Women's Bodies a Battlefield in War for "Greater Serbia"

By Grace Halsell

The question I've been asked most frequently since my return in February from interviewing Bosnian Muslim women who were victims of Serbian atrocities is whether the Serbian assaults, including gang rapes, are different from what happens in other wars.

We know any war brings atrocities. I saw this as a reporter in Korea, Vietnam and Lebanon. As is well known, women have always suffered from rape—especially during wartime.

And I know that rape—political rape— has a long history. In the legendary account of the founding of Rome, Romulus told his soldiers to procreate with the local women. This we know as the "Rape of the Sabine Women." Helen of Troy was a war trophy. So was Cleopatra.

They go under the heading: to the victor belongs the spoils. Rape was always regarded as an inevitable by-product of war.

In the early days of the First World War, German soldiers were accused of raping women as they overran Belgium. After Japan invaded China in 1937, rape was part of the pattern of conquest, as in "the Rape of Nanking." There are documented cases of rape by Americans in Vietnam, as during the infamous massacre at the village of My Lai.

The Serbs, however, in the words of Time magazine (Feb. 22, 1993), have taken the matter of rape in war "down into deeper, more sinister dimensions." In my opinion they have unleashed the most evil weapon against civilians since germ warfare and the atomic bomb—and they have aimed it at the most innocent victims in any war: women and children.

A Strategy of Genocide

The Serbs are using three kinds of attacks on women and children in their strategy of genocide:

First, they are mutilating sexually by criminally assaulting small girls, and even infants. Physicians for Peace, a worldwide operation, has documented cases of Serbs raping 3-year-old girls.

I interviewed one 56-year-old Bosnian woman named Marta. She wore a dark maroon dress. She had a spirit about her, despite all her travail. She had cried so profusely over the past months that the area around her eyes had gone past the color of red—all around her sockets was the color purple. She was held in a concentration camp with 150 women and children. She said she was raped, that they all were raped. But here I am talking about the mutilation of small girls, and Marta testified:

"I saw Serbs raping children—girls as young as six and eight years old." She said she and others could do nothing. If a woman objected too strenuously, she said, "they slit your throat."

I talked with a young and beautiful woman, a Bosnian from Sarajevo. Her first name is Aida. She is blonde, slender, about 30. As she talked, I wrote her words:

"A physician who is a friend of my father came to my father's house one evening extremely distressed—crying, screaming, wailing. He had treated an eight-year old girl after she had been gang-raped by Serbians. She was torn apart inside. She was bleeding so badly he couldn't stop it. She was in great pain and could not be repaired. He told my father he had injected her and killed her to relieve her suffering. "

In a refugee camp, I listened to a Bosnian Muslim, Issa, 39. He told me the Serbs had attacked his village. They shot more than 200 civilian men and rounded up others, including Issa, and carted them off to a concentration camp. I wrote his words:

"A doctor from my same town also was a prisoner here. One day the Serbian guards called for this doctor. They wanted him to sew up a 10-year-old girl they had raped. She was torn apart. Seeing the mutilated child, the doctor forgot he was a prisoner, that he was in a concentration camp. He cursed the Serbs, telling them, 'You are not human!"' According to Issa the guards then left the child bleeding on the table and assaulted the doctor. Issa said that when he again saw the doctor, "he was barely alive."

In addition to the mutilation of small girls, the Serbs have a second method of using women as a weapon of genocide. They keep women separated from their husbands or their potential husbands. They do this by holding the men in concentration camps or by killing them. And, meanwhile, the Serbs hold in captivity women they repeatedly assault sexually. They are forcing the women to give birth to what they term "little Chetniks"—or Serbian soldiers.

Ziba, 26, who with other women was held in a Gracko rape camp, said Serbs shouted at Muslim women with small children: "Look at how many children you can have. You are going to have our children. You are going to have our little Chetniks." She added, "The rapes went on day and night."

