Gendercide in Kosovo

by Adam Jones

[A longer version of this essay, incorporating "Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War", was previously published as CIDE Documento de Trabajo #62, 2000. The essay was written before the fall of Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Belgrade, and the subsequent revelations about transportation of Kosovar corpses for dumping in the Drina River and at gravesites throughout Serbia.]

ABSTRACT

The campaign of genocidal assault and 'ethnic cleansing' waged by Serb forces in Kosovo in 1998-99 was characterized, above all other atrocities, by the gender-selective mass-murder of 'battle-age' civilian males. The present article seeks to place this campaign of 'gendercide' against non-combatant men in the broader context of the Balkans wars of the 1990s -- including the five worst massacres in Europe since the aftermath of the Second World War, all of which clearly reflected the gendercidal underpinnings of the Serb strategy. The military and cultural 'logic' of the strategy is examined, as are the harbingers of gendercide that were evident in Kosovo after the imposition of a Serb police-state in the early 1990s. An analysis of the key atrocities of the 1999 war in Kosovo follows, along with some concluding comments about the taboo treatment accorded the subject in the international relations and peace studies literatures, particularly their feminist strands.

Introduction

From the opening hours of the 1999 war in Kosovo, several overriding tactics were evident in Serb military strategy. Internationally, these included the attempt to inflict at least symbolic casualties on NATO's air forces, and efforts to draw Russia and other potentially sympathetic countries 'on side' in the political battle with the Allies. Within Kosovo itself, the Serbs sought to inflict a decisive military defeat on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); to round up and expel the bulk of the province's ethnic-Albanian population to neighbouring countries; to rape and otherwise abuse ethnic-Albanian women as a tool of terrorizing and humiliating the population as a whole; and to destroy houses and property so as to undermine the material basis of Kosovar-Albanian society.

Perhaps the most destructive policy pursued within Kosovo, however, was the gender-selective detention and mass killing of ethnic-Albanian men, especially those of 'battle-age.'⁽¹⁾ It was upon members of this demographic group that the most systematic and severe atrocities and abuses were inflicted. The motives were varied -- 'revenge,' terrorism, and a 'pre-emptive' emasculation of the KLA's potential power-base. The policy of gender-selective mass killing has, however, received strikingly little attention in the scholarly and media commentary on Kosovo and the wider Balkans wars of the 1990s.⁽²⁾ This article seeks to place the 'gendercide' and other atrocities against Kosovar men in regional and historical perspective.

'Gendercide,' inclusively defined as gender-selective mass killing,⁽³⁾ is a frequent and often defining feature of human conflict, and perhaps of human social organization, extending well back into antiquity. Likewise, it is a regular, even pervasive feature of contemporary politico-military conflicts the world over. In other research,⁽⁴⁾ I am developing Mary Anne Warren's original framing of gendercide to fulfill its inclusive promise. Warren drew

an analogy between the concept of genocide and what I call gendercide. The Oxford American Dictionary defines genocide as 'the deliberate extermination of a race of people.' By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as 'gynocide' and 'femicide,' have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But 'gendercide' is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.⁽⁵⁾

Warren, though, never develops the concept past female-selective killings and abuses (female infanticide, the witch-hunts in Europe, suttee or widow-burning in India, female genital mutilation, 'the denial of reproductive freedom' [to women], and 'misogynist ideologies'). My work on the theme attempts to supplement feminists' analysis with an inclusive framing that can also grasp the experience of non-combatant men in situations of war and social upheaval. Such an understanding, I contend, has powerful implications for policy and practice in the political, humanitarian, and mass-media spheres. It should also resonate with students of international war and security, peace studies, genocide, and the gamut of 'ordinary' repressive strategies that regimes employ to discipline and punish dissidence -- or to pre-empt it.

Lastly, as I have argued for several years now, I believe the subfield of gender and international politics requires a rapid and sweeping overhaul of many of its central propositions and heuristic strategies. This is true both from the perspective of analytical nuance and from that of ethical and normative consistency.⁽⁶⁾ I will return briefly to this issue in the conclusion.

Gendercide and Mass Killings of Men

The phenomenon of gendercidal killings of males has attracted no formal attention in the international relations or peace studies literatures, my own tentative efforts aside; but the I.R. literature does, perhaps, provide a paradigmatic case of gendercide against men. It is the 'Melian Dialogue' that closes Book Five of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. After the various learned discussions that compose the 'Dialogue' have concluded, negotiations are broken off, and the Athenian siege is commenced. At its conclusion, Thucydides reports dispassionately, 'The Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves.'⁽⁷⁾

Elsewhere, I have deployed a wide range of case-studies of gendercide from the realm of twentieth-century conflicts and genocides. Contemporary examples can be selected almost at random from the panoply of civil and international conflict, though gendercide (still less, one-way gendercide) is by no means predominant in all cases of war and mass killing.⁽⁸⁾

The variables underlying this overwhelmingly gendered concentration of direct state repression are straightforward enough. There is a military logic to the destruction of the 'battle-age' portion of a targeted community's males, whether as a sufficient measure in itself or as a prelude to 'root-and-branch' extermination of the community as a whole. In many societies, cultural taboos prohibit or limit the killing of groups defined as inherently 'non-combatant,' notably women, the elderly, and children. Correspondingly, the sole remaining demographic (and militarily the most 'threatening' one) is deemed 'fair game' for slaughter. Many acts of mass killing also contain strong overtones of 'elitocide' -- the 'decapitation' of prominent members of the community, an area in which there is a strong correlation with gender (masculinity). If elites are mostly male, it is not a great leap to the proposition that male equals elite -- just as men's 'potential' as combatants may leave them vulnerable to mass slaughter in military sweeps, such as those conducted by Serb forces throughout the Balkans wars of the 1990s.

