Paper presented to the Fourth International Bi-Annual Conference
of the Association of Genocide Scholars
Minneapolis, MN, June 10-12, 2001
The gender variable is one of the least-analyzed and most misunderstood elements of genocidal killing. This paper seeks to develop the author's inclusive framing of "gendercide," i.e., gender-selective mass killing, by exploring the relevance of gender to genocide prevention and humanitarian intervention. Among the specific arguments to be advanced is that the genocidal or proto-genocidal targeting of males, especially "battle-age" men, is one of the most reliable indicators of the onset, or impending onset, of fullscale genocide. In the three "classic" genocides of the twentieth century, for example -- against the Armenian community in Turkey, European Jews, and the Tutsis of Rwanda -- fullscale genocide was preceded by a wide range of gender-selective measures, including mass roundups and localized killings of men. The demonization of out-group males was a key feature of the propaganda discourse that paved the way for genocide. In addition, the initial stages of all these genocides overwhelmingly targeted males for extermination, a phenomenon that is also evident in numerous contemporary and historical cases. Associated patterns of the demonization of "out-group" women, and abuses including rape and sexual assault, also need to be factored into the analysis. I also devote a separate section to "The Challenge of Gendercidal Institutions," focusing on one -- maternal mortality -- in which state-sponsored negligence kills hundreds of thousands of women annually.
I begin by examining the incorporation of the gender variable into both international relations and genocide studies. In the latter half of the paper, the gender policies of two institutions that play a key role in humanitarian interventions -- the United Nations and human-rights NGOs -- are considered and critiqued. The argument will be that these institutions have, on balance, paid only the most limited attention to the vulnerability of the group most typically targeted in genocidal killing -- younger, "battle-age" males. This focus on males reflects, and is designed to partly redress, the marginalization of male victims from the discourse of human rights and humanitarian intervention. It should not be seen as suggesting that men and boys are in any way "more important" as subjects of analyses than women and girls. Rather, I contend that the link between women/femininity and humanitarian emergencies has been relatively well conceptualized and explored by feminist scholarship, and entrenched as a subject of legitimate concern in the policies and coverage developed by the key institutions already referred to. The challenge of expanding the framework of "gender" beyond women has, however, barely begun to be met, and urgently requires scholarly and institutional consideration.
Over the last couple of decades, feminist theories of international relations have become one of the most vibrant subfields in the discipline. In the process, they have diversified to include liberal, radical, and post-modernist/post-positivist "strands." Each has sought to undermine the hegemony of realist and neo-realist framings -- typically denouncing classical I.R. as "one of the most gender-blind, indeed crudely patriarchal of all the institutionalized forms of contemporary social and political analysis,"(1) and stressing its failure adequately to incorporate a "gender variable" in the analysis. The result has been an impressive contribution to the I.R. literature and the integration of a rich array of theoretical insights into the gendering of international politics and international conflict.(2)
In a 1996 article for Review of International Studies, however, I argued that "feminists' success in exploring the gender variable remains ... mixed. And until feminist frameworks are expanded and to some extent reworked, it is hard to see how a persuasive theory or account of the gendering of international relations can be constructed." The key problem, I contended, was the fact that "Feminist attempts to incorporate a gender variable into IR analysis are constrained by the basic feminist methodology and all feminists' normative commitments. A genuinely 'feminist approach' by definition 'must take women's lives as the epistemological starting point' [quoting Rebecca Grant]."
"In its way," I suggested, this represents "a new logocentrism, whereby (elite) male actions and (hegemonic) masculinity are drawn into the narrative mainly as independent variables explaining 'gender' oppression. ... The plight of embodied women is front and centre throughout, while the attention paid to the male/masculine realm amounts to little more than lip-service."(3) I concluded this article by "suggesting a range of phenomena and issue areas that ought to be explored." Among them, "Patterns of political violence ... need to be explored for the light they might shed on how 'security' is gendered at the societal level. Preliminary investigation suggests that political violence by state agencies is predominantly, even overwhelmingly, directed against males rather than female."(4)
While the reaction to the article among the feminist-I.R. community was generally hostile,(5) there are indications that scholars and students of gender and International Relations might be growing more receptive to analyses that call attention to male victimization. Some feminist writers, including Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe, and Cynthia Cockburn, have offered increasingly nuanced and sensitive gender analyses that both broaden the palette of women's actions and attitudes, and open space for empathetic, as well as critical, consideration of the male subject.(6) An important recent volume, States of Conflict, includes contributions by Judy El-Bushra, Ruth Jacobson, and Parita Mukhta that further problematize women's involvement in conflict and pay specific, if passing, attention to the phenomenon of gender-selective atrocities against men. According to the editors, "The collection emphasises women's agency, alongside men's, in both creating and challenging conflict. In so doing, we aim for a feminist analysis which is at the same time more consistent in its treatment of gender than is often the case when conflict and/or violence is under examination."(7)
In December 2000, El-Bushra edited a groundbreaking issue of Forced Migration Review on the theme of "Gender and Displacement," asking, among other questions:
Does the stress on women prevent us from recognizing discrimination by men against men (older versus younger men, for example, or men from different classes or ethnicities), women against women (when women collude in promoting gender discrimination against each other) and women against men? Can women's rights be supported within a context of broader developmental and humanitarian goals or do men inevitably have to lose when women gain? In short, where do men fit within a gender approach to development? ... If "gender" is to be rescued as a useful project for development, it needs time and resources to be invested in research in order to understand how it works in different social, economic and political contexts. It needs to be re-politicised and understood as a factor of contested identities, both of women and of men. Most importantly, if gender is to continue to be a relevant concept, it needs to be understood as having meaning for both men and women, old and young, settled and displaced, North and South: in other words, as an expression of human identity and human aspirations.(8)
Finally, Charli Carpenter, who like myself seeks to bridge international relations and genocide studies, has criticized "the misconception, shared by feminist and non-feminist IR scholars alike, that gender studies in IR is synonymous with feminist IR theory. ... A gender theory that focuses only on women is leaving a vast array of other topics on gender unexplored." She calls for "expanding gender research beyond feminism ... [in order to] yield more inclusive analyses, particularly of men and masculinity and of non- or anti-feminist women's issues."(9) One can only applaud the trend, and hope that in the future the study of gender and international politics, including such grim manifestations as genocide, will indeed produce the "more inclusive analyses" that Carpenter recommends.
In the field of genocide studies, meanwhile, the gender variable has been "invisible or barely visible," an "obfuscation" that "may reflect the fact that it is non-combatant males who tend overwhelmingly to be the victims of gender-selective mass killing, and this remains a powerful taboo in the feminist-dominated discussion of gender."(10) Only one book has appeared that claims to address the subject of gender and genocide: Ronit Lentin's edited collection Gender & Catastrophe.(11) The editor's introduction describes women as "uniquely at risk" in genocidal outbreaks, and the volume as a whole attempts to illustrate "the ways [in which] women are targeted by genocides and catastrophes."(12) It is a worthwhile contribution, but also a blinkered one. And apart from case-studies of women's victimization in individual genocides, mostly focused on the former Yugoslavia,(13) nothing has appeared subsequently, to my knowledge.
It was with this analytical gulf in mind that I wrote my article "Gendercide and Genocide" for Journal of Genocide Research; and also the reason that I co-launched, in February 2000, a Web-based educational project called Gendercide Watch (www.gendercide.org), which seeks to confront gender-selective mass killings and other atrocities against both men and women worldwide. In marked contrast to the response generated by my work in gender and international relations, both projects have benefited by a quite extraordinary receptiveness. In the first instance, the Journal of Genocide Research offered the opportunity to follow up my article with a special issue of the journal addressing the theme of gender and genocide (to be published in Spring 2002). Gendercide Watch, meanwhile, has attracted some 400-500 visitors a day to its website, received numerous Internet awards, and has been cited by media outlets including The Times and BBC Online in the UK and The Village Voice in the United States. Moreover, both the list of affiliates and the e-mail list for the project have attracted women and men in roughly equal numbers (in fact, with a slight preponderance of women). I believe this bodes extremely well for incorporating the gender variable into analyses of genocide and genocide prevention, and for doing so in an inclusive way that treats both men and women as "worthy" victims, while not being blind to the role that both sexes play in the perpetration of genocide.(14)
At the same time, however, criticisms have been voiced about the "gendercide" framing. One issue is whether the term itself can legitimately be used to refer to selective genocidal attacks on men and women (or boys and girls). In another paper presented on this panel, for instance, R. Charli Carpenter argues that a clear distinction should be drawn between (biological) sex and (culturally-constructed) gender, and what I call "gendercide" would better be referred to as "sex-selective massacre." Stuart Stein, in his forthcoming contribution to the special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, concurs, claiming that "There is also a subsidiary confusion between sex and gender" in my work: "Sex refers to the biological status of the individual, whereas gender refers to socially learned behaviors and expectations. As far as selection of individuals [for mass murder] in the situations depicted by Jones are concerned, differences between sex and gender are unlikely to be taken note of by perpetrators, selection being made on the basis of sex. To be strictly accurate, therefore, the selectivity that Jones refers to should be designated sexcide."(15)
This is not the place for an extended discussion of this subject,(16) but I believe there are solid grounds for using "gender" as shorthand to designate for the continuum of biologically-given and culturally-constructed attributes; that such a practice is common in "colloquial usage" and in "much international discourse pertaining to women," as Carpenter, for one, recognizes; and that use of the term "gendercide" is amply in keeping with the original deployment of the term, by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection.(17)
Much seems to be gained in terms of nomenclatural convenience, and little analytical force surrendered, if the specific context of "gender" is simply borne in mind. When I talk, for example, about the "gendering" of the victims of a mass grave (or a campaign of sexual assault, or a military press-gang), it can be assumed that I am discussing the fate of "embodied" males and females, rather than (or prior to) inquiring into more subtle cultural conditioning. "Gendercide" similarly refers to the deaths of "embodied" males and females -- or rather, violently disembodied ones. In "gendering" social phenomena or historical events, meanwhile, I should be understood as trying to discern the explanatory power of gender in the broader political or sociological equation (gender, again, both as biological sex and cultural construction).
Carpenter also notes that using the term gendercide "is not without its political advantages." It "creates an obvious semantic corollary to the much-abused term 'genocide.'" It helps to "advanc[e] a normative argument that policymakers and activists turn their brains on." I would not deny for a moment that the political-activist component is integral to my research on gendercide, nor that this component is greatly aided by deployment of a term that is both evocative and concise.(18) The political aspect of the project also prompts my focus on "sex-selective massacre."
Carpenter is quite right when she contends that it would be disastrous for studies of gender and genocide to become preoccupied with this theme to the exclusion of all else. Her specific recommendations for building on the existing gendercide literature -- such as further exploring the age variable, destabilizing heterosexual assumptions, and examining gendered discourses of humanitarian intervention -- strike me as convincing and well thought-out.(19) Thus, gendercide should not be the focus of gender-and-genocide research. In my view, however, it should remain a legitimate focus of such research. And it is perhaps one of the most urgent ones, given that the phenomenon of gender-selective mass killing has not, until now, been framed inclusively, analyzed within a comparative and global-historical framework, or integrated into the policy and humanitarian discussion and agenda.(20)
In the activist context, in which "issues" must be carefully defined and energetically lobbied, the validity of a focus on gender-selective mass killing becomes clearer still. Primary attention to the most atrocious real-world reflections of gender bias can create the kind of cognitive "shock" that is vital to establishing phenomena as issues and problems. It is especially vital to draw attention to male victims, since the culture's prevailing obliviousness to this category of victims means that only the worst abuses have a chance of being viewed as morally problematic and worthy of policy concern.
The real world changes far more slowly than does scholarship. One can be reasonably sure that if one advances theory X in the social sciences and succeeds in finding an audience for it, a year or two later one will be reading an article entitled "Beyond X." Activism, on the other hand, often involves decades of patient and insistent work before one even begins to see one's framings and arguments reflected in the policy sphere -- if one ever does. The question, then, is whether "gendercide" is nothing more than a political "catch-phrase," as Carpenter suggests (that is, something gimmicky and disposable); or whether it serves instead as a catalyzing idea, without which no meaningful "principled-issue network" can develop. I believe strongly that it can succeed as the latter.(21) In the remainder of this paper I seek to extend my previous research on gendercide by concentrating on its relevance to the policy sphere and strategies of intervention in humanitarian emergencies, including genocidal and proto-genocidal campaigns.
How might more nuanced and sustained attention to the role of gender in genocide -- in particular, an analytical framework that incorporates victimized or vulnerable males -- affect strategies of genocide prevention and humanitarian intervention? I will build the following analysis around the prelude and onset/outbreak stages of genocide. The aftermath of genocidal killing also deserves careful consideration, particularly with regard to the humanitarian needs of women and girls, who are likely to be disproportionately represented among the survivors of genocide. Given that the focus here is on prevention and suppression, though, I will not give the aftermath stage the attention it merits.
There are two key areas in which gender seems to play a significant role in preludes to genocidal killing: mass detentions, torture, and selective killing of "battle-age" males, and the demonization of both males and females, but especially males, as part of the campaign of stigmatization, marginalization, and concentration that standardly precedes the onset of larger-scale or full-blown genocide. Those seeking to isolate "warning signs" of genocidal outbreaks should therefore attend closely to this gendered patterns of anathematization and persecution -- along with other important (and standardly gendered) indicators, such as the development of paramilitary forces, primordial appeals to racial and ethnic identity, the cultivation of "the politics of verbal assault and physical violence," and the deepening of inter-generational cleavages.(22)
The detention, abuse, and selective killing of "out-group" males as a signal of impending mass slaughter is quite clear in the case of the twentieth century's "classic" genocide, the Jewish holocaust. A major marker on the road to genocide was the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") on November 9-10, 1938, when Hitler's thugs targeted Jewish citizens and property for largescale violence and destruction. In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, the Nazis rounded up at least 30,000 Jewish males and incarcerated them in concentration camps. As Eugen Kogon writes,
These arrests were made without regard for age. Ten-year old boys could be seen side by side with septuagenarians and octogenarians. En route from the Wiemar [sic: Weimar] railroad station [to the camp at Buchenwald] all stragglers were shot down, while the survivors were forced to drag the bloody bodies into camp. ... Inside stood the Block Leaders, wielding iron rods, whips and truncheons, and virtually every Jew who got into the camp sustained injuries. The events that took place at the time are not easily described in a few words. Let me merely mention that sixty-eight Jews went mad that very first night. They were clubbed to death like mad dogs ... four men at a time. ... SS noncoms pushed the heads of some of their charges into overflowing latrine buckets until they suffocated.
