Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 14:06:04 CST
From: <U15231@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: A Pattern of Rape

From: Bos.Net@um.cc.umich.edu

Contribution by : SII




A PATTERN OF RAPE

By TOM POST
c.1993 Newsweek
   About all she has left is her name, which she prefers to keep to
herself, and the shocking memories of last July.
   That's when Serbian troops stormed the northwest Bosnian village
of Rizvanovici, and S., a 20-year-old Muslim woman with a ponytail,
was rounded up with 400 other women in the yard of a neighbor's
house.
   Two soldiers, wearing camouflage uniforms and Serbian crosses
around their necks, picked S. and her friend I. out of the crowd.
   ``They brought us to an empty house and there they did what they
wanted to do,'' says S. dully. ``First we had to excite them and
then we had to satisfy them.''
   Afterward the Serbs traded partners. The girls had been virgins.
``They were laughing at us,'' S. recalls. ``They said we were
pretty girls and (that) we saved ourselves for them.''
   Her ordeal didn't end there. After being raped and dumped at the
yard, one of the soldiers came back to bring S. to his commander.
``He told me to take off my clothes and to lie down on the bed,''
she says. ``Then he did the same thing.
   He started to kiss and to caress me. He saw that I didn't feel
anything. I looked into his eyes and asked him if he had a wife. He
said no. I asked him if he had a sister. He said he had one.
   Then I said, `How would your sister feel if somebody did the
same thing to her that you are doing to me?' Then he jumped up and
told me to get dressed and leave.''
   S., who now lives in a refugee center in northern Croatia, is a
survivor of what may be the most sadistic violence to haunt Europe
since the Nazi campaigns: ``ethnic cleansing.''
   Now, on top of documented cases of systematic torture and murder
in Bosnia, come charges of a new Serb atrocity  mass rape. No one
knows how many victims there are, though estimates range from
30,000 to 50,000 women, most of them Muslim.
   In the last few months, a torrent of wrenching first-person
testimonies from refugees has emerged, suggesting widespread sexual
abuse by Serb forces.
   They tell of repeated rapes of girls as young as 6 and 7;
violations by neighbors and strangers alike; gang rapes so brutal
their victims die; rape camps where Serbs routinely abused and
murdered Muslim and Croat women; rapes of young girls performed in
front of fathers, mothers, siblings and children; rapes committed
explicitly to impregnate Muslim women and hold them captive until
they give birth to unwanted Serbian babies.
   Many reports are unconfirmed, and some may never be
independently corroborated. But as anecdotal evidence piles up,
Western media and women's groups are pressuring their governments
to take some kind of action.
   So far it has resulted in little more than intelligence
gathering by the United States and the European Community.
   The U.N. Security Council, citing ``massive, organized and
systematic detention and rape,'' voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to
condemn ``atrocities committed against women, particularly Muslim
women, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.''
   In blithe defiance of international outrage, the Serbs continue
to attack Bosnian towns.
   Do the Serbs have a deliberate policy of rape? Have they, as
Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic alleges to Newsweek, used
rape in the ``systematic humiliation and genocide of the Bosnian
people''?
   U.S. government analysts haven't yet uncovered anything as
obvious as a speech or direct order by a Serbian leader calling on
troops to violate Muslim women.
   But there does seem to be a widespread pattern of on-the-ground
commanders encouraging  or even ordering  their men to rape. The
testimonies of so many victims and witnesses, and of some captured
Serb perpetrators, have a consistency that cannot be accidental.
   ``It's hard to believe that all these Serbian men, no matter how
animalistic you think human nature is, would suddenly get it in
their heads to find a 7-year-old girl and rape her,'' says the lead
State Department researcher.
   Rape is an integral part of ethnic cleansing, of eradicating
entire areas of their historic Muslim populations through brutal
intimidation, expulsion and outright murder.
   In such Bosnian towns as Brcko, Bjeljina, Kljuc, Sanski Most,
Prijedor, Kotor Varos, Zvornik, leading citizens  anyone who owned
a business, participated in the Party of Democratic Action, held a
university degree  were hunted down and liquidated. The rest of
the male population was packed off to prison camps.
   Rape clearly was the coup de grace delivered to tens of mortally
wounded towns, a way of ensuring that women would never want to
return to their homes.
   For 12-year-old Vasvija, the terror began after she was evicted
from her village of Jelec in August.
   During her first night in Partizan Hall, a Serb-run detention
camp in the nearby eastern Bosnian town of Foca, two soldiers
picked her from among the 70 detainees, all women, children and
elderly civilians.
   ``They brought me to a flat, an empty flat,'' she says, a single
tear running down an otherwise passive face. ``They raped me.''
Both soldiers? ``Both.'' Over nine consecutive nights, Vasvija
endured the same hideous treatment at the hands of different men.
   Once she was taken out with her mother and another inmate. They
were all raped by the same Serbian soldier. Exchanged on Sept. 17
for Serb prisoners, Vasvija, her siblings and her mother now live
in a refugee center near Sarajevo.
   No one has heard from her father, who was beaten and dragged off
to a different prison camp when the Serbs overran Jelec.
   How many women are victims of rape? The Bosnian government
commission on war crimes in Sarajevo claims that there are 30,000;
the Ministry for Interior Affairs goes as high as 50,000 women.
When pressed, Bosnian officials concede that their estimates are
extrapolations based on a relatively small number of testimonies.
   There's no procedure for reporting such crimes and little
willingness by victims to come forward. Battered by fear and shame,
most survivors keep their stories to themselves.
   ``They have been brought up in the Islamic spirit,'' explains
Dr. Muhamed Sestic, chief of the neuropsychiatric department at the
hospital in Zenica, in central Bosnia. ``Sexual intercourse is a