The conclusion, though, seems inescapable: the most vulnerable and consistently targeted population group in conflicts, through time and around the world today, is non-combatant men of 'battle-age,' roughly 15 to 55 years old. They are nearly universally perceived as the group posing the greatest danger to the conquering force, and are the group most likely to have the repressive 'security' apparatus of the state directed against them. The 'non-combatant' distinction is also critical. Unlike their armed brethren, these men cannot defend themselves, and thus can be rounded up and exterminated by the hundreds, thousands, or millions. If the Balkans wars of the 1990s have not reached the levels of earlier twentieth-century gendercides, such as the Congo 'rubber terror,' the Nazi extermination of Soviet prisoners-of-war in 1941-42, and the genocides in Indonesia and Bangladesh,⁽⁹⁾ they have nonetheless provided one of the most vivid and consistent examples of the phenomenon. The remainder of this article will examine gendercide as it has featured in the Balkans wars of the last decade, and the extent to which the pattern is also evident in the Kosovo war of 1999.

Gendercide in the Balkans in the 1990s

Gender-selective massacres of 'battle-age' men have constituted the dominant and most severe atrocities inflicted on non-combatants in the modern Balkans wars. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, 'Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old]. It has never happened that the men of that age arrived across the front-line.' Citing Muratovic's comment, Mark Danner gives the most succinct and rigorous summary of gendercide (and 'elitocide') in the Balkans. The genocidal assault, he writes, standardly proceeded as follows:

1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs -- often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags -- intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets.

2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.

3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of 'fighting age' -- sixteen years to sixty years old.

4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.

5. Liquidation. Execute 'fighting age' men, dispose of bodies.⁽¹⁰⁾

The five worst known atrocities of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were variations on this gendercidal theme - targeting males almost exclusively, for the most part 'battle-age' males. (These are also, by my reckoning, the five worst atrocities inflicted in Europe since those carried out by Tito's partisan forces in Yugoslavia in 1945-46.) At Vukovar in November 1991, between 200 and 300 Croatian men, 'mostly lightly wounded soldiers and hospital workers,' were pulled out of the hospital surroundings -- some with the catheters still dangling from their arms -- executed, and buried en masse outside city limits.⁽¹¹⁾ A second gendercidal massacre took place in May 1992, on terrain that would be even more massively blood-soaked three years later -- the gymnasium and soccer field at the village of Bratunac, near Srebrenica. After marching into the Muslim village of Glogovac, 'herdi[ing] away the women and children, and execut[ing] as many of the men as they could find,' Serb paramilitaries and special police continued on to Bratunac, 'where no Muslim had as yet fired a shot.' They then

went through the streets with megaphones ordering the Muslims to come out of their homes. Columns of men, women, and children wound their way through the town and were herded into its soccer stadium. Babies cried. Guard dogs barked. There were explosions and gun bursts in the hills. ... At five in the afternoon, men with megaphones ordered the Muslims to move out of the stadium through its main gate. Outside, the Muslim men were separated from their wives and children. The air became a din of voices calling out names. Women and children cried. Men who tried to linger with their families were beaten with clubs and metal bars. The women and children were packed aboard buses and trucks and driven over the mountains ... from there, they were forced to walk along an asphalt road to Muslim-controlled territory. The Serbs ordered the 750 Muslim men left behind in Bratunac to line up in rows of four and march down the main street. ... The Muslims were marched to the yard of the primary school and told to kneel. Some of the men were beaten with wooden bats and electrical cables. Then they were lined up, two-by-two, and marched into the gymnasium. ... In a garage behind the school, [one prisoner] saw stacks of corpses of Muslim men who had been abducted in Bratunac. Within three days, there would be 350 more. The dead were eventually loaded aboard trucks and dumped into the Drina [River].⁽¹²⁾

At Vlasic (Ugar Gorge), on 21 August 1992, a convoy of prisoners from the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp were driven to Muslim and Croat territory. B.J., a Muslim man who survived the ensuing carnage, told Helsinki Watch investigators that after women, children, and four busloads of men had been evacuated, the deported men were separated from the remainder of the population, and 200-250 of them executed at a nearby ravine.⁽¹³⁾

A more shadowy but largescale slaughter appears to have occurred at the strategic town of Brcko on the Drina River during the massive Serb offensive of 1992. Danner, who has investigated what little is known about the events, summarizes them as follows:

During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims ... were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A U.S. intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. 'They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood,' an investigator working outside the U.S. government who has seen the photographs told us. ... The photographs remain unpublished to this day.⁽¹⁴⁾

The vast majority of gender-selective slaughters between 1991 and 1994 were naturally of a smaller magnitude, and went virtually unrecorded. But the litany of atrocities compiled in a brief section of the Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch report on War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina brings home the pervasiveness and systematic character of the gendercide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that more epic acts of carnage perhaps do not (all the accounts are from the Serbs' 1992 offensive alone):

In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje)

We were met by the etniks [Serb irregulars], who were separating women and children from the men. Many of the men were killed on the spot -- mostly over old, private disputes. The rest of us were put on buses and they started to beat us. (Kozarac)

The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and killing them. (Prnovo)

The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere. (Rizvanovici)

The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but we were surrounded and could not escape. They [Serb troops] finally entered the village at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children. There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. We were screaming, and the children cried as we were forced to walk on. I saw another six men killed nearby. (Skelani)

Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo)

We came out of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together. We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards the women buried the men. (Biscani)⁽¹⁵⁾

