Bosnia Rape Victims’ Fight to Live Steals Time to Heal

It’s not the memory of her husband’s death while defending their home in eastern Bosnia or the 100-mile walk through exploding battlefields that haunts Amira and keeps her from sleeping.

Each night, just when the comforting oblivion of slumber is about to engulf her, she hears the heavy thud of Bosnian Serb soldiers’ boots and is jolted awake.

“They would come in and walk among us, to see who they wanted to take,” she recalled recently.

Amira, a 35-year-old Muslim, was held for two months in a Serb-run detention camp and repeatedly raped. She was released 19 months ago, but, like most Bosnian rape victims, she found her recovery from the ordeal put off by the daily struggle to survive.

Once freed from the camp, Amira had to wander with her two children and beg for food until settling with other refugees in the nearby town of Kakanj in December.

It was there that she heard about the Medica center for women war victims that has given her temporary shelter, help for her children and the courage to talk about what she has been through with others who suffered the same pain.

But for every Amira, fortunate enough to be taken in by one of the few Western counseling services set up amid Bosnia’s continuing horrors, there are believed to be hundreds or even thousands of others still wandering, hungry and homeless, too beset by the hardships of life as a refugee to even begin to heal from the rape.

The Medica shelter-clinic was opened last year by German gynecologist Monika Hauser and volunteers from Germany and Italy who were moved by the plight of Bosnian women.

“Sometimes I fear the international community considers the topic closed,” Hauser said. “It was good that there was such strong worldwide condemnation (once news of the rapes spread), but there has to be continuing support from the world. This is going to be a very long-term program here.”

The center’s biggest drawback, its volunteers concede readily, is its ability to help only a few women when so many are in need.

Selma Hadzihalilovic, a 19-year-old nurse, practices triage in apportioning the center’s limited resources to the most desperate cases. She has compiled a neat ledger with the names and circumstances of 1,800 women in the Zenica area who have appealed to Medica for food, clothing, evacuation or help in dealing with the physical and psychological consequences of having been raped.

“We have one woman who has 11 children, her husband was killed, they live in one room, one of her children is blind and another is wounded,” the exasperated nurse offered as an example of the horror stories the overtaxed center feels compelled to pass over.

The center chose not to help the woman in question because she had not been raped, Hadzihalilovic explained, adding: “I cannot cry in front of these women. I have to stay calm.”

Another volunteer, Meliha Causevic, who helps sort through the mountain of pleas for assistance, said her office deals with an average of 150 phone calls and 100 women applying in person each day.

Medica workers and those of other relief agencies that aid rape victims who have managed to get out of Bosnia say the systematic use of rape as a weapon has diminished but not ended.

“We can’t say what is happening now in the Serb-occupied areas, but it’s not like it was when they had the big camps,” Hauser said. “The world knows what is going on now. (The attackers) have to be more careful. But in places like Prijedor and Banja Luka, the horror is still going on.”

In an effort to drive out the last non-Serbs from northwestern Bosnia, Bosnian Serb gunmen have resumed a campaign of organized violence.

Rape was also used as a weapon and an assertion of conquest during the past year in Muslim-Croatian fighting in central Bosnia. It was not as commonly used there as it had been by the Bosnian Serb guerrillas, but it was no less devastating for the victims.

“The Chetniks (Serbs) started it, but the HVO (Croat forces) proved to be good pupils,” said Hauser, who divides her time between fund raising in Cologne, Germany, and administering the expanding Medica center.

About 90 patients are housed and treated at the original complex and a gynecological clinic and therapy network reach 400 outpatients each month. A second Medica center has been opened to house 50 women who have gone through the initial stages of counseling and need only financial assistance. The follow-up center includes a handicrafts workshop where Medica graduates knit and sew items that can bring them income.

Hauser’s agency also deploys mobile teams of doctors and counselors to help women in refugee centers set up self-help programs. But the crowded conditions of those places often deter meaningful discussion.

“They should see that they’re not alone, that many others have been through the same terrible experiences. But nobody talks in the camps because of the conditions,” Hauser said.

Healing the mothers has proven easier when the suffering of their families is relieved. That is why Medica shelters the rape victims’ children and serves as a distribution point for privately collected aid.

“We have a great deal of difficulty teaching the children, because they are usually unfamiliar with an orderly institutional environment,” said Kanita Hadzihajdic, a teacher employed by Medica to look after the 38 children whose mothers are being housed and counseled. “We have to start at the beginning, teaching them songs, how to play and learn, so we can help them to forget the things they’ve gone through.”

Many of the children, like Amira’s 6-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, were imprisoned with the women and witnessed their sexual abuse. Helping children overcome the trauma of a violation that even the youngest understood as an act designed to inflict terror demands as much time from the center’s psychologists as its efforts to help the women.

Hauser rejects the notion that the Medica building has been stigmatized because it holds so many rape cases, insisting that the sooner Bosnians acknowledge what has happened, the sooner the women will be able to recover from their ordeals.

“There was a war here, and rape has been an instrument of war throughout history,” Hauser said. “Russian soldiers raped women in Germany (during World War II) as a way of saying, ‘See, we have conquered you.’ The same thing happened in Korea.

“They just never talked about it until recently,” she said. “Our duty is to see that these women don’t get to speak about what happened to them 40 years later, but to get them to deal with it now.”

Drawing women out of their protective cocoons of denial gets more difficult with the passage of time, Hauser said, adding that many raped women have not had the opportunity to face up to what they have endured.

“Women who were held in the camps and raped in the summer of 1992 didn’t make their way to (government-held territory) until at least winter and the first came to us only in April and May,” Hauser said. “They lived with their trauma for months, repressing what happened as a protective mechanism, to stay focused on how to survive. This was a kind of resistance--you can’t call them victims. They are strong and found a way to survive.”

Amira’s story is not unusual in a country that remains at war long after her sexual abuse ended.

Swept out of the Serb-run camp at Kalinovik to make room for fresh victims, Amira and her children made their way on foot about 40 miles to a refugee camp near Mostar, which in late 1992 was in the hands of allied Muslims and Croats.

When Croatian nationalists turned on the Muslims, she was forced to flee again, this time more than 100 miles along a circuitous route across snowbound mountains. She arrived in nearby Kakanj only in December and first appealed to Medica in March in hopes of getting food for her children.

She now works at the center in exchange for room and board and takes part in group discussions with other rape victims, slowly learning to accept that she was not culpable for what befell her, said the psychiatrist who has been counseling her.

But the woman remains troubled by recurring nightmares in which she relives the worst horrors, like the time drunk, sadistic gunmen threatened to castrate her 6-year-old son.

And the sound of thick-soled boots pounding across cement floors still comes back to her almost nightly as she struggles to fall asleep, reminding her of a terror she will likely recover from but that still lurks in the repressed memories of thousands of women.

Williams was recently on assignment in Zenica.