Chernobyl Voices, 20 Years Later 25/05/2009

Liudmila Ignatenko’s testimony, wife of the dead fireman Vasili Ignatenko:

I don’t know what to talk about. Death or love? Or is it the same? About what?’

We had married recently. We still walked down the street holding hands, even when we were shopping. Always together. Used to tell him ‘I love you’. But I didn’t know yet how much I loved him. I could not imagine it. We lived in the building blocks of the firefighters’ unit, where he used to work. In the flat at the top. There were three other young families; we had a kitchen to share. And downstairs there were the cars. Red firefighting lorries. That was his job. I was always aware of everything: where he was, what was going on.

I heard a noise in the middle of the night. Shouting. I looked out the window. He saw me: ‘Close the windows and go to bed. There is a fire in the plant. I’ll be back soon.’

I didn’t see the explosion. Only the flames. Everything looked lit up. The whole sky. Tall flames. And soot. A horrible heat. And he was not back yet. The soot was caused by burning tar; the plant’s ceiling was covered in tar. Over which people used to walk, he remembered later, as if it was resin. The flames were suffocating, and all along, he was crawling. He went up the reactor. They were throwing out the burning graphite with their feet. They went there without wearing their canvas suits; they left with what they were wearing, in their shirts. Nobody warned them, they called them as if it were a normal fire.

Four. Five. Six. At six we were to go and see his parents. To plant potatoes. There are 40 Km from Pripiat city to Sperizhie, where his parents used to live. We had to go to sow and plough. It was his favourite job. His mother often remembered how neither herself nor her husband wanted to let him go to the city; they even built him a new house.  But the Army took him. He served in Moscow, in the firefighting troops, and when he came back he only wanted to be a firefighter. He didn’t wish for anything else. [She goes silent].

Sometimes I think I can hear his voice. Alive. Not even photos have the same effect on me like his voice. But he never calls me. And in dreams, it is me calling him.

Seven. At seven they told me he was in hospital. I ran there, but the hospital was already cordoned off by the militia; they didn’t let anybody through. Only ambulances were allowed through. Militians were screaming: the cars are contaminated, do not get close. I was not alone, all the women, whose husbands were that night in the plant, came over.

Do not trespass.

I ran looking for somebody I knew who worked as a doctor in that hospital. I grabbed her by the uniform as she was getting out of a car. ‘Let me get in!’ ‘I can’t! He’s bad. They’re all bad.’ I was still grabbing her. ‘Only to see him.’ ‘Fine’, she says. ‘Quick, fifteen, twenty minutes.’

I saw him. He was swollen all over. He almost didn’t have any eyes. ‘Milk! Lots of milk!’ said my friend. ‘Let him drink at least three litres.’ ‘He does not drink milk.’ ‘Then now he’ll have to.’

Many doctors, nurses and especially assistants in that hospital would be ill after a while. They would die. But back then nobody knew it.

At ten in the morning the technician Shishenok died. He was the first one. On the first day. Then we found out that underneath the rubble another one had been trapped, Valera Jodemchuk. They didn’t manage to get him out. They were trapped between concrete. Back then we still didn’t know that all of them would be the first ones.

I ask him, ‘Vasia, what will I do?’ ‘Leave! Leave! You’re expecting a child.’ I am pregnant, it is true. But how am I going to leave him? He asks me ‘Go! Save the child!’ ‘First I’ll bring the milk and then we’ll see.’

My friend Tania Kibenok arrives. Her husband is in the same room. She has come with his father, who has a car. We all get into the car and we go to the village to get milk. About 3 kilometres from the city. We buy many 3-litres containers of milk. Six of them, so that there was plenty for everybody. But the milk was provoking them to vomit horribly. They kept on losing consciousness constantly; they put them on a drip. Doctors assured us, I don’t know why, that they had been poisoned by the gases; nobody was talking about the radiation.

In the meantime the city was filled up by military cars, all the roads were closed. You could see soldiers everywhere. Short-distance trains stopped running. They washed the cars with a white powder. I felt alarmed. How was I going to get to town at the following day to get fresh milk? Nobody was talking about the radiation. Only military men were wearing masks. City people carried the shops’ bread, muffin bags open. On the shelves there were cakes. Life went on as usual. They washed the streets with powder.

At night they didn’t let me into the hospital. A sea of people around it. I was standing in front of his window; he got close to it and shouted something at me. He looked so desperate! Among the crowd somebody made out what he was saying: they were taking them to Moscow that night. The wives got together in a circle. We made up our minds: we are going with them. Let us be with our husbands! You have no right! We tried to get through by pushing and scraping. The soldiers, soldiers had already formed a cordon of two rows, and they prevented us from getting through by pushing. Then the doctor came out and confirmed that they were being taken to Moscow that night on a plane, that we had to bring them clothes; what they were wearing in the plant had already been burnt. Buses were not running already, and we went on foot, running, home. When we came back with our bags, the plane had already left. They had lied to us. So that we didn’t shout, nor cry.

Night fell. On one side of the street, buses, hundreds of buses (they were already preparing the city’s evacuation), and on the other, hundreds of firefighting cars. They brought them from everywhere. The entire street was covered in white foam. We were treading on that foam. Shouting and swearing.

Evacuating the city

They said on the radio the city would be evacuated for three, maybe five days. Take winter and sports clothes with you, for you are going to live in the woods. In tents. People were even happy: they are sending us to the countryside! We will celebrate the First of May. Something unusual. People were preparing roasted meat for the trip, they bought wine. They took guitars, tape-recorders. The wonderful May celebrations! Only those women whose husbands had suffered the misfortune were crying.