The campaign of gendercide was crowned by the massive slaughter of unarmed men at Srebrenica in July 1995. The town, an isolated Muslim enclave in Serb-dominated eastern Bosnia, was the first 'safe area' designated by the United Nations, in April 1993. But the designation, and the U.N. commitment, proved risible. In June 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, pushing for a resolution to the ethnic 'anomaly' of the Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia, closed their noose around Srebrenica and the other safe areas. Their actions, including the impending bloodbath, were closely coordinated by authorities in Belgrade⁽¹⁶⁾ and crucially assisted by paramilitaries dispatched from across the Drina. In scenes that further besmirched the reputation of the United Nations after its Rwanda fiasco, the U.N. high command and Dutch peacekeepers on the ground stood by and issued antiseptic communiqués as hundreds of men, mostly elderly and infirm, were separated from the huddled refugees and led away to mass execution. Human Rights Watch recorded the testimony of one eyewitness to the slaughter at nearby Nova Kasaba. The Serbs, he said,

picked out Muslims whom they either knew about or knew, interrogated them and made them dig pits. ... During our first day, the Cetniks killed approximately 500 people [men]. They would just line them up and shoot them into the pits. The approximately one hundred guys whom they interrogated and who had dug the mass graves then had to fill them in. At the end of the day, they were ordered to dig a pit for themselves and line up in front of it. ... [T]hey were shot into the mass grave. ... At dawn, ... [a] bulldozer arrived and dug up a pit ..., and buried about 400 men alive. The men were encircled by Cetniks: whoever tried to escape was shot.⁽¹⁷⁾

Thousands of other unarmed men were hunted down in the hills around Srebrenica, in an orgy of killing that the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic dubbed 'a feast.' Mladic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic were subsequently indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for crimes against humanity. While neither has been brought to account, some 3,000 corpses have now been recovered by forensics teams. More than seven thousand men from Srebrenica are missing and presumed dead. Their women relatives regularly gather to protest the slow pace of the investigation, marching outside U.N. headquarters in Tuzla and maintaining a website for the 'Women of Srebrenica'.

Summarizing the catastrophe in 1997, David Rohde -- who as a journalist with the Christian Science Monitor won a Pulitzer Prize for unearthing the first mass graves around Srebrenica -- noted that the massacre 'accounts for an astonishing percentage of the number of missing from the brutal [Balkans] conflict. Of the 18,406 Muslims, Serbs and Croats reported still missing ... as of January 1997, 7,079 are people [all but a handful men] who disappeared after the fall of Srebrenica. In other words, approximately 38 percent of the war's [known] missing are from Srebrenica.' 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.⁽¹⁸⁾

Kosovo: Prelude to Gendercide, 1998-99

As tension and violence increased in the Kosovo police-state prior to the outbreak of the war with NATO, there were signs that gender-selective mass killings and other atrocities against males would again be an essential Serb strategy in any fullscale conflagration. The first indicator was the broad-based campaign of state terror and punitive detention against younger ethnic-Albanian men. Women certainly numbered among the detained.⁽¹⁹⁾ But as Julie Mertus noted shortly before the outbreak of the 1999 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 -- [were] arrested, interrogated, interned or remanded' by the Serb security forces, one can be reasonably certain which half.⁽²⁰⁾

The gendering of state terror throws important light on the immense demographic upheavals that rent Kosovar society well before the outbreak of fullscale war in March 1999. If we learn that the migrant flow of ethnic-Albanians worldwide was 'one of the most numerous diasporas in the world';⁽²¹⁾ if we then learn that this diaspora was swelled in the 1990s by 'several hundred thousands of ethnic Albanians, the majority young men,' fleeing 'police violence, together with economic hardship and the fear of military call-up to the Yugoslav Army'; and if we understand this, as Amnesty International urges us to, as part of a policy by the authorities 'to actively encourage their departure ... with the aim of changing the demographic balance,'⁽²²⁾ then it becomes clearly evident that the campaign of gender-selective terror and physical repression was the harbinger of a fullscale assault on Kosovar society, including the unbridled mass killing of 'battle-age' men and the mass expulsions of women and other community members. The harbinger, that is to say, of genocide.⁽²³⁾

The evidence from executions and mass killings in the 1998-99 period also points in a gendercidal direction, though with important qualifications. The victims of mass killings in the Serbs' 1998 offensive included women, elderly, and child victims -- nearly always members of prominent or 'suspicious' ethnic-Albanian families. Frequently, however, the gendercidal dimension was total, or very nearly so. Consider, for instance, the slaughter at Racak on 16 January 1999, often presented as the massacre that forced the West to take action against the Serbs. The international monitors who investigated the killings provided the most detailed accounting of the victims:

Twenty-three adult males of various ages. Many shot at extremely close range, most shot in the front, back and top of the head. Villagers reported that these victims were last seen alive when the police were arresting them. ... Three adults [sic] males shot in various parts of their body, including their backs. They appeared to have been shot when running away. ... One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing. ... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. All the flesh was missing from the skull. One adult female shot in the back. ... One boy (12 years old) shot in the neck. One male, late teens (shot in abdomen).⁽²⁴⁾

The pattern would be repeated many hundredsfold when NATO used the Racak incident and the Serbs' refusal to sign the Rambouillet agreement as an excuse to threaten air strikes, and the Serbs seized the opportunity to launch their 'final solution to the Kosovo problem.'⁽²⁵⁾

The scale and ferocity of the Serb offensive's opening blast took the world by surprise, and rapidly made plain that even the gendered norms of atrocity were prone to being violated on occasion. In particular, family affiliation and perceived political identification led in a number of recorded cases to the indiscriminate slaughter of women, the elderly, and children along with 'battle-age' males.⁽²⁶⁾ In a number of cases, men were absent altogether, believing, in the words of a survivor of one of the massacres at Djakovica, that 'they wouldn't touch the women and children.'⁽²⁷⁾ The Serbs did, and perhaps twenty defenseless people died.