Eventually, "for reasons that never became clear, most of the[se] Jews were set free on orders from the Reich authorities" and allowed to go into exile. Exactly a year later, however, after "an alleged attempt on Hitler's life," Jewish men in Buchenwald "were suddenly recalled from their [work] details and confined to barracks." The Germans "picked out twenty-one Austrian and German Jews, entirely at random, without any list. Most of them were vigorous young men. ... The SS took the group out through the gatehouse and shot them at close range in the quarry."(23)
It is scarcely surprising that by the time such abuses and atrocities spilled over to fullscale genocide, "the [Nazis'] decision to kill every Jew did not seem to demand special justification to kill Jewish men," as Joan Ringelheim notes. "They were already identified as dangerous. ... Jewish men were always considered an objective enemy of National Socialism."(24)
A similar process of roundup, detention, and ill-treatment of out-group males was evident in the prelude to the Rwandan genocide, beginning with the invasion of Rwanda by the RPF rebels in 1990. In October 1990 a pogrom was launched against Tutsis which began -- like the 1994 genocide -- with the imposition of a curfew. "I got scared as soon as I heard the word curfew" in April 1994, recalled one young man. "The curfew in October 1990 had been a disaster for Tutsi men. Thousands of them were arrested and thrown into prison. Some died. I feared the same thing would happen again."(25) When the genocide first erupted, Tutsi males -- as well as many Hutu men of an oppositionist bent -- understood immediately that they were at greatest risk. "As soon as I heard that Habyarimana had been assassinated, I knew they would go for all Tutsis, especially Tutsi men," one survivor, Emmanuel Ngezahayo, told African Rights.(26) In general, "they" did, although the nature and evolution of the mass-killing enterprise in Rwanda is a matter of some dispute (see the following section for further discussion).
One other case-study is worth citing in this context, though in scale it can hardly be compared with the Jewish and Rwandan catastrophes. In the prelude to the Kosovo war -- the period from 1989 to 1998 -- there is little question that the focus of Serb occupation strategies revolved around the detention, abuse, and intimidation above all of younger Kosovar males. Amnesty International's 1994 report on the Serbs' reign of terror in Kosovo -- worse was to follow in the next five years -- gives a sense of the thousands of individual acts of "extreme brutality" involved in these proto-genocidal campaigns, and their destabilizing effect upon the entire ethnic-Albanian community:
Because of the traditional pattern of settlement in rural areas of Kosovo, in which large extended families tend to live together, police raids are normally witnessed and personally experienced by many relatives. ... Accounts of arms searches repeatedly refer to the deliberately intimidating and destructive way in which they are conducted: furniture is broken up, the inmates of the house are threatened, shouted and sworn at, and the men of the house are frequently arrested and beaten in local police stations or, even more humiliatingly, in their homes in front of their families. These beatings are often severe, causing injuries: reports of the victim losing consciousness as a result of beating, or of suffering bruising, broken teeth or ribs, are not uncommon. It is not only those found to possess unlicensed arms who are at risk of being beaten: those who do not possess weapons may also find themselves bearing the brunt of police frustration.(27)
Women certainly numbered among those detained by Yugoslav security forces during this period. But as Julie Mertus noted shortly before the outbreak of the Kosovo war, "while police ... routinely stop ethnic Albanian men, women and children can usually walk the street without police harassment." Thus, when Mertus cites the astonishing statistic that between 1989 and 1997 "584,373 Kosovo Albanians -- half the adult population -- [was] arrested, interrogated, interned or remanded" by the Serb police state, one can reasonably guess which half.(28)
Analyses of past atrocities, however, can do little to help the victims apart from retrospectively validating their suffering. The challenge is to apply the lessons to the conflicts of the present, and there is no shortage of contemporary case-studies meriting urgent attention. As this paper was nearing completion, for example, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch -- which has devoted greater attention to the plight of younger males in conflict situations than any other established organization I can think of (see "The Human Rights NGOs," below), issued a press release on Macedonia that anyone familiar with the patterns of abuse and atrocity in the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s could only find chilling:
Macedonian Police Abuses Documented
Ethnic Albanian Men Separated, Tortured at Police Stations
(Skopje, Macedonia, May 31, 2001) Macedonian forces are systematically separating out ethnic Albanian males fleeing fierce fighting in northern Macedonia, and severely beating some of the men at police stations, Human Rights Watch said today. In the most severe cases documented by Human Rights Watch, the ill-treatment appears intended to extract confessions or information about the National Liberation Army (NLA) and amounts to torture. The fear of violence at the hands of the Macedonian police is also stopping many ethnic Albanians from fleeing to safety into government-controlled territory.
"Ethnic Albanian men fleeing the fighting in Macedonia face severe ill-treatment by the police," said Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "We have documented serious beatings and torture of ethnic Albanians at the Kumanovo and Skopje police stations in the last week. The victims we interviewed have the bruises and injuries to back up their claims of abuse." ...
Since the beginning of the renewed offensive, Macedonian forces have separated out men from the civilians fleeing the fighting and have severely beaten some of them. ... Some of the tactics involved hundreds of blows to the soles of the victims' feet -- a torture technique known as falanga which causes severe pain and swelling and can lead to kidney failure -- as well as extended beatings on the hands, buttocks, arms, and heads of the victims. The men interviewed by Human Rights Watch indicated that they had heard the screams of many other beating victims at the police stations, suggesting that the scope of such abuse may be widespread and condoned at the police stations. ... Some of the men were forced to sign confessions under torture and to implicate others in NLA-related activities. Large numbers of men continue to be separated out from convoys of fleeing civilians and taken to police stations. ... "Ethnic Albanian men remaining in the villages under NLA control fear ill-treatment and torture at the hands of Macedonian forces," commented Cartner. "There is little doubt that this fear is one of the reasons why so many ethnic Albanian men are refusing to leave their homes in the conflict zone."(29)
The press release concluded with a call for international denunciations of the Macedonian government and the immediate halting of police abuses. Could practical interventionist measures also be undertaken? Surely, it would be an appropriate moment for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees -- or NATO peacekeepers in Macedonia -- to intervene to provide escorted safe passage to all the younger males in the villages who wish to leave. Whatever the success of efforts to defuse the Macedonian crisis, the lesson of such gendered state strategizing should be taken to heart: in any "crackdown" on perceived dissident elements, it will nearly always be males, especially younger males, who suffer first -- and worst.
One of the most interesting and potentially useful fields for future research into gender and genocide is the process of demonization that standardly accompanies the "prelude" phase. Both women and men of designated out-groups may be viciously anathematized by the purveyors of genocidal hatred. But while the female side of the phenomenon has received some scholarly attention, notably in the context of the European witch-hunts and the Rwanda genocide, the male dimension, though more pervasive and analytically significant, has been almost entirely ignored. A rare and welcome exception, though hardly a sustained analysis, can be found in Deborah Willis's study of the English witch-hunts, Malevolent Nurture. In the concluding paragraph of the book, Willis provides an important digression on "some of the most virulent of the twentieth-century 'witch-hunts,'" in which "violence has been directed against symbolic 'fathers' or other figures of authority." The trend is especially prominent "in countries where newly emergent but precarious ruling elites needed 'others' to blame for the serious economic or other problems they faced." Her example is Stalin's purges in the USSR:
... During the 1930s and 1940s in Stalin's Soviet Union, leadership fractured at all levels, not only within Stalin's "inner circle" but also within local and regional party machines (paralleling in some ways the neighborly quarrels and religious controversies that divided early modern communities). As power oscillated between different factions, purges were carried out in the name of Stalin, "Father of the Country," "the Great and Wise Teacher," "the Friend of Mankind," against the antifathers and betraying sons who had perverted the socialist program, the "enemies with party cards." Underlying the psychology of the purges may have been, among other things, the magical beliefs of the Russian peasantry, still lively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, translated after the Revolution into the language of "scientific socialism." Rather than the female witch, however, it was the male possessed by evil spirits who anticipated the typical target of persecutory violence -- the "evil spirits" of foreign, class-alien, or counterrevolutionary ideas. Demystified, secularized, stripped of his supernatural power, the great demonic adversary no longer needed to seduce a weaker [female] vessel but could walk among the elect as one of their own.(30)
Research on this subject is so lacking that one is forced to develop Willis's point in a somewhat impressionistic and intuitive fashion. A useful way of proceeding may be to invite the reader to engage in two rather macabre speculations. First, returning to the twentieth century's "classic" genocide, consider the Jew -- the purportedly "evil," "shiftless," "dirty," "skulking," "subversive," "rodent-like," "hook-nosed" Jew -- of Nazi propaganda. How was this grotesque propaganda portrait gendered? Was the Jewish enemy generally depicted as male or female? It is hard not to agree with the evaluation of Claudia Koonz, who notes the standard motif in which "Germany [was] pictured as an innocent female, about to be attacked by a hyper masculinized male -- the Jew."(31) It was for this reason and by this process that Jewish men were "already identified as dangerous" (recall Joan Ringelheim's comment earlier). Detailed content analyses of Nazi and other hate-propaganda would be needed to establish the accuracy and boundaries of this argument; but as a general proposition, it seems difficult to deny.
The second speculation may have broader applicability. The reader is asked to take the following pejorative terms and descriptions frequently applied by would-be and actual génocidaires to the members of the out-groups they target:
• evil
• monster
• demon/devil
• vampire/bloodsucker
• parasite
• vermin
• sub-human
• barbarian
• enemy
• terrorist/subversive
• rebel
• spy
• predator
• bandit
• criminal
• traitor
• rapist
• schemer/scheming
• corrupt
• swindler
• dirty
• shiftless/shifty
• vagabond
• exploiter
Now impose a human face on each of these genocidal stereotypes -- or, if this is too uncomfortable a proposition, imagine the face that the architects of genocide have tended to attach to these designations. Is it a male or a female face that comes to mind first and most vividly ... perhaps exclusively?
Consider now a handful of additional genocidal stereotypes:
• seducer
• prostitute/whore
• baby-factory
• witch
• child-killer
Here female "faces" would likely dominate overwhelmingly or exclusively in the first three cases, and would also figure strongly in the latter two. There are, therefore, ways in which women/females are effectively demonized. Perhaps it is fair to argue, however, that the available range of genocidal stereotypes is much narrower for women; and that when genocidal language and strategies are "gendered," they are most likely to focus on males, especially those of "battle age."
The sexual nature of most of the anti-female stereotypes points to the important role of sexual harassment, abuse, and attacks -- as well as allegations of the same committed by out-group males -- as a prelude to genocidal outbreaks. One of the most dramatic examples of the sexual demonization of women in a pre-genocidal context is Rwanda. Linda Melvern points out in her study A People Betrayed that of the notorious "Ten Commandments" propounded by the "Hutu Power" movement, "the first three ... referred to Tutsi women; the first commandment forbade marriage between Hutu and Tutsi because every Tutsi woman was a traitor and Hutu girls made more suitable mothers." In general, "here was enormous propaganda [directed] against Tutsi women in the build-up to genocide and the hatred mobilization [later] allowed the most inhumane acts of sexual violence to take place." This hate propaganda existed against a backdrop of women's structural oppression and systematic denigration: "In Rwanda, women could not inherit land or take out a loan and a wife could not work without the authorization of her husband."(32)
This important theme is explored in greater detail in Christopher Taylor's powerful book Sacrifice As Terror. Taylor notes that "in the months leading up to the genocide violent sexual imagery of both males and females abounded in the iconography of Hutu extremist literature while acts of actual sexual violence against Tutsi women occurred with increasing frequency." He points out that through gendered propaganda,
Hutu extremists appear[ed] to be attempting to purge their ambivalence toward Tutsi women via symbolic violence, even as they project[ed] their own erotic fantasies upon them. ... One can only speculate about the possible cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Hutu extremists where the question of Tutsi women was concerned. What is most important for our purposes is the fact that these sentiments received social expression(33)
-- and that they served as a key indicator of the impending campaign of genocidal hatred against all Tutsis (though the "ambivalence" to which Taylor refers seems to have resulted in a disproportionate targeting of Tutsi males in the early and most destructive stages of the genocide, as we will explore further below).
It should be pointed out that a corollary phenomenon, the demonization of out-group males as "rapists," has been a common feature of proto-genocidal situations. In her study of "how myths and truths started a war" in Kosovo, Julie A. Mertus notes that "a sexualized imagery of Albanian men and women was adopted ... in the mainstream Serbian and Yugoslav presses," with "Albanian men ... declared to be rapists, although Kosovo had the lowest reported incidents of sexual violence in Yugoslavia." (Albanian women, meanwhile, "were portrayed as mere baby factories, despite statistics indicating that the childbirth rates of urban Albanian women and those of other urban women in Yugoslavia were nearly identical.")(34) Such charges of rape -- so central to the murder of thousands of Black men in lynchings in the U.S. Deep South -- also serve as a powerful indicator that a campaign of mass violence, if not outright genocide, is being prepared.
