Adriana Zaharijević

Women Between War Scylla and Nationalist Charybdis: Legal Interpretations of Sexual Violence in Countries of Former Yugoslavia

Human rights has been treated as one of the pillars in the processes of post-conflict state building and sustainable peacebuilding in the former Yugoslav region; and the gender dimensions of seeking justice for wartime sexual and gender based violence, fall under the rubric of mainstreaming of gender justice in both transitional justice and human rights reforms. The post-conflict justice mechanisms may be viewed as adequate means to pursue gender justice. Therefore, in this chapter we will focus on the implementation of the Point 11 of UNSCR 1325 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo—who, by 2014, had adopted the National Strategic Documents for the implementation of UNSCR 1325. The implementation of UNSCR 1325 had been seen as a promising provision for women war violence survivors and was strongly advocated by grassroots women’s and feminist groups. It was believed that such a provision might bring justice and equal treatment to all women who suffered sexual and gender based violence during the wars, regardless of their ethnicity. However, as will be showcased by country cases, several years after the beginning of the implementation of National Strategic Documents the states lack consistent and collaborative measures to prevent impunity and offer redress to the survivors of gender related war injustices. Furthermore, it is our claim that the four successor states of Yugoslavia have not only failed to implement measures adequately, but that they have used those very mechanisms to promote a certain form of legal nationalism. We will demonstrate how the gendered post-transitional justice has been nationally applied in post-Yugoslav societies, by showing how legal imagery, supposed to transform the lives of victims of war sexual violence, turned into the instrument for the re-introduction of nationalism. We rely on the analyses of the laws on civilian victims of wars or related measures, of the National Strategic Documents of each state, on reports of women’s grassroots and feminist groups and international institutions, as well as on recent media reports.

The Strange Case of Yugoslav Feminism: Feminism and Socialism in “the East”

The chapter counters the prevailing idea that there was no feminism in the socialist Eastern bloc, carefully presenting a peculiar case of Yugoslav feminism which grew out of socialist political and cultural frameworks. Yugoslavia was a country where the organization of the singular feminist event in the Eastern world, the conference Comrade Woman—The New Approach? (1978), took place. The text traces the ideas on emancipation and liberation which appeared in Yugoslav scientific and literary journals immediately after the “Comrade Woman” and until the late 1980s, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The written material is grouped into three sections, according to how the so-called woman’s question was elaborated. By re-reading this material, the chapter examines if feminism was legitimized within the dominant socialist discourse, or whether it was purely translated as something externally Western. The aim of the text is to describe how scholars and activists portrayed emancipation and liberation at that very time: to see if they negotiated or failed to negotiate Western definitions and Eastern realities. In that sense, given material is not used to simply reinforce or refute the claim that feminism was an imported Western (i.e. capitalist) product that had no place interfering with the development of socialism. It also urges us to re-consider the common knowledges we have, in order to see how it becomes situated as common in the first place.