go on to serve as prime minister and president of Republika Srpska, stated that her guilty plea was “a courageous gesture on the part of a woman—and I repeat, a woman.”60 This emphasis on Plavšić’s courage points to a clear gender stereotype that portrays men as more courageous than women. Plavšić’s actions in accepting guilt were portrayed as extraordinary—for a woman. Moreover, her courage was ascribed to the goal of reconciliation, with reconciliation being an appropriately feminine goal, rather than a strategic legal defense or an element of her political agency.61 The emphasis on Plavšić’s reconciliatory role was in line with the Mother narrative in which she was the Mother of the Serb nation who would lead her people on a path to truth and remorse. In addition, the stereotypical image of an “elderly frail mother” burdened by the ICTY’s cumbersome bureaucracy was evoked. Speaking about the burdens placed on Plavšić, the defense team stated, “What I’m being told by the Prosecution, apparently, is that I should take 4,000 or 5,000 documents to Mrs. Plavšić, a lady now approaching her 72nd birthday, who resides in Belgrade under the order of the court, and ask her to read through these documents and tell me

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what they say.”62 Another instance where the tribunal was portrayed as treating Plavšić unfairly based on her gender was when the defense suggested that the detention center where Plavšić was held was inappropriate for the detention of a woman since “in all prisons in the world, there are separate facilities for men and women.”63 The defense was able to leverage gendered assumptions from the very beginning of the trial and ultimately diminished Plavšić’s individual agency in the process. Trial evidence shows Plavšić’s desire to portray herself as a martyr for the Serb people like other high-profile male defendants, but she did so by assuming the role of Mother of the Serb nation. In her guilty plea, she stated that she voluntarily came to the court in order to “confront these charges and to spare [her] people, for it was clear that they would pay the price of any refusal to come.” She continued that the responsibility for war crimes “certainly should not extend to our Serbian people, who have already paid a terrible price for our leadership.” Finally, in calling for justice for “all sides,” Plavšić implied that the ICTY had not facilitated justice for Serb victims.64 Plavšić presented herself as the Mother of the Serb nation who came to The Hague not only to defend her individual actions but to also sacrifice herself for her people by subjecting herself to the possibility of life imprisonment. Plavšić’s adoption of the Mother narrative paved the way for her return to the status of a “normal” and “real” woman. In the process, she weakened the monstrous images assigned to her by the indictment and the media. More

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importantly, Plavšić successfully distanced herself from her criminal actions and diluted her agency in the war. PLAVŠIĆ IN CONTEXT

Plavšić wrote a two-volume memoir, Svedočim (I Testify), while serving her sentence, which was published in Republika Srpska in 2005.65 Plavšić used her memoir to reinforce her Mother narrative while painting the West as the enemy of the Serbs, and illustrating disrespect of and disregard for international criminal law. Far from calling for reconciliation with rival groups, she displayed nationalist and racist beliefs toward non-Serbs in her memoir. Contrasting her performance at the trial with that in her memoir reveals the significant agency Plavšić had in shaping her legal versus literary narratives and international versus domestic images. The fact that the memoir was in Cyrillic Serbian and never translated into English nor reprinted in the Latin alphabet (which is used more widely in the region) suggests that Plavšić specifically targeted an audience of Serbs in BiH and in Serbia. Evidence of this new audience can be found in Plavšić’s treatment of Wiesel. In the memoir, Plavšić shamed Wiesel, calling him “an embarrassment for the Nobel prize” and arguing that she had reliable evidence that Wiesel “does not enjoy a high reputation among Jews because he turned his people’s tragedy into a lucrative business.” Plavšić implied that Wiesel’s testimony at The Hague fit perfectly into the insubstantial

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and imprecise text of the indictment and was motivated not by truth but a monetary payment—a claim which draws on anti-Semitic stereotypes.66 Although I Testify was intended for her domestic audience, one similarity with Plavšić’s performance at The Hague was her desire to portray herself as a humanitarian and an anticorruption crusader. For example, Plavšić boasted about being praised by the Western journalist Martin Bell for securing a humanitarian aid convoy that carried food for two Serb and two Muslim villages in BiH.67 She distinguished herself from Karadžić and Šešelj, whom she described as “very similar to each other, incapable of sympathy and connection with others.”68 She also confirmed her commitment to rooting out corruption by calling out numerous colleagues and recalling specific incidents in great detail, such as the exchange and sale of arms between different warring sides and illegal trading and theft of automobiles.69 The most consistent element in Plavšić’s legal and literary performances was her portrayal of herself as a martyr for the Serb people in her role as Mother of the Serb nation. Plavšić’s memoir confirmed that she did not go to The Hague merely to defend her individual actions, but also to sacrifice herself for her nation. She emphasized repeatedly that all of her wartime actions were for her people, much in “the same way a mother feels when her child is in danger.”70 Opportune references to gender were definitely present in Plavšić’s communication with her Serb audience.

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Plavšić also argued that her colleagues perceived her as an illegitimate intruder in the male political arena: According to their understanding, in the time before the war and during the war especially, there is no place for a woman. Talks, negotiations, that is man’s business . . . I can maybe accept the traditional understanding of women’s engagement in politics, but in this case it went beyond this simple idea: it was full of dishonesty and disrespect.71

This dynamic gives some legitimacy to her claims at The Hague that she was left out of certain political negotiations and decisions. It also suggests that Plavšić was well aware that the most likely path to domestic approval was to rely on traditional values of motherhood (honesty and respect), rather than her role as an elected politician. Still, this was no easy feat for Plavšić, who was derided by her colleagues and their wives because she did not have children. Plavšić quoted a colleague’s wife as saying, “Give birth to them and then speak.”72 Elissa Helms confirms that this attitude was common in the region; Helms found that Bosnians of various political orientations explained Plavšić’s failings through the fact that she was childless.73 Plavšić thus found herself constantly attempting to construct her image as an unconditionally devoted, responsible Mother of the Serb nation. On the other hand, the differences between the narrative in her memoir and her performance at The Hague were significant. Plavšić’s attitudes toward the West, the international community, the tribunal, and non-Serb

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victims of the conflict were closely aligned with the attitudes of high-profile male defendants. Diverging drastically from her trial defense, in her memoir Plavšić painted the West as the enemy of the Serbs, demonstrated disrespect and disregard for international criminal law, and displayed extreme nationalism and racism. Throughout the two volumes of her memoir, Plavšić emphasized that the West was biased against—and by implication an enemy of—the Serbs, echoing the attitudes of Milošević, Karadžić, Šešelj, and Mladić. She argued that the West tolerated the “manufacturing, trickery and crimes” carried out by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegović, and that the United States not only tolerated but actively supported such politics. An example she gave was Izetbegović’s wartime strategy of ensuring that Sarajevo was without electricity during wintertime.74 Plavšić likewise portrayed NATO as the enemy of the Serbs, as her male colleagues did.75 She commented that even a four-year-old boy was well aware that “NATO kills only Serbs . . . a fact that Damjan [the boy] and his peers will never forget.”76 She dismissed reports of thousands of Bosnian Muslim women being raped by Serb forces as a “fabrication” resulting from Western “unequal policy” toward the warring parties. She spoke of anti-Serb politics in the Clinton administration and accused the U.S. government of wanting to eradicate the Serbs.77 Plavšić portrayed the ICTY as part of this Western conspiracy against the Serbs, suggesting that she personally felt threatened. On the last page of her memoir,

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Plavšić evoked her readers’ memories of Milošević’s health problems and death while on trial at The Hague. She additionally suggested that she experienced health problems, such as breaking her right arm due to poor lighting in her cell, that may have been “intentional or unintentional” on the part of the ICTY.78 Šešelj and Karadžić made very similar accusations against the ICTY during their trials.79 The only difference was that Plavšić made her accusations in her memoir, noting that she experienced worry and fear that she would not have the chance to declare her truth.80 Presumably, Plavšić was trying to tell her audience that the memoir, rather than the courtroom, was where the real truth could be found. Plavšić used her memoir to reject the lessons of The Hague and to disrespect international law in general. Recalling an incident when Albright asked Plavšić to deliver Karadžić to the ICTY, Plavšić claimed that arresting Karadžić would violate the national constitution. Albright responded by stating that “international responsibilities are above the national constitution.” Plavšić then boasted that Albright soon realized that with this statement, the meeting was over.81 In this anecdote, Plavšić’s goal was to declare her commitment to national law above all international obligations and laws, renouncing her statements at The Hague. Finally, Plavšić used her memoir to reaffirm her extreme nationalist and racist views, with no signs of remorse. This was most obvious in her description of a group of Bosnian Muslim victims of rape who came

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forward to share their stories on television. Plavšić used the Whore narrative against the victims and described them as “loaded with make-up.” She also implied that they were paid sex workers or were making false claims because “if you really experienced rape you cannot testify about it so easily with no trouble looking straight into the camera, unless it is your new job to make such statements.” She referred to these victims as “women who did not experience the horror of rape but realized that for a ‘patriotic lie’ they could earn a lot of money and see the world.”82 She compared these “fake” Bosnian Muslim victims of rape to what she claimed were legitimate Serb victims of rape who did not want their faces on camera when they gave their testimonies to journalists. According to Plavšić, “watching the shaking backs of the Serb victims as they retold their experiences was much more convincing than watching the made-up faces of the ‘raped Muslims.’”83 Whereas Plavšić dismissed Bosnian Muslim victims as illegitimate from the very beginning—assuming that victimization and trauma take a uniform form—she spoke about the “legitimate” experiences of Serb victims in great detail.84 Her anti-Muslim views were solidified in her explanation of a perceived biological deficiency in Bosnian Muslims: “During the Ottoman occupation only people who valued a good life more than the nation or their Orthodox faith converted to Islam and later mistreated the people of their own ancestry. That behaviour stayed in their genes.”85 In sum, there was no sign of

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remorse or empathy in Plavšić’s memoir for Bosnian Muslim victims of the war. Plavšić openly rejected reconciliation or catharsis when addressing her domestic audience. In a 2014 interview for the television series Goli Život, Plavšić made a rare public appearance. She spoke about her choice to plead guilty. Far from expressing remorse and encouraging reconciliation, Plavšić described her guilty plea as “a strategy to end one’s suffering” after choosing “a bullet to one’s temple” and advised Mladić to follow her example. She explained that once she looked at her own case rationally—“with a cool head and a cool heart”—she realized that defense witnesses were terrified to testify on her behalf and that The Hague would accept a guilty plea on any charges. To her, an admission of ethnic cleansing made most sense as “ethnic cleansing and displacement have always happened in this part of the world by all warring sides.”86 Plavšić made a strategic choice and acted upon the advice of her attorneys while the tribunal, including Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, made a bargain too easily and misjudged Plavšić’s actions as remorse.87 Plavšić was able to assume agency and create distinct legal and literary narratives about herself for international and domestic audiences. Her two-pronged approach, and its distinction from her male compatriots’ tactics, says a lot more about the importance of contextualizing international criminal law than it does about the defendant herself. Accused war criminals are able to adapt to international trials and become creative political entrepreneurs. In the

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process, they may put forth lessons that are detrimental to reconciliation and moderation. Plavšić was well aware of the gender constraints imposed by her society and the international legal community, and used them strategically. She exploited the gendered construction of the female peacemaker to distance herself from the role of perpetrator at The Hague. She similarly used the gendered construction of the eternally devoted Mother of the Serb nation to win over her domestic audience. The ICTY expected Plavšić to be less guilty and more remorseful than male defendants, a view evident in statements by the prosecution, witnesses, and in the final judgment. The ICTY’s treatment of Plavšić did not contribute to reconciliation in communities across the region.88 The tribunal clearly did not manage to convert a key female perpetrator into a reconciliatory figure through leniency and a reduced sentence.

2  THE MINISTER: PA U L I N E N Y I R A M A S U H U K O

The Rwandan genocide is among the most infamous episodes of mass violence and war crimes in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered by their compatriots during a civil war that began on October 1, 1990, with the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from Uganda. The RPF was an armed group of mostly Tutsi exiles whose families fled Rwanda in the 1950s and 1960s. Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana framed the RPF invasion and its guerrilla-style violence in ethnic terms, claiming that the RPF intended to eliminate all Hutus, and vilified Rwandan Tutsis as supporters of the RPF. After two and a half years of fighting and no clear winner in sight, Habyarimana caved under domestic and international pressure and signed a peace agreement with the RPF in August 1993. The conflict changed dramatically the following year when, on April 6, 1994, assailants shot down the plane carrying Habyarimana from Arusha, Tanzania, where regional heads of 43

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state were trying to convince him to implement the power-sharing terms of the peace agreement. The systematic killing of between 507,000 and 850,000 Rwandan citizens began within hours of Habyarimana’s death and lasted 100 days.1 The genocide was organized by a small group of Hutu hardliners, many from the inner circle of Habyarimana’s government, who were excluded from and disapproved of Habyarimana’s powersharing agreement with the RPF and decided to employ whatever means necessary to remain in power.2 Militias set up roadblocks and perpetrated violence against anyone who opposed the self-appointed interim government and its genocidal aims. This included numerous Hutu moderates, as well as anyone with a Tutsi identity card or who “looked” Tutsi.3 Three quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, as well as thousands of Hutu moderates, were killed by the Interahamwe militia and its civilian accomplices.4 The genocide ended when the RPF took Gisenyi by force on July 18, 1994, and declared victory. Extensive war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by government-backed genocidal forces; the RPF was also accused of committing war crimes during its liberation, reprisal, and insurgency activities. Just over a year after the genocide in Rwanda, African Rights published a report entitled Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers.5 The report named over 40 Rwandan women who participated in the violence and described their actions in detail. Among them was Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the first woman charged with the crime of genocide and rape as a crime against humanity.

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The report recounted the actions of many more Rwandan women, including neighbors, nuns, doctors and nurses, teachers and students, ministers and government officials, and journalists. It received extensive attention in academic and journalistic sources precisely because it spoke only of female perpetrators despite the fact that countless Rwandan men participated in the violence. While women were more often accomplices than direct offenders in the Rwandan genocide, they still took part in significant crimes. About 6 percent of persons prosecuted for genocide-related crimes were women, and about 9 percent of cases in Rwandan gacaca, which were communitybased courts albeit heavily influenced by the RPF government, had female defendants.6 Gacaca cases involved women participating in stoning and acts of rape and sexual torture. Nicole Hogg interviewed women who participated in large-scale massacres and clubbed their neighbors to death.7 Women also denounced Tutsis and moderate Hutus who were in hiding, beat individuals, found sex slaves for militia members, and looted bodies, in addition to delivering final death blows to those clinging to life. Adam Jones emphasized that “Hutu women were no more likely than men to grant refuge to those seeking to flee the holocaust.”8 Jones and many other sources expected that Rwandan women, because of their gender, should have been more willing to grant refuge and protection. Often when women do not behave as expected in war, an explanation based on their internalization of patriarchal values is given.9 This approach leaves little room for understanding the agency and autonomy of individual

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female perpetrators, such as Nyiramasuhuko. Nyiramasuhuko’s case received a disproportionate amount of attention in the international media. Sources writing on Nyiramasuhuko were perplexed by the multiple and overlapping dichotomies in her persona.10 Her actions refuted the neat gender essentialisms of motherhood, peacemaking, and victimhood that the media, policymakers, and academics apply to women—African women especially— when analyzing their place in the state, society, and international system. She was consequently portrayed as a deviant from the accepted gender status quo. Drawing on legal documents from Nyiramasuhuko’s case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), we argue that while Nyiramasuhuko’s defense team not only relied on arguments rooted in blatant gender essentialisms, they tried to cast doubt on her responsibility as a superior and her participation in and knowledge of violent events. Most importantly, they sought to normalize Nyiramasuhuko’s image in the eyes of the international audience, including the ICTR staff, by portraying her as a pious and devoted mother. The prosecution and the judges at the ICTR were much less open to genderbased arguments by Nyiramasuhuko’s defense team than were the legal officials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) during Biljana Plavšić’s trial. Despite the ICTR’s efforts in stressing a gender-neutral approach to the case, the legal process was influenced by ingrained biases about how African actors behave in conflicts, as well as pressure on the ICTR to

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find the Rwandan leadership guilty of rape as genocide and rape as a crime against humanity. The result was a racist and reductionist approach to the prosecution of a high-ranking official in Rwanda’s genocidal government. W H O I S PAU L I N E N Y I R A M A S U H U KO ?

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was an ambitious daughter of a subsistence farmer in the southern Butare region of Rwanda, born in 1946. After she completed her studies, she became a social worker and worked for the Ministry of Health for eight years. Nyiramasuhuko married Maurice Ntahobali in 1968 and had four children with him.11 In 1988, she returned to college to obtain a law degree.12 Nyiramasuhuko was active and committed to the Mouve­ ment révolutionnaire national pour la démocratie et le développement (MRND), the most influential Hutu political party. A close friend of President Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, she continued to climb the party ladder and was appointed Rwanda’s national Minister of Family and Women’s Development in April 1992 under Habyarimana.13 Nyiramasuhuko’s husband held a number of prestigious posts, including President of the Rwandan National Assembly, Minister of Higher Education, and Rector of the National University in Butare during the genocide. Media articles nevertheless portray him as the deferential partner in the marriage, “quiet and humble,” suggesting that Nyiramasuhuko’s personal connection to the wife of Habyarimana helped her husband’s career.14

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After Habyarimana’s assassination, Nyiramasuhuko was chosen to serve in the interim government led by Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, who in his confession to the ICTR named her as one of five key members of his inner circle.15 During her service in the interim government, Nyiramasuhuko participated in government meetings, which set out the plan for massacres against Tutsis and the Hutu opposition. Préfets (governors) and bourgmestres (majors) were instructed to incite the massacres. Nyiramasuhuko was the minister responsible for the pacification of Butare préfecture (province), including the city of Butare, the second largest city in Rwanda and one with a large population of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. She replaced Jean Baptiste Habyalimana—a préfet of Tutsi descent who refused to incite massacres in Butare—with Sylvain Nsabimana, who cooperated with the interim government’s extermination plan in Butare and Ngoma.16 Nyiramasuhuko directed the Interahamwe in Butare and managed a roadblock with the assistance of her son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, from April to July 1994. She traveled throughout the region in a Peugeot van using a loud speaker to incite killings of Tutsi men and rape and murder of Tutsi women, ensuring that préfecture offices were abiding with the extermination plan and often monitoring entire episodes of massacres. Witnesses reported that Nyiramasuhuko lured thousands of Tutsis into enclosed spaces offering protection, only to give the order that they be machine-gunned or burned to death. Witnesses also reported that Nyiramasuhuko was quick to suggest that

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the Interahamwe rape the Tutsi women before killing them.17 Nyiramasuhuko fled Rwanda in July 1994 but traveled and worked in the region until 1997, when she was arrested in Kenya and transferred to the ICTR in Arusha.18 She was prosecuted in a group trial, as the lead defendant with five other defendants from Butare préfecture, including her son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali. Together, they were known as the Butare Six. Nyiramasuhuko pleaded not guilty to 11 charges but, in 2011, the ICTR convicted her of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, war crimes of violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity, as well as crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution, and rape. She was given a life sentence.19 The other defendants in the Butare Six trial received sentences of 25 years, 30 years, 35 years, and two life sentences, including a life sentence for her son. Upon appeal, the ICTR found in 2015 that the defendants’ right to be tried without undue delay had been violated and that the judges erred in convicting them for committing a crime against humanity as the crimes did not fit under one of three discriminatory grounds in the ICTR’s Statute.20 The appeal judgment reduced the life sentences of three defendants, including Nyiramasuhuko who received 47 years of imprisonment.21 Nyiramasuhuko remains the only woman tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal for the crime of genocide. She is also the only woman to be tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal for rape as a crime against humanity.