One of the most predictable features of a pre- or proto-genocidal situation is the advent or deepening of economic crisis. This always has profoundly "gendered" attributes. Women, for example, are likely to be "first-fired" when widespread layoffs hit, and may be increasingly forced into the informal economy or the sex industry. Single mothers and widows may confront enormous added difficulties in securing sustenance for themselves and their children.(35)
The reality, however, is that women rarely figure directly in the organization of genocide, and somewhat less rarely in its perpetration. Men's role as the dominant planners of genocide, and that of the willing and unwilling male executioners who are its foot soldiers, should make us particularly attuned to the gendered effects of economic crisis on males, especially younger males. They are likely to experience unemployment and poverty with a particular existential piquancy. Employment and (in predominantly agricultural societies) access to land may be essential to their self-definition as males, and to their prospects for marriage and offspring. Economic crisis undermines employment opportunities and divests many male "heads of households" of their property. They may grow, as a result, more receptive to genocidal appeals and to conscription into the ranks of the génocidaires. Those same genocidal appeals and conscription calls frequently play upon the economic and existential insecurities of younger males. Such seems to have been the case in the early years of Nazi rule in Germany. It was certainly true in the pre-genocide period in Rwanda. There, the economic crisis that descended in the 1990s, though it had a devastating impact on all underprivileged sectors of Rwandan society, constituted a special crisis for younger males: "Without land or employment, young men cannot advance in life, they cannot marry or achieve the social status of their parents."(36) According to Elenor Richter-Lyonette, landlessness and poverty made younger males especially "vulnerable to taking compensatory action. ... The hope for a redistribution of wealth in one's favour was a distinct incentive for the commitment of acts of genocide, particularly with the landless, unemployed youth ..."(37)
This gender analysis would seem to hold considerable relevance for the policymaking of international organizations and financial institutions, such as the United Nations and multilateral lending agencies. These play a vital role in managing economic crisis in the Third World. Unfortunately, too often that role has been a destructive one. In particular, the "austerity programmes" imposed on volatile and debt-ridden economies throw hundreds of thousands out of work, and undermine the land-base for subsistence agriculture in favour of cash crops (and migrant rather than landed labour). The contribution of such programmes to genocidal outbreaks should not be underestimated, and their special impact upon younger males' life prospects and self-image should be integrated into any evaluations of their anticipated or actual impact. "Austerity" initiatives that merely fuel masculine crises (and greatly increase children's and women's material suffering as well) should have no place in processes of "reform," "democratization," and "peacebuilding." Nation-states in the industrialized world have an additional responsibility in this area:
While espousing the virtues of free trade, the United States, Japan, members of the European Union and other rich countries continue to employ various means -- including high tariffs, export subsidies and hygiene restrictions -- to shelter their own industries, effectively preventing developing countries from gaining [a] greater share in the markets in which they can compete most effectively. The rich do this largely because of the political clout of certain domestic industries and unions that worry about losing jobs. ... Although global trade grew 12 percent last year -- the fastest pace in more than three decades -- the export share of poor countries has continued to slide, contributing to deteriorating living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. ... Last year, the 25 wealthiest nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development spent more than \$360 billion [U.S.] on agricultural subsidies -- a sum equivalent to the gross national product for all of sub-Saharan Africa. The EU alone spent close to \$300 billion last year on export subsidies that reward its farmers for creating surpluses which are then dumped in many Third World markets -- at prices below production cost. This practice often destroys an important pillar of the farming community in poor nations and undermines their food security because local growers can't compete.(38)
By sapping the wealth and available resources of the most fragile economies on earth, the industrialized world thus bolsters the near-perpetual atmosphere of economic crises in these countries. Riots and unrest, and sometimes the outbreak of genocidal killing, are the far-from-indirect results. Promotion of a greater degree of economic justice, therefore, can be seen as one of the most effective forms of humanitarian intervention and genocide prevention that the wealthy nations of the West can engage in.(39)
In "Gendercide and Genocide," I suggested that "a gendered understanding of the dynamics of genocide throws important new light on key cases of mass killing throughout modern history."(40) Specifically, the initial/preliminary targeting of battle-age males for concentration and extermination is so regular a feature of twentieth-century genocides that it is almost ubiquitous. It is worth revisiting the evidence for this proposition in the case of the three twentieth-century genocides that, for Alain Destexhe,(41) constitute the century's only "true" cases of genocide: the assaults on the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire; Jews in Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories; and Tutsis in Rwanda. I rely here on sources not cited in my "Gendercide and Genocide" article.
The genocide of Ottoman Armenians began with the April 24, 1915 detention and subsequent execution of elite Armenian males in Constantinople. This was followed by a campaign of mass killing that targeted Armenian men conscripted into the Ottoman armed forces, as U.S. diplomat Henry Morgenthau noted:
In the early part of 1915, the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were reduced to a new status. Up to that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. Instead of serving their country as artillerymen and cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that they had been transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all kinds were loaded on their backs, and, stumbling under the burdens and driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag their weary bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. ... If any stragglers succeeded in reaching their destinations, they were not infrequently massacred. In many instances Armenian soldiers were disposed of in even more summary fashion, for it now became almost the general practice to shoot them in cold blood. In almost all cases the procedure was the same. Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village. Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes. In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims' sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.
When the next stage in the genocidal campaign was decided, built around expulsion of Armenians in "caravans of death," the focus was again on the outright slaughter of "battle-age" males, as Morgenthau relates:
The systematic extermination of the men continued; such males as the persecutions which I have already described had left were now violently dealt with. Before the caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial -- the only offense being that the victims were [male] Armenians -- were taking place constantly. The gendarmes showed a particular desire to annihilate the educated and the influential. ... At Angora all Armenian men from fifteen to seventy were arrested, bound together in groups of four, and sent on the road in the direction of Caesarea. When they had travelled five or six hours and had reached a secluded valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws. Such instruments not only caused more agonizing deaths than guns and pistols, but, as the Turks themselves boasted, they were more economical, since they did not involve the waste of powder and shell. In this way they exterminated the whole male population of Angora, including all its men of wealth and breeding, and their bodies, horribly mutilated, were left in the valley, where they were devoured by wild beasts. ... In Trebizond the men were placed in boats and sent out on the Black Sea; gendarmes would follow them in boats, shoot them down, and throw their bodies into the water. When the signal was given for the caravans to move, therefore, they almost invariably consisted of women, children, and old men. Any one who could possibly have protected them from the fate that awaited them had been destroyed.(42)
In the case of the Jewish holocaust, in "Gendercide and Genocide" I cited Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's finding that in the earliest stages of the fullscale genocide, the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing-squads in occupied Poland and the USSR overwhelmingly targeted Jewish (and other) males. Christopher Browning concurs with this assessment, noting that "it is generally accepted that in the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa the Jewish victims were primarily adult male Jews, and that beginning in late July -- at different times in different places at different rates -- the killing was gradually expanded to encompass all Jews except indispensable workers ..."(43) Browning's research into the atrocities committed by police battalions attached to the Einsatzgruppen demonstrates how orders from the top were translated into gendercidal policies at the base. On July 11, 1942, the following orders went out to the police battalions: "Confidential! By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader ... all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares." Browning notes: "There was, of course, no investigation, trial, and conviction of so-called plunderers to be shot according to martial law. Male Jews who appeared to be between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were simply rounded up" and led away for execution.(44)
In both the Armenian and Jewish cases, the genocidal campaign was subsequently expanded from an attack on community males to an all-encompassing "root-and-branch" assault on the entire community, including children and women. A number of commentators have pointed to a very similar pattern in the Rwandan genocide -- a preliminary targeting of adult males and boy children, followed by a more sweeping assault on the entire Tutsi community. Human Rights Watch, for examples, contends that a decision was taken in mid-May -- some five weeks after the outbreak of the genocide -- to extend the slaughter to these previously protected groups.(45) However, close analysis of the "policy of massacres"(46) implemented beginning on April 6, 1994, suggests a more complex picture: classic gendercidal massacres of males intermingled with "massacres in [i.e., as early as] April 1994 that were both gargantuan in scale and largely indiscriminate in targeting Tutsi men, children, and women," including one -- at the parish of Kurama in Butare prefecture on 20 April -- that was almost certainly the worst of the twentieth century, with between 35,000 and 43,000 Tutsis killed in six hours.(47)
There is little doubt, however, that males (men and boys alike) were most at risk in the first and most exterminatory phases of the genocide, and that at no point in the genocide were they granted the exemptions, sometimes apparently official, that women and girls received -- albeit often at the cost of sexual servitude to their tormentors:(48)
The primary targets of the hunt [for survivors of the opening massacres] were Tutsi men, particularly what extremist propaganda portrayed as the "ultimate" enemy -- rich men, men between their twenties and forties, especially if they were well-educated professionals or students. Most hated of all were well-educated Tutsi men who had studied in Uganda (and to a lesser extent Tanzania and Kenya) who were immediately suspected of being members or supporters of the RPF. Within days, entire communities were without their men; tens of thousands of women were widowed, tens of thousands of children were orphaned.(49)
In the case of children, males were again at special risk: "The extremists were determined to seek out and murder Tutsi boys in particular. They examined very young infants, even new-borns, to see if they were boys or girls. Little boys were executed on the spot. Sometimes they ordered mothers to kill their children. ... In what can only have been a horrific unending nightmare, older boys were relentlessly hunted down. Many mothers dressed their little boys as girls in the hope -- too often a vain hope -- of deceiving the killers. The terrified boys knew exactly what was happening."(50) The boys were particularly targeted, according to African Rights, "on the basis that they will be tomorrow's RPF soldiers. 'Paul Kagame [then-RPF rebel leader, now Rwandan president] was also three when he left the country' is the phrase that preceded the cold-blooded murder of thousands of little Tutsi boys. Little Tutsi girls were spared with the comment that 'they can be married off to our boys.'"(51) Indeed, the opening blast of the genocide was accompanied by an injunction not to repeat the "mistake" of the 1959 revolution, when male children had been spared only to return as guerrilla fighters.(52)
This gendercidal targeting of males, particularly "battle-age" (but non-combatant) men, is more evident still in instances of mass killing that have often been designated as genocides, but around which greater debate has swirled about the accuracy of the designation.(53) Such cases include the Nazi war against the Soviet Union, East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971, Iraqi Kurdistan (notably the Anfal Campaign of 1988), Kashmir and Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s,(54) Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, Kosovo in 1998-99,(55) the events in East Timor in mid-1999 (as opposed to the preceding period of Indonesian occupation),(56) Colombia,(57) Afghanistan,(58) and Chechnya (1994-2001). The point can be illustrated with testimony and analyses from recent or ongoing conflict situations (I will again avoid citing evidence given in "Gendercide and Genocide"):
Chechnya. Human Rights Watch's in-depth report on The "Dirty War" in Chechnya reports that "Military servicemen and police frequently conduct large sweep operations in Chechen villages or towns, with the stated aim of seizing illegal weapons and ferreting out those believed to be collaborating with Chechen rebels. Typically, they detain dozens of men in such operations, many of whom 'disappear' without a trace." Excavation of a mass grave containing "at least sixty dead bodies" in the village of Dachny, near the Khankala army base, resulted in the observation that "the overwhelming majority of the corpses -- mostly male and ranging in age from eighteen to fifty years -- were dressed in civilian clothes, had their hands tied behind their backs and had gunshot wounds."(59) "I killed a lot," reports a Russian soldier in the renegade province. "I wouldn't touch women or children, as long as they didn't fire at me. But I would kill all the men I met during mopping-up operations. I didn't feel sorry for them one bit. They deserved it. I wouldn't even listen to the pleas or see the tears of their women when they asked me to spare their men. I simply took them aside and killed them."(60)
Colombia. "William Rozo spoke in a hushed staccato from his desk at the office of the Catholic church's local Committee for Justice, Life and Peace. Flanked by posters -- one heralding the rights of civilians to remain neutral during armed conflicts, another from the United Nations urging Colombians to 'join the force for peace' -- Rozo gave a preliminary accounting of the massacre committed by a paramilitary squad in the town of Mapiripán. 'The diocese has a record of 26 people killed. Most were mutilated with machetes, their heads were chopped off, their chests sliced open in the sign of a cross so the bodies wouldn't float when thrown into the river. All were men. The killings began July 16 and ended July 20,' Rozo, 24, said. 'It seems they used heads for soccer balls. There were heads 50 yards from bodies, next to stones that looked like goal markers,' he said."(61)
Kashmir. "A band of suspected militants massacred 36 Sikh men on Monday night in a village in the Indian state of Kashmir on the eve of President Clinton's state visit to India, a visit he had hoped would help bring peace in violence-torn Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan region claimed by both India and Pakistan. No group has yet claimed responsibility so it was not possible to ascribe the motives of the killers with any certainty, nor whether they are from one of the militant organizations that have links to Pakistan's army intelligence. ... Indian police officials said the massacre, which took place on Monday night about 9 p.m., was carried out by dozens of Muslim militants. They descended on the largely Sikh village of Chattinsinghpura about 40 miles south of the summer capital of Srinagar, ordered people from their homes, then executed the men. Thirty-four men perished on the spot and two more died later at a hospital."(62)
Punjab. "Many young people killed have not been engaged in armed combat. They have been ordinary boys who have disappeared on an errand for their parents, visiting relatives, or while working in their fields, or who have been picked up from their own or their in-laws' home. ... Disappearances occurred primarily in the under-thirty age group. Some villages had lost more than forty young men. Sursinghwala in Amritsar district had lost seventy young men. Buttar Kalan, in Gurdaspur district, lost twenty. Each village has not kept a separate account of its losses. Erring on the conservative side ... it is highly probable that most villages in the Amritsar district would have lost on average ten young men."(63)
Zimbabwe. "To Blessed Nkano and his friends, the armed enforcers who descend on their Zimbabwe township after dark in Land Rovers with blacked-out windows are known as the 'ghost squad.' They wear no uniforms and carry no identity cards, but after they have gone through the beer halls and nightclubs beating young men like Mr Nkano, 19, the ghost squad retreat into the night, taking a victim with them. In the past fortnight, 11 young men have disappeared from St Mary's township after these late-night raids. Local churchmen and human rights groups can find no trace of them in any police station or detention centre. Nobody is in doubt that this is the work of President Mugabe's feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), which, in a country that cannot find money for food or petrol, has just been given another £20 million budget to create havoc."(64)
Afghanistan. "In its report today, Human Rights Watch said the most recent massacre took place in early January as the Taliban advanced toward Yakaolang. Taliban search parties rounded up several hundred men from their houses and shot them, along with some Afghan relief workers, by firing squad, witnesses said. 'The killings were apparently intended as a collective punishment for local residents whom the Taliban suspected of cooperating with United Front forces, and to deter the local population from doing so in the future,' the rights report said. In May, Human Rights Watch said, an unknown number of people were killed on a road between two northern towns in an area populated by Hazara Shiite and Ismaili Muslims. Some of the men killed there had been in custody for four months and may have been tortured, witnesses told Human Rights Watch. 'What has emerged from these cases, as well as prior events in Hazarajat and northern Afghanistan,' the rights report concluded, 'is a pattern of efforts to intimidate minority populations and to deter them from cooperating with the United Front, through the arbitrary detention and summary execution of male civilians.'"(65)
Mexico. "The killers came on Valentine's Day, and made this a village of widows. In the middle of a birthday party, masked men with automatic rifles walked out of the green hills and slaughtered most of El Limoncito's men and boys, 12 in all. Even here in Sinaloa, a Pacific Coast state known as the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, the executions were shocking. In their savagery, they signaled the ugly realities that stand in the way of President Vicente Fox's pledge to crack down on the violent drug industry. 'I have no voice left from screaming,' said Leticia Gaspar, 39, whose husband and two boys, age 13 and 19, were among those cut down in a spray of bullets from AK-47 assault rifles in this remote valley where marijuana and poppy fields flourish. As the young widow tied a crucifix to a tree marking the spot where her husband's blood still stained the dirt, her 8-year-old son, Francisco -- one of the few surviving males -- spoke up: 'Bad people killed everybody.' Those bad people have not been found. The widows here tell police they have no idea who killed their husbands, or why."(66)
Ivory Coast. "Ivory Coast's new interior minister has vowed to track down and punish the killers who massacred up to 50 young men during election violence. The bodies, which had bullet wounds, were found piled up on the outskirts of the country's main city, Abidjan, days after the country was hit by a post-election power struggle. The victims may have been supporters of Alassane Ouattara, a leading politician who was excluded from the election which finally brought Laurent Gbagbo to power. ... The bodies were found on Friday. Many had been stripped naked. A man who says he is the only survivor of the massacre has blamed military police. 'At the gendarmerie headquarters they undressed us, they hit us, they put us into a truck with bodies, they took us to Yopougon and there the soldiers opened fire,' said the man, identifying himself only as Ibrahim."(67)
East Timor. "The East Timorese selected for execution in the Oecussi enclave were first registered by Indonesian officials before being marched, hands bound, a short distance across the border where they were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a militia death squad. Senior UN officials claim the executions were supervised by Indonesian army and police. At least one person was shot dead, possibly while trying to escape the frenzy of killing. ... Evidence gathered so far indicated the victims were mostly men taken on September 8 from villages near Passabe, identified by Indonesian authorities as pro-independence strongholds. According to accounts from independence supporters, between 52 and 56 men were marched across the nearby border into West Timor for registration. Their hands were then bound with palm twine and they were marched a short distance back into East Timor where they were executed ..."(68)
It is also important to recognize that some contemporary examples of genocidal or proto-genocidal campaigns do not conform to this pattern. The gendercide analysis appears to be of relatively little utility in Algeria, for example, where both the "wholesale" terrorism of the state and the "retail" terrorism of paramilitary and guerrilla forces appears to discriminate hardly at all on gender grounds. Much the same seems to hold true in the extraordinarily destructive civil wars that have consumed West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo); whatever gendercidal assaults have occurred against "battle-aged" males, or younger boys, has been swamped by gender-indiscriminate killings of civilians as well as deaths from hunger and disease, the total apparently approaching, in the Congo case, a staggering three million people.(69)
It is notable, though, that in no twentieth-century case I am aware of have women and girls been initially, predominantly, or exclusively targeted in genocidal attacks -- though this picture becomes significantly more clouded if we consider gendercidal institutions such as maternal mortality, discussed in greater detail later in this paper. But there is nothing at the conceptual or strategic level that would preclude such a targeting -- an important point, since gendercidal attacks on males are often explained (and frequently dismissed) as simply the product of military "logic" or "necessity." In my reading of the literature, I have found one nineteenth-century case that indeed points to a genocidal strategy in which females (along with the elderly and children -- indeed, everyone except "battle-age" males) were specifically targeted for extinction, while males were disproportionately preserved.(70)
The strategy in question was part of the genocidal campaign by which Shaka Zulu, probably the single most powerful leader of the last half-millennium of African history, established and expanded his empire in the 19th century. Shaka ruled the kingdom of the Zulus for just a decade -- from 1818 until his assassination in 1828. The scale of the terror that his forces inflicted on neighbouring populations in this brief period beggars belief. But it has been little appreciated, in large part because the obliteration or dispersal of the victims was so extensive, and the personal testimonials so rarely gathered or set down. Jonassohn and Chalk describe a "mass exodus of African peoples" fleeing Shaka's extermination campaigns, and note that "To this day, peoples in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda can trace their descent back to the refugees who fled from Shaka's warriors."(71) It was also a genocide that, at least for substantial periods and over substantial areas, seems to have regarded "battle-age" males as a vital addition to the armies of imperial expansion. After his early victory over the Butelezi clan, Shaka
conceived the then quite novel idea of utterly demolishing them as a separate tribal entity by incorporating all their manhood into his own clan or following, which brilliant manoeuvre immediately reduced his possible foes for all time by one and at the same time doubled the number of his own army.
