Abstract
Elissa Helms’ book Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina is published in the Critical Human Rights Series by the University of Wisconsin Press. It covers research from a participant observer’s perspective over 15 years from 1993 onwards with several interruptions until 2008/2012. In 2015, the 20-year-old Dayton Peace Accord and the massacre in Srebrenica were commemorated widely, and Helms’ research remains relevant to current understandings. Mass graves are still being found and opened, war crime trials are still being conducted, and the political make-up of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) is still being questioned. Gender- and nation-related issues continue to be ambiguous, and women’s activism has not halted.
The greatest merit of Helms’ book is her unravelling of ambiguities, of rigid connectivities, and how multiple women’s groups were trying to come to terms with human rights, entitlement claims, and also with frictions between each other and among staff. With much detail, the book discusses gender ideologies that emphasize traditional gender hierarchies of male strength and female weakness and innocence, of the heroic male defender of the nation and the motherly woman portrayed as symbol of the nation, which had already appeared before fighting started. During the preparations for the war, citizens were no longer identified as Yugoslavs but as Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, or Albanians, attributed with an ethnic identity that would lay the ground for future ethnicity-based nations. It was difficult and often futile to uphold a singular gender identity – woman/man – and not identify with the ethnic or the religious background as Catholic, Orthodox Christian or Muslim.
Women’s NGOs found it challenging to create women’s solidarity as an overarching principle that overrides ethnic and religious divides. That struggle over women’s solidarity found its expression in the often fierce debates about whether ‘rape is rape’ irrespective of the ethnic or religious affiliation of the victim; or, whether the rape of a Bosniak women is to be considered more severe because Bosniak women are believed to be innocent, morally pure, maternal, embedded in their family, and therefore would suffer even more than other women from sexual abuse. It is the culture of shame and honour that is supposed to distinguish the Bosniaks from the Serbs. In consequence, Serb forces are said to have deliberately wanted to rape Muslim women; not only to inflict suffering on the women but to damage all Bosniaks and show that Bosniak men are incapable of protecting their women. In such a logic, rape has become an instrument of war to weaken the enemy physically and morally, and victimize the whole ethnic group. The Serb rapist then is portrayed as the ultimate villain, abnormally brutal, devilish and uncivilized (p. 84). Omitted in this construction is the fact that Croat and Muslim armed forces also committed rape, that Serb and Croat women were raped too, and that some Serb soldiers or guards protected Muslim women or refused to rape. Such nuancing would harm the nationalist project.
The logic that the rape of a Bosniak women is more severe than other rapes was used by some women’s group in their campaigns and their requests for support, whereas other women’s groups, especially Medica Zenica, tried to avoid ethnicized rhetoric. Medica Zenica, located in the small town Zenica, is a branch of the international NGO Medica Mondiale, providing services to war victims of sexual violence and was thoroughly studied by the author, as she volunteered with them. Medica Zenica reached out to women’s NGOs in Serbia and Croatia – Women in Black from Belgrade are especially mentioned as an ally for their anti-militarism and anti-patriarchy vision.
Elissa Helms disputes notions of the differential severity of rape by opposing concepts like Orientalism and Balkanism with feminist framings that ‘denounce nationalist violence’ (p. 43). Yet, she also draws on Spivak’s concept of ‘strategic essentialism’, consciously used by feminist NGOs to gloss over substantive differences between and among women’s groups (p. 8). Taking the issue of essentialism further, Helms identifies ‘affirmative essentialisms’ as the ‘crux of contestations over women’s roles’, the division between public (male) and private (female) spheres (p. 9). Other essentialist attributions Helms observed are the creation of other victim identities, namely the ‘rural refugee’ and the ‘Srebrenica widow’, the latter taking over the ‘female face of the ethno-national victimhood’ from the rape victim (p. 230).
While such attributions can open access to support, services and income, they also limit women’s space: women do not want to be reduced to a victim or even survivor identity, or to be portrayed as rural, with a white head scarf and baggy trousers. Instead, they identify more agentically as visible and audible citizens and activists and as ‘aiding victims, rejecting violence, and working for peace’ (p. 27). That not all women were so innocent and that some were responsible for atrocities (like Biljana Plasvic, then vice president of the Serb Republic in Bosnia who was convicted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [ICTY] for war crimes) did little to shake the positive women image, as aggressive, violent women were constructed in Bosnia-Herzegovina as ‘other’ and not as Bosniaks.
