Nations and Nationalism 6 (4), 2000, 563-90.

0 ASEN 2000

Rape in Kosovo: masculinity and

Serbian nationalism*
WENDY BRACEWELL
Department of History, School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London

ABSTRACT. Accusations of Albanian rape of Serbs in Kosovo became a highly

charged political factor in the development of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s.
Discussions of rape were used to link perceptions of national victimisation and a crisis
of masculinity and to legitimate a militant Serbian nationalism, ultimately contri-
buting to the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. The article argues for attention to the
ways that nationalist projects have been structured with reference to ideals of
masculinity, the specific political and cultural contexts that have influenced these
processes, and the consequent implications for gender relations as well as for
nationalist politics. Such an approach helps explain the appeal of MiloSeviC’s
nationalism; a t the same time it highlights the divisions and conflicts that lie behind
hegemonic gender and national identities constructed around difference.

On 1 May 1985 an army employee and part-time farmer, Djordje

MartinoviC, a Serb, appeared in the hospital in Gnjilane, a primarily
Albanian town in Kosovo, with a bottle wedged up his rectum, puncturing
his large intestine. He reported that as he had worked in his field outside
Gnjilane he had been attacked by two hooded Albanians who had tied and
drugged him and assaulted him with the bottle. Under interrogation he was
said to have confessed that he had injured himself in an act of sexual self-
stimulation, though he subsequently denied this and reiterated his original
story. Different interpretations of what had actually happened (encouraged
by conflicting statements from the authorities) circulated widely, polarising
public opinion. The case of Djordje MartinoviC was one of the earliest and
most notorious stories of nationalist violence with a sexual subtext that
came out of Kosovo in the 1980s, but it was far from the only one.
Accusations that Albanians were raping Serbian women followed. From

* A CREES visiting associate professorship at Stanford University made it possible for me to

begin this project. I am also indebted to the staff of the Hoover Library, Sava PeiC of the
British Library, and DuSan PuvaEiC, for providing me with research materials. A number of
colleagues have read different versions of this article; I am particularly grateful to Pamela
Ballinger, Jasna DragoviC, Rada DrezgiC, Ger Duijzings, Gale Stokes and Bob Shoemaker
for their comments (and their patience).
564 Wendy Bracewell

being an almost invisible phenomenon, reported reluctantly and debated

hardly at all, rape and sexual assault became a highly public political issue
in the Serb debate over Kosovo in the 1980s.
This debate was shaped both by conditions in the province and by
political developments in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Reforms in the 1960s and
1970s had placed political control of Kosovo in the hands of the Albanian
majority, and the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had made the Socialist
Autonomous Province of Kosovo into an autonomous unit within the
Republic of Serbia, but the way that politics was understood as a struggle
for power between national oligarchies did little to solve economic and
social difficulties, and compounded national tensions. In 1981, Albanian
demonstrations and calls for a ‘Kosova Republic’ were met with federal
repression. Further Albanian disturbances followed. The result was fear and
resentment among Kosovo’s Serbs and Montenegrins. More and more Serbs
emigrated from the province, many feeling pressured to leave. Kosovo Serbs
complained that the province was being run as an Albanian fief; that
Albanians wanted an ‘ethnically pure’ Kosovo; and that the demand for the
constitutional status of a republic was merely a prelude to secession from
the Yugoslav federation and union with Albania.
These complaints were echoed in Serbia proper. In the 1980s, the
problem of Kosovo made the national question into the central political
issue for many Serbs, distracting attention from the pressing problems
raised by Yugoslavia’s economic crisis and party paralysis. Kosovo’s status
and circumstances had long been a sore point, in part because of its status
in Serbian national mythology. Kosovo Serbs, members of the Serbian
Orthodox Church, and Belgrade intellectuals began to raise the issue of
Kosovo publicly in the seventies and early eighties. In the mid-l980s, a part
of the Belgrade intellectual opposition (particularly critics of the regime
associated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the
Association of Writers of Serbia) took up the cause. They initially treated it
as an issue of democracy, human rights and free speech, using conditions in
Kosovo to criticise an undemocratic government, but rapidly shifted their
focus to a defense of Serbian national rights, condemning the nationalism of
the Kosovo Albanians, and attacking the Yugoslav and Serbian communist
leadership for colluding in oppression of the Kosovo Serbs (DragoviC 1997).
Similarly, these critics presented Kosovo as a specifically Serbian problem,
rather than a Yugoslav one; and Albanian motives as national-chauvinist
rather than counter-revolutionary.
The politics of national victimisation formulated by the intellectual
opposition on the Kosovo issue - and particularly the idea that Serbia’s
most urgent political priority was a reassertion of its national rights -
provided the platform for Slobodan MiloSeviC’s leadership challenge
(StojanoviC 1995). From 1987 MiloSeviC, supported both by party conserva-
tives and by a broad coalition of nationalist intellectuals, strove to
recentrahe political control within Serbia, maintain the party monopoly
Rape in Kosovo 565

over political power, and revise the principles governing the Yugoslav
federal system, all in the defence of Serbian rights. The Kosovo issue and
the sense of victimisation it engendered was one of the most potent
instruments used to mobilise mass support for a policy of Serb separatism.
This contributed to the break-down of the Yugoslav political system and
eventually to armed conflict in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and
most recently in Kosovo, where the story began.
Rape was only one of an arsenal of tactics Albanians were accused of
using against Serbs in Kosovo, but it was one that aroused intense reactions.
Defenders of the Kosovo Serbs interpreted sexual violence in Kosovo as
part of a deliberately orchestrated Albanian campaign to terrorise and
humiliate the Kosovo Serbs, encourage them to sell their lands and
emigrate. The depiction of rape in Kosovo implied that sexual violence in
Kosovo had a radically different character from that elsewhere in the
country: that rape was an age-old weapon of Albanian nationalism; that it
was an everyday occurrence; that no Serb, regardless of age, sex or status,
was safe from sexual assault; that the Albanian judiciary protected rapists, a
policy that was either ignored or condoned by the republican and federal
authorities; and that all Albanian men were potential or actual rapists. The
presumption was that rape in Kosovo was committed primarily from
nationalist motives. In an unconscious echo of the feminist approach to
rape, nationalists described it not as a sexual crime, but as an act of
violence. Women, however, were not the main victims in their analysis.
Rape in Kosovo was ‘an act of genocide’ and ‘an attack on the Serbian
nation’ (e.g. PopoviC 1987: 152; Vukovid 1987: 56). The outcry over rape -
and over the fate of the Serbs in Kosovo - reached its peak in 1988 and
1989, when the province’s autonomy was curtailed by de facto reincorpora-
tion into Serbia.
Analyses of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s have mentioned the hysteria
over ‘nationalist’ rape, usually interpreting it as a crude attempt to
manipulate public opinion. Even at the time, critics of nationalist trends in
Serbia noted that the incidence of rape was lower than elsewhere in the
federation, and pointed out the way that the politicisation of rape
aggravated Serb-Albanian relations and fed Serbian paranoia (Horvat 1988:
115-17; Gaber and Kuzmanid 1989: 213-26). Subsequent analyses have
elaborated these points more clearly (PopoviC et al. 1990; Meinarid 1994:
76-97). While allegations of ‘nationalist’ rape clearly did contribute to
increasing national tensions in Yugoslavia, the clamour over the subject also
had wider ramifications. Sexual violence became a focus of public discourse
in the 1980s because of the way the subject linked assumptions and anxieties
to do with gender (and especially masculinity) to a vision of Serbian
nationhood under threat and to an aggressive nationalist programme. This
link had implications both for the conduct of public politics and for
individuals’ private lives.
566 Wendy Bracewell

Approaches to gender and nationalism

This line of investigation into contemporary Balkan political history is

shaped by broader theoretical discussions of the interactions between gender
and nation. Scholars have usually treated these two systems of social
organisation as distinct and unconnected, partly because gender has been
seen as irrelevant to the public politics of nationalism. But new approaches
to gender as a tool of analysis, and particularly the premise that political
history has been ‘enacted on the field of gender’ and that ‘significations of
gender and power construct one another’ (Scott 1988: 49), have influenced
some recent work on nationalism. A number of studies have explored the
ways the community of the nation has been imagined and legitimated
according to gendered metaphors of reproduction and kinship, and the ways
nationalist politics have been structured with reference to gender (e.g.
Yuval-Davis 1997; for Eastern Europe, Verdery 1994). Much of this work
focuses on the consequences for women, exploring the ways that gendered
national representations reproduce and consolidate power relations which
subordinate women.’ But the persistent emphasis on woman as the defining
‘other’ against which national identities and boundaries can be consolidated
(either within or beyond the national community) implies a central,
dominant role for men and masculinity in the discursive construction of
nations. The work of feminist political theorists analysing the gendered
character of the modern state has also suggested the importance of a
hegemonic masculinity in legitimating the state, defining the public sphere of
citizenship and politics, and institutionalising male privilege (and in the
process marginalising women) (Pateman 1989; Brown 1992; a critical
overview of these approaches in Connell 1990).
Paradoxically, this very centrality often seems to have made men as such
invisible. Attempts to theorise nations and nationalism from a gendered
perspective have raised some of these issues, but they have too often treated
men and masculinity as stable, undifferentiated categories, and have posited
a straightforward equation between male interests, masculinity and nation-
alism.2 Though, as gender theorists have argued, modern nationalism may
rest on male bonding, and national projects may have worked to reinforce
male privilege, the relationship between men, masculinity and the nation is
not a simple one - it does not always play out according to the same
patterns, nor do all men necessarily benefit equally. A slightly different
approach to men and the nation has been pioneered by historians primarily
concerned with the construction of gender identities. They have focused on
nationalist and imperialist politics as important sites for the formulation
and contestation of masculinities, exploring the ways national projects have
promoted or proscribed particular masculinities (and the gender relations
these entail), and the ways that changing ideas of manliness have shaped
nationalisms (e.g. Mosse 1985; Dawson 1994; Sinha 1995; Cohen 1996).
Such historical accounts show ‘masculinity’ to be multiform and unstable;
Rape in Kosovo 567