But while "admitting the young warriors into his regiments," write Jonassohn and Chalk, Shaka "usually destroyed women, infants, and old people." The difficulty here is that Shaka seems to have been at least as prone to "root-and-branch" killing as to gender-selective massacre. Here too, however, his strategies were intimately gendered. In exterminating the helpless followers of Beje, a minor Kumalo chief, and the chief himself, Shaka employed the same kind of military "logic" that has governed gendercides against men throughout history. But while the framing is familiar from slaughters of "battle-age" males, deemed threatening as a group, here it specifically targeted women along with children. Shaka directed his troops
not to leave alive even a child, but exterminate the whole tribe. We [foreigners] remonstrated against the barbarity and great impropriety of destroying women and children, who, poor unoffending innocents, were not culpable, and could do no injury. "Yes they could," he said; "they can propagate and bring children, who may become my enemies. It is the custom I pursue not to give quarter to my enemies, therefore I command you to kill all."(72)
Again, nothing fundamentally distinguishes these extensions of genocide's virulent logic -- the mass slaughter of women and girls as potential bearers of combatants and new ethnic stock; of young boys as possible future combatants; or of elderly men as possible former combatants -- from the strategy of gendercide against "battle-age" males. Nothing, that is, except the fact that Shaka's policies are all but unique in the historical record.
Various proposals for integrating a gender analysis with strategies of genocide prevention and humanitarian intervention have already been touched on. The most important challenge, I contend, is to approach gender inclusively so that the vulnerabilities and victimization experiences of males, especially "battle-age" males, receive the attention they so urgently require. In this main section, I want to examine the specific mechanisms by which this social cohort is standardly marginalized from the discourse of intervention and protection. I focus on three main actors: the United Nations; the leading human-rights NGOs (Amnesty International dn Human Rights Watch); and the mass media. The analysis concentrates on examples drawn from the Balkans wars of the 1990s. Thereafter, I assess the analytically distinct "Challenge of Gendercidal Institutions," particularly with regard to their destructive impact on ordinary women worldwide.
The United Nations and other international organizations (like the World Bank) have increasingly moved to integrate a gender perspective in their policies and operations. This reflects the indefatigable efforts of feminist activists and researchers to "mainstream" gender. The "malestream," however, has tended to get very short shrift in the process. The potentially catastrophic implications of this exclusion were nowhere more evident than in an event that constituted one of the U.N.'s nadirs in the 1990s: the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslim males by Serb army and paramilitary forces -- under the noses of Dutch peacekeepers, and with the passive acquiescence of the international community.(73)
After the Bosnian atrocities of 1992 and further fighting in 1993, Srebrenica was declared one of five "safe areas" under UN protection. Tens of thousands of desperate Muslims sought protection there. In an article written in 1993 and published in January 1994, "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia," I pointed to the plight of the civilian population in the city, noting that
Serb forces guarding checkpoints [on the edge of the "safe area"] ... have repeatedly made plain their unwillingness to let through any fighting-age males -- presumably for fear that male refugees might subsequently join the anti-Serb resistance once safely out of Serb-besieged communities. ... Remarkably, the United Nations and other international agencies involved in refugee evacuation have tended to accommodate themselves to the blatantly discriminatory rules laid down by Serb occupiers. At the time of writing (April 1993), for example, the news from Bosnia centres on protracted attempts to secure the evacuation of civilians from the besieged town of Srebrenica. Convoys of trucks have evacuated women, children and old people, but the Serbian requirement that no males with combat potential be carried out overland has been respected -- as a glance at photographs of the evacuation convoys makes clear.
... A certain voluntary element is likely to feature here. The "women and children first" rule seems as operative among besieged populations as it once was for ocean-liner passengers abandoning ship. But it must also be relevant that, as The New York Times reports, "during evacuations from cities and towns surrendered to Serbian fighters in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia, Serbian militia-men have summarily executed men of fighting age."(74)
This implicit plea for intervention, if heeded, might have required the following:
• a stronger line towards Serbs guarding checkpoints, making it clear that "battle-age" civilian males had the same guaranteed right of refuge under international law as did any other members of the population, and perhaps the use of force to defend convoys against Serb attempts to seize and abuse these prime human targets;
• arguably, humanitarian emphasis on ensuring that all "battle-age" civilian males, as the most vulnerable members of the community, be given priority in the evacuation process (recognizing that many would choose to stay behind in favour of allowing other family members to leave first);(75) and perhaps
• the mediation of an agreement between the two sides that "battle-age" males evacuated to safety in Bosnian government-held territory would be considered ineligible for conscription or volunteering for military service, with such arrangements monitored, as far as reasonably possible, by the U.N. and other agencies.
Failure to implement such measures ensured that thousands of Muslim males would remain in Srebrenica as fodder for genocide. In June 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, pushing for a resolution to the ethnic "anomaly" of the Muslim enclaves, closed their noose around Srebrenica and the other safe areas. Their actions, including the impending bloodbath, were closely coordinated by authorities in Belgrade(76) and crucially assisted by paramilitaries dispatched from across the Drina. In Srebrenica, mass panic took hold of the civilian population. Women and children gathered at the U.N. base of Potocari, together with about 1,700 men, while most of the "battle-age" males -- mainly unarmed civilians -- took to the hills in a desperate attempt to flee Muslim-held territory to the west. Watching them file off into the mountains on 14 July was the Bosnian Serb General (and, since 1996, indicted war criminal), Ratko Mladic. "It is going to be a meza," Mladic reportedly told his troops -- Mark Danner translates the term as "a long, luscious feast." "There will be blood up to your knees."(77)
The better-armed head of the column, which included most of the prominent citizens of the enclave and their families, succeeded in breaking through the Serbs' "Ring of Iron" on the main roads between Srebrenica and Muslim-held territory. A vicious ambush by mortar and flak separated the head of the column from the thousands of men, mostly unarmed, bringing up the rear. The Bosnian Serb commander, Gen. Radivoj Krstic, in a radio transmission intercepted by western eavesdroppers, ordered his forces surrounding the trapped column: "You must kill everyone. We don't need anyone alive."(78)
Serb forces took special pleasure in isolating the trees where men had sought to hide, and riddling them with shrapnel from their anti-aircraft guns. Trapped in the hills, sleepless and thirst-maddened, men succumbed to hallucinations, paranoia, and despair. Thousands surrendered to Serb troops along the "Ring of Iron," who lured them with the sight of captured UN vehicles and promises of safe passage. Those captured ended up in surrounding fields and, shortly after, in mass graves.
At Potocari, and then in fields and villages nearby, a more systematic liquidation took place. Some 1700 men, disproportionately elderly and infirm (the fit being concentrated on the "Trail of Life and Death"), were separated from women and children. They were led off by Serb occupying forces. As Ratko Mladic postured and preened for his troops and the TV cameras, Dutch peacekeepers meekly assented as the defining ritual of politico-military gendercides against men was enacted in front of their eyes. "The peacekeepers stood inches away from the Serb soldiers who were separating the Muslim men, one by one, from their families as they were allowed to pass and climb aboard."(79) Children and women were bused away, with isolated exceptions, to safety; men were carted away to their deaths. More than one Dutch soldier found himself thinking of Auschwitz and Schindler's List, but it was a different list that the Dutch helped to compile -- a death-dealing rather than life-preserving one. At Serb command, the Dutch drew up a registry of the 239 Bosnian men remaining in the camp, again mostly elderly and infirm. Then they handed the men over to the Serbs:
One witness who spoke with these men maintains that they felt that if they were handed over to the BSA, they would be killed. This witness adds that these fears were expressed to the Dutchbat Deputy Commander, who was also reminded that the bodies of 9-10 men had been found next to a nearby stream, having been summarily executed. They pleaded not to be handed over to the Serbs, but to no avail. Dutchbat then ordered them to leave the compound and present themselves to the waiting Serbs. The Dutchbat personnel concerned have since stated that they did not believe they were handing these men over to certain death, and that they believed the men would be treated by the Serbs in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. They felt that, having prepared a list of the names of those handed over, the men would enjoy some degree of security. All 239 men on the list are still missing.(80)
Finally, "the Dutch reimbursed the Serb army for the fuel burned in the buses and trucks used to expel Srebrenica's women and children and to transport its menfolk to the execution grounds."(81)
Many of the doomed men were trucked to the school gymnasium in Bratunac that had served in 1992 as the site of a massacre of some 350 men. There and nearby, they were detained, tortured, and finally killed with axes, automatic weapons, and hand grenades. Many hundreds more were massacred at a football field near Nova Kasaba, the worst killing ground of the entire five-day orgy of slaughter. Dutch soldiers detained in Nova Kasaba heard "continuous shots from hand-held weapons ... coming from the direction of the football pitch ... for three quarters of an hour to one hour." The following morning two Dutch soldiers "reported that they had seen between 500 and 700 bodies." Again, it remains a mystery "why the Dutch did not find this eyewitness account of a substantial massacre worth broadcasting to the outside world, or indeed even worth mentioning at their press conference in Zagreb more than a week later." Nor was the list of 239 men from the Potocari camp produced, though officials would later claim that it was precisely to publicize their plight that the Dutch had originally collaborated in compiling the list.(82)
In total, the Red Cross counted 7,079 people, virtually all men and boys, missing and presumed dead at Srebrenica. Some 4,300 of their corpses had been exhumed as of May 2001.(83) Women and children, with rare exceptions, were bused to safety across government lines. Summarizing the Srebrenica catastrophe in 1997, David Rohde offered a blistering critique of the moral lapse on the part of the "safe area's" alleged guardians:
The international community partially disarmed thousands of men, promised them they would be safeguarded and then delivered them to their sworn enemies. Srebrenica was not simply a case of the international community standing by as a far-off atrocity was committed. The actions of the international community encouraged, aided, and emboldened the executioners. ... The fall of Srebrenica did not have to happen. There is no need for thousands of skeletons to be strewn across eastern Bosnia. There is no need for thousands of Muslim children to be raised on stories of their fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers slaughtered by Serbs.(84)
The United Nations Secretary-General appeared to admit as much with the publication of his report on the Srebrenica fiasco in 1999. "The report blames serious misjudgments on the part of the United Nations, misjudgments which included an inability to recognize the 'scope of evil' confronting the people of Srebrenica from Serb forces. The report says NATO air strikes should have been authorized to stop the Serb assault and that an arms embargo against Bosnia should have been lifted."(85) It did not, however, explore the lessons to be learned, in future attempts at humanitarian intervention, from the specific vulnerabilities and grisly fate of "battle-age" civilian males in Srebrenica. The lessons appear to me twofold: 1) maximize attention to this group, perhaps ahead of others, in the periods of humanitarian crises in which largescale killing is a background threat rather than a pressing reality (in Srebrenica, between the fall of the "safe area" in 1993 and the Serbian seizure of the city in 1995); and 2) when mass gender-selective killing erupts, devote whatever resources are necessary, including military ones, to stop it.(86)
This account of the Srebrenica massacre, along with the findings reported in the section on "The Prelude Phase," suggest that international organizations like the U.N. urgently need to develop programs and strategies that acknowledge younger males as the most vulnerable target group in cases of state-directed killing and repression; and that seek to protect this group specifically, though not to the exclusion of others, when genocidal outbreaks are recorded. Such a framing would constitute nothing short of a paradigm shift, given the narrow definition of "gender" that prevails in the IGO and NGO sphere. But it is required if the gender variable is to be employed in humanitarian emergencies and genocidal outbreaks with maximum effectiveness and analytical insight.