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ETHNICITY AND GENOCIDE IN RWANDA

Given the well-documented participation of numerous and diverse women in the violence in Rwanda, the existence of powerful female perpetrators who, because of their leadership positions, had the opportunity to be operational and effective in the killing agenda should be unsurprising. Nyiramasuhuko’s role in inciting rape as part of the genocide was not unique, as numerous government officials implemented or sanctioned mass rape as part of the extermination plan.22 To avoid the pitfalls of an entirely gendered or a gender-void approach, some scholars have emphasized the relationship between gender and ethnicity in Rwanda in their analysis of Nyiramasuhuko. A relationship between ethnicity and gender was constructed during the conflict to draw distinctions between Hutus and Tutsis and to incite violence against Tutsis.23 The Hutu Ten Commandments, which were publicized by Kangura newspaper and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), established how the genocide would be gendered. The first commandment stated that “Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is, works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who marries a Tutsi woman, befriends a Tutsi woman, and employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or a concubine.” The second commandment emphasized that Hutu men should value the loyalty of Hutu women, their role in the family, and place in patriarchal society: “Every Hutu should know

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that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?” The third commandment called on Hutu women to actively uphold the first and second commandments: “Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers and sons back to reason.”24 Stereotypes about Tutsi women being more beautiful than Hutu women were rooted in colonialism and utilized to gender the conflict in the 1990s. The Hutu Ten Commandments portrayed Tutsi women as conniving and mischievous women, who used their beauty and their sexuality to empower their ethnic group and whose dangerous influence must be defended against by virtuous Hutu women. The ideology behind the Hutu Ten Commandments disrupted any sense of unity that might have existed between Hutu and Tutsi women. How women’s relationship to the nation is defined has implications for how they are then regarded (or not) as actors.25 As Georgina Holmes argues, “Hutu women who appeared loyal to the idea of a pure Hutu state were imagined as political subjects and full citizens, while Hutu women who campaigned for democracy or were actively involved in the women’s movement were perceived as a threat to the regime and subsequently imagined as partial citizens.”26 Many Hutu women answered the call to action during the genocide and participated in the victimization of Tutsis and Tutsi women in particular. They earnestly believed that the RPF invasion presented an existential threat to

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the Hutu population in Rwanda and would not only result in mass murder but also years of subjugation under Tutsi domination. In such circumstances, ethnicity overpowered any sense of sisterhood.27 Reporting by African Rights relied heavily on data provided by the RPF which described female perpetrators as one-dimensional, enthusiastic perpetrators motivated in particular by anti-Tutsi hatred.28 However, ethnicity and ethnic ideologies cannot in and of themselves explain the Rwandan genocide. Analysts are often too quick to label African conflicts as tribal, ignoring that the racial and ethnic hierarchies constructed during colonialism still shape the international system.29 Western audiences, including the international legal community, are more likely to believe explanations of war crimes based on ethnic loyalties in cases involving Africans. Arguments emphasizing tribalism or ethnicity can imply that Africans are more “savage” for engaging in tribal conflicts while Westerners engage in more “civilized” political and economic conflicts. Indeed, it is difficult to attribute Nyiramasuhuko’s motivations to ethnicity. Her grandfather was a Tutsi who was demoted to a Hutu when he became poor.30 While switching between Tutsi and Hutu identities was not a common occurrence in Rwandan families, it did happen. Historically, the Hutu and Tutsi categories were not rigid primordial categorizations, but rather semiartificial monikers dependent on socioeconomic status.31 Some have interpreted Nyiramasuhuko’s crimes as a desire to “kill her

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‘inner Tutsi’” and thus evidence of apparent disdain for Tutsis.32 Another interpretation is that Nyiramasuhuko targeted Tutsis during the conflict for ends that were politically and socially, rather than ethnically, motivated. Her grandfather’s experience might have instilled a fear of losing socioeconomic status, which was reignited during the RPF invasion. Nyiramasuhuko was possibly trying to guard her post because in pre-genocide times women were hardly present in government, and men held all governor and mayor positions.33 Ethnicity might also be overemphasized in analyses because of a general lack of awareness of the historical importance of socioeconomic status in ethnic categorizations in Rwanda, and the Tutsi survivor versus Hutu génocidaire binary which is the bedrock of the postgenocide Rwandan state. THE TRIAL

Nyiramasuhuko was treated as one of a kind, an exceptional perpetrator. In the words of Gentry and Sjoberg, “Pauline Nyiramasuhuko has been the ‘star’ of genocide narratives.”34 International and regional media headlines about her trial emphasized and oversensualized her womanhood, motherhood, monstrosity, sexuality, and drew links between them: “A Woman’s Work” (New York Times); “Woman-Monster” and “Rwandan Murderess” (Ynetnews); “Madame Genocide” (Daily Mirror, UK); “Minister of Rape” (Toronto Star); “Female Genocide ­Mastermind” (ABC, Australia); and “Mother and Son

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Genocidaires” (Arusha Times). Such sensationalism is also propagated by legal specialists and academics who, despite their calls for a nonsensationalized approach, nevertheless continue to employ catchy headlines.35 Nyiramasuhuko’s case shows how intersectional the Mother, Monster, and Whore paradigms are. Rather than suggesting that Nyiramasuhuko participated in the crimes because she was a mother trying to protect her symbolic or real sons, an expected argument from the Mother narrative paradigm, Nyiramasuhuko was cast as a MotherMonster. Her deviance was accentuated precisely because she was a mother: “The Mother Who Awarded Rape for Murder” (Huffpost), “‘Matron’ Told Killers to Rape Tutsi” (Sunday Times, South Africa), and “Une criminelle aux airs de ‘mère-poule’” (Le Monde). Mark Drumbl fittingly noted that “Motherhood, in this regard, is not a shield so much as it is a sword. Motherhood presents a basis for Nyiramasuhuko to be cast as an even greater pariah—all the more abnormal than her male counterparts.”36 In this sense, Nyiramasuhuko was portrayed as worse and more unique than a génocidaire, as if somehow being a father and a perpetrator is not a common characteristic of male génocidaires. Reports and analyses related to Nyiramasuhuko also display an uneasy tension between her roles as a mother and a perpetrator of rape. As a woman, Nyiramasuhuko was supposed to be the most “legitimate” victim of sexual violence, yet she became the most “illegitimate” perpetrator of the same crime. As the first woman to be charged

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and convicted of rape as a crime against humanity, Nyiramasuhuko shattered the image of men being exclusive perpetrators of rape. Rape and the supposed exceptionality of a female rapist were thus emphasized in numerous headlines describing her. Among other accusations of perverse sexual activity, Nyiramasuhuko was claimed to have persuaded her son to commit mass rape. One rape victim mentioned that Arsène Shalom Ntahobali received permission from his mother.37 Nyiramasuhuko was portrayed as someone who encouraged, persuaded, and even commanded her son to take part in sexual violence, despite the ICTR finding that no superior-subordinate relationship existed between her and her son.38 Nyiramasuhuko was also framed in the Whore narrative in sources that highlighted her interest in sexual acts and emphasized her specific instructions to her son and the Interahamwe to engage in rape. Her actions were often told in the Whore narrative for, rather than protecting her son as a mother should, she was portrayed as turning her son into a murderous sexual predator.39 Despite this fixation on their mother-son dynamic, there was nothing unique about parent-child defendants at the ICTR or previous tribunals. For instance, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a pastor, and his son Gerard Ntakirutimana, a physician, were both convicted of genocide by the ICTR. However, this duo was referred to as “pastor and son,” not “father and son,” whereas Nyiramasuhuko and Arsène Shalom Ntahobali were publicized as

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“mother and son génocidaires,” rather than by their formal government or professional titles.40 Nyiramasuhuko’s status as a mother and as a deviant overpowered her professional status in analyses. Media sources contrasted these elements of Nyiramasuhuko’s character with her perceived femininity and modesty at the trial. Peter Landesman suggested that her appearance “resembled a schoolteacher” and described her “plain high-necked dresses that showed off the gleaming gold crucifix she usually wears.”41 He tried to reconcile the modest, teacher-like appearance he witnessed with “wild hairstyles and headdresses” that he heard Nyiramasuhuko sometimes wore. Landesman proposed that Nyiramasuhuko was “trying to disguise herself from witnesses asked to identify her” and had difficulty accepting Nyiramasuhuko as a multifaceted individual who challenged Western notions about African women.42 Danna Harman similarly wrote about Nyiramasuhuko looking like “someone’s dear great-aunt” with “hair neatly pulled back” and “heavy glasses beside her on the table.” She commented on Nyiramasuhuko adjusting “one of the shoulder pads of her pretty dress” and on her courtroom outfits, which included “a green flowery dress” and “a pressed cream-colored skirt and blouse.”43 Other than the obvious problem of blatantly sexist media coverage that focused on women’s clothing, such comments reinforced traditional gender norms through the disbelief that someone as feminine as Nyiramasuhuko could commit horrific crimes.

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Examining clothing would be more useful if, for example, we ask whether Nyiramasuhuko’s choice of attire had to do with her strategy to employ stereotypes associated with femininity in her criminal defense. During the genocide Nyiramasuhuko reportedly wore camouflage, a color heavily associated with her leadership role in the militia groups in Butare.44 Trying to cut ties with the militia and appear nonviolent, she abandoned this style of dress during her trial. She also tried to minimize her Africanness; Landesman’s reaction suggests that bright, traditional wear might have been seen as “too tribal” and “too wild.” Moreover, unless attending ceremonies, educated women in Rwanda rarely wear traditional dress, instead relying on Western-style outfits. Styling herself as a modest schoolteacher was the best possible choice of a public image. Nyiramasuhuko’s use of the crucifix was very similar to Plavšić’s strategy of trying to portray herself as an honorable and god-fearing Mother of the Serb nation. Nyiramasuhuko was likely aware that her actions during the genocide destabilized essentialist narratives on gender and consequently tried to fit into the frame of a “real” or “normal” woman who is peaceful, dignified, and restrained during the trial.45 Similar to Plavšić, Nyiramasuhuko and her defense team took opportunities to emphasize her womanhood and motherhood as proof of her pacifism, humanitarian contributions, and her innocence. In 1995, before her arrest, Nyiramasuhuko was interviewed by journalist Lindsey Hilsum while working

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in a Hutu refugee camp in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. Nyiramasuhuko said that she was serving orphaned and abandoned children in the camp and trying to reunite them with their parents. She emphasized that her activities in 1994 were in the interest of pacification: the writing of a pacification document, bringing order to the civilian-led violence, and controlling Tutsi extremist infiltrators.46 Regarding her role in the genocide, she had the following to say: “I’m ready to talk to the person who said I could have killed. It’s not possible. I couldn’t even kill a chicken . . . If there is a person who says a woman, a mother, could have killed I’ll tell you truly, then I am ready to confront that person.”47 Nyiramasuhuko’s husband and mother employed the same discourse that linked innocence with womanhood and motherhood in Rwandan culture. Her husband stated that “it was not culturally possible for a Rwandan woman to make her son rape other women. It just couldn’t have taken place.” Her mother similarly added: “It is unimaginable that she did these things. She wouldn’t order people to rape and kill. After all, Pauline is a mother.”48 The family’s narrative was in line with the opinion of certain Rwandan nongovernmental women’s organizations, such as the National Coordinator of Réseau des Femmes in Kigali who argued that “women have a different nature to men” and “if there had been more women in power, the genocide would not have taken place.”49 Nyiramasuhuko’s supporters were thus appealing to traditional Rwandan beliefs

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about women, as well as Rwandan and Western feminist approaches which essentialize women as peacemakers. Both those who defended Nyiramasuhuko and those who vilified her relied on gender stereotypes. For her supporters and defenders, she was especially innocent because she is a woman and a mother; for the victims and accusers, she was especially guilty and vicious because she is a woman and a mother.50 Some Rwandan lawyers and judges argued that “it was an aberration for women to have participated in the genocide . . . they could not have done such things as women, and therefore are not genuine women but deviants.”51 While Nyiramasuhuko and her defense team did not strategically manipulate gender essentialisms in her trial to the extent seen in the Plavšić case, there were certainly some identifiable moments. On one occasion Nyiramasuhuko was absent from the court “preferring, her attorneys told the court, to worship in chapel.”52 The defense took the opportunity to cast Nyiramasuhuko as a virtuous woman of faith who preferred to be judged by divine powers over the supposedly dubious witnesses the prosecution was calling to the stand. Defense attorney Nicole Bergevin portrayed Nyiramasuhuko as a helpless mother who “has only one concern . . . it is Shalom,” because her son too faced life imprisonment. Commenting on the trial for the New York Times, Bergevin emphasized that Nyiramasuhuko felt “helpless,” casting her client into the paradigm of a mother whose goals and actions are entirely

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determined by her devotion to her child.53 Having a Canadian female attorney represent Nyiramasuhuko and speak for her in the international press may also have been a strategic choice; presumably, Bergevin is well-versed in gender-based defenses at the international level. Gender was also a key component of the legal defenses of other Rwandan women accused of genocide-related crimes. The defense of Nyiramasuhuko’s daughter-in-law, Beatrice Munyenyezi, in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire relied entirely on a gendered narrative to prove her innocence. The defense did not address the accusations about Munyenyezi’s role in selecting the Tutsi women to be raped at a roadblock, but merely emphasized that “Munyenyezi was simply too busy caring for her baby and managing her pregnancy” to have committed any crimes.54 The trial of Yvonne Basebya in The Hague District Court in 2012, which resulted in a conviction for inciting genocide, involved gender stereotyping by both the prosecution and defense teams. Prosecutors referred to Basebya as a “genocide cheerleader” and “General Mother,” while the defense constructed the image of a “dedicated mother” who was “married to a respectable [Member of Parliament].”55 Although Nyiramasuhuko manipulated gender stereotypes in court and when speaking to the international press, her comments on gender were followed by her discussion of social status and education. Most analyses of Nyiramasuhuko overlooked these dimensions of her character. Like Plavšić, Nyiramasuhuko emphasized her advanced degrees

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and the unique position of a highly educated woman among a male-dominated elite. In Not So Innocent, Nyiramasuhuko was quoted saying, “The RPF have put on their list all intellectual Hutus. I’m amongst those Hutu who have been to university. I studied law. All women who went to university are seen as killers.”56 Juliana Niyirora, an old friend of Nyiramasuhuko, described Nyiramasuhuko as an ambitious, type-A character: “From her childhood Pauline had political ambition. She always wanted to achieve high. If she saw someone build a house, she wanted a bigger house. If she saw someone do well, she wanted to do better.”57 Similar to the defense tactics in Plavšić’s case, Bergevin attempted to distance Nyiramasuhuko from the genocidal intentions of other offenders. This proved difficult, considering that Nyiramasuhuko was tried in a group trial and was named one of five key members of the interim government in Prime Minister Kambanda’s confession and guilty plea to genocide.58 Nevertheless, Bergevin claimed that “[Nyiramasuhuko] was never known to be anti-Tutsi. I’m not saying that no one wanted the Tutsis to be exterminated. Probably there were, but it was not a plan. It was never the government’s intention. If it was, Pauline was not aware of it.”59 Bergevin also claimed that Nyiramasuhuko was not aware of the rapes taking place in Rwanda during the genocide. The defense sought to cast doubt on the alleged common plan, trying to distance Nyiramasuhuko from the “bad guys” in Rwanda’s criminal leadership. Similar to

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Plavšić’s goal at the ICTY, the objective was to diminish Nyiramasuhuko’s individual responsibility for the conception and execution of the genocidal plan by casting her as an unaware, uninformed, innocent victim of male leaders and suggesting that she was a passive participant. Bergevin and her team argued that the ICTR judges “should have sought out sufficient factual allegations of the criminal acts to which the Accused [were] connected through joint participation in a common plan” rather than relying on a broad allegation applied to all of the accused.60 Another complaint of the defense was that Nyiramasuhuko had to present her defense without knowing the evidence her coaccused would offer, which was a problem because of a conflict of interest with some of her co-accused.61 Whereas Plavšić was treated on an individual basis by the ICTY prosecution and defense, Nyiramasuhuko was definitely presented as part of the Rwandan criminal collective by the prosecution and the judges at the ICTR. Because Nyiramasuhuko was tried in a group trial with five men, opportunities for a gendered defense were limited, and she was perceived as one of the génocidaires. The court was not open to the argument that Nyiramasuhuko was a woman duped by genocidal men. For example, because Nyiramasuhuko attended the swearing in of Nsabimana as préfet of Butare, the judges determined that “by her presence and failure to dissociate herself from the content of Prime Minister Jean Kambanda’s and President Theodore Sindikubwabo’s speeches during the ceremony, Nyiramasuhuko effectively endorsed their

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inflammatory statements.”62 Her capacity to commit crimes was not questioned by the court. Just like the five men—Joseph Kanyabashi, Alphonse Nteziryayo, Elie Ndayambaje, Sylvain Nsabimana, and Arsène Shalom Ntahobali—she was accused of not only inciting, but aiding and abetting the population in the slaughter of Tutsis in an “efficient and unflagging manner.”63 While the ICTY prosecution and judges placed Plavšić, who held the most senior political post in Republika Srpska, in a secondary role and recommended a lighter sentence, the ICTR prosecution and judges put Nyiramasuhuko at the top of the criminal pyramid in Rwanda. The ICTY thus accepted a president—Plavšić— as having less superior responsibility than the ICTR did a minister—Nyiramasuhuko. Both women were clearly culpable, but Plavšić, who had a higher post, received a lighter sentence and was assigned less responsibility for her crimes while Nyiramasuhuko, who occupied a lower political and social status, was held to the same standard as the Rwandan male leadership. The ICTR judges argued that Nyiramasuhuko was well aware that massacres and rapes of Tutsis were taking place and repeatedly noted that Nyiramasuhuko was an integral member of the genocidal government: the Interim Government, including Nyiramasuhuko,64 did nothing to stop the massacres. Rather, the Interim Government, of which Nyiramasuhuko was a member, adopted directives and issued instructions which were designed to encourage the population to kill Tutsis.65

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As a member of the Interim Government, Nyiramasuhuko participated in many of the Cabinet meetings at which the massacre of Tutsis was discussed, and took part in the decisions which triggered the onslaught of massacres in Butare préfecture. There can be no other inference from these facts than that Nyiramasuhuko conspired with the Interim Government to commit genocide against the Tutsis of Butare préfecture.66

Nyiramasuhuko appealed her guilty verdict but the judges dismissed her challenge that she was not a superior responsible for rapes committed by the Interahamwe during attacks at the préfectoral office.67 Nyiramasuhuko’s trial judgment was neutral on gender. By remaining silent on Nyiramasuhuko’s gender, the ICTR differentiated itself from both the international media and the public supporters and detractors of Nyiramasuhuko, who sensationalized her role in the genocide. This gender-related reticence portrayed the court as an objective legal institution interested only in the facts. While Drumbl and Hogg mainly praised the ICTR for resisting gender essentialisms, they also noted that the silencing of gender resulted in missed opportunities, specifically in helping the audience understand the “why” of the crimes in question.68 By ignoring the potential role gender had in Nyiramasuhuko’s motivations, we are unable to learn about how masculinity and femininity were performed in the Rwandan context and affected violence overall. It is also probable that the ICTR did not feel equipped or qualified to address the element of gender in the conflict, especially in a case involving five men and one woman, and meticulously avoided this issue.

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Relying exclusively on gender to understand female war criminals diminishes their social, political, and material motives. Removing gender entirely, as the ICTR did in Nyiramasuhuko’s judgment, however, denies the gendered context in which the crimes took place. Gender relations in pre-genocide and genocidal Rwanda were “nuanced, complex, and dynamic.”69 Rakiya Omaar, codirector of African Rights, cautioned against falling into the reductionist argument of Rwandan women’s innocence in a patriarchal society, claiming that “the argument that women were helpless to act against the genocide is bullshit.”70 The ICTR may have been opposed to gender-based arguments and resistant to the appeals of the defense due to international pressure to find the Butare Six guilty of rape as genocide and rape as a crime against humanity. Although the ICTR employed quite progressive definitions of rape and sexual violence, it faced criticism and relentless pressure from women’s organizations to rectify historical ambivalence about wartime sexual violence by being more punitive and bringing about international condemnation of such crimes.71 The ICTR failed to indict sexual crimes at the beginning of its tenure and had significant delays in arresting and prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence, as well as a poor record in meeting the needs of witnesses.72 The ICTR made headway in 1998 in the case of JeanPaul Akayesu, which was the first time an international tribunal ruled that rape and other forms of sexual violence could constitute genocide. The expectation among

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women’s organizations, human rights activists, and legal specialists was that the Butare Six case needed to cement the precedent established in the Akayesu trial. The ICTR’s affirmation of Nyiramasuhuko’s guilt for rape as genocide reflects this objective: The Chamber [of judges] further found that Nyiramasuhuko ordered the woman to whom she distributed the condoms to: ‘Go and distribute these condoms to your young men, so that they use them to rape Tutsi women and to protect themselves from AIDS,73 and after having raped them they should kill all of them. Let no Tutsi woman survive because they take away our husbands’ . . . this circumstantial evidence shows Nyiramasuhuko’s intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, the Tutsi group.”74

The political motivation of the ICTR to find the Butare Six guilty of rape as genocide and rape as a crime against humanity differed from the ICTY’s political motivation to find a reconciliatory heroine in Plavšić and may have significantly influenced the course of the legal process. NYIRAMASUHUKO IN CONTEXT

Gender expectations of women being less likely to participate in genocide-related killing and organizing, as opposed to supportive roles, such as those identified in the Hutu Ten Commandments, and looting translated into particular outcomes in justice on a massive scale. Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Christopher Uggen, and Jean-Damascène Gasanabo examined 52,564 gacaca cases in the genocide orga-

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nizing and inciting category and 315,916 gacaca cases in the killing category. They found female defendants in 5.5 percent of those cases.75 Female perpetrators benefited from Rwandan gender norms that portrayed women as more peaceful. In the case of Nyiramasuhuko, nongender dimensions—such as rank and position—proved central, and she needs to be understood as a multidimensional perpetrator who was embedded in a variety of social and political structures. Oyèrónké Oyēwūmi appropriately reminds us to not forget fundamental factors such as age, class, kinship affiliation, marital status, rank, and seniority in our analyses of African women.76 The overemphasis on patriarchy in writing on African conflicts results in the erasure of women as political subjects and the gross distortion and misrepresentation of gender relations. For example, James Sias claimed that it is “unbelievable” that rape orders came from the Minister of Family and Women’s Development, while Landesman wrote that it is “shocking” that so many sexual crimes were orchestrated by Nyiramasuhuko, “whose very job was the preservation, education and empowerment of Rwanda’s women.”77 A more realistic view of Rwanda’s social relations would have recognized that the state at times acts to protect and empower some of its subjects and harm those that it does not consider as a legitimate part of society. Nyiramasuhuko’s position as a senior state official—as a Minister of Family and Women’s Development—gave her power to decide who was to be considered a legitimate citizen, as well as widespread access to