Nonetheless, literally from the first hours of the Serb offensive, it was clear that the Serbs would be preoccupied above all with the physical extermination (sometimes 'only' the detention and torture) of younger ethnic-Albanian men, accompanied by the mass expulsion of most of the remaining Albanian population. What followed was memorably referred to as 'a genocidal cull of ethnic-Albanian males' (by Guardian correspondent Ian Traynor).⁽²⁸⁾ On 26 March, two days into the NATO bombing campaign and five days into the broader Serb offensive in Kosovo, State Department spokesman James Rubin relayed 'ominous indications that men of fighting age were [being] separated from their families.' A UNHCR spokesperson described women of a village, Goden, being 'told to take the children to Albania'; before they left, the women 'witnessed the killing of 20 men.'⁽²⁹⁾ As the weeks wore on, the chillingly consistent refugee testimonies began to mount. 'They collected all the people,' ran a typical survivor's report. 'They separated the women from the men. They told the women to leave. They put the men against the wall. And they killed the men. I don't know what else to say. My brother was killed, three of my cousins, and the son of one of them. They were all killed.'⁽³⁰⁾

Perhaps the most wrenching testimonies came from the massacres at Velika Krusa (25 March) and Izbica (28 March). The events at Velika Krusa reached the outside world by the route such news usually travels: locked inside the mind of a man who had crawled out from under bullet-riddled corpses and been transported to freedom. Selami Elshani spoke from a bed at the Central University Hospital in Tirana in mid-April, 'using his elbows to avoid leaning on his heavily bandaged hands.'⁽³¹⁾ He and his family had moved to Velika Krusa after their house was burned out during the Summer 1998 Serb offensive. The day after the NATO bombing started, ten 'battle-age' men of one extended clan decided to escape the town and hide in a nearby riverbank. 'We had to leave, because we knew the Serbs wanted the men,' Elshani explained. Along with other fleeing men, they were captured and mown down by five paramilitaries with Kalashnikovs. Then the paramilitaries moved around scattering straw, soaking it in gasoline, and lighting it. Elshani, unhit and buried under bodies, 'was mad with fear. I had to come out of the fire or die burned alive. It felt like an hour in the flames even though it was a very short time. It was horror for me.' He eventually escaped and found refuge in his uncle's house, from where he was surreptitiously evacuated to Albania.

Many other eyewitness accounts of separation and mass execution of males could only be related by survivors -- overwhelmingly the women, elderly, and children whom the Serbs terrorized and pushed over the border to Albania, Macedonia, and Montengro. Of these, none was more dramatic than the testimony of an anonymous witness turned up by Human Rights Watch to the slaughter of 'more than 120' unarmed ethnic-Albanian men at Izbica. The 20-year-old woman, interviewed a month after the massacre, lost her father, a cousin, and her uncle in the slaughter. She described her family's terrifying escape to Albania, and the merciless culling of 'battle-age' males, including the elderly and adolescent boys:

The Serbs arrived late in the evening during the Muslim celebration of Bajram, on March 26 or 27. There were about fifty of them. ... At about 11 a.m. they separated the women from the men. We asked them why they were doing this and they told us, in a very scary voice: 'Shut up, don't ask, otherwise we'll kill you.' The children were terrified. The Serbs yelled: 'We'll kill you, and where is the United States to save you?' All the women had covered their heads with handkerchiefs out of fear of [rape by?] the Serbs, hiding their hair and foreheads. ... They said: 'You've been looking for a greater Albania, now you can go there.' They were shooting in the air above our heads. ... About 100 meters from the place we started walking, the Serbs decided to separate out the younger boys from our group. Boys of fourteen and up had already been placed with the men; now they separated out boys of about ten and up. ... We stopped moving when we heard automatic weapon fire. We turned our heads to see what was happening, but it was impossible to see the men. We saw the ten-to-fourteen-year-olds running in our direction; when they got to us we asked them what was happening. They were very upset; no one could talk. One of them finally told us: 'They released us but the others are finished.' ... The automatic weapon fire went on non-stop for a few minutes; after that we heard short, irregular bursts of fire for some ten minutes or so. My father, my uncle and my cousin were among the men killed. ... Then ten Serbs caught up with us. They said lots of obscenities and again told us: 'Now you must leave for Albania -- don't stop, just go.' We had to leave. ... My father had given me his jacket because I had been wearing another jacket that said 'American Sport' on it and he was afraid; he wanted to cover that up. Because I was pushing the wheelbarrow and wearing a man's jacket, they thought I was a man. They told me to stop and then to come over to them, but I was too afraid. It was the scariest moment of my life. Then they shined a flashlight in my face and saw that I was a woman. One of them said, 'Let her go.'⁽³²⁾

Some commentators have suggested that Serb atrocities were mostly limited to the early days of the war. It is true that the atrocities appear to have exhibited variations across time and space. But the gendercidal massacres at Meja, more than a month after the onset of the bombing campaign, belie the claim of an initial murderous 'spasm' followed by a decline in savagery.⁽³³⁾ The gendercidal atrocities near Vucitrn (2-3 May), as well as the mass killing of some 100-120 male inmates at the Istok prison in apparent revenge for a NATO bombing raid (22 May), also attest to the basic consistency of the Serb strategy throughout the war.⁽³⁴⁾

To what extent did those in the Yugoslav regular forces condone and facilitate the atrocities? 'In general,' according to Steven Erlanger, 'the army held the ground; special police units and paramilitary units, sometimes with long hair, beards and bandanas, like actors in Hollywood movies, cleared the villages, often killing those who resisted leaving; the civilians were channeled along certain roads toward buses or the border; bodies were often cleared out by other police units; and then the army checked through the villages again.'⁽³⁵⁾ Paramilitaries and other thugs also appeared to have a droit d'assassin once preliminary clearings were over -- that is, the right to carry out summary detentions and executions in the field.