A specific institutional innovation that should be considered is the creation of a male-focused equivalent of the "Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences," the position currently held by Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka.(87) The Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Men could serve as the catalyst for educational and activist efforts aimed at sensitizing both publics and governments to the special vulnerabilities of "battle-age" males in conflict situations and state "crackdowns," broader patterns of gendered violence against men and boys (rape in prisons, violence against gay males, trafficking in male economic migrants, domestic violence against young boys, male genital mutilation, "blood-feud" and vigilante killings, and so on). He or she would also be the ideal point-person for situations like the emerging pattern of violence against younger males in Macedonia (see above). The task in this case would be to call attention to the specific gendering of violent victimization (as Human Rights Watch so ably did in its bulletin on Macedonia); to stress that younger ethnic-Albanian males enjoyed the same rights of security of person as other human beings; to mobilize direct interventions aimed at protecting besieged ethnic-Albanian males and/or escorting them to safety; and to lobby representatives of the offending government to cease violent abuses against this population group. The Special Rapporteur could also monitor the situation of younger-male refugees, who are vulnerable to both traffickers and conscriptors. It is worth noting that the Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, Ms. Coomaraswamy, intervened vocally and directly in the cases of both Kosovo and East Timor, calling for women's human rights to be respected. But there was no U.N. figure to express official concern over the detention, torture, and selective or mass execution of "battle-age" males, which constituted the majority of the most severe atrocities inflicted in both these conflicts.
In the last decade or so, an impressive literature has arisen in the International Relations field around the growing role of non-governmental organizations in global politics.(88) These organizations play a diversity of roles in terms of providing catalyzing ideas for the formation of international "regimes" around, for example, human rights, women's issues, and the environment; the mobilization and articulation of public opinion; and vigilance over the actions of national governments and international institutions. The latter institutions have become especially dependent upon the research findings, organizational efforts, and "cutting-edge" activism of the NGOs. Nowhere is this more evident than in the human-rights sphere, where the international "mechanisms rely almost exclusively upon NGO information," according to Felice Gaer, and "human rights NGOs are the engine for virtually every advance made by the United Nations in the field of human rights since its founding." Amnesty alone sends more than 500 communications a year to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. "Furthermore, the [UN] Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions reported in 1995 that 74% of the cases it took up in 1994 were brought by international NGOs, another 23% came from national NGOs, and 3% from families."(89) The agenda-setting power of the human-rights NGOs is therefore considerable. How these NGOs address gendercidal killing and other gender-selective human rights abuses therefore has a direct bearing on international policy-formation in this area. Accordingly, in this section I examine the performance of the two leading human-rights NGOs, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), in the context of the Kosovo conflict of 1998-99. On balance, Amnesty's coverage allows us to perceive many of the flaws and blind-spots in "gendering" human-rights reportage, while Human Rights Watch, despite certain weaknesses of its own, points in a much more promising direction.(90)
Before proceeding, it is worth citing a passage on abuses and atrocities in Kosovo from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)'s exceptional report, Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told. I am aware of nothing in the record that contradicts the OSCE's conclusions, and they can therefore be used as a yardstick to measure the performance of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:
Young men were the group that was by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo ... Clearly, there were many young men involved in the UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army] ... but every young Kosovo Albanian man was suspected of being a terrorist. If apprehended by Serbian forces -- VJ [Yugoslav army], police or paramilitary -- the young men were at risk, more than any other group of Kosovo society, of grave human rights violations. Many were executed on the spot, on occasion after horrendous torture. Sometimes they would be arrested and taken to prisons or other detention centres, where, as described afterwards by men released from such detention, they would be tortured and ill-treated, while others would simply not be seen again. Others were taken for use as human shields or as forced labour. Many young men "disappeared" following abduction.(91)
The OSCE report, which devotes a full chapter to the fate of "Young Men of Fighting Age," is the only human-rights report I have ever seen or heard of that isolates younger males as a victimized group worthy of specific and detailed attention. (The report also includes a chapter entitled "Women," and thus stands as a model of gender-inclusiveness.(92)) But this framing was largely absent in the coverage of the Kosovo conflict offered by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. At no time in the Kosovo conflict did either of the major human rights NGOs express specific concern about a pattern evident to any observer -- that "Albanian men were particular targets in the systematic Serb ethnic cleansing."(93) Human Rights Watch did offer a considerable and commendable amount of "gendered" commentary. But Amnesty, an organization that has a particular responsibility to help the "disappeared," chose virtually to "disappear" males from its reporting, placing them at the very bottom of its scale of priorities.
In general, Human Rights Watch deserves praise for the scope and calibre of its reporting during the Kosovo conflict. The organization issued literally dozens of "human rights flashes" before, during, and after the war. Their team in the field, led by Fred Abrahams, consistently produced the most detailed and gut-wrenching accounts of the major atrocities and acts of gendercide in Kosovo, notably at Velika Krusa, Izbica, Meja, Vucitrn, and Pusto Selo.(94)
Moreover, Human Rights Watch at several points recognized the specific vulnerability of males in particular locations throughout Kosovo, and expressed concern for their plight. A week or so into the NATO bombing campaign, for example, the organization released its Human Rights Flash #13, entitled "Serb Forces Separating Men from Women and Children in Malishevo." The analysis, moreover, was exceedingly nuanced:
Interviews with refugees arriving in Albania today [April 1] established that Yugoslav forces were systematically separating adult males from women, children, and elderly men in the Malishevo area of Kosovo ... According to the refugees, thousands of mostly unarmed ethnic Albanian men in the area have fled into the mountains, fearing arrest and possible summary execution. ... According to refugees from the village of Ostrazuk, men were systematically separated from their families and taken away to an unknown location, after which the women and children were ordered to leave the village. The refugees told Human Rights Watch that the forces separating out the men were wearing green uniforms of the Yugoslav army (VJ), with a smaller number of forces in blue uniforms worn by the Serbian police (MUP). The ethnic Albanian men were questioned about the whereabouts of the Kosovo Liberation Army and of hidden guns before being taken away. Refugees from other villages in the Malishevo area told Human Rights Watch that thousands of unarmed men had fled into the mountains in advance of the Serb offensive, fearing for their lives. The fate of these men is unknown. In a number of earlier incidents in the Kosovo conflict, and in the Bosnian conflict, the Yugoslav army and Serb police were responsible for the summary execution of unarmed, fighting-aged men (emphasis added here and throughout this section).
Here a broader framing of the atrocities is briefly established, with a reference not only to the immediate Kosovo context, but to gender-selective atrocities and acts of gendercide in Bosnia as well -- an important, and rare, hint of historical context. A bulletin several days later on "Violent Ethnic Cleansing in Dakovica" reiterated the point, though slightly more narrowly:
Many of the Dakovica refugees arrived without men aged between twenty and fifty. According to the refugees, many of the men had fled in the previous days to the mountains out of fear of police retaliation. ... Human Rights Watch is particularly worried about areas such as Dakovica where the men have been left behind. In many of the forced depopulations documented by Human Rights Watch since the NATO bombing began, the men exited Kosovo together with their families. In some areas -- namely Dakovica and Malisevo -- the men have either been forcibly separated or have autonomously taken to the hills to avoid capture. In some past instances, Serbian and Yugoslav forces have executed ethnic Albanian men of fighting age (for example in the village of Golubovac on September 26). ...(95)
The organization's coverage of incarcerated ethnic-Albanian men was also detailed and insightful. The approximately 600 male prisoners released from Smrekovnica prison on May 22, 1999 were carefully debriefed -- and concern expressed urgently for the fate of those who remained.(96) Consider, for example, the following bulletin, entitled "Concern About Fate of Detained Kosovar Albanian Men," which specifically addressed the detention of male inmates at Smrekovnica prison (albeit late in the game, after two months of war):
While the majority of the detainees were released [n.b. to be replaced by new ones], the witnesses claim that a number of men from the Kosovska Mitrovica area -- men who were arrested in the days immediately prior to the witnesses' release -- are still being held at the Smrekonica [Smrekovnica] prison. Human Rights Watch is extremely concerned about the safety and well-being of those held in Smrekonica and other prisons, and calls upon the Serbian authorities to release as soon as possible those men against whom there is no evidence of KLA membership. Moreover, the Serbian authorities should guarantee the physical integrity of the detainees and provide them with basic items such as food, water, mattresses, and blankets.(97)
Males drafted as corvée labourers received specific attention in Human Rights Flash #35 early in May:
Refugees who have fled Kosovo during the past week also report that Serbian forces have detained ethnic Albanian men and forced them to dig trenches. Six refugees from the city of Prizren who were interviewed by Human Rights Watch in northern Albania reported that they had seen groups of ethnic Albanian men being forced to work along the road between Prizren and the border village of Vrbnica (Vernicë in Albanian). Each of the refugees, interviewed separately, reported that they had seen small groups of ethnic Albanian men being forced to dig trenches while being guarded at gunpoint by Serbian police or Yugoslav Army soldiers. ...
This coverage suggests both a surprising and a gratifying amount of attention to the exceptional vulnerability of "battle-age" ethnic-Albanian males. Some criticisms and concerns can nevertheless be raised about HRW's performance during the Kosovo war.
In the first place, as noted, the organization never felt it worthwhile to issue a bulletin on the pattern of summary executions and detentions of males as such. The passages quoted tended to be included in broader analyses of the conflict -- although when allegations of the rape of women began to circulate in substantial numbers, HRW was quick to issue not just a bulletin ("Rape of Ethnic Albanian Women in Kosovo Town of Dragacin")(98) but a detailed "backgrounder" on the subject, entitled "Sexual Violence As International Crime." This was one of the lengthiest reports issued by Human Rights Watch during the war. It examined "sexual violence as war crime," "as crimes against humanity," "as torture," and "as genocide"; considered the question of "universal jurisdiction for international crimes of sexual violence"; and described in detail the past proceedings of criminal tribunals that heard evidence on the subject from Bosnia and Rwanda.
By contrast, the pattern of gender-selective killing of "battle-age" men in Kosovo and the wider Balkans wars was noted, but usually late and in passing. The gendercide was never deemed relevant subject material for "backgrounder" treatment, although it was by any objective measure far greater and more systematic an atrocity than the rape of women, in Kosovo and in the Balkans wars as a whole. The organization also limited its concerns for detained males to those at a single facility, or at a particular location and point in the war. Again, the wider pattern of gender-selective detention, at most times and in most places across Kosovo, was never made the subject of a specific bulletin. The most "gendered" treatment of detainees, the coverage of those released from Smrekovnica and those kidnapped to Serbia, occurred so late in the war as to be largely irrelevant.
There is, nonetheless, a solid foundation in HRW's coverage for an inclusive conceptualizing of gender-selective victimization and vulnerability. HRW's dedicated staff would be well-advised to build on that foundation, and to assist in the further exploration of this "other -cide" of gender-selective atrocity.
By comparison, Amnesty International's performance during the Kosovo conflict was nothing short of parlous. At no point before or during the 1999 war did Amnesty devote meaningful attention to the pattern of gender-selective mass execution, abuse, and detention of "battle-age" males -- though these clearly accounted for the war's central, most systematic, and most severe atrocities.
The organization's obfuscation of this theme was well-established by the time fullscale war broke out in Kosovo in March 1999. The early part of 1998 witnessed a Serb offensive in which gender-selective mass executions, detentions, and "disappearances" of non-combatant males also featured as a dominant strategy. The same strategy was an equally glaring feature of the renewed offensive in Summer 1998, as with the massacre at the village of Racak in January 1999. But Amnesty's reports from the region emphasized a different "gendering" of the human-rights situation. "Human Rights Violations Against Women in Kosovo Province" were deemed worthy of a full report as early as August 1998. It began as follows:
In areas of civil turmoil or armed conflict, women are particularly vulnerable to human rights violations. They are often subjected to brutal treatment simply because they live in a particular location or belong to a particular group. This report aims to illustrate the human rights situation of women, primarily ethnic Albanian women, in Kosovo ... by highlighting a number of representative cases. The report does not claim to depict the full range and severity of human rights violations against women which have taken place and which, as armed conflict persists, continue to occur daily. Ethnic Albanian women are the victims of human rights abuse now, but since the early 1980s there have been cases in which ethnic Albanian women have shared the fate of many of their menfolk and like them have been arbitrarily detailed, ill-treated and convicted in unfair trials. With the outbreak of armed conflict, they now also face mass forced displacement and the risk of deliberate and arbitrary killings.(99)
The passage begged a rather important question: how could women be "particularly vulnerable," when the abuses referred to were "cases" in which they had simply "shared the fate of many of their menfolk"? (Many more of their menfolk, is the unspoken implication.) The following month, Amnesty did deign to report on "The Hidden Victims of Conflict" in Kosovo. The reference was not, however, to the victims hidden by their own coverage. The report concerned "Disappeared and Missing Persons," and the gender variable was invisible in the framing. The introduction deployed an impressive range of "displacement" strategies to marginalize gender from the equation (see further discussion of these strategies in "The Mass Media," below):
Ethnic Albanians unseen since entering police stations or being led away by Serbian police ... Serbs and Albanians taken from vehicles stopped by the armed ethnic Albanian opposition, hauled off trains, or unseen since armed Albanians came to their homes ... People unaccounted for in the aftermath of armed police operations or military engagements, who may be among the hastily and anonymously buried ... In Kosovo province the "disappeared" and "missing" come from all ethnic groups. The police are believed to be responsible for the "disappearance" of ethnic Albanians. Many of those who have "disappeared" were reported to have been arrested and led away by police, either captured or detained ... The KLA has been accused of the abduction and presumed unlawful killing or detention of ethnic Albanians whom it alleges are "collaborators" with the Serbian authorities ... Other victims include members of the Serbian, Montenegrin, Romani and other ethnic groups. ... It is still to early to ascertain accurate statistics for "missing" or "disappeared" ethnic Albanians ...