I can’t remember the trip. When I saw his mother it felt like I was waking up. ‘Mother, Vasia is in Moscow! He was taken there in a special flight.’ We had just sowed the orchard. Potatoes, cabbages (and in a week’s time they’d evacuate the village!) Who was to know it? That night I threw up violently. I was six months pregnant. I felt so ill.

At night I dream he is calling me. While he was alive he used to call me in his dreams: ‘Liusia, Liusia!’. But after he died he didn’t call me a single time. Not a single one. [She cries]. I wake up in the morning and  tell myself: I am going to Moscow on my own. I that… ‘Where are you going to go, in your condition?’ his mother asks me, crying. My dad also came with me: ‘It is better if I go with you.’ He took all the money they had in their account, all of it…

I can’t remember the journey. The entire trip has been erased from my memory. Once In Moscow we asked the first militian we saw to which hospital the Chernobyl firefighters had been taken to, and he told us; I was even surprised, for they had scared us we wouldn’t be told, it was a state secret, ultra secret.

To the Clinic number 6. To the Schúkinskaya.

The hospital was specialized in radiology, and they did not let you in without a pass. I gave money to the guard and he told me ‘Go ahead.’ He told me the floor I had to go to. I don’t know who else I implored and begged to. The truth is that I had already arrived to the radiology section manager’s office: Anguelina Vasílievna Guskova. I still didn’t know her name, I could not remember anything. The only thing I knew was that I had to see him. Find him.

She quickly asked me: ‘But, on God’s name! Child! Have you got any children?’

How was I to tell her the truth? It was clear I had to hide my pregnancy. She wouldn’t let me see him! Thankfully I am thin and it was not showing at all.

Yes, I answered. ‘How many?’ I think to myself ‘I have to say I have two children. If I only have one, she won’t let me through.’

‘A boy and a girl.’

‘Well, if you have two, I don’t think you’ll have any more. Now listen: his central nervous system is completely damaged; his spine is totally destroyed.’

‘Well’, I thought to myself, ‘this will make him more nervous.’

‘And listen to me well: if you start crying, I’ll send you home straight away. It is forbidden to embrace and kiss each other. Don’t get too close to him. I’ll grant you half an hour.’

But I already knew I wouldn’t leave. If I did, it would be with him. I had sworn to myself!

I get in…I see them sitting on their beds, playing cards, laughing.

‘Vasia!’, they call him.

He turns around. ‘Good Lord! She has even found me here! I am lost!’

It was funny to see him with his size 48 pajamas for his is a 52. Too short in the sleeves and legs. But the swelling in his face was gone. They were injecting them with some kind of solution.

‘You, lost?’ I ask him.

And he wants to hold me.

‘Sit down’ the doctor doesn’t let him get any close to me. ‘No embracing here.’

I don’t know how, but we made a joke out of that. And a minute after everybody got closer to us, even people from other rooms. All of them were our men. From Prípiat. For they brought 28 of them in that plane. What’s the story? What’ s going on in the city? I tell them that they have started to evacuate people, that they are taking all the city to the country for three to five days. The men grow silent; but there were two women there, one of them was on duty at the entrance the day of the accident, and she starts to cry: ‘My God! My children are there. What will become of them?’

I wanted to be alone with him; well, even if it was only for a minute. The guys noticed and each of them came up with an excuse in order to get out to the corridor. Then I held him and kissed him. The he pulled away.

‘Don’t sit close to me. Take a chair.’

‘That’s nonsense’, I told him, giving it less importance. ‘Did you see where the explosion came from? What was that about? Because you were the first ones to arrive.’

‘The most likely explanation is that of sabotage. Somebody has done it on purpose. All the guys agree on this.’

Back then that’s what they said. That’s what they believed.

When I arrived at the following day they had separated them, each in a different room. They had categorically forbidden them to go out to the corridor. To talk to each other. They communicated among themselves by knocking on the walls. Stop-hyphen, stop-hyphen. Stop. Doctors explained that each organism reacts differently to the radiation doses, so that what one can stand might kill the another. Where they were, even the walls reacted to the Geiger. To their left, their right and the bottom floor was emptied of people. They took everybody else out, they did not leave a single patient inside. Not even on top, nobody else was left. (…).

His death

One night I’m sitting on a chair beside him. At eight in the morning I tell him ‘Vasia, I’m going out for a while. I’m going to rest a bit.’ He opens and closes his eyes, he lets me go. Once I get to the hotel and to my room, I lie on the floor –I couldn’t lie down in bed, I was so sore all over- I am called by a nurse: ‘Go! Run to see him! He’s calling you nonstop!.’ But that morning Tania Kibenok had asked me so many times, she had begged me: ‘We’re going to the cemetery together. I can’t do it without you.’ That morning they were burying Vitia Kibenok and Volodia Právik.

He was very close to Vitia. Two friendly families. A day before the explosion we had taken a picture together in the residence. How handsome our husbands look there! Happy. The last day of our past life. The time before Chernobyl. How happy we were!

I come back from the graveyard and I hurriedly call the nurse: ‘How is he?’ ‘He died about fifteen minutes ago.’  What? I’ve spent all night beside him, I’ve only been away for three hours! I was beside the window, screaming ‘Why? Why?’ I was staring at the sky and screaming. Everybody in the hotel could hear me. They were scared to get close to me. But I got over it and told myself that I would see him for the last time, that I would go to see him. I flew down the stairs. He was still in the chamber, they had not taken him away yet.

His last words were ‘Liusia! Liusia!’ The nurse tried to calm him down telling him that I had just left, but that I would be back soon. He sighed and went quiet.

