This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Rape stands out, compared with other acts of violence in wartimeβeven other acts of extreme violenceβas it is never officially sanctioned and in theory should always be punished. In other cases, endemic sexual violence in wartime barely registers on wider public consciousness. Through the two case studies examined here, the Indonesian War of Independence β and the Algerian War of Independence β , we seek to demonstrate the dynamics at play that increase the risk of rape, and at the same time explore how knowledge about rape is silenced, transmitted, or documented.
From the outset, it is important to underline that there is little we can quantitatively affirm about the relative occurrence of rape in the two wars. For a total , military personnel who served in Indonesia over four years, Dutch Military Justice records that were preserved yield seventy-two cases in which Dutch military personnel were accused of sexual violence, fifty-three of which cases resulted in guilty verdicts. This tribunal was one of three of its type in Algeria that disciplined some of the two million soldiers deployed by the French army in Algeria.
Statistically, this kind of comparison is largely meaningless. Rape has always been underreported and under-prosecuted, both in civilian societies and in theaters of war. In wartime, bystanders, mostly fellow soldiers, rarely break the code of silence about offenses they have witnessed. The scandal became emblematic of the broader treatment of Algerians by the French state. In his war diaries, Indonesian general Abdul Haris Nasution does refer to the rape of Indonesian women by Dutch soldiers, but it features almost in passing.
Figure 5. Not only does it enable us to examine why rape happensβthat is, whether it functions as a weapon of war and how it is facilitated by certain types of warfareβbut it also gives us insight into how victims might seek redress and how the act of condemning rape was politically weaponized.
This chapter begins by delineating the places and contexts in which Indonesian and Algerian women were especially vulnerable to rape. We quote at some length from sources such as judicial records, contemporary published accounts, memoirs, and oral histories, because their very existence is at the core of the analysis in parts two, three, and four of the chapter, in which we address attributed motivations, politicization, and redress.
