She’s Seeking Women’s Rights--Quietly

Jadranka Milicevic is doing something a little bit subversive.

She is gathering women in this divided city in southern Bosnia, quietly and without fanfare. They come from all over the region. Muslims, Serbs, Croats. Mixed. And they don’t want anyone to know about it. Not yet.

The agenda is pretty basic stuff, Milicevic says. Organizing. Voter education. Women’s rights. Democracy.

In Bosnia’s hesitant recovery from 3 1/2 years of war, Milicevic is one combatant in a newly emerging army of women helping women.

“We have to reach women and tell them if they don’t take their future and the future of their children into their own hands, no one will,” Milicevic said. “It is very important for women to work together. By sharing our problems and talking about them together, we can more easily overcome them. We don’t want a state without men, but we do want our place and attention. No one takes that seriously.”

This may sound elementary to Western ears. But Bosnia-Herzegovina remains a patriarchal, conservative society that has traditionally lagged behind the rest of the former Yugoslav federation when it comes to the status of women. The word “feminism” has only bad connotations in a largely rural country where girls are often taken out of school and where a growing Islamic movement may further limit opportunities for women.

War offered little space for focusing on issues such as women’s rights. Men and women alike suffered, were victimized, fought. In fact, women were often double victims, suffering both the loss of slain families and the degradation of rape and sexual humiliation. Today, however, women say they find themselves being left behind and their unique problems ignored by the establishment.

With the conflict having claimed an estimated 200,000 mostly male lives, Bosnia now has a large female majority. About 68% of the Muslim-Croat half of the country is women. (Figures are not available for the less populous and slightly smaller Bosnian Serb half.)

The grass-roots activism that Milicevic champions, experts argue, is precisely the kind of bottom-to-top transformation that must occur for there to be any significant change in Bosnia, which is still governed by the same war-era leaders who exploited ethnic tensions to divide people, hang on to power and stifle freedom.

Milicevic, 41, is a feisty woman who talks nonstop and sports a bright red head of hair visible for miles.

She is also a Serb. But born and bred in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, she is such a true believer in the idea of multicultural diversity that she grows angry when asked to identify her ethnic group.

“My name tells you I am a Serb,” she says, leaving it at that.

Group Takes On Nationalism

Milicevic insists that being a Serb has not hurt her ability to work with Muslim women, particularly the many female survivors of Srebrenica, an eastern Bosnian enclave where thousands of Muslim men and boys were slain by the Bosnian Serb army in the single deadliest atrocity of the war. Numerous Srebrenica women have settled in the Sarajevo area and look to people like Milicevic for help.

No, says Milicevic, her problems are not with other women but with nationalist authorities of all stripes and creeds. In Sarajevo, it’s the predominantly Muslim one-party government. In Mostar, it’s the ruling hard-line Bosnian Croat separatists. During the war, when she lived as a refugee in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and the rump Yugoslavia, it was the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

Every Wednesday during the war, Milicevic and a small group of women, all wearing black, demonstrated in Belgrade’s central square to protest the hostilities unleashed by Milosevic. With bellicose nationalism the order of the day in Serbia, the women were scorned and ridiculed.

“We were traitors,” Milicevic recalled. “We were called vulgar names. Some of the women had trouble at work and were called in for questioning by the police. As a refugee, I was supposed to sit down and be quiet. . . . Well, I wasn’t quiet then, and I won’t be quiet now.”

Milicevic’s husband remained in Sarajevo throughout the war. On several occasions, she braved Bosnian Serb artillery fire to cross the lines of combat into the besieged city to visit him. She returned for good in 1996.

With two Muslim women, Milicevic founded the Zena Zenama (Women to Women) association last year. It works out of a crowded, chaotic eighth-floor apartment (with neighbors angry at the constant commotion) and handles a wide range of problem cases, from elderly widows attempting to recover their homes to young wives dealing with abusive husbands to traumatized survivors of ethnic massacres.

“My dream is to one day have a proper women’s center,” she said.

Reaching Out to the Disenfranchised

As temperatures soared toward the 100-degree mark on a bright summer afternoon, Milicevic was pounding the cracked pavement of a Sarajevo suburb to visit some of her “clients.”

Bozica, a 74-year-old retired lawyer, showed Milicevic her four-room apartment, which she is trying desperately to salvage. Straddling a wartime front line, the building was nearly in ruins. Rubble was piled in the entryway, and the staircase tilted perilously.

The plaster on the bullet-riddled walls in Bozica’s apartment was peeling, the ceiling was charred from fires, and the sinks, toilet, tub and electrical wiring had been plundered. Bozica had covered the blown-out windows with plastic and had even attempted to sleep in the apartment, but she found it too uncomfortable and was bunking with friends while scrounging money for repairs.

Milicevic’s organization had already bought Bozica a front door, and during the visit she promised she would try to help her buy windowpanes.

Bozica was encouraged. “Oh yes, to have glass in the windows would be very nice,” the older woman said, blinking through bottle-thick spectacles.

Next, Milicevic called on 81-year-old Vera, climbing four flights of stairs in a building brimming with refugees. Vera faced eviction any day, apparently because someone in the city government coveted the apartment where she was staying. Her original home, meanwhile, had been occupied by a young man who refused to leave.

