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20,000 Women Raped
During Kosovo War -
Babies Now Arriving
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,194119,00.html
6-21-00
 
Comment
 
Kosovo Rape Account Pure Propaganda
From: Ken McCarthy <ken@amacord.com>
6-21-00
 
"20,000 Women Raped During Kosovo War"
 
Jeff,
 
Yes, many, many tragedies occurred during the KLA terror campaign and the NATO bombardment, but this reads like a propaganda piece, not a news story. The British papers excel at this kind of thing.
 
This article contains two MAJOR internal inconsistencies:
 
1. The Serb army withdrew *12 months ago*, so if babies are showing up now as the result of Serb military rapes - as this reporter claims - we've got a very strange biological phenomenon going on here.
 
2. *As many as 20,000* (in other words the highest possible estimate) *might* have been raped quickly becomes - through deliberate misdirection on the part of the writer - 20,000 Albanian women pregnant as the result of rape by Serbian troops.
 
Also, the over the top melodrama of some of these accounts reads like the very NATO propaganda that preceded the bombing, 99% of which turns out upon examination to have been carefully manufactured lies.
 
By the way, what happened to the AP documented accounts of Serbian nuns being raped and tortured in their convents by Albanian terrorists? Why did this "reporter" ignore the other half of the story: attacks on Serbian women by sick elements of ethnic Albanian society?
 
Read the core "fact" of the story carefully:
 
"It is estimated by the World Health Organisation and the US-based Centre for Disease Control that as many as 20,000 Kosovar women (4.4 per cent of the population) were raped in the two years prior to Nato's forces entering the benighted territory."
 
Notice, the reporter carefully fails to mention raped by *whom*. How many of those rapes were by family members or acquaintances, the most common source of rape and sexual assault by far. She also carefully uses the word Kosovar which means ANYONE living in Kosovo regardless of their ethnic background, so conceivably Serbians, Gypsies, and other targeted by the CIA supported KLA are included in these figures.
 
I'm sorry to say that these figures are not out of line with what women experience in war-time throughout the world. In fact, they are not even that out of line for peacetime in many parts of the world and communities within the US.
 
 
-----
 
 
Rape victims' babies pay the price of war.
 
Up to 20,000 women were raped during the Kosovan carnage. Now the victims are bearing children fathered by their Serb tormentors. In this harrowing dispatch, Helen Smith reports on the awful fate awaiting the offspring of conflict
 
Kosovo: special report Sunday April 16, 2000 He was a healthy little boy and Mirveta had produced him. But birth, the fifth in her short lifetime, had not brought joy, only dread. As he was pulled from her loins, as the nurses at Kosovo's British-administered university hospital handed her the baby, as the young Albanian mother took the child, she prepared to do the deed. She cradled him to her chest, she looked into her boy's eyes, she stroked his face and she snapped his neck. They say it was a fairly clean business. Mirveta had used her bare hands. It is said that, in tears, she handed her baby back to the nurses, holding his snapped, limp neck. In Pristina, in her psychiatric detention cell, she has been weeping ever since. 'Who knows? She may have looked into the baby's face and seen the eyes of the Serb who raped her.' The words are uttered coolly, undramatically, by Sevdije Ahmeti almost as a matter of course. Ahmeti, tireless human rights activist, mother and member of Kosovo's transitional government, does not want me or anyone to sensationalise this poor woman's plight. 'She is a victim too. She is just 20 years old and cannot read or write. She has been abandoned by her husband. Psychologically raped a second time.'
 
She reels off Mirveta's details from a thick, yellow notepad. 'She is repenting, of course, but the attitude that she is a cold-blooded murderer is wrong. Who knows what this poor girl has been through? Who knows why she didn't abort? 'There were marks, signs of bites and bruises over her body, her intimate parts. We want to protect her; we will try to get her a new lawyer.' This is what Ahmeti does: she speaks for the estimated 20,000 women now carrying Kosovo's dark secret. The innumerable women who were raped, and impregnated, abandoned by family and friends. The women outcasts violated, tortured and left for dead; the 'touched' women, who have now heaped shame on the houses of their husbands. The women who see the war every day, in their minds, in their bodies, through their rape-babies. It is Friday morning and there are snowflakes splattering the window panes of the Centre for Protection of Women and Children which Ahmeti set up in 1993. Women trudge up the hill on which the centre stands, daintily side-stepping the litter and carrion birds that defile so much of the province. Sometimes, when they are feeling strong, they step inside. Sometimes, if Ahmeti is lucky, a woman will even tell her story. So far, 76 women, mostly young and beautiful, the daughters of eminent Kosovars and village elders (women targeted by the Serbs) have been mus tered enough courage to enter the centre. For everyone who had come there, Ahmeti said you could count at least a hundred more.
 