I did not leave his side again. I went with him to the grave. Although what I remember is not the coffin, but the polyethylene bag. That bag. In the morgue they asked me whether I wanted to be shown how they were going to dress him, and I said I did. They dressed him with his uniform, and they put his hat on his chest. They did not put his shoes on. They could not find adequate shoes, because his feet had swollen. It looked like he had bombs instead of feet. They also had to cut up his uniform, they could not put it on him.

A shattered body

His body was shattered. He was a big bloody wound. During his last two days in hospital I would take his hand and the bone moved inside, it was separated from the flesh. Bits of lung and liver would come out of his mouth. He was drowning in his own entrails. I would cover my hand with a surgical gauze and I would put it inside his mouth in order to take all that from inside of him. This can’t be told! This can’t be written! It can’t be borne! All my beloved…all so mine. No shoe size would fit him. They put him in the coffin barefoot.

In front of my very eyes. Dressed formally, they put him into a plastic bag and they tied it up. And once in that bag, they put him inside the coffin. They also put the coffin inside another bag. A transparent film, but thick as a tablecloth. And all of this was put inside a zinc coffin. They could barely fit it in. Only the hat was left on top.

Everybody came. His parents, mine. We bought black handkerchiefs in Moscow. An extraordinary commission received us. All of us were told the same: we cannot give you back your husbands’ bodies, your children’s bodies, they are extremely radioactive and they will be buried in a Moscow graveyard in a special way. Inside soldered zinc coffins, beneath reinforced concrete. You have to sign these documents. We need your consent. And if somebody, outraged, wanted to take the coffin home, they convinced him that they were heroes, they said, and that they did not belong to their families. They were official people. And they belonged to the State now.

We got into the bus. Relatives and a few military men. A colonel with a radio. I could hear coming from the radio: ‘Wait for orders! Wait!’ We drove around Moscow for two or three hours, through the belt road. Then we went back to Moscow. And from the radio: ‘We cannot enter the graveyard. Foreign correspondents have surrounded it. Wait a bit longer.’ The relatives were silent. Mother was wearing the black handkerchief. I feel myself losing consciousness.

I have a hysterical attack: ‘Why do we have to hide my husband? Who is he? Is he an assassin? A criminal? A common prisoner? Who are we burying?’ My mother tells me ‘Hush, hush, my daughter.’ And she caresses my head, she holds my hand. The colonel informs through the radio: ‘Requesting permission to enter the graveyard. The wife has had a hysterical attack.’

Translated from “Voces de Chernóbil, 20 años después”, by Svetlana Alexievich, published in “El País Semanal” on 9^th April 2009 (available in

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/Voces/Chernobil/anos/despues/elpdomrpj/20060409elpdmgrep_8/Tes)

Belarus after the catastrophe

‘Belarus. To the rest of the world we are a terra incógnita, unknown land, still to be discovered. The White Russia, that’s more or less how our country’s name sounds in English. Everybody knows about Chernobyl, but only as related to the Ukraine and Russia. Belorussians still have to tell their story…’

(Naródnaya Gazzette, 27^th of April 1996).

On the 26^th of April, 1986, at 1:23’58” a series of explosions destroyed the reactor and building of the 4^th energetic block of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Central Plant (ACP), located near the Belorussian frontier. Chernobyl’s catastrophe became the most serious technological disaster of the 20^th century.

For the small Belarus (with a population of 10 million inhabitants) it meant a national cataclysm, despite Belarusians not having any nuclear plant within their territories. Belarus was still an agricultural country, with a population mainly rural. During the Big Patriotic War, German Nazis destroyed 619 Belarusian villages and their inhabitants. After Chernobyl the country lost 485 villages and towns: 70 of them are buried forever. During the war one out of 4 Belarusians died; nowadays, one out of five lives in a contaminated territory. We are talking about 2.1 million people, 700,000 of them being children. Among the causes of the demographic fall, radiation is at the top. In the regions of Gomel and Mogilyov (the most affected by Chernobyl’s accident), the death rate is a 20% higher than the birth rate.

Children of Ethnic Cleansing 15/05/2009

The raped mothers of the Balkan Wars break their silence and start demanding justice.

They were raped over and over again, night and day, until their captors got tired of it. Their husbands, children and brothers were killed in front of their very eyes. It took place during the declared war in Bosnia (1992-1995) by the recently deceased Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, when the old Yugoslavian Republic opted for independence. Today, 10 years after political leaders signed the peace treaty in the Dayton Agreement, these women are still the living image of the conflict itself. While the fallen men in the war are shaheed, heroes, nobody wants to hear about them; the word rape is too ugly to be present. These women are the forgotten victims, who have needed a movie, Grbavica, winner of the latest Berlin Festival for their country and the world to remember their existence. Over 20,000 Muslim Bosnians were raped systematically by the Serbian forces in the ethnic cleansing campaign organized by Milosevic. Some of them say that it takes too much to live, and that if they don’t kill themselves it is for their children’s sake, many of them the result of the rapes which destroyed their lives.

For them, war and the savagery in concentration camps has not ended yet. They live trapped in the horror images that appear daily in their heads, without a warning and needlessly.  The moment in which the smelly soldier says “You are going to have a Serb son” and they are gang-raped, when the uniformed man takes the knife and cuts their son’s throat, or the minute they start cutting their breasts. But they can’t even afford thinking in all of that, for they still have to bring up whatever is left from their families. Their children are already teenagers and want to know the truth.

