Bosnian mass rape stories revisited in Bucha

From a book ”To kill a nation” by Michael Parenti

BBC repeated the same, unproven story about “mass rape” in Ukraine, as they did for Bosnia:

Ukraine's ombudsman for human rights Lyudmyla Denisova says they're documenting several such cases.

"About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant," she said. "Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn't want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children."

This is regularly pointed out as facts on social media.

These claims reminded me of the exact same thing that was reported in the war in Bosnia, from a book ”To kill a nation” by Michael Parenti

One of the earliest propaganda campaigns during the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina came in 1991-93 when the Serbs were accused of pursuing an officially sanctioned policy of mass rape.

Bosnian Serb forces were said to have raped from 20,000 to 100,000 Muslim women; the reports varied widely. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements. Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with some skepticism. Instead, they were eagerly embraced by Western leaders and their media acolytes.

"Go forth and rape," a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that widely circulated story could never be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such order was ever issued.
The New York Times did belatedly run a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that "the existence of 'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved.

Hearings held by the European Community's Committee on Women's Rights in February 1993 rejected the estimate of 20,000 Muslim rape victims because of the lack of evidence. At the hearings, representatives from the UN War Crimes Commission and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees concluded that not enough evidence could be found to sustain charges of a Serbian mass-rape campaign.

At the same time, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross concurrently declared that all sides had committed atrocities and rapes.

A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that reports of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible support. Likewise, Nora Beloff, former chief correspondent of the London Observer, says she elicited "an admission from a senior German official that there is no direct evidence to support the wild figures of rape victims."

The official in charge of the Bosnian desk in the German Foreign Affairs Ministry admitted that all such rape reports came partly from the Izetbegovic government and partly from Caritas, a Catholic charity—that is, entirely from Muslim and Croat sources, without any corroboration from independent investigators.'

The media repeatedly referred to "rape camps" allegedly maintained by the Serbs as part of a campaign of "ethnic breeding."

Thousands of captive Muslim women were reportedly impregnated and forced to give birth to Serbian children. But after hostilities ceased and UN troops occupied all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the mass rape camps never materialized.

The waves of pregnant victims supposedly treated at Bosnian hospitals, and the medical records of their treatment also never materialized. The handful of rape-produced births that actually came to light seemed to contradict the image of mass-rape pregnancies reported by Muslim authorities and Western journalists.

An Agence France-Presse news item reported that in Sarajevo, "Bosnian investigators have learned of just one case of a woman who gave birth to a child after being raped."

And Amnesty International "has never succeeded in speaking with any of the pregnant women.""

It has been suggested that these women were so few in number because they were unwilling to come forward, given the stigmatization that their culture places upon rape victims.

But provision was made by international aid agencies to render confidential assistance to them. The women were never asked to go public, only to be interviewed anonymously and receive medical care, as some did. In any case, if 20,000 or more rape victims so successfully kept their plight a secret, how did Bosnian and Croatian government officials and Western journalists know about them? What actual evidence did they have of mass rapes involving tens of thousands of women, and why did they never produce it?

This is not to say that no rapes occurred.

Eight years after the mass-rape stories were circulated, an unidentified Muslim Bosnian woman testified before the International Criminal Tribunal that she and other women had been held captive by Serb paramilitaries and repeatedly raped for a number of weeks in the summer of 1992. Some fifty women were said to have been detained, but the trial testimony of no other woman was reported in the AP stories.

The case was against two Bosnian Serb paramilitaries accused of running a "network of rape camps" southeast of Sarajevo.'Sometimes the press outdid itself in its tabloid concoctions, as when the BBC informed its millions of listeners that Serb snipers were paid 2,700 FF for every child they killed—or when the London Daily Mirror reported that a Bosnian woman died "after being forced to give birth to a dog." Variations on this bizarre and biologically incredible story were carried also in Germany's Bud am Sonntag and Italy's La Repubblica, with lurid accounts of how fiendish Serbian gynecologists implanted canine fetuses in the woman's womb.10 The dog story was also embraced by an obscure West German parliamentary deputy,Stefan Schwarz, who gained instant fame by telling gruesome tales in the Bundestag about Serbian burnings, castrations, the roasting of children in ovens, and the use of poison gas. In January 1993, Schwarz spoke of the "Serbian successors to Mengele" who planted dog embryos in Muslim women. He announced the arrival of a videotape that would corroborate his claim. Only a year later did he admit that no such tape existed. Nor did he produce any evidence to support his other horror stories." Nevertheless Schwarz's popularity with the press was undiminished. Lack of evidence was irrelevant against the images evoked of sadistic death-camp Serbo-Nazi medical experiments.

Along with the references to "rape camps" were the equally unsubstantiated stories about Serbian "death camps" in northern Bosnia. These tales were launched by reporter Roy Gutman, who invited comparisons to the extermination camps run by the Nazis during World War II. The first of these articles, appearing on the front page of Newsday under the large headline "Bosnian Death Camps," opened with: "The Serbian conquerors of northern Bosnia founded two concentration camps where more than a thousand civilians have been killed or died of hunger, and thousands are being kept until death follows. . . In one of the camps, over a thousand men are locked up in metal cages." Bodies were burned in cremation furnaces, then turned into animal feed. Gutman quotes someone described as an exprisoner who says: "I saw ten young men lying in a trench. Their throats were slit, their noses cut off and their genitals torn." Though seriously lacking in confirmed sources, Gutman's stories were eagerly picked up, causing an international outcry that helped mobilize world opinion against the Serbs.

Similar reports soon appeared in British newspapers, along with charges that Bosnian Serbs had executed more than seventeen thousand Muslim and Croatian prisoners.

Gutman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his stories.