In Kosovo, Rape Seen as Awful as Death

Her body savaged, her family wronged and her future ruined, 13-year-old Pranvera Lokaj has taken off for the mountains of Kosovo to seek the only solace her hidebound clan accords a rape victim: to kill or be killed in pursuit of vengeance.

“I have given her to the KLA so she can do to the Serbs what they have done to us,” Haxhi Lokaj said of his daughter, who has been sent to fight with the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“She will probably be killed, but that would be for the best,” the 40-year-old father said with more resignation than sorrow. “She would have no future anyway after what they did to her.”

For the untold numbers of Kosovo Albanian women and girls raped by Serbian soldiers in the conflagration of hate consuming the province in southern Yugoslavia, the heartless judgment expected from their backward rural communities may prove the more enduring injury from this most humiliating of war crimes.

While rape has for centuries been committed by soldiers as a tool of terror, its power to destroy women’s self-worth in the tradition-bound Balkans is intensified by the patriarchal views of Kosovo villagers who see the savagery as a shame on the victim’s entire family.

Even more sophisticated urban Kosovo women say they’d rather die than bear the humiliating brand of a rape victim--a view that threatens to compound the efficacy of the Serbian forces’ war crimes by driving survivors to suicide and depleting the ethnic Albanian population of women of childbearing age.

“Rape is a powerful taboo in their society. Kosovar men do not accept the women as blameless victims,” said Eglantina Gjermeni, head of an international rape relief project to aid the Kosovo victims of sexual violence. “But that has to change because what has happened in these conditions of war has affected too many women.”

Ethnic Albanians like the Lokajs, who are from poor, rural areas, see death as the only honorable future for those raped by the marauding enemies.

In the second week of April, according to Pranvera’s parents, Serbian soldiers herded Pranvera and at least 20 other terrified girls into the cellar of an empty house in the nearby village of Bileg and gang-raped them for four nights.

Their screams pierced the floor above them, torturing their helpless mothers and brothers being held there at gunpoint, and reverberated through the wooded hills where Lokaj and other KLA rebels were dug in in hopes of ambushing the Serbs.

Bleeding and sobbing, the girls were shoved back among their horrified families just before sunrise after the fourth brutal night, when all were loaded into tractor-driven carts for the journey into exile, recalls Pranvera’s mother, Ajmane.

“We couldn’t do anything because we were surrounded by police,” said the dazed mother. “We couldn’t do anything except listen to their screams.”

For the victim’s father, the affront remains as raw as an open wound--and fresh inspiration to forever rid Kosovo of the reviled Serbian gunmen. As if the defilement by drunken soldiers and paramilitary thugs had been committed against his own person, Lokaj said he sent his daughter into combat for the greater goal of getting even.

“I too have been attacked because of what they did to my daughter,” said the farmer, who is taking shelter with his wife and remaining five children in a malodorous ground-floor room of a schoolhouse in this border town overflowing with 100,000 refugees from Kosovo.

“We will only recover from this when Kosovo is finally free of the Serbs,” said Lokaj, who plans to return himself to the rebel front that has so far done little to deter the Serbian gunmen’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing.”

The wounds inflicted on Kosovo society by the use of rape as a weapon of terror, including reported rapes before the eyes of victims’ husbands, brothers and fathers, will leave families and communities in shambles long after the fighting is over.

“When Serb soldiers rape Albanian women, their first aim is to humiliate them. They want to destroy their future and their family lives so they never want to come back to their communities,” said Gjermeni, head of the Tirana rape relief project sponsored by the Medica Mondiale group based in Cologne, Germany.

Since 1992, Medica Mondiale has been aiding Balkan rape victims, including those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where rape was systematically committed against Muslim women to destroy their society and traditions. Bosnian women, however, were less reluctant to share their trauma with fellow victims and rape relief workers than Kosovo women appear to be because the community was more supportive of the women.

Medica Kosovo, as the current relief effort is known, aims to locate and assist raped women because its counselors fear that the victims will never recover or return to their native villages if they continue to repress and distort what they’ve been through. In addition, a team of UCLA physicians arriving in Albania today includes several rape counselors.

“So far, we have only been able to let them know we are there for them if they want to talk. But they are afraid to trust us, which is why we are trying to involve more Kosovo Albanian women, because they are closer to their own culture,” said Gjermeni, who last week began training Kosovo women volunteers for outreach work with the 430,000-plus refugees scattered throughout Albania.

Mobile rape relief teams have been assembled to visit refugee camps where sexually assaulted women are living in self-imposed isolation and denial. Gynecologists, psychologists and lawyers will be traveling from camp to camp in a specially equipped ambulance donated by the organization’s German sponsors to persuade victims that they should undergo both physical and psychological examinations.

They are also being asked to provide legal testimony to assist the war crimes tribunal in The Hague in the hope of one day punishing the assailants. In the wake of the atrocities in Bosnia, rape has been classified as a war crime.

Even the most engaged professionals say they have no perspective on the scope of the rape problem because evidence has been so anecdotal and obscured.

“It is dangerous to speak of rape as being systematic. The incidence does not seem as deliberate and widespread as it was in Bosnia, but that doesn’t make it any less of a personal disaster for the victims,” said Barbara Hofmann, a German physical therapist who has shuttered her practice in Switzerland to volunteer her time to the Medica Kosovo project. “Each female life is a whole world of its own.”