There are recorded instances of mercy being extended or quarter granted by regular forces, and of interventions to quell the worst paramilitary and police excesses. A Kosovo father and his son who were caught by Serb forces near Pristina said that after being forced to lie on the ground, a Yugoslav Army officer freed them 'because they were not involved in politics.'⁽³⁶⁾ Sometimes members of the security forces would also show restraint. Witnesses to the massacres at Glogovac identified one deputy police chief, 'Lutka,' who 'did not behave brutally, unlike many of the paramilitaries, although he was involved in thefts, and he was a principal organizer of the forced depopulation in early May.'⁽³⁷⁾

But the grim likelihood is that orders to expel and exterminate Albanians found a fertile soil in which to take root -- at whatever point in the chain of command. The genocidal strategy could successfully be implemented by the few, and ignored by the many. There was hardly any detectable sympathy for the Kosovar Albanians among ordinary Serbs. When atrocities could not be denied, they were dismissed 'as an inevitable consequence of war, somehow beyond human responsibility,' according to Chris Hedges. Vuk Obradovic, editor of the Vranjske Novine weekly, was quoted as saying that the Yugoslav regime had 'created a situation where Albanians are no longer seen as equals,' and as a result, 'no one feels guilty for what happened.'⁽³⁸⁾

Claiming the Dead

As the war proceeded, the observer was confronted with a series of imponderables in trying to gauge the scale of the gendercide and other gender-selective atrocities against ethnic-Albanian males. How many men had actually been separated from women and children, how many others had self-selected by fleeing to the mountains, and how many of the escapees had managed to elude the subsequent roundups? Of those who had been separated, how many had been summarily executed on the spot? How many had lived no longer than a few hours, perhaps a day or two, before being shot en masse like the men at Brcko and Srebrenica? Of those taken into custody, how many had been employed as 'human shields' at military installations, and how many held in ordinary prisons? Of those held in prisons, how many were held in grossly-overcrowded quarters, and systematically tortured and starved?

What was perhaps most striking was how little attention these questions commanded in the media, government, and NGO quarters. Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post, the two leading 'agenda-setting' newspapers in the United States, published a single story or editorial in the first two months of the war focusing on the broad pattern of gender-selective executions and other atrocities against Kosovar males (though both delved into the issue of the rape of Kosovar women at feature length). Neither the UNHCR nor the Red Cross apparently kept statistics on the 'male deficit' in refugee flows, though many onlookers found the disparity surreal and overwhelming.

As Yugoslav troops pulled out of Kosovo in June 1999, defeated if largely unbloodied, KFOR moved in, with its unprecedented retinue of forensics teams and human-rights investigators in tow. The scene that awaited them was described by one foreign observer as 'a vast crime scene ... with mass graves around almost every corner.'⁽³⁹⁾ 'Nearly every village, every neighbourhood, every family has been somehow touched by the savage spasm of killing whose dimensions are only becoming fully clear now,' wrote Laura King of the Associated Press. 'What the people of Kosovo are finding as they return to their homes is nothing less than a giant charnel house.'⁽⁴⁰⁾

One of the first sites focused upon by Tribunal investigators and international forensics squads was Velika Krusa, from which one intended victim -- Selami Elshani -- had crawled out alive. British sergeant Ron Turnbull, contemplating the scene of the carnage (the one-storey shed where a hundred men had been shot and burned alive), confirmed that the victims had been killed in a kneeling position, based on the 'low shots' whose marks were still visible on the wall. Julian Borger reported that 'many of the corpses were found in a tangled heap,' and that 'some of the victims appeared to have huddled together in a vain attempt to escape the hail of bullets.'⁽⁴¹⁾ John Daniszewski of the Los Angeles Times reported at the end of June that 'several hundred male villagers are still missing, and residents say they suspect that the men may have been buried by the Serbs in other, as yet undiscovered mass graves.'⁽⁴²⁾

At Korenica, investigators found evidence of the calamity that had descended on the village on 27 April. It occurred after 'Serb-led forces [had] pushed ethnic Albanians out of a cluster of nearby villages into Korenica,' swelling the population to some 1,500 people.⁽⁴³⁾ Human Rights Watch investigators viewed the charred bodies of six men and reported the testimony (at second-hand) of Daniel Berisha, who claimed that

Serb forces arrived at 7:30 a.m. and made everyone leave the house, then separated the women and children from the men. The Serb forces initially agreed to allow Daniel's sixty-eight-year-old uncle to leave with the women and children, but they ordered him to drive away on a tractor. When he responded that he didn't know how to drive a tractor, they reportedly made him return to the house and go up to the third floor along with the other men. When the men reached the third floor they began to plead for their lives. A local policeman whom Daniel identified by name reportedly ordered the men to turn their backs to him and shot them at close range with an automatic weapon. Daniel ... [claimed] that he fell first, being hit twice in the leg, and was covered by other bodies. He said that he pretended to be dead while the Serb forces brought blankets upstairs, lit them, and threw them on the bodies. He escaped from the blaze as the Serbs left, displaying burns on his arms and forehead, as well as bullet wounds to his leg ... That evening, he showed up in the mountains and told ... his story. The next day, attempting to escape this hiding place along with other villagers, he was captured by Serb forces. Daniel's body was found the following day with five additional bullet holes in it -- two in the forehead and three in the chest.⁽⁴⁴⁾

While both family-centred and generalized atrocities were hardly absent, the massive gender disproportion in the body-count was impossible to evade. Even the massacre at the village of Celina, which was depicted in the media as a massacre 'mostly of women and children,' actually lay 'at the epicenter of what is proving to be the heaviest concentration of mass graves in Kosovo.'⁽⁴⁵⁾ While 'more than 50 bodies, mostly women and children, [had] been exhumed so far from eight grave sites,' residents of Celina and Nagafc 'said Serb paramilitary troops ... [had] separated groups of men from their families and ordered the women and children to flee to Albania. Several villagers said they watched the men being shot to death from hiding places nearby, and that the bodies were later burned.'⁽⁴⁶⁾ A survivor, 70-year-old Najdar Fazlici, said 'that he and many of the men escaped being killed because they fled in the middle of the night for nearby mountains. Those who stayed or tried to run away later were chased around the village and into the fields, where they were immediately shot ... six here, a dozen there. After three days in the mountains, most of the escapees were rounded up as well. The women were sent to Albania immediately, ... but the men were forced to walk a gauntlet, where they were beaten, and then to crouch down and chant, 'Serbia, Serbia.' A few were shot even then.'⁽⁴⁷⁾ The Agence-France Presse reported 'a total of 119 bodies' exhumed at Celina, 'buried throughout the village and its environs,' with another '60 bodies ... still buried in the area, according to locals.'⁽⁴⁸⁾ There was reason to believe these were predominantly the corpses of the men described by villagers having been separated or ferreted out and shot. German Lieutenant-Colonel Dietmar Jeserich told The Los Angeles Times that an estimated 110 village men were still on missing lists.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Numerous other Kosovar villages had been decimated by the 'genocidal cull' of their male population. At the village of Goden, twenty men had been 'marched to the side of a barn and told to crouch down with their hands behind their heads. ... all 20 were mowed down by machine-gun fire. ... The men killed also constituted two-thirds of the village's adult male population ... making it unlikely that normal life will ever resume in Goden.'⁽⁵⁰⁾ 'So many have disappeared, so many are afraid to come back, we know our village will never return to what it was before the war,' said one resident of Korenica. 'My sister has lost five sons. She is not that strong. No one is. I think that none of us here is very far from madness.'⁽⁵¹⁾