When we look at the body of the report, we find a reference to "a disturbing series of reported 'disappearances' as well as many cases of 'missing' persons and others who are unaccounted for. It is feared that some -- perhaps all -- of these people are no longer alive." But the detailed description of the atrocities tells a discernibly different, though parallel, tale:
Ahmet Berisha (40), Hajriz Hajdini (48), Muhamet Hajdini, (45), Sahit Qorri (60), Sefer Qorri (55), Ferat Hoti (39), Rama Asllani (60) and Blerin Shishani (15) were inhabitants of Novi Poklek (Poklek i Ri), a settlement which was built in recent years on the edge of Glogovac close to a factory called Feronikl. On 31 May a large operation was mounted by police in and around the settlement. ... After firing at the houses from a distance, patrols of police reportedly started to go from house to house in the settlement, ordering the inhabitants out of the buildings. Many of them were reportedly collected in a house in the settlement where men were separated from women and children. The women and children were directed to leave. Reports of the events include allegations that nine or more men were killed. Despite the lack of confirmed information, the whereabouts of the eight men named above who were reportedly detained by the police remains unknown. Amnesty International believes that these eight men have "disappeared," and may have been the victims of extrajudicial executions. The bodies of two other men, Ardian Deliu (18) and Fidai Shishani (17), were reportedly found at the scene, but it has not yet been possible to establish the circumstances of their death. Several different rumours about the fate of the "disappeared" men have circulated, including claims that bodies or body parts have been seen in the village; that the police were seen apparently transporting prisoners in the direction of the Feronikl factory where they are being held, or that they have been killed and buried in a mass grave. ...
All of this was an obvious prelude to the gendercidal strategies followed in the Serb military attack; but throughout the report, and throughout the Kosovo war, Amnesty remained unable to connect the dots. There was no report entitled "Human Rights Violations Against Men [or 'Battle-Age' Men] in Kosovo Province."
Amnesty's report on the notorious Racak massacre of January 1999 was similarly obtuse. "The truth behind the killings of 45 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo must be found," it declared. "The victims' bodies -- including three women, a 12-year-old [male] child and several elderly men -- were found on 16 January ..." Thus, 42 out of 45 male victims, the vast majority of them "battle-age." The organization announced sagely that "This brutal crime is chillingly similar to the first reports of large-scale killings of ethnic Albanian civilians, less than one year ago." How, precisely? Again, the skein of gender was all but impossible to tease out in Amnesty's account: "Many of the victims had reportedly been shot through the head at close range and some showed signs of mutilation. The victims appeared to be local villagers ... possibly with some members of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) among them. As background on the atrocity, Amnesty offered this:
Over 2,000 people died after armed conflict erupted in Kosovo province in February 1998. Many of them were extra-judicially executed or deliberately and arbitrarily killed. Some 700 people, the majority ethnic Albanians but also including over a hundred Serbs, remain unaccounted for. At least 1,000 ethnic Albanians were detained by the Serbian authorities in 1998. Amnesty International has evidence that many of them were tortured or ill-treated in custody. As many as five [?] may have died in 1998 as a result of injuries sustained during brutal interrogations. Many of the detainees are currently being tried even though there is no solid evidence to support the charges against them.
Amnesty did, in this release, have the good grace -- uniquely in these bulletins -- to fleetingly gender the detainees rounded up at the time of the Racak massacre, and to express its standard concern for their fate: "As villagers fled their homes, some men were reportedly arrested by Serbian police and taken to the Stimlje police station. Amnesty International is extremely concerned that those arrested may be tortured and ill-treated in police custody and is urging the authorities to protect them."(100) It would be months -- not until after the Kosovo war had ended -- before an Amnesty press release would again address the fate of detained men in Kosovo. Even such fleeting gestures as the one just cited were utterly absent from the organization's public record throughout the war.
In Amnesty's wartime press releases -- the bulletins that alerted the mass media and policy circles to the human rights issues it considered most pressing -- I have found only three mentions of the pattern and policy of detaining and executing "battle-age" Kosovar males. None of the bulletins focused on the subject. In fact, the first bulletin -- issued on April 1 -- left the subject to the final paragraph of an eleven-paragraph release: "Particularly disturbing are a series of reports describing how men of military age were separated from the women, children and elderly men. It has not proved possible to confirm these reports, but the proportion of men among the refugees crossing the borders out of Kosovo is small."(101) If the reports were indeed "particularly disturbing," why were they not touched on until the last paragraph of the bulletin? And why was no bulletin or background piece issued on the subject? Contrast this with the Human Rights Watch bulletin, "Serb Forces Separating Men from Women and Children in Malishevo," issued on the same day.
A week later, Amnesty International returned to the reports of gender-selective atrocities, this time in a bulletin about refugees, whose plight was predictably uppermost. "Many of those attempting to leave Kosovo -- mainly women, children and elderly people -- had been waiting to cross for up to five days, and are weak from lack of food and exhaustion." Five paragraphs later, Amnesty reported:
Refugees in Northern Albania have eye-witness tales of systematic extra-judicial executions carried out by security forces and paramilitary groups while forcing people out of their homes in towns and villages. Although the accuracy of such reports is difficult to confirm due to the lack of access for foreign journalists and other international observers, many of them appear credible. A disproportionate number of those who have succeeded in fleeing the country are women, children and elderly men. Many of those arriving continue to testify that during the expulsion or their flight they were stopped by members of the Serbian police, armed forces or paramilitaries, who separated the men from the women and children. The men were either detained while the women and children were ordered to continue their journey, or rounded up and taken away. Other refugees have reported being detained and used as human shields by the security forces in clashes with the KLA.
So ended the main part of the bulletin, and the discussion of the subject. There was no expression of concern for those detained; no declaration that Amnesty held the Yugoslav authorities responsible for their safe return; no follow-up on what their fate might have been; no bulletin issued specifically on their behalf. Rather, as noted, the bulletin focused on the plight of the "womenandchildren" refugees, and all normative injunctions were devoted to their situation and urgent requirements: "These people urgently need medical attention and have nothing to go back to. ... No refugee should be sent to a third country unless it is voluntary ... The places so far offered [to refugees] are only a fraction of the total required ..."(102) A concluding section provided "background" on the abuses discussed in the bulletin. Again, all concerned the refugee flow, and the strain it had imposed on neighbouring countries.
The closest Amnesty came to acknowledging the gendercide in Kosovo came the following day, with a bulletin on "Killings in the Kacanik Area." The killings, to be specific, were "of at least four men and the 'disappearance' of at least 22 men ... who hid in the woods during the [Serb] offensive [and] remain unaccounted for. Amnesty International is seriously concerned about their fate, and is seeking further information about them."(103) There was no indication that such killings were part of a wider pattern. On May 12, 1999, a full month-and-a-half into the gendercide, Amnesty issued a report, "Killings and 'disappearance' in Ade village," describing "the killings of four [!] men, and the 'disappearance' of another [!] at the hands of Serbian security forces."(104)
On May 22, 1999, as noted earlier, hundreds of Kosovar men were released from Smrekovnica prison near Mitrovica, and made their way in handcuffs to refuge in Albania. Brendan Paddy, an Amnesty representative, expressed relief at seeing a sizeable number of "battle-age" males emerging from Kosovo. "We have been extremely concerned about reports of people being removed from convoys, particularly youngish men detained at Smrekovnica," he told The Washington Post. "We were very relieved to see a significant number of them cross the border. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong."(105) While Paddy's relief was understandable, his statements raised serious questions. Where was the evidence of Amnesty's "extreme concern" -- for example, a single bulletin on the subject of detained males at Smrekovnica and elsewhere? And rather than the pat "nice-to-be-wrong" formulation, where was Paddy's -- and Amnesty's -- concern for the hundreds of men that the refugees described as still under detention -- most for periods rather longer than the "weak," "emaciated," "very traumatized" prisoners freed in May? (We now know that this same weekend witnessed the mass slaughter of about 100 male inmates at Istok prison, following a NATO bombing raid on the facility.)
Late in the war, Amnesty finally got around to issuing a bulletin on the massacre of well over 100 Kosovar men at Izbica -- a full week after Human Rights Watch had issued its superior, stomach-churning report on the killings. Amnesty's bulletin was titled: "Civilians rounded up and murdered by Serbian forces." "What is clear from these testimonies is that our fears that civilians of the Drenica region were murdered by Serbian security forces between 25 and 28 March are not unfounded," though the organization had released no bulletin expressing its "fears," let alone one focusing on the gender-selective character of the "civilian" extermination at Izbica. This was the case even though the release began, with impressive obliviousness, by presenting one of the more succinct survivor's account of this act of gendercide:
The women were ordered to depart with the elderly and children ... The men were lined up in two rows, and told to turn their backs. The soldiers then opened fire on the group with automatic weapons. Bodies fell on top of me and I was able to feign death until the soldiers left.(106)
The press release concluded by describing mass graves in the vicinity, filled with male corpses, as video footage released at the time clearly showed. Amnesty noted the footage of "the burial of the victims," suggesting that the site contained "151 bodies," some of whom "were KLA combatants." The organization stated its belief nonetheless that "some of these bodies [were] of civilians who were killed by Serbian security forces or indiscriminately killed during shelling ... Amnesty International cannot confirm the manner in which these people died." The contrast with the much more detailed, powerful, and prompt reporting of Izbica by Human Rights Watch again did no credit to Amnesty.
One wonders what difference a concerted bombardment of e-mail messages from Amnesty's global network of supporters might have made to the progress of the gendercide? Might it have lent a little weight to the hardline versus softline elements of the Yugoslav armed forces? How might a concerted campaign of bulletins expressing concern for the fate of the missing men have influenced the wider public discussion and policy agenda? We will, unfortunately, never know. But some sense of the contribution Amnesty could have made to the protection of ethnic-Albanian men's human rights in Kosovo was suggested by its belated attention to the fate of remaining detainees in Serb hands. On June 23 -- after an estimated 2,000 prisoners were shipped off to Serbia by retreating Yugoslav forces -- Amnesty issued a bulletin on the subject, and the international wire services lit up like a Christmas tree.(107)
Why did the detainees suddenly become noteworthy only after the war was over and they were transported to Serbia? Many had been languishing in grossly-overcrowded conditions, exposed to regular beatings and torture and perhaps selective executions, for weeks or even months. And why, even now, could Amnesty only acknowledge that (genderless) "People have been detained for expressing dissenting views, for refusing military service on conscientious grounds or simply because of their ethnic origin"?(108) The majority of male detainees had been imprisoned not for refusing military service but for being deemed capable of it. They were targeted first on grounds of ethnicity -- which Amnesty could not miss; and secondly, according to variables of gender and age -- to which Amnesty remained oblivious, in its public pronouncements at least.(109)
Could some of this inattention perhaps be excused by the argument that Amnesty's task is not, fundamentally, to address mass killings, but the detention of prisoners, primarily those deemed "political"? If the argument is to be sustained, it must be explained why Amnesty felt justified in pronouncing on a whole range of "non-traditional" issues during the war. It addressed itself to the U.N. Security Council and denounced the "chronic neglect of consistent warnings by human rights organisations" and "the absence of redress for all Kosovo's people" as underlying the crisis and war in the province.(110) It accused Macedonia of "playing politics with refugees" through "frequent closures of the border." This, it declared in solidarity with the UNHCR (whose purview this might ordinarily have been), constituted "an unacceptable intrusion of politics in the humanitarian response to refugees in crisis."(111) And, as we have seen, Amnesty was amply aware of Kosovar women's (much lesser) vulnerability to "deliberate and arbitrary killings."
These critical comments should be seen as motivated by a strong appreciation for the stellar work Amnesty International has done over the decades, and the space it has carved for itself in the public debate and the international policy arena. But the inability or unwillingness to grasp the essence of the gendercide, and to take Amnesty's time-honoured steps to intervene (urgent actions, special reports and bulletins, etc.) was nothing less than an abdication of responsibility on the organization's part. Both the human rights NGOs discussed here could benefit by a broadening of their frameworks and the development of specific working groups and initiatives to address human-rights abuses against males, particularly "battle-age" males. But in Amnesty's case, the need for an overhaul of performance and policy appears far-reaching..
Humanitarian intervention, especially in the age of media spectacle, is concentrated upon discrete events. Emergency situations arise and are dealt with or not. One way or another, the crisis eventually passes, and the peacekeepers and aid agencies pick up and move on, perhaps leaving behind a skeletal presence of monitors. This "firefighting" approach is entirely unable to engage with more structurally-entrenched crises, especially those spawned by institutions -- including gendercidal ones.
Gendercidal institutions are most destructive in their impact upon females. The phenomenon of female infanticide is likely responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, mostly in China and India. It has at least attracted significant attention internationally.(112) Much less well-known is the crisis of maternal mortality. In a 1996 report, UNICEF called the issue "in scale and severity the most neglected tragedy of our times," citing a staggering 585,000 women who die annually from complications arising from pregnancy and childbirth. And "these are not deaths like other deaths," the organization noted:
They die, these hundreds of thousands of women whose lives come to an end in their teens and twenties and thirties, in ways that set them apart from the normal run of human experience. Over 200,000 die of haemorrhaging, violently pumping blood onto the floor of bus or bullock cart or blood-soaked stretcher as their families and friends search in vain for help. About 75,000 more die from attempting to abort their pregnancy themselves. Some will take drugs or submit to violent massage. Alone or assisted, many choose to insert a sharp object -- a straightened coat-hanger, a knitting-needle, or a sharpened stick -- through the vagina into the uterus. Some 50,000 women and girls attempt such procedures every day. Most survive, though often with crippling discomfort, pelvic inflammatory disease, and a continuing foul discharge. And some do not survive: with punctured uterus and infected wound, they die in pain and alone, bleeding and frightened and ashamed.
