By Slavenka Drakulic
ZAGREB, Croatia — The room is tiny, with one small window letting in almost no light on a gloomy winter morning. Outside, it's bitter cold, -
15° C. Stiffly frozen pieces of hand-washed clothing are hanging on lines stretched between the barracks.
This is my first visit to Resnik, a camp near Zagreb housing 9000 refugees, mostly Muslims, from Bosnia and Hercegovina. They have lived here for months now, 10 to 15 of them in one room. They are not allowed to cook, they have to fetch their water from outside faucets and the nearest toilets are 50 metres away.
In the room of the Kahrimanovic family there are six bunk beds, one tin stove, no table, no chairs, no closet. All they possess is laid out on the beds: clothes, toys, cans of food, two or three pots. Yet these people, from a village near Kozarac in Bosnia, consider themselves lucky because they have survived.
The crowded room smells of freshly brewed coffee, of dampness and unwashed bodies. Eight men, five women and four or five children are sitting in a circle, eager to talk. They have nothing to do but wait. When I ask them what they're waiting for, they are not certain. Three of the men are waiting for a foreign country to accept them as immigrants; the others do not know what they are waiting for. One woman waits for a sign that her husband is alive, another just cries.
The women prefer to talk about the war, how much land they once owned, how many cattle, how big their houses were. The men talk about how they survived Omarska and Trnopolje concentration camps.
None of them will mention the subject they know I've come here to talk about. Finally, I ask them if they have heard about mass rapes. Have they seen any? At first there is a silence; even the children are quiet for a moment, as if that horrible word leaves them speechless. I sense it is the wrong way to ask this
question, or the wrong time or context, but it is too late — I feel the doors are closing. Then I get an answer: "There were no women raped in our village. We were just lucky, I guess", says one of the women. We heard that it happened in other villages, cautiously adds Smail, the oldest man in the room.
The conversation suddenly stops. People get up and start leaving, a sign that I should do the same. As I am walking out the door, an old woman, Hajra, says in a low voice, "Come tomorrow, my child. Then we'll tell you what we know. We can't talk about these things in front of men, you know."
I expected this kind of reaction. I was warned by colleagues who have tried to talk to rape victims. Since September, when news stories, eyewitness accounts and official reports began appearing in the press, it has been clear that mass rapes are taking place in Bosnia. Now refugee women are questioned almost every day. A reporter gets off the plane at Zagreb and, like the old American journalists' joke, barges into one of the five or six refugee camps nearby, asking, "Anyone who was raped and speaks English?"
But most of the time one runs into a wall of silence. This silence is driving everyone crazy: reporters, feminist activists, UN officials, European Community delegates, Human Rights Watch, Helsinki Watch and Amnesty International envoys — all of them enter small and crowded rooms in this or another camp in Croatia, hoping to get closer to the real picture, to hear eyewitness testimony. But in vain.
The likelihood is that they will leave empty-handed or hear the same stories from the same few women willing to talk. If they are persistent and patient, they will eventually find a victim who will tell her story. Or they will go to Bosnia — to the towns of Tuzla or Zenica, where women and doctors are a bit more open, perhaps because they are in the war zone. Otherwise, they leave confused and disappointed that, after all the fuss that the rapes have caused in the world media, the women are reticent. Why won't they talk? Don't they know it is good for them?
The matter is more complicated than outsiders realise.
That their cases might provide evidence against war criminals in not these women's main concern. They barely survived the terrors of the war; many have lost family members or have husbands and sons who are still fighting there — or are held in concentration camps or have disappeared and it's not known if they are alive or dead. If the women talk, they could jeopardise the men's lives. Besides, once they are safely out of Bosnia, they want to forget what happened to them as quickly as possible.
The third, and perhaps the most important, reason is that they want to hide it. Even though each woman is one among the many victims of a mass rape, what happened to them is in the domain of unspeakable things, the ultimate humiliation and shame. The invisible scars are never going to heal, but it is better if they can hide their hurt and shame from others, even relatives and neighbours.
A doctor told me a story about three sisters. One of them was raped but didn't dare tell the other two until her pregnancy became evident. After all, under normal conditions only one out of 10 rape victims reports the crime. Why would women who are raped in wartime be more forthcoming? Most of the victims are Muslims from strongly patriarchal communities; they simply do not want to revive the pain they went through. I asked one if the women talk about it among themselves. No, she said, they prefer to face it all alone.
