THE WAR INSIDE ME: A RAPE VICTIM WHO CALLS HERSELF PATIENCE TELLS HER OWN HORRIFIC WAR STORY
TO GIVE WOMEN FROM KOSOVO A WINDOW OF HOPE
By Patti Hartigan

June 19, 1999 – (Boston Globe article in The Hamilton Spectator) She ran away from a civil war, but she couldn't flee the war raging in her mind. She was haunted by the memories -- images of her baby boy suffocating, flashes of men violating her day and night, recollections of torture and sexual abuse.

She lost all of her documents, but she carried her history with her, from Liberia to Sierra Leone to Canada to the United States. As time passed, she kept her story bottled up, shackled by its weight.

But after years of guilt and shame and suicidal thoughts, she found a safe place to heal at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Centre; she let her story spill out and began to recover. And now she's telling her tale publicly so survivors of other wars might be inspired to seek help. She's seen the footage from Kosovo, heard the stories of violence against women. She is testifying now to give women from Kosovo a window of hope.

"Looking back, I think I would be dead now if I hadn't found the (rape crisis) centre,"she says quietly. "The only reason I decided to tell you this story is because there might be one or two people out there who have been through what I've been through."

She asks only that her first name be used. It's Patience -- and she knows only too well that healing takes time.

"I was born in Cameroon," she begins, composing her thoughts slowly yet calmly. She explains that she became politically active as a high school student in the early '80s; Cameroon is bilingual and students protested when the government mandated that school be taught in French rather than English. She was arrested twice and was whipped and tortured in jail.

In the midst of that upheaval, she met a Liberian soldier who asked her to marry him. Her family objected to the match, but she listened to her heart and followed him to Liberia in 1986. Back in Cameroon, her parents disowned her, throwing her belongings in the public cemetery to signify her death.

That symbolic death was just the beginning. She moved to Monrovia with her new husband, an elite soldier from the Krahn tribe who served in the regime of President Samuel Doe. She desperately wanted children, but had trouble conceiving for several years. After one ectopic pregnancy, she finally gave birth to a son in 1989; the couple named him Julius Doe, after the president.

But Doe was overthrown and killed by the rival Manu tribe in 1990, igniting a civil war that left about 200,000 dead and sent half of the country's 2.5 million people into exile. Patience, now 32, is one of them.

One night when her son was about three, her husband told her to pack food and documents and said he was sending a friend to usher his family out of the country to escape rebel Manu soldiers, who controlled the area.

"The guy never came," she recalls. "We could hear firing and gunshots everywhere, so I locked up the house and hid under the bed. In the early hours of the morning, I realized the whole house was filled with smoke. We were trying to go out the door when someone broke in. There were soldiers everywhere. One of the officers asked me where my husband was, and I told him I didn't know."

The soldiers tied up Patience and her son and threw them in the back of a truck. But young J. D. was screaming, so the officers gagged the prisoners with dirty newspaper and duct tape. As the truck drove through a forest, Patience noticed that her son was gasping for air; his nose was covered with tape.

"He was really struggling to breathe and I was kicking the side of the truck," she recalls. "I couldn't really help him. My hands and feet were tied, and I was rubbing my jaw against his jaw. I tried and tried, but he was getting weaker and weaker.

He looked at me and then closed his eyes and opened them again. He just became limp. I looked at him and I realized he was dying, so I hit the truck really hard."

The truck screeched to a halt. "An officer came out and felt my son's chest. He said, 'Oh, he died,' and pulled him out of the truck. I just realized he was going to dump him at the side of the road, and I tried to make some kind of action to stop him. But he just kind of dumped him and then the truck started moving."

Her voice is cool, almost detached, and the room is quiet. Suddenly, a breeze blows through a window and the door slams shut.

"It's like you bring somebody into this world, and they're in trouble and you cannot help them," she says. "It's so painful. Why did I have this child if I cannot help him?"

The soldiers took her to an enclave where they whipped her and tried to get her to talk about her husband.

"At that point, I really wanted to die. I told them to just kill me." Instead, they put her in a corner and, over the next few days, raped her repeatedly. "It was like I didn't own myself anymore," Patience says. "I was just there for anyone to rape me."

Finally, the commanding officer ordered a soldier to kill her, but he refused. Another soldier took her into the forest and asked her to escort his four children out of Liberia into Sierra Leone. "I said, 'No, just kill me.' I refused and refused and refused until finally I said OK." A pause.

"I was numb and I didn't have any feelings. A soldier who had killed my own child was asking me to help his children. But he didn't use force to make me do it, and that's why I said yes."

The man took Patience to his home where his mother nursed her for about a week and half. Then she walked through the forest with the four children, ages 3, 5, 8, and 12. After five days, they crossed the Mano River into Sierra Leone, where they met some United Nations officials who took them to a refugee camp.

But her journey was far from over.

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The story of a woman named Patience speaks for thousands of women who have been silenced for centuries.

