It is to the lasting shame of the Serb people that they have tolerated it for this long, and for the most part enthusiastically supported its genocidal campaign against the Kosovars. It brings home very vividly the grotesque patriarchal traditionalism that still pervades Kosovar culture, and that further blights the lives of rape survivors. Brief excerpts are attached below. She would have no future anyway after what they did to her. For the untold numbers of Kosovo Albanian women and girls raped by Serbian soldiers in the conflagration of hate consuming the province in southern Yugoslavia, the heartless judgment expected from their backward rural communities may prove the more enduring injury from this most humiliating of war crimes.
Rape is a powerful taboo in their society.
But that has to change because what has happened in these conditions of war has affected too many women. Ethnic Albanians like the Lokajs, who are from poor, rural areas, see death as the only honorable future for those raped by the marauding enemies. Fears of being ostracized are clearly not unfounded, with even younger men often saying that they would be unable to bear the social stigma of having a wife who had been raped. There would be strong pressure for me to reject her. We would only be able to stay together if we went abroad.