They are just the tip of the iceberg; the very few who have managed to break the 'metallic silence' that surrounds the issue of being 'touched'. For rape is not a word that Kosovar women ever use. This is not Bosnia; there is no cosmopolitan Sarajevo. There is only provincial Pristina. In the villages and hamlets, where the Yugoslav police, military and Serb paramilitaries evidently ran amok, rape has yet to enter their ancient lexicon. 'These are simple women, women who have been degraded, disgraced, and will carry this trauma like a bullet for the rest of their lives,' Ahmeti murmurs, chain-smoking. 'Raped women all over the world find it hard to speak, here they can hardly do it at all. 'They rarely tell each other... we've had cases of suicide, the lunacy of women losing all access to their children if it gets out.' Mirveta, the pretty infanticidal mother, is no exception. She is typical of the selection process pursued by the perpetrators, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last month. As they tried to ethnically cleanse Kosovo, paramilitaries - often aided by masked Serb neighbours - systematically searched villages for girls of prime, child-bearing age. It was about power and control, humiliation and revenge. And what better way to damage the enemy's morale than to hit at his family? 'Our society is a traditional one where Albanian men are brought up to see themselves as breadwinners and protectors,' Ahmeti points out. 'Once you touch the woman, you touch the honour of the family and you provoke the man to react. The Serbs knew this. Belgrade had, for years, put out propaganda that the only thing Albanian women could do was produce like mice. So daughters were gang-raped in front of their fathers, wives in front of their husbands, nieces in front of their uncles, mothers in front of their children, just to dehumanise, just to degrade.'
 
It is estimated by the World Health Organisation and the US-based Centre for Disease Control that as many as 20,000 Kosovar women (4.4 per cent of the population) were raped in the two years prior to Nato's forces entering the benighted territory. Numbers to match Bosnia, if not more. But unlike Bosnia, where international organisations were located throughout the war, the province was on its own. If, as Human Rights Watch argues, politicians did not exploit the fate of the women (which would have been a way of drumming up support for the Nato bombing campaign), aid organisations also played it down. 'I think there was a deliberate policy to keep it quiet. We knew, in such a patriarchal society, where the perception of rape is so medieval, that it would probably cause a lot of social distress,' said Gamilla Backman, an adviser on violence prevention at the World Health Organisation. 'Making revelations just to shake mentalities might have had the opposite effect and made life even more difficult for victims brave enough to speak. 'The international community has got cynical about rape. Time has shown, with the women of Bosnia, how very little talking can achieve.' By the time the province was liberated, hundreds of women who had been plucked from columns of refugees as they tried to flee the Serb onslaught were discovered wandering the hills, often disoriented, drugged, half-naked and half-crazed.
 
'There was always so much focus on the refugees who managed to get out and so little on the people who stayed inside - the 700,000 of them who suffered the real trauma,' said Ahmeti. How many of these women then found themselves pregnant will remain a mystery. How many gave birth is almost impossible to determine because of taboo. Local humanitarian groups, including the Red Cross, have estimated that 100 rape-babies were born in January alone. Innumerable others almost certainly came into the world on bathroom floors and kitchen tables, behind the high-walled homes of family clans who have vowed never to speak. 'Only God knows,' said Professor Skender Boshnjaku, Kosovo's leading neuropsychiatrist, who specialises in women's illness, 'how many have been born in secret.
 
I know of children who are being brought up by their grandmothers, women who want to protect their daughters. These babies will know a lot of hate, they will not have a lot of love.' The issue of babies 'born of violence' is not a subject Kosovars find easy to address. Boshnjaku concentrates on his shoes when the conversation veers in the direction of the rape-babies. Did he think I would be able to talk to some of the victims? No, he said flatly. Albanian women did not talk about themselves. They did not talk about their feelings. They used language economically, usually to convey the essentials of their primitive lives. They were 'the property of men, to be bought, sold and betrothed before birth'. They are 'sacks to be filled,' he says, citing the Kanun, the medieval war-and-peace code of behaviour still adhered to in these parts. 'Ours was a society built on generations of hate. There are older Albanians who speak Serbian, but generally there was very little interaction between our people and the Serbs.
 
