Marchers Call for Prosecuting Bosnia Rapes as War Crimes : Protest: Westwood demonstrators mark International Women’s Day. Their demand follows action by U.N. Security Council taking a similar stance.

More than 70 women, most dressed in funereal black, marched through Westwood on Monday in solidarity with rape victims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, calling on the U.S. government and the international community to prosecute the rape of Bosnian women as a war crime.

Following a mock coffin draped with a red banner that read “20,000 Women Raped,” members of the Women’s Coalition Against Ethnic Cleansing and the Women’s Action Coalition staged the observance on International Women’s Day.

“We are mourning for women we have never met, but our hearts reach out to them,” said Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, director of the Feminist Center of the American Jewish Congress.

The congress, along with the Muslim Women’s League, the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, the Pasadena YWCA Rape Crisis Center and other local groups formed the Women’s Coalition against Ethnic Cleansing in December in reaction to reports of systematic rapes and beatings of women and children, most of them Muslims, in the war in the former Yugoslavia.

“To allow tens of thousands of women to be raped and just sit back and do nothing--that’s unacceptable,” Summer Hathout, president of the Muslim Women’s League, said outside the Federal Building in Westwood.

A European Community report in January estimated that 20,000 women had been raped by Serbian soldiers as part of a deliberate pattern of abuse aimed at driving them from their homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbs have denied those accusations.

In February, the United Nations Security Council voted to set up an international tribunal to prosecute people accused of war crimes, including rape, in Yugoslavia and its former republics.

The women’s groups are calling on the Clinton Administration and Congress to make sure the prosecutions are carried through.

Carrying banners that read “Stop Rape in Bosnia, Call Clinton (202) 456-1414” and chanting “Women raped and children die while the world is standing by,” the marchers Monday passed outleaflets and bright orange postcards addressed to President Clinton and U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, asking them to “use their influence to end the agony of these women.”

“Fifty years ago, during the Holocaust, we said ‘Never again’ and now another religious minority group in Europe is being annihilated,” said Hathout, one of a six-member delegation headed from Los Angeles to Zagreb, Slovenia, next week to explore how women’s groups can help the rape victims.

One of the marchers, Amira Elfarra, brought her 5-month-old daughter to her first International Women’s Day rally. “It’s really difficult to see this kind of tragedy going on in Bosnia,” Elfarra said.

“I really feel for the women struggling with this kind of oppression.”