I was otherwise busy this morning writing this short piece for the Guardian on rape in wartime, following the arrest two days ago of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
I details my own extremely brief career as a war correspondent.
Wednesday 23 July 2008
Rape in wartime
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Thank you, Linda for writing this. Rape has been used as a weapon of terror against women ..probably forever. But I also have to say that perhaps in that part of the world, there is a particularly vicious form of violence to some people's characters. We have a situation here locally which will probably make people think that all Serbians are thugs. "If or when a formal extradition request is made, Serbia may or may not send Miladin Kovacevic to the United States to face charges of beating a fellow Binghamton University student into a coma." Mr. Kovacevic(a student-athlete at Binghamton Univ.)was sprung by the Serbian Consulate in New York who then provided him with temporary papers which he used to skip the country and escape home.
http://www.pressconnects.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080723/NEWS01/807230322/1001
I think The Balkans is a particularly vicious corner of the world. Tit for tat revenge on a grand scale of evil has been going on for centuries. We can be forgiven for thinking Serbs are thugs. Although I have to say, Serbia is making an effort for redemption, as it wants the economic benefits of international respect, at least. Radovan Karadzic is a product of that brutality. In 1995 he was indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal, making him the first doctor so charged since the Nuremburg doctors trial in 1946.
He is inextricably linked to mass rape as a weapon of war.
I hope this genocidal maniac will be indicted for inciting mass rape. Lock him up and throw away the key.
What happened in the Balkans ranks up there with the worst of WWII, and I mean no disrespect to Holocaust victims or survivors. The scale was smaller, but the savagery was familiar.
Post a Comment