Perhaps 75,000 more die with brain and kidney damage in the convulsions of eclampsia, a dangerous condition that can arise in late pregnancy and has been described by a survivor as "the worst feeling in the world that can possibly be imagined." Another 100,000 die of sepsis, the bloodstream poisoned by a rising infection from an unhealed uterus or from retained pieces of placenta, bringing fever and hallucinations and appalling pain. Smaller but still significant numbers die of an anaemia so severe that the muscles of the heart fail. And as many as 40,000 a year die of obstructed labour -- days of futile contractions repeatedly grinding down the skull of an already asphyxiated baby onto the soft tissues of a pelvis that is just too small. In the 1990s so far, three million young women have died in one or more of these ways. And they continue to die at the rate of 1,600 every day, yesterday and today and tomorrow. For the most part, these are the deaths not of the ill or of the very old or of the very young, but of healthy women in the prime of their lives upon whom both young and old may depend.(113)
Can this be considered gendercide? Surely, by now, it is well-accepted in the human-rights discourse that negligence and conscious oversight can themselves be means of inflicting murder on a genocidal scale. Human Rights Watch has noted in the case of communal violence that "a pattern of [government] discrimination" may be evident if conduct "is intended to or can be reasonably expected to lead to intercommunal conflict." The discrimination may include:
• failure to provide physical protection for vulnerable communities under attack from private actors;
• failure to prosecute those responsible for attacks on targeted communities, whether these are state agents or private actors;
• persistent official representation of members of a targeted community, in media and official comments, as less than full citizens or as deserving of less than full respect;
• suppression of dissent by those (of whatever origin) who oppose attacks on or discrimination against the targeted community,
• and discriminatory legislation, which denies full status and recourse to members of the targeted community with regard to their rights as citizens of the nation.(114)
Such a framework can be "gendered" to encompass the institutional discrimination, leading to physical victimization, that occurs on a massive scale with maternal mortality in the underdeveloped world. Fundamental is the failure of most states to provide physical protections, in the form of access to a safe and hygienic natal environment. The suppression and marginalization of women in most respects, and in most countries of the world, is brought about in precisely the way Human Rights Watch describes. The tools at the disposal of the government and ruling elites include control over the mechanisms and policies of the state administration (and thus the possibility to implement or not implement safe conditions for women and their children). They also include control over the "commanding heights" of the culture -- the ability to selectively choose the subjects and viewpoints that will be presented for discussion, and the allowable range of debate. Such strategies have long been used to keep women as "second-class citizens" throughout most of the world.(115)
In addressing these institutionalized crises, perhaps what is needed is a new concept of humane intervention -- one that will promote the longterm commitment of resources and sustained campaigns, rather than the kind of limited disaster-relief efforts that usually pass for "humanitarian intervention." If the problems are structural, the solutions will have to be as well. They must involve paradigmatic rethinkings of obligations and priorities. For example, to confront maternal mortality globally with the success that a poor Third World country, Cuba, has attained domestically would involve training some 850,000 health workers, and assigning the necessary drugs and equipment. The total cost would be about US \$200 million, according to UNICEF and World Health Organization reports. This is the price of half a dozen jet fighters.
A fundamental rethinking of gendercidal institutions that are accepted and validated by the liberal-democratic countries of the industrialized West is also urgently required -- perhaps especially in the sphere of gendercidal institutions that target males predominantly or almost exclusively. Three examples can be cited here: the death penalty, military conscription/impressment, and corvée (forced) labour. All three of these have received case-study treatment on the Gendercide Watch site, but it is worth dwelling for a moment on corvée. Readers may be as astonished as I was to learn that forced labour, an institution that has killed millions if not tens of millions of people, overwhelmingly younger males, in its history, is not today banned under international labour legislation. Rather, its imposition is legitimized for one group and one group only: able-bodied adult males. Article 11 of the International Labour Organization's Convention Concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour -- passed in 1930, and still in effect today -- states that "Only adult able-bodied males who are of an apparent age of not less than 18 and not more than 45 years may be called upon for forced or compulsory labour," so long as "they are physically fit for the work required and for the conditions under which it is to be carried out" and "the number of adult able-bodied men indispensable for family and social life" is allowed to remain in communities targeted for forced labour. (Specifically, the Convention states that "the proportion of the resident adult able-bodied males who may be taken at any one time for forced or compulsory labour ... shall in no case exceed 25 per cent.")(116)
In addition, in contrast to the "absolute prohibition" on female forced labour, male-dominated military conscription is exempted from forced-labour regulations, so long as the labour is used for military purposes. In drafting the Convention, the ILO reports, "there was general agreement that compulsory military service as such should remain beyond the purview of the Convention." Prison labour, again overwhelmingly a male phenomenon, is also exempted.(117) Clearly, any international campaign against gender discrimination in forced-labour legislation -- such as the one that Gendercide Watch is now mounting(118) -- must inevitably spill over into a reevaluation of military conscription and the economics of incarceration. Confronting such powerful and deeply-ingrained institutions head-on can be a dispiriting task, since the challenges seem so immense and the readiness to engage in radical rethinking so limited. Much the same challenges, however, had to be faced in eliminating the closely-related scourge of slavery in the 19th century. The fact that efforts at amelioration and elimination proved possible, indeed were successful in a remarkably short period, offers grounds for hope.
This paper has argued for the wide-ranging inclusion of a gender framework into analyses of international politics, genocide, and humanitarian intervention. It has suggested that, while the study of women and girls and their special vulnerabilities in emergency situations is well advanced, virtually no attention has been paid to the specific vulnerabilities and victimization experiences of men and boys. Until this range of experiences is integrated into an inclusive gender framework, only limited investigations of the multifaceted "gendering" of these phenomena will be possible, and distorted policymaking will tend to result. Politico-military gendercide against males, featuring sex-selective massacres and other atrocities, is an important and largely unrecognized subject for scholarly study and political activism. Key institutions of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organization, along with the mass media, have been critiqued for marginalizing and displacing the male victim in their discourse. At the same time, the role of gendercidal institutions such as maternal mortality and corvée labour has been reduced to a background feature in the human-rights equation, which remains concentrated on emergencies narrowly bounded in time and space. A new concept of "humane" intervention would assist in confronting such phenomena, which are deeply entrenched in social structure and historical practice.
1. R.B.J. Walker, "Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations," in V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1992), p. 179.
2. For an overview of the feminist-I.R. literature through to 1994, see Adam Jones, "Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations," Review of International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 405-29. For a rejoinder, see Terrell Carver, et al., "Gendering Jones: Feminisms, IRs, Masculinities," Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 283-97. See also Craig Murphy, "Seeing Women, Recognizing Gender, Recasting International Relations," International Organization, 50 (1996), pp. 513-38; Charlotte Hooper, "Masculinities, IR and the 'Gender Variable': A Cost-Benefit Analysis for (Sympathetic) Gender Sceptics," Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 475-91. Standard full-length works on gender and international relations include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mary K. Meyer and Elisabeth Prügl, eds., Gender Politics in Global Governance (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (London: Routledge, 1996); V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
3. See Jones, "Does 'Gender' ...," pp. 420-21.
4. Jones, "Does 'Gender' ...," pp. 426-27.
5. See, e.g., Carver, et al., "Gendering Jones"; Cynthia Weber, "IR: The Resurrection, or New Frontiers of Incorporation," European Journal of International Relations, 5: 4 (1999), pp. 435-50.
6. See, e.g., Elshtain, Women and War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and my review of Maneuvers in Contemporary Politics (forthcoming, June 2001); Cynthia Cockburn, "Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence," World Bank background paper, June 1999 <http://www.worldbank.org/html/prmge/info/Cockburn2.doc>.
7. Ruth Jacobson et al., "Introduction: States of Conflict," in Susie Jacobs et al., eds., States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2000), p. 1; see also chs. 4, 9, 10.
8. Judy El-Bushra, "Gender and Forced Migration: Editorial," Forced Migration Review, issue 9 (December 2000). See also Cathrine Brun's contribution to the issue, "Making Young Displaced Men Visible."
9. R. Charli Carpenter, "Gender Theory in World Politics: Contributions of a Non-Feminist Standpoint," unpublished paper, 2001, pp. pp. 2, 4, 17.
10. Jones, "Gendercide and Genocide," p. 197.
11. Ronit Lentin, ed., Gender & Catastrophe (London: Zed Books, 1997).
12. Ronit Lentin, "Introduction: (En)gendering Genocides," in Lentin, ed., Gender & Catastrophe, pp. 1, 6.
13. See, e.g., Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Sara Sharratt and Ellyn Kaschak, eds., Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia (Haworth Press, 1999); Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, ed., Women, Violence and War: Wartime Victimization of Refugees in the Balkans (Central European University Press, 2000); and Julie A. Mertus, War's Offensive on Women: The Humanitarian Challenge in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (Kumarian Press, 2000). Most of the gendering of the Balkans wars has therefore focused on women's rape experiences; there has been no concomitant treatment of sexual assaults and other abuses against detained males in Bosnia and elsewhere, though in numbers and severity they may more than match the atrocities inflicted on women. I am currently engaged in a joint research project with Augusta C. Del Zotto on the theme of male rape victims in Bosnia, for presentation to the International Studies Association conference in New Orleans in 2002; please contact me for further information.
14. For some discussion of the gendering of "worthy" versus "unworthy" victims in media coverage of genocidal attacks -- in this case, the Serb campaign against Kosovar Albanians -- see Adam Jones, "Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War," Transitions (multiple issues), 2001, available at <http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm>.
15. Stuart Stein, "Geno- and Other Cides," forthcoming in Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 1 (Spring 2002).
16. I defend my usage of "gendercide" at greater length in my article "Problems of Gendercide," forthcoming in Journal of Genocide Research, 4: 1 (Spring 2002).
17. Warren defined gendercide as "the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender)" (emphasis added). See Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), p. 22; and the discussion in Jones, "Gendercide and Genocide," p. 186.
18. Even those who feel that the "gender" prefix is unduly stretched in its application should acknowledge that "genocide" has proved similarly malleable, moving, in most applications, beyond the ethnic connotations of "geno-" (Greek: "race, tribe") to encompass other groups, particularly those designated by common political affiliation; and to encompass acts that fall well short of literal "-cide" (killing). The use of "genocide" to encompass acts that are not explicitly murderous is, of course, enshrined in the Genocide Convention of 1948. For the extension of the term to cover political (and "sexual") groups, see the excerpts from the report of U.N. Special Rapporteur Ben Whitaker ("The Whitaker Report") in Israel W. Charny, ed., Encyclopedia of Genocide (ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 581-87.
19. I believe I can claim to have travelled some analytical distance in all three areas: e.g., by emphasizing the particular vulnerabilities of "battle-age" males to gendercidal massacre; by commissioning an article for the forthcoming special issue of Journal of Genocide Research on the theme of biotechnology and potential gendercide against gays and lesbians; and by exploring discourses of humanitarian crisis and intervention in both "Effacing the Male" and in "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda" (forthcoming in Journal of Genocide Research, Spring 2002).
20. Carpenter also criticizes my use of the term "mass killing" as being somewhat woolly. I agree that it has imprecisions, as does virtually all terminology in these subject-areas. In common parlance, it tends to refer to "any killing of four or more victims at one time and place" (the FBI definition; see <http://jove.prohosting.com/~mclough/massmurder.htm>, including the author's discussion of problems with this definition). Importantly, though, I believe that "mass killing" can also be applied to largescale killings that may, at ground level, be carried out by individuals against individuals, with the acts removed from one another in time and space, but bounded territorially and temporally nonetheless, and linked to a larger plan, strategy, or institutionally patterned behaviour. If every willing and unwilling executioner in Rwanda, for example, had killed just one Tutsi or oppositionist Hutu -- 800,000 perpetrators killing 800,000 victims in twelve weeks -- could we not speak of the "mass killing" of Tutsis and oppositionist Hutus? Note also the common usage of "mass rape" to define widescale sexual assaults in the Balkans, Bangladesh, Japanese-occupied China, and other conflict areas. Does this require that women are brought together in a confined limited space and then raped all together and at once? Or does "mass rape" instead generally consist of the planned, repeated, systematic sexual assault of individual women on separate occasions?
21. Carpenter may agree, noting that the gendercide framework has "swiftly generated a body of genocide research that specifically focuses on sex-selectivity in patterns of mass killing," succeeded in disseminating "provocative" writings to the mainstream, and drawn "much traffic and acclaim" to the Gendercide Watch website since its founding.
One urgent requirement for a serious study of gendercidal killing is the development of a data-base of case-studies. This is the main function of the Gendercide Watch website, which now posts 22 detailed analyses (between six and twenty pages, printed) of historical and contemporary gendercides, as well as gendercidal institutions (female infanticide, "honour" killings and blood feuds, corvée labour, and so on). The research involved in preparing these case-studies is quite significant, since teasing out the gendercidal thread in human history and institutions is often akin to searching for nearly-invisible needles in haystacks of scholarly and media accounts. Without such a broad data-base, however, the most minimal comparative frameworks -- of the type advanced in "Gendercide and Genocide" -- are impossible. One function of these case-studies (and of the gendercide theory as a whole) is to serve as a "plausibility probe" for future research. It is quite reasonable, for example, for Carpenter to question inclusion of the case-study of the 1989 "Montréal Massacre" of 14 young women at the École Polytechnique <http://www.gendercide.org/case_montreal.html>. Can this truly be considered an "act of gendercide," as the case-study suggests? Many feminist scholars who have considered the slaughter within the broader framework of male violence against women would likely argue that it can be. Counter-arguments are also possible; but in preparing the Montréal Massacre study, I preferred to err on the side of inclusion. The subject at least seems to merit discussion and debate, and the event in itself requires analyzing and memorializing. It bothers me very little if a reader emerges from the case-study, and others, saying "Well, I wouldn't necessarily call that gendercide, but the events are certainly something to think about and be concerned about."
22. See the overview of genocide "early warning systems" in Charny, ed., The Encyclopedia of Genocide, pp. 261-67; and
the work of the organizations Genocide Watch 23. Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (Berkley paperback edition, 1980), pp. 176-79.
24. Joan Ringelheim, "Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory," in Lentin, ed., Gender & Catastrophe, pp. 21, 23. For a typical example of gendered Nazi discourse, see the S.S. pamphlet cited by Jonathan Glover in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 339: "From a biological point of view he [the Jew] seems completely normal. He has hands and feet and a sort of brain. He has eyes and a mouth. But, in fact, he is a completely different creature, a horror. He only looks human, with a human face, but his spirit is lower than that of an animal. A terrible chaos runs rampant in this creature, an awful urge for destruction, primitive desires, unparalleled evil, a monster, subhuman."
25. African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, Revised Edition (London: African Rights, 1995), p. 385.
26. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 587.
27. Amnesty International, "Police violence in Kosovo province: The victims," in Robert Elsie, ed., Kosovo: In the Heart of
the Powder Keg (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1997), p. 259.
28. Julie A. Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started A War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp.
279, 46.
29. Human Rights Watch, "Macedonian Police Abuses Documented," press release, May 31, 2001
<http://hrw.org/press/2001/05/macedonia0530.htm>.
30. Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 244-45.
31. Koonz quoted in Miryam Z. Wahrman, "Gendering the Holocaust: Women as Victims and Perpetrators," Jewish.com,
2000 <http://www.jewish.com/news/columnists/MIRY397.shtml>.
32. Linda R. Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000), p. 73
(n. 9).
33. Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 153-54.
34. Mertus, Kosovo, p. 8.
35. On the plight of widows, see Margaret Owen, A World of Widows (London: Zed Books, 1996).
36. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 20.
37. Elenor Richter-Lyonette, "Women after the Genocide in Rwanda," in Richter-Lyonette, ed., In the Aftermath of Rape:
Women's Rights, War Crimes, and Genocide (Givrins: The Coordination of Women's Advocacy, 1997), p. 106.
38. William Drozdiak, "Poor Nations May Not Buy Trade Talks," The Washington Post, May 15, 2001.
39. A step in the right direction was the February 2001 decision by the European Union "to open its markets to all products
except weapons from the world's 48 poorest countries. Although the EU initiative will delay duty-free access for such
sensitive items as bananas, rice and sugar, the move was welcomed as a step toward improving the plight of the most
indigent Third World nations by the world's biggest and most powerful commercial bloc." Drozdiak, "Poor Nations."
