Rights
Child
INT’L WOMEN’S DAY: Bosnia
Rape Victims Forgotten
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
March 7, 2006 -(IPS) “When I gave birth to her,
I didn’t want to see her…but on the second day, when I took her to my breast,
I realised that she was the only beauty remaining in this world and so I kept
her.”
With these words Esma, a Bosniak waitress, explains what made her
keep her rebellious daughter Sara, 13, in the emotional award-winning movie
‘Grbavica’ made by the young Sarajevo author Jasmila Zbanic (31).
Esma,
former medical student, becomes pregnant in war-torn Sarajevo in 1992 after
being raped by Serb soldiers in her Grbavica home. But she tells Sara that her
father, a Bosniak Muslim, died as a ‘shaheed’, a martyr, in defence of
Sarajevo.
The horrifying truth surfaces when Sara needs a certificate of
her father’s death to obtain a free field trip with her school. Mother and
daughter are devastated, and fight, but make up again, despite the dark
secret.
But this happy ending is far from what is really happening in
Bosnia. As Zbanic told the audience in Berlin after receiving the Golden Bear
award for the best movie two weeks ago, “the ordeal of rape victims of Bosnia is
far from over.”
Victims of mass rapes are being shunned by family and
friends. Most of them are stigmatised and excluded from society if people around
them come to know the truth.
The children conceived in rapes were mostly
pushed into orphanages in Bosnia or neighbouring Croatia, and in rare cases
given for adoption. They grow up knowing nothing about their
parents.
Officials at orphanages in Tuzla and Zenica in Bosnia and
Vladimir Nazor and Goljak in Croatia do not keep track of the children’s origin
or whereabouts.
“I hope that this screening in Belgrade is the beginning
of the closing of a circle,” Zbanic told a Belgrade audience as the film was
shown at the local film festival Monday night. “This is because the foundation
of this scenario was practically written here.”
Belgrade-backed Serbian
forces in Bosnia have been accused of a systematic rape campaign against Muslim
women in the three-year war where Serb forces resisted an independence move by
Bosnians, many of them Muslims. The issue remains taboo in Serbia, where denial
prevails that such events could ever happen.
“The subject remains a
controversy that needs honest clarification in order to learn the truth of war
in Bosnia,” human rights activist Natasa Kandic told IPS. “Manipulation with
numbers does not serve the truth on either side.”
Documents submitted by
the wartime Bosnian government in 1993 put the number of rape victims at 20,000
to 50,000.
The rapes were described as “the most shameful form of human
degradation, humiliating violence and Serb aggression
policy.”
International reports such as a European Union-led commission
and a United Nations (UN) report came to vastly different numbers of rape
victims. In 1993, the EU put the number at 20,000, while a UN report in 1994
thought the number less than 150.
This last number is often quoted by
Serb nationalists who deny any atrocities in the Bosnian war.
The
International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has sentenced three
men, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic to a total of 60 years
in prison for rapes they committed in the eastern Bosnian town Foca in 1992,
where they held a camp for Muslim women.
As years went by the issue was
put aside, with numbers quoted selectively, but with victims completely
neglected.
A book was published on the horrors of rape victims’ lives,
‘Breaking the Walls of Silence’ by Seada Vranic. She came to the conclusion that
only one out of ten rapes was reported.
Medica Zenica, a non-governmental
organisation from central Bosnia, said in a study in May 1997 that one to four
percent of rape victims became pregnant.
“Those women were victims twice
— when they were raped, and afterwards when they were forgotten,” head of the
Sarajevo Society for Endangered People Fadila Memisevic told local
media.
Bosniak media took on the subject only after ‘Grbavica’ won the
Berlin film festival award.
“The issue will explode now (after the
movie),” Memisevic said in an interview with Croatian newspaper Vecernji List.
“I meet dozens of rape victims and their children on a daily basis, but no
mother has told her child the truth. This is where society should play a role,
but Bosniak society is obviously not ready for this.”
Memisevic said
there are no teams of psychologists who could advise mothers how to deal with
this issue.
“The local work and social care ministry has no idea how many
children there are of such origin, and they consider neither them nor their
mothers as subjects for social care,” Memisevic said. “Last year they tried to
make a list of those children but gave up.”
Reliable sources in Sarajevo
told IPS that in July last year the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef)
commissioned a report on children born as a result of war rape in Bosnia. It was
the first time any organisation has focused on these children. The report,
however, was never published for reasons not known.
In the end, the
victims of sexual violence are mostly left to themselves, despite the widespread
publicity over the atrocities committed during the war. Abandoned by the state,
many of these women are not only traumatised by their experience, but also
impoverished.
Cast out from their communities, often abandoned by their
husbands, few of them can hold down jobs either. Only a handful have received
compensation for their suffering, which continues in the form of nightmares,
physical injury and mental ill-health.
“In real life, there is no happy
ending like in ‘Grbavica’,” Memisevic said.
================================================================
To
leave the list, send your request by email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.
Categories: Releases