[ALBSA-Info] A War's Hidden Tragedy

[Iris Pilika]

A War’s Hidden Tragedy

NEWSWEEK and MSNBC revisit Kosovar Albanian women raped during the war

By Donatella Lorch and Preston Mendenhall
Newsweek.MSNBC.com

CENTRAL KOSOVO — These days Drita rarely enters her former home, destroyed 
by Serbs during the Kosovo war. Only one and a half walls still stand; slabs 
of scorched concrete cast shadows across a floor littered with broken red 
bricks. Drita, 29, comes here to be alone, to escape the inquisitive eyes 
and ears of her extended family.
  As she tells her story, Drita’s eyes constantly dart over her shoulder. 
She is worried that someone in the family will hear.



YET BEING ALONE-or, in this case, accompanied by a foreign reporter she got 
to know last year-also makes her nervous. She squats on a pile of bricks, 
her hands clasped tightly in front of her, and stares straight ahead toward 
rolling green hills.
The real damage, she seems to be saying, is not the debris around her; it's 
the ruin within.

Drita recalls wartime memories with as much overt emotion as she'd muster to 
read a grocery list. A Serb policeman dragged her away from her children, 
out of a room in a private house where she and other women and children were 
being held. He taunted her and ordered her to strip. When she screamed, he 
laughed and clamped a hand over her mouth. Then he pinned her arms behind 
her and raped her. Another man stood by, waiting his turn.

As she tells her story, Drita's eyes constantly dart over her shoulder. She 
is worried that someone in the family will hear. Children are playing in the 
ruins of another house 20 feet away, and the rest of the family is sitting 
and talking under a nearby apple tree. She tugs at her mass of curly black 
hair. "For over a year I have not told anybody about it," she admits. "I 
can't. No one here talks about what happened to the women."

The Kosovo war ended in June last year when, after a 78-day pounding by NATO 
bombers, Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic withdrew his forces. As 
correspondents covering the war, we came to know some of the women quoted in 
this article, including Drita. (The women's names have been changed at their 
request.) They told us last year in a refugee camp, in hushed tones, about 
the abuses they had suffered. Recently, in a joint reporting project by 
NEWSWEEK and MSNBC, we returned to their isolated village in Central Kosovo 
to find out what had become of them. What we found was a mostly wrecked 
place, where even the closest relationships are plagued by fear, suspicion 
and shame.

Since the war's end, the ethnic Albanians who make up the vast majority of 
Kosovo's population have been picking up the pieces with help from Western 
countries. Justice, though, remains elusive, particularly in cases of sexual 
abuse. A study issued in March by Human Rights Watch reported 96 documented 
cases of rape against Kosovar Albanians; the organization believes the 
actual number of rapes committed by Serbs during the NATO bombing was much 
higher.

The majority of the documented rapes, the report says, were committed by 
Serb paramilitaries "who wore various uniforms and often had bandannas, long 
knives, long hair and beards." Other sexual assaults were committed by 
uniformed police and soldiers. "Rapes were not rare and isolated acts 
committed by individual Serbian or Yugoslav forces," Human Rights Watch 
concluded, "but rather were used deliberately as an instrument to terrorize 
the civilian population, extort money from families and push people to flee 
their homes."

Drita's village, miles from the nearest paved road, sits on a ridge 
overlooking forests and other hamlets. Brick houses with intricately carved 
wooden gates are connected by narrow dirt paths. Haystacks crowd the 
backyards and chickens scamper underfoot. In all, the village is home to 300 
people. Most of them have known Drita for many years, and most would 
ostracize her if they knew her secret.

Yet in private, several women told us the same basic story. On April 21 last 
year, Serb police and Army units marched into the village and herded women 
and children into three houses. For two days and nights they pulled out 
women one by one and sexually assaulted them. At least 10 women were raped 
here and human-rights investigators believe the number is much higher.

In Kosovo generally, women fear speaking about sexual assault, terrified 
that they will be blamed for what happened to them. A married woman risks 
being expelled from her husband's family and forced to give up her children. 
An unmarried victim will probably never find a husband. "The stigma of rape 
is so deep that it is often stated that a 'good' woman would rather kill 
herself than continue to live after having been raped," states a report by 
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Drita once 
considered telling her husband the truth. "I did not want to tell him 
directly so I asked him 'what would happen to us if I were to be raped?' " 
she recalls, staring at the ground. "And he answered: 'I would never keep 
you'."

