From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Subject: Rape Victims
Organization: Systems'n'Software
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 92 16:24:42 GMT

Copied without permission from:
The Washington Post, December 26, 1992

ONE MUSLIM SCHOOLGIRL'S TALE OF TERROR

By Peter Maass

ZENICA, Bosnia-Before the local Serb warlord took Mersiha away from
her apartment to rape her on June 9, he told her not to cry. Mersiha, a
Muslim schoolgirl, would be safe with him.
	Then, Mersiha, 17, said in a lengthy interview here, the Serb
ordered her, her 15-year-old sister and an 18-year-old friend into a car
and drove them to a motel in their home town of Visegrad. The notorious
Bosnian Serb White Eagle militia had just seized Visegrad, and Mersiha
sensed in a terrifying instant that the victors were starting to divvy up
the female spoils of war.
	The girls were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel, which has been
described by the Muslim-led Bosnian government as one of the Serbs' alleged
"rape motels." Mersiha was locked in one room, her friend was locked in
another. Mersiha's younger sister, Emina, was put in a room across the
hall. A few hours later, Mersiha heard her sister moaning and sobbing, but
she never saw her again.
	The warlord, Milan Lukic, who has been well-known locally for
years, came into Mersiha's room, put a table in front of the door and told
her to undress.
	"He said that if I didn't do what he wanted, I would never go
home," Mersiha recalled, speaking in a nervous but constant voice. "Then he
ordered me to take off my clothes. I didn't want to do that. He said I
must, that it would be better to take my clothes off myself or else he
would do it, and he would be violent."
	Mersiha paused in her narration. She tightened her hold on the hand
of her older sister, who is a student in Zenica and sat next to her
throughout the interview, which was conducted in this government-held city
in an empty pizzeria decorated with a few paltry Christmas ornaments.
Mersiha stared hard at a spot on the tablecloth and resumed speaking.
	"I started to cry. He said I was lucky to be with him. He said I
could have been thrown into the river with rocks tied around my ankles. But
I didn't want to do it. He got angry and cursed and said, `I'm going to
bring in 10 soldiers.' "
	And so Mersiha, who had never had a boyfriend, tried to stop crying
as she was raped.
	According to the Bosnian government, more than 30,000 women have
been raped in this former Yugoslav republic's nine-month-old war, with some
of the victims as young as 12.
	The government, partly supported by testimony from Muslim victims
and captured Bosnian Serb soldiers, accuses the Serbs of employing rape as
a tactic to "boost morale" among the victorious fighters and humiliate
Bosnian women and their families. A captured Serb soldier in Sarajevo has
told journalists that men in his unit were ordered to rape. The soldier,
Borislav Herak, admitted to violating two Muslim women at a "rape motel"
outside Sarajevo and then killing them.
	This practice of mass rape, the actual numbers of which have not
been confirmed, has been condemned by the United Nations and the European
Community. Each organization is sending investigative teams to the former
Yugoslavia to interview rape victims and determine the extent of sexual
crimes here that EC leaders described earlier this month as "acts of
unspeakable brutality."
	Most Muslim rape victims who have survived their ordeal are
unwilling to talk to anyone - spouses, siblings and especially journalists
- about what they have been through. Their moral code of silence may make
it difficult for investigators to collect firsthand testimony.
	One hindrance to disclosure is the resentment that many Muslims
feel toward Western reporters trying to investigate this latest atrocity in
the Bosnian war. The Bosnian government is publicizing the rape issue in an
effort to galvanize support for its fight against the Serbs, but many
lower-level officials and ordinary people view the Western interest in mass
rape as an example of how the West loves to be entertained with lurid tales
of Bosnia's misery - then do nothing about it.
	Mersiha, who escaped Visegrad a month after being raped, agreed to
talk on the condition that her last name not be divulged because her
younger sister is, if not dead, still in Serb captivity. Mersiha said there
was one reason why she decided to talk: "I want people to know the truth."
After a moment, she added, "I was lucky. I survived."
	As in virtually all other rape cases, there was no way to
independently corroborate Mersiha's story, since there were no witnesses
and the shadowy warlord who allegedly raped her could not be reached.
	The trouble in Visegrad reached a climax in early June when the
White Eagle militia, which has been linked to some of the worst war crimes
in Bosnia, took control of the Muslim city, a once lovely tourist draw on
the Drina River near the Serbian border. The White Eagles began rounding up
and murdering fighting-age Muslim men, so most of them fled to the
surrounding forests to wage a guerrilla war. The women and children had to
be left behind.
	Lukic, a tall, handsome and athletic Serb who is said by the
Bosnian government to have led the "ethnic cleansing" operation in
Visegrad, came to Mersiha's building on June 9 to inspect its vacant
apartments. About 11:30 p.m., he entered the apartment where Mersiha, her
younger sister and mother were staying with friends. According to Mersiha,
Lukic asked how old they were and, seeing the girls tremble, told them not
to worry.
	Lukic ordered the three girls to come with him so that they could
help identify some Muslim youths being held at the city police station.
When Mersiha's mother pleaded with Lukic not to take the girls, he became
enraged and started overturning furniture. "I am the law," he screamed.
	The three girls went downstairs and got into Lukic's car. They did
not go to the police station. They were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel,
which has between 20 and 30 rooms. They did not see any other women there
except for the middle-aged Serb receptionists, who were joking with
soldiers milling around the lobby.
	The girls initially were locked in one room together. But after
about 10 minutes, Lukic came to the room with a soldier and told Mersiha's
18-year-old friend to go with him for "questioning." Mersiha overheard
Lukic tell the soldier in the corridor to "question her but not too much."
Other soldiers in the hallway began laughing.
	The same scenario unfolded with Mersiha's sister, Emina. Lukic
entered with a soldier and told 15-year-old Emina to leave with the
soldier. He gave the same order - question her but "not too much." There
was more laughter in the corridor.
	Lukic left Mersiha alone in the room for about 10 minutes. Then he
came back, put a table in front of the door and gave the order to undress,
followed by the threat of rape by 10 soldiers if she did not comply.
	After the rape was over, Mersiha began crying again. She said in
the interview that she was crying for her younger sister, not for herself.
It did not matter. Lukic taunted her, she said. "What do you want to do to
me?" he sneered. "Stuff me into a big artillery gun and shoot me to
Turkey?"
	Mersiha said Lukic fell asleep. Some soldiers knocked on the door
and one of them shouted to Lukic, "We know what you've got in there and we
want it too." Lukic told them to go away.
	Then Mersiha heard the voice.
	"At about 3 o'clock, I heard a loud cry when the door across the
hall was opened. The girl inside that room started to cry. I recognized the
voice. It was my sister."
	Mersiha has not seen or heard from her sister since that moment.
	At about 5 a.m., Lukic ordered Mersiha to get dressed, and then,
much to her surprise, he drove her home. Mersiha's terrified mother was
waiting for her in the apartment building's entryway.
	"I decided to not tell her that I was raped," Mersiha explained.
"She was crying and asked me, `Where is your sister and your friend?' I
told her they were okay, they were just staying overnight. I didn't want to
hurt my mother."
	Mersiha and her mother stayed in Visegrad for a month more, hoping
that Emina would be freed and sent home. Even though the town's Muslim
population was under virtual house arrest, Mersiha's mother went to the
police station almost every day. One time, a Serb policeman simply aimed
his loaded gun at her and said, "Leave." Another time, she saw Lukic there.
	"Lukic said to her, `What do you want? At least I returned one of
your daughters,' " according to Mersiha.
	With few Muslims left in Visegrad, Mersiha and her mother had
little choice but to leave in a bus convoy in the middle of July. Their
best hope is that Emina is still in Serb captivity. Their worst fear is
that she is dead.
	Mersiha now lives in a student hostel in Zenica with her older
sister, Meliha, who was in this central Bosnian town when the rapes
occurred. Instead of remaining silent and withdrawing, she constantly talks
about the ordeal with her sister.
	Even so, Mersiha says she has nightmares every night and must sleep
in the same room with her sister. She gets frightened whenever Meliha goes
out. Mersiha told her story reluctantly - she avoided talking about the
rape for the first 45 minutes of the interview. But then it came tumbling
out, almost nonstop.
	"I want to tell the Westerners the real truth," she said. "I want
them to stop these crimes. There are plenty of girls in a worse position
than me."