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women and familial relations, making it less, rather than more, surprising to learn of her crimes against Tutsi women and families. High-level génocidaires were much more likely to highlight “political betrayal/oppression/manipulation” and “victor’s justice” in the bias they experienced than gender.78 High-level perpetrators demonstrated remarkable resilience to gender-based discrimination. Valerie Bemeriki, who is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to planning and inciting genocide as a top RTLM journalist, spoke of political betrayal, victor’s justice, and her profession in her 2012 interview with Izabela Steflja in the Kigali Prison. While victor’s justice is not an excuse for Bemeriki’s crimes, several scholars have demonstrated that victor’s justice was indeed the outcome in postgenocide Rwanda, the most obvious proof being the fact that the RPF thwarted prosecutions of its own crimes.79 Bemeriki linked her participation in the genocide to childhood socialization that emphasized oppression by the Tutsi population and her post at RTLM. Another high-level perpetrator was the former Rwandan Minister of Justice, Agnès Ntamabyaliro, the only member of the genocidal government tried in Rwanda. Ntamabyaliro is serving a life sentence in isolation for planning and inciting genocide, complicity to murder, and conspiracy. In her analysis of Ntamabyaliro, Jacqueline Novogratz suitably focused on professional rank and material ambitions, rather than gender or ethnicity, writing that “Agnès stood as a reminder that power corrupts

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on an equal-opportunity basis.”80 The fact that Ntamabyaliro was tried in Rwanda from 2006 to 2009, rather than at the ICTR, decreased the international attention her case received.81 Consequently, and unlike Nyiramasuhuko, Ntamabyaliro was not demonized by the international media for failing Rwandan women and families despite the fact that she was one of the first women in Africa to serve in Parliament and held explicitly humanitarian roles, such as raising microfinance loans for Rwandan women in poverty. Nyiramasuhuko’s position in the government structure was not given the attention it deserves in analyses of her case the way that Ntamabyaliro’s or Adolf Eichmann’s positions were.82 Nyiramasuhuko’s case also highlights that gender stereotypes are applied differently to African women. Bias against Black African defendants is a legitimate criticism in international legal structures that operate with implicit racist understandings. As Holmes argues, “The division between the colonial and ‘native’ still exists today within the hierarchies of knowledge that separate the ‘civilized’ West from ‘barbaric’ Africa.”83 Characterizations of Africans are still restricted to “disorder,” “the reign of evil,” “melancholy,” “disease,” and “irrationality.”84 This bias is often internalized by African actors themselves, as seen in the South African Sunday Times, which referred to Nyiramasuhuko as the “Beast of Butare.” Race was a key factor in the UN tribunals’ different approaches to the role of gender, response to defense teams, and sentencing. While Nyiramasuhuko and her

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defense team tried to adopt the Mother narrative, which proved a successful strategy for Plavšić at the ICTY, the ICTR treated Nyiramasuhuko no differently than her ­co-accused and tried to fit her into the violent “African ­savage” stereotype. The two women who faced the UN tribunals were evidently culpable, but the one with more influence, the European, was considered less responsible for her crimes and received a lighter sentence. The other was deemed a Monster loyal to her “tribe,” one no different, and possibly worse, than African men driven by ethnic or tribal interests. Nyiramasuhuko was not “a new kind of criminal.”85 Her crimes were not unique. What was distinctive were the different ways in which various actors—including the prosecution, defense, judges at the ICTR, researchers, journalists, her accusers, and her defenders—reacted to her case. The typically gendered reactions that her case evoked are a consequence of the fact that society still struggles to talk about female perpetrators, particularly when their crimes are of a violent, sexual nature. While Nyiramasuhuko destabilized gender stereotypes, she also disrupted Western ideas of the “naked and victimized African woman” as the principal victim of Western and African men: an infant-like individual unable to fight for herself and in need of protection by Western feminists.86 Nyiramasuhuko thus presented a double dislocation for global archetypes of women, one based on the intersection of gender and race.

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Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison, is now synonymous with the excesses of America’s War on Terror. Once home to Saddam Hussein’s torturers, Abu Ghraib served as a U.S. Army Forward Operating Base and prison from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 until 2006. Renamed the Baghdad Central Correctional Facility, it held as many as 3,800 Iraqi detainees at a time—men, women, and children—and was known for riots, escapes, and other internal security issues. Unseen by the outside world, the torture continued. The world learned of U.S. military personnel’s abuse of Iraqi prisoners when CBS broke the story on the news program 60 Minutes II on April 28, 2004. Days later, the New Yorker published photos of the abuse alongside reporting by Seymour Hersh.1 The commanding officers operating Abu Ghraib knew of the abuse months before these journalistic revelations. “When I opened [the folder], the first thing I saw was a human pyramid with England. 71

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I was shocked . . .” recounts Janis Karpinski, the general responsible for the U.S.-run Iraqi prison system. “There is little Lynndie England, looking like some two-bit prison marm with that cigarette dangling out of her throat and her thumbs up.”2 Another photo depicted that same soldier, in a t-shirt and fatigues, holding what appeared to be a leash wrapped around the neck of a naked man. As journalist Mark Danner describes yet another photo, “[Private First Class] Lynndie England, she of the famous leash, frames the body like a car salesman displaying next year’s model, grinning back at the camera, pointing to its genitals with her right hand, flashing a thumbs-up with her left.”3 These photos placed then 21-year-old England at the center of the sexual and physical abuse meted out by U.S. Army personnel. U.S. President George W. Bush referred to the crimes at Abu Ghraib as “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops, who dishonored our country and disregarded our values” and expressed remorse. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took full responsibility for the abuses in congressional hearings that followed. However, by calling the Iraqis held prisoner at Abu Ghraib “detainees,” the Bush administration obfuscated whether they were entitled to Geneva Conventions protections as prisoners of war. The neutralized term simultaneously helped justify the detention of Iraqi women and children in a U.S. military facility. England is one of 11 soldiers charged in relation to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. These abuses met the international definition of war crimes—including torture, unlawful

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confinement, and outrages upon personal dignity—even if they were never prosecuted as such. The abuses included: punching, kicking, and slapping individuals; forcing men and women to remove their clothing and videotaping and photographing them; forcibly arranging individuals in sexually explicit positions; and forcing men to masturbate. The U.S. government continues to characterize the actions by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib as abuse, not torture. Referred to as the “face” of the Abu Ghraib scandal, England swiftly became the subject of an intense cultural fixation. England was understood primarily through the Whore frame, where her crimes were seen as tied to her sexuality, as evidenced by late-night talk show jokes and a slew of songs including “Dangerous Beauty” by the Rolling Stones (2005) and “Talking Lynndie England” by Oh No Ono (2006). Her assumed sexual curiosity, lack of sexual experience, and naïveté were acted out in pornography replicating the photographed scenes, while the acts of torture were referred to by Rush Limbaugh as “standard good old American pornography.”4 England’s romantic relationship—prohibited by military regulations—with another soldier and co-perpetrator and her resulting pregnancy provided additional fodder for the Whore frame. The birth of England’s son during her pretrial detention and his presence during her two courts-martial only drew more attention to her sexual behavior while a soldier. In her courts-martial, England’s defense team intentionally used her gender and status as a mother to minimize

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her role in the abuse by depicting her as sexually and emotionally exploited by an older, higher-ranked man. They argued that England was socially dysfunctional and vulnerable to exploitation due to a long-standing intellectual disability as well as her youth. In contrast, the prosecution argued that England’s low-rank and status as a follower did not negate her agency or responsibility for the prisoner abuse. Ultimately, perceptions of England’s culpability centered around whether England was irredeemable—a “bad apple” as she was referred to by President Bush—or someone ruined by the corrupting influence of a man and the Army, rather than her actual crimes. W H O I S LY N N D I E E N G L A N D ?

Born in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1982, Lynndie Rana England had an archetypal Appalachian childhood. One of three children, she grew up in a trailer park in Fort Ashby, a small town in West Virginia.5 Her father worked as a railroadutility worker, and her mother worked as a cleaner at the local retirement home and in a manufacturing plant. By all accounts, including her own, England’s family and childhood were not exceptional: “I mean, yeah, we were brought up right. If we were out of line, we got spanked. We got privileges taken away. We had chores to do, dishes. Mow the grass.”6 As a child, England was diagnosed with selective mutism and a learning disability. She did not speak in school until she was almost eight years old. She nevertheless had

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a wide group of friends and progressed regularly through school. England signed up for the U.S. Army Reserves in December 1999 as a junior in high school, over the objections of her parents. After graduating, she married her boyfriend and took a job at a chicken processing plant. England complained to her managers about food safety violations and abruptly quit after the plant’s managers did nothing in response.7 This episode would later be used as evidence of England’s ability to make independent, principled decisions. After being activated for deployment to Iraq in February 2003, England met Specialist Charles Graner. He would later direct many of the Abu Ghraib abuses. Based on explicit photos recovered from Graner’s computer during the investigation, their sexual relationship began at Fort Lee, Virginia, while England was still married.8 England was eventually cited under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for disobeying a lawful order to sleep only in her own bed and demoted from Specialist to Private First Class. She later divorced her husband. By May 2003, England and Graner’s 372nd Military Police Company had deployed to Al Hillah, Iraq, where it conducted law-and-order patrols and ran the local jail. Their unit moved to Abu Ghraib that October, where En­gland worked as a processing clerk. At Abu Ghraib, England became a regular visitor to the night shift in Tiers 1A and 1B, where Graner worked, despite being officially prohibited from the area. The two maintained a sexual

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relationship, and a little more than six months after the abuse scandal broke, in October 2004, England gave birth to their son, Carter, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. England faced two related courts-martial for her involvement in the prisoner abuse. The charges included assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of subordinates, indecent acts, and disobeying an order given by a noncommissioned officer. The first court-martial saw the judge reject a guilty plea that England’s lawyers had arranged due to conflicting testimony by Graner during the sentencing phase. In the second court-martial, England’s lawyers downplayed her role in the abuses and deflected culpability toward Graner. England was found guilty on seven of eight counts and sentenced to three years in a military prison. Following her early release in March 2007, England returned to Fort Ashby. Two years later, England authorized the release of her biography, Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World. She currently works odd jobs, including preparing tax returns, and periodically grants media interviews. SEXUALITY AND HIERARCHY AT A BU G H R A I B

Of the four court-martialed soldiers who opted to go to trial, England and Specialist Sabrina Harman were the first U.S. military women to face trial for significant warrelated crimes. Notably, their courts-martial were held in the United States, thousands of miles from their victims,

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while the male soldiers were tried at the Baghdad Convention Center. Restrictions on women’s combat participation had previously kept U.S. servicewomen far from enemy lines, but the scale of the Iraq War saw historic numbers of women deployed. While military women are not exceptional in the contemporary American context, they remain relatively marginal—holding steady at roughly 15 percent of the armed forces. These courts-martial provide the only examples of what military justice for war crimes looks like for American servicewomen. Narratives about England at the time of her trial focused on three key features: her gender, specifically as a female soldier; her sexuality, as a soldier engaged in prohibited sexual behaviors in both her personal life and in the prisoner abuse; and her role in the military hierarchy, as one of the lowest ranking soldiers involved. Analyses of England’s case emphasize how her identity as a young military woman violates conventional standards of femininity that differentiate between peaceful home life and the violence of the military. The idea that military women are unprepared for the rigors of war, both physically and emotionally, was a key argument of those opposing the full combat integration of women in the U.S. military.9 Despite England’s status as a soldier and someone with considerable power over the Iraqi prisoners whose paperwork she processed, England—who stands at five-foot, one-inch tall—was repeatedly identified by her fellow soldiers and in the media as “small,” “little,” and in one instance, “like a 14-year-old boy who shouldn’t have been

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there in the first place.”10 Karpinski noted, “I remember that her hand was very small. She was small, you know. Not assertive or aggressive. She seemed nondescript. Honestly, she was young and innocent. And I know those words don’t seem to apply to those pictures she was in.”11 These labels minimize England’s role in the Iraq War and in the prisoner abuse while reinforcing biases against women in the military. England’s case also challenges gendered assumptions about the acceptable bounds of military violence. As Sjoberg and Gentry note, “A soldier can engage in torture, but a ‘woman soldier’ cannot be a torturer.”12 This double stigma, as a woman who adopted a marginal role and as one who engaged in unauthorized violence, allows some to depict England as a sexually deviant Monster. The possibility that military women observed—and may have been directly involved in—acts of male-on-male rape established women’s participation in wartime sexual violence in a way that the American public had never before confronted: as victimizers rather than victims. Many observers remain divided on how the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the U.S. military influenced women’s participation in torture at Abu Ghraib. As Johanna Bond notes, “The Abu Ghraib abuse constructs women as perpetrators of sexual violence and victims of sexual stereotypes, resulting in an ambiguous form of agency.”13 Although it may be easy to blame the hypermasculine nature of the U.S. military for leading these woman astray, Cynthia Enloe reminds us that it is

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precisely because militarization advantages some women some of the time that it is difficult to assess its effects.14 In public commentary, the sexual nature of the Abu Ghraib abuse was occasionally attributed to the very existence of military women, as when Linda Chavez remarked, “They look like they’re showing off at some wild party, trying to impress everybody with how ‘cool’ they are.”15 Yet, the “wild” behavior of the male soldiers seen in the photos was not similarly interpreted. England, as the “bad girl” of Abu Ghraib, is often directly compared to Private First Class Jessica Lynch, an Army supply clerk who was captured by Iraqi forces on March 23, 2003.16 Both Lynch and England were from West Virginia, but the media’s treatment of their stories was dramatically different. Lynch was depicted as a naïve and harmless country girl who became a war hero. England was cast as an uncivilized, promiscuous Hillbillyturned-Torturer.17 The Hillbilly is a racialized, social construct that situates individuals from white, rural communities as near the bottom of the American social hierarchy. Fittingly, England was also near the bottom of the military hierarchy. The Hillbilly construct also comes with other associations, including poverty and limited access to education. The media and those who knew England personally did not hesitate to apply these stereotypes to her. Karpinski referred to England as “this impoverished, undereducated young woman,” despite the fact that England purportedly joined the Army reserves to help fund her college

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education.18 Journalist Tara McKelvey’s description of England’s family centers on their trailer park and the fact that no one in the family holds a college degree.19 The most frequent descriptor of England in media reports prior to her courts-martial was “pregnant out-of-wedlock,” something indicative of the social dysfunction associated with the Hillbilly construct.20 England’s own defense team did not hesitate to refer to her as socially dysfunctional.21 However, reporting on co-perpetrator Specialist Jeremy Sivits, a 24-year-old mechanic from Appalachia, did not deem his educational or socioeconomic background relevant to his crimes.22 England’s widespread depiction as socially dysfunctional aligns with less culturally specific depictions of women as “ruined.” According to Jennifer Lobasz: The prevalence of this trope made it all but inevitable that England, an unwed mother impregnated by an older man with a history of domestic violence, who had further compounded her situation by posing for sexually explicit pictures and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners, would be depicted as the epitome of the Ruined Woman.23

Rather than being seen as naïve, as her age might suggest, England was presented as incapable of making good decisions as evidenced by her divorce, pregnancy, and participation in torture. By extension, she was viewed as incapable of being a “good” mother. England’s defense team went so far as to argue that her son’s birth was a result of “sociological dysfunction.”24 England’s separa-

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tion from her son due to her imprisonment only bolstered this notion. As a so-called Hillbilly and as an enlisted reservist, England’s social status was seen by some observers as reinforcing her culpability. THE COURTS-MARTIAL

Similar to Biljana Plavšić’s and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s trials, England’s two courts-martial took place thousands of miles from where her crimes occurred and in the broader context of a series of related prosecutions. Of the 11 soldiers who were court-martialed following Article 32 hearings (roughly the equivalent of a grand jury trial in the civilian U.S. justice system), only four chose to face a trial; the rest pleaded guilty. England initially faced 19 counts and a maximum 38-year sentence based on charges filed at Fort Bragg. After the main military prosecutors dealing with the Abu Ghraib abuses relocated from Iraq, the charges were reduced and the court-martial was transferred to Fort Hood. In a court-martial trial, both the judge and the jurors are able to question the witnesses. England took the stand only during the mitigation or sentencing phase of both of her courtsmartial, when her punishment was to be determined by the court-martial’s members (the equivalent of the jury). England’s courts-martial garnered far more media coverage than those of individuals who were more deeply involved in the abuse. The resulting media reports were highly gendered.25 The press was quick to play up the “love triangle” between England, Graner, and Megan Ambuhl,

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another female soldier involved in the abuses. The New York Times referred to England’s court-martial as “a spectacle worthy of ‘As the World Turns,’” a soap opera.26 In her initial May 2, 2005, court-martial, England pleaded guilty to seven of nine counts against her as part of a pretrial agreement that would have her spend no more than 30 months in prison. England stated that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib had staged the scenes of humiliation and sexual abuse “for their own amusement.”27 Yet in her authorized biography, England repeatedly claims that her counsel pressured her into pleading guilty for the reduced sentence: “I was dead set against it, because you’d have to really feel that you were guilty, and I didn’t.”28 A mistrial was declared during the sentencing phase after Graner, testifying for the defense, argued that in one incident England was acting on his orders and that he believed his actions were legal. The judge, Colonel James Pohl, argued that a conspiracy to commit a crime could not exist if one party did not think a crime was being committed and declared England’s guilty plea invalid.29 A second court-martial began with the same judge presiding on September 21, 2005. England was represented by military lawyers and faced eight counts carrying a maximum sentence of 11 years. During the trial, the defense argued that England was a follower who did whatever Graner asked her to do because she was “smitten” with him.30 Expert witnesses testified that England was overly compliant, be it with Graner or other higher-ranked officers, if she perceived individuals to be authority figures.

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Compounding this disability-based compliant behavior were her depression, her fear, and her anxiety, which were stoked by the constant attacks on Abu Ghraib. Sociologist Stepan Meštrović, who worked for the defense, characterizes this narrative as “an abusive love story between Charles Graner, the ringleader of the night shift, and Lynndie England, the naïve ‘hillbilly’ from West Virginia.”31 In short, the defense argued that England was following Graner’s orders, not the Army’s, because she loved him. This narrative places England in the Whore frame while simultaneously infantilizing her as romantically naïve and blinded by love. Much of the court-martial testimony supported parts of the defense’s narrative. Her fellow soldiers characterized England as impressionable and under the influence of Graner, to whom she was completely devoted. Testifying for the prosecution, Sergeant Robert Jones described Graner as a charismatic personality who preyed on the weak and was even able to control those who outranked him.32 Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, Graner’s commanding officer, testified that England had blind faith and trust in Graner and would do “pretty much whatever he asked.”33 At least one soldier testified to hearing Graner tell England to get into the photographs.34 The charismatic and controlling nature of Graner was juxtaposed to the subdued and compliant nature of England. One defense witness, Dr. Xavier Amador, compared England’s relationship with Graner to that of a battered wife or abused child.35 Ryan Caldwell, a sociologist who

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assisted the defense, has argued that “looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs, everyone thinks England was abusing prisoners, but really Graner was abusing England.”36 At times, this line of argument absolves England of any responsibility for her actions, as when Caldwell argued that, “the overly compliant and overly reliant England was a victim of Graner’s abuse, but not a perpetrator, and not even a co-abuser.”37 In addition to her relationship with Graner, the defense focused on England’s supposed cognitive limitations and portrayed her as intellectually disabled. Dr. Amador suggested that England was incapable of evaluating her involvement in the Abu Ghraib abuses: “There’s no reflecting on her internal values about this or anything. It’s like a child in that way. It really is like a child.”38 The defense called the Mineral County West Virginia school psychologist, Dr. Thomas Denne, to testify on England’s behalf. Dr. Denne first evaluated England at the age of four. He stated that England had a language-based processing disorder that caused her to comply in the presence of authority figures and be anxious in social settings. He described how, on the Wechsler IQ test, England scored high on visual and low on verbal intelligence.39 Yet England had performed adequately in school, basic training, and the Army despite these limitations, giving rise to questions from the judge and the jurors as to how profound her cognitive limitations actually were.40 Despite this, Meštrović characterized England as “a person who had no idea of what was going on in the court-

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room or in the midst of chaos at Abu Ghraib . . . In the courtroom, she clearly could not comprehend what was happening. Experts established that she suffered from a serious cognitive deficit as well as PTSD. Sending her to prison came across as sending a disabled person to prison.”41 Contradicting the narrative that England was incapable of sound decisions was testimony that established her as an active participant in episodes of abuse and one who, paradoxically at times, demonstrated a reluctance to participate.42 Dr. Denne suggested that while in school England did her best “to avoid putting herself in situations where others were misbehaving.”43 Yet, her presence at and engagement in many acts of abuse at Abu Ghraib were corroborated by victims’ depositions, which referred to England as “the female wearing eyeglasses [who] was short and had short hair,” or “the short female soldier.”44 In some instances, England allegedly seemed to enjoy the abuse, laughing and having a good time as prisoners were stripped and stacked naked in a pyramid.45 One victim who was ordered to masturbate while looking at England said that “she was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts.”46 A soldier testified that he saw England, among others, watching the forced masturbation of a prisoner.47 However, England’s only direct act of abuse was an incident where she and another soldier walked or stomped on the hands and feet of prone prisoners. England provided her perspective in a sworn statement and in interviews following her trial. After outlining how she visited Tier 1A on the evening of her birthday to see