Compiling an accurate count of the dead and missing was hampered by the post-conflict chaos in Kosovo, and the under-resourcing of virtually every aid effort and organization that took to the field. 'International officials admit that they don't even have a good guess on how many people are missing. There is also no system to centralize information on bodies that have been found. Investigators for the international war-crimes tribunal are already overwhelmed by the number of sites to examine.'⁽⁵²⁾ Controversy over the death-toll increased with the announcement by the ICTY that it had recovered some 2,100 bodies in its first season of exhumations in Kosovo. Critics leapt on the figure to suggest that only a relatively small number of Kosovars had died at Serb hands during the war. The claim seemed absurd in the light of the ICTY's admitted resource constraints, and its apparent unwillingness to investigate some of the worst alleged atrocity sites; I have addressed the subject in detail elsewhere.⁽⁵³⁾

Whatever death-toll is eventually arrived at -- if one ever is -- there can be no doubting the gendercidal trend. In perhaps the most haunting comment of the postwar period, Louise Arbour, then-head of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, spoke of 'conglomerations of males of military age' among the victims exhumed from mass graves.⁽⁵⁴⁾ The most comprehensive report on the human-rights dimension of the war was Kosovo/Kosova: As Seen, As Told, issued by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in November 1999. The OSCE's conclusions about the gendering of the slaughter were commendably blunt. 'Young men were the group that was by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo,' the organization wrote. '... 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.'⁽⁵⁵⁾

Conclusion

The evidence elicited thus far from the Kosovo conflict suggests that a single category of ethnic-Albanian victims was the target of the worst and most systematic Serb atrocities: males, especially 'battle-age' men between roughly 15 and 60. This campaign of 'gendercide' can be seen as the continuation of longstanding Serb military strategy in the Balkans wars, of which the massacres at Srebrenica in July 1995 are the best-known and most substantial example. In this article and other fora, I have argued that the 'genocidal cull' of the male population is a pervasive and predictable feature of warfare, both ancient and modern; but it has received little or no attention in a wide range of literatures, ranging from international relations to peace studies, comparative politics, and genocide studies.

If the 'logic' underlying such acts of gendercide is straightforward, so too may be the reasons for the general failure to acknowledge or analyze it. In an international-relations context, the major theoretical 'schools' -- realist, neo-realist, liberal -- have come in for sweeping criticism from feminist analysts for their failure to integrate the gender variable into their analyses of war and international conflict. However, the increasingly prominent feminist strand -- which above all others should be attuned to the operation of the gender variable in such circumstances -- may have a vested interest in overlooking gender-selective atrocities against males, since they distract from the desired focus on women's gendered suffering. Perhaps as a result, the subject of mass and genocidal killings of males seems to have attracted no attention in the feminist literature. In my broad though not exhaustive reading of this literature, I have come across literally not a single paragraph devoted to the subject.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Men as brutalizers and power-mongers have, however, received extensive notice. The same appears to be true for the growing literature on peace studies.

The gender-selective slaughter in Kosovo, and the possibly even greater atrocities inflicted on young East Timorese men in September 1999, serve as reminders that the gendercidal trend remains pervasive (though not ubiquitous) in global conflicts, and is unlikely to decline soon. It is high time, both from a normative and an analytical perspective, to break the prevailing taboo -- certainly one of the most powerful and hermetically-sealed in the social sciences -- and to expand the analysis of gender and international politics to include 'battle-age' men as the most vulnerable group of non-combatants in conflict situations, up to and including full-blown genocide.

Notes

1. As I have written elsewhere: 'I place "battle-age" in quotation marks throughout, to problematize a term that rolls off the tongue too trippingly, in my view. The "battle-age" construction implicitly assumes that if a male is of an age that renders him liable to military conscription and combat, his entire identity should be so defined. This renders the analyst complicit with those who would subordinate the destiny of "battle-age" males to this outside demand -- akin to defining women by their capacity to be raped, and suggesting as well that "battle-age" men are "asking for it." With this equation of males and combatants completed, the analyst or policymaker can move to the final stage of effacing all non-combatant males from the policy and analytical equation, a phenomenon that is also commonplace.' See Adam Jones, 'Gendercide and Genocide', Journal of Genocide Research, 2: 2 (June 2000), p. 207 (n. 9).

2. In a fine article for International Security on 'The War for Kosovo,' Barry R. Posen ably surveys the range of Serb military strategies employed in the conflict. But he devotes only the most glancing attention to the phenomenon of mass killings of civilians, noting that 'Some 10,000 Kosovar Albanians are said to have been killed in the eleven-week war. Substantial numbers were murdered, probably to terrorize others into leaving.' There is no attempt to 'gender' the strategy with reference to the overwhelming disproportion of adult males among the victims. Posen, 'The War for Kosovo: Serbia's Political-Military Strategy,' International Security, 24: 4 (2000), pp. 39-84 (quote from pp. 62-63).

