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Sexual violence in the Kosovo conflict: a lesson for Myanmar and other ethnic cleansing campaigns

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Abstract

In this article, we analyze the patterns of sexual violence against Albanian women during the Kosovo conflict (1998–1999) as a weapon of the Milosevic regime’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. We used a broad combination of sources: a secondary literature of history and social science, human rights reports, trial records, our oral history of survivors, interviews with advocates and psychologists handling hundreds of survivors, and a subset of survey data of reported discrete incidents of sexual violence. Our focus on Kosovo as a single-case study rich in data allowed us to discern patterns that offer important insights for understanding how women’s bodies come to be sites of militarized violence in the context of ethnic exclusion and destruction. This carries policy implications for preventing the use of sexual violence in other conflicts, or, in the case of Myanmar military’s sexual violence against Rohingya women, to offer a roadmap for the prosecution of perpetrators.

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Notes

  1. Idriz Balaj, a KLA commander, was tried for the rape of a Roma woman, among other crimes, and acquitted both in the first instance and on appeal at the ICTY (Haradinaj et al. IT-04-84).

  2. Since the organization does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, this database includes 35 incidents involving women of the RAE community (Roma, Ashkali, Egyptians), 1 Bošniak, 1 Serb and 1 Turk. We set aside these incidents, which are not part of our investigation, but noticed that the women of the RAE community were all but one victim of Serb perpetrators.

  3. Anger at the NATO intervention might have increased the hatred of Serb troops for their captives. However, the characterization of Albanians as foreign interlopers were tropes of long standing, as discussed above. The war provided the opportunity for deploying this propaganda in the field, as shown by a striking sequence in the documentary The Scorpions (2007), made in large part of the videos filmed by a paramilitary affiliated to the police. In this sequence an Orthodox clergy blesses paramilitaries with the words, ‘Go to destroy them! Turks are not like us, they are beasts from Asia.’ The Kosovo conflict was not a religious conflict, but the Muslim affiliation of Albanians was and is used in orientalist fashion to signify their status of non-natives, and not belonging.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to Linda Sada for making available to us the dataset underlying this study; to Feride Rushiti and Kadire Tahiraj for supporting our research with survivors; and to Mayesha Alam for the fruitful exchanges we had on the deployment of sexual violence during ethnic cleansing campaigns, and also for her comments and suggestions on the Rohingya.

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  1. New York University, New York, USA

    Anna Di Lellio

  2. Independent Researcher, Pristina, Kosovo

    Garentina Kraja

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  1. Anna Di Lellio
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Correspondence to Anna Di Lellio.

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Di Lellio, A., Kraja, G. Sexual violence in the Kosovo conflict: a lesson for Myanmar and other ethnic cleansing campaigns. Int Polit 58, 148–167 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00246-4

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