very serious act, no matter if it's done with or against the will
of the woman.''
   Families, he says, often conceal rape to spare a woman from
marrying beneath her station  or to keep the knowledge from her
husband.
   Muhamed Sacirbey, leader of the Bosnian Mission to the United
Nations, has a grimmer explanation for the relative paucity of
confirmed reports: ``We believe many of the women who've been raped
have been murdered. But a thorough search can't yet be conducted of
the victims' whereabouts.''
   The Serbian forces, after all, still occupy 70 percent of
Bosnia.
   Proving mass rape is difficult. No allegation is so emotionally
charged  or so susceptible to exaggeration and propaganda. ``It
will be years before the full picture of what has transpired
emerges,'' reports a U.S. government specialist.
   ``When we finally can survey the interior of Bosnia, I think
we'll find a mass grave associated with each and every camp and
village that was ethnically cleansed. And in every one of them will
be women who were raped.''
   The attempt to pin down numbers enrages some advocacy groups.
``What happens to men is called politics, what happens to women is
called culture,'' says Gloria Steinem. She has a point: rape has
historically been treated as an incidental atrocity of war.
   Along with groups like the International League for Human Rights
and the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy, the Ms. Foundation
has labored to place rape in Bosnia at the center of international
attention.
   Many organizations hope to provide psychological support to rape
survivors. But a chief aim is to prosecute war criminals. Says
Steinem: ``These people must be held responsible.''
   But sorting out ``these people'' won't be easy. In his call for
a war-crimes trial, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger lumped
together the chief architects of a Greater Serbia  including
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic and Ratko
Mladic, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs
with low-ranking henchmen like Borislav Herak.
   A 21-year-old Serb laborer from Sarajevo, Herak admits to raping
seven Muslim women and to killing two of his victims in addition to
the 18 murders to which he has already confessed.
   ``We were ordered to rape so that our morale would be higher,''
he says from a military prison in the Bosnian capital. ``We were
told we would fight better if we raped the women.''
   He claims that he and fellow soldiers frequented the Sonja Cafe
 one of several alleged ``rape camps'' outside Sarajevo  which
maintained a population of 70 Muslim women and girls; those who
were killed were quickly replaced.
   Entire villages, such as Miljevina in eastern Bosnia, may have
been converted to rape camps. About 100 people,
   ``all young Muslim women and girls, were raped,'' says a
20-year-old named Aida. Her attacker was Dragan J., a Serb
policeman and neighbor, who excused his behavior, she says, on the
ground that ```It is war, you can't resist, there is no law and
order'.''
   Rasema, a 33-year-old mother, offers a similar account. She
claims that her assailants raped her in front of her two girls.
When she resisted, they threatened, ``We will cut out your teeth!
Do you want us to slaughter your children, to watch us cutting them
into pieces, piece after piece?''
   In his own defense, one attacker told Rasema, ``I have to do it,
otherwise they will kill me.''
   He may have been telling the truth. Two young Serb deserters,
Slobodan Panic and Cvijetin Maksimovic, now being held in a prison
in Orasje, Bosnia, told Newsweek they were ordered to rape and
murder for the amusement of their commander in Brcko, in
northeastern Bosnia, last May.
   Panic says he balked when two battered women, each about 18,
were brought to him in a room in a warehouse where 500 to 600
civilians were imprisoned.
   Serb soldiers ``said they'd kill me if I didn't'' rape them, he
recalls, insisting that he ``only did a little'' to his screaming
victims, not consummating the act.
   Three other women were dragged out for the same humiliating
display. During these episodes, Panic says, soldiers stood around
in a circle and laughed.
   Then they hauled two badly beaten Muslim prisoners before Panic
and handed him a gun. ``I said, `I can't, they've never done
anything to me','' he remembers. ```You have to or else we'll kill
you','' Panic says he was told. He shot each man in the chest.
   Two more male prisoners appeared. A soldier handed Panic a
knife. ``Butcher them,'' he commanded. When Panic protested, the
soldier replied, ``I'll show you how it's done.''
   Then, holding Panic's hand around the knife handle, he seized
the man by the hair, jerked back his head and cut his throat.
   Death, at least, brings an end to suffering. Rape victims who
became pregnant relive their horror every day.
   Sofija, a 30-year-old Muslim, was released from a school turned
prison camp in the village of Parzevic in mid-September, after
being raped every night for six months by five or six different
Serb soldiers.
   Now she is hiding from her family in a cold Sarajevan hospital,
tormented by the thought of the unwanted child growing inside her.
   ``I do not want to see the baby,'' the mother of two says
without emotion. ``I will not feed it. I do not want anything to do
with it.''
   Her roommate says that Sofija talks in her sleep every night,
debating whether to kill the baby when it arrives in mid-January.
   Somewhere in Sarajevo are 12 other pregnant women and girls from
the same village as Sofija who were similarly raped and held until
long past the time for a safe abortion.
   Earlier release doesn't guarantee relief: a 1978 Yugoslav law
allows gynecologists to perform abortions only up to the 10th week
of pregnancy; thereafter, cases are referred to a hospital ethics
commission which, in Roman Catholic Croatia, home to 400,000
Bosnian refugees, may be more inclined to put the babies up for
adoption.
   Rape is the ultimate act in the Serbs' program of annihilation.
They have robbed countless civilians of their possessions, their
land, their lives and their dignity. Bosnia will be haunted by
hundreds, if not thousands, of Serbian children forced on unwilling
Muslim mothers.
   The Serbs do seem to be winning their ugly war. But their crimes
have guaranteed that Greater Serbia will be an international pariah
for years to come.
-0-
 NYT-01-03-93 1800EST


