MEDIA IGNORES CRISIS: MASS RAPES IN BOSNIA AREN'T SEXY ANY MORE, THEY'RE JUST TRAGIC
By Linda Grant

August 9, 1993 – (The Record – Waterloo, Ontario) Eight months ago, in a maternity hospital in Zagreb, a British journalist and a French camera crew degenerated into an undignified tussle over the bed of a teenage girl who was pregnant after being raped by a Serbian.

The media was desperate for rape babies. Rape in Bosnia was the hottest story of the new year. The city was teeming with foreign journalists, scouring refugee camps with a revival of that familiar wartime phrase: "Anyone here been raped and speak English?"

The European Commission investigation into the allegations of mass rape, led by retired Bristish diplomat Dame Anne Warburton, concluded that around 20,000 women had suffered sexual assault at the hands of Serbian forces and the mission gave credence to the claim that rape was being used as a systematic weapon in the campaign of ethnic cleansing. There were demands by women's organizations that rape be included as a war crime within the Geneva Convention.

Then the hospitals of Zagreb and Sarajevo did not fill with abandoned infants and the media lost interest. No one was able to come up with any reliable figure for the numbers of women actually raped.

At least one member of the EC mission, who was originally convinced that rape was part of the ethnic cleansing program, is now more skeptical. Ironically, these doubts have crept in because some aid agencies have begun to admit privately that rape has always been part of the spoils of war. If rape became an international issue in Bosnia, it is because it is the first war that has been monitored by a well-organized, modern women's movement.

Even the allegation of rape camps now seems contentious. Certainly, women were raped in general prisoner of war camps. But no one has produced hard evidence of special installations established to impregnate Bosnian women with Serbian babies.

What seems more likely is that Serbian paramilitaries would move into an area and establish a base in a village. A number of women would be rounded up and held in a motel or restaurant which would be used as an enforced brothel by soldiers tanked up on drugs after a hard day's killing and torture. When the Serbians moved on, after a few weeks, the women would be murdered or released according to no clear pattern.

The reason for the lack of rape babies is obvious. Only women who have been held over a period of months would be forced to bring a child to full term. Abortion on demand is available in Bosnia up to 10 weeks, in Croatia up to 12. Most raped pregnant women would have had abortions without having to notify anyone of the cause of the pregnancy.

However, arguing about how many women have been raped and why it was done has overshadowed another issue: what has happened to the women since their ordeal ended?

In Zagreb, there is a growing number of reports of suicide and attempted suicide among female Bosnian refugees. The stigma associated with rape in a country that has never had a rape counselling service means the most likely way for women to receive help is if they have developed general psychiatric problems. Other women have been referred by their families after two psychiatrists went on a local radio phone-in.

"We have women who have been raped and diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorders - nightmares, manic depression - and they don't want to talk about what happened to them. They feel they are somehow guilty themselves," say Dr. Vera Folnegovic and Dr. Dragica Kozaric-Kovacic, at Zagreb's Rebro Psychiatric Hospital.

For them, the numbers game is irrelevant: "We have one or two women who were raped eight or nine times a day for five months. Is this one case or hundreds?" Getting the women to come forward is another matter. In January, Croatia officially had 288,000 Bosnian refugees, of which 111,000 lived with families rather than in refugee camps where there are aid workers to listen to testimonies.

Some are presenting themselves at casualty departments with what psychiatrists regard as psychosomatic symptoms such as high blood pressure and irregular heartbeats. It is only during medical examinations that they admit they were raped. Yet earlier this year, the Croatian government announced that Bosnian refugees would no longer receive free medical treatment.

There is only one reported case of a woman resuming sexual relations with her husband and she told psychiatrists it was "like being killed, she didn't know if the emotional pain was worse than the physical pain and there was no reason for physical pain," Folnegovic says.

The future for young girls who were virgins before they were raped is even grimmer: "They don't want to see men, any men. Their sexual function is completely destroyed and it's very hard to tell if they will ever have a normal sex life. They all need psychiatric support," says Folnegovic.

A debate has been raging about what should happen to the raped women of Bosnia. Women's groups in Zagreb want to set up a special hostel where they could receive long-term counselling.

Specialists in war trauma, however, argue that rape as a specific issue will become an acute problem only after the conflict is over and people are no longer in survival mode. The Muslim community believes special hostels will identify and stigmatize the women. In one refugee camp I visited in January, the activists seemed to be educated women who had committed themselves to a more fundamentalist Islam than that practised loosely by the peasant Muslim population. It was these women who were organizing groups within the camps and to whom raped women were sharing the secret of their ordeal.

One of the recommendations of the EC mission was for money to be made available to set up rape counselling services. The money was snapped up by the British organization Marie Stopes Society which has two teams currently trying to establish bases within Bosnia, at Tuzla and Zenica.

The Marie Stopes teams' aims are to help existing groups and deliver resources and training. Like everyone else, they have no idea of the numbers of raped women they may find. "One can only speculate and it's dangerous to speculate," says Paul Anticoni, the London co-ordinator of the Marie Stopes Bosnia project. "There may be one, there may be thousands. What we do know is that there is a severe lack of trauma counselling, as a result of the breakdown of infrastructure, as well as a lack of trained personnel. A large number of individuals will have taken it on themselves to establish self-help groups. There's a lot of prostitution and a degradation of the social order. We're trying to identify the problems and see what kind of support is needed."

This makes pretty dull reading. There is something sexy, in media terms, about thousands of pretty Muslim virgins sobbing out their tales of sexual violation: "The 15-year-old pulled her thin blouse over her full breasts and said, "The Chetnik penetrated me many times'," was the general quality of the news reporting in January. When there are no more weeping girls the long-term fate of a traumatized nation becomes substantially less worthy of media attention.

Linda Grant writes for the Guardian in London.