It is unknown how many children are the offspring of those rapists, but organizations talk about thousands of them. Many were given for adoption in Europe, others live in Bosnian orphanages and many others have grown up with their mothers, believing that their father was a shaheed, a Muslim who died in the war defending his land. Jasmila Zbanic, director of Grbavica, who carried out an intensive field research in order to prepare the movie, says that women, when they came out of the camps, were in a state of shock and didn’t want to know anything about their children. Many ended up in Northern Europe. Nobody has tracked them and it is not known how many there are. Nowadays, those mothers who gave up their children live in torment. In the International Council for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims of Sarajevo they say that Serb soldiers did not hand the captive women back to the enemy until they were seven months pregnant, when there was no way out and knew for sure that they were not going to have an abortion. They wanted them to have Serbian children, in order to stigmatise the entire family, says Dubraka Salvia, the association’s director.

Without state sponsorship, these women have to scrape a living in the slums of Bosnian cities. In spite of the huge psychological problems they have, they lack social insurance and their incomes are limited to a widow pension, whenever they are lucky. Dayton and the Bosnian Government insist on the fact that they should go back to the areas they were expelled from, but they are terrified of the idea of going back, for they fear coming across face to face with their rapists, the majority of them still on the loose. And the Bosnian authorities defend themselves in the lack of agreement between the two entities which are part of the country –the Serb Republic and the Croatian-Muslim Federation- so as to avoid having to hunt the criminals down. Many women have been silent all these years and they start talking only now, little by little. They know their testimonies could imprison their aggressors, although they barely have faith in justice. Experts insist on the fact that exposing their pain is the first step towards cure, but many are incapable of verbalizing so many atrocities. Not even their husbands –the ones who are still alive- know about it, very few of their children do, for they fear being abandoned.

A Subject that Is Never Brought Up

Hasija Brankovic lives in one of the five hills surrounding Sarajevo, the city that was sieged for about 43 months during the war. At 35, she rarely ever talks about what the soldiers did to her during the month she spent in a concentration camp in Rogatica, in Bosnia’s Serb Republic. Both her older sister and her mother, who has almost gone insane totally, also went through the camps, but the subject is never brought up, despite the three of them living in the same shabby house and sleeping in the only bedroom, together with two other younger brothers.

They arrived to that house by chance after they had been evicted from nine previous houses for not paying the rent. Hazira talks about the tribulations she goes through to rear up her family, being unemployed and without any other help apart from her father’s pension, killed in the war. A mere €170, to which rent -€100- has to be subtracted. Hasija jumps from one subject to the other, later on explaining that the pills for the nerves don’t let her focus on one subject. Sitting on the floor of a living-room-come-kitchen and storing room, she starts talking about her imprisonment in the concentration camp. Her mother, wearing a headscarf and with very few teeth left, quickly tells her to shut up. The woman still fears retaliation.

We agree to meet another day, away from her mother’s presence. She says that the soldiers took them to Rogatica’s school. They arrived there every day and night, with a stocking covering their heads and they asked them whether they wanted to be raped or whether they preferred to watch. Sometimes it was only one man, some other times a whole group. It went on for a month. Hasija cries, inhales and thinks. They killed her father, and her three year-old sister could not make it out of the camp. If it wasn’t because she has to pull her family through, she would do something to herself, states this woman, who keeps to herself more horrors than what she lets out. Hasija doesn’t know yet whether she will testify in front of the judges one day; so far she does not feel up for it.

In the tribunal organized in Bosnia a year ago to prosecute war criminals, and which will replace the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a team of psychologists attends to the women who have decided to testify against their rapists. Jasmina Pusina, one of the therapists, explains that many women do not speak up because they hope to forget. They try to forget without knowing that they will never be able to do so. They live with their secrets until they one day they break down. It happens sooner or later, it is only a question of time, she states, who also explains that the therapy tries to put together the pieces of such a horrifying jigsaw. The smells, the sounds, the images of the torture days; they try to make the women aware of their own trauma so that they can learn to live with it. These therapies are directed by NGOs, which work intermittently, depending on the international aid.

Marijana –fictitious name- decided to talk some time ago, and to re-construct her hair-rising story. She has spoken about it in The Hague. Nevertheless, having testified has not inoculated her against the unavoidable breakdowns every time she re-lives her stay in a Visegrad’s concentration camp, east of the country. They raped her several times. So many that she couldn’t count them. Her 16 year-old son saw everything. They reeked, of onions, of alcohol. They were very dirty. They showed her several knives and asked her which one she thought was the sharpest. She bursts in tears. She saw how they put the knives to her son’s throat, and she asked them to kill her instead. She can’t understand what they have done in order to be so hated. The starts crying again, she sobs, but she wants to keep on. The men had everything thorught through, had everything planned to humiliate them and destroy their community. She realizes that them, the women, are useless now, and the Government turns a deaf ear to the whole issue. But she also knows that if they stay quiet they will never get anywhere, states this woman who lives in Sarajevo, who says she can tell the Bosnian winter’s arrival from the pain in her body’s scars. While in the concentration camp, Marijana recognised Milan Lukic, handed in by Argentina to the ICTY last February, after having spent seven years on the loose. Lukic was under orders of the fugitives Radovan Karazdic and his military boss, Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide for Srebrenica’s massacre, in which they exterminated 8,000 Muslim Bosnians back in 1995.

