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 9th April 2009 (available in
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Hijos/limpieza/etnica/elpdompor/20060409elpdmgpor_1/Tes)