And now,' he said, waving his hands desperately, 'there are these babies.' Even Ahmeti, who hails from a family of open-minded, well-travelled intellectuals, finds the phenomenon of Albanian-Serb progeny un-comfortable. Some women will accept them, some will nurture them begrudgingly, some will reject them. But, she said, they will not be dumped in orphanages and they will not be left in baskets and boxes on the streets. 'They are innocent children, they are not to blame,' she said. 'People, here, will take them into their homes and married women will be able to cover up. Our hope is that they grow up without the guilt of their mothers.' The local authorities are about to start a television campaign appealing for prospective parents. 'It concerns me greatly that some are calling them "children of shame".' But rape, I am told on my first night in Pristina, is worse than death. To be an Albanian who gives birth to a child sired by a Serb is to be sentenced to a living hell. Pedric, who told me this, is young and worldly. 'If I were normal, I would keep the kid, accept my wife. But in Kosovo, in our culture, death is better than rape. I could not accept my wife. She would be dirty, evil, the castle of the enemy,' he booms. 'A lot of women have been very sensible. They have kept quiet about it, they have given birth at home and, if they are even more sensible, they do what that woman (Mirveta) did last month.
 
They kill their scum-babies.' Agron Krasniqi, a gynaecologist at Pristina's University Hospital, is also at the table. 'All of us, we were conducting abortions around the clock,' he said. 'Only a few weeks ago we had a woman who came to the hospital and said she was raped and could we help. She was six months pregnant. There are so many women like that...Women who couldn't physically make the journeys to hospitals and private clinics because they couldn't afford it or didn't dare tell their husbands. In this instance, there was nothing we could do. It was a terrible business, as terrible as the abandoned babies we've also got at the hospital.' Abandoned babies? 'Yes, we've got eight new-born babies and a roomful in the paediatric ward. There are boys as well. In our culture, boys are usually never abandoned. It is fair to say most are the product of rape.' No one wants to talk about the abandoned babies; no one wants to associate them with rape. But there they are, on the second floor of the Pristina clinic in an airy room off a chamber lined with incubators. Babies less than eight weeks old lie in little plastic cases, the others in blue-and-white check-cloth cots. The doctors have given them names which they have written in blue ink on plasters they have stuck to their beds. 'They have nothing. The least we can do for their dignity is give them names,' said Enser, the neo-natalist. 'We try to cradle them, hug them whenever we can, because we now know how important the first six months are in a baby's life. Before we didn't do it, and you could see the difference.'
 
 
Did the mothers ever return to claim them? 'Never,' he said. 'And we don't really have any idea who they are because they usually come alone, very early, around 5am so no one will see them and then they give us false names. An American woman, a midwife, came the other day. She wanted to adopt Teuta, our oldest one, but the authorities don't want any to go abroad, they want them to stay here.' In the paediatric wing, there are 12 more abandoned children, all between six and 18 months. They are kept for most of the day in a small room, playing on plastic tricycles, lying on mattresses, sitting on nurses' laps. Some are dark, some blond, some obviously Slavic with give-away high cheekbones and broad faces. When we open the door they come rushing out, tugging at the hems of our skirts, jumping up and down, beseeching to be held. 'They are lovely children,' said the nurse, apologising for her insistence that in the room, at least, we do not take any pictures. 'There are other rape-babies, you know, in other hospitals. There are some in Prizren and some in Pec.'Around Pec, Serb paramilitaries and the Yugoslav army appear to have acted with wanton abandon, raping women in barracks, public buildings and private homes. It is in Pec that the UN-sponsored International Rescue Committee has established the Women's Wellness Centre, one of only two international organisations in Kosovo specialising exclusively in violence against women.
 
The centre has taken a holistic approach in its attempt to attract victims. And since opening six months ago it has run classes in English, sewing and art. But getting these same women to tell their stories is another matter. 'We have a lot of cases of domestic violence, which is prevalent in this culture,' said Jeanne Ward, an American psychotherapist who has worked on similar programmes in New York. 'But so far absolutely no rape cases, although a great many women are suffering from depression, isolation, nightmares, flashbacks, all the symptoms of such trauma. Confidentiality is a big problem here and the social stigma is just so great. Kosovar women are afraid that if they are perceived to have been raped they will automatically be cut off from their families, children, everyone .' 'Let me tell you a story,' she said. 'I know of one woman who was raped and when it got out she was immediately dropped by her fiancé. The dishonour, he said, was just too much. Since she's been deflowered and is no longer seen as fit for marriage, her family have made her a prisoner. She is now a servant to the household.' The centre's Albanian director, Lumnije Decani, interrupted. 'Jeanne is right,' she said. 'It will take time, but I'm sure women will come. They want to, I know, they need to talk, which is why we are going to install 24-hour hotlines. You should go to Belegu.' 'And Lubeniq,' said the American. It was in Lubeniq that about 70 men were shot dead in the village square, after taking up arms to protect their women. They had heard about the mass rapes.
 