3. For present purposes, 'gender' can be viewed as a continuum of biological sex and the roles (primarily feminine and masculine) assigned to it by cultural codes. I share the view of I.R. scholar Joshua Goldstein that clear-cut distinctions between 'sex' and 'gender' are chimerical: 'Many scholars now use the terms "sex" and "gender" in a particular way, which I find unworkable. "Sex" in this approach refers to what is biological, and "gender" to what is cultural. ... The sex-gender discourse constructs a false dichotomy between biology and culture, which are actually interdependent and mutually constitutive. More concretely, I will argue that the conception of biology as fixed and culture as flexible is wrong. Biology provides diverse potentials, and cultures limit, select, and channel them ... Furthermore, culture literally influences the expression of genes and hence the biology of our bodies. There is no universal biological essence of "sex" but a complex system of potentials that are activated by various internal and external influences. Nor (to consider the opposite direction of causality) are social gender roles so separate from the bodies that perform them. ... I therefore use "gender" to cover masculine and feminine roles and bodies alike, in all their aspects, including the structures, dynamics, roles and scripts associated with each gender group.' Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2001).

4. See, e.g., Jones, 'Gendercide and Genocide'; Adam Jones, 'Gender and Genocide in Rwanda' (forthcoming in Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4 [2002]); and the case-studies compiled on the Gendercide Watch website.

5. Mary Anne Warren, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), p. 22. Emphasis added.

6. Readers may also be interested in my earlier research on these themes, such as 'Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17: 1 (January 1994), pp. 117-34; 'Does "Gender" Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations', Review of International Studies, 22: 4 (October 1996), pp. 405-29; and 'Engendering Debate', Review of International Studies, 24: 2 (April 1998), pp. 299-303.

7. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1954), p. 408.

8. The trend seems more muted in current wars in Africa, for example -- Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola -- and the mortal victimization of women may be further heightened by the threat of AIDS that routinely accompanies the rape of civilian women.

9. For case-study treatments of all these historical events, see Gendercide Watch. The case of the Soviet POWs, 2.8 million of whom were killed in just eight months of 1941-42 by exposure, starvation, and mass execution, vies with the 500,000-800,000 Tutsis killed in Rwanda during twelve weeks of 1994 as the most concentrated act of mass murder in recorded history. But there is no book in English on the subject.

10. Muratovic quoted in Mark Danner, 'Bosnia: The Great Betrayal,' New York Review of Books, 26 March 1998, p. 40; Danner, 'Endgame in Kosovo,' New York Review of Books, 6 May 1999, p. 8.

11. On Vukovar, see Eric Stover and Gilles Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar (Zurich: Scalo, 1998), pp. 102-07.

12. Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 152-54.

13. See Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Vol. II (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), pp. 34-42.

14. Charles Lane and Thom Shanker, quoted in Mark Danner, 'The Killing Fields of Bosnia,' New York Review of Books, 24 September 1998, pp. 63-64 (n. 2). Danner adds: 'In the matter of "precise details," a partly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency cable, which offers "a list of prisons in Bosnian territory, with the number of prisoners as of July 1992," under the rubrics "Location," "Number of Prisoners," and "Number Liquidated," includes "Brcko-Luka" and lists the "Number Liquidated" there as over 3000. The list, presumably compiled in July or August of 1992 -- the date, like much else, is blacked out by the government censor -- includes one place where the "Number Liquidated" exceeded 2000 (Dvornik "Bratsvo" Stadium) and three where it exceeded one thousand.'

15. Helsinki Watch, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Volume II (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), pp. 58-83.

16. In mid-July 1999, the international war-crimes tribunal at The Hague issued a ruling that Bosnian Serb forces under 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, 16 July 1999.

17. Danner, 'The Killing Fields of Bosnia,' pp. 73-75.

18. Rohde, Endgame, pp. 350, 353.

19. Mertus cites the case of a 21-year-old female student who was 'sent to prison for thirty days after her youth group organized a party in a private house to honor five young local Albanians [men] who had been killed by police in 1982 and 1984. ... They picked on her at the police station because she spoke no Serbian. ... Later, the student would tell me about the police who threatened to shoot her at the border with Albania, the inspectors who beat her with a stick across her hands and legs, the "bad feeling" she had when they called her an "Albanian whore" and the hopelessness she felt when she heard women screaming in another cell and could do nothing to help them. Her story, she would say, is "nothing special."' Julie A. Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started A War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 167.

20. Mertus, Kosovo, pp. 279, 46.

21. Mertus, Kosovo, p. xix.

22. 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. 260. 'Press-ganging' by the Yugoslav Army was particularly feared. As the 1990s wore on, 'Albanian recruits reported greater harassment in the military; the number of young Albanian soldiers dying under suspicious conditions rose.' Mertus, Kosovo, p. 156.

23. The term 'genocide' must be used with care, but it is by no means the case that the destruction of a targeted population must be total in order to qualify. Citing the United Nations definition of genocide (1948), John B. Allcock carries the argument to the opposite extreme: 'It is often assumed that in order to qualify as genocide, killing must take place on a very large scale, with perhaps thousands if not millions of victims. It is important to note, however, that within the terms of the UN Convention, no account is taken of the number of victims. The execution of a handful of villagers for reasons of national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity might be legitimately regarded as an act of genocide.' (Allcock, 'Genocide,' in Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia [ABC-CLIO, 1998], pp. 99-100.) My preferred definition reworks that of Steven Katz (although Katz would take great issue with the italicized addition): genocide is 'the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in whole or in substantial part any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.' See Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 132. The U.N. definition reads as follows: "Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." In W. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou, eds., The Laws of War (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 84-85.

24. 'Charting a Massacre: The Monitors' Report,' excerpts from Special Report: Massacre of Civilians in Racak, The New York Times, 22 January 1999. The standardly-cited death-toll for Racak is 45; the monitors arrived after a number of autopsies had already been carried out. The number of females killed was apparently between one and three.

25. Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour, 'The massacre that forced the West to act,' The Guardian, 18 July 1999.

