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[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

>>Ten years after the systematic rape of Bosnian women 

uat !z dze eku!valent dz!ng u!ch ud hapn 2 xyz +?






01 2x t!pd [! uondr uh! 

>attempted castration

fun +?




>[paraphrase] skars make one stronger

... mhhm. uho r ue k!d!ng








ivo not having learned very much 

>Here is the saddest story

the are very many sad stories.
the saddest of all is the story









>------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
>
>INVISIBLE CASUALTIES OF WAR
>
>Bosnia's raped women are being shunned by a society that refuses to see
>them as victims.
>
>By Belma Becirbasic and Dzenana Secic in Sarajevo
>
>Nine-year-old Edin is one of thousands of children in Bosnia growing up
>without a father. But while others have a grave to visit, or photographs
>to treasure, Edin has neither. His mother Safeta has one single, terrible
>memory of his father. "He lit a candle or a lighter and made his choice,"
>she said. "He was a Serb from Zemun. Even 20 years from now I'd recognise
>him."
>
>Safeta is a "raped woman", to use a label which became commonplace for
>women who fell victim to systematic sexual abuse in the first year of
>the Bosnian war.  Edin's father is the man who raped her.
>
>Today, these women are the invisible casualties of the war, overlooked
>and often shunned. The fate of their children is even more tragic. Edin
>is one of a tiny minority who live with their birth mothers - many of
>the other women abandoned their babies, or even murdered them.
>
>In the summer of 1992, chilling reports of mass deportations from
>eastern Bosnia and detention camps in north-west Bosnia, were
>accompanied by accounts of mass rape. There were even rumours of a plan
>to impregnate thousands of non-Serb women to fuel ethnic hatred. The
>exact numbers of women raped will never be known, not least since some
>of the victims were later murdered.  The highest estimate, delivered to
>a European Union commission in Brussels in February 1993, was 50,000.
>
>Behind the statistics were women like Safeta, detained for three days
>in an abandoned house outside Zvornik, north-east Bosnia.  There, she
>was raped by a one of group of soldiers and volunteers from Serbia.
>Two seventeen-year-old girls were detained with her. "One of them, Amra,
>was raped by 13 men," she said. Safeta, then 29, was luckier - she was
>raped only once.
>
>Today, Safeta and Edin live together in a small house in Zivince,
>outside Tuzla. The former works at the Vive Zena womens' centre in Tuzla,
>which provides counselling for rape victims and includes some raped women
>among its staff. Now 40, she talks openly about her experiences, turning
>away only occasionally. But she is unusual. Shame and ostracisim drive
>many women to conceal their ordeals, another reason a definitive estimate
>has been so difficult to establish. Safeta's story has an uplifting
>ending, but it sheds light on the tragic experiences of the many women.
>
>Many raped women were deliberately kept in detention until it was too late
>for them to get an abortion.  Safeta was six months pregnant by the time
>she arrived in Tuzla, and no one would perform the operation at that late
>stage.  Edin was born on April 14, 1993.  Unable to prevent his birth,
>his mother refused to even look at him, claiming she would strangle him.
>Edin was deposited in a Tuzla orphanage, and Safeta began her life as
>a refugee in Zivince.
>
>Teufika Ibrahimefendic, a clinical psychologist at the Vive Zena centre,
>where Safeta works, said, "It is the women who have kept their ordeal
>a secret for the last ten years who concern psychiatrists the most. They
>conceal it to try and protect themselves, but this creates an intolerable
>pressure.  I once heard a woman describe how every time she remembers
>being raped, she stands under a cold shower until she freezes."
>
>The Hague tribunal has recognised that rape was used as a systematic
>weapon of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, making it indictable as a war crime.
>Rape formed part of the case against the three-member Foca group,
>sentenced to a total of 60 years in prison for crimes against humanity
>committed in eastern Bosnia in the early Nineties.  Ante Furundzija,
>the commander of a special Bosnian Croat unit in central Bosnia was
>charged with watching the rape of a Bosnian woman, not intervening and
>not punishing the rapists. Proceedings against Hazim Delic in connection
>with the Celebici prison camp also confirmed rape as a war crime.
>
>But regardless of international law, raped women are still not
>recognised as victims within Bosnia.  At best, they are regarded
>as tarnished, at worst as "fallen women" who somehow invited their
>own misfortune.  For years, Safeta says she endured the whispers
>and pointing fingers of other women in Zivince. The taboo around rape
>even extended to her family. Her mother, sister and brother-in-law
>were supportive, but not her father or younger brother. "My father
>never asked me what had happened or where my child was," she said.
>
>Safeta remained in Bosnia throughout her pregnancy, but many women
>who had been raped in prison camps in north-west Bosnia were evacuated
>to third countries via Croatia. Director of the Zagreb Centre for Women
>Victims of War, CWVW, Nela Pamukovic, recalled two pregnant raped women
>who took refuge with her organisation, "One of them kept her baby and left
>for the US with her parents. The other threw her newly-born child into the
>Sava river.  She was charged with infanticide, but did not stand trial
>after doctors diagnosed diminished responsibility."
>
>Like Safeta, many women rejected their babies immediately after giving
>birth. In Zagreb, most deliveries took place at the Petrovo maternity
>hospital. From there, according to CWVW and the Zagreb Caritas office,
>unwanted babies were taken to the Vladimir Nazor orphanage or the
>Goljak centre for children with special needs. At this point, it becomes
>difficult to keep track of the babies. Records were kept of all children
>admitted, but staff had no way of knowing which babies were the offspring
>of raped mothers, not least because some women didn't tell anyone they
>had been raped.
>
>Moreover, the aftermath of war in Croatia and the raging conflict in
>Bosnia made tracking the children even harder "We didn't keep track of