Still another problem is that it is extremely difficult to gather solid evidence under wartime conditions, with daily shelling and lack of food, water and electricity. In Bosnia, governmental commissions are investigating war crimes and are compiling affidavits. Such documentation is also collected by local clubs of exiles, the police, the Interior Ministry, hospitals, individual doctors and social workers. But these are random efforts and the results are not made available to the public.
In fact, the barely functioning Bosnian government is not using rape reports as propaganda. If it were, the evidence and documentation would be more available. But all the officials have been able to do up to now is publish a few bulletins containing estimates of the
number of victims and excerpts from victims' testimony: one report was submitted to the UN. It's almost as if they prefer to hide the information rather than go public with it.
And yet, by now there is sufficient evidence to conclude that tens of thousands of women in Bosnia and Hercegovina have been raped. The European Community recently put the number of rape victims at 20,000. The Sarajevo State Commission for Investigation of War Crimes estimates that 50,000 women were raped up to October 1992.
The numbers are highly controversial, and it may be that the truth will not be known until after the war, if ever. It could well be that, because of the wall of silence and the difficulty in documenting cases, the number is far greater than the world is ready to believe.
When I returned to Resnik the day after my first visit, there were only five women in the room. The youngest one, 17-year-old Mersiha, who just the day before strongly denied that she'd ever seen any rape, spoke up:
" Yes, I knew that five of my school colleagues were raped and killed afterward. I saw them lying in a ditch. They were there for days and each time I passed by I didn't want to look, but I did. It was in June. Their clothes were torn off them and I could see that they had been tortured. I saw knife wounds on their breasts, on their stomachs. Then, one afternoon, when we were coming back from a concentration camp where my brother was imprisoned — there were about 50 women walking back to our village through the woods — we saw that armed Serb Chetniks were waiting for us. We knew what was going to happen, but it was impossible to escape. They stopped us and chose two women. Then about 10 Chetniks raped them in front of us. We were forced to stand and watch. It was dark when they released us, and I still remember how one of the women shivered when I took off my jacket and put it over her naked shoulders."
When Mersiha talked, the other women didn't comment. They stared at the floor as if they were guilty, as if they were to blame. I asked Mersiha, But what about
you? She looked at her mother, sitting there and listening, as if asking her for permission to say more. "No it did not happen to me", she said, but I doubted her. Maybe, if I came on another day, she would decide to tell me her true story. That is how it works; only patience and empathy can break the wall of self-protection.
But Mersiha did tell me about a cousin who was raped. Her story led me to a refugee camp in Karlovac, as if she had given me an Ariadne's thread leading to an underground network — a secret, silent frightened network of women who know about one another's misery but prefer to hide it.
The 30-year-old cousin had been raped by four perfectly normal-looking Serbian boys, barely over 20 — not drunk, not crazy, not beasts. In fact, they were the boys next door; she knew them because they were from a nearby Serbian village. "After all these months", she said, "I cannot get rid of a feeling of carrying some kind of visible stamp, of being dirty, physically dirty and guilty."
When I asked her if she would go back, she said something that I heard over and over from many Muslims — and not only from rape victims or even women: "Under no condition would I return to live in the same village with Serbs as before. I would never let my children go to a school with their children. I would not work with them. In fact, I would not even live in the same state with them."
These words reveal the role that mass rape plays in the Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing". As Susan Brownmiller and other feminists have pointed out, women have been raped in every war: as retaliation, to damage another man's "property", to send a message to the enemy. Rape is an instrument of war, a very efficient weapon for demoralisation and humiliation. In World War II, Russian and Jewish women were raped by Nazis, and Soviet soldiers raped German women by the hundreds of thousands. Chinese women were raped by the Japanese, Vietnamese by Americans.
What seems to be unprecedented about the rapes of Muslim women in Bosnia (and, to a lesser extent, the
Croat women too) is that there is a clear political purpose behind the practice. The rapes in Bosnia are not only a standard tactic of war, they are organised and systematic attempts to cleanse (to move, resettle, exile) the Muslim population from certain territories Serbs want to conquer in order to establish a Greater Serbia.
The eyewitness accounts and reports state that women are raped everywhere and at all times, and victims are of all ages, from 6 to 80. They are also deliberately impregnated in great numbers (the Bosnian government estimates that some 35,000 of them have been impregnated, unbelievable as it may sound), held captive and released only after abortion becomes impossible. This is so they will "give birth to little Chetniks", the women are told.