The nationalist project depends on binary gender images of the man as the hero and guardian of the nation, and the woman as the potential or real mother and guardian of the family. Such an understanding of heroic masculinity could not hold since men, including men in arms, became victims (many more men died in this war than women) but, according to Helms (p. 231), only civilian men could be recognized as victims because the image of victimhood is one of innocence. To reconcile that contradiction, the besieged hero/victim is depicted as the martyr (p. 233). Yet, there is another problem with masculinity that means that it cannot be ‘innocent’. The association of masculinity in BiH also became linked with corruption, greed and incompetence, and thus dirty politics. Feminist women have criticized this kind of politics (which is associated with a negative female symbol as whore), but at the same time this rejection has served to affirm gender polarity.
In various chapters Helms further contextualizes those representations: Chapter 2 discusses ‘Wartime: Gender, nationalism, and sexualized violence’; Chapter 3, ‘The NGO boom: Women’s organizing and foreign intervention in the wake of war’; Chapter 4, ‘The nationing of gender: Nationalism, reconciliation, feminisms’; Chapter 5, ‘Politics is a whore: Women and the political’; and Chapter 6, ‘Avoidance and authenticity: The public face of wartime rape’. Her conclusions discuss the problematic of the dual gender divisions that have a strategic merit, but remain captives of patriarchal ideology. She argues against this - differences among women need to be articulated, painful as they may be. Thus, ‘alternative scripts’ to the motherhood ideal, which has been challenged for its association with the ‘nation’, need to be enacted (p. 236). Feminists also need to give voice to silent or silenced victims, not only those who have undergone wartime rape, but also those who suffer postwar domestic violence (Medica Zenica’s approach). Reporting domestic violence generally highlights men of the women’s own ethnicity who are not so innocent when hurting female family members. In addition, several women’s groups point out that the Orientalist image of the Bosnian Muslim woman as powerless needs to be dropped. Yet, there are in circulation also powerful ideas that silence is golden and that it is better that raped women do not speak out because the ‘shame and honour’ culture needs to be respected as a form of agency (p. 240). In order to identify ‘counter-images of women’s passive victimhood’, women who fought back, who defended themselves and who broke silence are important for bringing to public attention a counter-narrative to the image of the weak victim (p. 241). In order to attain cross-NGO women’s solidarity, ‘strategic avoidance’ of perceptions of female identities only in terms of victimhood might help to build a common base, for example to facilitate demands for reparations and legal recognition of entitlements. This strategy, designed to avoid risking solidarity, was a conscious choice by some groups.
To sum up, Helms aims critically to examine notions of women as victims, especially as victims of ethnic-nationalist violence, and of ethno-nationalist gender stereotypes. She shows how women’s NGOs and women’s groups used affirmative images of women victims of sexual atrocities, mainly rape, such as women as peaceful, motherly and morally superior. Drawing on such identities, they were able to claim compensation and services that allow recognition of suffering and the building of new livelihoods. In addition, Helms challenges this strategy and gives alternative examples of activists who wanted to overcome the bipolar gender ideology by differentiating women and even attending to male war victims of sexual and other violence.
The book is an impressive example of excellent action research which brings together abundant kinds of material. Helms draws, for example, on numerous meetings, accidental and planned encounters, observations of campaigns and protest rallies, media analysis of newspaper articles and TV shows, examination of publications and reports, and of reactions to controversial films (Calling the Ghosts of 1997, Grbavica by Jasmila Zbanic of 2006 and Of Blood and Honey by Angelina Jolie of 2012). The research process is precisely shown and the author is present on nearly every page. Woven into the analysis of those abundant sources are theories of gender, representation, armed conflict, international relations, civil society engagement, and expert authors like Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Cockburn and Dubravka Zarkov (editor of EJWS) frequently populate pages. Many other authors appear in brackets and footnotes, making this book scholarly, yet very readable. The extensive reference list demonstrates that the author has read a great deal, if not everything, that has been written in English and in BCS (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) language, on the Yugoslav wars and the post-conflict processes in BiH.
One question arises: why has the author not applied the concept of intersectionality as a matrix of power (e.g. Patricia Hill Collins, Iris Marion Young). With her rich empirical data, she could have contributed to conceptual debates on the interwoven dynamics and contradictions of power and identity during and after the war with a broad intersectional lens. I would also have liked more discussion (more than one sentence on p. 66) of Karen Engle’s article ‘Feminism and its (dis)contents: Criminalizing wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (American Journal of International Law, 99(4), 2005), which elaborated the debate on the severity of rape against Bosnian Muslim women and considered whether ‘rape is not just rape’ from a legal perspective.
Despite these criticisms, the author succeeds in deconstructing victimhood, gender and nation by contextualizing those concepts. Her book is an inspiration for all activists and researchers alike.