Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told There are several descriptions of Serb perpetrators gloating over raping Kosovo Albanian women. One woman described how the police, after having been in a house where they had put the young women 49 from the village, laughed and said that they could do what they wanted with Kosovo Albanian women. Another young woman who had been assaulted by a police commander described how the commander boasted the morning after the assault: "In the morning the police forced our family onto a bus. When the police commander saw me he stated that he `had been with me during the night' and he bragged how bad he had made my brothers look." 50 Rapes and other sexual assaults were sometimes committed in a very public way so that as many people as possible would come to know about them. By this means the Serb forces made sure that the word was quickly spread among the Kosovo Albanian population, and this became yet another weapon of intimidation during the most violent period of the internal conflict, from late March 1999. When rape is committed in an armed conflict it is directed towards the whole society rather than the individual victim. Another dimension to the use of rape as an instrument in the conflict is that many women who are raped violently, and sometimes mutilated, are afterwards physically unable to bear children. Or the victim may suffer psychological effects from the rape such that it is impossible for her thereafter to have a normal heterosexual relationship. Again, society may reject the victim and see her as "debased" and not worthy of marriage. Furthermore, it is clear that sexual violence was used as an instrument of "ethnic cleansing" following patterns similar to those seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Comments by Serb rapists as reported from Kosovo, such as "you are no longer Albanians because you will carry Serb children", are very similar to those reported as having been made by similar perpetrators in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that indicates that rape was being used as a weapon to nullify the ethnicity of the women. 51 Sexual assault on men The cases of sexual assault on men, reported below, are further indications that sexual violence was used as a deliberate tactic to undermine Kosovo Albanian identity by breaking down the physical, psychological and sexual identity of the victims. Where it is mentioned in the statements collected by the OSCE-KVM, sexual violence against men appears to have taken place most commonly in detention. Outside these situations, it appears that forcing men to strip naked was the most common way of sexually humiliating men. The statements below should not be seen as in any more exhaustive than those concerning women, as men have just as much difficulty as women in talking about being victims of sexual violence. It is therefore quite possible that incidents took place that were not reported to the OSCE-KVM. Sexual assaults in detention centres. Much violence took place in the detention centres, some of which can be classified as sexual violence (see also Chapter 6: Torture and ill-treatment). One 55-year-old man http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch7.htm (12 of 17)12/5/2003 11:51:55 AM