The Raw Language of Unending Terror

They are not the usual dispatches of war coming from what used to be Yugoslavia--not about troop movements, the big picture, the score. We have a place for these images. Nations erect museums to the glory of fighting men.

The word trickling out of Bosnia-Herzegovina is far more unsettling. The word hate is inadequate to describe the systematic brutality of men against women, these neighbors against neighbors, these “friends.” These images are impossible to box and put aside.

Women and girls are being raped and tortured, as they have been through the centuries--mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, all cheap booty of war. Females, know thy place. You are for the pleasure of men, some of them sadists, but so what?

I am not exaggerating. And, yes, it happens here.

During Senate hearings earlier this year, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) estimated that more than 60,000 American women have been raped or assaulted while serving in the military. Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) said American women in the Persian Gulf “were in greater danger of being sexually assaulted by our own troops than by the enemy.”

And then there was Tailhook.

On the escalating scale of horrors, however, Bosnia-Herzegovina commands our attention now. A political scientist in Croatia, overwhelmed by the countless stories of women and children subjected to unspeakable abuse, pleads through the pages of this newspaper to make raping civilians a war crime.

“No one here cares about the women,” Biljana Kasic writes. “There is no social consciousness on this issue.”

On the opinion page of the New York Times, Slavenka Drakulic writes: “Mass rape is a method of genocide that should become a war crime and outlawed in all international conventions. The lives of tens of thousands of women have been destroyed; the world owes them at least that.”

But since the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, rape, forced prostitution and “any form of indecent assault” have indeed been deemed punishable crimes. In theory, that is.

Before that, the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907 referred only to “family rights and honor.”

So, we’ve come a long way, baby. We can now read about gang rape in a family newspaper. We can now read this, from Z.N., age 40, in the New York Times:

“Every day the same picture was repeated; they would rape and kill in front of hundreds of us. Once a young woman with a baby was taken in the middle of the hall. It was in June. They ordered her to take off her clothes. She put the baby on the floor next to her.

“Four Chetniks (Serbs) raped her; she was silent, looking at her crying child. When she was left alone, she asked if she could breast-feed the baby. Then a Chetnik cut the child’s head off with a knife. He gave the bloody head to the mother. The poor woman screamed. They took her outside and she never came back.”

It has come to this. We are left to measure our humanity by our potential for shock.

Catherine O’Neill, the Pacific Palisades businesswoman who chairs the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, recently visited Croatia and Bosnia with two other women from her group. She talks of finding evidence of hatred nearly beyond what the mind can comprehend.

“Every single woman that we met had a story,” she says. “They all started to cry. I was so personally overwhelmed by all the tragedy that I couldn’t include it all in our report.”

The commission, an independent group funded by the MacArthur Foundation, hopes to help set up a trauma hostel in Croatia for victims of violence and rape, to be run by Bosnian refugees. The Rape Treatment Center in Los Angeles says it will send, at its own expense, specialists to help train local counselors.

The draft proposal for the hostel states the problem as this: “Many are traumatized by loss of family members or homes and/or have been victims of violence and rape. They are thus less able to provide adequate nurturing for their children.”

This is the language one uses in the hope of getting funds. The language of those terrorized in the Balkan war, however, is more universal.

It is an unending scream.