and demonstrate that it has articulated with national ideologies in changing,

historically constituted ways as part of a process of political struggle.
Approaches problematising the relations between men, masculinity and
nationalism are especially relevant in the case of Yugoslavia, where
nationalist politics precipitated and justified armed conflict. Historians have
assessed the causes of the Yugoslav wars in terms of nationalist ideologies,
economic crisis, the disintegration of state systems and great power politics.
But the events in Yugoslavia also raise questions about the connections
between masculinity, militarisation and the resort to violence on behalf of
the n a t i ~ n Some
.~ commentators have attempted to explain these links in
terms of a specifically Balkan culture which encourages a cult of manly
heroism and violence, in line with a more general tendency to see the events
in the former Yugoslavia as somehow uniquely ‘Balkan’ (e.g. Kaser 1992;
MeStroviC et al. 1993). By reducing everything to cultural determinants, this
approach obscures individual agency, political calculation and internal
divisions. It also ignores parallels with similar conflicts elsewhere - the
Yugoslav conflicts are far from unique in equating violent masculinity,
militarism and nationhood. But neither is it accurate to say that war in
Yugoslavia (or indeed, any war) represents ‘masculinity’ run riot. This
interpretation of the Yugoslav conflict rests on an essentialist view of
masculinity as fundamentally violent (e.g. UgreSiC 1995; Ivekovid 1993;
Stiglmayer 1994)4
Much nationalist discourse appeals to this same essentialism, celebrating
the familiar figure of the soldier-hero, whose duty is that of taking up arms
to defend the mothers of the nation. Such dichotomies make the connections
between nationalism, masculinity and militarism seem natural and straight-
forward. But they obscure important complexities (why some men are
pacifists; why some women are militant nationalists; why some nationalisms
are not militaristic). They also obscure the specific processes which make
men willing to fight and die for the nation (and women willing to send them
off to battle). These reactions are created and fought over; they are not
natural or inevitable. In Serbia in the 1980s, a narrative of threatened
masculinity, developed as a part of the nationalist treatment of Kosovo and
reinforced by a more general narrative of gender crisis, offered militarism as
a way of winning back both individual manliness and national dignity. Not
everyone accepted this reasoning, but it was a potent factor in making war
thinkable - even attractive.

‘Nationalist’ rape in Kosovo

This is not an analysis of sexual violence in Kosovo. The lack of reliable

sources makes it impossible to assess the reality of rape in the province with
complete certainty. Furthermore, discussions of the ways rape was imagined
and depicted are arguably more relevant in an analysis of Serbian
568 Wendy Bracewell

nationalism. But it is worth making a brief attempt to assess the character

and extent of rape in KOSOVO, precisely since the available evidence seems
incommensurate with the debates that rape provoked. The statistics
advanced by all sides were hotly disputed, and are difficult to judge.
However, material from the annual bulletins of the Federal Institute of
Statistics, which compared police and judicial data from the whole country,
supports the contention that the incidence of rape reported in Kosovo was
in line with that in the rest of the Federation, or even slightly lower.
Furthermore, the numbers of rapes reported, and indictments and convic-
tions for rape in Kosovo did not fluctuate markedly (Popovid 1990:
37-47).5 Of course, criminal statistics for rape are notoriously unreliable,
given the reluctance of victims to report the crime. Serb accounts often cited
the fear of the social stigma attached to rape victims, and argued that the
actual numbers of Albanian rapes of Serbs were far higher than official
statistics revealed (though it has been argued that Serb women, because of
their relatively higher level of education and their social background, were
more likely to report rapes than Albanian women) (Popovic et al. 1990:
43-4). Still, if Albanian nationalists were mounting a deliberate campaign
of sexual violence, an increasing number of rape reports and indictments
over such a long period should reflect this. The claims that Albanian judges
were protecting Albanian rapists are also difficult to substantiate. Sentences
for rape in Kosovo did tend towards the minimum established by law, and
often fell below that minimum. But the Kosovo judiciary was not
exceptional in handing down light sentences for rape. This pattern also
characterised the rest of the country. (Two separate legal studies published
in the 1980s found that convictions for rape in Croatia and in Serbia
clustered at the very bottom of the scale of penalties envisaged by law, and
were often much lower. This material led the author of the Belgrade study
to argue that the Serbian judiciary was not taking the crime of rape
seriously) (HorvatiC 1980; MemedoviC 1988). Over the five-year period
before KOSOVO’S de facro reincorporation into Serbia in 1989, the Kosovo
judiciary handed down a smaller proportion of lenient sentences to rapists
than the norm in either Yugoslavia as a whole or Serbia proper. It is
difficult to accept that the Kosovo judges were motivated by nationalist
considerations in handing down light sentences, when this sentencing
pattern was the same as that elsewhere in Yugoslavia, or even slightly
stricter (PopoviC et al. 1990: 46).
Given the lack of evidence to support claims of a deliberate campaign of
sexual violence, why did the subject receive so much attention? Certainly
tensions in Kosovo itself were such that even the slightest incident was
interpreted in the worst possible light among local Serbs, but this is not
enough to account for the intense concern with ‘nationalist’ rape in Serbia.
The answer is that intellectuals, politicians and the media actively promoted
hysteria over rape as part of their efforts to revive the Serbian national
question in Yugoslav politics. Kosovo Serbs and representatives of the
Rape in Kosovo 569

Serbian Orthodox Church had been protesting about rape and other forms
of Albanian violence in Kosovo since the early 1980s, but it was not until
the case of Djordje MartinoviC was taken up by the Serbian intellectual
opposition in 1985 that the issue of sexual violence in Kosovo was widely
publicised.6 The nationalist intelligentsia continued to focus attention on
sexual violence as an aspect of the threat to the Serb nation in KOSOVO,
foregrounding ‘nationalist’ rape in political and academic journals, debates,
public petitions, and in works or art and literature, and condemning a state
which could countenance such ~iolence.~ The politicians who appropriated
the nationalist rhetoric over Kosovo also found accusations of rape an
effective way of mobilising popular sentiment, and kept the issue in the
limelight - thus MiloSeviC used references to rape in Kosovo to condemn
the victimisation of Serbs and present himself as the protector of Serbian
rights and national integrity (MiloSeviC 1989: 257, 269).
The press followed the lead given by the intellectuals and politicans.
Reports of rape in Kosovo published in the Serbian press after 1985 moved
from short accounts in the ‘black chronicles’ dealing with crime and violent
death to full-scale coverage, often exaggerated and sensationalist, of any
incident that could be construed as nationally motivated sexual violence. A
few specific incidents (most not actually rapes) were widely covered - an
indecent assault on a girl in Plemetine in 1986; an assault on an Orthodox
prioress in 1988; a break-in at the home of a Serb woman in PriStina in
1988 - but many less verifiable anecdotes also circulated. In part the greater
press coverage was due to the increased freedom to deal openly with
political controversy (and by market-driven sensationalism), but political
interests also determined the treatment of the issue.* Accounts often blurred
the boundary between rape and other forms of violence, so acts that might
more correctly be described as attempted rape, statutory rape or assault - or
even crude behaviour - were described as rape when an Albanian was the
aggressor and a Serb was the target (Hokat 1988: 115; TijaniC 1988:
127-8).

Nationalism and Serbian masculinity

The utility of the rape panic for nationalist politics in the 1980s is obvious:
it made graphically manifest the victimisation of the Serbs in Kosovo, the
barbarity of the Albanian enemy and the culpability of the regime which
condoned this state of affairs. But the way nationalist ideologues presented
the issue also played on concerns about the gender order, linking the plight
of the nation to a putative crisis of Serbian masculinity. Posing Serbia’s
problem in such a way implied a ready-made solution: an aggressive
political programme that could redeem both national dignity and masculine
honour. This version of Serbian nationalism both required and reinforced a
particular masculine ideal (tough, dominant, heterosexual) and a comple-
570 Wendy Bracewell

mentary feminine one (passive, maternal, vulnerable). The fusion of national

assertion and manliness had a broad emotional appeal, especially to men
(and women) set adrift in a rapidly deteriorating social and economic
environment, and mobilised support for a politics of confrontation and
conflict. Structuring Serbian nationalism with reference to an aggressive and
competitive masculinity also contributed to the break-down of political
relations in Yugoslavia and to the violence of the war that followed.
The association of heroic masculinity with Serbian national identity was
well established in the popular tradition (as the writer Danilo KiS had
commented in his ironic dissection of nationalism in the 1970s, ‘Testicles are
a national symbol, a trademark of the race; other peoples have luck,
tradition, erudition, history, reason - but we alone have balls’ (1979: 61)).
But the thesis of Serb nationalists in the 1980s was that this claim had been
put in doubt, above all by Kosovo. The Serbs had seen their military
victories in two world wars come to nothing; had been forced to relinquish
claims to Serb territory; had been humiliated and imperilled in Kosovo; and
had accepted all this passively. Many Serbs agreed with the assessment
popularised by nationalist intellectuals that although the Serb nation had
been ‘a hero in the war for liberation, it has become a coward in peace and
freedom’ (Cosid 1992: 106). The nationalist clamour over rape in Kosovo
helped to gender this sense of national decline by phrasing it in terms of
masculine honour and impotence.
The treatment of the Djordje Martinovid case illustrates the way a threat
to the nation could be conflated with an assault on Serbian manliness. The
incident served a nationalist agenda in part because of the way the case
reflected existing stereotypes about Albanians and Serbs. Nationalist
rhetoric had long equated the predominantly Muslim Albanians in Kosovo
with the Ottoman Turks (who in Serbian national mythology had defeated
the Serbs at Kosovo Field in 1389). Djordje Martinovid became a Christian
impaled by the Turks, with the bottle acting as a latter-day stake; or else he
was compared to Christ crucified by the infidel^.^ These metaphors did not
stress sexuality or gender, though in both cases there was a contrast
between the passive, feminised victim and the aggressive, masculine
tormentors. Explicit sexual aliusions were muted, but they did form an
important undercurrent of the public discourse around the Martinovid case.
The manner of the attack on Martinovid resonated with a popular belief
that Muslims are given to sodomy, and a long-standing stereotype of
deviant Muslim sexuality shaped by national antagonism (cf. Banac 1984:
372). A cartoon by Milenko Mihajlovid in Knjiievne novine (Figure 1)
played on this idea, showing a hairy, evilly grinning Albanian in a skull-
cap, with a bottle on his penis, creeping up behind an apprehensive Serb in
a condom (15 June 1987: 2).” The drawing has two main messages. The
logic of the first message is that Albanian nationalists are sexual deviants,
that the sexual and the national aspects of the attack on Martinovid were
inextricably entwined, and that therefore Albanian nationalism is bestial
Rape in Kosovo 571

