Sexualized Violence Is Used as a Weapon of War
For ethnic cleansing: There are testimonies from women who had soldiers tell them, while raping them, that they wanted to get them pregnant or force them to have children who would look ethnically different from their mother, or that they were raping them to punish them for being Muslim (or Croatian). There were also women who became pregnant and were forced to carry their babies to term.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) declared that "systematic rape", and "sexual enslavement" in time of war was a crime against humanity, second only to the war crime of genocide. Although the ICTY did not treat the mass rapes as genocide, many scholars such as Becirevic, Boose, Johan Vetlesen etc. have provided sufficient arguments and concluded from the organized, and systematic nature of the mass rapes of the female Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population, that these rapes were a part of a larger campaign of genocide and that the VRS were carrying out a policy of genocidal rape against the Bosnian Muslim ethnic group. Utmost due respect is given to the decision of the ICTY.
For ethnic cleansing: There are testimonies from women who had soldiers tell them, while raping them, that they wanted to get them pregnant or force them to have children who would look ethnically different from their mother, or that they were raping them to punish them for being Muslim (or Croatian). There were also women who became pregnant and were forced to carry their babies to term.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) declared that "systematic rape", and "sexual enslavement" in time of war was a crime against humanity, second only to the war crime of genocide. Although the ICTY did not treat the mass rapes as genocide, many scholars such as Becirevic, Boose, Johan Vetlesen etc. have provided sufficient arguments and concluded from the organized, and systematic nature of the mass rapes of the female Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population, that these rapes were a part of a larger campaign of genocide and that the VRS were carrying out a policy of genocidal rape against the Bosnian Muslim ethnic group. Utmost due respect is given to the decision of the ICTY.