26. Perhaps the best-known instance is Suva Reka, where 'British war crimes investigators using specialist archaeological equipment ... uncovered a mass grave of 50 bodies, including many women and children, buried deeper than any other yet found in Kosovo.' The article adds: 'The presence of a "considerable number" of women and youngsters explains the extraordinary measures the killers took to conceal their remains. Most other graves in the area contain male victims.' Stephen Farrell, '50 bodies found in waterlogged Kosovo grave,' The Times (UK) (in the Calgary Herald, 3 September 1999).

27. Enver Nuci, quoted in Michel Moutout, 'How Djakovica's lookout men saved Kosovars from hell,' Agence France-Presse dispatch, 25 June 1999.

28. Ian Traynor, 'KLA battered by Serbian offensive, but still recruiting and raising funds,' The Globe and Mail (from The Guardian [UK]), 1 April 1999.

29. Agence France-Presse dispatch, 26 March 1999.

30. Quoted in Danner, 'Endgame in Kosovo.'

31. Peter Finn, '"If I Could Not Talk, Nobody Would Know,"' The Washington Post, 18 April 1999.

32. Human Rights Watch, 'Witness to Izbice Killings Speaks: Possibly Largest Massacre of Kosovo War,' Kosovo Human Rights Flash #39, 19 May 1999.

33. Sebastian Junger describes the events at Meja with brutal succinctness: 'Shortly before dawn on April 27, according to locals, a large contingent of Yugoslav army troops garrisoned in Junik started moving eastward through the valley, dragging men from their houses and pushing them into trucks. "Go to Albania!" they screamed at the women before driving on to the next town with their prisoners. By the time they got to Meja they had collected as many as 300 men. The regular army took up positions around the town while the militia and paramilitaries went through the houses grabbing the last few villagers and shoving them out into the road. The men were surrounded by fields most of them had worked ... their whole lives, and they could look up and see mountains they'd admired since they were children. Around noon the first group was led to the compost heap, gunned down, and burned under piles of cornhusks. A few minutes later a group of about 70 were forced to lie down in three neat rows and were machine-gunned in the back. The rest -- about 35 men -- were taken to a farmhouse along the Gjakova [Djakovica] road, pushed into one of the rooms, and then shot through the windows at point-blank range. The militiamen who did this then stepped inside, finished them off with shots to the head, and burned the house down. They walked away singing.' Junger, 'The Forensics of War,' Vanity Fair, October 1999, p. 140.

34. See Human Rights Watch, 'Separation of Men and Mass Killing Near Vucitrn,' 20 May 1999; 'Istok prisoners "were massacred by Serbs,"' BBC Online, 12 August 1999.

35. Steven Erlanger, 'For Serb Draftee in Kosovo, a Close-Up of Deadly Purges,' The New York Times, 28 July 1999.

36. Quoted in William Ickes, 'A Kosovo summer crop could include corpses,' Agence France-Presse dispatch, 23 July 1999.

37. Human Rights Watch, 'Kosovo Atrocities Recounted in Detail,' press release, 27 July 1999.

38. Quotes from Chris Hedges, 'Angry Serbs Hear a New Explanation: It's All Russia's Fault,' The New York Times, 16 July 1999.

39. Sebastian Junger, 'The Forensics of War,' Vanity Fair, October 1999.

40. Laura King, 'Death Touches Most Kosovo Families,' Associated Press dispatch, 26 June 1999.

41. Julian Borger, 'Cook promises to make killers pay,' The Guardian, 24 June 1999.

42. John Daniszewski, 'Victims of Village Massacre Laid to Rest,' Los Angeles Times, 28 June 1999.

43. Peter Finn, 'Bodies, Death Mark Kosovo Villages,' The Washington Post, 22 June 1999.

44. Human Rights Watch, 'Burnt Remains of Korenica Villagers Found,' Kosovo Human Rights Flash #48, 17 June 1999.

45. The Washington Post, 1 July 1999.

46. 'German troops find more evidence of atrocities in Kosovo,' CNN dispatch, 1 July 1999.

47. John Daniszewski, 'Beneath Bits of Fresh Earth, Tales of Horror,' The Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1999.

48. '119 bodies found near Prizren, Kosovo,' Agence France-Presse dispatch, 2 July 1999.

49. Daniszewski, 'Beneath Bits of Fresh Earth.'

50. John Daniszewski, 'Ashes, Bits of Bone Testify to Another Massacre,' Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1999.

51. Tom Hundley, 'Kosovars agonize over the missing,' Chicago Tribune, 7 October 1999. See also Danica Kirka, 'Kosovo village [Korenica] wonders what happened to its men,' The Globe and Mail, 24 December 1999: "Six months after the end of the Kosovo conflict, not a single man from 16 to 60 in this ethnic-Albanian village has been accounted for, residents and human-rights activists say. Its population used to be 600.'

52. Kirka, 'Kosovo Village.'

53. See Adam Jones, 'Kosovo: Orders of Magnitude', IDEA -- A Journal of Social Issues, 5: 1 (2000).

54. Reuters dispatch, 11 November 1999.

55. 'Young Men of Fighting Age,' chapter 15 in Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- Kosovo Verification Mission, Kosovo/Kosova: As Seen, As Told (1999). Emphasis added. The OSCE's comments on the fate of Kosovar women are also worth citing: 'The way women in which [sic] 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.' Excerpts from 'Women,' chapter 16 in Kosovo/Kosova: As Seen, As Told.

56. For a critical overview of the feminist I.R. literature, see Jones, 'Does "Gender" ...'. Charlotte Hooper, citing Molly Cochran, claims that 'even empirically oriented feminist IR scholarship may have implications too radical for its easy incorporation into mainstream analyses.' Likewise, empirical treatments of male victimization may be too radical for easy incorporation into most feminist analyses. See Hooper, 'Masculinities, IR and the "gender variable": a cost-benefit analysis for (sympathetic) gender sceptics,' Review of International Studies, 25: 4 (1999), p. 490.