and depraved. The second message is subtler, implying that while Albanians
are depraved, the Serbs are unmanned (in line with the popular under-
standing that being forced to submit to male rape dishonoured only the
victim, while confirming the assailant’s potency). The Serb’s lack of virility
is confirmed by the condom he is wearing: a reminder that the Serbs, with
their low birthrate, were losing a demographic race with the Albanians in
Kosovo. The themes of Albanian deviance, the physical and demographic
threat to Serbs in KOSOVO,and Serbian weakness were constants in
nationalist discourse. Mihajlovik’s cartoon focused attention on the subtext
of these themes: the connection between the threat to the nation and to
Serbian manliness.
A petition of Serb intellectuals in 1986 asserted straightforwardly that
this episode was a metaphor for the position of the Serbs: ‘the case of
Djordje Martinovik has become that of the entire Serb nation in Kosovo’
(reprinted in MagaS 1993: 51). The sexually coded language commonly used
by the ideologues of nationalism reinforced the point that Serbia, like
Martinovik, had been emasculated by Albanian nationalism and Yugosla-
vism. In the words of nationalist critics, the Serbian nation had been placed
in an unnatural position, forced to submit, violated and degraded by
Albanian autonomy and separatism, and had passively, even masochisti-
cally, failed to defend itself.“ Still, commentators hesitated to exploit the
image of violated manhood (few treatments were as explicit as Mihajlovik’s
cartoon). Perhaps this was partly because those who were skeptical of
Martinovik‘s story also stressed the sexual aspect, portraying Martinovik as
trying to hide his own deviance behind a tale of victimisation. Perhaps a
measure of homosexual anxiety was involved. The Serb satirist Brana
CrnCeviC hinted at this in an assessment of MartinoviC’s significance: for the
Serbs, MartinoviC ‘will always be a martyr and a saint impaled just like one
of his forefathers on a stake’, while for the Serbs’ enemies ‘he will be used
for ridicule; they are already pointing out that the myth of Serbian
manliness has been utterly overturned’ (Duga 10 June 1985, in Spasojevik
1985: 318). But perhaps a line of argument comparing the Serbian nation to
MartinoviC in terms of a raped and humiliated male body had only limited
utility in mobilising a nationalist project, even one shaped by images of
victimisation. What course of action was left to a nation which was so
comprehensively unmanned?
There was no such hesitation in interpreting the rape of Serb women in
Kosovo. Here too the issue was the same, but the message was inflected
differently when it was made through the bodies of women. For men to be
forced to submit to such violation negated their very being (just as it was
‘unnatural’ that Serbia should be ‘humiliated’ and ‘degraded’ by a constitu-
tional arrangement that deprived the nation of ‘dignity’). Nationalist
interpretations saw sexual violence against women, on the other hand, as
being less about the experience of the victims themselves than about the
challenge to Serbian masculine pride:
572 Wendy Bracewell

f
Figure 1. Milenko Mihajlovic, KnjiTevne
novine, 15 June 1987 Figure 2. Milenko Mihajlovii, Knjiievne
novine, 1 October 1988

The Albanian separatists are inflicting on us the greatest dishonour by raping our
sisters and mothers, by assaulting our young children. Are we - the nation that
destroyed the Ottoman Empire, that broke apart the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,
that united the South Slavs - are we really going to stand for this? (Ilustrovuna
politiku 5 July 1989: 10)

In effect, Serb-Albanian relations in Kosovo were presented as a matter of

competing masculinities, with the bodies of women serving as the markers
of success or failure. A second Mihajlovid cartoon, published in 1988 at the
height of nationalist rallies protesting the situation in Kosovo, depicts rape
as an Olympic event, with the Albanian team (under the emblems of
Yugoslavia and the penis) hot in pursuit of a female Serbia, while an
audience of Serb and Albanian men cheer on their own sides (Figure 2)
(Knjiievne novine 1 October 1988). From this perspective the problem of
Kosovo had less to do with constitutional arrangements, the rule of law or
socialist brotherhood and unity than with competition, dominance and
honour, seen as simultaneously masculine and national.

‘Nationalist’ rape, Serbian women and the rhetoric of gender

It must be stressed that the outrage over rape in Kosovo had little to do
with violence against women as such. There was no condemnation of the far
more prevalent phenomenon of rape within the national community (Serb/
Serb, or Albanian/Albanian). The fact that sexual violence against women
was not the main object of public concern was made clear in a law on
‘nationalist rape’, hastily added to Serbian Criminal Code in 1986. The new
Provisions made sexual assault across national lines a separate offence and
punished ‘nationalist’ rape more severely than ‘ordinary’ rape. The law
Rape in Kosovo 573

applied to sexual assault committed ‘in a manner or under circumstances

which provoke or might provoke disturbance or a sense of insecurity among
citizens who are members of another nation, nationality or ethnic group’
(Sluibeni glasnik Socijalistitke Republike Srbije XLII/39, 18 October 1986:
2739-40). It was not the injury to the victim that counted, but the injury to
the nation.
Women themselves were treated as little more than vehicles for commu-
nication among men, both in this law and in the nationalist discourses
around rape more generally. Narratives of rape emphdsised this in
describing the ways Albanian rapists selected their victims: not for their own
qualities, but because of the size and standing of their family; the potential
for humiliating the woman’s male protectors; hopes of acquiring property
’*
by shaming households into emigration. Accounts dwelled on the reactions
of the family and community, rather than the experience of the victim. This
reversed the usual approach to rape, which focused on the victim and her
sexuality, and blamed her for provoking the rape. In contrast, nationalist
discourses underlined the a-sexuality of the victims by concentrating on
alleged attacks on nuns, old women and children. Describing assaults as
‘attempted’ rape also left the sexual probity and national purity of Serb
women unquestioned. I 3 Individual women vanished almost entirely from the
discourse of ‘nationalist’ rape, except as emblems of male honour and
symbols of the Serbian nation.
But women were not simply passive symbols in the intersection of
nationalism and gender. Female agency was important in creating the
atmosphere of panic over rape, and ideas of womanliness were crucial to the
resulting discourses of nationalism and patriotic masculinity. In 1987 there
were massive demonstrations of Serb women across Kosovo, when the
Belgrade press publicised remarks by a prominent Kosovo Party official and
member of the Federal state presidency, Fadil Hoxha. The year previously,
Hoxha had apparently suggested that legalising prostitution might eliminate
the problem. He had allegedly suggested that
it be permitted to bring women from other parts of Yugoslavia to work in private
cafes in Kosovo, so that those who rape women of other nationalities can indulge
themselves there. Albanian women wouldn’t do this, but Serbian and other women
would like to, so why not let them? (NIN 25 October 1987: 12).

When this was published a year later, in the midst of a witch-hunt directed
from Belgrade against the Kosovo party leadership, Hoxha’s apparent
equation of Serb women with prostitutes sparked popular fury. Serbian
women in Kosovo took to the streets in well-reported public protests,
demanding his resignation for impugning their sexual respectability and
national honour. But honour was not the only issue. They also made
explicit political demands, calling for military rule from Belgrade, and
proclaiming ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ (Zntervju 23 October 1987: 7-10; NZN 25
October 1987: 12-14; Danas 27 October 1987: 7-10). These demands were
574 Wendy Bracewell

now more than the protests of the province’s beleaguered Serbs or an issue
for opposition intellectuals in Belgrade, since Slobodan MiloSevic had
taken up the cause of the Serbian nation in Kosovo, and was using it to
‘differentiate’ (and purge) opposition in the party and to mobilise popular
support.
These women demonstrated in the streets in a way that was unprece-
dented for the women of socialist Yugoslavia, in spite of its putative gender
equality. Yet they presented themselves entirely in terms of their relations
with their menfolk. Their banners read: ‘We are not whores, but the
mothers and sisters of the sons of Serbia and Yugoslavia!’ (NZN 25 October
1987:12). It was their relations with their men and their nation that were
relevant - it was as mothers (of Serb sons) and sisters (of Serb brothers)
that they were raped; it was as mothers and sisters (not as women, or even
simply as Serbs) that they claimed the right to protest; and it was as
mothers and sisters that they called on their sons to protect them. ‘We are
the mothers of Tito’s soldiers!’ and ‘Our sons will protect us!’ were the
slogans they shouted out as they gathered in front of the Yugoslav army
barracks calling for military rule. These women were asserting a rigid
gender differentiation, dividing the Serbian nation into virtuous mothers
and heroic soldiers; those who nurture the nation and those who are called
upon to defend it. The protests over rape defined - and simultaneously
undermined - Serb masculinity, not just in contrast to Albanian potency
but also in relation to Serbian women’s vulnerability and claims to
protection. l4
The demonstrators’ slogans illustrate the way the clamour over nation-
alist rape helped construct a rhetoric of gender which was both traditionalist
and national. In some ways this was simply a continuation of existing
attitudes towards gender relations. In spite of its formal commitment to
women’s emancipation through socioeconomic change (and its very real
achievements), Yugoslav socialism had never seriously confronted the
persistent gender hierarchy which privileged men and subordinated women.
In the 1980s the socialist government, trying to cope with unemployment
and a labour surplus by encouraging women out of the labour market, had
Mtiated a shift away from the language of emancipation and equality
towards a model of separate and complementary gender roles. The crisis of
communism gave this shift an added impetus, since ideals of gender equality
could be dismissed as socialist and anti-national. Those who condemned
Yugoslav socialism as artificial, unnatural and anti-Serb invoked a con-
trasting ‘natural order’ in which nation and ‘patriarchal values’ were
mutually reinforcing. (It should be emphasised that a revived ‘Serbian
patriarchy’ was traditionalist rather than traditional, selecting specific
aspects of ‘Serbian culture’ for their political utility while ignoring others.
Values such as masculine honour and heroism, patriarchal families with
many children Or Illrdl Simplicity were appealing in an increasingly urban
and industrial Serbia precisely because they evoked a lost past. T~ see the
Rape in Kosovo 575

