Feminists, Feminisms
In October 1992 an international feminist conference was organized in Zagreb by a few feminist groups, and almost every feminist and woman's group existing in Croatia at the time, took part in it. This was the conference in which the conflict between anti-nationalist and nationalist feminists in Croatia came out into the open. The conflict centered around the question: who is the victim? The organizers of the meeting (the groups Kareta and Women's Help Now) emphasized "the necessity of naming the aggressor and the victim" and distinguished themselves from the so-called "neutral position of some feminist, pacifist and other alternative circles in and outside Croatia" (Working Programmeof the group Women's Help Now, dated December 10, 1992, Zagreb). The `naming' here, however, meant naming Muslim and Croat women as the only victims, and Serb men as the only perpetrators.
In February 1993 a big international `Solidarity Meeting' was organized in Zagreb, sponsored by a German women's group. The meeting was supposed to bring together all women and women's groups, feminists and feminist groups from the former Yugoslav territories and from abroad concerned with war violence against women in Bosnia and Croatia. However, when a few women from Serbia who were invited and finally got visas to enter Croatia attempted to address the audience, Croatian nationalist women created an uproar. It did not help that the women from Serbia were condemning rapes of Muslim and Croat women by Serb forces. For they also mentioned rape of Serb women by Croat and Bosnian forces - and nationalist feminists from Croatia were unwilling to accept this account. As a result, many anti-nationalist feminists and groups pulled out of the meeting, and continued their work not only independent of the work of the nationalist women's and feminist groups, but often in direct opposition to them.
Nationalist feminists continued to insist that only Croat and Muslim women were victims and only Serb men the perpetrators. Furthermore, for nationalist feminists, the woman was also a metaphor of the nation-state. They talked about `rape of Bosnia and Croatia' as much as about `rape of Muslim and Croat women'. Nevertheless, they continued working on other aspects of their feminist agenda: from recovering women in Croatian national history to addressing the issue of domestic violence, from publishing feminist journals to lobbying in the Parliament for passing legislation that protects women's rights. Furthermore, feminists in Kareta, defined themselves as a radical feminist group. They systematically accused Croat men of oppressing Croat women. Interestingly, their radical feminism did not appear to give them a negative public image in Croatian media, otherwise so sensitive to the word ‘feminism’. On the contrary, their work received a positive reception in the press, they were invited to be guests on different radio programmes and finally, appeared on the national television, prime time. Through these appearances, their work, as well as their perspectives received, in their own words, "an important public legitimacy" (Program Statement, O-ZONA: Assistance to Women in Crisis, i.e. an S.O.S. hot-line, Kareta, 1994).
Public legitimacy is obviously an important aspect of the work in which nationalist feminists were engaged. Acceptance into the newly created nation-state was not always an easy thing. Many anti-nationalist feminists were publicly excluded through media campaigns. Croatian weekly Globus, for example, conducted an actual “witch-hunt” in December 1992, calling five outspoken women critics of Croatian nationalism "witches" and "feminists", and accusing them of "raping Croatia", while at the same time praising nationalist feminists (Globus, 10 December 1992, cover page). One of the accused was Slavenka Drakulic. The shifts in her writing and attitudes towards the newly established Croatian state show some of the internal contradictions and dilemmas that feminists from Croatia faced. In her book about war in former Yugoslavia, Balkan Express, Drakulic defines the nation in ways quite similar to definitions given by nationalist feminists - as a personified (albeit not directly feminized), suffering victim:
So, right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat. And even if this is not what one would really call freedom, perhaps it would be morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering nation. (Drakulic, 1993a, p. 52; emphasis added).
Through such a statement, any criticism is morally discredited because the state of Croatia and the (Croat) nation are defined as the suffering war victims, and the victim-status is transformed into the ultimate moral status. Drakulic proceeds to state that she feels "a new kind of pride" despite the fact that she was "robbed of [her] past", for, now at last, she reiterates, when she says she is from Croatia, everybody knows where it is (Drakulic, 1993b, p. 58).
The thing is: everybody knows where Serbia is, too. But no Serbian feminist could ever utter the same sentence. In Serbia, there was no feminist flirting with nationalism. There were only anti-nationalist feminists. This is because, first, nationalist women's groups distanced themselves very explicitly from feminism, and second, because Serbian feminists could not afford such a link. For them, the war brought no pride, only “separation, guilt and identity crisis", as Mladjenovic and Litricin (1993) reiterate in the title of their article. Feminists from Serbia never ever dared writing about their `suffering nation', only about "nationalism of [their] own people" (Korac, 1993). They would never even think about putting together words `love' and `blood' the way Drakulic (1993b, p. 59) did when writing about Croatia's independence:
Croatia is getting its independence simply because millions of people loved it enough to fight and to shed their blood for it, practically to the death.