40. Jones, "Gendercide and Genocide," p. 201.
41. Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
42. Excerpts from Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, ch. 24: "The Murder of a Nation,"
<http://www.cilicia.com/morgenthau/Morgen24.htm>.
43. Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 30.
44. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York:
HarperPerennial, 1998), pp. 13-14.
45. Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p.
296.
46. This phrase is drawn from the (indispensable) African Rights report, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, chapter 7.
47. Jones, "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda."
48. These themes are analyzed and buttressed in far greater detail in Jones, "Gender and Genocide in Rwanda."
49. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, pp. 597-98.
50. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 815.
51. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 798.
52. African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, p. 39.
53. For what it is worth, I would consider all the cases cited to qualify as genocides on a greater or lesser scale.
54. See Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, "Case Study: Kashmir / Punjab / The Delhi Massacre (1984),"
<http://www.gendercide.org/case_kashmir_punjab.html>.
55. See the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) -- Kosovo Verification Mission report,
Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told, December 1999, especially ch. 15, "Young Men of Fighting Age,"
<http://www.osce.org/kosovo/reports/hr/part1/ch15.htm>; and Adam Jones, "Gendercide in Kosovo,"
<http://www.gendercide.org/gendercide_in_kosovo.html>.
56. For an evaluation of gendercidal strategies in East Timor in 1999, compared and contrasted with previous Indonesian
invasion and occupation strategies, see Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, "Case Study: East Timor, 1975-1999,"
<http://www.gendercide.org/case_timor.html>.
57. See Adam Jones/Gendercide Watch, "Case Study: Colombia," <http://www.gendercide.org/case_colombia.html>.
58. See the Human Rights Watch report, "Massacres of Hazaras in Afghanistan" (February 2001,
<http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghanistan/>); Kate Clark, "Taleban Accused of Mass Killing," BBC Online, February
19, 2001 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1178000/1178075.stm>; Pamela Constable, "Many
Witnesses Report Massacre by Taliban," The Washington Post, February 19, 2001
<http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23349-2001Feb18.html>.
59. Human Rights Watch, "The 'Dirty War' in Chechnya: Forced Disappearances, Torture, and Summary Executions,"
March 2001 <http://www.hrw.org/hrw/reports/2001/chechnya>.
60. Quoted in Maura Reynolds, "War Has No Rules for Russian Forces Battling Chechen Rebels," The Los Angeles Times,
September 17, 2000. See also Geoffrey York, "Russia Detaining All Chechen Men Between 10 and 60," The Globe and
Mail, January 13, 2000.
61. Leslie Wirpsa, "Economics Fuels Return of La Violencia," National Catholic Reporter, October 1997.
62. Celia W. Dugger, "36 Massacred in India, as Clinton Begins Visit," The New York Times, March 21, 2000.
63. Joyce Pettigrew, "Parents and Their Children in Situations of Terror: Disappearances and Special Police Activity in
Punjab," in Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000),
p. 211.
64. Daniel McGregory, "Mugabe's Ghost Squads Spread Terror at Night," The Times (UK), March 12, 2001.
65. Barbara Crossette, "Rights Group Tells of Taliban Massacres," The New York Times, February 19, 2001.
66. Mary Jordan, "Death of a Mexican Village," The Washington Post, February 28, 2001.
67. "Ivorian Massacre: Justice Promised," BBC Online (UK), October 28, 2000.
68. Mark Dodd, "Passabe Massacre: Marked for Killing Frenzy," The Sydney Morning Herald, February 8, 2000.
69. Karl Vickers, "Toll of Congo War is Called Apocalyptic," International Herald Tribune, May 2, 2001.
70. A somewhat similar pattern can be found in the selection-for-extermination in the Nazi death camps, when women with
children, and pregnant women, were dispatched immediately to the gas chambers, while able-bodied males were
temporarily preserved for forced-labour purposes (see the discussion in Jones, "Gendercide and Genocide," pp. 204-05).
All authorities agree, however, that this was only a temporary exemption. Forced labour represented merely another,
somewhat longer route to extinction, as memorably depicted by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler's Willing Executioners.
71. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990), p. 223. The ease with which a few thousand Boer farmers conquered the interior of South
Africa in the 1840s was directly related to the near-total depopulation of many zones by the Zulu genocide.
72. All quotes in Jonassohn and Chalk, The History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 224-25, citing Eugene Victor Walter,
Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Emphasis added.
73. The definitive reconstruction of the Srebrenica events is David Rohde's Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica,
Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). See also Jan Willem Honig
and Norbert Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996); Chuck Sudetic, Blood and
Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, especially parts 5 and 6); Yves
Laplace, Considérations salutaires sur le désastre de Srebrenica (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998); Eric Stover and Gilles
Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar (Zurich: Scalo, 1998).
74. Adam Jones, "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17: 1 (January 1994), p. 124.
75. In many cases this would involve confrontation with the local authorities, e.g., those in the Bosnian government who
sought to prevent "battle-age" men from fleeing as refugees and conscript them into military service.
76. In mid-July 1999, the international war-crimes tribunal at The Hague issued a ruling that Bosnian Serb forces under
Ratko Mladic were operating under "a direct chain of military command" from Belgrade. Accordingly, it redefined the
Bosnian war as "an international armed conflict." See Ian Traynor, "Belgrade 'Directed Bosnian Serb Forces,'" The
Guardian, July 16, 1999.
77. Mark Danner, "The Killing Fields of Bosnia," New York Review of Books, September 24, 1998, citing a report by Roy
Gutman in Newsday, July 24, 1995.
78. Danner, "The Killing Fields of Bosnia," p. 63.
79. Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 306.
80. "Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (1998)" (the Srebrenica Report), para.
348 <http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/UNsrebrenicareport.htm>.
81. Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 323.
82. All quotes in the preceding passages are drawn from Danner, "The Killing Fields of Bosnia," pp. 73-75. The reference
to the Dutch witnesses at Nova Kasaba is quoted from the Dutch Report Based on the Debriefing of Srebrenica.
83. "Bodies From Srebrenica Massacre Go Unclaimed," The Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2001.
84. Rohde, Endgame, pp. 350, 353.
85. Breck Ardery, "U.N. Srebrenica Report," Voice of America, November 15, 1999
<http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/docs99/991115-bosnia1.htm>.
86. For another example of a "missed opportunity" for gender-sensitive intervention in genocide, see African Rights'
account of the massacre at St. Famille Church in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1994. Refugees ostensibly under the protection of
UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda) were systematically harassed and decimated by
interahamwe raids on the church. Finally, in early June, the U.N. organised an evacuation, but as a female refugee, Gorette
Uwimana, reported, the UNAMIR forces "put the names [of the refugees] in alphabetical order and when they came to
evacuate they did so in this alphabetical order." This approach failed to take into account the fact that "there were some
refugees who were more at risk than others, particularly Tutsi men and boys who should have been evacuated first,"
something that "was out of the question for UNAMIR." On 17 June, after the first evacuation convoy had left, "more than
one hundred Tutsis," nearly all male, were selected out of the crowd and executed nearby. Thereafter, "almost all the Tutsi
men were finished." African Rights, Death, Despair and Defiance, pp. 694, 701. Earlier, on 15 April, "interahamwe
accompanied by members of the Presidential Guard entered the church. They selected a hundred and twenty Tutsi men and
boys, one by one, took them outside, and promptly executed them by shooting them. They were clearly working from a
prepared list -- most of the victims were political activists, businessmen, students and young men who 'looked Tutsi.' Only
one man is said to have survived this massacre" (p. 689). "Sixty Tutsi men and boys" were also "snatched from the
neighbouring church of St. Paul's on 14 June" (p. 698).
87. See the collection of documents on this office at <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu2/7/b/mwom.htm>.
88. See, e.g., Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International
Politics (Cornell University Press, 1998); John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture:
International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford University Press, 1999); Jackie Smith, ed.,
Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics: Solidarity beyond the State (Syracuse University Press, 1997); Susan
Burgerman, Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action (Cornell University Press, 2001); Thomas G.
Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, & Global Governance (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1996);
Andrew Hurrell and Benedict Kingsbury, The International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in
International Society," International Organization, 44: 4 (Autumn 1990), pp. 479-526; Kathryn Sikkink, "Human Rights,
Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America," International Organization 47, 3 (Summer 1993); Mary
Kaldor, "Transnational Civil Society," in Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler, eds., Human Rights in Global Politics
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 195-213; Richard Price, "Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society
Targets Land Mines," International Organization, 52: 3 (Summer 1998), pp. 613-44.
89. Felice Gaer, "Reality Check: Human Rights NGOs Confront Governments at the UN," ch. 2 in Weiss and Gordenker,
NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance, p. 55.
90. For more on gender and the human-rights NGOs, focusing on Amnesty International, see David Buchanan, "Gendercide
and Human Rights," forthcoming in Journal of Genocide Research (4: 1, Spring 2002).
91. "Young Men of Fighting Age," ch. 15 in Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe--Kosovo Verification
Mission, Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told, December 1999 <http://www.osce.org/kosovo/reports/hr/part1/ch15.htm>.
Emphasis added.
92. "Women," ch. 6 in OSCE, Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told <http://www.osce.org/kosovo/reports/hr/part1/ch16.htm>.
The chapter explicitly compares the experiences of women with those of men: "The way women in which were targeted
during the conflict differed notably from the way in which men were targeted. Much of the violence that women suffered
seems to have been directed towards their gender in a way that appears also to have been intended to humiliate the whole of
Kosovo Albanian society. Instead of being arbitrarily killed, as were many men, many women suffered rape and other
forms of sexual violence, since the perpetrators knew that this attached extreme stigma in many women's eyes ... In some
cases when men and women were separated, the men were victims of extra-judicial killing, torture and ill-treatment, while
the women were taken away and raped nearby. As young men were singled out from the convoys, so were groups of young
women. However, in such cases, it was more common for women and children to be released and sent on their way out of
Kosovo, while the men were kept back by Yugoslav/Serbian forces."
93. Paul Koring, "Ethnic Albanians recall their days and nights of hiding in Kosovo," The Globe and Mail, 25 June 1999.
94. "Multiple Eyewitnesses Confirm Killings Around Velika Krusa, Kosovo," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #4, April 2,
1999; "Massacre in Meja," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #34, April 30, 1999; "Witness to Izbice Killings Speaks," Kosovo
Human Rights Flash #39, May 19, 1999; "Separation of Men and Mass Killing Near Vucitrn," Kosovo Human Rights
Flash #40, May 20, 1999; "Bodies Discovered at Massacre Site in Meja, Kosovo," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #46, June
18, 1999; "Large-Scale Massacre in Pusto Selo (Postoselo)," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #51, July 2, 1999.
95. Human Rights Watch, "Violent Ethnic Cleansing in Dakovica," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #16, April 3, 1999.
Though it also indulged in a fairly wide range of displacement strategies, Human Rights Watch showed a regular
willingness to gender the victims of mass killing in the headlines. The bulletin on the May 2-3 slaughter in a field outside
Vucitrn (Human Rights Flash #40) was entitled: "Separation of Men and Mass Killing Near Vucitrn." Its account of the
"Massacre in Meja" on April 27 included the subheading: "At Least One Hundred Men Believed Executed." This was
again atypical of commentary at the time, though not completely unheard-of.
96. "Ex-Detainees Recount Ill-Treatment in Smrekonica Prison," Kosovo Human Rights Flash #41, May 26, 1999.
97. Human Rights Watch, "Ex-Detainees Recount Ill-Treatment in Smrekonica Prison."
98. Human Rights Watch, Kosovo Human Rights Flash #31, April 28, 1999.
99. Amnesty International, "Human Rights Violations against Women in Kosovo Province," report, August 1998.
Emphasis added.
100. "The Truth Behind the Killings of 45 Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo Must Be Found," Amnesty International News
Release EUR 70/05/99, January 18, 1999. Emphasis added throughout.
101. Amnesty International, bulletin EUR 70/23/999, April 1, 1999.
102. "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia -- Kosovo: The Plight of Refugees Must Not Be Ignored," Amnesty International
bulletin, April 8, 1999. Emphasis added.
103. Amnesty International, "Killings in the Kacanik area," EUR 70/29/99, April 9, 1999.
104. The news release noted, in passing, that "the police separated the men from the women."
105. John Ward Anderson, "In Singular Move, Serbs Free 1,000 Ethnic Albanian Men in Kosovo," International Herald
Tribune, May 24, 1999 (from The Washington Post).
106. "Kosovo: Civilians rounded up and murdered by Serbian forces, witnesses tell Amnesty International delegates," May
26, 1999.
107. All three of the wire-services I consulted -- Associated Press, United Press International, and Agence France-Presse --
ran stories on the Amnesty bulletin. See "Amnesty calls for prisoner releases" (UPI); "Yugoslavia Urged To Free
Prisoners," (AP); "Amnesty calls for release of prisoners of conscience [held] in Serbia" (AFP) (all June 23, 1999).
108. Quoted in AFP, "Amnesty calls for release."
109. Various national offices of Amnesty did receive numerous press releases and other communications from me during
the war, so I assume there was also an element of conscious rejection of the framing, as well as obliviousness, in Amnesty's
stance.
110. "Unheeded Warnings at Root of Kosovo Crisis -- Amnesty International Writes to the UN Security Council," Amnesty
International bulletin, May 5, 1999.
111. "Kosovo: Playing Politics with Refugees in Macedonia," Amnesty International bulletin, May 19, 1999.
112. It is also the subject of a Gendercide Watch case-study (notably, the one that has received the greatest amount of
traffic) at <http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html>.
113. Peter Adamson, article from the UNICEF Progress Report in New Internationalist, January/February 1997.
114. Human Rights Watch, Slaughter Among Neighbors: The Political Origins of Communal Violence (Yale University
Press, 1995), p. 10.
115. This section is adapted from the Gendercide Watch case-study of "Maternal Mortality" at
<http://www.gendercide.org/case_maternal.html>.
116. See the full text of the Convention at <http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/n0ilo29.htm>.
117. See the International Labour Organization, Forced Labour in Myanmar (Burma), Report of the Commission of Inquiry,
July 1998 <http://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/gb/docs/gb273/myanmar.htm>.
118. See my letter to ILO director-general Juan Somavia at <http://www.gendercide.org/news.html>.
Created by Adam Jones, 2001. This essay may be freely copied and distributed for educational and other non-profit purposes, if the author is credited.
adamj_jones@hotmail.com
Last updated: 13 August 2001.