charactef of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s as simply reflecting entrenched

cultural values is to fall victim to nationalist rhet~ric.)’~
Anti-communists were not the only ones who used this traditionalist
language. In the late 1980s a broad coalition of communists and anti-
communists, intellectuals, party bosses, and ordinary people came together
over events in Kosovo. Their shared nationalist project found expression in
a whole repertoire of metaphors drawn from a traditionalist model of
gender relations: the nation-state as a patriarchal family, governed by a
father-ruler, its territory demarcated by ancestral ‘hearths’, nurtured by
‘Mother Serbia’, defended by her sons against rape by her enemies.
A single emblematic image of a Serbian mother suggested the way that
such metaphors were brought to life by events in Kosovo, and drove home
the implications of a neo-traditional gender regime for men and patriotic
masculinity (Figure 3). It evoked all the actors in the drama of rape in
Kosovo: not just the vulnerable Serb woman, but also the predatory
Albanian rapist and the impotent Serb man. The photograph was taken in
the village of Prekale, after an alleged Albanian rape attempt in 1988.
Claiming official Yugoslav security organs would not protect them against
further assault, the villagers had organised an armed watch, which received
intense publicity in the Serbian press. The photograph is an image of the
world turned upside down: a mother, the guardian of the nation’s future,
carrying a gun as well as a baby, forced to defend herself and her children
from unnatural assault, because those who should do so (her menfolk, the
state) can not or will not. It was read as a vision of Mother Serbia, but a
Mother Serbia whose sons were incapable of protecting her.I6 It was this
message that gave the women’s demonstrations in Kosovo their force. In
the ironic words of one Serbian commentator:
When mothers and sisters speak out, then something is really out of order; then the
‘last days’ have really come; for the holiest mother of all - Serbia - has chosen to
speak through them, to send a summons, almost a cry to the men, to those who can
defend her, calling on them to prove themselves to be men at last, and to take on the
task of her defence. This act of defence will be a holy act - paying a debt to Mother.
(Branka Arsic, Vrerne 7 December 1992).

Failure to fulfil their patriotic role as defenders of the mother-nation meant

failure not just as Serbs but as men.

A crisis of masculinity?

The fear that circumstances in Kosovo were endangering Serbian masculi-

nity fed on a more general uneasiness about the gender order. Yugoslav
socialism had always treated gender equality in terms of ‘the woman
problem’; it had never questioned an ideal masculinity defined in terms of
physical prowess, heterosexual virility and financial success. But by the mid-
576 Wendy Bracewell

Figure 3. Mile JelasijeviC, Woman from Prekale, 1988

1980s these long-standing indices of manhood were perceived as being under

siege in Serbia. This sense of a crisis in masculinity was not unique to the
Serbs. Manliness is rarely perceived as unproblematic in any society: it is
always a source of anxiety since it ‘is never fully possessed, but must
perpetually be achieved, asserted, and renegotiated’ (Roper and Tosh 1991:
18; Gilmore 1990). Such anxieties are exacerbated when changing conditions
undermine expectations about how this is to be done. The sociologist R.W.
Connell suggests that everywhere in the modern world profound changes in
the gender order (feminism, the growth of women’s employment, the
acceptance of alternative sexualities) have shaken assumptions about
masculinity and have contributed to perceptions of a gender crisis (1995:
Rape in Kosovo 577

81-6, 199-203). Throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, these

pervasive anxieties about masculinity were amplified by the crisis of
communism. Calls for a reassertion of dominant masculinity were a central
part of the neo-traditionalist programme for restoring the ‘natural and
authentic’ social order that had allegedly been subverted by socialism (for
similar debates beyond Yugoslavia see Goven 1993; Molyneux 1994:
307-8). In Serbia, such fears about the erosion of traditional masculinity
also acquired a national dimension, and were often explicitly linked to the
problem of Kosovo.
In the popular press, articles with titles like ‘It’s not easy to be a man’
stressed three aspects of this gender crisis: the economy; the low Serb
birthrate; and women’s emancipation. Inflation and unemployment did
make it more difficult for men to define themselves through the role of
breadwinner. The economic crisis also affected other markers of Serbian
masculinity, according to journalistic accounts. Men could no longer afford
to take women out on dates, and so they could not affirm their virility by
pre-marital sex; and they had to postpone marriage because they did not
have a career. They couldn’t even go out for a drink with the boys, because
they could not pay for their round. One author proposed the formula: ‘as
inflation grows, masculinity diminishes’, and (jocularly?) compared the
economic crisis to the crisis in Kosovo as a threat to Serb manliness (NfN
11 August 1985: 22-4). The low birthrate among Serbs was usually blamed
on women (who put their careers before the national interest) or Yugoslav
socialism (which had promoted both women’s emancipation and abortion).
But it also raised questions about the virility of Serb men, especially in
comparison to the Albanians, with their high birthrate (Bracewell 1996).
(Tolerance of homosexuality was only occasionally cited as evidence of an
erosion of Serbian masculinity; this was usually projected onto other
Yugoslav nations (TijaniC 1988: 78; DragoS KalajiC in Dugu 8 July 1989:
70).) If Serb manliness was in crisis, critics claimed that emancipated women
were partly to blame, since women’s gains in status and employment under
socialism had been at the expense of men. One well-known aphorist, DuSan
Radovid, summed up this assessment by noting that in Serbia ‘women
haven’t achieved anything. Once they lacked equality with real men. Now
they have equality, but with ersatz men’ (fntervju 29 January 1988: 21; see
also ToSevski 1988). Again, such complaints were made more pointed by
reference to the Kosovo Albanians, who were supposed to have achieved
their ascendancy in Kosovo in part because of their un-socialist patriarchal
practices, including keeping their women firmly under masculine control
(CeroviC 1989: 332; VojnoviC 1993: 100; RadiC 1995: viii).
Dobrica CosiC, the leading nationalist intellectual, claimed that ‘a Serb is
a man who is not a man unless he is also a Serb’ (CosiC 1992: 109). Even
without agreeing, it is possible to see how individual men might have felt an
emotional impetus to identify with Serb nationalism. Those who felt their
masculinity threatened from other quarters - especially by the growing
578 Wendy Bracewell

insecurity of employment - may have been particularly susceptible to a

nationalism formulated in such terms. It is suggestive that the mainstay of
MiloSeviC’s support came from the unemployed and those who were
threatened by the economic and political reforms of the 1980s (including
unskilled and semi-skilled workers, agricultural workers, and low-level
officials) (GoluboviC 1995: 157-67; Woodward 1995: 92-3). These were
men whose experiences were in sharp and frustrating contrast to an ideal of
masculinity based on dominance, power and economic self-sufficiency. The
mass nationalism of the late 1980s gave them an opportunity to reassert
their own masculine dignity, as well as that of the Serbian nation. The same
opportunity may also have appealed to other social groups. Some
intellectuals apparently found the national cause a means of claiming an
active masculinity not usually associated with the man of words in this
culture (Diadiic 1987: 180-202). Some women, too, may have welcomed a
nationalism structured by traditionalist gender roles, seeing a return to the
home and to masculine protection as a liberation from an unsatisfactory
emancipation and a chance to shed the socialist ‘triple burden’ of paid
work, household duties and political responsibilities. l 7
The rhetoric of gender helped make Serbian nationalism a potent
political force in the 1980s. People turned to nationalism not just because of
the bankruptcy of the socialist model and the absence of alternatives, but
also because it offered a solution to insecurity and uncertainty on a number
of levels, from the public to the private. Without a closer insight into the
intimate emotions and experiences of individuals, it is impossible to trace
precisely how ideas of nation and masculinity interacted in mobilising
political commitment. The question deserves more research, but it is
plausible that for the men who embraced nationalist politics, asserting the
rights and prerogatives of their nation also meant asserting their own claims
to an embattled masculinity.