For feminists in Serbia, this patriotic romanticization of the war deaths was unimaginable. For them, there was no independence to celebrate, only a bloody disintegration to mourn. They could never hope to "love [their] new country" as Drakulic (1993b, p. 58) did, for their country was not the `new' one, it was a `remnant' or the `left-over', the `former', the `ex-'. And, it was, in the words of some of them, "fascist" and "totalitarian" (see the Annual Reports of Autonomous Women's Center Against Violence, Belgrade, from 1994/5 and 1997/8, and the opening quotation in Huges et all, 1995, p. 509).
The differences of the internal contexts that feminists from Serbia and Croatia faced are also apparent in the differences that can be found in the manner in which the two territories can be talked about. In the edited publication by Funk & Mueller (1993) Slavenka Drakulic and Andjelka Milic (a feminist from Serbia) write about women in former Yugoslavia. The Croatian feminist Drakulic writes about women and the new democracy in Croatia (Drakulic, 1993b); the Serbian feminist Milic writes about women and nationalism in Serbia (Milic, 1993). Both texts are about nationalism and women's actions against it. Reading them, one comes to the same, depressing conclusion that, in both places, nationalism, not feminism, is the winning force. The difference is that, `new democracy' is the vocabulary that describes Croatia, whereas `nationalism' is the vocabulary for Serbia. These words define the two states, as much as the people who live in them. And, on the surface, it seems to be an accurate description. However, not every feminist in Croatia believed that democracy had come and that she has anything to be proud of in her new country. Many were, actually, appalled with their new country and the way it had come about. In addition, they were also disappointed in Drakulic, who, after braving public opinion in 1992 by stating that Croat soldiers were rapists too, had become ever less critical of Croatian nationalism. Similarly, not every feminist in Serbia thought that she had to feel guilty and ashamed solely on the basis of her Serbian origin or residence, or that she had to be blind to the atrocities against Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, or that her comments should be limited to condemnation of `her own' nationalism, people, state or government. Nevertheless, these differences were significant, and they influenced the manner in which anti-nationalist feminist from Serbia and Croatia operated and cooperated.
Hence, not surprisingly, anti-nationalist feminists in Croatia and Serbia were not all that unified in definitions of victims and aggressors. On the one hand, they did assume that women were the main victims, and that women of any ethnic background could become a victim. Consequently, they explicitly included women of different ethnic and national affiliations as target groups of their work, especially when working with rape victims. They often deliberately chose to work with, and search for women from ethnic groups that were on the receiving end of violence by their own governments. Croatian anti-nationalist feminists, for example, were the first to explicitly accuse Croatian forces of raping Serb and Muslim women, and to condemn national and international demonization of Serb men and the Serb nation, be it by mainstream politicians or by American feminists such as MacKinnon. They were also first to aid Serb refugees and (a few) returnees and to criticize the Croatian government's nationalist politics within Croatia, and expansionist politics in Bosnia. For all of this they received hostile public reactions, with few, if any, other civic and anti-nationalist groups or individuals coming to their aid. Seen as traitors within their own nation-states, they turned to other anti-nationalist feminist groups of ex-Yugoslavia and to international feminist and civil-society networks, in all of which they were well received. Serbian anti-nationalist feminists also directed their activities towards all women, regardless of their ethnic background. They were among the few to establish links with Albanian women from Kosovo, for example. They, too, were treated as traitors in their own territory, and after the initial rejection, they were eventually embraced by the international feminist networks, albeit as one of the `good' faces of Serbia. The negative aspect of such positioning of Serbian feminists notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the presence of Croatian and Serbian feminists in the international arena actually showed how non-exceptional, far from unique and truly global, was the drama happening in Yugoslavia. By being related to the past and present dramas in Algeria, Korea, Ireland, Israel or South Africa, the Yugoslav conflict showed how relevant it is both to learn from others' experiences and to teach others about one's own[iv].
On the other hand, the notion of a woman as the main victim of war and nationalism did not always and everywhere have the same meaning. Faced with very different contexts of war and nationalism within their states, as well as with very different personal, professional and feminist histories that pre-dated nationalism and war, anti-nationalist feminists and groups in Croatia and Serbia often attached very different meanings to the notion of a woman-victim. For example, in Serbia anti-nationalist feminists split precisely over the definition of a woman-victim. A small but influential group of radical feminist, led by Mladjenovic initially refused to acknowledge any relevance of ethnicity or nation, when talking about war rapes, and reduced them to the "male violence against women" (Annual Report 1994/1995, AWC Belgrade, p.1). They asserted that "rape is not a nationalist but a gender issue" and that nation, state, militaries, patriotism and wars are all products of patriarchy, conceived in, and sustained through, male violence against women, and male hatred of everything female and feminine (Mladjenovic & Litricin, 1993, p. 113). This assumption that all women are victims of all men, defines a woman as an ultimate metaphor of a victim and adopts the dominant patriarchal notions of gender - with aggressive masculinity and violable femininity. At the same time, it is extracting both masculinity and femininity from other social relations of power, notably - relations of ethnicity. The latter stance is not necessarily radical, and is shared by many anti-nationalist feminists who assume that no difference among women matters as much as difference between men and women, and that feminism replaces all other identities. One anti-nationalist Croatian feminist expressed that belief very clearly:
It is impossible to merge nation and gender - they are different understandings of human nature and human essence. It is therefore impossible to be equally of one's nation and of one's gender. (Cullen, 1992, p. 414).
