Women's Side of the Story

"The idea was to present the unnoticed, female side of the war. The chief impression is that any violent termination of a life-style (normal course of things) is experienced as violence. This does not include only what they lived through in war, but also what they have lived through when they came here as refugees," says Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, one of the co-authors of the book published by the Institute for Criminological Studies and sponsored by the Soros Foundation. The book "Women, Violence and War" was also written by Natasa Mrvic-Petrovic, Slobodanka Konstantinovic-Vilic and Ivana Stevanovic, members of the European Movement Women's Rights Group in Serbia.

One of the chief differences in the men's and women's experience of violence lies in the fact that an armed conflict implies a power struggle which men and women experience differently. Rape is mostly the synonym of violence against women and it can be regarded as a symbol of an armed conflict. Women however suffer other forms of torture as well: they are the victims of murder, malnutrition, fear, psychological and physical harassment. They suffer the loss of or forced separation from their children, husbands, relatives, various forms of discrimination and violence in the environment to which they had fled.

However, the mention of violence associates most women first to sexual and the immanent physical violence. Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic interprets this phenomenon not only by the nature of the crime as the most specific and grossest form of violence against women in general, but as the consequence of a large media campaign which has followed the cases of rape in war and virtually equaled the notion of violence against women and rape.

Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic maintains that the manipulation with the number of raped women is usually publicly counter-productive. "Speaking of a smaller, therefore more realistic, number of raped Moslem women meant negating the guilt of the Serbian side, while data about the realistic, therefore smaller, number of raped Serbian women was often countered by the ironic question: "Only?", "How can that be compared to thousands of raped Moslem women?" One gains the bitter impression that some regret that there is not a greater number of raped women so that they could argument their viewpoints and actions."

"A group of Moslem troops broke into the apartment of a girl working in the Public Accountancy Office. They tortured her, beat her up, all of them raped her and finally stuck a bottle in her vagina. The girl succumbed to injuries. She had been very good looking and known in Sarajevo for publicly speaking against the Moslem authorities and criticizing what was happening" says Lepa. The brutality of raping women in war is particularly augmented by the fact that the woman symbolises the enemy to the rapist.

The authors also focused on rape as an ethnic cleansing method, based on a deeply patriarchal belief: women are regarded as objects, "receptacles" which passively receive male semen and having nothing to do with the conceived child. The authors underscore that this is a war crime of forced pregnancy, which has not been defined neither by the international community nor the International Tribunal for Crimes of War in the Former Yugoslavia. "Feeling a child in one's womb, convinced that everyone will now it is the child of an enemy and simultaneously bearing in mind that it is her child, too, is one of the most brutal forms of torturing women in war. The rapists are also sending a message to the husbands of the raped women that they are debased, because they are bearing children of their own enemies. What is particularly horrible is that this is how the husbands feel their wives' rape and pregnancy too."

In addition to prostitution as a way of surviving, which some women have resorted to in order to preserve their dignity, the authors of the books say some women were forced to yield to sexual blackmail and humiliation in order to achieve some of their rights, to leave the seized city, join their children who had already fled, and so on. Emina tells about her cousin, who had to sleep with the Croat issuing permits for leaving Mostar in order to leave the city. He told her he would not let her leave until she gave birth to an Ustasha, although he knew she already had three children. He let her leave Mostar when she was over three months pregnant. She does not want to have the child, she fears her children, her brother and the rest of the family will abandon her. She is afraid her husband will say: "You came here to give birth to an Ustasha bastard."

The motives of physical harassment and murder of women in war and sexual harassment are basically the same. However, the analysis of the testimonies shows that there is a discrepancy between rape as a war tactic and the individual harassment and murder of women of the same nationality. In addition to the intentional conception of children who will be of the rapists' nationality, the enemy also causes women to suffer by killing their children. The authors also cite examples of women who were victims of physical violence by their husbands or because of their husbands: "Croatian troops broke into the apartment of a Croatian woman married to a Serb, an army officer. They threw her and the children out of the apartment and dragged her to the entrance of the apartment building where they tortured her. They cut off both her arms: one because of her husband, the other because of her brother-in-law. The children ended up on the trauma ward," says Blazenka.

The hatred of wives of army officers, the consequence of the hatred of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), was extremely brutal and the assailants disregarded whether the male members of the family were active combatants and of what nationality they were. Slobodanka Konstantinovic-Vilic explains in the chapter on psychological violence that the armed stage of the civil war in Slovenia was preceded by a long period of special warfare directed against Army members and their families. "My husband is a JNA officer, a Serb, who spent his whole life in Slovenia. I am Slovene, of pure "Aryan" Slovene origin. I took very hard the preparations for the war, the mongering against the Serbs and the JNA and the harassment because I was married to an army officer. For instance, I suffered a lot when they showed my husband on the TV screen with the caption Serbian Chetnik and his full name," says Katja.

Speaking about violence, the interviewed women say they experienced it as refugees, too. Women, who had not been independent as persons, who had built their identity on the understanding that they "belonged" to someone, had undergone the greatest traumas. Women from "mixed marriages" felt the separation from their husbands the most - they had betrayed their own nation, without acquiring the deserved status among their husbands' compatriots. Women also suffer because of their passive status, they are in a kind of dilemma between the need to remain loyal to their loved ones who had remained in the war-torn areas and providing their children with a future. Long separation leads to alienation in both the husband-wife and parent-child relationships. "When I would start to undress myself before going to sleep in the evening I had to ask my husband to turn off the light because I had the feeling that I was getting undressed in front of a total stranger. I wanted my husband to court me all over again so we could again become close," says Metka.

Women refugees confront impoverishment and women who were well-off before the war have a harder time dealing with their new status. "The status is worse than fear. There, I had been afraid for my life, that I would be killed, here, I fear I won't survive because of the poverty, the uncertainty," says Mirjana. Many of them are forced to suffer various forms of humiliation because of their poverty. "The boss liked to see me bring coffee and juice to him and his friends. He would tell his friends: "I have a woman working for me, she is a Master of Economics and she is cooking my coffee for me."

The authors note that the employers, landlords, Refugee Camps managers, Red Cross employees sometimes abuse their positions and blackmail and harass the refugees. "Women coped in all kinds of ways, some even turned to prostitution. One would go to him, another to another man, she would go to a bar, all kinds of things happened. And I was left without my dignity. That man, a widower, he called me too, to go to Vojvodina with him. I know a woman who got married, left a husband in Zenica, although he is still alive."

Speaking about their futures, most of the women said that a job in their profession would help them. The authors say this would be the first step to help the women integrate in the new environment and regain their former status, drawing them away from severe psychological crises. Women have suffered various forms of violence in war although they had not wanted the war. This is why they have the full moral right to demand of the host country and the international community to provide them with conditions in which they and their children will be guaranteed protection, a better status and a life better than this one.