COLUMN ONE : Keeping a Baby Born of Violence : Unlike other Balkan rape victims, Kata refuses to give up her 3-month-old son. Defying social mores, she clings to this tiny chance at hope in a world that otherwise is ruined.

On a glorious late autumn day, with the mercury nearing 80, Kata feeds a roaring wood stove in the corner of her one-room shack and hugs herself against an unshakable chill.

Oblivious to the beads of moisture glistening on the brow of her 3-month-old son, Stipe, the disheveled, dark-haired woman piles on layer upon layer of snagged terry jumpsuits and hand-me-down sweaters, as if to protect him from the ordeal that has left her cold.

She rocks the infant in a silent, faraway reverie, ignoring a local nurse who has neither the confidence nor the skill to draw the troubled mother into a cathartic discussion of what haunts her.

Kata’s son, as every busybody in her village knows, is the consequence of gang rape committed by nationalist militants in Bosnia-Herzegovina a year ago.

The attack on her was similar to those committed against thousands of women trapped in the Balkan war zones, where gunmen--motivated by the quest for ethnic supremacy and emboldened by alcohol--have resorted to sexual violence to terrorize women into fleeing their homes for easy plunder by the conquering warlords.

But unlike the hundreds of other Bosnian women impregnated as part of the harrowing practice of “ethnic cleansing,” Kata has defied social mores and unsolicited advice by choosing to keep her child.

“I don’t think about where he came from. It’s not his fault,” insists the 27-year-old mother, caressing the sweating infant and nervously bouncing him in a clumsy embrace. “I’m glad I kept him, and no one is ever going to take him away.”

She stares at the sleeping baby with rapt bewilderment, a look of wonder that may be as much an expression of shock that he belongs to her as evidence of maternal devotion.

The only doctor who has seen Kata since she gave birth in late July fears that she is clinging to the baby for what may eventually prove to be destructive reasons--that the child is a kind of emotional armor against memories of the assault.

“There is the risk that she will someday connect him with the rape and reject the baby,” says Mladen Loncar, a Zagreb psychiatrist who works with more than 100 victims of war rape through a year-old relief agency known as the Medical Center for Human Rights. “It’s hard to say how she might react later, but it is possible she could someday suddenly decide to leave him, if she were to go into an extreme psychosis.”

Loncar, however, concedes that Kata may have kept the baby to have something or someone to hang on to for the future, as others who have met her suspect.

Kata, an unmarried peasant from the rich farmland around the northwestern Bosnian town of Kotor Varos, is a woman of few words and little education. But her protective gestures toward the baby and monosyllabic responses to questions about her plans suggest she might have come to see him as a last-ditch chance for a normal life.

A rangy, big-boned woman in men’s work pants and a wrinkled shirt, Kata emits flashes of confidence and a grasp of reality when discussion turns from the assault that she clearly doesn’t want to talk about to the mundane issues of how she will care for her child.

“I’m not afraid. We will find some way to make it,” she says with more defiance than conviction.

She is applying for Croatian citizenship for herself and the baby, after which she expects to find a job as a farm laborer or unskilled worker.

Besides her married sister, who lives as a refugee with two small children in a nearby village, Kata has a brother who was working at odd jobs in Austria at the time her family was driven from Kotor Varos. She says he helps her out when he can with food or money when he makes his way to this isolated haven in eastern Croatia.

Unlike most of the more than 2 million Bosnians displaced by the war, Kata has no expectation of ever returning to her home.

“I think I will always live here. I would go back to Kotor Varos only if everyone could go back. But I don’t think that will happen,” she says morosely.

The overworked and inexperienced social workers who are supposed to help her and other war victims are unsure whether such fatalism is a reaction to what Kata experienced or a pragmatic acceptance of the reality that Serbian gunmen are unlikely to be moved from the occupied territory.

Even if, by some miracle, places such as Kotor Varos could be re-integrated, no one seems confident that the tradition-bound rural societies would treat women such as Kata as innocent victims.

Kotor Varos, about 50 miles south of here, was largely Muslim before Serbian nationalist forces descended on its farms and forests a year ago and unleashed one of the most savage campaigns of terror and expulsion in their 18-month rebellion against Bosnian independence.

Kata will not answer directly when asked what she experienced on the arduous journey from Kotor Varos to her current haven.

But other women refugees from her hometown have told of mass roundups of young women who were taken to buses and truck beds to be gang-raped by soldiers every night for weeks before being dumped on mountain roads, battered and terrified, to make their way across the front line to the government-held city of Travnik.

From Travnik, Kata says, she was relocated to the town of Busovaca. In April, when she was six months’ pregnant, she was brought by a friend and fellow refugee to the rural fringes of this corn- and tobacco-growing town.

Croatia’s fledgling social welfare system was supposed to have assisted Kata and her baby, but she says she has yet to receive any financial help.

Stipe’s clothes and diapers are castoffs sent over by neighbor women; the low-ceilinged hut in which Kata lives with her baby and aged mother is a loan from the friend from her hometown.

