From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: talk.rape
Subject: Serb Forces Rape 20,000 in Bosnia, EC Team Finds
Date: Sat,  9 Jan 93 18:03:10 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

	Copied without permission from:       
	The Washington Post, January 8, 1993

	SERB FORCES RAPE 20,000 IN BOSNIA, EC TEAM FINDS

	By William Drozdiak

	PARIS - A European Community team of investigators has concluded
that Serbian forces have raped up to 20,000 Muslim women and girls in
Bosnia as part of a systematic policy of terror designed to intimidate,
demoralize and drive them from their homes.
	The Community's inquiry, the first official effort to collect
evidence for a Nuremberg-like war crimes tribunal, was led by former
British diplomat Anne Warburton and a former French health minister, Simone
Veil, who is now a leading member of the European parliament. They were
accompanied by lawyers, forensic psychiatrists and experts in rape
counseling.
	The group was assigned its task by the EC's 12 government leaders,
who issued a harsh condemnation of these "acts of unspeakable brutality" at
their summit meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, last month.
	The EC investigators spent five days in Croatia in late December
interviewing Muslim refugees. They also collated other eyewitness accounts,
first gathered by the Red Cross and other humanitarian aid groups on the
scene, that will serve as a body of evidence to bring the perpetrators of
war crimes to justice.
	In their report, the investigators said they found that rape was
occurring in Bosnia on a mass scale, not as random attacks but as part of a
deliberate policy to build a Greater Serbia through "ethnic cleansing" -
the driving out of non-Serbs.
	"A repeated feature of Serbian attacks on Muslim towns and villages
was the use of rape, or the threat of rape, as a weapon of war to force the
population to leave their homes," the delegation said in a five-page
report.
	The investigators said "rape is part of a pattern of abuse, usually
perpetrated with the conscious intention of demoralizing and terrorizing
communities, driving them from their homes and demonstrating the power of
the invading forces.
	"Viewed in this way, rape cannot be seen as incidental to the main
purpose of the aggression but as serving a strategic purpose in itself."
	While acknowledging that they heard allegations of assaults against
Croat and Serb women, as well as accounts of sexual abuse on men held in
detention camps, the EC investigators said "Muslim women undoubtedly form
the vast majority of rape victims." Although an exact number was difficult
to quantify, they said the most reasonable estimate was 20,000.
	They said Serbian forces carried out rape of Muslim women "in
particularly sadistic ways to inflict maximum humiliation on the victims.
Many women, and more particularly children, may have died during or after
rape."
	The delegation warned that many of the victims who did survive face
the prospect of long-term psychological troubles that could lead to suicide
unless they are given sensitive and sophisticated counseling.
	In addition, the investigators said governments should accelerate
visa procedures to accommodate the victims as quickly as possible and to
consider the best ways to prepare adoption channels since "many of the
women are not likely to wish to keep children conceived in such
circumstances."
Newsgroups: talk.rape,alt.politics.correct