Rape and the spoils of war

I remember in the mid90s, sitting in a political science class, when the professor was discussing, no, excusing the rape that had just occurred in Bosnia and Kosovo by way of explaining it as 'spoils of war'. It was something that men did in the face of death and destruction. Some primal urge. I was in my early 30s then and the majority of my classmates were much younger than myself, except for the odd student. Sitting in the back, I could see their reaction of disbelief. It was not just politically incorrect, it was truly ignorant. The professor actually believed it!

I could not say nothing and inspite of always having felt extremely shy to speak up in class, I raised my hands and said "no professor, rape is not an act of desire, it's an act of aggression".

Monika Hauser



One of Amy Goodman's fellow recipients of the Right Livelihood award (see post below), the alternative Nobel award, is Monika Hauser. She is a gynocologist and founded a non profit organization based in Germany called "medica mondiale". Her organization works to "prevent and punish sexual violence against women and girls in wartime."
Over 70.000 women and girls from "Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Afghanistan" have been exposed to their aid.

Anti-rape sign in Liberia







Here is an excerpt of Amy Goodman's interview with Monika Hauser:

"...Hauser received the Right Livelihood Awardfor “her tireless commitment to working with women who have experienced the most horrific sexual violence in some of the most dangerous countries in the world, and campaigning for them to receive social recognition and compensation.”She joins me here in the studio in Stockholm, Sweden.
Welcome to Democracy Now!"

MONIKA HAUSER: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: "So, congratulations, and tell us about your organization. What is medica mondiale? What prompted you to start this?"


MONIKA HAUSER: "I founded medica mondiale in the end of ’92, because I realized what happened in Bosnia, because in the war there, many, many women got raped. And as a young gynecologist who has worked already with raped women before in Germany and other places in Europe, I was aware about that these women need a holistic approach of support. They need medical support, they need psychosocial support."

photo by HIDAJET DELIC [Bosnian Muslim women holding posters with the names of the missing during a protest in front of the UN office in Sarajevo, on Friday, July 18 , 2008. Hundreds of war-time rape victims protested against the decision of the U.N. war crimes tribunal to reject the prosecution's request for rape to be added to the charges against two Bosnian Serbs currently on trial for other war crimes. The women claim Milan and Sredoje Lukic organized rape camps for Serb soldiers in which they held Muslim women as sex slaves. Milan and Sredoje Lukic are on trial at the tribunal in Netherlands for murder and other war crimes described by the prosecution as one of the most brutal in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.]


"When I read the media reports, I got very angry, angry about that what happened to the women and angry about that how the medias reported about the women. They scandalized that what happened to them. And instead of looking to them as survivors of grave human rights violations, they abused, misused them again by their media reports. So I said to myself I have to support these women, as a gynecologist, as a feminist and as a European.

I went there to central Bosnia, and I found very fast twenty professional Bosnian women, gynecologists, nurses, psychologists, who were very eager to start with me this women’s therapy center there."

AMY GOODMAN:" And how did you go from that to working in countries around the world?"

MONIKA HAUSER: "So, this was the first step, and now Medica Zenica is fifteen years old, the project there, still working and still helping traumatized women. And the staff there is very experienced.

And then we started new programs in Kosovo, because we saw after the end of the war there in ’99 that to Kosovo women, the same happened again. Rape as a tool of war was happening, and they were exposed to so much violence. So we decided to set up there our second project. And Bosnian therapists, Bosnian professionals supported us to build up this new project. They trained their new colleagues."












"The 12-year-old girl, gang-raped in Afghanistan, weeps as her family demands justice", please see >"Muslims Against Sharia - Islamic Reform Movement"


"And the same with Afghanistan. This is our main project since 2002. We have there now, in the meantime, over seventy local female staff members, and we had again the Bosnian therapists with their huge experience coming over to Kabul to train doctors, midwives, nurses, psychologists, lawyers, in order to help traumatized Afghan women."

Read the rest of the interview.

Here is a definition of rape; The crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.

[emph,bold,underlining added by yours truly]