Maida Cupina also testified in Holland. It was against Milosevic. She doesn’t have a job either and lives in a flat lent to her by the tribunal. At 50 she is tall and properly dressed. Her hair looks well dyed, she wears blusher and lip-liner. She says that she has to be courageous and keep on going for her children’s sake. She was locked up in her father’s house, where she was available for soldiers 24/7. Serbians shouted at her that she was a useless Muslim, staging orgies that lasted for entire days, she tells us, chain-smoking in her apartment, where she lives with her daughter, who is an anorexic and does not have access to medical treatment. Cupina, 1,72 tall, saw her weight drop to 42 kilos. It was only then when the fanatic nationalists decided she was no longer useful for their needs and they exchanged her for Serbian female prisoners. She says that nowadays she lives condemned to a life sentence with those images, with the alcohol and sweat smell of those men, tattooed in her brain.

While Cupina speaks, the television shows the images of Milosevic’s burial in Pozarevac, birth place of the ultra-nationalist Serbian dictator. The soldiers who went to Nevesinje were Serbian, not Bosnian. It was not a civil war but a genocide orchestrated by Milosevic. He has diesd after taking up most of The Hague’s Tribunal’s time and money. What now, this woman who does not trust justice any longer, asks herself.

Suspects Still At Large

Together with Milosevic and the rest of the big names of the ICTY, official sources estimates talk about around 10,000 suspects still on the lose (the majority of them coming from the ranks of Serb fanatics, but some of them Bosnian too). Most of them live in the Serb Republic of Bosnia, one of the country’s two entities, and which, after the expulsion of thousands of Muslims during the war, has become an ethnically clean zone, with barely no Muslim presence. In spite of Dayton having recognized the right to the return of the displaced and the authorities meekly encouraging their return, the victims insist on the fact that going back is not an option until the aggressors are apprehended.

Nusreta Sivac is one of the few women who decided to return and now she has to face the possibility of bumping into her torturers in the three concentration camps she was put into in 1992: Omarska, Trnopolje and Keraterm, widely known through the images which went around the world, where starving men behind barb wire could be seen. She was there for almost two months. Talking about what took place there is extremely hard, says Sivac, who says that the torture and the rapes were generalized. Before the war she was a judge in Prijedor, a multi-ethnic city back then, 20 kilometres away from the border with Croatia, and where nowadays Muslims make up a tiny community settled in Kozarac. The houses are new there and have been built on the ashes to which Bosnian’s homes were reduced to, burnt by Serb soldiers and militians.

Sivac says that she was always sure of the fact that she wanted to go back. It is her city. The first day she arrived to her house there was a sign saying that that was Omarska’s door. Now she comes across men who tortured her on the street, and some who have been released after serving two thirds of their sentence. Her reaction is to look at them in the eye, it is the only thing that she can do, for with such people one cannot talk. This woman, who has testified in the ICTY against several concentration camps rulers, believes that for women like her, the best way to fight is through the truth.

Sivac, who belongs to a victims of war association, states that many of them do not want to testify because they are scared. The aggressors still have important positions within the Serb Republic of Bosnia. Some of them are military heroes, she says, while we sit in a Turkish air cafeteria in Kozarac. Proof of that is what is left of the Trnopolje’s concentration camp, nowadays re-converted into a school and neighbours’ association. In its entrance there is a large eagle sculpted in stone, paying homage to the soldiers who have lost their lives to help make the foundations of the Srpska Republic. Bouquets of fresh flowers lay on the snow, at the feet of the monument. In that camp, soldiers chose a few girls every day, and took them away to rape them. Some of them returned scarred by the tortures. Some others didn’t even return.

Sivac does not have a current occupation, and it is difficult that she find one in a community in which Muslims are not welcome. At 55, she will not be eligible for a pension either. In the Serb Republic of Bosnia women who were in concentration camps are not even considered victims of the conflict. Everywhere else in Bosnia, women who were systematically raped during the war are officially considered victims since last year, and in theory they are entitled to a pension, similar to the one any man who lost a leg by a grenade. The problem, the Tribunal therapists point out, is being able to prove psychological damage. For that reason, some associations ask the Government to pass a specific law that deals with these women, much in the same way to the one passed for the people who disappeared during the war.

No Specific Rights

The Bosnian Minister for Human Rights and Refugees, Misrad Kebo, admits that there is not a clear definition of who are the women war victims. They have no specific rights. He defends that raped women should not have any special right, and blames the Serb authorities for rapists still being on the streets and that in the Srpska Republic the recognition of women as being war victims does not even exist. He sustains that it is a regional issue, not only an internal one. It is about Mladic and Karadzic, about people who are safe in neighbouring countries. They ask Serb authorities to cooperate, states Kebo in the Government headquarters in Sarajevo.

Kebo also shifts the blame. He blames women for not wanting to speak. According to him, the State cannot do anything as long as they do not go public about what happened to them. He also assures that his Government does not have the necessary resources to help these women. Nevertheless, it is surprising to see Sarajevo a completely rebuilt city nowadays, where there is barely a trace left in any building of the mortars and grenades, but where th0se economic means have not been extended to re-construct the lives of the ones who were damaged for life by the barbarities.

In view of the lack of State initiatives, Grbavica, the recently awarded Bosnian movie in Berlin, could be the catalyst of the long-awaited collective catharsis which encourages women to speak and to remind the Bosnian Government its pending obligation with the forgotten victims.

Like the Spanish The Secret Life of Words, by Isabel Coixet, Grbavica tells the story of a woman raped during the war. The film talks about the economic difficulties with which women like Esma, the main character, have to survive. It also talks about the children who were begotten in rapes, who are now teenagers and who start asking about their fathers’ identities.