Ankica Djurasek, a provincial nurse now expected to deal with the traumas of Kata and other rape victims, says she is upset by the government’s failure to provide at least food money for the women and at a loss as to how she might ease their plight.

“We are supposed to talk to the victims, but it is so distressing because there is so little we can do,” says Djurasek, who has no training in the care of women who have been sexually assaulted.

She and other medical professionals say that little can be done to relieve the emotional distress of the mothers without providing for their physical needs, such as housing and a reliable source of food for them and their children.

“The women who are in the worst shape are those who have suffered an accumulation of traumas--displacement, wounding, rape and loss of family members,” says Loncar, the Zagreb doctor.

Djurasek believes that Kata has accepted her child in a sad realization that it is unlikely she will return home, marry, have other children and settle into a normal pattern of rural Balkan life.

Kata’s ordeal has been endured by thousands of women in Bosnia, where rape has been employed by all ethnic factions but most frequently and systematically by the heavily armed Serbs--a reality that has been documented by numerous independent international organizations.

Although educated urbanites see the women as guiltless victims, doctors and social workers fear that people in backward areas of rural Bosnia may shun the women.

“Our men are like that,” Djurasek says resignedly. “I doubt anyone would accept her (Kata), unless he was a widower and just needed someone to care for his children.”

Kata seems to share the view that she is unlikely to marry.

“I can’t, because I could never give him up,” she says, referring to Stipe and rocking so violently in her discomfort that she wakes him.

She claims to be unconcerned about the stigma that may be attached to her son, especially in the claustrophobic village environment where she plans to rear him, a languid shantytown.

“Of course they know” how her son was conceived, Kata says with a dismissive shrug, nodding toward the handful of kerchiefed women unabashedly clustered at the edge of her dirt courtyard, craning to see who has come to visit.

Although they pay her some attention this day, Kata usually keeps to herself and has little contact with them.

That other war victims, however, might see her child as a reminder of their suffering is a thought too deep and disturbing to distract Kata from her only focal point for the present and what little ambition she has for the future.

She says everyone in the hamlet loves him and that it wouldn’t matter to her if they did not.

Whether staying with a mother who is a rape victim is the best solution for the child is another daunting question.

Those involved in helping the women concede that victims such as Kata are seldom in a proper mental state to make such decisions. They add that the alternatives are not much better.

“Everyone feels the women should decide for themselves whether to have an abortion and whether to keep the child. But much depends on the individual woman’s background and education and circumstances,” says Sarifa Halilovic, a Sarajevo English teacher who heads a refugee assistance program called BH Women.

Only those who were able to escape their captors and flee to Croatia are receiving any counseling and assistance from foreign aid sources.

“The Croatian and Bosnian government attitude is not to let the children (of rape) be adopted from abroad,” Halilovic says. “That may be all right for those in Zagreb, where they can be well cared for. But it is certainly not the case for those born in Bosnia.”

Others seeking to counsel rape victims and help them deal with their disrupted lives worry that children such as Stipe will be labeled for life and relegated to the fringes of society.

News accounts of war rape in Bosnia last year galvanized international support for a network of counseling and women’s self-help groups, but the good intentions have seldom translated into effective relief for the victims.

Some women driven to desperate means to get money or shelter for their displaced children have appealed to aid groups, claiming to be rape victims after months in refugee camps.

Other efforts to single out the sexually brutalized for special care have failed because of the stigma attached to accepting the help.

“One group tried to open a camp only for women rape victims,” Loncar recalls. “For obvious reasons, none of the women wanted to be seen going there.”

No one knows the exact number of war rape victims in the Balkans, because many remain trapped in the territory controlled by their attackers or refuse to seek help.

But Loncar shares the view of Bosnian government officials and international investigators who estimate the number of victims in the tens of thousands.

Vera Cubela, a psychologist with the Zagreb medical team aiding rape victims, sees a glimmer of hope in the ability of some to put their ordeals behind them and not judge other Balkan ethnic groups by the behavior of their attackers.

Referring to a rape victim who is rearing her child in the ethnically mixed town of Orasje, Cubela says the woman is a rare example of someone who has the strength to accept what has happened and to attempt to build a new life.

“She is just one example, and there are many others who do not manage to overcome their ordeals,” Cubela says. “But it gives us hope that one day we will be able to get over all this and prove that the nationalists were wrong, that we can live together.”

For Kata, the decision to keep Stipe seems to have been neither so noble nor so carefully considered.

After her uprooting and violation and an early pregnancy spent as a penniless nomad, Kata entered this town’s maternity ward with no intention of keeping the baby.

But from the first moment she saw the child, “I felt that I wanted him,” she says. “Now that I have him, I’ll never give him to anyone else.”

The possessive tone of her explanation appears to validate Djurasek’s theory that the baby born of violence and carried through a succession of deprivations has come to be seen by Kata as all that she has to call her own.

Williams, The Times’ Vienna correspondent, was recently on assignment in Croatia.