In a report to the United Nations earlier this week, a French psychologist said she was told of mass rapes and barbarity against Kosovo women in the cities of Djakovica, Pec and Drenica--three of the larger ethnic Albanian communities within the western KLA stronghold.

“The soldiers took groups of five to 30 women to unknown places in trucks or they were locked up in houses where the soldiers live. Any resistance is met with threats of being burned alive,” Dominique Serrano-Fitamant wrote in her report for the U.N. Population Fund.

Based on interviews with 35 women who survived brutal mistreatment by Serbian gunmen, Serrano-Fitamant said the troops appeared to consider the NATO bombings to provide “psychological license” to inflict sexual violence on Albanian women.

Like most who have investigated rape incidents among Kosovo women, Serrano-Fitamant said she was unable to offer any estimate of how widespread the assaults have been. But she said recent testimony by refugees suggests the use of sexual violence has been increasing.

Last month, Human Rights Watch documented one case of organized mass rape by Serbian police and soldiers in the village of Dragacin, near Suva Reka.

Victims interviewed by the New York-based group described how they and dozens of other women were dragged off by drunken and mocking gunmen who raped them in front of a senior officer. Most of the victims, however, refused to admit they had been assaulted, returning to the fold of captive women kept in three houses before their mass expulsion with tales of having only been asked to undress and serve the men coffee.

“We interviewed at least 25 of the women, and only three of them admitted to having been sexually abused. Most of them said they had been spared by some good soldier who only asked them to make coffee,” recalls Penelope Lewis, a counselor with UNICEF who was asked to help the Dragacin women when they arrived en masse at the nearby Morine border crossing April 26.

“But it became clear after a while that ‘making coffee’ was a euphemism for having been raped,” Lewis said. “Even the ones with the ‘good soldier’ version had all the physical signs and body language of someone in extreme distress.”

Many Kosovo women fear being shunned by their own menfolk if they concede that they have been sexually violated.

“Life would be horrible for a woman if that happened to her,” said 18-year-old Vlora Gegaj, who was abducted at gunpoint by Serbian police in October and shoved into a prison cell where another gunman in the blue camouflage uniform of the Yugoslav special forces was waiting. “If it happened to me, I’d rather kill myself than tell anyone.”

Still shaken by the incident seven months ago, in which she said she was released unharmed after 90 minutes, Gegaj recalls how she escaped a second kidnapping when her family was expelled from Kosovo last month.

“I put a scarf over my head to cover my hair and held the baby of another woman so the Serbs would think I was already married,” said Gegaj, describing a ruse many young women say they used to convince their Serbian oppressors that they would not be despoiling virgins.

Fears of being ostracized are clearly not unfounded, with even younger men often saying that they would be unable to bear the social stigma of having a wife who had been raped.

“I would still love her, but I don’t think the community would accept her back,” Zemeri Mehaj, a waiter from Pec, said of the hypothetical consequences of his wife of six months being raped. “There would be strong pressure for me to reject her. We would only be able to stay together if we went abroad.”

Ensuring that the traumatized women never want to see their homeland again appears to be a primary aim of the Serbian gunmen who have been systematically emptying Kosovo of the ethnic Albanians who were a 90% majority of its 2 million population. Now, fewer than 900,000 ethnic Albanians remain in Kosovo, and half of them are believed to be wandering homeless or held near military targets for use as human shields.

Because Kosovo society differs so sharply from that in Albania, where Islamic traditions were eradicated by the paranoid dictatorship of the late Enver Hoxha, sociologists and rape relief counselors say it will require Kosovo women to reach out to Kosovo victims.

“We’ve already begun to work with groups of women in Albania and Macedonia, but it is going to be very difficult to have any success in the camps,” said Vjosa Dobruna, a physician and founder of the Center for the Protection of Women and Children in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. Like most ethnic Albanian medical professionals from Kosovo, Dobruna is a refugee herself.

Living in the newfound anonymity of massive tent cities sprouting throughout Albania, the traumatized victims of war rape can often hide their ordeals from those around them by suffering in silence instead of seeking medical or psychological help.

“We have had no cases of sexual assault brought to our attention, although we hear that this is happening,” said Elida Jano, a physician staffing the medical tent at the Piscina refugee camp in central Tirana, the Albanian capital, where 5,000 people--mostly women and children--have massed over the past two months.

At Tirana’s main hospital for women, chief gynecologist Vjollca Tare said two Kosovo women who appeared to have been sexually brutalized sought abortions at her facility in recent weeks but refused to discuss how they had become pregnant.

While both Albanian and Kosovo counselors are concerned about rape victims languishing in denial or deluding themselves with tales of rescue by some invented “good soldier,” some psychiatrists argue that the defense mechanisms may be necessary, at least in the short term.

“The Western psychiatric model that insists that people must talk about what they have experienced is not necessarily correct. I don’t think we should be imposing our practices everywhere,” said Lynne Jones, a psychiatrist with British-based Child Advocacy International who is counseling traumatized women and children at the mobile hospital set up on the outskirts of Kukes by the United Arab Emirates.

“For women with children, having been raped is not always the first thing they worry about. They may be repressing memories of the attack because they simply have no time when they have to think about everything else they’ve lost--their homes, their income, sometimes their entire families,” said Anda Durha, coordinator of the Albanian Women’s Federation project, which is collecting testimonials from displaced Kosovo Albanians for potential use in war crimes prosecutions.

“It only seems to happen to the women in the truck in front of them or the one behind them,” she said with a tone of despair rather than judgment. “But that’s their mentality, and perhaps it is the only way they can cope.”