War lies

Many of the mothers who decided to keep their children have raised them in refugee camps, sheltered by the lies of the war. But these boys and girls are nowadays 14 and want to find out about their paternal grandparents and aunties…and there is no answer to those questions. Their mothers were raped so many times that, even if they dared telling their children that their fathers were not heroes, they would be unable to find them. They are extremely insecure and dependent children. They live with the fear that their mothers, traumatized and barely able to pull the family through, abandon them. A generational transmission of the trauma has taken place, Salvia believes.

Grbavica, which has been banned in the Serb Republic, and which during its première in Belgrade counted with the presence of Mladic’s and Karadzic’s followers who tried to abort its projection, is currently breaking record ticket sales in Croatian and Muslim Bosnia. The movie has been able to take the systematic rapes form the private to the public sphere, something never seen before in Bosnia. Not to let it be forgotten is an obsession for its young director. In her words, they were acts designed to humiliate. They destroyed so much: religious beliefs, self-esteem, lives. She is still incapable of understanding how men can use rape as a weapon, how they can have an erection as a result of hatred, says Zbanic in Tuzla, in Bosnia’s North-West, where the movie was recently shown.

That night in Tuzla spectators –mainly women- come out of the showing room shaken. Some of them, still with tears in their eyes, are speechless. A little later, Eilla Vickovic, wearing a hiyab, is able to speak again. She says that this movie can offer Bosnians a better future, especially to the ones who are scared that society will not understand them if they talk about being raped. But everybody knows the facts for some time now. She asks herself how it is possible that there needs to be a movie to understand it.

Translated from “Hijos de la limpieza étnica”, by Ana Carbajosa, published in “El País Semanal” on 9^th April 2009 (available in

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Hijos/limpieza/etnica/elpdompor/20060409elpdmgpor_1/Tes)

Edith Minturn Sedgwick: The Hell of A Muse 04/05/2009

Andy Warhol elevated her to the altars of his Factory. She became the flag of the ‘underground’ movement, cover of ‘Life’, actress, model and artists’ muse. Edie Sedgwick lived fast and died young, devoured by drugs. Hollywood, which never opened its doors to her, dedicates her now a movie, ‘Factory Girl’.

Edith Minturn Sedgwick

Edith Minturn Sedgwick came from a rich family in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.The Sedgwicks had been triumphing socially for generations: they were not only rich, but also refined and influential. A great-aunt of Edie’s had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent, the American aristocracy’s painter, and for years the family mansions were the setting of gatherings where the foremost members of the country’s society. Edie celebrated her coming of age in a full regalia party and was inscribed as a debutant in the Social Register. Pretty, elegant, educated in exclusive schools, a good marriage and a resounding success were expected of her. The problem was that Edie Sedgwick wished for something completely different.

In 1964, right after turning 21, Edie moved out of the family home in Palm Springs and went to New York. Her parents must have told themselves that New York wasn’t a bad place to find a husband, so they gave her a portion of her inheritance and left her in her grandmother’s house, who lived in a fourteen-roomed apartment in Park Avenue.

Edie didn’t have the slightest intention of wasting her time in the hunt of a good husband. She wanted to shine in Manhattan, but not as the twee debutante, typical of Waldorf Astoria’s galas: she wanted to immerse herself in modernity’s terrain, to reign in the temples of the New Wave. And so every night, after kissing her grandmother goodnight, she dived into New York’s night, where she became a reference. She was pretty, funny, classy and went around in a chauffeured Mercedes. In just a few weeks trendy Manhattan clubs –the Online, the Arthur or the Shepheard’s- fought for her presence. Everybody thought of her as the party girl of the time.

Andy Warhol met Edie Sedgwick at a party in Lester Persky’s penthouse, an advertising producer whose privileged apartment in 59th St. was the meeting point for New York’s social and intellectual elite of the 60s. Edie, who was an exceptional dancer, was on top of a platform, moving to the rhythm of music. A friend of Andy’s, Isabelle Collin Dufresne, Ultra Violette, said the minute she spotted her that she inhaled and exhaled glamour, that the word “glamour” had been coined for her. According to Victor Bockris, Warhol’s biographer, another friend of the artist’s was less complacent when stating that Edie was like a loony Holly Golightly [Breakfast with Diamonds’ main character]. In any case, Andy Warhol was fascinated by the young slim girl, tall and extremely thin, long-legged and whose dark eyes somebody compared to being the colour of a Hershkey chocolate bar put in the freezer. Had he not been gay, Warhol would’ve asked her to marry him that very same night. Before leaving, he made Sedgwick the closest thing to declaring his love: he said he wanted to do a movie with her.

Edie wasn’t aware of it at the time, but that sentence had the magic words in it that gave free entrance to The Factory’s universe. In 1965, the space created by Warhol at 231 in 47th St. had become the promised land of the New Wave. Completely covered in silver, like a gigantic mirror, The Factory was a film set, a place for orgies and photographic sessions and, especially, the reference point for anybody who wanted to become somebody: you could meet there Rudolph Nureyev, Tennessee Williams, Jackson Pollock, Jane Fonda, William Burroughs, Judy Garland, Roy Liechtenstein or Jim Morrison. Naturally, also policemen were regular visitors to the place when, alerted by the neighbours, they became guests artists and witnessed Andy’s and his friends’ mayhem. In The Factory one could listen to Puccini’s music while inhaling laughing gas, inject drugs, have a piece of marihuana cake for an afternoon snack or participate in an S&M number, everything in the same afternoon. Anything was posible.