WHERE THE WORLD CAN DRAW THE LINE

By RUSSELL WATSON
c.1993 Newsweek
   Is there any way to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia? So far,
the Serbs have resisted an international blockade and a global
outcry.
   They have ignored a United Nations ban on flights by Serbian
warplanes over Bosnian territory.
   The no-fly zone may not do the poor Bosnians much good, but that
is where George Bush, in the valedictory days of his presidency,
wants to draw the line.
   He hopes an aerial crackdown on the Serbs will keep their ethnic
aggression in check, even if it cannot roll back their conquests.
The trouble is, Bush's allies keep dragging their feet.
   The administration hopes for a U.N. Security Council resolution
this week authorizing military enforcement of the often flouted
flight ban. But a senior State Department official complains: ``Our
British friends are wimping again.
   So are the French  and it's their goddammed resolution.'' The
British wanted a 30-day delay in enforcing the ban, which would
allow them to equip their 2,400 peacekeeping troops in Bosnia with
heavy weapons as protection against reprisals threatened by Serbs.
   That long a delay would take some pressure off Serbia. It also
would ``leave it to (Bill) Clinton to blow the first Serbian
helicopter out of the sky,'' said the Bush adviser, ``and that
would be terribly unfair.''
   France wanted to limit the enforcement by allowing allied
warplanes to shoot down only the specific Serbian violators of
Bosnian airspace. The Pentagon said it needs authorization to take
out support facilities in Serbia itself, including air bases,
communications gear and fuel supplies.
   France also wanted to put the entire operation under U.N.
command, an arrangement that the United States, which would supply
the largest share of the military assets, simply would not accept.
   Washington believes that quick action is needed to avert a
repressive move against Kosovo, a Serbian province whose population
is 90 percent ethnic Albanian. The fear is that Kosovo could become
the vortex of a wider war ultimately involving nations outside the
former Yugoslav federation.
   The level of concern rose again last week, with a vote in the
federal parliament to oust Milan Panic as prime minister of what
remains of Yugoslavia.
   Last month Panic, a Belgrade-born California millionaire, ran on
a peace platform against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the
nationalist who inspired the attacks on Bosnia.
   Milosevic won a resounding victory, and the Bush adminstration
worries that he will now claim a mandate to extend Serbian
territorial ambitions even further.
   Newsweek has learned that, in hopes of heading off a crackdown
on Kosovo, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger considered a
trip to Belgrade to confront Milosevic, a former communist official
he got to know well during his years as U.S. ambassador to
Yugoslavia.
   An allied source quoted Eagleburger as saying he wanted to see
Milosevic and ``shake my fist in his face.'' But the secretary
scrubbed the trip after he and Bush decided that a high-profile
visit would only harden Milosevic's defiance.
   Meanwhile, Bush's people are keeping in touch with Clinton's
foreign-policy advisers, observing a careful distinction between
``informing'' them and ``consulting'' them.
   Clinton advocates enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia and
supports other limited uses of force, especially from the air, to
defend the former Yugoslav republic. Sources say Clinton's vice
president, Al Gore, met quietly in Washington before Christmas with
Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia's foreign minister.
   Short of bombing Serbia's infrastructure, the Bush
administration sees no sure way to restrain Milosevic. A Serbian
purge of Kosovo could draw other Balkan countries into a widening
war. But nationalism is complicating the effort to find a solution
at the United Nations.
   Hard-line nationalists in Moscow are demanding a tilt toward
Serbia, a traditional Russian ally. It's by no means clear that the
Russians would veto military action against Serbia, but cooperating
with Washington could cost embattled President Boris Yeltsin some
scarce political capital.
   And a senior administration official worries that ``If Russia's
foreign policy turns back, all bets are off. The U.N. and the CSCE,
as instruments of peacemaking or peacekeeping in the post-cold-war
era, are finished.''
   It hasn't yet come to that, but the idea of a ``new world
order,'' George Bush's loftiest legacy, is fading fast.
-0-
 NYT-01-03-93 1812EST