“It’s not just minorities that the local authorities evict,” Milicevic said. “It’s also Bosniaks [Muslims] who are not well-connected. If they evict [Muslims] too, then imagine! Who will defend Vera? Who will walk from office to office to fight her eviction?”

Milicevic was beginning to let despair into her voice. Vera, tiny and stooped but perky despite her plight, patted the younger woman on the back.

“You can’t lose hope,” Vera said. “If you give up, then there’s no hope for us.”

A Wide Array of Programs

Milicevic and her associates also tackle vexing matters such as wife-beating and voter education, and they offer psychological counseling. They have developed a wide array of programs for women aimed at healing bruised psyches and helping women to function in Bosnian society by getting jobs, devising household budgets and nurturing their children.

In Stup, another ruined Sarajevo suburb, where houses are slowly getting new roofs and the gashes left by artillery bombardments are being filled, eight women sat in a circle inside a room that doubles as a kindergarten.

Two counselors employed by Milicevic guided the women through steps meant to teach them basic coping skills. Most fled Srebrenica when it fell, and several have fathers, brothers and husbands who are among the more than 7,000 missing.

Each had to describe something positive that had happened to her the previous week. Each had to answer a simple question about how she viewed her life or herself.

‘This Has Been My Worst Week’

Sadika Bajic was the most animated, laughing a little too loudly and at seemingly inappropriate moments, and hyperventilating slightly when she spoke.

“This has been my worst week,” Bajic, 21, told the group. “Sometimes, I want to lie down and die. I feel completely broken.”

“Where does this come from so suddenly?” counselor Gordana Radivojevic asked.

As it turned out, the owner of the house where Bajic had been squatting had arrived and indicated that he planned to move back.

“Well, you knew that would happen sooner or later,” Radivojevic said.

Such uncertainty and tenuous living plague many refugee women, Milicevic said, especially Srebrenica survivors who do not want to believe their missing relatives are dead and consequently are unwilling to make plans or decisions.

Still, the group in Stup has made remarkable progress in the five months it has been meeting, Milicevic said. At the beginning, one or two members could not even speak. Several broke down at the mention of a missing relative.

In initial meetings, members were asked to draw self-portraits indicating a place on their body that hurt. Almost all drew headaches.

Gradually, they started to take better care of themselves, to dress more carefully, get haircuts, apply makeup.

“Each time is a time for laughing, and for crying,” said Radivojevic. “But each time, there is less crying.”

The group planned a field trip to the Adriatic coast. No husbands allowed--quite a step toward independence. And buying a bathing suit, for these women steeped in modesty who had never seen the sea, became a consuming topic of discussion.

Bringing Together Former Enemies

Milicevic and others who are organizing networks for Bosnian women attempt to build ties among ethnic groups. Success varies. It is not easy to bring some former enemies together.

In the rural village of Semizovac, about 10 miles northwest of Sarajevo, Muslims and Serbs have joined together to receive small loans from a U.S.-based nonprofit organization called Women for Women. It teaches basic organizational skills, such as how to have a meeting, elect a local leader, draft and follow an agenda and manage money.

Amina Spahic, a Muslim, and Borka Maksimovic, a Serb, had little in common and less interest in collaborating. For Spahic, all Serbs were like the ones who shot her husband. Maksimovic, urban and better educated, clearly looked down on the Muslim woman.

“I was the first to say that I did not want Serbs in my group,” said 25-year-old Spahic, who was forced to flee her home during the war but returned in 1996 and has since given birth to a second child.

“She never said anything directly to me, but I could notice she couldn’t stand Serbs,” said the fortyish Maksimovic, who was imprisoned by Muslim authorities for 17 days during the war and eventually expelled from Sarajevo. “She is young.”

Counselors put the two women in a car pool, obliging them to ride together for several weeks until the ice was broken.

They talked at first about trivial matters such as hair dye. But eventually, they came to see that they shared a common goal: overcoming poverty and learning to earn a good income. While there does not appear to be great warmth between the two women, they do work together.

“It’s not worth fighting anymore,” Spahic said.

Wilkinson was recently on assignment in Mostar.

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A Nation Still Divided

Nationalism and ethnic prejudice were used to stoke 3 1/2 years of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Millions of lives were ruined. Long after the shooting stopped under a Western-imposed peace settlement, much of Bosnia remains separated along ethnic lines. But a small number of Bosnians fights the system and resists the status quo in uphill battles to make a difference and give Bosnia hope for genuine change. This series introduces a few of these men and women:

SUNDAY: A Serbian mayor’s quest to go back to a hometown now controlled by Croats reveals the complexities of refugee returns, the single greatest problem in postwar Bosnia.

MONDAY: A Muslim reporter who remained in Serb-held territory grapples with how to live alongside the very men who abused him for his faith.

TUESDAY: A Muslim judge endures threats and condemnation from fellow Muslims for standing up for what he feels is just, even if it runs counter to nationalist wishes.

WEDNESDAY: A Serbian woman in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia ignores ethnic prejudices to help women assert their rights and rebuild their lives.

THURSDAY: A Croatian priest working in a Muslim city challenges hard-liners from both groups to preserve a Catholic community in unfriendly territory.