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her friends, even as seven prisoners were stripped and hooded, England recounted in her sworn statement that “CPL Graner and SSG Frederick wanted me to get beside [a hooded prisoner] and pose pointing at him masturbating for a picture. I really didn’t want to get that close [to] him masturbating, but posed for the picture anyway.”48 Five years later, England recalled the same episode in Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedures: england: At one point, six of the guys stopped. And the one guy kept doing it for, like, 45 minutes. No joke. The one guy that was still masturbating, that was the one picture with me in it. He wanted me in it, and I didn’t want to be in it. I was like “I’m not going over there.” morris: Who wanted you in it? england: Freddy! And then Graner joined in. Graner was like, “Yeah, just come on.” I was like, “No, I don’t wanna go over there.” And he’s like “Come on, just do it for me,” and this and that, I’m like, “Fine.”49

The relevance of peer pressure and group dynamics in explaining England’s behavior is difficult to evaluate. In her own account, England sought out her friends in Tier 1A, even though she was restricted from the area. When asked to participate in the abuse, she initially resisted or had internal misgivings but ultimately did what was asked, be it taking pictures of abused prisoners or posing in photos with them. England’s ambiguous agency is also seen in the infamous leash incident. Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, a Military

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Police officer, established that the prisoner in the photo weighed 80 to 95 pounds at most, less than England’s own weight at the time.50 According to England, “[Graner] gave me the end of the strap and took a picture. At any time, I did not drag or pull on the leash. I simply stood with the strap in my hand. ‘Gus’ [the prisoner] started to crawl on the floor and CPL Graner took another picture.”51 England describes herself as a passive participant in the abuse; both Graner and the victim have more active roles. Caldwell argues that this characterization of England is accurate: “Although England did not abuse the detainee . . . she was pictured alongside the detainees. She appeared guilty of these actions, but simply appeared in the photos themselves.”52 This gap between England’s depiction in the Abu Ghraib photos (thumbs up and smiling while men are tortured around her) and the actual acts she admitted to (holding a leash, stepping on fingers, taking photos, etc.) was left unresolved by her courtsmartial, which equated these different acts of abuse as “maltreatment.” The prosecution argued that England’s compliant personality and intellectual challenges did not excuse her behavior or its devastating consequences for the U.S. Army. “She can quit over bad chicken, but she can’t understand that making men masturbate is wrong? This is the same person? That’s what the defense wants you to believe,” argued the Army’s prosecutor. “No, she knows what’s right and wrong. She chooses not to do what’s right. She chose because she thought it was funny. Not because

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Graner thought it was funny, not because Harman thought it was funny, but because she thought it was funny.”53 Although the prosecution recognized England’s agency, it failed to consider the broader social and institutional environment that the abuse occurred in. The defense repeatedly tried to draw attention to the poor conditions and conflicting standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib. Other critics argued that the Abu Ghraib courtsmartial reflected a “disparity of discipline” by neglecting issues of command responsibility.54 Rather than holding senior officers responsible for the misconduct that occurred under their watch, Army commanders, who held prosecutorial discretion, chose to pursue the most punitive but least reformist approach by court-martialing enlisted soldiers. Ultimately, the objective of the Abu Ghraib courtsmartial was to deflect blame away from the Army and toward the individual perpetrators rather than establishing a broader system of accountability. As Judge Pohl proclaimed, “The Army is not on trial here.”55 England’s own feelings about the abuse and her relationship to the Army were absent from the second courtmartial trial. England apologized to “the detainees, their families, the Army, America, and to all the soldiers and their families.” She also apologized to Coalition Forces for retaliatory attacks that occurred in response to the photos. But she did not acknowledge any specific crimes that she herself committed nor did she express remorse. Her lawyers, however, expressed remorse on her behalf: “Of course she regrets things. Every one of us has done things in our

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teens and early twenties that we have come to regret.”56 Yet, England’s regret consistently focuses on the impact of the photos’ release rather than the acts of abuse that they documented. “Thinking back . . . I don’t want to say I matured more, but I realized that I was so naïve and trusting,” recalled England. “But what happens in war, happens. It just happened to be photographed and come out.”57 On September 26, 2005, England was found guilty of four counts of maltreating detainees, one count of conspiracy, and one count of committing an indecent act. She was sentenced by the court-martial’s members, all of whom were male officers of higher rank, to three years in prison, a reduction to the lowest rank, and a dishonorable discharge. England later appealed to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld the guilty ruling. ­England’s sentence was the harshest of all of the female soldiers charged in the abuse. Ambuhl pleaded guilty to one charge of dereliction of duty for failing to stop or report the abuse and was discharged from the Army without prison time. Harman was found guilty on six charges, sentenced to six months in prison, and received a bad conduct discharge. Multiple people, including Iraqi nationals, testified to Harman’s caring and supportive nature which helped to mitigate her sentence. England was released early, in March 2007, after serving 521 days at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Miramar, California. The male soldiers’ sentences varied based on their cooperation with the investigation. Sivits agreed to testify on behalf of the prosecution and was the first to plead

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guilty. In return, he was sentenced to one year of confinement, demoted, and received a bad conduct discharge. Frederick also pleaded guilty to multiple charges and agreed to testify against England, Graner, and others. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, but released after only three years. Graner, whose case went to trial, received the stiffest sentence as the ringleader of the abuses: 10 years in prison, demotion to the rank of Private with loss of pay, and a dishonorable discharge. He too was released early after serving six and a half years. Arguments that England and the other servicewomen involved in the abuse should not have received equal treatment as the servicemen, including prison time, are based upon the corrupting influence of Graner and the chaotic environment of Abu Ghraib more generally. Regina Titunik, for instance, argues that while female soldiers were responsible for acts of abuse, they inflicted less direct physical violence than the male soldiers and appeared to be followers rather than leaders in perpetrating the abuse.58 However, such arguments neglect the fact that women may have been involved precisely because their participation was expected to have a significant negative psychological impact on the male Iraqi prisoners due to cultural norms relating to the mixing of sexes.59 Weighing this potential psychological harm against physical harm complicates assessments of who was most deserving of punishment.

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ENGLAND IN CONTEXT

Had England not become the “face” of the Abu Ghraib abuse, she would likely be unknown. Instead, she remains an oft-cited example of how young military women can go terribly wrong. England’s behavior at Abu Ghraib can be understood, in part, in the context of the U.S. military’s unequal gender relations. In England’s own words, when you join the military, no matter what anybody says, it’s a man’s world. You have to either equal a man or be controlled by a man. If you wanna be their equal, you got to be strong. They’re gonna try to control you. You need to step up and tell them, you know, show them who’s boss . . . I mean, hell, if you’re in the military, you got a gun. Use it. If I would have thought about that, then by God, I would have. But I was blinded by being in love with a man.60

According to England, her ability to assert herself as a woman in a male-dominated institution was impaired by her relationship with Graner. Her ability to function as a soldier was compromised by her vulnerability as a woman in a man’s world. This tension is also identified by Karpinski, who argued that “the Army gave [England] a very tough job in an overwhelmingly masculine environment. And she responded as other young women have, seeking out men to prove to themselves that they are still women.”61 The idea that participation in a patriarchal and hierarchical institution such as the U.S. military compels women to assert their femininity and sexuality feeds narratives that

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imagine servicewomen as Monster-Whores who deviate so far from traditional notions of femininity as to be unrecognizable. Yet women’s agency need not only be understood through their relation to men. England was another poor, young recruit who enlisted with the belief that the Army could provide opportunity. At Abu Ghraib, she willingly entered prohibited areas to hang out with her friends. She not only failed to report the acts of abuse she saw there, she photographed and participated in them. Later, she pleaded guilty in order to receive a reduced sentence. Neither the military nor a man compelled her to do these things, though both shaped the environment that she experienced at Abu Ghraib. England bore the brunt of the public’s fascination with the Abu Ghraib abuses due to her gender and her low social status. Despite her role as a uniformed combatant, England’s status as a so-called Hillbilly differentiates her from the social and political elite that Plavšić and Nyiramasuhuko were part of as government officials. England’s already marginal role as an enlisted female reservist was reimagined using the Hillbilly lens to cast her as a socially dysfunctional Whore. The monstrosity of a woman’s participation in wartime abuses was heightened by England’s pregnancy and the birth of her child with a co-perpetrator. Negative tropes remain prevalent in writing on England, making it less surprising that England feels the tortured Iraqi detainees “got the better end of the deal,” while she suffers from depression and underemployment.62

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England’s case also provides insight into the repercussions of prosecuting the rank-and-file while allowing highranking officials to evade justice. England and the other court-martialed soldiers were situated at the bottom of the ranks. As Graner’s defense team argued, “In Nuremberg, it was generals who were being prosecuted. It was order-givers who were being prosecuted . . . Here, the government is going after the order-takers.”63 Those involved insist that they were just following the lead of their military superiors. “We didn’t kill them. We didn’t cut their heads off. We didn’t shoot them. We didn’t cut them and let them bleed to death,” England argued in Standard Operating Procedures. “We just did what we were told, to soften them up for interrogation. And we were told to do anything short of killing them.”64 England’s insistence that she was simply following orders serves two purposes. First, it absolves her of personal responsibility. Second, it deflects guilt toward the chain of command. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, commanders can be held liable for the criminal acts of their subordinates if they know, or should have known, about criminal activity but did not take steps to prevent it or to punish the perpetrators.65 Some higherups did see their career advancement blocked or were demoted, including Karpinski—the first woman commander in a combat zone in U.S. military history. Yet despite being part of a powerful institution, England was held responsible for her actions as an individual while the

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collective in charge—be it her commanding officers or the generals atop the military hierarchy—escaped punishment. Following years of government investigations, the allegation that soldiers were directed to commit some acts of abuse has considerable support. For instance, the removal of detainees’ clothing as an interrogation procedure can be traced back to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, where the Bush administration determined the Geneva Conventions did not apply.66 A 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that the Abu Ghraib abuse was not simply the result of “a few bad apples” acting on their own.67 Despite this, the only Army officer to face court-martial over the prisoner abuse, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, was acquitted.68 England’s defense was unable to raise these issues in her courts-martial, a justice process controlled by the military. Instead, her lawyers offered a gendered defense based on England’s abuse by Graner, not the military’s role in creating conditions conducive to torture or ignoring abusive acts. Both the defense and the military justice process more generally individualized blame because military justice is not designed to address underlying, systemic problems like the ones that facilitated the Abu Ghraib abuses. The lesson of England’s courts-martial is that women soldiers will face military justice. When they do, they will be judged for failing not only as soldiers, but as women.

4   T H E S T U D E N T: H O DA M U T H A NA

The abrupt rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group was fueled by the group’s strict ideology, extreme performative violence, and promises of life under an idealized Muslim state or caliphate, all broadcast globally via social media. In response, thousands of individuals from roughly 90 countries traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS. Thousands more were voluntarily or forcibly recruited from local populations that fell under the group’s control. Between June 2014 and December 2018, ISIS controlled swaths of territory in Libya, Syria, and Iraq and fielded between 35,000 and 100,000 fighters.1 ISIS deliberately targeted civilians and perpetrated mass executions, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, enslavement, rape, and sexual abuse. According to the UN, ISIS committed systematic and widespread violence which may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.2 Although the full extent of ISIS’s horrors is still being uncovered, roughly 3,100 members of 95

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the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq were murdered or died as a result of ISIS’s siege of Mount Sinjar in August 2014.3 Thousands more were kidnapped and forced into slavery. In Raqqa, Syria, at least 16 mass graves have been identified, containing more than 5,000 bodies.4 The overall civilian death toll remains disputed, but at least 18,800 civilians were killed by ISIS in Iraq alone during the first two years of war.5 Women’s participation in these crimes received scant attention while the conflict was ongoing. However, by June 2018 roughly 13,500 foreign women and children from at least 51 countries were living in ISIS-held territory in Syria and Iraq.6 Both local and foreign female ISIS members joined the religious police or h. isbah and used intimidation, violence, and torture against other women to enforce ISIS’s interpretation of shari’a law.7 ISIS’s h. isbah flogged and tortured women pulled from the streets for infractions such as wearing nail polish or an abaya made of an unapproved fabric.8 Single women between the ages of 18 and 25 were recruited into the armed, all-female Al-Khansaa brigade, which helped police ISIS-controlled territory. As ISIS’s control collapsed, women were depicted as taking up arms, although women’s participation in armed combat on behalf of ISIS has yet to be confirmed.9 Hoda Muthana, a 20-year-old college student, left Alabama to join ISIS in the fall of 2014. Her precise motivations remain unclear. In media interviews, Muthana has mentioned a misguided religious devotion; a desire to

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escape the social and cultural confines of her family; and the need to avoid a forced marriage to a cousin from Yemen.10 After joining the group, she allegedly served as an important mouthpiece for ISIS by writing social media posts extolling the virtues of the terrorist group and criticizing those who failed to support it. One tweet Muthana acknowledged writing urged terrorist attacks against Americans: “You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades . . . go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them.”11 Muthana stands accused of membership in ISIS and inciting terrorist acts against U.S. President Barack Obama, American citizens, and the West more generally. Similar to the furor surrounding Lynndie England’s courts-martial for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Muthana became the center of an international media frenzy in early 2019 when she was discovered in a displaced persons camp in northern Syria. Her case is part of a complex international legal debate that includes issues such as how the rights of the women and children affiliated with ISIS should be balanced against the need for justice for ISIS’s war crimes and who, ultimately, should be responsible for holding ISIS members to account. As of our writing, these questions remain far from settled. Although Muthana seemingly fits a post-9/11 stereotype of religiously justified Arab or Muslim terrorists, her defenders have highlighted her youth and sheltered,

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suburban upbringing as the primary explanations for her decision to join ISIS. Beyond traveling to Syria to join the group—an act that is illegal under U.S. law—she has admitted to no crimes. In a Fox News interview, Muthana responded to a question about why she joined ISIS with simply “no comment” and a chuckle.12 Research suggests, however, that while men disproportionately commit terrorism-related offenses, women who engage in terrorism tend to commit similar crimes.13 Despite this, female terrorists have systematically received more lenient sentences in the United States.14 Female terrorists have also emerged as subjects of widespread media fascination, potentially reinforcing their differential treatment by the American criminal justice system. In addition to the gender gap in terrorism prosecutions and sentencing, Muthana’s case highlights other significant fault lines in the treatment of women war criminals including race, nationality, religion, age, and parental status. WHO IS HODA MUTHANA?

Hoda Ahmed Muthana was born on October 28, 1994, in Hackensack, New Jersey, to immigrant parents, Ahmed Ali Muthana and Basma Mohamed Eshayri. Her father had recently been relieved of his duties as First Secretary of Yemen’s delegation to the UN but chose to remain in the United States due to the outbreak of civil war in Yemen. The family of seven eventually settled in Alabama and purchased a home in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover.

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Muthana’s upbringing was strict and traditionalist. “My household wasn’t a happy one. My father traveled a lot. I got along with my siblings well but my relationship with my mother was always strained,” she remarked to USA Today.15 By all accounts, Muthana rarely socialized outside of school and had few friends. A classmate’s video from 2011 shows Muthana joking about dropping bombs on her high school with a lightly veiled reference to the September 11, 2001, attacks. With her face covered by a bright blue scarf, leaving only her eyes exposed, Muthana says menacingly, “Oh, we’re doing it today? Nine o’clock? 9:11, oh. We drop the bombs at Hoover High School. Right on D Hall, the broadcasting class, because I just hate that class and I need to get revenge. Okay, 9:11.”16 Such juvenile behavior seems distant from her later embrace of ISIS. Muthana has identified her family’s restrictions on her social interactions as a factor in her radicalization arguing, “You want to go out with your friends and I didn’t get any of that. I turned to my religion and went in too hard. I was self-taught and thought whatever I read, it was right.”17 After graduating from Hoover High School, Muthana enrolled in a business degree program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. She was also given her first smart phone by her parents. Even though her father regularly checked the apps on her phone, Buzzfeed’s Ellie Hall reports that Muthana’s “‘jihadi’ evolution was both influenced by and supported by social media.”18 Muthana secretly set up a Twitter account in 2013 and eventually had thousands of followers. From Syria, she would later

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claim that, “Sometimes I think if I didn’t have Twitter, I wouldn’t be here.”19 Muthana withdrew from university in November 2014 and used her tuition reimbursement to buy a plane ticket to Turkey.20 She told her parents and siblings that she was traveling two hours away to Atlanta, Georgia, on a school trip. From Turkey, she was trafficked across the border into Syria. She then contacted her family to explain her disappearance; they, in turn, contacted the FBI. Muthana’s father reported shock and dismay at the idea that she had traveled to Syria by herself to join ISIS. Yet Muthana herself reflected that, “They didn’t know I was leaving, but they had an idea. They’d see news reports about girls who have made it and say things like, ‘Hoda would probably do that.’”21 She later claimed on Twitter that she had spent almost a year preparing for the trip.22 Muthana recalled seeing ISIS as an opportunity. “I jumped for it because I felt like I could do whatever I want with my future.”23 In Raqqa, Muthana was placed in a guesthouse with dozens of other women. After rejecting her first suitor, she married Suhan Rahman, a 23-year-old Australian who also dropped out of college and went by the nom de guerre Abu Jihad al-Australi. Muthana adopted the social media moniker Umm Jihad (Mother Jihad) and developed a close circle of friends among ISIS’s English-speaking members.24 When Rahman was killed in the battle of Kobane less than three months into their marriage, Muthana entered a period of mourning before marrying a 19-year-old Tunisian, Osama

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Ziad, who was killed when Muthana was approximately seven months pregnant. She gave birth to her son, now identified as Adam Muthana, in Raqqa. Her third husband, whom she has mentioned in interviews as being divorced from but has not publicly identified, has not been accounted for.25 The world beyond Hoover, Alabama, learned about Muthana in April 2015 in reporting by Hall, who maintained sporadic communication with her over the course of four years.26 “With a chatty ease, Muthana tweeted for her Muslim ‘sisters’ in the U.S. to join her in Syria and denounced her own father on Instagram,” Hall wrote. “She praised the deaths of Americans at ISIS’s hands and encouraged vehicular attacks worldwide. She encouraged horrific attacks that have killed thousands of people around the world—including dozens in the very nation she wants to call home once again.”27 The social media posts Hall documented are characteristic of ISIS propagandists who used multiple platforms and user names to avoid having their content blocked. According to Muthana’s lawyers, she fled ISIS-controlled territory with her son in mid-December 2018. “I was trying to find a way out for a while. When I finally did, I just walked out really,” recalled Muthana.28 She surrendered to opposition Kurdish forces in Syria on January 10, 2019, and was placed in the al-Hol displaced persons camp. The camp rapidly swelled following the defeat of ISIS in Baghouz in March 2019, eventually holding over 68,600 individuals—94 percent of whom were

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women and children.29 Muthana and her son were later transferred to the nearby al-Roj camp after threats were made against her. As of March 2020, Muthana lives with her son in a tent in al-Roj, among 4,000 other women and children affiliated with ISIS. I D E O LO G Y A N D T E R RO R I S M I N T H E I S L A M I C S TAT E

The media has typically framed Muthana and other young Western women who joined ISIS as “Jihadi Brides,” duped into joining the group by “Jihotties”—young, attractive terrorist fighters looking for wives.30 Most headlines refer to Muthana simply as “the ISIS Bride.” As Alice Martini argues, this label attaches a woman’s project to a man’s agenda and acknowledges women’s agency only within the framework of marriage.31 Emphasizing the supposed romanticism of young women who successfully evaded intelligence agencies to travel to a war zone downplays the very real engagement of these women with ISIS’s ideology. In Muthana’s case, there is no evidence that she joined ISIS because she was persuaded to by a man, nor did she do so for the primary purpose of getting married. Such frames also ignore the degree of planning required to travel to Syria or Iraq. Muthana’s alleged tweets to women wanting to join ISIS advise, “Don’t rely on anyone. Don’t plan with anyone, don’t wait on anyone.”32 The Jihadi Brides label additionally contrasts with the common category that the media and

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governments adopted in reference to Western men who joined ISIS: Foreign Terrorist Fighters. ISIS and its ideology explicitly appealed to women. A 2015 manifesto on women in ISIS described the woman’s role as the behind-the-scenes guardian of society—“the producer, the most important figure in the media work”— as the most difficult one.33 It argued that “while Islam hands the reins of leadership over to man, it grants woman the honor of implementation.”34 Similar to National Socialism in interwar Germany and Hutu extremist ideology during the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS created an ideological space and a physical place for women to express their commitment to the group. Glossy magazines and slickly produced videos called on women to participate in defensive jihad, in part by serving as wives and mothers.35 Drawing on women’s participation in prior conflicts in Iraq and Chechnya, ISIS’s ideologues argued that women were also required to participate in jihad if the efforts of men proved insufficient.36 Some women answered ISIS’s call to build a new caliphate by bringing their children to an active war zone. ­Others sought to create new families upon their arrival. Researchers contend that up to 60 percent of the minors associated with ISIS were born while the conflict was ongoing.37 ISIS’s social policy provided for women, who received monthly financial support for their children. Women played an essential role in training Cubs of the Caliphate, male children who were to become fighters and suicide bombers and who featured heavily in the group’s

