Herzegovina, there is little reward aside from the emotional catharsis of voicing a painful truth. Their experiences are horrifying and legion. At virtually every refugee camp and hostel in crowded Croatia, haunted women of all ages plod through the motions of living, propelled only by the need to be strong for children or parents depending on them. Every time one woman finds the strength to talk about what has happened to her, it turns out every woman in her village was raped. In traditional societies, like those in the occupied areas, women have always been considered property, so violating them is a way for the winners to show who now controls that property.
Some victims relate their attacks in the third person, or delegate the disclosure to trusted elders.
While their daughters wept in silence, two older women from Hanifici, near the central Bosnian city of Kotor Varos, told of a three-night ordeal suffered by the younger women of their village after Serbian rebels moved in with tanks and artillery, rounded up adult men and marched them off to a fate still unknown to the women. The rapes, amid four months of unmitigated terror, seem to have equal rank with the other brutalities in her recollections. She has no more tears to shed in the retelling. They kicked in the door. I don't know how many.