Edie entered Warhol’s world through the main door. Of all the girls who made up his legion of fans –pushing each other whenever Warhol decided so-, Edie was the most dotted on, and also the most loved. Truman Capote used to justify the painter’s sudden affection for young Edie stating that Andy had always wanted being somebody like Miss Sedgwick, an adorable Bostonian girl whose parents put her in a long dress. That was, precisely, the Warhol’s biggest fascination: the privileged background, the exclusive origins. He, who came from an Slovak immigrant family badly located in Pittsburg’s outskirts, who had spent his childhood being fed –coincidence?- watered Campbell’s soup, who had had a life dominated by financial difficulties, used to fall head over heels for private school girls, who traveled Europe, spoke French and wore haute couture.

The majority of the genius’ muses were young girls who belonged to swanky families. Isabelle, Ultra Violette, was a French girl with aristocratic pedigree who used to go on vacation with the Rostchilds and the Dukes of Windsor. Brigid Berlin, nicknamed Polk, was the Hearst Corporation’s president’s daughter. Andy used to idolize those young exquisite-mannered damsels, victims of noteworthy class boredom and who were avid for new experiences, and he also got an additional kick in perverting them, tearing them away from their Uptown universe and dragging them to a damp basement covered in tin foil. The heart of The Factory.

Edie was the perfect incarnation of Warholian fantasies: so delicate, so distinguished, so full of charm, so sweet and at the same time so eager to experience new situations. Her wardrobes were packed with designer clothes and fur coats, but she always preferred wearing black leggings and men’s shirts. Despite her apparent scruffiness, she always looked splendid. She used to combine her men’s shirts with sophisticated long earrings and stiletto heels. She used to enhance her helplessness look using thick kohl liner on her big dark eyes. Her broad smile illuminated that girlish face showing dark circles under her eyes. Her wispy waist, her non-existent hips, her flat chest could make one think of her as a boy, but Edie Sedgwick was full of femininity, pure eroticism.

There was something mysterious about that girl; perhaps because underneath her sophistication and good taste there was a terrible past which revealed itself little by little. She had a long family history of mental illness. One of her eight brothers had committed suicide, another one had died tragically. Her father had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive. Even she had been in several resting homes before she was twenty, and she was an anorexic and a bulimic. Later on Edie would say that her father and two of her brothers had tried to abuse her sexually, and that her parents had checked her into a clinic for saying that she had seen her father having sex with a maid. Perhaps her parents hadn’t sent her to New York in order to make her find a husband so much so as to get her out of their hair. By the time she arrived in The Factory she had practically no contact with her family, and that made her find a substitute family in that strange tribe.

Albeit in an asexual way, Warhol became mad about Edie, and she became mad about Andy. A special relationship was forged between the two of them, something similar to a symbiosis which looked sick to some but which ended up being utterly destructive. With the aim of looking like Andy, Edie died her hair silver, and he started wearing, like she did, large shirts over his leggings. Sometimes it was hard to tell one from the other. Andy was delighted to have found his alter ego: it was like having within his reach the image that was waiting for him on the other side of the mirror. The decided to mould Edie until turning her into the woman he would’ve wanted to be had he not been born a man.

The artistic collaboration between Edie and Warhol began with a short appearance of the young girl in the film “Vinyl”, to which a protagonist role “Poor Little Rich Girl” followed. After that other movies would come: “Beauty #2”, “Kitchen”, “Bitch”… Warhol’s movies didn’t have a script: he would simply focus the camera on his star and invited her to speak, move and express herself. It wasn’t about telling a story but rather about creating a new form of art. And Edie, with her photogenic face, her elegance and high-pitched voice, was perfect for Andy’s plans, who just used to scream; you’re ideal, marvelous, just speak. Those films, which weren’t shown in commercial theatres, were Edie’s spring board, who became the queen of New York’s avant-garde. Beside her, to share the throne, was Andy Warhol.

In The Factory Edie found something more than a stage where she could unleash her artistic aspirations. The space conceived by Warhol became her testing grounds where she could experiment with drugs. Although a while later Edie would blame Andy for her addiction to half a dozen of substances, the truth is that when she met the artist she was already a drug user. The Factory only contributed to keep her habit, for all types of concoctions were around. The most popular drug was crystal meth , which could be taken dissolved, sniffed or injected, but there was also acid, speed, hash, amphetamines…Edie took anything. With or without The Factory, she was a drug addict who was completely dependent on pills. Meanwhile, she kept on living her popularity dream beside Andy Warhol.

Women’s magazines also fell at The Factory’s princess’ feet. Edie Sedgwick represented the fashion canons of the 60s: she looked brittle and fragile, had thin bones and girlish traits, like Hane Shrimpton or Twiggy, who topped the covers at the time. In came illustrated reports for Life or Vogue. The result of the shooting sessions is there: Edie owned the camera, she could pose, had a face full of meanings and nuances and an elastic body, perfect to show clothes off. Anybody would’ve predicted she would have a dazzling fashion career. But Edie was unforeseeable, had a changing mood and a quick temper. And, in case that wasn’t bad enough, she was always surrounded by a strange entourage where there was always a second rate drug dealer looking for payment of her latest dose. And that was something which sent chills down the spine of anybody who was within Diana Vreeland or Carmel Snow’s distinguished orbit, the grand Dames of fashion magazines. Thus, after a couple of articles Edie was generously paid and she became one more number in the black list of conflictive cover girls with which it was better not to work. Again.

