UN moves to investigate mass rape in camps
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Your support makes all the difference.THE United Nations Security Council yesterday denounced mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women that are alleged to have occurred at Serbian detention camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Security Council passed a resolution by 15 votes to none that condemned 'these acts of unspeakable brutality' and advocated sending investigation teams into the camps. The teams are likely to be provided with armed escorts from the 20,000-strong UN peace-keeping force that is stationed in the former Yugoslavia.
The resolution said that all camps, especially those in which women were held prisoner, should be closed immediately and that the Security Council was 'appalled by reports of the massive, organised and systematic detention and rape of women, in particular Muslim women'. The resolution was sponsored by Britain, France, Belgium and Morocco.
The Security Council took its action after a Croatian writer, Slavenka Drakulic, published an article in last Sunday's New York Times which alleged that Serbian soldiers were raping Muslim women 'as a planned crime to destroy a whole Muslim population'. She said that Bosnia's Muslim-led government believed that 50,000 women and girls had been raped since the war started last April, and that many had been deliberately made pregnant.
However, the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church denounced these reports as 'monstrous accusations' and said they were 'the most dishonourable part of the war propaganda emanating from one of the warring sides'. The Church said it had numerous testimonies of Serbian women who had been victims of violence, including 'individual and group rapes and violence committed against women and even girls'.
Frits van Kalshoven, a Dutchman who heads a UN commission investigating human rights abuses in the Bosnian war, said on Thursday that rapists could eventually be charged with war crimes. Noting that the Geneva Convention on the conduct of war forbids inhumane treatment, he said: 'Rape, I would think, amounts to inhumane treatment in all cases. It could amount to a war crime.'
Last Wednesday the US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, released a list of seven men - four Serbs and three Croats - whom he said should be charged with war crimes. He also named President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, and said they should explain whether and how they sought to ensure that their forces complied with international law.
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