The politics of masculinity and nationalism

This was certainly the tone of Serbian public politics in the 1980s in general,
and prescriptions for the Kosovo problem in particular. If failing to resist
aggression had emasculated the Serbs, nationalist calls to action asserted
that Serbs could stand up and be men once again. MiloSeviC’s calls for
immediate, direct action on behalf of the Serbs in Kosovo were char-
acterised, even by his opponents, as ‘manly’, as opposed to the pussy-
footing of the Yugoslav leadership (e.g. PavloviC 1988: 31 1). The MiloSeviC-
led assault on the party bureaucracy (the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’)
used the image of working-class masculinity to contrast ‘real Serbs’, workers
in blue overalls, with hard bodies and dirty hands, the true representatives
of the nation, to the soft, effeminate, de-nationalised middle-class ‘armchair
bureaucrats’ (foteljaSi), who had betrayed both their nation and their
Rape in Kosovo 579

gender (ZaniC 1989). Only by reasserting their dignity in Kosovo and

beyond, decisively, heroically and as men, would the Serbs once more be
able to ‘stand tall’, as a slogan from the protest meetings over Kosovo
demanded (NIN 27 November 1988: 24).
But not everyone was convinced by the nationalist contention that
aggressive manliness and the defence of national honour were indissoluably
linked in a new political imperative. Both the requirements of gender and of
nation were open to different, conflicting interpretations. Feminists explicitly
challenged the assumptions about gender that underpinned the new Serbian
nationalism. Many feminists were skeptical about the nationalist manipula-
tion of the rape issue in Kosovo since it deflected attention away from
sexual violence perpetrated by men (regardless of nation) against women,
and pressed women’s bodies into the service of nationalist ideology. Thus,
in response to the women’s demonstrations against rape in Kosovo in 1987,
feminist groups from Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade issued a joint letter
announcing:
Do not let men divide us into whores and mothers, raped and not raped, their own
and others. . . . We, the women of Yugoslavia, d o not wish to be manipulated and
divided on a nationalist basis, d o not wish to be the private property of nationalists.
( N I N 8 November 1987: 3)

They were slower to criticise the way that nationalist rhetoric manipulated
men, but as war euphoria mounted feminists in Yugoslavia developed a
sustained critique of the patriarchal nationalism that not only reduced
women to self-sacrificing mothers producing children for the nation, but
also required men to be heroic warriors prepared to kill and die (e.g. PapiC
1992). Women, and especially feminists, dominated the various forms of
anti-war action, but they were not the only activists. They were also joined
by men, particularly from among the urban population, the professions and
the young. The outbreak of war made it clear that not all Serbian men
accepted an equation between manliness, national honour and militarism.
Many such men made their attitude plain by refusing to answer their call-up
papers or by deserting from the Federal Army. Others resolved the
contradiction between their own values and the requirements of official
nationalism in more violent ways. One reservist, Miroslav MilenkoviC,
apparently felt it unmanly to refuse the gun issued him, as fellow recruits
were doing, but having accepted it then turned it on himself, committing
suicide in front of his unit. A published collection of tributes collected
during anti-war vigils commemorated his act; the comments stress the
dilemma between the official definition of ‘patriotic heroism’ and private
concepts of masculine honor (Grobnica za Miroslava Milenkovila 1991).
However, different views of what it meant to be a man and a Serb did
exist. Anti-war activists embodied an alternative to the hegemonic masculi-
nity promoted by the dominant political order - one that was controlled
and rational rather than violent, committed to negotiation rather than force,
580 Wendy Bracewell

cosmopolitan and tolerant rather than parochial and xenophobic, com-

mitted to gender equality rather than patriarchy. l 9 Such reformulations of
masculinity were part and parcel of broader political struggles. Since
MiloSeviC’s nationalist project was connected to a reassertion of ‘traditional’
masculinity, staking out a different position meant either contesting the
gender ideals it invoked or pushing them to even greater extremes. Elements
of the Serbian opposition parties echoed and amplified alternative formula-
tions of masculinity, their pagers and expensive suits evoking a modern,
urban and ‘European’ model, contrasted to the ‘uncouth’ and ‘primitive’
beards, guns and uniforms of many of the extremist Chetnik-inspired
nationalists. (Vuk DraSkoviC, one of MiloSeviC’s nationalist rivals, moved
several times between these two poles.) Still, variant models of masculinity
could also coexist with an aggressive and expansionist nationalism: thus
both the paramilitary leader Kapetan Dragan and the Yugoslav Federal
Army promoted an image of professional, technologically competent and
dispassionate manliness against the brutality and ill-discipline of rival
paramilitary units as a means of staking their own claims to authority and
patriotic legitimacy in the military context (koloviC 1994: 61-70).
The alliance between the dominant national ideology and a traditionalist
gender regime set the tone of debate in the political conflicts of the late
eighties and early nineties. Activists contested their opponents’ gender
images as fiercely as their politics. Adversaries derided Serbian anti-war
activists as women who had failed to fulfill their patriotic duty as mothers
by bearing enough children to spare some to the defence of the nation. Male
pacifists and members of the opposition were traitors to their nation, but
also traitors to their gender: cowardly, weak, effeminate and probably
homosexual. Thus the writer Mom0 Kapor (who had affirmed his virility
and patriotism to his own satisfaction by reporting the war from the front
lines) lumped members of the smaller opposition parties together with
‘lesbians, homosexuals, philatelists, what have you, members of Doberman
owners’ clubs, mountain climbers, or writers, who will support them in
anything’ (Vreme 11 May 1992: 51). To DrdgoS KalajiC, propagandist of the
‘New Serbian Right’, ‘peace activists, multiculturalists, members of the
Belgrade Circle of independent intellectuals and of the parties of treason’
were masturbators - but it was ‘better that their seed should end up in their
hands than that they should multiply and so distort the Serb national norm’
(Vreme 15 August 1994: 35). Such accusations would be recycled against
former allies as MiloSeviC’s nationalist coalition broke apart, with the more
militarist faction pouring scorn on their adversaries’ inability to live up to
the requirements of their sex.2o
All this was not just a matter of invective. Nearly everyone agreed that
only ‘real men’ were true Serbs - but exactly who was a patriot and what
patriotic manliness entailed could be a matter of dispute. Definitions of
masculinity were closely tied to struggles over definitions of national
interest, and served as a resource in these conflicts. Alternative models, in
Rape in Kosovo 58 1

masculinity as well as in politics, would make some headway as MiloSevik‘s

nationalist coalition began to fragment, but in the short term at least the
pact between Serbian nationalism and a tough, militarist and patriarchal
masculinity held sway, marginalising other less politically powerful and
culturally authoritative understandings. It was in these circumstances that
the nationalist media could present the petty gangsters turned paramilitary
adventurers of the early stages of the war as the very paladins of Serbian
manhood: courageous desperadoes whose manly refusal to conform had put
them at odds with the socialist state, but who were more attuned to the
needs of the nation than were the corrupt, emasculated and de-nationalised
representatives of ‘respectable’ society.2’ But what one side presented as
virility, self-sacrifice and patriotism, others would soon characterise as rape,
war profiteering and ethnic cleansing. How far such dissenting voices found
a hearing would depend on the political power - domestic or international -
they could muster.

Gender discourses in action

The alliance between MiloSevid’s nationalist politics and a particular ideal of

masculinity was not just a matter of style - it had consequences. Making
heroic masculinity into a guarantee of individual and national worth was a
first step towards war - well before the first shots were fired in Slovenia,
these steps were taken in Kosovo. Events there, and particularly the furore
over rape, contributed to the belief that Serbia’s problems could (and
should) be addressed by force. The suffering of women and children and
affronted masculine honour required immediate action, not calm negotiation
or cooperation. RadoS Smiljkovie, one of MiloSeviC’s supporters in the
Belgrade branch of the party, made this point in 1987 in a response to
criticism of burgeoning nationalism in Serbia: ‘Calls for patience, for
waiting, for cool heads are counterproductive in a situation when heads are
bloody and when the floors are heaving .. . with the bodies of raped girls,
women and old ladies’ (quoted in TaSiC 1994: 100). Albanian violence
justified violence in return; this was the only way of restoring a damaged
masculine and national honour. As early as 1988, Serbian nationalists were
openly declaring war on the Albanians in Kosovo. In a speech to a forum
of Serbian and Albanian writers in April 1988, the poet Milan KomneniC
declared: ‘Gentlemen, we are at war! Since we already know this, why hide
it? Whether war has been declared or not is only a matter of form’ (NZN 15
May 1988; Knjiievne novine 1 May 1988). Throughout that summer calls to
arms accompanied demands for a unilateral revision of Kosovo’s constitu-
tional position at mass meetings throughout Serbia (‘We want arms’; ‘kill
the rapists’; ‘Slobo, only speak, we will fly like bullets’). Nationalists stressed
that war had proven Serb manhood in the past. In December 1988, on the
70th anniversary of the establishment of the first Yugoslavia, a public
582 Wendy Bracewell

celebration in Belgrade evoked the memory of the Serbian soldiers who

‘with their bayonets set the borders of the new state’ and chorused: ‘If you
remember, man, stand tall!’ (text in htervju 9 December 1988: 4-6).
In 1989, on the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, MiloSevid
would predict that ‘once again we are engaged in battles and on the eve of
battles. They are not yet armed battles, but the latter cannot yet be ruled
out. Nonetheless, such battles cannot be won without resolution, valor, self-
sacrifice’ (Politika 29 June 1989: 2). These were claimed as Serb qualities.
‘We may not be good at working and earning money, but at least we are
good at fighting’, as MiloSeviC would later remark (DjukiC 1994: 187). Such
statements could be read as implying that war would reaffirm Serbian
manhood, and the bloody conflict that followed would indeed be taken as
proving that the Serbs were indeed an ‘unyielding, tough, masculine nation’
with a ‘powerful male fist’ - though this would first be shown not in
Kosovo but on other Yugoslav battlefields.22 Still, it must also be stressed
that acceptance of this proposition did not come naturally or easily, even in
the Balkans, with its reputation for primitive, violent maleness. Psycholo-
gical preparation for armed conflict had required a considerable ideological
effort from the activists of Serbian nationalism. War may have been ‘an
invitation to manliness’ in George Mosse’s phrase (1985: 114), but that
invitation was only made compelling by the contention that the Serbian
nation was in danger, and with it Serbian manliness itself.
Did the discourse of rape in Kosovo influence the practice of war in
Bosnia, as some commentators have suggested (Sorabji 1993; MeinariC,
1994)? Events in Kosovo certainly reinforced the idea that sexual violence
could be a effective instrument of politics; and rape an activity in which
men might demonstrate their nation’s power and masculinity. When in 1986
Serbs from Kosovo had threatened: ‘Let them rape; we can rape too’, they
had been quoted in the Serbian press with no hint of condemnation for
proposing to retaliate in kind, since such a provocation demanded equal or
greater retaliation from the victims. ‘If they keep on raping, there’s no
alternative but for us to respond with the same measure’ (NZN9 November
1986: 13; Zntervju 7 November 1986: 39). In a 1988 speech condemning
Albanian actions in KOSOVO, Slobodan MiloSeviC had stated: ‘nowhere else
in Europe are women raped for nationalist reasons’ (1989: 257). The point
he intended to make was that Albanian nationalism in Kosovo was un-
European, uncivilised and deviant, but those words became a hostage to
fortune when Serb troops were accused of mass rape in Bosnia. Still, it is
difficult to sustain an argument that the outcry over rape in Kosovo led
directly to rape in Croatia and Bosnia. Even without Kosovo, soldiers
would still have raped. But events in Kosovo did create an atmosphere in
which rape as an instrument of nationalist politics was made thinkable. Well
before the outbreak of war, rape had been redefined as an aspect of national
conflict, rather than a sexual crime. And the lesson was that this tactic -
however ‘un-European’ - brought results: in Serbian eyes, nationalist rape
Rape in Kosovo 583

had contributed to the success of Albanian ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Kosovo.

