From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Bosnia, Ingush etc (from Haluk)
Date: 28 Dec 1992 12:47:38 -0600
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

: Rape may be deliberate tactic in Serbs' 'ethnic cleansing' strategy
: Ultra-nationalist calls for merger of Serbian areas of Croatia, Bosnia
: Ingush leader slams Russian government policy in ethnic conflict

Rape may be deliberate tactic in Serbs' 'ethnic cleansing' strategy

27 Dec 92

        ZAGREB, Croatia (UPI) -- Esma, 40, sits in a chair in a Zagreb
apartment wringing her hands, as if this could ease the pain of
recalling her imprisonment with 2,000 other women in a ``rape camp'' in
Serb-controlled eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        The Serbs assaulted her town -- she will not give its name, nor hers,
to prevent reprisals -- in early June. She and about 1,500 other
townspeople, most of them Muslim Slavs, were forced to make a human
shield to prevent a Muslim counteroffensive.
 in a ``rape camp'' at the Djure Pecar Stari
school along with about 2,000 other women.
        They slept 40 to a classroom, shared a few mattresses, and were fed
bits of bread and splashes of water. Those camped close to the classroom
doors got all these meager provisions, and the prisoners vied for this
privileged position.
        And, she says, they were raped, repeatedly, systematically raped,
sometimes by former neighbors and acquaintances, while their fellow
inmates looked on.
        ``I don't know what kind of abuses I didn't taste,'' she remembers,
her voice emotionless, distracted, as if to avoid the memory. ``If there
was only one way left, the most cruel one, they would use it.''
        Once she was beaten and forced to urinate on the Koran, Islam's holy
book, for refusing to dance naked on a table for the entertainment of
her captors.
        ``They ripped off my clothes...they beat me here and there,'' she
says, pointing abstractedly to different parts of her body. ``This was
with the knife,'' she says, indicating a ragged scar above her left
breast.
        The soldiers, sometimes more than one at a time, also raped her and
the other women repeatedly each day, sometimes even with broken
bottlenecks and rifle barrels.
        ``You don't know whether it's going to shoot or not, you die of fear,
you go mad,'' she says, her voice still unnaturally level. ``Everything
else becomes secondary, and the raping was not so terrible any more.''
        The Bosnian government, women's groups and doctors all agree that
Esma's is only one story of the war in Bosnian-Herzegovina, which has
displaced more than 2 million people, creating Europe's worst refugee
crisis since World War II.
        A chilling aspect of these camps is that rape appears to be a
deliberate tactic in the Serbs' ethnic cleansing campaign against the
approximately 2.7 million Muslim Slavs and Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
which was the most ethnically diverse republic of the former Yugoslavia.
        No one doubts that Serb women also are being raped as Bosnian
territory changes hands in this bitter war. But independent relief
groups agree that the rapes of Serb women are spontaneous. The Serb
``rape camps'' appear to be deliberately organized.
        ``The rapes are part of a strategy to drive Muslims and Croats from
their homes,'' says Vera Folnegovic, a Zagreb psychologist who councils
some rape victims. ``It instigates panic among the population. When
hundreds of women see that even one or two are raped, then they flee.''
        The rapes also serve a second psychological purpose, according to
Asija Armanda, who helps war-displaced women in Zagreb. They are not
only attacks on the women but also are aimed at shaming ``the women's
husbands, fathers and brothers who failed to protect them,'' she says.
        Esma believes she was singled out for abuse because her husband was
the leader of the Muslim party in her village in northern Bosnia near
Doboj.
        ``They had a list, and we were chosen according to those -- they
usually chose the educated, distinguished, intelligent types of people,''
she says.
        As the Serbs were on the verge of entering her village, she says, she
and her husband braced themselves for the worst, but they could not have
anticipated what actually occurred.
        Serb leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina deny allegations about the
imprisonment and systematic rape of women. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic told a Dec. 23 news conference in Belgrade: ``The lies about
organized raping of Muslim women in the prisons and elsewhere are
shameless, groundless and beyond any criterion of human integrity.''
        ``We challenge anybody in the world to prove the existence of a
single prison for women, or a single case of organized raping, or even
