1. Numerous organisations have documented and produced extensive reports on the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia in the name of “ethnic cleansing”. See, for example, the United Nations, Rape and Abuses of Women in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia, UN Doc. E/CN.4/ 1993/L21. The focus of my discussion will be primarily on the mass rapes of women in Bosnia Herzegovina. For a discussion of rape and other atrocities committed in Bosnia, see: Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia -Hercegovina, vol. I (New York, Washington, Los Angeles and London: Helsinki Watch - A Division of Hutnan Rights Watch, 1992). It is important to note that while I am focusing on the rape of women, Helsinki Watch has documented rapes of men in Bosnia. The rape of women in the former Yugoslavia will be discussed in more detail below.
2. For a discussion of narratives of male bravery and sacrifice during war, see: J. Elshtain, “Sovereignty, Identity, and Sacrifice”, in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, ed. V.S. Peterson (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishing, 1992), 141–154.
3. Ruth Harris notes that the rape of French women was extensively publicised, sometimes with lurid detail, in order to garner support for World War One. Despite this publicity, the rape of French (and German) women has not been part of the iconography or story of that war: “The ‘Child of the Barbarian’: Rape, Race and Nationalism in France During the First World War”, Past and Present 141 (1994), 171–206. Cynthia Enloe has also written about how images of women were predominate in the days leading up to the Persian Gulf war, but once “the serious business of combat had begun”, stories of women disappeared: “The Gendered Gulf”, in Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War, ed. S. Jeffords and L Rabinovitz (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 211–228, at 212–13 [hereinafter “The Gendered Gulf], and The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993) [hereinafter “The Morning After”].
4. For a detailed discussion of incidences of wartime rape in the last century, see: S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
5. V. Penezic, “Women in Yugoslavia”, Genders 22 (1995), 57–77, at 64