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propaganda.38 As Vale notes, “An [ISIS] pamphlet, entitled ‘Sister’s Role in Jihad,’ advises mothers to read bedtime stories of fighters and martyrs; to encourage target practice through archery and play with toy guns; and to educate them in the correct targets for violence.”39 The existence of traditional family life alongside participation in a violent terrorist group has led to competing narratives of women in ISIS as victims and as perpetrators. For some, ISIS women are victims of the group’s patriarchal structure, which placed its female members in the role of “good” and subservient women who took care of their husbands and children. Nelly Lahoud describes ISIS’s messaging as “privileging dominant masculinity” through its emphasis on segregation of the sexes and governance of the domestic sphere.40 In some accounts, ISIS women are depicted as depraved mothers who dragged their innocent children into a life of suffering. Physical manifestations of women’s so-called radicalization, such as the adoption of more conservative Islamic dress such as a burqa or niqab, have been identified by analysts as evidence of patriarchal repression. A fixation on outward appearance was especially true in reporting on white European or North American female ISIS recruits.41 Others raise the concept of perverse empowerment, where women succumb to a version of feminist jihadism that subjugates women through strict religious and gendered expectations of social behavior. Still other Western perspectives on women in ISIS label them as “bad” women who blur the boundaries between the West and the Mus-

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lim world by taking elements of their Western life into a “terrorist” world.42 In the media, however, the age and gender of young Western women in ISIS are depicted as interacting in ways that make them especially vulnerable to recruitment through social media channels.43 English-language reporting frames young women who joined ISIS as manipulated, controlled, or otherwise lacking choices. They are characterized as seduced, preyed upon, or held against their will.44 When pleading to be allowed to return to the United States, Muthana has repeatedly referred to herself as “brainwashed,” “traumatized,” and “manipulated” by ISIS.45 Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shajkovci rely heavily on this narrative in their analysis of Muthana, claiming that, “She, like other naïve and impressionable youth, fell for it all.”46 While online recruitment was a core strategy of ISIS, overemphasizing the power of recruiters erases women’s agency and ideological commitment to the group. As Sjoberg observes, “Many of the news stories about female fighters, jihadi brides, or female members of IS[IS] more broadly tell stories . . . effectively removing choice from female perpetrators, instead treating them as victims of both IS[IS] and flaws in their own femininity.”47 Narratives of entrapment or subjugation are often contradicted by women’s public ideological statements and their own accounts of their reasons for joining ISIS. One analysis of the social media activity of 17 Western female ISIS recruits finds that, although these women were driven by

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a gendered religious ideology to join the group, feelings of isolation and disaffection were at play for both female and male recruits.48 The Jihadi Brides narrative was strongly rejected by Muthana, who asked BuzzFeed ’s Hall to: Tell the West we didn’t come here because we want to be jihadi wives. If that were the case you’d see most of us trying to go back. Who would risk everything they know and own to have a marriage thats span isn’t guaranteed for the next day. And if one came for marriage then in that i still say there is nothing wrong in it for muslim women should refrain in marrying men who are not in jihad or support it. We came because it’s an obligation upon us upon every muslim to unite under one Khilafah [caliphate], we came because it’s impermissible for us to live under the laws of man, we came so we can live under justice ie. Shar’iah law.49

In addition to clearly articulating women’s agency in joining ISIS and their ideological alignment with the group, Muthana’s statement frames women’s actions as in line with God’s laws, if not man’s. It also situates women’s individual actions within a collective frame of action: the founding of a Muslim state or caliphate as an obligation that ISIS believers consider every Muslim subject to, regardless of gender, race, or nationality. This perspective is wholly absent in media reporting, which focuses on individual storylines rather than situating women’s stories in the context of the mobilization of thousands of people from around the world based on ISIS’s interpretation of religious identity and belonging.

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Even after the collapse of ISIS’s caliphate in Syria, some women remained committed to the group’s ideology. For instance, women and children briefly raised ISIS’s black flag in a Syrian displaced persons camp in July 2019.50 Reports of violence committed by female ISIS detainees in Syria, including the stabbing of Kurdish guards and the murders of an Azerbaijani teenager and an Indonesian woman, suggest that some female ISIS members are ready to use violence when given the opportunity.51 This stands in contrast to Muthana’s claim that “Really, women didn’t have a role [in ISIS] at all. We just sat at home and cooked and cleaned. That was very depressing for me because that was my way of living.”52 Making this claim problematic, Muthana’s alleged social media posts documenting ice cream sundaes, chocolate pancakes, and elaborately frosted cakes in the midst of war are, nonetheless, intermingled with praise for terrorist attacks in Europe, calls for attacks in America, and advice to other women seeking to join ISIS.53 The relative youth of many female ISIS members and their potential victimization at the hands of spouses, parents, and the terrorist group raise legitimate concerns regarding their culpability in ISIS’s crimes. However, concerns about parental pressure, online grooming, or brainwashing are rarely extended to the thousands of young men who joined the group voluntarily or through coercion. Aided by the international media, women in ISIS have heavily relied on a narrative where youth, victimization, motherhood, and widowhood combine in favor of

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the argument that women have already suffered profoundly for their decision to join the terrorist group. That the women, and not the men, of ISIS are able to press such claims reflects the deeply gendered bias in both media portrayals and the legal treatment of ISIS members. THE CASE

Muthana’s court case did not result in a legal judgment regarding her alleged war crimes, nor did it even go to trial. Instead, the case examined Muthana’s right to return to the United States, which would have provided a mechanism for her prosecution in U.S. federal court. In contrast to other American women who joined ISIS, the U.S. government did not seek Muthana’s return. Instead, it argued that Muthana should not be allowed back to the country of her birth because she is not a U.S. citizen. However, Muthana’s membership in ISIS and potential war crimes animated the case. At the heart of the case was the 2016 decision by the U.S. Department of State to strip Muthana of her U.S. passport based on a revised understanding of her father’s diplomatic status. The State Department concluded that Muthana’s father was still subject to diplomatic immunity when she was born. Therefore, according to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, she was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and not entitled to birthright American citizenship. When the State Department revoked her passport in January 2016, Muthana had been living in

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ISIS-controlled territory for more than a year. Three years later, Muthana’s father contested the State Department’s decision and sued Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, President Donald J. Trump, and Attorney General William Barr in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Acting on his daughter’s behalf, Ahmed Ali Muthana argued that the United States had a pressing legal obligation to repatriate Muthana and her son from Syria given her previous eligibility for a U.S. passport, a benefit which is extended only to American citizens. On the surface, the case seemed to be about a narrowing definition of rightful American citizenship. President Trump’s tweets about Muslim immigration and about Muthana herself were raised in court filings and media coverage.54 However, the case was also part of an international debate about how to bring members of ISIS and other terrorist groups to justice and who has the obligation to do so. In this context, there was little dispute over the basic facts of Muthana’s crimes. Both the U.S. government and Muthana’s lawyers acknowledged that she traveled to Syria with the intent of joining ISIS and was present in ISIS-controlled territory and in the company of ISIS fighters.55 These actions are prohibited under the USA Patriot Act.56 Where the two sides differ is what the United States is required to do in response to Muthana’s actions. Her lawyers argued that the State Department’s exhortations that other nations repatriate and prosecute their citizens implied that the United States is itself obligated to

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repatriate Muthana and her son.57 Her lawyers suggested that Muthana would surrender to face federal charges following her repatriation. The U.S. Department of Justice, on the other hand, argued that the government has no legal obligations toward noncitizens and that the challenges Muthana faced in Syria were a mess of her own making.58 Secretary Pompeo went one step farther, arguing that, “She put American soldiers’ lives at risk . . . this woman chose to use her life to try and kill those people.”59 Although the Obama administration made the decision, members of the Trump administration framed the revocation of Muthana’s citizenship as a punishment for her contribution to ISIS. Comparing Muthana’s case to that of Samantha Elhassani highlights how unique it is in terms of the United States’ treatment of women terrorists. In contrast to Muthana’s contested nationality, Elhassani’s status as a “typical” white American woman is unmistakeable. A video from her wedding to Moussa Elhassani in 2012 shows her with dyed blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and multiple tattoos. Photos from a displaced persons camps in Syria show Elhassani wearing blue jeans and sweaters with her hair uncovered. Elhassani asserts that she is a Christian and never adhered to ISIS’s ideology. Instead, she claims that her husband joined ISIS without her knowledge and duped her into traveling to Turkey with her children under the guise of a vacation.60 Referred to as “An American Mom Who Lives under ISIS Rule,” “An American Woman Inside the Islamic State,” or

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“The American Woman Forced to Join ISIS,” the media depicted Elhassani as being outside or separate from ISIS, even though she allowed her eldest son (from a previous marriage to an Iraq War veteran) to be trained in firearms, used in ISIS propaganda videos threatening President Trump, and armed with a suicide belt.61 The U.S. government was harsher in its interpretation of her actions, arguing that, “Due to her reckless and selfish behavior, [Elhassani] endangered the lives of her children and facilitated the use of her son as a trainee and propaganda tool for a savage foreign terrorist organization.”62 Elhassani has also acknowledged that she and her husband purchased three Yazidi children as slaves; the two girls were repeatedly raped by her husband while the boy was used in ISIS propaganda videos.63 In late 2017—a full year before Muthana fled ISIS— Elhassani left ISIS-controlled territory and voluntarily surrendered to Kurdish forces after her husband was killed fighting for ISIS. She was transferred into U.S. custody and flown back to the United States with her four children—two of whom were born in Syria—on a military plane. Elhassani was charged in August 2018 for conspiracy to provide material support to ISIS.64 Her lawyers argued that she was a victim of “domestic violence and patriarchal abuse” and that her case was effectively a proxy prosecution of her deceased husband, who forced her to go to Syria.65 However, in advance of her January 2020 trial, Elhassani pleaded guilty to a single count of financing terrorism with a maximum potential sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.66

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While Muthana could not claim she was forced to join ISIS by a man, she has tried to downplay her culpability by emphasizing her youth and poor judgment. “Once I look back on it, I can’t stress how much of a crazy idea it was. I can’t believe it. I ruined my life. I ruined my future,” she said to the New York Times.67 Muthana repeatedly referred to herself as “a teenager” when she left Alabama despite being a 20-year-old college student. In a Guardian interview, she said that she would tell U.S. government officials, “Please forgive me for being so ignorant, and I was really young and ignorant and I was 19 when I decided to leave.”68 One lawyer for the Muthana family described her as “just a girl who was unhappy with her life and was given an opportunity for an adventure” and as “a young, vulnerable woman who was brainwashed and manipulated by monsters who took advantage of her.”69 These statements strip Muthana of any agency or responsibility. More importantly, they contradict Muthana’s assertion in social media posts from Syria that, “I have more freedom here than any muslim male in the west.”70 Muthana demonstrated her agency not only in leaving her family to join ISIS, rejecting her initial suitor and independently choosing her first husband, but also in successfully leaving the terrorist group as well. Muthana’s agency is also evident in changes to her public image over time. In her first television interview, Muthana dressed similar to other women in ISIS: wearing a jilbab—a long, flowing dark outer garment—and a black head covering. By her second interview, her royal

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blue hijab, red shirt, and thick black eyeliner stood out— the latter because makeup was banned by ISIS. Muthana subsequently adopted a light brown hijab and a red polka dot shirt with pants. Her shift in dress over the course of 2019 can be interpreted as a repudiation of ISIS’s ideology, as well as the strategic manipulation of her appearance for international audiences. The media gave Muthana an opportunity to tell her side of the story and, as Pauline Nyiramasuhuko did at the ICTR, Muthana may be using dress to project a certain image. For Muthana, that may mean dressing as “American” as possible, as she did in high school, by wearing bright colors and makeup. That her media appearances are cited in her family’s legal filings suggests a coordinated attempt to craft a plausible defense. In addition to emphasizing her youth and naïveté, Muthana has crafted a narrative of redemption where she has come to understand the error of her ways through suffering: “I am the one who has to live with my foolish and rash teenage decision for the rest of my life. What’s inside my mind is torture enough. People believe I should do time in jail, but I’ve been doing time since I got to Syria.”71 The death of her first husband fighting for ISIS is framed as part of this suffering: “I was still at the peak of being brainwashed I guess and I had people all around me that were just widowed so we were very angry . . . because we were all just young girls married for the first time—most of us it was our first relationships—and then he just suddenly died.”72 Muthana has repeatedly referred to eating grass as the breaking point in her commitment

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to ISIS. This deprivation contrasted sharply with the opulence of her early social media posts. “Seeing a potato was like seeing a Lamborghini,” she told the New York Times.73 Her disillusionment with ISIS is clear: “During my years in Syria, I would see and experience a way of life and the terrible effects of war, which changed me. Seeing bloodshed up close changed me. Motherhood changed me. Seeing friends, children and the men I married dying changed me. Seeing how different a society could be compared to the beloved America I was born and raised into changed me.”74 Muthana’s status as a mother is intertwined with this redemption narrative. In almost every interview she gave in 2019, Muthana played with her son or cradled him. Her portrayal as a devoted single mother struggling with “first-time mom syndrome” shapes perceptions of her current vulnerability in a Syrian displaced persons camp.75 “I ruined my life. I’ve ruined it. I ruined my son’s future, but I wouldn’t have had a son if I didn’t come. That’s the only regret I don’t have,” she said to a CBS reporter.76 As a result, Muthana has the complex persona of a devoted mother who may have nevertheless been complicit in ­terrible crimes. Yet, in contrast to Nyiramasuhuko and England, Muthana’s status as a mother is rarely used as evidence of her monstrosity. Only one article from USA Today stands out in this regard for noting that, “What [Muthana’s son] Adam couldn’t know is that his mother abandoned the comforts of a suburban American life for one of the world’s most barbaric terror organizations.”77

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There are several reasons why Muthana has been spared the Mother-Monster designation despite having a child with a terrorist fighter. First, Muthana’s second husband was killed before their son was born, eliminating his perceived negative influence on the child. Second, the difficulties of raising a child in a war zone, including accessing basic supplies such as diapers, are used by Muthana to illustrate the suffering she and her son experienced. Third, Muthana has linked her hopes for her son’s future to her own redemption. In comparison, the manipulation of Elhassani’s eldest son is far more prominent in reporting. The latter relationship is similar to that of Nyiramasuhuko and Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, with Nyiramasuhuko seen as intimately involved in directing her son’s war crimes. Although Elhassani attributed her son’s participation in ISIS to threats from his stepfather and her own fear of violence from her husband, her failure as a mother to protect her son is mentioned in legal filings and reporting. Akin to Biljana Plavšić’s commitment to wearing a crucifix in court and Nyiramasuhuko’s absence from court to pray in the chapel, faith is central in Muthana’s redemption narrative, including her belief that God and America should give her a second chance.78 “I believe that America gives second chances. I want to return and I’ll never come back to the Middle East. America can take my passport and I wouldn’t mind,” she told the Guardian.79 She pleaded to CBS News that “I hope no one sees me as a threat, and I hope everyone gives me a second chance.”80 She expressed remorse to her co-religionists stating, “I

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would like to apologize to all Muslims for what we’ve done. We painted such a horrifying picture of Islam to the world, it’s practically unforgivable. ISIS ruined my life and my religion.”81 Such statements position her as a fallen woman who misunderstood her faith and is seeking forgiveness and redemption. On November 15, 2019, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton invoked the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to uphold the State Department’s determination that Muthana is not an American citizen and, as a result, neither is her son. Even though she was 24-yearsold at the time of the ruling, Judge Walton evoked Muthana’s status as a child in his opinion, writing, “As the father of a daughter, [I] can appreciate the anguish the plaintiff is experiencing resulting from his daughter’s conduct. Unfortunately, children all too often make bad decisions, and sometimes those decisions can be lifealtering, which is the consequence in this case.”82 The judge’s opinion reflected Muthana’s narrative that she was simply a misguided teenager, but denied her a second chance at life in America. Muthana’s resulting banishment from the United States is based on a legal technicality rather than her alleged crimes. If she is allowed to return to the United States on appeal, her case would be the most high-profile prosecution of a female terrorist to date. It would likely diverge from past prosecutions which have primarily focused on the provision of material support to terrorist

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groups and typically end in guilty pleas, as was the case for Elhassani. If the courts allow Judge Walton’s ruling to stand, the question then becomes what entity has jurisdiction over Muthana’s potential prosecution. Her lawyers asserted that her desire to return to the United States despite the risk of prosecution was notable because “she would otherwise not be charged.”83 Increasingly, this assertion looks more like a statement of fact. MUTHANA IN CONTEXT

All of the women war criminals we have examined voluntarily aligned themselves with male-dominated armed groups that waged war based on a clear ideological agenda. As a woman, Muthana’s contribution to ISIS’s crimes was constrained by the group’s gendered ideology and institutional structure, which put men and boys on the frontlines. Muthana was not in a position to directly use violence to inflict harm on others, though some women were. However, as a propagandist she allegedly called for international terrorist attacks, lauded the murder of innocent civilians in places like Paris and Manchester, and appealed for support for a terrorist group that perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity. Despite social media posts from Syria and interviews that suggest she independently planned to join ISIS based on a complex array of motivations, since her surrender Muthana has drawn on the Jihadi Bride trope to argue in the media

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that she was manipulated by online recruiters and misled by her friends in ISIS: “I was brainwashed once and my friends are still brainwashed.”84 Muthana was not in a position of power or decisionmaking authority within ISIS. Nevertheless, like Nyiramasuhuko, she is accused of inciting the indiscriminate murder of those cast as “others.” Her parallels to England, who also went to war in the Middle East at the age of 20, are even more notable. Both women conceived children with co-perpetrators. England’s pregnancy during the Abu Ghraib abuses and subsequent prosecutions was interpreted as a sign of her monstrosity. In contrast, Muthana’s claim that motherhood helped her realize the error of her ways allowed her to craft a redemption narrative. Similar to England’s experience in the U.S. Army, Muthana eventually found that life as an ISIS member was not what she expected. She struggled to find the sense of agency and independence that ISIS at first seemed to offer. Ultimately, the patriarchal nature of ISIS constrained her independence by forcing her to rely on men, as evidenced by her three marriages in four years. Muthana has made public statements disavowing ISIS and expressed regret for her social media posts. She has used her status as a young mother and the suffering she endured as a consequence of war to appeal for leniency and a second chance, claiming that “people when they’re young they make very big stupid mistakes.”85 Like En-­ gland, who apologized to U.S. and Coalition forces facing retaliatory attacks as a result of the Abu Ghraib photos,

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Muthana apologized to Muslims for painting “a horrifying picture of Islam to the world.”86 Nevertheless, Muthana has yet to demonstrate remorse for the victims of ISIS or an understanding of how her actions contributed to harm, much in the same way that England has refused to say sorry “to the enemy.”87 Muthana’s case is unique because the balance of evidence regarding her purported crimes has yet to be determined. Muthana has not been prosecuted, and as of our writing, her case is pending appeal. However, it is clear that her race, ethnicity, and religion are politicized in post-9/11 American political culture in ways that undermine her claim to being an American and her right to be tried in U.S. courts. Both President Trump and Secretary Pompeo’s comments about Muthana echo the so-called Muslim ban instituted by the Trump administration in 2017, which bars travel to the United States by citizens of five Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen. Elhassani’s repatriation and guilty plea stand in stark contrast to Muthana’s ongoing exile in Syria. By placing Muthana outside of the criminal justice system, the United States is denying her the opportunity to face judgment by her peers. It is also missing an opportunity to demonstrate that retributive justice can occur, as seen in other domestic prosecutions. In Germany, female ISIS members have been prosecuted for crimes ranging from membership in a foreign terrorist organization to war crimes.88 Iraqi courts sentenced dozens of women to death or life in prison for membership in a terrorist

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organization and illegally crossing the Iraqi border, outcomes that Human Rights Watch criticized as “unjust.”89 Without an international court to address ISIS’s war crimes, and with some countries refusing to repatriate or stripping citizenship from their nationals, the world is torn between relying on potentially flawed justice and accepting that war criminals may walk free.90

CONCLUSION

Women war criminals are a long-standing phenomenon. Too often, however, our stories about these women emphasize their manipulation or victimization by men. Women war criminals are also presented as unique cases of “deviance” and “monstrosity”—the exceptions that prove the rule that women are the gentle and peaceful sex. Over the past several decades, media reporting has entrenched and perpetuated these biases by focusing on individual storylines and purportedly exceptional cases. Stories about women war criminals omit important information about their political goals and ideological beliefs, as well as the gendered, racial, ethnic, and religious opportunity structures and biases that they face. The stories told about violent women deny their agency as complex political and ideological actors. This book stands as an important corrective to this approach. Focusing on women as war criminals does not diminish the important and well-established fact that women 121

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are among the greatest victims of armed conflict. Rather, as female perpetrators become increasingly visible, greater attention must be paid to their agency in war and in postconflict justice. Women who encourage and commit horrendous crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, have always existed. The gender “violence gap”—the difference between the rate at which men and women commit violent acts—is not as wide as often thought, in part because women’s historical participation in wartime violence has willfully been ignored. Women war criminals have gone unnamed or been underestimated in the attempt to preserve archetypal images of women as victims and men as perpetrators. We challenge the assumption that women are secondary actors in war crimes by treating them as responsible, independent wrongdoers. Women war criminals from all parts of the world and all walks of life employ similar gendered strategies to evade responsibility for their crimes. Their legal and public defenders cast them as manipulated and victimized or as passive participants in crimes led by men. “A man made me do it” remains a plausible defense. Indeed, media, scholarship, and legal bodies have long tried to uphold the international status quo of what a woman is at the cost of failing to complexify what a violent perpetrator is. Biljana Plavšić, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Lynndie England, and Hoda Muthana blatantly broke accepted norms of a woman’s position during wartime which situate women as victims of mental, physical, and sexual violence. The agency

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of these four women is evident in the defenses they presented in and outside of court. They were instrumental actors who utilized—and sometimes pushed back against—narratives that the media and their opponents constructed about them. In all four cases, the women showed noteworthy ideological commitment to the cause they took up. They believed, with conviction, that they were fighting for the right side. Although all four women argued that they were manipulated—by male co-leaders (Plavšić), superiors (Nyiramasuhuko), a boyfriend (England), and online recruiters (Muthana)—as part of a gendered, legal, and public defense strategy, they also took opportunities to confirm their ideological convictions outside of the courtroom environment. In her memoir and interviews after her imprisonment, Plavšić rejected the reconciliation promoted by the ICTY and engaged in sexist and Islamophobic depictions of Bosnian Muslim women. Similarly, England repeatedly argued in interviews and documentaries that the suffering of tortured Iraqis is not something to apologize for. No different than their male counterparts, women are political actors willing to act on their convictions and use their trials and notoriety to further their messages. The women profiled in this book were committed to making a mark and having a voice in a man’s world. With their authentic voices missing from their trials, Plavšić and England used memoir and biography to set the record straight. Plavšić’s comments on the difficulties of holding a leadership position in the man’s game of

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politics and England’s reflections on holding one’s own as a woman in the military reflect their determination to have agency in inherently gendered institutions. The patriarchal structure of ISIS still permitted Muthana’s ideological beliefs and calls to violence to be heard through the global platform of Twitter and other social media, while Nyiramasuhuko’s yearning to lead manifested in her eagerness to put on camouflage and command a deadly militia to rape and kill. These examples show that women can incite and perpetrate war crimes even while constrained by patriarchal, male-dominated institutions. Justice is not blind to gender. This is especially true when legal defenses that draw on other characteristics of a woman are interpreted through a gendered lens. For instance, the age of a female defendant is often persuasive when arguing for differential treatment. At one extreme, Plavšić’s lawyers used her advanced age and frailty to spare her the burdens of legal bureaucracy, obtain better conditions while in detention, and reduce her sentence. At the other extreme, Muthana argued that her age and immaturity when she joined ISIS meant that she should not be held responsible for her crimes. Her legal team succeeded in getting a U.S. District Court judge to see her as a child, even as a 24-year-old. England’s defense team emphasized how, despite legally being an adult, England’s intellectual disability meant that she was unable to make decisions like one.