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	THOUSANDS OF WOMEN ALLEGED TO HAVE BEEN RAPED

	By Peter Maass

	ZENICA, Bosnia - Two weeks ago, a 22-year-old woman made her way to
the gynecology ward at the main hospital here and asked doctors for an
abortion. The woman, from the eastern Bosnian town of Foca, said she had
been repeatedly raped by Serb soldiers and had just escaped.
	She was 4 months pregnant.
	"She insisted on having an abortion," said Sead Sestic, head of the
hospital's gynecology department. "She didn't understand the danger for her
health, that we couldn't do it. She cried. It was painful. We didn't know
what to tell her."
	The woman, who had come to the hospital alone, left it alone,
trudging off into a shabby city filled with refugees and despair. But in
the saddest of ways, she was not alone. There are, according to the Bosnian
government, at least 30,000 other women who have been raped by Serb
soldiers.
	"We see a lot of pregnant women, and we imagine that they were
raped, but they won't talk about it," said Selma Hecimovic of the Center
for the Investigation of War Crimes and Crimes of Genocide Against Bosnian
Muslims, which is headquartered here. "They talk about other women being
raped but not about themselves being raped."
	At the Zenica hospital, doctors perform about nine abortions a day,
which is three more than they performed in peacetime. The doctors suspect
that rape is the reason, but they do not make inquiries when women ask for
an abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.
	In conservative Muslim culture, the rape of a woman is not just a
personal tragedy; it is viewed as an attack on the woman's family. Nothing
can ever be the same again. If the rapes are, indeed, aimed at demoralizing
all Bosnians, as the government maintains, then the aim has been partly
achieved.
	"It is a double humiliation," said Hecimovic. "The women were
humiliated when they were raped, and the men were humiliated for being
unable to protect them."
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SAVE BOSNIANS FROM HUNGER AND FREEZING.


(Please also write to your elected representative and
ask him/her to speak up AND do something to stop the
aggression on innocent people.)

 
Make a donation to one of the organizations below:     
 
Bosnia Relief Fund       Bosnia Relief Fund        
1926 freedomlane         330 East 39, Suite 4D     
Falls Church, VI 22043   Newyork, NY 10016          
 
Food & Relief for Bosnia Ziraat Bank
277 west midland Ave.    Account no 60558000433
Paramus NJ 07652         330 Madison Avenue (32nd Floor)
                         New York, NY 10017 
Bosnian relief
American Red Cross 
P.O.BOX 37243
WASHINGTON D.C. 20013 
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