"Rape is one of the oldest weapons of war," says Charlene Allen, executive director of the Boston rape crisis centre. It is only in the last six years, however, that the international community recognized rape as a crime against humanity and that U.S. immigration policy accepted rape as grounds for political asylum.

"Up until five years ago there was very little that happened with regard to women," says Nancy Kelly, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services and the Women Refugees Project. "They were virtually invisible."

That began to change in 1993, when the United Nations sent a team to investigate rape in Bosnia and the UN Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution defining rape as a war crime. That same year, the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals granted political asylum to a woman who had been raped by armed men in Haiti during the political coup.

"It is hard to believe, but there was no precedent that said that rape inflicted because of a woman's political opinions was persecution," says Kelly.

The Haiti decision was published in 1995, setting a precedent for immigration law. Soon after, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued a set of gender guidelines, establishing sexual abuse as a form of persecution.

But despite these changes, sexual violence is still extremely difficult to document in war situations because of the stigma and shame. In a new study, the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights documented only a handful of rape victims out of 1,180 Kosovar refugees interviewed in Albania and Macedonia.

"There are a number of reasons why this may be underrepresented," says Dr. Vincent Iacopino, senior medical consultant for the group and leader of the survey. "We know that there is a severe social stigma, and that they are viewed as unmarriable. There is pain and shame. I spoke to one woman who told me if this had happened to her, she wouldn't be speaking to me. She would have killed herself."

Iacopino stresses the battery of abuse against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, rather than singling out rape. "But if it happens once, it's a serious problem," he adds.

There are few, if any, rape-specific services in the refugee camps, where privacy is impossible and basic human needs like food and shelter take precedence. Staff workers from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Centre left last Tuesday for a conference in Vienna, where they will train aid workers in rape counselling skills.

"One of the things that leads to stability is getting control back," says Allen. "How can you get control in other issues in your life and maybe never even talk about the rape? (Counselling skills) can absolutely make a difference even in the immediate aftermath."

Patience says she didn't meet any rape counsellors in the Sierra Leone refugee camp, but she doesn't think she was ready to talk then anyway.

"Healing happens when it happens," says Allen. "But we're trying to demystify the crime. Whatever we can do to help people understand that this is a common occurrence in the context of war will help people come forward when they're ready. They can get support. They can get control."

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It took Patience several years to seek help. "I was running away from a war and I didn't want to talk about it," she says. In Sierra Leone, she bribed her way into joining an entourage headed for a training seminar in Montreal. There, she was befriended by a Jamaican woman in a travelling carnival who sneaked her onto a bus bound for New York. From there, she stayed briefly with a relative in Oklahoma before joining her brother in Boston.

But it took her three years to seek help. She stayed away from men and small children, who reminded her of her son. She didn't leave her brother's home. "I slept for hours and hours and hours," she says of those empty days. "I didn't go to church. I didn't go the market. I didn't go anywhere."

Her brother provided emotional support, but he died in a traffic accident in July, 1997. His death almost destroyed her.

"He was everything to me, and I just wanted to kill myself," she says. She planned her own death twice, even wrote a note. "I bought this chemical that said fatally harmful or harmfully fatal," she recalls. "I knew if I would drink it I would die. I kept looking at it, but then I got up one day and poured it down the sink. It's like I had this war in me. I'm a Christian and I thought, 'What will I say to God when I meet him? That I killed myself?' When you get to the bottom, the lowest point, something comes up and you keep going."

Friends pulled her through. A rape survivor from Liberia encouraged her to take charge of her life. She met Tony, a gentle man from Ghana she plans to marry when her divorce to her husband in Liberia is finalized. She first walked into the rape crisis center about a year and a half ago. Today, she has gotten over her phobia of small children; she even adopted a little girl, Tony's niece, and named her Alberta, after her brother.

"Even now, I'm scared of being alone," she says. "I live on a busy, busy street with lots of people around. I can't take the quiet."

She wants to stay on that street permanently. In February, she requested asylum from the Immigration and Naturalization Service; her request was denied because of a problem with her documents, which she had paid a friend to obtain for her in Liberia. She will plead her case to an immigration judge in November.

"Of the 50 or 60 asylum cases I've done, hers is the most compelling story I have ever heard," says her attorney, Randy Feldman.

Patience now works as a counsellor for the mentally ill, and she prays for her daughter's future. She says she could never return to Liberia -- "I wouldn't be a good citizen, let's put it that way." And although she has reconciled with her family in Cameroon, there is no life for her there. "No man would want me," she says.

"It's like you have a taboo attached to you. You become 'that girl who went to Liberia and got raped.' "

She's still afraid of being alone; she hasn't completely erased the images and pain. Someone recently told her that after her long struggle, she must have some purpose in life: There is a reason she survived.

"Maybe God has a plan for me," she says. "That's why I decided to tell this story. Maybe one or two women will read this at their lowest point. Maybe those people will think, 'Well, this woman made it. How about me?' "