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When used as part of a gendered defense, pregnancy and motherhood can act as a double-edged sword. Across cultures, motherhood definitively establishes females as adults irrespective of age. As a result, expectations for accountability are higher for mothers. This can work against young mothers in court. England’s pregnancy and the birth of her child—fathered by a co-perpetrator— while awaiting trial acted as a visceral symbol of the sexual nature of the Abu Ghraib abuses and her failure to adhere to the standards of behavior dictated by the U.S. military. England was punished by the Army for her sexual behavior, while her male partner received no blame. Unlike England, Muthana’s status as a widowed, single mother garnered her some sympathy in the media and formed the basis of her argument that she was worthy of a second chance. Nyiramasuhuko attempted to argue that her status as a mother made her unable to commit violent acts. Yet, the role that she and her son played in the systematic rape of Tutsi women demonstrated that mothers could lead their children astray. Ironically, Plavšić—who does not have any biological children—was most successful in utilizing a Mother narrative in her defense. She constructed herself as the Mother of the Serb nation and, as such, positioned herself as a reconciliatory figure in the postwar political environment in BiH. None of these women showed remorse for the victims of their violence. In some cases, they expressed concern and distress for consequences and harm experienced by members of their own side. In the case of Plavšić, this

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meant the Serb victims of the Bosnian War. For England, it meant U.S. military personnel who faced retaliatory attacks by Iraqis in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Muthana also apologized, not to the victims of ISIS’s violence and ethnic cleansing but rather to her fellow Muslims for misrepresenting ISIS as the true path in Islam. Despite tropes about emotional women on the stand, these cases suggest that we should not expect a greater degree of genuine remorse from female perpetrators. Women who are willing to cater to gender stereotypes through compliance, obedience, and apology are more likely to evade the full weight of their crimes. Even though there is some evidence that Plavšić and England may have initially resisted the gendered defenses advised by their legal teams, they eventually accepted this approach. Our cases also suggest that guilty pleas should be understood as part of a gendered strategy. Plavšić’s and England’s defense teams negotiated plea agreements (though England’s was tossed out by the judge) that significantly reduced their charges and prison time even as the women continued to reject their guilt. Along with the numerous guilty pleas by female defendants in U.S. terrorism cases, Muthana has offered to face justice in the United States in an attempt to broker a deal for her return. We find considerable evidence that race can compound the responsibility assigned to female perpetrators. The cases of Nyiramasuhuko and Muthana directly challenge the view that positions African and Arab women as poor, victimized, and violated by men, both local and

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Western, and in need of protection from men and Western feminists. When faced with racialized female perpetrators on the world stage, legal professionals seemed unprepared to humanize them by acknowledging their complexities in court. In the case of Muthana, it was easier to use a constitutional loophole to keep a woman born and raised in the United States out of the country than to consider the merits of terrorism and war crimes charges against her. It was easier for the ICTR to ignore Nyiramasuhuko’s gender than to consider its implications for how, as a Black African woman, she should be held responsible for rape as a weapon of war. Scholarship and courts can better represent racialized female perpetrators and their agency without relying on the reductionist tendencies present in society. One way forward is to explore how such women are doubly (or sometimes triply) discriminated against in legal cases. Our analysis suggests that negotiation does not work for racialized women, who are much more likely to be held accountable for their crimes. White women can negotiate plea deals, but certainly not Africans, not even the Christian Nyiramasuhuko. The courts saw both Nyiramasuhuko and Muthana as being responsible for the situations they were in. As an Arab Muslim, Muthana was not given the opportunity to go to court and face judgment by her peers. On the other hand, both white women, regardless of their difference in rank, put up successful defenses based on being manipulated and duped by more powerful men. As of our writing, Nyiramasuhuko remains in prison

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and Muthana remains displaced in Syria, while Plavšić and England are free. The political context and motivations of courts are an essential factor in the treatment, trials, and sentencing of female perpetrators by domestic and international legal systems. War and war crimes occur in a broader political context, and the legal process that follows is an extension of this. During the 1990s, the development and refinement of international law and the furthering of peace and reconciliation were core areas of concern for the UN. However, the following decade saw international legal structures such as the International Criminal Court discredited, while international law struggled to adapt to the rise of terrorism as an overriding security concern for countries around the world. The United States, in particular, came to emphasize state sovereignty over the obligations of international law. This shift in the international political environment is reflected in the outcomes of the four cases. The way that gender-based considerations played out at the UN’s international tribunals was affected by the fact that the ICTY and ICTR were expected to establish legal precedents, such as rape as a crime against humanity, and significantly impact the postconflict political conditions in the countries in question. For instance, part of the ICTY mandate was to contribute to peace and reconciliation in the Balkans. Plavšić’s trial and verdict came at a time when the ICTY was in need of a reconciliatory and

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remorseful figure, because no high-ranking defendants had pleaded guilty, apologized, or shown remorse. Therefore, the ICTY saw the opportunity to make Plavšić into a symbol of reconciliation. Her gendered defense was compatible with this political goal of the court. Nyiramasuhuko’s trial and verdict came at a time when the ICTR was pressured by women’s groups around the world to establish rape as a crime against humanity. While Nyiramasuhuko’s case was not the first to find an individual guilty of rape as a crime against humanity—the Jean-Paul Akayesu case was—the pressure to affirm this legal precedent was a key motivating factor for the ICTR’s verdict and Nyiramasuhuko’s lengthy sentence. Domestic trials may also succumb to pressure to contribute to national political goals. The desire by the Bush administration and the U.S. Department of Defense to move on from the Abu Ghraib scandal led to a series of courts-martial for the soldiers photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners. Facing a media-driven need to hold individuals immediately accountable, the U.S. Army assigned blame at the lowest level—to direct perpetrators—rather than addressing failures in command or the permissive environment and ambiguous standard operating procedures that characterized the War on Terror. Had the principle of command responsibility been taken seriously, England may have had more success with her gendered defense. With England characterized as both a “bad apple” and a “fallgirl,” her courts-martial were ultimately about finding someone to blame for the failures of the

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Iraq War. The Army also needed to maintain the status quo of an inherently gendered institution during an unprecedented mobilization of servicewomen. This meant disciplining servicewomen and holding them to higher standards than servicemen, rather than taking the opportunity to address the persistent gender issues that plague the U.S. military, including high rates of sexual assault and women’s differential treatment in dress codes and for pregnancy. In Muthana’s case, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia operated in a charged political environment and faced direct comments by senior U.S. government officials, including President Trump, on the case. In upholding the State Department’s determination that Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and not entitled to repatriation to the United States, the court sided with diplomatic tradition and international law as established by the Vienna Convention. However, the decision ultimately aligned with the Trump administration’s political objective of enforcing a so-called Muslim ban. Gendered defenses work best when the defendant’s identity is in harmony with the political motivation of the court and reinforces positive social biases about women. For example, the argument that Elhassani—the wife of an ISIS fighter whose son featured in propaganda videos— was simply an abused, Christian, Midwestern mom aligns with the post-9/11, Islamophobic political environment in the United States. Similarly, Plavšić sought to highlight her natural and “motherly” inclinations towards peace in

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an international court trying to find reconciliatory figures. Unfortunately, the success of these war criminals’ defenses simply reinforced society’s preexisting biases toward women. Using only a gendered lens to understand female perpetrators denies their social, political, ideological, and material motives. However, discounting gender entirely, as the ICTR did in Nyiramasuhuko’s case, neglects the gendered setting in which these crimes occur. Recognizing the agency of women war criminals is important. Continuing to see women as weak and powerless actors who are not to be feared constructs them as easy targets in conflicts, which consequently perpetuates violence against them and entrenches their victim status. If we acknowledge the full potential of women to do as much harm as men do, perpetrators of violence may come to see women as equal actors and, hopefully, be less willing to violate their rights. Until we recognize that women can be as violent as men—that women can commit horrendous crimes, including torture, rape, enslavement, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide—we cannot expect their equal treatment under the law or in society.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book enabled us to experience the exceptional rewards of a collaboration that is rooted in friendship and a deep appreciation of one another’s strengths and expertise. We are indebted to Alan Harvey, director of Stanford University Press, for believing in this project and to Caroline McKusick for her valuable comments and stewardship of the manuscript. We are grateful to Richard A. Wilson, Mark Drumbl, and Dženeta Karabegović for thoughtful chapter comments and to our anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Fatma Hassan also provided helpful points of clarification and critique on the entire manuscript. We would like to thank our research assistants at Tulane University and American University: Courtney Dobbs, Terez Hobson, Reva Resstack, Emmanuelle Rosenthal, Brenda Gearhart, and Harrison de ViginerAwad. John Heywood, associate law librarian at American 133

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University’s Washington College of Law, and Megan Garton, reference librarian at Tulane University Law School, also provided valuable assistance. Thanks are also due to Evan Abramsky, Abbas Barzegar, Edina Bećirević, Predrag Dojčinović, Ellie Hall, Amila Karačić, and Ebru Suleyman. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University and the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. We dedicate this book to our families, for supporting us in finishing this project in the midst of a global pandemic, and to our sons, for whom we hope the future will be feminist.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.  “Bosniak Ex-Soldier Becomes First Woman Convicted of War Crimes,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 30, 2012, https://www.rferl.org/a/bosniak_first_woman_convicted_of_ war_crimes/24564893.html; Rick Anderson, “U.S. Authorities Seek to Strip Citizenship of Bosnian War Criminal Living in Oregon,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2018, https://www.latimes. com/nation/la-na-oregon-war-criminal-20180406-story.html. 2.  Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine Federalni Zavod za Statistiku, Popis stanovništva 1991 (Sarajevo: Federalni Zavod za Statistiku, 1998), http://fzs.ba/index.php/popis-stanovnistva/popis -stanovnistva-1991-i-stariji/; Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Stanova u Bosni i Hercegovini, 2013 (Sarajevo: Agencija za statistiku Bosne i Hercegovine, 2016), http://popis2013.ba/ popis2013/doc/Popis2013prvoIzdanje.pdf. 3.  Seth Augenstein, “Bosnian War Criminal Stripped of U.S. Citizenship,” Forensic Magazine, March 6, 2019, https://www .forensicmag.com/news/2019/03/bosnian-war-criminal -stripped-us-citizenship.

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4.  Albina Sorguc, “Bosniak Ex-Officer’s War Crimes Appeal Rejected,” Balkan Transitional Justice, April 30, 2019, https:// balkaninsight.com/2019/04/30/bosniak-ex-officers-war-crimes -appeal-rejected/. 5. Edin Džeko also obtained U.S. citizenship and was denaturalized on August 15, 2018. U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Secures Denaturalization of Convicted War Criminal Who Fraudulently Obtained Refugee Status and U.S. Citizenship,” news release no. 19-189 (Washington DC: Office of Public Affairs, March 5, 2019), https://www.justice .gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-denaturalization -convicted-war-criminal-who-fraudulently-obtained. 6.  See for instance, Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (New York: Mariner Books, 2014). 7. Lower, Hitler’s Furies, 167–168. 8.  Ibid., 169. 9.  Ibid., 168. 10.  Michael Leidig, “Elderly Woman Is Wanted Nazi War Criminal,” Telegraph, October 22, 2007, https://www.telegraph .co.uk/news/worldnews/1566994/Elderly-woman-is-wanted-Nazi -war-criminal.html. 11.  Brett Barrouquere and Bruce Schreiner, “‘Lovely’ Ky. Woman Accused of Horrific War Crimes,” Associated Press, March 18, 2011, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42145729/ns/us_ news-crime_and_courts/t/lovely-ky-woman-accused-horrific -war-crimes/#.XVRIui3Mwes; Emina Dizdarevic, “Female Bosnian Croat Fighter Jailed for War Crimes,” Balkan Transitional ­Justice, December 27, 2017, https://balkaninsight.com/2017/12/27/female -bosnian-croat-fighter-jailed-for-war-crimes-12-27-2017/. 12.  “Bosnia War Crimes: Former Female Fighter Azra Bašić Gets 14 Years,” BBC News, December 27, 2017, https://www .bbc.com/news/world-europe-42495423.

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13. U.S. Department of Justice, “U.S. District Judge Revokes Beatrice Munyenyezi’s U.S. Citizenship” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, March 2013), https:// www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-hrsp/legacy/2013/ 03/21/HR-Newsletter-March-2013.pdf. 14.  U.S. Department of Justice, “Court of Appeals Upholds Conviction and Sentence of a Woman who Concealed her Role in Rwandan Genocide” (Boston: United States Attorney’s Office, March 26, 2015), https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/ court-appeals-upholds-conviction-and-sentence-woman-who -concealed-her-role-rwandan. 15.  Associated Press, “German Woman Aged 91 Charged over Nazi Death Camp Allegations,” Guardian, September 21, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/21/german -woman-charged-nazi-allegations-auschwitz-death-camp. 16.  Milica Stojanovic, “Serbian Court Cuts Female War Criminal’s Prison Sentence,” Balkan Transitional Justice, July 16, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2019/07/16/serbian-court -cuts-female-war-criminals-prison-sentence/. 17.  Melissa Eddy, “German Woman Goes on Trial in Death of 5-Year-Old Girl Held as ISIS Slave,” New York Times, April 9, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/world/europe/ germany-isis-trial.html. 18.  For instance, Miranda Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009); Mia Bloom, Bombshell: Women and Terrorism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Dara Kay Cohen, “Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra Leone Civil War,” World Politics 65, no. 3 (2013): 383–415; Alexis Henshaw, Why Women Rebel: Understanding Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016); Laura

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Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007); Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, eds., Women, Gender, and Terrorism (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Reed M. Wood, Female Fighters: Why Rebel Groups Recruit Women for War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 19.  Suzannah Linton, “Women Accused of International Crimes: A Trans-Disciplinary Inquiry and Methodology,” Criminal Law Forum 27, no. 2 (June 2016): 162. 20.  Charli Carpenter, “Innocent Women and Children”: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (New York: Ashgate, 2006); Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko Darden, “Making Civilian Casualties Count: Approaches to Documenting the Human Cost of War,” Human Rights Review 14 (2013): 347–366. 21.  Carpenter, “Innocent Women.” 22. Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (November 2007): 387–399. 23.  UN Security Council Resolution 1325, Women, Peace, and Security, S/RES/1325 (October 31, 2000), https://undocs .org/S/RES/1325(2000). 24.  Amy C. Alexander, Catherine Bolzendahl, and Farida Jalalzai, “Defining Women’s Global Political Empowerment: Theories and Evidence,” Sociology Compass 10, no. 6 (June 2016): 432–441; Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Swanee Hunt, Rwandan Women Rising (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Mary Moran, “Our Mothers Have Spoken: Synthesizing Old and New Forms of Women’s Political Authority in Liberia,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 4 (2012): 51–66; Cecilia L. Ridgeway, Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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25.  Steflja and Trisko Darden, “Making Civilian Casualties Count”; see also Chris Coulter, “Female Fighters in the Sierra Leone War: Challenging the Assumptions,” Feminist Review 88, (2008): 54–73; Jessica Trisko Darden, “Assessing the Significance of Women in Combat Roles,” International Journal 70, no. 3 (2015): 454–462; Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekely, Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019). 26. Bloom, Bombshell. 27.  Trisko Darden, “Assessing the Significance”; Lower, Hitler’s Furies. 28.  Laura Sjoberg, “Women and the Genocidal Rape of Women: The Gender Dynamics of Gendered War Crimes,” in Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women’s Lives, Human Rights, eds. Debra Bergoffen, Paula R. Gilbert, Tamara Harvey, and Connie L. McNeely (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 27. 29.  Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores; Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2015). 30.  Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers. 31.  Sabrina Gilani, “Transforming the ‘Perpetrator’ into ‘Victim’: The Effect of Gendering Violence on the Legal and Practical Response to Women’s Political Violence,” Australian Journal of Gender and Law 1 (July 2010): 1–40, http://www .austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AUJlGendLaw/2010/1.html. 32.  Gilani, “Transforming the ‘Perpetrator,’” 30. 33.  Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998); Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 34.  On assumptions about women as agents of peace and reconciliation in international criminal law, see Isabelle Delpla,

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“Women and International (Criminal) Law,” Clio 39 (2014): 183–204.

CHAPTER 1

1.  “Bosnian Muslim” is generally used interchangeably with “Bosniak,” and the latter term is the official term used by the Government of the Federation of BiH. We use the term Bosnian Muslim throughout the book because the ICTY used the term Bosnian Muslim in key documents concerning Plavšić’s trial, such as the Sentencing Judgment; Plavšić discriminated and committed crimes against this ethnic group precisely because of their Muslim heritage, and using the term Bosnian Muslim clarifies this important fact for the reader; the term Bosniak did not come into official usage until after 1993. 2.  Allan Little and Laura Silber, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). 3.  Plavšić claimed that she wanted her ex-husband to defend her at The Hague but that he had nearly gone blind from glaucoma. “Bosnian War Criminal: ‘I Did Nothing Wrong,’” The Local: Sweden, January 26, 2009, https://www.thelocal.se/ 20090126/17162. 4.  Daniel Simpson, “Defendant in Hague to Aim Defense at Serbs of the Future,” New York Times, February 20, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/20/world/new-defendant -in-hague-to-aim-defense-at-serbs-of-the-future.html. 5.  Julian Borger, The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt (New York: Other Press, 2016). 6.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40-I, Indictment, (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Apr. 3, 2000), https://www.icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/ind/en/pla-ii000407e.pdf.

