July 29, 2008 – (Manly Daily) Forestville academic Eileen Pittaway savoured the moment last week when she heard war criminal Radovan Karadzic had been arrested and would finally be brought to trial.

Her emotions could never have matched those of the Bosnian people who suffered in the bloody campaign the Bosnian Serb leader waged between 1992 and 1995. But she had the satisfaction of knowing her efforts had helped to ensure Karadzic will now face justice for the full range of his crimes against humanity including his use of rape as an instrument of state terror.

During those years an estimated 20,000 non-Serb Bosnian women were rounded up, put into camps and systematically raped until they were pregnant in a grotesque form of ethnic cleansing.

Dr Pittaway, director of the University of NSW's Centre for Refugee Research, played a leading role in the long international campaign to have rape recognised as a war crime after research she had conducted in the late 1980s laid the foundations for action. It wasn't until 1998, three years after Karadzic went on the run, that the International Criminal Court in The Hague recognised rape as a war crime, a crime against humanity and, in certain situations, as an act of genocide.

Dr Pittaway said the scars now borne by the Bosnian women put into those camps would never disappear, but Karadzic's prosecution was very symbolic and could aid their healing.

"My opinion is that every woman who has been raped or pack raped would like to see their very own rapist brought to justice but, given we know that's not going to happen, this is probably the best thing they could hope for to have the man who orchestrated it and ordered it be publicly held up for trial," she said.

"I think for many of the women who were in those camps and suffered this, it will be some sort of closure for them that they have never been able to get so far."

Dr Pittaway said the significance of the decision to accept rape as a war crime was summed up by a Bosnian woman speaking at a conference on the need for an International Criminal Court. "She said, 'I know my rapist will never be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court but what's important to me is that someone will be prosecuted on behalf of all the women. What it means is that at last the world is saying what happened to me was not just something that was shameful and horrible or painful, they are saying what happened to me was an international war crime and that is so important'."

Dr Pittaway said the systematic way women were raped in Bosnia was far from unique. It had happened in dozens of conflicts in places including Rwanda, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Aceh and East Timor and was still occurring today in Darfur and Burma, where, according to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, soldiers regularly raped women and girls as young as eight.

But Dr Pittaway said Bosnia was pivotal in highlighting the issue to the world and galvanising the campaign for justice.

She said rape and pillage had historically been associated with wars but in her view it was increasingly being used, as it was in Bosnia, as a deliberate strategy to destabilise and shame communities and break the spirit of a people.

Eileen Pittaway said she was first exposed to the systematic use of rape 40 years ago when she met Tibetan women crossing the border into India who told of being raped by Chinese soldiers and impregnated in a deliberate strategy to dilute their ethnic purity.

But it wasn't until she was conducting research with Sydney's refugee community in 1989 that she was alerted to how pervasive it was.

Her interviews with almost 300 refugee women revealed 80 per cent of them had been systemically raped or subjected to sexual violence as a form of torture.

"It shocked me because I had been working with refugees for so long but there was this big silence about it," she said. As a result of her findings, she was invited to go to the United Nations as a designated expert and discovered her research was the first compelling, documented confirmation of a level of abuse the UN and human rights groups had suspected.

She said the recognition of rape as a war crime was one win in a very long battle to protect women caught up in war zones. She said she and colleague Linda Bartolomei continued to visit refugee camps where between 80 and 100 per cent of the women had been raped if not before they arrived, then afterwards, and in most cases both.

But she said one of the problems was the difficulty of alerting the civilised world to the true horrors when most of the abuses were so appalling they could never be exposed in mainstream media. She said if readers tried to imagine the worst possible forms of sexual cruelty and degradation that could be inflicted they would probably still fall short of being able to imagine what women in some countries had suffered.

"There are times when I wonder how human beings could be so evil," she said.

"The ones that make me most upset are the ones that are planned, where someone has been so evil that they have thought through how to do this. That is what happened in Bosnia they said let's set up camps and anyone can rape these women whenever they want until they are pregnant."Dr Pittaway said despite working in the field for 20 years she was still discovering new levels of cruelty.

"The worst I heard of two years ago happened in Aceh and I still find it hard to tell anyone because it is so unbelievably awful," she said.

From:http://www.manlydaily.com.au/article/2008/07/29/11313_news_feature.html