While Muslim men are killed fighting or are exterminated in about 100 concentration camps (the Bosnian government estimates that as many as 120,000 people have been killed or have died in the Bosnian war up to now and some 60,000 are missing, while the US State Department estimate for those killed is as low as 17,000), women are raped and impregnated and expelled from their country. Thus not only is their cultural and religious integrity destroyed but the reproductive potential of the whole nation is threatened.
Of course, Croats and Muslims have raped Serbian women in Bosnia too, but the Serbs are the aggressors, bent on taking over two-thirds of the territory. This does not justify Croat and Muslim offences, but they are in a defensive war and do not practice systematic and organised rape.
Women who have been raped have almost no future. Besides the psychological damage, and in spite of a fatwa issued by the highest Bosnian Muslim authority, the Imam, that men should marry these women and raise the progeny of the rape in a Muslim spirit, each of them knows that this is unlikely to happen. It may seem very abstract to speak of rape as a method of ethnic cleansing, but it becomes quite clear and understandable when one talks to the victims and witnesses.
One woman told me that if she were raped, she would kill herself, even if her husband did not reject her. She could not stand the shame and humiliation, she could not face her children afterward. "I would prefer to be killed than raped"; "I thought about killing myself so many times" — this is what they say.
One of the most disturbing and painful things to hear is their attitude toward the children born of this violence. All the women I have spoken with or heard about or whose statements I have read — whether or not they are victims or eyewitnesses — with no exception said they would kill such a child ("I'd strangle it with my own hands", as Hajra put it) or abandon it.
To hear such statements from women, many of them mothers, gives an idea of how strongly they feel about rape, what intense negative emotions mass rape has stirred in them. In their view, the rapes are only one of the things the enemy is doing to them and are directly linked to other kinds of aggression, from shelling and attack to imprisonment, torture, killing, deportation and, finally, exile from their own homes, from their own country. They are suffering not only a loss of pride but also the loss of their identity and of their country — the loss of everything they ever had. This is why the mass rapes of women in Bosnia cannot be discussed without taking into account the political context.
What the rape victims care about most is the reaction of their immediate social group — their husbands, fathers, brothers and other relatives, their neighbours, their village, their compatriots. Their lives are strongly rooted in community, and any help they might receive individually will be inadequate. As one of them who declined psychiatric care said to me: "I refused the doctors' help because I cannot see how they could help me. I need the understanding of my relatives. I need to go back home."
The most important therapy is reintegration of the victims into normal life, but this is almost impossible. Reintegration is not going to happen soon; people cannot go home because of the war. And integration into the few countries that have accepted
some half-million refugees is problematic. Western Europe is closing its borders because of a rising tide of xenophobia and racism and because of the recession.
About half of the nearly 2 million Muslims who lived in Bosnia are now in exile. Europe has no policy on what to do with the greatest migration of refugees since World War II, on how to stop the bloodshed in Bosnia and bring about a sensible political solution that would be acceptable to all three sides. Without a political solution, rape victims are left to themselves and to partial solutions that offer only short-term relief.
It is easy to invoke the familiar feminist argument that rapes in wartime only draw wider attention when they are used as propaganda. If this is so, in Bosnia the propaganda hasn't been working. The mass media have mainly focused on the sensationalistic aspect and have treated it as a women's problem only, without considering the wider context, in terms of arousing public pressure for a comprehensive political settlement.
But even if the rapes were used for political propaganda, this could be justified because of the Serbian policy of exiling and destroying the Muslim population. If an entire ethnic group is systematically destroyed to the point of genocide, it is legitimate to "use" accounts of rape (or anything else, for that matter) as a means of getting attention and influencing public opinion.
Strangely enough, the women themselves — the five in Resnik camp, for example — are fully aware of this, much more than are the many politicians, humanitarians, feminists, activists or journalists who are taking their side and trying to help them. They also know something else, of which Europe is not yet aware: If there is no political solution soon, the Muslims will turn to terrorism as a last resort. Bosnia's Muslims are the Palestinians of Europe, and they will not willingly give up the right to their land.
As I was about to leave the little room in Resnik, a boy entered and listened to the end of our conversation. "I will slaughter Serbs with a dull
knife", he said, matter-of-factly. I asked him how old he is. Thirteen, he said. In two years he will be doing just that, if there is no other future for him. But he won't kill just Serbs. There will be a price to pay for those who prefer to close their eyes now. It was easy to see it on that boy's face.
["Women hide behind a wall of silence", by Slavenka Drakulic, The Nation magazine. 1993 The Nation Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Subscriptions to The Nation are US$44 per year (47 issues), from 72 Fifth Avenue, Box P, New York, NY 10011, USA.]