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7.  Transcript of Rule 62 Bis Hearing at 337-44, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/ plavsic/trans/en/021002ED.htm. 8.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-39 & 40/I-S, Decision Granting Prosecution’s Motion to Dismiss 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of the Amended Consolidated Indictment (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Dec. 20, 2002), https://www .icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/tdec/en/021220.pdf. 9.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-39&40/I-S, Sentencing Judgement (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Feb. 27, 2003), https://www.icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/tjug/en/ pla-tj030227e.pdf. 10.  Sanja K. Ivković, “Justice by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” Stanford Journal of International Law 37, no. 2 (June 2001): 255–334; James Meernik and Kimi King, “The Sentencing Determinants of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: An Empirical and Doctrinal Analysis,” Leiden Journal of International Law 16, no. 4 (December 2003): 717–750. 11.  Gideon Boas and Pascale Chifflet, “Sentencing Coherence in International Criminal Law: The Cases of Biljana Plavšić and Miroslav Bralo,” Criminal Law Forum 23, no. 1-3 (September 2012): 135–159. 12.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Sentencing Judgement; Kerstin Bree Carlson, “Reconciliation through a Judicial Lens: Competing Legitimation Frameworks in the ICTY’s Plavsic and Babic Judgments,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 44, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 281–322. 13. Prosecutor v. Kambanda, Case No. ICTR 97-23-A, Judgement (Oct. 19, 2000), https://unictr.irmct.org/sites/ unictr.org/files/case-documents/ictr-97-23/appeals-chamber -judgements/en/001019.pdf; Andrew N. Keller, “Punishment

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for Violations of International Criminal Law: An Analysis of Sentencing at the ICTY and ICTR,” Indiana International & Comparative Law Review 12, no. 1 (September 22, 2001): 53–74; Meernik and King, “The Sentencing Determinants.” 14.  Carlson, “Reconciliation through a Judicial Lens.” 15.  See Prosecutor v. Milošević, Case No. IT-02-54-T, Second Amended Indictment (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Jul. 28, 2004), https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milos evic/ind/en/mil-2ai020728e.htm. 16.  See Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Case No. MICT-13-55-A, Judgement, (Mar. 20, 2019), https://www.irmct.org/en/cases/mict-13-55. 17. See Prosecutor v. Šešelj, Case No. MICT-16-99-A, Judgement, (Apr. 11, 2018), https://www.irmct.org/en/cases/ mict-16-99. 18.  See Prosecutor v. Mladić, Trial Judgement Summary for Ratko Mladić (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Nov. 22, 2017), https://icty.org/x/cases/mladic/tjug/en/171122-sum mary-en.pdf. 19.  Izabela Steflja, “Internationalised Justice and Democratisation: How International Tribunals Can Empower NonReformists,” Third World Quarterly 39, no. 9 (September 2, 2018): 1675–1691. 20.  Izabela Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult: Radovan Karadžić and Vojislav Šešelj at The Hague,” Nationalities Papers 46, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 52–68. 21.  Marlies Glasius and Francesco Colona, “The Yugoslavia Tribunal: The Moving Targets of a Legal Theatre,” in PostYugoslavia: New Cultural and Political Perspectives, eds. Dino Abrazovic and Mitja Velikonja (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8–34; Maria Koinova, “Why Do Conflict-Generated Diasporas Pursue Sovereignty-Based Claims through StateBased or Transnational Channels? Armenian, Albanian and Palestinian Diasporas in the UK Compared,” European Journal

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of International Relations 20, no. 4 (December 2014): 1043– 1071; Jelena Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); ­Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult.” 22.  Tawia Ansah, “Genocide and the Eroticization of Death: Law, Violence, and Moral Purity,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 14 (April 1, 2005): 181–345; Caron E. ­Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2015). 23.  “Biljana Plavsic: Serbian Iron Lady,” BBC News, February 27, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1108604.stm; Carrie Sperling, “Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2006): 101–127; Emir Suljagić, Postcards from the Grave, afterword by Ed Vulliamy, trans. Lejla Haveric (London: Saqi in association with the Bosnian Institute, 2005). 24.  Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, 121. 25.  Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers; Sabrina Gilani, “Transforming the ‘Perpetrator’ into ‘Victim’: The Effect of Gendering Violence on the Legal and Practical Responses to Women’s Political Violence,” Australian Journal of Gender & Law 1 (July 1, 2010), http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/52007/1/ Aust_J_of_Gender%26Law.pdf. 26.  Stacy Sullivan, “Bosnia’s Most Wanted: NATO’s Pursuit of War Crimes Fugitives in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Newsweek 130, no. 3 (July 21, 1997). 27.  Samantha Power, “Pale Imitation,” New Republic, October 13, 1996, https://newrepublic.com/article/62111/pale-imitation. 28.  International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Prosecution Closing Arguments - Šešelj (Part 1/2), YouTube video, 1:16:32, March 7, 2012 https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=GxqgrriBKyw&feature=youtu.be.

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29.  Power, “Pale Imitation,” 19. 30.  Ibid., 20. 31.  “Biljana Plavsic: Serbian Iron Lady.” 32.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497-619, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/ trans/en/021217IT.htm; Sullivan, “Bosnia’s Most Wanted.” 33.  Power, “Pale Imitation,” 19. 34.  Joseph Lelyveld, “The Defendant: Slobodan Milosevic’s Trial, and the Debate Surrounding International Courts,” New Yorker, May 27, 2002, 82–95; Jordan Kiper, Richard Ashby Wilson, Christine Lillie, and Lasana T. Harris, “Propaganda, Empathy, and Support for Intergroup Violence: The Moral Psychology of International Speech Crimes,” July 5, 2019, Social Science Research Network; Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult”; Subotić, Hijacked Justice. 35.  Transcript of Status Conference at 232–263, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/ plavsic/trans/en/020510SC.htm, 247. 36.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 368–495, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/ plavsic/trans/en/021216IT.htm, 379. 37.  Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult.” 38.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 612. 39.  Ibid., 611. 40. Ibid. 41.  Ibid., 534. 42.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Sentencing Judgement, 19. 43.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 368–495, 458. 44.  Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult”; Gregory S. Gordon, Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 45.  Tim Meijers and Marlies Glasius, “Expression of Justice or Political Trial? Discursive Battles in the Karadžić Case,”

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Human Rights Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2013): 720–752; Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult.” 46.  Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult.” 47.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 368–495, 459. 48.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 516. 49.  See also Daryl Mundis, “Current Developments at the Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunals,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 1, no. 3 (2003): 703–727. 50.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 515. 51.  Transcript of Defense Closing Statement at 17466-540, Prosecutor v. Šešelj, Case No. IT-03-67-T, https://www.icty .org/x/cases/seselj/trans/en/120320IT.htm. 52.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 565. 53.  Ibid., 585. 54.  Ibid., 612. 55.  Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Sentencing Judgement. 56.  Ibid., 21. 57.  Statement on behalf of Biljana Plavšić Statement by Robert Pavich, Lead Counsel for Biljana Plavsic, Press Release (Int’l Crim. Trib for the Former Yugoslavia Oct. 2, 2002), https:// www.icty.org/en/press/statement-behalf-biljana-plavsic-statement -robert-pavich-lead-counsel-biljana-plavsic. 58.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 610–611. 59. Ibid. 60.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 368–495, 408. 61.  On the denial of political agency and high levels of political participation to women in the former Yugoslavia, see Elissa Helms, Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). 62.  Transcript of Motion Hearing at 264-71, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-39 & 40-PT, icty.org/x/cases/plavsic/ trans/en/020531MH.htm.

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63.  Transcript of Initial Appearance at 1-10, Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-40-I, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/ plavsic/trans/en/010111ia.htm. 64.  Transcript of Sentencing Hearing at 497–619, 612. 65.  All translations from Serbian are by Izabela Steflja. Biljana Plavšić, Svedočim: I–II (Banja Luka, BiH: Trioprint, 2005). 66. Plavšić, Svedočim I, 277. 67.  Ibid., 245, 317. 68.  Ibid., 328–329. 69.  Ibid., 61–62; Plavšić, Svedočim II, 8. See also Plavšić’s interview on the TV series Goli Život. “Biljana Plavsic,” YouTube video, 1:56:29, posted by “Goli Zivot TV Happy,” August 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBQe43axhyA. 70. Plavšić, Svedočim I, 47, 94, 107, 138. 71.  Ibid., 48. 72.  “Biljana Plavsic,” YouTube video. 73. Helms, Innocence and Victimhood, 137. 74. Plavšić, Svedočim I, 246. 75.  Steflja, “The Production of the War Criminal Cult.” 76. Plavšić, Svedočim II, 15. 77. Plavšić, Svedočim I, 278–279. 78. Plavšić, Svedočim II, 375. 79.  Šešelj accused the ICTY of conspiring to kill him. Conflating literal and political “death,” he played off the Serb audience’s bad memories of Milošević’s death while in ICTY custody. Karadžić also linked the tribunal to violent acts, claiming that NATO aggressively searched his family’s residence under the order of or in connection to the tribunal. Transcript of Defense Closing Statement at 17466-540; Transcript of Status Conference at 436–63, Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Case No. It-95-5/18-PT, https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/trans/en/090908SE.htm. 80. Plavšić, Svedočim II, 375. 81.  Ibid., 308.

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82. Plavšić, Svedočim I, 279. 83. Ibid. 84.  Plavšić’s lack of sympathy for Muslim women based on a common womanhood should not be a surprise. For examples of female guards being brutally violent towards female inmates in the all-female Ravensbrück camp during World War II, see Helms, Innocence and Victimhood, 137. On female perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide inflicting violence on Rwandan women, see Sara E. Brown, Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). 85. Plavšić, Svedočim II, 69. 86.  “Biljana Plavsic,” YouTube video. 87.  Carlson, “Reconciliation through a Judicial Lens”; Subotić, Hijacked Justice. 88.  See Janine Clark, International Criminal Trials and Reconciliation: An Analysis of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014); Laurel E. Fletcher and Harvey M. Weinstein, “Violence and Social Repair: Rethinking the Contribution of Justice to Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly 24, no. 3 (August 1, 2002): 573–639; James Meernik, “Justice and Peace? How the International Criminal Tribunal Affects Societal Peace in Bosnia,” Journal of Peace Research 42, no. 4 (July 2005): 271–289.

CHAPTER 2

1.  The lower figure is Des Forges’s and the higher figure is Prunier’s. Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 15–16; Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 265.

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2.  Roméo A. Dallaire and Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004), 232. 3.  Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story. 4.  Anuradha Chakravarty, Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 68. 5.  Yvonne Leggat-Smith, Rwanda: Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers (London: African Rights, 1995). 6. The first figure comes from Nicole Hogg and Mark Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators: Agency and Authority in Genocidal Rwanda,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century, ed. Amy E. Randall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 191. The second figure comes from Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Christopher Uggen, and Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, “Age, Gender, and the Crime of Crimes: Toward a Life-Course Theory of Genocide Participation,” Criminology 54, no. 4 (2016): 730. 7.  Hogg and Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators.” 8.  Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 65–94. 9.  As Michele Landsberg argues, “In every culture where men are dominant, and where patriarchal values hold sway over minds and hearts, many women help perpetuate unspeakable cruelties against vulnerable girls and young women . . . because they have drunk deeply of patriarchy’s poisons and thoroughly digested them.” Michele Landsberg, “Men behind Most Atrocities, But Women Are Singled Out,” Toronto Star, September 21, 2002, 21. 10. To an extent Drumbl (2012), Sperling (2005), and Holmes (2014) are exceptions. Mark Drumbl, “‘She Makes Me Ashamed to Be a Woman’: The Genocide Conviction of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 2011,” Michigan Journal of International Law 34, no. 3 (April 1, 2013): 559–603; Carrie Sperling, “Mother

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of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 33, no. 2 (2006): 637; Georgina Holmes, Women and War in Rwanda (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2014). 11.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Case No. ICTR-9842-T, Judgement (Dec. 14, 2015), https://unictr.irmct.org/sites/ unictr.org/files/case-documents/ictr-98-42/appeals-chamber -judgements/en/151214-judgement.pdf. 12. Ibid. 13. Ephrem Rugiririza, “Pauline Nyiramasuhuko: From Women’s Rights to Rape,” Agence France Presse, June 24, 2011; Josephine Hazeley, “Profile: Female Rwandan Killer Pauline Nyiramasuhuko,” BBC News, June 24, 2011, http://www.bbc .co.uk/news/world-africa-13907693. 14.  Peter Landesman, “A Woman’s Work,” New York Times Magazine, September 15, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/ 09/15/magazine/a-woman-s-work.html; Hazeley, “Profile: Female Rwandan Killer.” 15. Ibid. 16.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Case No. ICTR-9842-T, Amended Indictment, (Mar. 1, 2001), https://unictr. irmct.org/en/cases/ictr-98-42?page=1. 17. Leggat-Smith, Rwanda: Not So Innocent; Landesman, “A Woman’s Work”; Hazeley, “Profile: Female Rwandan Killer.” 18.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Case No. ICTR-98 -42-A, Summary of Appeal Judgement, (Dec. 14, 2015), https:// jrad.irmct.org/view.htm?r=244492&s=; Stephanie K. Wood, “A Woman Scorned for the ‘Least Condemned’ War Crime: Precedent and Problems with Prosecuting Rape as a Serious War Crime in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 13, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 274. 19.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Summary of Appeal Judgement.

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20.  Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Genocide and Other Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of Rwanda and Rwandan Citizens Responsible for Genocide and Other Such Violations Committed in the Territory of Neighbouring States, between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInter est/Pages/StatuteInternationalCriminalTribunalForRwanda.aspx 21. Press Release, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), “Appeals Chamber Delivers Judgment in the Nyiramasuhuko et al. Case,” ICTR Press Release (Dec. 14, 2015), https://unictr.irmct.org/en/news/appeals-chamber -delivers-judgement-nyiramasuhuko-et-al-case; Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Case No. MICT-15-90-ES.3, Order Designating State in Which Pauline Nyiramasuhuko Is to Serve Her Sentence, (June 18, 2018), https://jrad.irmct.org/ view.htm?r=241946&s=. 22.  Landsberg, “Men Behind Most Atrocities”; Wood, “A Woman Scorned.” 23.  Sara E. Brown, “Female Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 3 (2014): 448–469; Jones, “Gender and Genocide,” 65–94; Lisa Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Agents and Objects of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1999): 387–399. 24.  Hassan Ngeze, “Appeal to the Conscience of the Hutu,” Kangura, December 6, 1990. 25.  Theresa O’Keefe, Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 84. See also Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44, no. 1 (July 1, 1993): 61–80; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

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26. Holmes, Women and War in Rwanda, 268. 27.  Sharlach, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” 397. 28.  Luc Reydams, “Let’s Be Friends : The United States, Post-Genocide Rwanda, and Victor’s Justice in Arusha,” IOB Discussion Papers, Universiteit Antwerpen, Institute of Development Policy (January 2013): 65; Erin Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More,” Conflict and Society 1, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 60–80. 29.  The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was ratified when many African countries were still colonies. The definition of genocide thus does not include the “suppression of political dissidents and cultural groups” in Africa by imperial forces. Holmes, Women and War in Rwanda, 61. See also, Patricia O. Daley, Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 30.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work”; Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2015), 168. 31.  Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 32.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work”; Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, 107. 33.  Nyseth Brehm, Uggen, and Gasanabo, “Age, Gender, and the Crime of Crimes,” 720. 34.  Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, 66. 35.  See Sam Sasan Shoamanesh, “Nyiramasuhuko: The Mother Who Awarded Rape for Murder,” Huffington Post, August 9, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nyiramasuhuko-the -mother-_b_922216; Sperling, “Mother of Atrocities”; Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed.”

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36.  Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed,” 586; see also Sperling, “Mother of Atrocities.” 37. Quoted in Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007), 301. 38.  Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed.” 39.  Gentry and Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers. 40.  Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed.” 41.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 42. Ibid. 43.  Danna Harman, “A Woman on Trial for Rwanda’s Massacre,” Christian Science Monitor, March 7, 2003, http://www .csmonitor.com/2003/0307/p09s01-woaf.html. 44. Landesman, “A Woman’s Work”; Hazeley, “Profile: Female Rwandan Killer.” 45. Laura Sjoberg, “Looking Forward, Conceptualizing Feminist Security Studies,” Politics & Gender 7, no. 4, (2011): 600–604. 46.  Lindsey Hilsum, “The Widespread Role That Women Played in Rwanda,” Newsnight BBC2, August 25, 1995; Holmes, Women and War in Rwanda, 80. 47.  Hilsum, “The Widespread Role.” 48.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 49.  Quoted in Hogg and Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators”, 90; Donna J. Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide: When Women Choose to Kill,” University of Northern Iowa Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity 8 (2012–2013). 50.  Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed.” 51.  Maier, “Women Leaders in the Rwandan Genocide.” 52.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 53. Ibid.

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54.  Sara E. Brown, “‘But She Was Pregnant!’: The WomanAnd-Mother Narrative in Genocide,” Armenian Weekly, March 2, 2012, https://armenianweekly.com/2012/03/02/woman-and -mother-narrative/. 55.  Thijs Bouwknegt, “Rwanda Ex-Pastor Faces Genocide Charges in Finland,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, August 31, 2009, http://www.mw.nl/international-justice/article/rwandaex -pastor-faces-genocide- charges-finland. 56. Leggat-Smith, Rwanda: Not So Innocent, 106. 57.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 58. News, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), “Ex-Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda Pleads Guilty to Genocide,” May 1, 1998, https://unictr.irmct.org/en/ news/ex-rwandan-prime-minister-jean-kambanda-pleads -guilty-genocide. 59.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 60.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Judgement, 27. 61.  Ibid., 39. 62.  Ibid., 200. 63.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Case No. ICTR-9842-T, Judgement and Sentence, (Jun. 24, 2011), https://unictr .irmct.org/sites/unictr.org/files/case-documents/ictr-98-42/ trial-judgements/en/110624.pdf, 347. 64.  Authors’ italics were added for emphasis. 65.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Judgement and Sentence, 1363. 66.  Ibid., 1365. 67. Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Summary of Appeal Judgement, 11. 68. Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed”; Hogg and Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators.” 69.  Drumbl, “She Makes Me Ashamed,” 585.

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70.  Quoted in Nicole Hogg, “Women’s Participation in the Rwandan Genocide: Mothers or Monsters?” International Review of the Red Cross 92, no. 877 (March 2010): footnote 66. 71.  Wood, “A Woman Scorned.” 72. Ibid. 73.  There are two possible reasons why Nyiramasuhuko is associating Tutsi women with AIDS: (1) Tutsi women were portrayed as promiscuous in the Hutu extremist narrative, and (2) infecting Tutsi women with AIDS was part of the genocidal strategy. 74.  Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., Judgement and Sentence, 1412. 75.  Nyseth Brehm, Uggen, and Gasanabo, “Age, Gender, and the Crime of Crimes,” 723, 731. 76.  Oyèrónké Oyēwūmi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003). 77.  James Sias, The Meaning of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 76; Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 78.  Lower-level female génocidaires with minimal education, wealth, and social capital complained of gender-based discrimination in their cases and in their communities, such as abandonment by family members because their participation in the genocide meant that they were not perceived as women but Monsters “in addition to bad wives and mothers.” Jessee, “Rwandan Women No More,” 69. 79. Chakravarty, Investing in Authoritarian Rule; Bert Ingelaere, Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); Filip Reyntjens, Political Governance in PostGenocide Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 80.  Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (New York: Rodale, 2009), 163.

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81.  Hogg and Drumbl, “Women as Perpetrators.” 82. On Eichmann, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963). 83. Holmes, Women and War in Rwanda, 59. 84.  See for example Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 19–29; Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (1994): 44–76. 85.  Landesman, “A Woman’s Work.” 86. Oyēwūmi, African Women and Feminism, 35.

CHAPTER 3

1. Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, April 30, 2004, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib. 2.  Janis Karpinski (as told to Tara McKelvey), “Lynndie England in Love,” in One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara McKelvey (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 215. 3.  Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 3. For photos featuring England, see Danner, Torture and Truth, 219, 222–223. 4.  Frank Rich, “Saving Private England,” New York Times, May 16, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/saving -private-england.html. 5. Tara McKelvey, Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 36–45. 6.  Emma Brockes, “Interview: She’s Home from Jail, but Lynndie England Can’t Escape Abu Ghraib,” Guardian, January 2, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/03/ abu-ghraib-lynndie-england-interview.

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7. McKelvey, Monstering, 39. 8.  Christopher Graveline and Michael Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib Revealed: American Soldiers on Trial (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010), 33. 9.  Megan MacKenzie, Beyond the Band of Brothers: The U.S. Military and the Myth That Women Can’t Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983). 10.  Brockes, “Interview: She’s Home from Jail.” 11.  Karpinski, “Lynndie England in Love,” 213. 12.  Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007), 59. 13.  Johanna Bond, “A Decade after Abu Ghraib: Lessons in Softening Up the Enemy and Sex-Based Humiliation,” Law & Inequality 31, no. 1 (2013): 1–36. 14.  Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 297–298. 15.  Lila Rajiva, “The Military Made Me Do It: Double Standards and Psychic Injuries at Abu Ghraib,” in One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara McKelvey (New York: Seal Press, 2007), 219. 16.  Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores, 85–86. 17.  Jennifer K. Lobasz, “The Woman in Peril and the Ruined Woman: Representations of Female Soldiers in the Iraq War,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 29, no. 3 (2008): 317. 18.  Janis Karpinski and Steven Strasser, One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 234. 19. McKelvey, Monstering, 36–42. 20.  Lobasz, “The Woman in Peril,” 324.