There is no evidence that the Serb leadership consciously applied this lesson
in Croatia or Bosnia. Rape had, after all, been depicted as the instrument of
Serbia’s enemies; indeed, some Serb nationalists seemed to believe that
Serbs were incapable of rape. Academician Radovan SamardiiC: stated that
‘rape as a concept does not exist in the Serb nation, and especially not in
the Serb army . . . There are no examples of rape in our tradition’ (Zntervju
14 May 1993: 14). However, the persistent failure of the military and
political authorities to investigate or punish cases of rape committed by
their troops suggests that it was at the very least tacitly condoned (Helsinki
Watch 1993: 9; Amnesty International 1993: 4; Bassiouni et al. 1994). In
this conflict, soldiers who raped (and their superiors) could draw on
memories of rape in Kosovo to interpret their acts as retaliation in kind for
past Serb sufferings, as an effective means of destroying their enemies’ self-
esteem, national identity and community, and as an affirmation of their
own manhood and that of their nation.23 Wartime rape then became the
basis for a new spiral of retaliation by the victims (all sides in the conflict in
Bosnia-Hercegovina were accused of war rape). The issue was again
manipulated for political advantage, with the Bosnian government, in
particular, using rape as a device to mobilise national sentiment and attract
international support, relying on the same gendered assumptions that had
earlier fuelled nationalist passions in Kosovo. Thus, for example, the
Bosnian director of Merhamet, the Muslim charity, used the outrage over
the reports of rape in Bosnia to argue against the arms embargo in gendered
terms: ‘If Europe wants to help women in Bosnia, then it should send arms
to their men’ (quoted in Vreme 4 January 1993: 24-5).
It is easier to see some of the ways that connections between gender and
nation affected the lives of individual men and women. The panic over rape
in Kosovo constructed men and women as defined primarily by national
identity. It was not just that Serbian women were taught to fear Albanian
men (MeinariC 1994); at the same time Albanian men learnt to distrust and
avoid Serbian women in order to forestall a possible accusation of rape
(TaSiC 1994: 71). This fear and distrust contributed to the high degree of
ethnic distance that was measured between Albanians and other national
communities. It can also be traced in the low and steadily declining
percentage of marriages across national boundaries in Kosovo in the 1980s
(BaCeviC 1991: 168-84; PetroviC: 1985: 60, 74, 78; Borba 18 October 1990: 5).
The way that Serbian nationalism was entwined with assertions about what
was proper or natural for men and women also had broader implications.
Understanding the national community in terms of a family linked by ties
of blood put a premium on ethnic purity, encouraging intolerance of mixed
marriages and suspicion of the children of such unions (Osmica 19 February
1991: 22; NZN 6 March 1992: 49; GoluboviC 1995: 347-8). Seeing the nation
in terms of a virtuous mother and motherhood as a national duty elevated
women’s domestic role and devalued alternative possibilities for women
584 Wendy Bracewell

(Bracewell 1996). Imagining the sons of the nation as warrior-heroes

sanctioned bellicose masculinity, and by the same token stigmatised any-
thing short of swaggering machismo as a betrayal of the nation (in
particular, this contributed to an increasing intolerance of homosexuality)
(Rosandik and PeSiC 1994; Mertus 1994: 20-2). Asserting the ‘powerful male
fist’ of the Serbian nation went along with a reassertion of masculine force
and authority in the home. The masculine duty to protect the women of the
nation implied in turn a right to control them, to bring them back into line
with the patriarchal requirements of Serbian nationalism. ‘No one has a
right to beat YOU’proclaimed MiloSevic in defence of the Serbs in Kosovo
in 1987, but wife-beating was apparently ‘the right of good Serbs’.24 Data
from the SOS telephone helpline for women in Belgrade suggests that
national conflict and war was accompanied by a general increase in violence
against women in the family, not just in mixed marriages (where national
difference provided an ostensible provocation) (Zajovic 1993: 54-56, 94).
Linking the ideology of the nation to ideas of motherhood and female
submissiveness, of male dominance and power, and of uncompromising
heterosexuality reversed the official socialist ideology of gender equality,
reinforcing male privilege, eroding what gains women had made under
socialism, and marginalising men and women who did not conform to the
imperatives of nation and gender. And these imperatives were made
manifest in legislation (limiting abortion, taxing childless couples, control-
ling women’s access to work, criminalising homosexuality, seizing the
inheritances of draft evaders and deserters), bringing the power of the state
behind newly nationalised definitions of gender roles.

The way ‘private’ understandings of gender and the public politics of

nationalism could blur together is summed up in a remark attributed to a
Kosovo Serb married to an Albanian woman:
When I sit in the cafe with my friends, and the conversation turns to the pressures
put on the Serbs and Montenegrins by the Albanians, I usually say to them: ‘In my
house it’s the other way around: it’s clear who the man is. (Intervju 22 October 1988:
51)

The Serb in the cafe had a clear idea of what a Serbian man ought to be -
and he assumed that this was relevant to public politics. So did the Serb
intellectuals and politicians who put the Serbian nation at the centre of
political debate in the 1980s. In many ways the Serbian nationalist project
of the eighties and nineties can be seen as making it clear who the real men
were. The sense that the Serbs were victimised in Kosovo and in Yugoslavia
and the calls for a reassertion of national dignity were structured by a
shared understanding of masculinity; and, at the same time, a militant
nationalism helped reinforce male privilege in Serbian society and subordi-
nate or marginalise Serbian women. From this perspective nationalism and
patriarchy can seem to go hand in hand, almost inevitably, in this case as in
Rape in Kosovo 585

others. But looking critically at the way men and masculinities are
implicated in the nationalist project helps give us a more differentiated and
dynamic perspective on the interactions of gender and nation.
Both gender and nation are best seen as relational identities, not
reflections of a natural or immanent essence but created through a process
of highlighting difference. In the discourses around rape in Kosovo, and in
the ensuing struggles over the Serbian question, nationalist ideologues
defined the Serb nation in relation to a series of ‘others’, understood in
terms of both gender and nation - relationships which had implications for
social relations. Patriotic Serb masculinity depended heavily on the notion
of vulnerable Serb femininity (heroes and mothers; protectors and
protected); a relationship which justified control over Serbian women, but
also required the militarisation and self-sacrifice of Serbian men. Serbian
nationalism also emphasised other gendered dichotomies which shaped
relations among men. Serb nationalism was defined by setting ‘real Serbs’
against virile but bestial Albanians, against ‘emasculated’ Serb communists,
against ‘effeminate’ Serb peace-activists, against ‘hormonally challenged’
opponents of the MiloSeviC line. Ideas about what it meant to be a man
were an important resource in the competition to define and control Serbian
nationalism, and they were used by both men and women. In turn, laments
over Serbian dignity and honour helped reinforce particular understandings
of masculinity, mapping out what was and what was not appropriate
behaviour for a Serb man - in particular, legitimating and encouraging
violence as a way of recuperating national dignity and masculine honour.
But this was an ideological proposition, not a description of social or
cultural reality; it required a good deal of labour to remake Serb men in line
with the patriotic image and to mobilise Serb heroes for war.
This line of appeal was quite successful, garnering support from a large
proportion of the Serbian population, ensuring that the nationalist project
conferred not just power but popular legitimacy on the political elites. Even
though MiloSeviC‘s fortunes wavered with the changing fortunes of war, the
level of electoral support for ‘Serb heroes’ such as Vojislav SeSelj indicates
the continued potency of the equation of nation, manliness and militarism.
Even so, this model of patriotic masculinity was not all-conquering, nor was
the vision of Serb nationalism it sustained. Precisely because both were built
around the identification and suppression of difference, they contained - or
even provoked - possible alternatives which could be mobilised against the
hegemonic ideal. Defining Serbian nationalism in terms of blood, history
and patriarchy involved the silencing of other possibilities. These were then
available for those excluded or marginalised by this definition to use in
counter-identities (thus the mobilization of a modern, cosmopolitan, civic,
even feminist-friendly Serbian identity - or an even more aggressive and
militarist one). Identities were negotiated and renegotiated, depending in
large part on struggles over power, and the resulting configurations had
implications not just for women, but also for power relations and
586 Wendy Bracewell

hierarchies among men, who could be very differently affected by the

nationalist project.
Attention to the interaction of gender and nation in this particular case
suggests the advantages and possibilities of looking at nationalism and war
in a framework that goes beyond traditional political analysis of nation and
state-building on the one hand, and essentialist gender categories on the
other - that instead takes as its starting point the assumptions of the Serb in
the Kosovo cafe, that political conflicts and understandings of gender are
part of the same whole.

