Marking the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, activists gathered in Belgrade to urge the Serbian authorities to grant legal recognition to survivors of wartime rape.
Balkan Insight
Katarina Baletic
19 June 2024
Women displayed posters with slogans like “Rape is an act of genocide”, “We remember the women raped in the war!” and “Rape is a form of hatred towards women”. Photo: BIRN.
A symbolic protest was staged by the Serbian feminist organisations Women in Black and the Autonomous Women’s Centre in central Belgrade on Wednesday to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Women displayed banners with slogans declaring: “Rape is an act of genocide”, “We remember women raped in the war!” and “Rape is a form of hatred towards women”.
Serbia is the only country in the former Yugoslavia that doesn’t recognise survivors of wartime sexual violence as civilian war victims. The two NGOs are seeking a change to the Law on the Rights of Veterans, Disabled Veterans and their Family Members to address this omission.
Sanja Pavlovic, an activist from the Autonomous Women’s Centre, told BIRN that they want to highlight the sexual violence that happens all over the world during wars and conflicts, but above all want to emphasise that even though 30 years have passed since the 1990s wars, victims of sexual violence are not officially recognised as civilian victims by the Serbian authorities.
They want the law amended to recognise victims of sexual violence, regardless of nationality, allowing them to receive welfare benefits and support from the state,
Women in states that recognise them as civilian victims receive some kind of monthly pension, Pavlovic noted.
“They use that money, above all, for medicine, to take care of their physical and mental health precisely because of the consequences left by this crime,” she said.
She argued that “it is also, on a symbolic level, important for the state of Serbia to recognise the war crime of rape as such”.
At this point, she said, the Serbian authorities don’t even know how many victims there are in the country.
“This country often talks about Serbian victims, but we see that in the case of women, it’s not even about that,” she added.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in The Hague classified sexual violence as a war crime and a crime against humanity. Its first verdict convicting a defendant of wartime sexual violence came in 2001, in the trial of Bosnian Serb Army commander Dragoljub Kunarac and his subordinates Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, women who survived wartime rape were recognised for the first time in the world as civilian victims of war in the country’s Federation entity in 2006. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo have also established legal reparation mechanisms for survivors.
Last year, in a world first, Bosnia’s Federation entity recognised children born as a result of wartime rape as civilian victims of war too.
Croatia and Kosovo also recognise survivors of sexual violence in war as civilian victims of war who are entitled to various types of compensation and welfare services. More than 1,500 people have been granted this status in Kosovo, and more than 200 in Croatia, said the Autonomous Women’s Centre in a statement.