Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

massacre (e.g., in the wiping out of a whole village of men, women, and children) contains
some of the elements of a genocide, Kuper sought to find a way to give such massacres
their proper place within a model of genocide, while recognizing that such events
did not, by themselves, constitute genocide. Kuper found the notion of genocidal massacre
particularly helpful in this respect. He also found the concept and term useful in
describing colonial situations, as the large number of massacres accompanying colonial
acquisition pointed clearly to an affinity between colonialism and genocide. Although
even an aggregation of genocidal massacres did not necessarily connote a policy of genocide,
the motives that underlay such massacres were, in their time-and-place, motivated
by a genocidal intent. For Kuper, therefore, the genocidal massacre, while not equal to
genocide, was a device for explaining the many examples of destruction that took place
during territorial acquisition, maintenance, and decolonization.
Genocidal Rape. Genocidal rape is a relatively new term that has entered the vocabulary
of genocide studies. Generally, the term genocidal rape is used to suggest the use of mass rape
by perpetrators as a weapon against the group they perceive as enemies. In that regard, genocidal
rape, itself is largely used as a way to degrade, demoralize, and humiliate both the
female victims and their families (not to mention fellow community members and members
of their ethnic, religious, national group), as well as to cause physical trauma to the female
victims. It has also been used as a means of forced impregnation, particularly in societies
where the defiling of women often results in their becoming pariahs, not only in the larger
society, but also within their immediate families. Furthermore, it has been used as a means
to create “bastards,” who not only do not know their fathers who brought them into the
world by an act of violence, but are often unwanted by their mothers. Such rape is more a
crime of violence than sexuality, both culturally and historically, and made all the more
complicated in both Judaic and Islamic communities, which tend to regard the women who
have been raped not only unfortunate victims, but blemished religiously and shunned communally.
Although rape is not specifically referred to in the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG), both sections b (“Causing
serious bodily or emotional harm to members of the group”) and d (“Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part”) are germane to the act and violence of rape. The rationales for the
latter assertions are obvious in regard to section b, but less so in regard to section d. As
for section d, in many situations across the globe women who have been forcibly impregnated
by another group—particularly when the perpetrator group is perceived as “outsiders,”
enemies, or “infidels”—may result in a woman being forsaken by her own community,
and thus not able, even if she so desired, to bear children of her own ethnic group in
the future.
In many instances in the near past, mass rape has been used as a tool to carry out warfare,
“ethnic cleansing,” and genocide. Mass rapes, for example, were perpetrated during
the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, by Serbs in the 1990s in socalled
rape camps against Muslim women in the former Yugoslavia, and by government of
Sudan troops and the Janjaweed (Arab militia) throughout the course of the genocide in
Darfur, Sudan (2003 through today, late 2007).
There is evidence that one of the key purposes of at least some of the abuse in the Serbian
“rape camps” in the former Yugoslavia was impregnation. In fact, in certain cases women were
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