the presence of a single civilian female in our prisons, which were open
to the inspection of the international agencies,'' he added.
        Despite his claims, two other women interviewed independently confirm
Esma's account of the Doboj rape camp. They too say they were held in
the Durje Pecar Stari school, and describe the same sequence of events,
with nearly identical dates of imprisonment and treatment.
        ``At night the local Serbs would come. They would put ski masks over
their faces, or cover them with black paint, and pick the women out,''
says Vasvija, another Doboj rape camp survivor.
        ``There was a constant stream of such men coming through the door
like at a busy cafe,'' Vasvija says, speaking angrily. ``(The women)
were like fruit at a fruit stand or livestock in a pen: Whoever (the
Serbs) wanted, they could come in and pick one up.''
        Vasvija says she was raped frequently by more than one soldier at a
time ``from all sides,'' she says, pointing graphically to where she was
violated.
        A third woman who was held in the Doboj camp, Sejida, 45, gave a
similar account, adding that she and her 14-year-old daughter were gang-
raped together.
        Sabina Tihic, president of Sumejja, a Muslim women's group based in
Sarejevo, says her organization is taking care of 150 women who were
held in camps in Gorazde, Foca and Grabavica in eastern Bosnina. Half of
them are pregnant. Their average age is 25, the oldest 45 and the
youngest 12.
        Tihic says the most sinister aspect of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing
campaign is that women made pregnant through systematic rape often are
not released until they are in an advanced state of pregnancy -- far too
late to get abortions.
        ``The women are raped not only to humiliate, not only to torture,
but...to plant the seed,'' Tihic concludes.
        The Bosnian government's commission on war crimes in Sarajevo says
14,000 Muslim and Croat women have been raped. The center for the
investigation of war crimes in Zenica in central Bosnia puts the number
at 30,000, and the Bosnian Interior Ministry estimates that 50,000 women
have been raped.
        The International Committee of the Red Cross, which regularly visits
40 Serbian, Croatian and Muslim detention camps where only men are held,
could not confirm these accusations or the numbers of women allegedly
victimized, and Didier Pradervand, ICRC protection coordinator for the
region, said field workers have not pressed individual rape victims
because of the ``delicate'' nature of the issue.
        The ICRC also is not permitted access to nearly all of Serb-
controlled eastern Bosnia, where Pradervand acknowledged ``anything is
possible.'' And those women who have been released have been reluctant
to tell of their treatment.
        Most of the victims exhibit what Folnegovic calls ``classic rape
syndrome,'' knowing that even though they were forced into sex but
harboring lingering suspicions that they somehow provoked the attacks.
        ``They ask themselves, 'Why me?''' Folnegovic says.
        Often the plight of these women becomes known to medical personnel
only after the victims have descended into utter insanity or if they
seek abortions. One such woman, a Croatian, came to Folnegovic's
attention only after trying to commit suicide by swallowing a handful of
sleeping pills.
        She and her daughter were raped by a group of Serbs in their
apartment. Her daughter was killed a few days later by Serb occupiers,
and her husband hadn't returned from the front, so she fled to Zagreb.
Later she discovered she was pregnant and could not be sure of the
child's paternity.
        The woman had little hope of ever seeing her husband again, and even
if she did, she could never tell him what had happened.
        ``She felt she'd lost everything, and the only way out for her was to
kill herself and the baby,'' Folnegovic says.
        Many rape victims also hesitate to come forward because they are
afraid they will endanger the lives of their family members and friends
who are still in the Serb rape camps.
        And for those who eventually are released, there is virtually no way
to help them deal with the private trauma, let alone be assimilated back
into society, says Nina Kadic, who heads the Croatian women's group
Tresnjevka.
        The women often end up housed in overcrowded refugee centers, with
little or no contact with their families and friends, and no hope for
the future, Kadic says.
        Esma puts it this way: ``How big was my desire to survive -- my God --
while I was in the camp. But then when you come out, then you just want
to die, nothing else. When you walk throught the streets, you think that
everybody knows it. There is such a big feeling of shame that I can't
tell it to anybody.''