>any of the children who came to us in that period," said a hospital source
>who did not want to be named. "Our priority was to provide them with care,
>regardless of where they came from."
>
>Zagreb Caritas received around 150 raped women, of whom around 60 per cent
>were pregnant.  Director Jelena Brajsa remembers the first 15 pregnant
>women who arrived in 1993. All had been repeatedly raped.  After delivery,
>four babies were transferred to Obrenovo for medical treatment, two
>mothers kept their babies and the remaining nine were collected by
>the Bosnian embassy and Red Cross and later returned to Bosnia. There,
>two were taken by their families, two were adopted and the remainder
>placed in institutions.
>
>In general, the babies suffered from the stigma of the crime which
>had created them. "I once attended a meeting of the Association of
>Bosnian Women in Zagreb, which is now defunct," said Brajsa. "They
>discussed the fate of babies of raped women and there was a general
>consensus that these children should be taken as far away from Bosnia
>as possible."
>
>A doctor at the Goljak centre for children with special needs recalls
>how nine children of raped women were admitted to the centre in 1995.
>He even considered adopting one of the children.  "One little boy was
>very sweet and I spent a lot of time with him.  However, my wife,
>who is Bosnian herself, wouldn't even consider adoption. People have
>something against these children, even though they are not to blame
>for any of this."  He does not know where the children went after
>they left the centre.
>
>Six months after leaving her son in a Tuzla orphanage, Safeta set out
>to find him.  Thoughts of the baby had been haunting her.  "I couldn't
>sleep for four months. After six months it became unbearable. If I hadn't
>found him when I did, I probably wouldn't be alive now," she said.
>
>A social worker told Safeta that her son had been admitted to hospital.
>Edin was suffering from malnutrition and had chewed his fingers to
>the bone.  When she found him, she held him silently for 20 minutes.
>"I could see that he looked like me and that he was healthy. I don't
>know how I made it home that day," she recalled.
>
>Although neither she nor Edin ever left Bosnia, Safeta was still
>fortunate to find her son. Orphanages and hospitals were overloaded
>and other women who underwent a change of heart may not have been
>so lucky. "In 1993 alone, we admitted 700 children and the capacity of
>the orphanage was only 110," said Advija Hercegovac of the Vojo Peric
>orphanage in Tuzla. "It is possible that many of those were the babies
>of raped women, but there was chaos at the time and we had more important
>tasks than keeping detailed records." Children who were later adopted
>were subject to the usual rules protecting their identities and those of
>their adoptive parents.
>
>Finding Edin was not the end of the story for Safeta.  He remained in
>the orphanage for another seven years, while his mother summoned up
>the courage and the means to bring him home.  Raped women who kept
>their babies are a tiny minority, according to Fadila Memisevic of
>the Association for Threatened Peoples of Bosnia. Many more may have
>wanted to do so, but the pressures they were placed under were
>intolerable.
>
>Mirha Pojskic of Medica, an NGO in Zenica which focuses on helping
>traumatised women, recalls the case of one woman who was raped close to
>the border with Serbia.  Even though she was a Bosniak, the woman fled
>to Serbia where she adopted a Serbian name.  Unable to tell even her
>closest family about her rape and pregnancy, the woman gave birth and
>kept her child for a year. Finally, with no money or family support, she
>left him in a Serbian orphanage. The orphanage discovered that the baby
>was a Bosnian citizen and insisted that she remove him.
>
>She then took her son to her own parents in Sarajevo, but they refused
>to accept him.  He, in turn, developed a constant fear that his mother
>would abandon him.  After some months, Pojskic received a letter from
>the Sarajevo social services saying the woman wanted Medica to take in
>her baby, because she could no longer feed him.  "I begged the welfare
>people in Sarajevo to find the woman a job so she could her support
>her child, but they did nothing," she said.
>
>Another woman approached Medica after being raped in Brcko.  She
>was accompanied by her mother, who kept insisting the pregnancy was
>her daughter's own fault. In the end, this woman did manage to keep
>her child.
>
>After a period of living alone and drinking heavily, Safeta began to
>stitch her life back together. She found a job, bought a piece of land
>and started building a house.  She visited her son regularly and was
>driven by a vision of living with him under the same roof. "That was
>what I lived for, the moment when darkness would turn into light. And
>if people disapproved, I couldn't care less," she said.
>
>At the beginning of this year, Pojskic launched a campaign to obtain
>civilian war victim status for women who were raped. This status,
>granted by the ministry for human rights and refugees, has a number
>of benefits attached.  "By entitling them to health insurance and
>other benefits granted to victims of war, by helping them to find jobs,
>we hope that women will finally come forward and admit they were raped.
>We may then find out how many women were victims of this crime," she
>said.
>
>Currently, only former camp detainees are recognised as civilian victims.
>It is hoped that by extending this status to raped women, they will be
>de-stigmatised. Official recognition of their trauma may finally dispel
>the notion - most prevalent in small towns and villages - that they
>were in some way responsible for what happened to them.
>
>Today, Safeta proudly shows off photos of her son. With blue eyes
>and light brown hair, he takes after her. Traces of the ordeal mother
>and son have endured can be seen in a certain reserve between them.
>"Sometimes I feel an urge to hug him, to kiss him all over, but I only
>ever kiss him at night, while he is asleep," she said.  Edin too is
>discreet. Hidden behind a curtain, he likes to stand at the window
>and wait for his mother to arrive home from work. He has never asked
>about his father.
>
>Belma Becirbasic and Dzenana Secic are journalists with Start magazine
>in Sarajevo.
>