Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

The systematic rape of Muslim and Croat women as part of the ``ethnic cleansing'' campaign in the former Yugoslavia is by now common knowledge. Less well known is the military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide currently practiced in Bosnia-Herzogovina by members of the Yugoslav Army and the Bosnian Serb military. The author of this outraged protest asserts that rape is being used increasingly as a weapon of war in the Balkans, combining murderous misogyny with rabid nationalism. Allen explains the twisted logic by which perpetrators consider the act as cancelling the victim's cultural identity. If the victim is impregnated, so the theory goes, the offspring is nothing less than ``a little Serb soldier.'' Allen urgently argues that the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal must prosecute the perpetrators of pregnancy-aimed rape as a crime of biological warfare. Her self-consciously feminist book, documenting the mass scale of rapes at some 30 concentration camps, is shockingly effective. Allen is director of the humanities doctoral program at Syracuse University and a prominent advocate of women's rights. (Feb.)