Notes

1 Thus studies have shown how the widespread idealisation of the nation as female, and
especially as a mother, not only ‘naturalises’ national sentiment, but also strengthens the idea of
a natural division between public (male) politics and private (female) domesticity, reinforces the
idea that maternity is women’s primary role, legitimates state surveillance and regulation of
women’s bodies and female sexuality, and perpetuates male domination of women. Nira Yuval-
Davis (1997) gives an excellent overview of this approach. For case studies, see Heng and
Devan (1992); McClintock (1993); Tsagarousianou (1995); Bracewell (1996).
2 This position characterises a good deal of the work on women and nationalism; specifically
on men and masculinity see Nagel (1998). Theweleit (1987, 1989) is a controversial account of
the German Freikorps that illustrates some of the problems of treating ‘men’ as a homogeneous
category.
3 The first scholarly analyses are surveyed in a useful review essay (Stokes e f 01. 1996); the
authors point out that these approaches do not move us any closer to an understanding of why
humans are so willing to kill.
4 For a survey of feminist debates over relations between masculinity and violence, Segal
(1997: 233-71).
5 The incidence of inter-ethnic rape reported (e.g. Albanian-Serb) was considerably lower, and
that of intra-ethnic (Albanian-Albanian, Serb-Serb) rape higher than the theoretical norm
(PopoviCet ul. 1990: 44-6). The total numbers were fairly low: 323 criminal charges for rape and
attempted rape between 1982 and 1989, of which 31 were Albanian assaults on Serbs or
Montenegrins (and there were no such cases recorded from 1987 to 1989) (PopoviC e f 01. 1990: 41).
6 Opposition intellectuals around the Serbian Writers’ Association were very active in the
Martinovic case. An official meeting of the Association in August 1985 discussed MartinoviC,
and a communique expressing concern was sent to the Serbian parliament; a petition circulated
among intellectuals; and Dobrica CosiC, the central figure in the opposition intelligentsia,
protested MartinoviC‘s treatment to government authorities. The journalist Svetislav SpasojeviC
gives a detailed account of the early stages of this agitation (SpasojeviC 1986).
7 An example is the series of protest evenings ‘On Kosovo, for Kosovo’ held by the Serbian
Writers’ Association in Belgrade in 1987. The three representative texts published in the
Association’s journal Knjifevne novine (1 June 1987) all detail the sufferings of the Serbs in
Kosovo, with two focusing specifically on Albanian sexual violence.
8 Particularly after MiloSeviC‘s victory over his political rivals in 1987, and the subsequent
purge of the Polifiku news group, which became a mouthpiece of official nationalism. For this
analysis I have surveyed the popular journalism published by the Polifiku group (and Dugu,
separately owned, but similar); the debates in Knjijevnc novine (a forum for nationalist
intellectuals); and the writings of individual intellectuals and politicians. (For the Serbian press
in the 1980s and 1990s. Thompson, 1994: 56-8,67-70.)
9 A striking example was an allegorical painting by Serbian academician MiCa popovi~,
Rape in Kosovo 587

entitled ‘1 May 1985’ (the date of the assault on MartinoviC). This showed Christ being raised
onto the cross by Albanians in skullcaps, a large mineral water bottle in the foreground leaning
towards his groin, while a policeman looks on (illustrated in SamardiiC e f al. 1989).
10 MihajloviC‘scartoons, with their perceptive evocations of current political debates, appeared
regularly in Knjifevne novine.
I I Thus, for example, the Serbs were in a ‘politically inferior position’, the Serbian nation’s
‘integrity brutally denied’ (‘Memorandum SANU’, Duga [special edition] June I989:, 34-47);
‘deceived, forced to submit, bought off, degraded, and dishonoured‘ (Dobrica CosiC in
ffiji3evne novine I June 1987); ‘emasculated . . . deprived of rights . . . deprived of a soul’ (the
Serbian journalist and satirist Brana CrnEeviC in Duga 8 July 1989 16). For a discussion of the
term ‘degraded’ with reference to the Serbian nation, see GojkoviC (1995: viii-ix); for ‘Serbian
masochism’, see Popov (1993: 17-18).
12 See, e.g. PetroviC and BlagojeviC (1989: 116, 138) (rape ‘represents much more than an
injury to the physical integrity of the victim and her humiliation; it is a humiliation and an
affront inflicted on the head of the household, a proof of his impotence’). This theme was
stressed in press accounts ( e g Politika 1 Nov. 1986: 13) and more literary treatments (e.g.
A. IsakoviC, KnjiZevne novine 1 June 1987: 5).
13 Renata Salecl’s argument that the emphasis on attempted rape denied Albanian nationhood
by fantasising Albanians as impotent and unmanly (1993: 80) is unconvincing; Serb weakness
was constructed in contrast to aggressive Albanian masculinity.
14 The ways other nationalist projects have derived symbolic capital from the call to protect
women and simultaneously preserve male honour have been explored in two richly suggestive
articles looking at responses to wartime rape (Harris 1993; Butalia 1994).
15 This discourse drew heavily on ‘ethno-psychological’ models which defined Serb (or more
precisely Dinaric) culture as essentially patriarchal. See GoluboviC (1995: 148-50) for a
discussion of this literature and more generally for changes in social and cultural values in
Yugoslavia and Serbia.
16 A number of versions of this complling image were reproduced in the press, it was sold as
a poster, received several awards and inspired a number of literary treatments. One exemplary
poem, ‘ h n a sa puSkom iz Prekala’, is reprinted in PavkoviC (1995). See also the interview with
Mile Jelasijevik (the photographer) in DjokoviC (1990).
17 Surveys of public opinion in the 1980s and 1990s did find a high degree of correlation
between nationalism and conservative social values among both men and women, though men
were more likely than women to identify with the nation (GoluboviC 1995: 115-20, 148-52,
179, 343-6).
18 Only about 15-30 per cent of eligible young men from the Belgrade area and 50 per cent
from Serbia answered the call to mobilisation; around 2O,ooO-30,000 young men are believed
to have deserted the army and fled the country at the beginning of the war (BaCkoviC 1998).
19 See for example a text entitled ‘ImaS kompjuter, vrati piltolj’ (‘You’ve got a computer, hand
in your pistol’) (DemiroviC 1992) and a number of other similar texts in the same collection,
pointedly entitled ‘Another Serbia’ (Drugu Srbiju). Examples of alternative masculinities can
also be found in literary works with emphatically a-nationalist and non-heroic men as the
central characters, for example Vladimir ArsenijeviC‘s novel, U porpalublju (1995).
20 MiloieviC‘s ally in Srpska Krajina, Goran HadiiC, was driven to deny that he was a
homosexual in interviews after agreeing to the stationing of UN troops in Croatia (Duga 27
March 1993: 21); Biljana PlavSiC, one of the leaders of Republika Srpska, cut adrift after rejecting
the Contact Group’s peace plan in 1994, claimed that the only true Serbs were those who were
proving their manliness on Bosnian battlefields (and MiloSeviC‘swife Mirjana MarkoviC snapped
back that PlavSiC‘s war-mongering was evidence of a hormonal disorder) (Vreme 10 May 1993:
36-7); the extremist Vojislav Seklj was persistently rumoured to be a homosexual.
21 See, for example, the eulogy to Djordje BoSkoviC GiSka, commander of the paramilitary
Serbian Guard, comparing him to the bandit heroes of the national epics and contrasting him
to ‘those who have spent their whole lives hushed and protected under a bell jar’, ‘men who
588 Wendy Bracewell

have been granted privileges and exemptions from any sort of obligation or debt of honour’
(Dugu 28 September 1991).
22 The comments are from opposition politicians Vuk DraSkoviC and Vojislav SeSelj
respectively (Popov 1993: 28).
23 Victims’ accounts and interrogations of prisoners are problematic sources for the rapists’
motives, but they repeatedly depict rape being committed as an expression of national hatred
and revenge, an instrument of male bonding, and a proof of virility. For examples of rape
narratives, see Amnesty International (1993); Helsinki Watch (1993); Stiglmayer (1994).
24 The title of an article on the increase in reports of domestic violence (‘Pravo dobrih Srba’ in
NIN 22 October 1993: 29). See also ‘Are women part of the nation?’ (‘Jesu li iene narod?’ in
Osmicu 1 November 1990 12-13), specifically quoting MiloSeviC‘s statement in the context of
wife-beating.

References

Amnesty International. 1993. Bosniu-Herzegovinu: Rapes und Sexual Abuse by the Armed
Forces. London: Amnesty International.
ArsenijeviC, Vladimir. 1995. U potpulublju. Belgrade : Vreme knjige. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth.
1996. In the Hold. New York: Alfred Knopf.
BaCeviC, Ljiljana et ul. (eds.). I99 I . Jugoslavija nu kriznoj prekretnici. Belgrade: Institut
druitvenih nauka.
BaCkovif, Ofelija et al. 1998. ‘KO to rado ide u vojnike’, Republika 198-9: 11-22, 31 October.
Banac, Ivo. 1984. The Nutional Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Bassiouni, Cherif et ul. 1994. UN Commission of Experts Reporting on Gruve Breuches of the
Geneva Conventions and Other Violations of International Humanitariun Law Committed on
the Territory of the Former Yugosluviu. New York: United Nations.
Bracewell, Wendy. 1996. ‘Women, motherhood and contemporary Serbian nationalism’,
Women’s Studies Internutional Forum 19, 1-2: 25-33.
Brown, Wendy. 1992. ‘Finding the man in the state’, Feminist Studies 18: 7-34.
Butalia, Urvashia. 1994. ‘Community, state and gender: some reflections on the partition of
India’, Oxford Literury Review 16: 31 -66.
CeroviC, Vuksan. 1989. Kosovo: kontrurevoluciju koja tete. Belgrade: Nova knjiga.
Cohen, Michtle. 1996. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Languuge in the Eighteenth
Century. London: Routledge.
eoloviC, Ivan. 1994. Bordel rutnika. Belgrade: Biblioteka X X veka.
Connell, Robert W. 1990. ‘The state, gender and sexual politics: theory and appraisal’, Theory
und Society 19: 507-44.
Connell, Robert W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
CosiC, Dobrica. 1992. Promene. Novi Sad: Dnevnik.
Dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imugining of
Masculinities. London: Routledge.
DemiroviC, Hamdija. 1992. ‘ImaS kompjuter, vrati piitolj’, in Ivan eoloviC and AljoSa Mimica
(eds.), Drugu Srbija. Belgrade: Beogradski krug.
DjokoviC, Milorad. 1990. Kosmetski dosije: svedoknja i sudbine prognanih kosovucu. Belgrade:
AIZ Dosije.
DjukiC, Slavoljub. 1994. Izme4u s h e i unuteme: politifku biogruJju Slobodunu MiloSeviCa.
Belgrade: Nolit.
DragoviC, Jasna. 1997. ‘Les intellectuals serbes et la “question” du Kosovo, I981 -1987,
Relations Internutionales 89, 2: 53-70.
DzadziC, Petar. 1987. Homo bulcunicus, homo heroicus. Belgrade: BIGZ.
Rape in Kosovo 589