I can never forget the pained look in the large, dark eyes of a young woman I will call Nadia. She is 20, petite, standing perhaps five-feet-one. She is Muslim by religion—most of the rape victims are. When I talked with her, in a refugee camp, I was with a Bosnian woman physician named Amra, who acted as interpreter. Nadia was seated by a window and it was a bitter cold day.

"Aren't you cold?" Amra asked.

"How could I feel anything so unimportant as that?" Nadia replied. She was reliving her nightmare.

When the Serbs assaulted her village, she and others ran to the hills. Among them were three 12- and 13-year-old boys. The Serbs found the group.

"Before my eyes," Nadia says, the Serbs began shooting the boys. "Don't kill them!" Nadia shouted, running to defend them. A Serb knocked her unconscious. When she awakened, she was in a room with one of her arms tied to a bedpost. She was in a rape camp.

"I was kept in that room for three months. It was mostly walls. It had a concrete floor. And straw on the concrete. Other women and children were there. None of us were permitted to leave the room.

"Even on Christmas day," Nadia said, "eight Serbs came, saying 'Now we celebrate."' All eight gang-raped Nadia that day.

Listen to a woman, a trained nurse, who was arrested and put in a rape camp.

"I was one of 1,800 women kept as prisoners in Brocko. There were 600 women in my room. I was given a number—31. When they called your number, you had to go. One woman told me she was gang-raped by 50 Serbs."

Such stories repeat. They are too numerous not to show a pattern.

There is a third means by which the Serbs are using the female body as a battlefield. The European Community investigation into the large number of Bosnian women raped reported: "Rape is a part of a pattern of abuse, usually perpetrated with the conscious intention of demoralizing and terrorizing communities, driving them from their homes and demonstrating the power of the invading forces." It is a means to demoralize, to weaken—those men as well as the women—who are still alive.

I talked with 60-year-old women who had been raped. They said they had been held in concentration camps, and that those women who had been well off, such as owners of small shops, and women professionals, such as nurses, doctors, lawyers and teachers, were treated the worst.

Susan Woodward, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on what used to be Yugoslavia, said in an interview with Washington Post columnist Judy Mann that the Serbs deliberately sought to destroy those who are succeeding as urban professionals. The Serbs have transformed them from professional success stories into traumatized victims of rapes and other atrocities—women who sit in refugee camps, uprooted from their homes, their possessions, their families.

"Women are always raped in every war. That's not new," Woodward said. "But here it is not only rape, but in the name of ethnic cleansing they are being raped and being forced to become pregnant with the specific goal of forcing them to bear children of another ethnic group. You are attempting to destroy the honor of the Bosnian Muslim population.''

I talked with Judy Darnell, a registered nurse from Marlton, New Jersey, who has made five trips to the ravaged land to aid Bosnian victims of atrocities. She told of Serbs repeatedly raping one 82-year-old woman. As for women held in rape camps, "They are either holding these women to keep the Muslim population in Bosnia from reproducing or they are killing them."

How many women have been raped?

A while back a European Commission of Inquiry headed by Dame Anne Warburton made a study in the former Yugoslavia and reported that 20,000 women had been raped. New York Times correspondent John Burns puts the number at 50,000. Michigan law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, who is representing the Bosnian victims pro bono, puts the total at "more than 50,000'' women and girls raped, and another 100,000 women and children killed.

An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 women are now pregnant as a result of rapes. From 300 to 500 have had babies by Serbs who raped them. The Bosnian woman physician, Amra, said none of the Bosnian women raped by Serbs wanted to keep the babies.

It's not been easy for Bosnian Muslim women to speak of being raped. Nadia, the 20-year-old mentioned earlier, had a plaintive note to her voice when she confessed, "I'm struggling to forget. And I'm struggling to tell the story—so others will know. "

Most of the world knows now. Undeniably, in their quest for a "Greater Serbia," the Serbs have made women their battlefield.