SILENT CRIME OF KOSOVO CONFLICT: WOMEN ROUTINELY RAPED, BUT WON'T PUBLICLY ACCUSE PERPETRATORS
By Olivia Ward

June 2, 1999 – (Torstar News article in The Record – Waterloo, Ontario) In the dingy, humid hallway of the city's oldest women's hospital, exhausted-looking Kosovar women lean against the walls waiting their turn in the operating room.

At the other end of the corridor sits a glass jar containing an aborted fetus, waiting for a nurse's aide to remove it.

It's one more grim chapter in an ongoing drama of violence and death, from a war that destroys lives into the next generation.

"The evidence that women have been raped is here," says Dr. Terisina Braho, a senior gynecologist. "The Kosovo women want abortions with no questions asked. Nothing will change their minds."

Rape is the silent crime of this conflict that has driven close to one-million ethnic Albanians from their homes in the southern Serbian province.

Culturally taboo among Albanians, rape is seldom voluntarily reported. But it is a weapon of devastating effectiveness and a war crime whose perpetrators will never face justice because they will never be publicly accused.

"By raping women -- taking possession and totally exploiting the female body -- the Serbians are violating even those Kosovar men who are inaccessible and hidden in the mountains," said a report on sexual violence in Kosovo, released this week by the United Nations Population Fund.

"The women who have been violated say they are forever dead for having been subjected to absolute defilement," it said.

Last year, for the first time ever, convictions recognizing rape as a war crime were handed down by international tribunals trying charges stemming from the Bosnian civil war and the Rwanda genocide.

Zade, from a village outside the southern Kosovo town of Suva Reka, stands in the hospital waiting room with her shoulders slumped and hands tightly clenched.

But when she raises her head, her eyes are hard and reflective, like polished stones.

"We were forced out at the beginning of April," she says. "We were travelling on tractors, and women and children were separated from the men. Gangs of Serbs would stop us and demand money. For two days we were surrounded by them. They took some women into the school and raped them."

She will not say that she was among them. Nor can her account, or others like it, be verified by independent observers.

But in a predominantly Muslim culture where children are sacred, few healthy young women seek abortions.

In the Tirana women's hospital alone, 34 terminated unwanted pregnancies in the first six weeks after the NATO air strikes were launched and Kosovo's borders began to hemorrhage refugees.

But rape, like other crimes of wartime violence, began much earlier in Kosovo, after the onset of Serbia's brutal offensive against separatist guerrillas 15 months ago.

Drenica, along with half a dozen other resistance areas in the Serbian province, has been singled out for special brutality.

In Drenica last winter, the Serbian offensive against the KLA was already in full swing.Massacres of men, women and children were reported in the villages, some in retaliation for killing of security forces by the guerrillas.

Women who never fought in the independence struggle were caught up in the attacks. Often they became the target.

"They surrounded our village and took away the men," said a middle-aged farm woman who was later treated for bullet wounds in the capital Pristina. "Then they held us all prisoner."

The men were murdered, she said. Then the military operation turned into an orgy of drunkenness and sexual violence.

"They stripped women naked, and attacked them again and again. They were terribly drunk, and they played loud Serbian music tapes. Then they would force the women to cook food for them."

Astonishingly, the Serbs ended the two-day orgy and bloodbath by thanking the women for "a wonderful party," and telling them they would spare their homes from burning out of gratitude.

But, the female witness said, "the women screamed at them that they didn't care what they did. They hated them, and might as well be dead. The Serbs started to open fire, and most of the women were killed."

One of the marauders made the mistake of videotaping the scene of the rapes and murders. The tape was found by an elderly villager, and saved as evidence of war crimes.

The rapes committed in Kosovo do not appear to be as widespread as they were in Bosnia, where women were subjected to campaigns of systematic violence.

In Kosovo they are committed routinely in KLA areas, and villages the Yugoslav forces suspect are harbouring guerrillas.

A report released by Amnesty International this week says 300 women and children were held captive for three days, terrorized and some were raped in a village near the southern town of Suva Reka.

The UNFPA report, compiled from an aid workers' survey of refugee camps and hospitals in Tirana and Kukes, said that kidnapping of women is "more and more prevalent" as the war continues.

Unused to talking to strangers, and unable to talk to their own families, the women are locked into their sense of shame and guilt.

"They don't trust anybody," says Eglantina Gjermeni, executive director of the Women's Centre Tirana, run by the German-based charity Medica Mondiale. "If they have children they're afraid all the time for them. They won't let them outside alone even to play."

Establishing "women's areas" in the refugee camps, the centre gives the traumatized women the chance to meet with others like them for counseling sessions.

But in the floodtide of nearly one-million refugees, these are only a few drops of hope. Many Kosovar victims of sexual violence, therapists fear, will be deeply scarred for life by their ordeals.

"Many women are in denial," says Gjermeni. "Until that changes, they will not get better."