And they were scared. Belegu lies in the middle of a plain and Lubeniq stands on a hill on the road that leads to it. They are both wretched places, polluted by violence and death. We stop at Lubeniq on the way to Belegu to find children playing around their relatives' graves. 'My daddy is in there,' said Mentor Ukshinaj, pointing to the mound of earth bearing a wooden stump and the name of Hajdar Ukshinaj. 'He died protecting my mummy. He died in front of me.' When we go to Belegu, the members of the first house, a fine stone building erected around a triangular courtyard, rush out to greet us. Beqir Zukaj, a proud man in a white felt cap who is the head of the extended family, did not mince his gestures. Outside his stone, high-walled house, he made thrusting movements and performed the charade of ripping off his wife's clothes. 'It didn't happen here,' he said. 'It happened in the big barn in the other end of the village.' Sevdije Hoxha was there and she remembered everything. Hundreds of people had converged on Belegu from other villages on the plain and when the Serbs began to encircle them they hid in the barn. We went to the barn and she showed us its big lime-coloured doors. 'They came, they separated the women from the men, they took all our documents and then they took away the young ones. They took them to the brick building here,' she said, pointing to the half-constructed red-brick villa next door. 'We had plastered some of the pretty ones with animal manure, to make them smell and look less nice, but they took them anyway. You could hear them scream, beg, shout. Many have never come back to their villages. They got on tractors, they went to Albania and from there, I think, they went abroad.' The ones who returned to Belegu are broken. 'Broken lives, broken hearts,' said Imer Zukaj, who spent years working in Switzerland. 'There is one young girl here. She is 17 years old. She was raped by six Serbs, who pinned her down, cut her breasts. Whenever I, or any man, greets her, which is when we go to her home, she jumps in the air and screams. She is not well. She is on medication. She doesn't speak. Nobody, you know, will marry her, her life is finished.' When I asked Ahmeti if I could meet some of the victims, she glared. Hers is the only organisation that has managed to reach out to women trapped in villages like Belegu; she is furious that more has not been done for them. After last month's infanticide, WHO initiated a programme to sensitise doctors and nurses dealing with women about to give birth - to spot those who might want to reject their babies. Other than that, Ahmeti said, psycho-social support has been minimal. The women are outcasts. Some are war widows and many have no work, no family, no one to turn to. There has been almost no attempt to socialise, reintegrate or resettle them with therapeutic counselling. Or to provide witness protection so they may eventually give evidence before the criminal tribunal at The Hague. 'This is a torn society and there are so many things that have to be done, but these women's needs have really never been addressed. Wherever you go in Kosovo you bump into victims, but these particular ones gain nothing from talking. You just rape their psyche a second time.' She is right, of course. In Kosovo, everyone at some stage has been a victim and you do not have to go far to bump into one. Seated in front of Ahmeti, interviewing her, is 29-year-old Luljeta Selimi, a journalist who trained as a gynaecologist (a profession never allowed to flourish under the Serbs). 'Please excuse my English. I used to speak it very well, but last April the Serbs arrested me helping a friend give birth. They kept me in water for nine hours, beat me until I fainted and then threw me on a rubbish dump. It was Gypsies who saved me and took me to Macedonia,' she said. 'You will never find these women. I have had to spend weeks in villages posing as a doctor, gaining their trust, staying at their homes.' Selimi, it turns out, has collected testimonies from 200 rape victims; each case documented in black notebooks and on cassette. 'I want the world to know what happened to my country, to these women. Thousands of women who now have nothing.' Over the course of the next week she brought me three victims; women who are young, educated and angry with the world. Angry that Nato did not intervene or send in ground troops earlier; that help has not been more forthcoming; that they have been left to drift, dependent on small kindnesses. They have come to me, because they could never have me go to them - it would raise too many suspicions. They are willing to talk because they want the world to know that they exist. They have lost their homes, they have lost their valuables (extorted by the rapists) but they are still the lucky ones. At least they have been spared becoming pregnant. 'They stopped our car as my husband, son and daughter were driving towards the Macedonian border on 22 March, two days before Nato intervened,' said the school-teacher from a hamlet south of Pristina. 'They were paramilitaries, some wore bandannas, some masks. 'They made us get out and walk over the hills and then _ and then they took me, they made me comb my hair and they did what they did. When my husband tried to stop them, they shot him dead. My children were there, watching.' The two other women were similarly stopped, one as she tried to flee across the Albanian border, the other as she hid with her family in the forest, hours after the Serbs had torched their village in the middle of Kosovo. Both were virgins before and both have avoided sex since. Both hardly leave their homes. And both have the saddest, most vacant eyes I have ever seen. 'So what do you think I should do?' asked the one with red-dyed hair, the one who was raped for hours in the forest. I looked at her and thought: 'Yes, what next?' Here I am, privy to the most painful event this woman will ever endure and I have no ready answer; no relief to proffer, only the ability to make her, and the children of war, 'exist'. Some names have been changed.
 
The original article may be found here: http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,194119,00.htm

 
 
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