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21.  Gary S. Winkler, Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World (Keyser, WV: Bad Apple Books, 2009), 229–230. 22.  “Court-Martial of Spc. Jeremy Sivits,” PBS News Hour, last modified May 19, 2004, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/ show/court-martial-of-spc-jeremy-sivits. 23.  Lobasz, “The Woman in Peril,” 327. 24. Winkler, Tortured, 227. 25.  Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores, 89–90. 26.  Kate Zernike, “Behind Failed Abu Ghraib Plea, a Tangle of Bonds and Betrayals,” New York Times, May 10, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/us/behind-failed-abu -ghraib-plea-a-tangle-of-bonds-and-betrayals.html. 27.  Jim Polk, “New Legal Team to Represent Lynndie England,” CNN, May 24, 2005, https://www.cnn.com/2005/ LAW/05/24/england.case/index.html. 28. Winkler, Tortured, 178. 29.  Ari Shapiro, “Judge Declares Mistrial in Lynndie England Case,” National Public Radio, May 4, 2005, https://www .npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4630845. 30.  As cited in Graveline and Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib, 278. 31.  Stepan G. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 152. 32. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib, 156. 33.  Ibid., 159. 34.  Ibid., 159. 35. Winkler, Tortured, 205. 36.  Italics in original. Ryan Ashley Caldwell, Fallgirls: Gender and the Framing of Torture at Abu Ghraib (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 157. 37.  Italics in original. Ibid., 157.

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38.  Graveline and Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib, 277. 39. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib, 165. 40.  Ibid., 165–166. 41.  Ibid., 17. 42.  Ibid., 153–154, 161–163. 43.  Graveline and Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib, 275. 44. Danner, Torture and Truth, 236–237, 240. 45.  Associated Press, “Testimony Begins in England CourtMartial,” NBC News, September 22, 2005, http://www.nbcnews .com/id/9401437/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/testimony -begins-england-court-martial/#.XbG_sC2ZNCs. 46. Danner, Torture and Truth, 4. 47. Caldwell, Fallgirls, 104. 48.  Ibid., 187–188. 49.  Standard Operating Procedures. Directed by Errol ­Morris. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classic, 2008. 50. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib, 158. 51. Caldwell, Fallgirls, 157. 52.  Ibid., 159. 53.  Graveline and Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib, 279. 54.  See, for example, James W. Smith III, “A Few Good Scapegoats: The Abu Ghraib Courts-Martial and the Failure of the Military Justice System,” Whittier Law Review 27, no. 3 (2006): 671–724; Human Rights Watch, “Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees,” Human Rights Watch 17, no. 1 (April 2005), https:// www.hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/us0405.pdf. 55. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib, 14. 56.  Lobasz, “The Woman in Peril,” 325. 57.  Brockes, “Interview: She’s Home from Jail.” 58.  Regina F. Titunik, “Are We All Torturers Now? A Reconsideration of Women’s Violence at Abu Ghraib,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 2 (2009): 261.

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59.  Associated Press, “Sex Used to Break Muslim Prisoners, Book Says,” NBC News, January 27, 2005, http://www.nbcnews .com/id/6876549/ns/us_news-security/t/sex-used-break-muslim -prisoners-book-says/#.Xr2CLBNKiIQ. 60.  Standard Operating Procedures. 61.  Karpinski and Strasser, One Woman’s Army, 234. 62.  Talia Ralph, “Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Soldier, Still Not Sorry,” PRI, March 19, 2012, https://www.pri.org/stories/ 2012-03-19/lynndie-england-abu-ghraib-soldier-still-not-sorry. 63.  Graveline and Clemens, The Secrets of Abu Ghraib, 250. 64.  Standard Operating Procedures. 65. Meštrović, The Trials of Abu Ghraib, 27. 66.  Major General George R. Fay, “Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade,” August 23, 2004, 34–176, Available at: http://humanrights .ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/ testimonies/testimonies-of-the-defense-department/fay_jones .pdf. 67.  U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, 110th Cong., 2d sess., 2008, xii, https://www.armed-services.senate. gov/imo/media/doc/Detainee-Report-Final_April-22-2009. pdf. 68.  Andrew Gray, “U.S. Officer Found Not Guilty of Abu Ghraib Abuse,” Reuters, August 28, 2007, https://www.reuters .com/article/us-iraq-usa-courtmartial/u-s-officer-found-not -guilty-of-abu-ghraib-abuse-idUSN2826240220070828.

CHAPTER 4

1.  Lead Inspector General, “Operation Inherent Resolve and Other Overseas Contingency Operations,” October 1, 2018– December 31, 2018, by Glenn A. Fine, Steve A. Linick, and Ann

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Calvaresi Barr, https://media.defense.gov/2019/Feb/05/2002086500/ -1/-1/1/FY2019_LIG_OIRREPORT.PDF, 21; Kyle Rempfer, “Low Aim or Intel Failure? ISIS’ Last Stand Shows the Difficulty in Estimating Enemy Manpower,” Military Times, March 27, 2019, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/03/ 27/low-aim-or-intel-failure-isis-last-stand-shows-the-difficulty -in-estimating-enemy-manpower/. 2.  UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Human Rights Situation in Iraq in the Light of Abuses Committed by the SoCalled Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and Associated Groups (A/HRC/28/18) (New York: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2015), http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session28/Documents/A_ HRC_28_18_AUV.doc#st hash.nSedR2BP.dpuf. 3.  Valeria Cetorelli, Isaac Sasson, Nazar Shabila, and Gilbert Burnham, “Mortality and Kidnapping Estimates for the Yazidi Population in the Area of Mount Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014: A Retrospective Household Survey,” PLOS Medicine, May 9, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002297. 4.  Sarah El Deeb, “16th Mass Grave Uncovered beneath Former Isis Caliphate Raqqa Two Years after It Was Seized from Jihadi Group’s Control,” Independent, September 10, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle -east/isis-caliphate-raqqa-recovery-operation-syria-mass -graves-jihadi-murder-regime-a9098911.html. 5.  UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, Report on the Protection of Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq, 1 May–31 October 2015, (Baghdad, Iraq: UNAMI/OHCHR, 2015), https://www.ohchr .org/Documents/Countries/IQ/UNAMIReport1May31Octo ber2015.pdf. See also, Samuel Oakford, “Counting the Dead in Mosul,” Atlantic, April 5, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/

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international/archive/2018/04/counting-the-dead-in-mosul/ 556466/. 6.  Joana Cook and Gina Vale, “From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’ II: The Challenges Posed by Women and Minors after the Fall of the Caliphate,” CTC Sentinel 12, no. 6 (July 2019): 30. 7.  Mona Mahmood, “Double-Layered Veils and Despair . . . Women Describe Life under Isis,” Guardian, February 17, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/17/isis-orders -women-iraq-syria-veils-gloves. 8.  Al Jazeera, “Women of ISIL: Life inside the Caliphate,” Witness, video, 47:29, September 26, 2019, https://www.aljazeera .com/programmes/witness/2019/09/women-isil-life-caliphate -190923094413989.html. 9.  Charlie Winter and Devorah Margolin, “The Mujahidat Dilemma: Female Combatants and the Islamic State,” CTC Sentinel 10, no. 7 (August 2017): 23–28; Daveed GartensteinRoss, Vivian Hagerty, and Logan Macnair, “The Emigrant Sisters Return: The Growing Role of the Islamic State’s Women,” War on the Rocks, April 2, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/ 04/the-emigrant-sisters-return-the-growing-role-of-the-islamic -states-women/. 10.  Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shakjovci, “American-Born Hoda Muthana Tells All about Joining ISIS and Escaping the Caliphate,” Homeland Security Today, April 23, 2019, https:// www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/counterterrorism/american -born-hoda-muthana-tells-all-about-joining-isis-and-escaping -the-caliphate/. 11.  All of Muthana’s social media posts are reproduced as written. BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana Social Media Archive,” accessed May 22, 2020, https://www.documentcloud .org/search/projectid:43782-Hoda-Muthana-Social-Media -Archive-BuzzFeed News; ABC News, Nightline, February 20, 2019, 7:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVH7sTfe8u0.

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12.  Fox News, “ISIS Bride Speaks to Fox News about her Radicalization, Desire to Return to US,” Fox News video, 1:43, April 1, 2019, https://video.foxnews.com/v/6021276183001#sp =show-clips. 13.  For an overview of American women’s participation in jihadist terrorist movements, see Audrey Alexander, Cruel Intentions: Female Jihadists in America (Washington, DC: Program on Extremism, November 2016), https://extremism.gwu .edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/downloads/Female%20Jihad ists%20in%20America.pdf. 14.  Audrey Alexander and Rebecca Turkington, “Treatment of Terror: How Does Gender Affect Justice?” CTC Sentinel 11, no. 8 (September 2018): 24–29. 15.  Nadia Al Faour, Kim Hjelmgaard, Trevor Hughes, and Deirdre Shesgreen, “The Making of an American Terrorist: Hoda Muthana Joined ISIS. Now She Can’t Come Back,” USA Today, April 6, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ world/2019/04/06/hoda-muthana-married-isis-fighters-so -trump-wont-let-her-back-usa/3350233002/. 16.  USA Today, “American Who Joined ISIS Wants to Return Home,” YouTube video, 1:28, April 6, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZS1mslelAk. 17.  Martin Chulov and Bethan McKernan, “Hoda Muthana ‘Deeply Regrets’ Joining Isis and Wants to Return Home,” Guardian, February 17, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2019/feb/17/us-woman-hoda-muthana-deeply-regrets -joining-isis-and-wants-return-home. 18.  While the use of the term jihad—which literally means a “struggle” or “striving”—remains contested, we quote sources that use jihad and its derivations in the following ways. First, we take individuals’ interpretations of jihad seriously, as applied to the ISIS conflict and the Islamic just war tradition. This is reflected primarily in Muthana’s use of the term as a

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social media moniker and in her social media posts. Second, we recognize the term Jihadi Bride as a decontextualized derivation that was widely adopted in English-language reporting on ISIS. Ellie Hall, “Gone Girl: An Interview with an American in ISIS,” BuzzFeed News, April 17, 2015, https://www .buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/gone-girl-an-interview -with-an-american-in-isis. 19.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 20. Expedited Complaint for Declaratory Judgement, Injunctive Relief and Petition for Writ of Mandamus at 6-7, Muthana v. Pompeo, No. 19-cv-00445 (D.D.C. Feb. 21, 2019), ECF No. 1. 21.  Hall, “Gone Girl.” 22.  BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana.” 23.  Speckhard and Shakjovci, “American-Born Hoda Muthana.” 24.  Sarah Dean and Daniel Piotrowski, “‘I’m the most content I have ever been in my life’: Wife of Australian Jihadi Tweets Picture of ‘Martyred’ Husband’s Bloodied Body after He Is Killed Fighting for ISIS in Syria,” Daily Mail, March 18, 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3001341/Wife-23-year -old-Australian-jihadi-Suham-Rahman-posts-picture-dead -body-expresses-joy-s-killed-fighting-Islamic-State-Syria.html. 25.  Rukmini Callimachi and Catherine Porter, “2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home,” New York Times, February 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/ us/islamic-state-american-women.html. 26.  Ellie Hall, “An Alabama ‘ISIS Bride’ Wants to Come Home. Can We Forgive Her Horrifying Social Media Posts?,” BuzzFeed News, May 4, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews .com/article/ellievhall/hoda-muthana-isis-instagram-twitter -tumblr-alabama. 27. Hall, “An Alabama ‘ISIS Bride’”; BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana.”

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28.  Speckhard and Shakjovci, “American-Born Hoda Muthana.” 29.  As of September 2019. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “North East Syria: Al Hol Camp ­Service Mapping Snapshot,” September 29, 2019, https://reliefweb.int/ report/syrian-arab-republic/north-east-syria-al-hol-camp-service -mapping-snapshot-29-september-2019. 30.  CNN, “ISIS Using ‘Jihotties’ to Recruit Brides for Fighters,” CNN Video, 2:20, https://www.cnn.com/videos/ world/2016/01/20/jihotties-isis-recruiting-brides-todd-dnt-tsr .cnn; Tania Kohut, “Extremist Romance: How Terrorists Use ‘Jihotties’ to Lure Lonely Hearts Online,” Global News, January 21, 2016, https://globalnews.ca/news/2469726/extremist-romance -how-terrorists-use-jihotties-to-lure-lonely-hearts-online/. 31.  Alice Martini, “Making Women Terrorists into ‘Jihadi Brides’: An Analysis of Media Narratives on Women Joining ISIS,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 3 (2018): 465. 32.  BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana.” 33.  Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, The ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 207. 34.  Ibid., 203. 35.  On women’s role in and exclusion from defensive jihad, see Nelly Lahoud, “The Neglected Sex: The Jihadis’ Exclusion of Women from Jihad,” Terrorism and Political Violence 26, iss. 5 (2014): 780–802. 36.  Ingram et al., The ISIS Reader, 206. 37.  Cook and Vale, “From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’ II.” 38.  Mia Bloom with John Horgan, Small Arms: Children and Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 39.  Gina Vale, “Women in Islamic State: From Caliphate to Camps,” ICCT Policy Brief, October 2019, 4, https://icct.nl/ wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Women-in-Islamic-State-From -Caliphate-to-Camps.pdf.

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40.  Nelly Lahoud, Empowerment or Subjugation: An Analysis of ISIL’s Gendered Messaging (New York: UN Women, June 2018), https://arabstates.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/pub lications/2018/6/empowerment-or-subjugation. 41.  Martini, “Making Women Terrorists,” 467. 42.  Ibid., 461. 43.  Laura Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides and Female Volunteers: Reading the Islamic State’s War to See Gender and Agency in Conflict Dynamics,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 35, no. 3 (2018): 296–311; Martini, “Making Women Terrorists”; Simon Cottee, “What ISIS Women Want,” Foreign Policy, May 17, 2016, https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62346/1/63%20What%20ISIS %20Women%20Want%20_%20Foreign%20Policy.pdf. 44.  Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides,” 299. 45. Chulov and McKernan, “Hoda Muthana ‘Deeply Regrets’”; Enjoli Francis and James Longman, “Former ISIS Bride Who Left US for Syria Says She ‘Interpreted Everything Very Wrong,” ABC News, February 19, 2019, https://abcnews.go .com/International/isis-bride-left-us-syria-interpreted-wrong/ story?id=61175508. 46. Speckhard and Shajkovci, “American-Born Hoda Muthana.” 47.  Sjoberg, “Jihadi Brides,” 299. 48.  Meredith Loken and Anna Zelenz, “Explaining Extremism: Western Women in Daesh,” European Journal of International Security 3, no. 1 (2018): 45–68. 49.  Hall, “An Alabama ‘ISIS Bride.’” 50.  Richard Hall, “Isis Flag Raised at Syrian Camp Holding Jihadi Families,” Independent, July 16, 2019, https://www.inde pendent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-syria-flag-children -families-terror-islamic-state-camp-a9006566.html. 51.  Louisa Loveluck and Souad Mekhennet, “At a Sprawling Tent Camp in Syria, ISIS Women Impose a Brutal Rule,”

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Washington Post, September 3, 2019, https://www.washington post.com/world/at-a-sprawling-tent-camp-in-syria-isis-women -impose-a-brutal-rule/2019/09/03/3fcdfd14-c4ea-11e9-8bf7 -cde2d9e09055_story.html. 52.  Speckhard and Shajkovci, “American-Born Hoda Muthana.” 53.  BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana.” 54.  On February 20, 2019, President Donald J. Trump tweeted, “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Donald J. Trump, Twitter Post, February 20, 2019, 4:05 PM, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1098327 855145062411?s=21. 55. Expedited Complaint for Declaratory Judgement, Muthana v. Pompeo. 56.  United States, The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2001), http://purl .access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS39935. 57.  Expedited Complaint for Declaratory Judgement at 26, Muthana v. Pompeo. 58.  Memorandum in Response to the Court’s March 1, 2019 Order at 1, Muthana v. Pompeo, No. 19-cv-00445 (D.D.C. March 4, 2019), ECF No. 14. 59.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 60.  Shane Bauer, “Behind the Lines,” Mother Jones, July/ August 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/ behind-the-lines-syria-part-two/. 61.  Sarah Childress, “American Mom Charged with Aiding Terrorists after Living under ISIS,” PBS Frontline, August 23, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/american -mom-charged-with-aiding-terrorists-after-living-under-isis/; Jessica Roy, “Two Sisters and the Terrorist Who Came between

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Them,” Elle, August 27, 2019, https://www.elle.com/culture/ career-politics/a28485965/samantha-elhassani-isis-sisters-part -one/; Adam Rawnsley, “Indiana Mom Who Followed ­Husband to ISIS Helped Arm, Fund Terror Group, Feds Say,” Daily Beast, August 23, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/indiana -mom-who-followed-husband-to-isis-helped-arm-fund-terror -group-feds-say. 62. Government’s Response to Defendant’s Motion for Release at 2, United States of America v. Elhassani, No. 2:18-cr33 (D.IN.ND, Dec. 19, 2018), ECF No. 53. See also, PBS, “Her Husband Was an ISIS Sniper, Her Son Appeared in Propaganda. What’s Next for This American Family?” PBS News Hour, video, 4:46, April 11, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/news hour/show/her-husband-was-an-isis-sniper-her-son-appeared -in-propaganda-whats-next-for-this-american-family. 63.  David Wroe, “Yazidi Former Slaves Emerge from the Islamic State and Want to Tell Their Stories,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 28, 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/world/mid dle-east/yazidi-former-slaves-emerge-from-the-islamic-state -and-want-to-tell-their-tales-20190328-p518da.html. 64.  U.S. Department of Justice, “Former Indiana Resident Charged With Providing and Conspiring to Provide Material Support to ISIS,” press release no. 18-1094 (Washington DC: Office of Public Affairs, August 23, 2018), https://www.justice .gov/opa/pr/former-indiana-resident-charged-providing-and -conspiring-provide-material-support-isis. 65.  Grant Morgan, “Evidence Issues Persist in Case of Indiana Woman Accused of Aiding ISIS,” Chicago Tribune, November 6, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post -tribune/ct-ptb-evidence-issues-persist-st-1107-20191107 -tk4a2e6rtzhphcylyq53hr764a-story.html. 66.  Plea Agreement, United States of America v. Elhassani, No. 2:19-cr-00159 (D.IN.ND, Nov. 25, 2019), ECF No. 2.

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67.  Callimachi and Porter, “2 American Wives.” 68. Chulov and McKernan, “Hoda Muthana ‘Deeply Regrets.’” 69.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist”; Francis and Longman, “Former ISIS Bride.” 70.  BuzzFeed News, “Hoda Muthana.” 71.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 72.  Francis and Longman, “Former ISIS Bride.” 73.  Callimachi and Porter, “2 American Wives.” 74.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 75.  NBC News, “American ‘ISIS Bride’ Reflects on Motherhood While in Detention in Syrian Camp,” November 8, 2019, video, 1:32, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-born -isis-bride-says-everyone-deserves-second-chance-n1075046. 76.  CBS News, “‘I Am Allowed Back,’ U.S. ‘ISIS Bride’ Hoda Muthana Tells CBS News,” March 4, 2019, https://www .cbsnews.com/news/us-isis-bride-hoda-muthana-court-bid-to -come-home-donald-trump-says-not-citizen/. 77.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 78.  Luke Denne and Gabriel Chaim, “U.S.-Born ISIS Bride Says ‘Everyone Deserves a Second Chance,’” NBC News, November 9, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-born -isis-bride-says-everyone-deserves-second-chance-n1075046; ABC News, Nightline, YouTube video, 7:47, February 20, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVH7sTfe8u0. 79. Chulov and McKernan, “Hoda Muthana ‘Deeply Regrets.’” 80.  CBS News, “‘I Am Allowed Back.’” 81.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 82. Memorandum Opinion, Muthana v. Pompeo, No. 19-cv-00445 (D.D.C. Dec. 16, 2019), ECF No. 32. 83.  Expedited Complaint for Declaratory Judgement at 3, Muthana v. Pompeo.

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84. Chulov and McKernan, “Hoda Muthana ‘Deeply Regrets.’” 85.  CBS News, “‘I Am Allowed Back.’” 86.  Al Faour et al., “The Making of an American Terrorist.” 87.  Talia Ralph, “Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib Soldier, Still Not Sorry,” PRI, March 19, 2012, https://www.pri.org/stories/ 2012-03-19/lynndie-england-abu-ghraib-soldier-still-not-sorry. 88.  Jorg Luyken, “Germany Convicts First ‘Isil Bride’ in Precedent-Setting Case,” Telegraph, July 5, 2019, https://www .telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/07/05/germany-convicts-first-isil -bride-precedent-setting-case/; Melissa Edy, “German Woman Goes on Trial in Death of 5-Year-Old Girl Held as ISIS Slave,” New York Times, April 9, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/ 04/09/world/europe/germany-isis-trial.html. 89.  Sophia Jones and Christina Asquith, “Iraq Is Tempting Fate by Punishing Women,” Foreign Policy, October 25, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/25/iraq-is-tempting-fate-by -punishing-women/; Human Rights Watch, “Iraq: Change Approach to Foreign Women and Children in ISIS-Linked Trials,” June 21, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/21/iraq -change-approach-foreign-women-children-isis-linked-trials#. 90.  The International Criminal Court (ICC) currently lacks territorial jurisdiction over crimes committed in Iraq and Syria. Given its focus on prosecuting those most responsible for mass crimes (i.e., leaders), the ICC’s Prosecutor determined in April 2015 that it also lacked personal jurisdiction to open preliminary investigations as the majority of ISIS’s leadership were nationals of states that are not parties to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC. See, Fatou Bensouda, Statement of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, on the Alleged Crimes Committed by ISIS (The Hague, Netherlands: International Criminal Court, Office of the Prosecutor, April 8, 2015), https://www .icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=otp-stat-08-04-2015-1.