So silence became a barrier against further disaster. Drita's mother-in-law 
repeatedly reminds visitors that Drita only "served coffee" to the Serbs and 
never did anything "wrong." Other women may have, she says, but definitely 
not the ones in her family. "All the girls here are good girls," she says. 
"Nothing happened to them." Drita says she still screams in her sleep.

Investigation of war crimes now lies in the hands of the International 
Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Patricia Sellers, legal adviser for 
gender-based crimes at the Tribunal, says the aim is not to prosecute 
individual cases of rape but rather to build a case against the top 
commanders and leaders who gave the orders. But to do that, investigators 
need witnesses who can identify the rapists by their uniforms and units. 
This information will help the Tribunal track Yugoslav troop movements and 
lead them to those in charge. It's a huge task, and the women in Drita's 
village say tribunal investigators have yet to talk to them (although other 
human-rights researchers have come). Individual prosecutions are being left 
to local courts. But the victims aren't likely to find justice. For more 
than a decade, the Serb government in Belgrade controlled the courts in 
Kosovo and Albanians rarely used them. The war left a judicial vacuum. Now 
the United Nations civilian administration has just begun the process of 
rebuilding a legal system. But even then, finding and identifying the men 
who committed assaults is nearly impossible. Serb forces have long ago 
withdrawn from Kosovo.

A handful of foreign-funded grass-roots organizations run programs to help 
women in Kosovo. But none of these efforts have reached Drita's village, 
where the war continues to cast a pall on everyday life. The village no 
longer has its own water source, for instance: when Serb forces entered the 
area, they executed 11 men and dumped their bodies in the village well. 
"It's impossible to forget what happened because everything we do, 
everywhere we go, we are reminded of it," says Sheriffe, one of the 
villagers who witnessed the abductions of women.

Drita's extended family, which includes 30 people, lives in three rooms. 
Almost all of the adult men are gone, working menial jobs in Western Europe 
and only occasionally sending money home. With no phones in the village and 
no working postal system, contact is sporadic. One husband left seven years 
ago. It is a struggle for his wife to persuade him to send money for his 
nine children. Still, the family proudly displays pictures of the men 
working in Germany. In one snapshot, two men stand ramrod straight, visibly 
proud of the tuxedoes they wear. In the village, their children's toes poke 
through tattered sneakers.

The women say they are racked by anxiety, stress and depression. Symptoms 
include sleeplessness, chronic backaches, headaches and palpitations. One 
woman said she refrained from talking about the war at all so as not to 
upset her children. "You are forced not to remember and yet not to forget," 
she said.

Because the Serbs in this village raped women out of public view, people can 
only suspect who the victims are. One rape victim, Esma, points to other 
women and stresses that what happened to her was not unique. Women and 
children were packed into rooms, she says. The Serbs came with flashlights 
to pick out the prettiest. The women had covered their faces with dirt and 
hair to appear unkempt and pinched their children to force them to cry and 
distract their captors. For two nights in a row, Esma was taken out of the 
room where the women were being held and repeatedly assaulted. When she 
fainted, Esma told a human-rights investigator, one of her tormentors 
carried her back to the other women and handed her an aspirin before 
leaving.

Even within families, the wall of silence is firm. Arjeta, 28, is one of at 
least two women in one family who were raped, but neither woman acknowledges 
what happened to the other. For her, the bitter memories of war began long 
before that April. Several times that winter, scared of Serb patrols, the 
villagers had escaped into the nearby forests. Arjeta gave birth to her 
youngest child in the woods. Later, while a captive in her village, she was 
twice raped by the Serbs. Now she battles constant and severe headaches. 
"Every two or three nights I have the same nightmare," Arjeta says. "Someone 
is coming into my tent to eat me." She suffers in silence, her anxieties 
seemingly without end.


Mendenhall is MSNBC.com's International Editor.


© 2000 Newsweek, Inc.





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