Ultra-nationalist calls for merger of Serbian areas of Croatia, Bosnia

24 Dec 92

        BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (UPI) -- Serbians should move forward to unite
Serb-conquered aeas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia with the Yugoslav
union of Serbia and Montenegro, the leader of an ultra-nationalist party
that took second place in last weekend's legislative elections said
Friday.
        ``The triumph of patriotic forces in Serbia opens the possibility for
joining the 'Serbian Republic' and 'Serbian Krajina' to the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia,'' declared Serbian Radical Party chief Vojislav
Seselj, who has been accused of war crimes by the United States.
        The Serbian Republic is the self-proclaimed state that Serbian forces
are fighting to rip out of about 70 percent of neighboring Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The Serbian Krajina is the state declared by leaders of the
Serbian rebels who overran 35 percent of Croatia in last year's
conflict.
        ``Before all, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia must recognize the
independence of these two Serbian states,'' Seselj told a news
conference. ``And, they then will bring by their sovereign will
decisions about joining Yugoslavia as two federal units.''
        Seselj's right-wing party took second place on Sunday in elections of
questionable propriety for the 138-seat Chamber of Deputies, the lower
house of the Yugoslav Parliament, and the 250-member Serbian Assembly.
        He is widely expected to form republic- and federal-level coalition
regimes with communist President Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party of
Serbia (SPS), which won the largest share of seats, but failed to win
outright majorities.
        While there was still no verification of the elections results from
communist-run Serbian Election Commission five days after balloting,
unofficial returns gave a re-election victory to Milosevic over Yugoslav
Prime Minister Milan Panic.
        Panic has demanded new elections because of alleged fraud and vote-
rigging. International observers substantiated widespread
irregularities.
        Seselj declined to say if his party would join the SPS in ruling the
Serb-dominated remnants of former Yugoslavia.
        He attributed the unexpected showing of his party to a reaction
against measures taken against Serbia, including U.N. economic
sanctions, and proposals for using force to prevent Serbian aircraft
from violating a U.N.-decreed ``no-fly'' zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        ``With the Serbian people, they cannot talk with the language of
threats and political blackmail,'' Seselj declared.
        Seselj was named last week by U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence
Eagleburger as a suspected war criminal because of widespread alleged
atrocities committed against non-Serbs by the paramilitary branch of his
party, the Serbian Chenik Movement, in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
        Seselj, a thickset, pistol-packing member of the Serbian and federal
legislatures, shares with Milosevic the dream of uniting all Serbs in a
single state that would dominate the Balkans.

Ingush leader slams Russian government policy in ethnic conflict

23 Dec 92

        MOSCOW (UPI) -- The former administrator of the troubled Caucasus
mountains region where President Boris Yeltsin imposed a state of
emergency last month to quell ethnic warfare Wednesday accused Moscow of
taking sides in the conflict.
        Maj. Gen. Ruslan Aushev said Russian troops sent to North Ossetia and
Ingushetia last month to separate Ossetian and Ingush militants fighting
over a disputed internal border provided Ossetian irregulars with heavy
weapons such as tanks and armored personnel carriers.
        ``The Russian army is destroying the Ingush people. I've seen it
myself. Where else could Ossetians obtain such weaponry?'' said Aushev,
who resigned as temporary administrator of Ingushetia Saturday to
protest Russian government policy in the area.
        He told a news conference that most of the casualties in the conflict
had occurred since the state of emergency was introduced, and he called
for Russian troops to be withdrawn from the region.
        Aushev said the emergency administration created by Yeltsin and based
in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz had done nothing to ease
the plight of thousands of Ingush refugees, to arrange the release of
hostages or to disarm Ossetian fighters whom he said were still roaming
the countryside freely.
        ``The conflict has been going on for two months, and not a single
issue has been resolved. We haven't even been able to bury our dead,''
said Aushev, himself an Ingush. ``I think Russian policy in the north
Caucasus is very incompetent, very untrustworthy.''
        Russian deputy prime minister Sergei Shakhrai, who appointed Aushev
to his post last month, called his decision to resign ``unjustified''
and ``a mistake.''
        Shakhrai, sent by Yeltsin to head the emergency administration
shortly after fighting began, told a separate news conference that
refugees could not be sent home until their houses were repaired and all
illegal armed formations had been disarmed. He said he had punished
several Russian soldiers for breaking the law under the state of
emergency.
        Shakhrai said Aushev was ignoring the emergency administration's
achievements. He said it had helped to create a working government and
basic services in Ingushetia, where none existed before.
        The conflict flared in late October when Ingush militants began
fighting local police and seizing hostages in an attempt to take control
of the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia. Hundreds have died in the
ensuing bloodshed and an estimated 50,000 refugees on both sides have
fled the fighting.
        The district was traditionally Ingush but was transferred to Ossetia
by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in one of many moves to change the
boundaries in the pathwork of small ethnic groups in the Caucasus. The
changes left simmering unrest that boiled over into violence with the
decline of Soviet power.

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