For many anti-nationalist feminists from Serbia and Croatia who operated within heated nationalist discourses and realities increasingly reduced to ethnicity, denial of national and ethnic identities created a powerful starting point in communication. Their refusal of their own ethnic identities came to symbolize their refusal of nationalism. The problem is that Belgrade's radical feminists took this position to its extreme: women who did not refuse to acknowledge their own ethnic identities were simply declared nationalists. In a radical agenda, ethnicity and anti-nationalist feminism came to be regarded as incompatible. If ethnicity was introduced into the rhetoric it was only to declare the Serb government, Serb people and especially Serb men, as the ultimate war villains. There were feminists in Serbia, however, who were wary of the demonization of `the Serbs' as much as of Serbian nationalism and who disagreed strongly with radical feminist views (Milic, 1993; Duhacek, 1993; Blagojevic, 1994; Korac, 1996).Yet, as Duhacek (1993, p. 136) noted, unlike Croatian feminists who criticised the nationalism of their own government as well as that of others, feminists in Serbia limited their analyses to Serbian nationalism only. Because Serbian nationalism was already an almost exclusive topic in studies of nationalism in former Yugoslavia, in both feminist and non-feminist analyses, and by both foreign and domestic authors, academic feminists in Serbia were in a peculiar position. While these feminists showed that Serbia has had a feminist ‘face’ as well as a nationalist one, they sometimes, unwittingly, reinforced the very discourses they wanted to subvert.
Another difference among feminists in Serbia was in their attitudes towards political involvement. While some tried to engage in the domain of official politics through lobbying, creating women’s parties or joining existing opposition, others refused any contact with the official political parties. Mladjenovic and Litricin express a rather commonly held feminist viewpoint when they says that "the `Serbian nation', as the present government creates it, certainly has nothing in common with a `Woman's nation'" (Mladjenovic & Litricin, 1993, p. 119). However, they and the circle around them seldom differentiated between the government and oppositional political forces, and often denounced all opposition forces in Serbia as nationalists, chauvinist and patriarchal "street-crowds" (Mladjenovic & Litricin, 1993, p. 119). Furthermore, they systematically called the Serbian government fascist, which was more an ideological labelling than a good analysis of particular political processes and power (see especially Mladjenovic and Litricin 1993, Mladjenovic 2001, and Huges et al, 1995).
Needless to say, these attitudes and strategies brought self-isolation to the Belgrade radical feminists within Serbia, making them more dependent – emotionally as well as financially - on links with the feminist groups abroad. The fact that they were praised in feminist circles abroad, probably in part comes because their extreme separatism made them less ambiguous and thus easier to accept in those international feminist circles that had trouble dealing with feminists from Serbia (the same way they had trouble acknowledging the rape of Serb women during the war[v]). But they had few friends among other feminists and feminist groups in Serbia, and also largely marginalized themselves from political debates of the day.
Self-imposed isolationism, although carried to its extreme by the radical feminists, seems to characterise feminism in Serbia in general. In a recently conducted study on the women's movement in Serbia and Montenegro Milic (2002) concludes that women's groups are turned inwards, separated from local communities and each other, perceived in a very negative light by their surroundings and "politically completely uninfluential and ineffective" (Milic 2002, p. 123).
While the radicalization of feminist activism in Serbia potentially had many problematic aspects it made at least two significant contributions to the theory and practice of feminism in general, and in the region. The close and direct contact with women survivors of war in combination with the radical feminist definition of victim as exclusively female (and not female and ethnic at the same time) resulted in one extremely significant insight, which was quickly turned into both a political and theoretical point. Feminist activists from both Belgrade and Zagreb refused the "cynical quantification and hierarchization" of women's suffering in war" (AWC, Annual Report, 1994/1995, p.5). They refused to make the rape the single most important issue for their activism and stood firmly behind the statement that "many women have survived more than one type of violence, and if they come for one problem, many other different kinds of pains come out later on" (AWC, Annual Report, 1994/1995, p.5). These insights were later carried out from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia to the war in Kosovo (Mladjenovic 2001). At times when both nationalists in former Yugoslavia and many feminists across the globe rallied almost exclusively only around the issue of the war rapes, this was an extremely brave political position. Theoretically, it was a welcome opening to a possibility of situating rape within, and not above, feminist conceptualizations of violence against women in war.
Further, radicalized feminism in Serbia had another positive effect: making homosexuality visible. Not only was it the case that lesbian feminists received attention and were embraced as feminist sisters, but hetero- and homosexuality became legitimate political and theoretical issues (see for example Mrsevic 2000), and lesbian sexuality became a topic in the existing Women's Studies programs. While this did not do much to make a lesbian visible in the wider society, it did address almost total invisibility of homosexuality within Serbian feminism in the previous decades.