Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of that ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. The women - primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin - have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming.
The first English edition contains Stiglmayer's updates to her own two essays, one detailing the historical context of the current conflict and the other presenting the core of the book - interviews with some twenty victims of rape as well as interviews with three Serbian perpetrators. Essays investigating mass rape and war from ethnopsychological, sociological, cultural, and medical perspectives are included.
New essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rhonda Copelon, and Susan Brownmiller address the crucial issues of recognizing the human rights of women and children. A foreword by Roy Gutman describes war crimes within the context of the UN Tribunal, and an afterword by Cynthia Enloe relates the mass rapes of this war to developments and reactions in the international women's movement.
Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement, and systematic attempts to impregnate - all in the name of "ethnic cleansing" - make for the grimmest of reading. However brutal and appalling the information conveyed here, this book cannot and should not be ignored.
