by Manuela Dobos

About the author: Manuela Dobos teaches Russian and East European history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

In July 1992 the American, British, and French media accounts of the detention centers in Bosnia-Herzegovina evoked a public outcry in Western Europe and the U.S. Serbian and Bosnian Serb armed forces were holding the mostly Bosnian Muslim civilians in camps where they were being starved, tortured, and killed in order to drive the survivors from conquered territory, to carry out “ethnic cleansing.”

Rape Accounts Emerge

And disclosures of new horrors were yet to come. As the International Committee for the Red Cross and foreign journalists gained entry to some of the camps and Serb authorities released some prisoners, the story of mass rape of women detainees emerged in...