Edie had been in New York only a few months when she realized that she had squandered almost her entire inheritance: renting luxurious cars, inviting generously people she didn’t even know, her clothes and her drugs had eaten up her savings. It was around that time when she met Bob Dylan and his collaborators, Bobby Neuwirth and Albert Grossman. A silent war had been going on for a few months between them and Andy’s people; the Factory’s people against the Hotel Chelsea’s tribe. Starting a friendship with Edie was for Dylan a way of annoying Warhol. On her part, Edie found the musician and his friends very funny, and moreover, she was growing tired of being the vase of a gay man. Dylan and his friends were heterosexual, and Edie found in sex another excuse to unbalance the scales. The group welcomed her with open arms, and they took the opportunity to attack Warhol, asking Edie whether it was really true that he didn’t pay her for the movies, whether she was really working for free. They started telling her that he was taking her for a fool, and that she deserved better, for she could be a true movie star, or she could even make a record, which would make her earn millions.

Poisoned by the comments, tired of her red figures in her bank account, Edie spoke to Warhol and told him she wanted to be paid for her work. Andy tried to justify himself; his movies were works of art, not Hollywood mega productions. He went on to say that they were good as promotional items, but they didn’t bring him any revenue. In fact, they were quite expensive. Andy thought that everything had been cleared, but Edie castled herself: she wanted to be paid, she wanted to get something for everything she did in his stupid films, and if Andy wasn’t prepared to treat her like a professional actress, others would. Their relationship started to go cold.

Despite everything, for appearances’ sake the Andy-Edie tandem was still working. They were the best example of a pop couple, and their public appearances dragged hundreds of fans, who gave them ovations whenever they came out of a limousine together, and they let themselves be photographed wearing their impossible attires, their identical hairstyles and their uninterested look. One of such star-like entrees almost ended in tragically. It took place in Philadelphia, in autumn 1965, when the Institute of Contemporary Art organized a retrospective show of Warhol and the premises, which could hold 500 people, were packed with over 2,000. When Edie and Warhol showed up, the crowd pounced on them in a collective fascination fit. It was necessary for the security services of the building to intervene, and took both the artist and his muse out of the room. Both of them were delighted with the commotion they had caused, conscious that they had reached the peak of their popularity.

By that time, Edie’s problems with drugs increased. She used to start the day with a handful of pills, and she chained one dose with another until bed time. She started to go into a spin. She walked like an automat, she could stay days without bathing and had hysteric crises every so often. During this period Andy started to say that Edie would end up committing suicide, and that he hoped that when it actually happened she would call him so that he could film it. Their arguments were more and more frequent: she kept on insisting on Andy to pay her work, and gradually he stopped taking any measures in order to placate the infuriated Edie. She had gone from being his best friend to become an unbearable drug addict who had lost her self control.
In his next production, “My Hustler”, Andy decided not to count on his muse and recorded the film behind Edie’s back, who felt abandoned by him. A short time later she would sign a contract with Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager, and would make known her intention of not returning to The Factory. The evenings in Warhol’s lair were substituted by day and night parties at the Chelsea Hotel. Dylan was inspired by her and composed two songs of his “Blonde on Blond” record, and they all told her that her artistic career would definitely take off. In spring 1966 fifteen months after they first met, she lost all contact with Andy Warhol, and she devoted all her energies to her new group, in her new family, which was going to guide her towards the road of success.

It is difficult to know how aware was Edie Sedgwick of the fact that she had let herself be seduced by something that was only the siren’s song of people who only wanted her to be on their side. Hollywood wasn’t waiting for her. Commercial cinema didn’t await her, nor did record labels or producers. And one day, the Factory girl, the Warholian muse, the girl who was in Bob Dylan’s songs, took a look at herself and was horrified at what she saw. She wasn’t the charming debutante who had arrived in New York to live her dolce vita and spend indiscriminately her family’s fortune anymore, but her own remains, consumed by drugs and alcohol: a walking corpse who needed stimulants to wake up and sleeping pills before going to bed; a poor twenty-something who had wasted her life, who had no future nor present either.
Edie run away from Dylan, Warhol and New York. She spent some time with her family in a desperate attempt to find herself, but there wasn’t any room for her there either. She went back to New York and starred in a movie where her work went almost unnoticed. She was completely drug dependant. She started several de-tox programs and was at the brink of overdosing a few times. She was checked in half a dozen hospitals, turned a living skeleton. She admitted to her doctors that she spent days on end without eating at all, surviving through coffee and pills. Isabelle Collin Dufresne, who became Edie’s close friend, tells in her memoirs that the young girl was sentenced for drug trafficking and spent some time in jail. Prison, psychiatric centres and rehab clinics were the setting of Edie Sedgwick’s final years. Precisely in one of those institutions she would meet Michael Brett Post, whom she married a few months before her death.

The people who saw her during her final days state that Edie had become a monstrous caricature of the woman she had once been. Drugs had deformed her face, her body was all bloated and her mind was destroyed by confusion and delirium. Whenever she thought about The Factory it was only to blame Warhol and his friends of the hell her life had become.
Edie’s end was very similar to Marilyn’s: she was found in her house, dead by the effects of some drug. It was never clear whether she had overdone it with some trip or whether she had decided that it living wasn’t worth it anymore. She was 28. Andy Warhol found out about her death through a friend’s call. The news didn’t affect him too much. He only asked who was going to inherit all of Edie’s money. The person at the other end of the line answered that Edie Sedgwick was completely penniless. Warhol just went “ah, well” and proceeded to ask her what she had been doing. For Warhol, Eddie had stopped existing the very moment she left The Factory, with her black leggings and masculine shirt, to be in Bob Dylan’s songs and the cheap rooms of the Chelsea Hotel.

Translated from “El infierno de la musa”, by Marta Rivera de la Cruz, published in El País  Semanal on the 19th November 2006 (available in  http://www.elpais.es/solotexto/articulo.html?xref=20061119elpepspor_2&type=Tes&k=infierno_musa)