Gaber, Slavko and KuzmaniC, Tonci (eds.). 1989. Zburnik Kusuvu-Srbiju-Jugosluviju. Ljubljana:
Univerzitetna konferenca ZSMS.
Gilmore, David. 1990. Munhuod in the Muking: Culturd Concepts of Musculinity. New Haven,
CT:Yale University Press.
GojkoviC, Drinka. 1995. ‘Trauma bez katarze’, Repitbliku 7, 118 (16 June): i-xvi.
GoluboviC, Zagorka (ed.). 1995. DruStveni kurukter i clru$tvene promene u svetlu nitciunulni/i
sukubu. Belgrade: BIGZ.
Goven, Joanna. 1993. ‘Gender politics in Hungary: autonomy and antifeminism’, in Nanette
Funk and Magda Mueller (eds.), Gender Politics und Post-Communism. New York: Routledge.
Grubnicu zu Mirusluvu Milenkovitu. 1991. Belgrade.
Harris, Ruth. 1993. ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: rape, race and nationalism in France during
the First World War’, Pust & Present 41, 4 170-206.
Helsinki Watch. 1993. Wur Crimes in Bosniu-Herzegovinu. vol. 11. New York: Helsinki Watch.
Heng, Geraldine and Devan, Janadas. 1992. ‘State fatherhood: the politics of nationalism,
sexuality and race in Singapore’, in Andrew Parker et 01. (eds.), Nutionulisms und Sexuulities.
London: Routledge.
Horvat, Branko. 1988. Kusuvsko pitanje. Zagreb: Globus.
Horvatic, Zeljko. 1980. Izbur kuzne u jugusluvenskum krivitnum pruvu i surlskuj pruksi. Zagreb:
Informator.
IvekoviC, Rada. 1993. ‘Women, nationalism and war: “Make Love Not War”’, Hyputiu 8/4:
113-26.
Kaser, Karl. 1992. ‘Hirten, Helden und Haiduken: zum Mannlichkeitskult im jugoslawischen
Krieg’, L’Homme: Zeifschriytfur feministische Geschichts~vissenschuft311 : 155-62.
KiS, Danilo. 1979. Cus unutomije. Belgrade: Nolit.
Magal, Branka. 1993. The Destruction of Yugosluviu. London: Verso.
McClintock, Ann. 1993. ‘Family feuds: gender, nationalism and the family’, Feminist Review
44,3: 61 -80
MemedoviC, Nikola. 1988. Krivitno d e b silovunju u jugusluvenskum pruvu. Belgrade: NauEna
knjiga.
Mertus, Julie. 1994. “‘Woman” in the service of national identity’, Hustings Women’s Luw
Journul5, 1: 5-23.
MeStroviC, Stjepan et ul. 1993. Hubits of the Bulkun Heurt: Suciul Character und the Full of
Communism. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press.
MeinariC, Silva. 1994. ‘Gender as an ethno-marker: rape, war and identity politics in the
former Yugoslavia’, in Valentine M. Moghadam (ed.), Identify Politics und Women. Oxford:
Westview Press.
MiloSeviC, Slobodan. 1989. Gocline ruspletu. Belgrade: BIGZ.
Molyneux, Maxine. 1994. ‘Women’s rights and the international context: some reflections on
the post-communist states’, Millennium 23, 2: 287- 13.
Mosse, George. 1985. Nufionulism und Sexuality: Middle-Cluss Murulity und Sexual Norms in
Modern Europe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nagel, Joane. 1998. ‘Masculinity and nationalism: gender and sexuality in the making of
nations’, Ethnic und Racial Studies 21, 2: 242-69.
PapiC, Zarana. 1992. ‘Nationalism, war and gender: ex-femininity and ex-masculinity of ex-
Yugoslavian ex-citizens’, unpublished ms. presented at VI Symposium of the International
Association of Women Philosophers, Amsterdam, 22-25 April.
Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
PavkoviC, Vasa (ed.). 1995. Korovnjuk: srpske junufke puezoe nuvug dobu. Belgrade: Vreme
knjige.
PavloviC, DragiSa. 1988. Ohko obetunu brzinu. Zagreb: Globus.
PetroviC, Ruia. 1985. EtniEki meioviti brukovi u Jugusluviji. Belgrade: Institut za sociologiju
Filozofskog fakulteta.
PetroviC, Ruia and Marina BlagojeviC. 1989. Seube Srbu i Crnugorucu su Kosuvu i Mefohije.
Belgrade: SANU.
590 Wendy Bracewell

Popov, NebojSa. 1993. Srpski populizum: Oil murginulne do dominuntne pojuve, 24 May, Special
supplement to Vreme.
PopoviC, BoSko. 1987. ‘Razgovori o Kosovu’, Theoriu 1-2: 150-3.
PopoviC, Srdja et ul. (eds.). 1990. Kosovski fvor: clreSiti ili seCi? Belgrade: Kronos.
RadiC, Radmila. 1995. ‘Crkva i “srpsko pitanje”: Srpska pravoslavna crkva u poratnim i
ratnim godinama (1980-1995)’, Republiku 7, 121-2 ( I August): i-xxiv.
Roper, Michael and John Tosh. 1991. ‘Introduction: historians and the politics of masculinity’,
in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Munful Assertions: Musculinities in Brituin since
1800. London: Routledge.
Rosandic, Ruiica and Vesna PeSik (eds.). 1994. Wurfure, Putriotism und Putriurchy. Belgrade.
Salecl, Renata. 1993. ‘Nationalism, anti-Semitism and anti-feminism in Eastern Europe’,
Journul of Areu Studies 3: 78-90.
SamardiiC, Radovan et ul. (eds.). 1989. Kosovo i Metohiju u srpskoj istoriji. Belgrade: Srpska
knjiievna zadruga.
Scott, Joan. 1988. ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, in Gender and the Politics of
History. New York: Columbia University Press.
Segal, Lynne. 1997 [1990]. Slow Motion: Chunging Musculinities, Changing Men. 2nd edn.
London: Virago.
Sinha, Mrinalini. 1995. Colonial Musculinity: The ‘Manly Englishmun’ und ‘Effeminute Bengali’
in the L d e Nineteenth Century. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Slu5beni glusnik Socijulistirke Republike Srbije. 1986. XLII, 39 (18 October): 2739-40.
Sorabji, Cornelia. 1993. ‘Crimes against gender or nation?’, Bulkun War Report 18: 16.
Spasojevic, Svetislav. 1986. Slutuj Murtinovii. Belgrade: Partizanska knjiga.
Stiglmayer, Alexandra (ed.). 1994. Muss Rape: The Wur against Women in Bosniu-Herzegovina.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
StojanoviC, Dubravka. 1995. ‘TraumatiEni krug srpske opozicije’, Republiku 125-6 (31
October): vii-ix.
Stokes, Gale et ul. 1996. ‘Instant history: understanding the wars of Yugoslav succession’,
Slavic Review 55, 1: 136-60.
TaSiC, Predrag. 1994. Kuko j e ubijenu ilrugu Jugosluviju. Skopje: Al.
Theweleit, Klaus. 1987, 1989. Mule Funtusies. 2 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Thompson, Mark. 1994. Forging Wur: The Media in Serbia, Croutiu und Bosnio-Hercegovinu.
London: Article 19.
TijaniC, Aleksandar. 1988. stu i.e bit; s numu. Zagreb: Globus.
ToSevski, J. 1988. Plunetu 5enu. Belgrade.
Tsagarousianou, Rosa. 1995. “‘God, patria and home”: “Reproductive Politics” and nationalist
(re)definitions of women in EastlCentral Europe’, Sociul Identities I , 2: 283-95.
UgreSiC, Dubravka. 1995. ‘Because we’re lads’, Trunsitions I : 28-41.
Verdery, Katherine. 1994. ‘From parent-state to family patriarchs: gender and nation in
contemporary Eastern Europe’, EUSIEuropeun Politics und Societies 8, 2: 225-55.
VojnoviC, Milan. 1993. Prepororl srpskog nurortu. Belgrade: Mimiko.
VukoviC, Djordjije. 1987. ‘Kritika jedne politike’, Theoriu 3-4: 48-58.
Woodward, Susan. 1995. Bulkun Trugedy: Chum unci Dissolution ufier the Cold Wur.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender und Nution. London: Sage.
ZajoviC, StaSa (ed.). 1993. Women for Peace. Belgrade: Women in Black.
ZaniC, Ivo. 1989. ‘Bukvar “antibirokratske revolucije”’, Sturt (Zagreb), 13 September.

Newspapers and journals, Belgrade: Dugu. Iliustrovunu politiko. Sluzbeni glusnik Socijulisticke
Republike Srbije, NIN, Verme, Intervju. Knjizevne novine, Politiku, Borbu, Osmicu. Zagreb:
Dunus