Serbia raped women\

Serbs Rape Albanian Women at Border

SKOPJE, Macedonia--Serbian border guards have taken to adding one more atrocity to their campaign of driving ethnic Albanians from their homes in the province of Kosovo -- rape.

The women are reluctant to talk about what happens in the border post at Monice, though which more than 200,000 people have been herded over the last few weeks. But the faraway stares in their tearful eyes, their torn clothing, and the despair of their families speaks volumes.

According to human rights groups and investigators from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, and some of the women themselves, Kosovo Albanian women are being picked out at the border as they wait with their families to cross into Albania, taken to a building not far away, and raped.

"There have been so many credible reports of this sort of thing that we are convinced it is part of a systematic campaign of sexual abuse," said a member of the tribunal team in Kukes, the nearest town to the border crossing.

The Serbs' method is simple. They select women as they approach the final crossing point with their families, who are ordered to keep traveling into Albania. The women are then taken away, weeping and begging for their lives. Hours, perhaps a day passes, during which they are raped and then sent away.

At Monice, their families keep a vigil standing in silent huddles by the metal barrier. Reluctant to admit what is happening to their daughters, these members of a society that views rape as the ultimate shame for a woman say, "We were separated, and praying that the Serbs will let them live."

When the young women are reunited with their families, there is no celebration that they have survived. They fall in silence into their parents' arms. Hiding their faces, they rejoin the huge throng of refugees, in silence.

Overwhelmed by the logistics of coping with an influx of refugees, the Albanian authorities and the few aid agencies that have reacted to the Kosovo catastrophe have been unable to offer any kind of help to the rape victims.

Other women, like one who spoke with Washington Post reporters, were raped by Serb soldiers before they were forced into trains that took them into exile.

The Women's Center in Albania is calling for relief for the refugees, especially women and children. It supports the NATO bombing as an attempt to save the Kosovar Albanians.

The address of the Albanian Women's Center is P.O. Box 2418, Tirana, Albania. Tel/fax: +355-42-23693.

--info from Washington Post, 4/13, The Times of London, 4/6

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. May 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...05/ai_n8835622

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Serbs raped women systematically some as young as 12 and 15

“When they raped me, they screamed, ‘You won’t give birth to little Turks anymore, but to little Cetniks,’ ” she said

By IWPR staff in The Hague, London and Sarajevo (08/01/07)

International justice has come a very long way since the summer of 1992, when violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina raged and reports surfaced for the first time of mass rape being used as a weapon of war. As Bosnian Muslim women flooded into the government-controlled down of Zenica escaping attacks on their villages, accounts emerged of Serb forces engaging in systematic rape, with many of the victims made pregnant.

Fadila Memisevic, a founder of the Zenica Centre for Research on War Crimes and Genocide, remembers the account of just one woman made a delegation from the European parliament go numb. Scars clearly visible on her body, the woman, from a village near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, explained that she had been hiding in a basement in order to care for her pregnant daughter-in-law, but was discovered by a group of Serb soldiers. Despite her pleas, they ordered her to strip, and the entire group raped her. To muffle her cries, she bit into her own arm, so that her son, nearby, would not hear what was happening to her.

Her story took two hours to tell, and when she was done the faces of the women from the parliamentary group, which had been tasked to investigate the issue, were white. One was sick. Although they had asked to speak to at least 50 victims, they said they did not want to hear any more accounts. “They talked to only one woman […] [but] there were thousands of women with similar stories,” said Memisevic.

The episode is revealing, as it underscores the delicacy and the difficulty of uncovering this most sensitive of crimes. Initial estimates of 60,000 and more raped women were not substantiated. The parliamentary group’s report settled on an estimate of 20,000 rapes, while recognizing the difficulty of ever achieving precise numbers. But it also marked a turning point, as the role of rape as an explicit tool of war became more widely understood. Shortly afterwards, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, whose research cited a figure of 12,000 victims of sexual violence, concluded that “rape has been used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing.”

The plethora of new war crimes courts have all taken up rape, mounted investigations and in many cases successfully prosecuted cases sexual violence as a war crime. The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) secured its first conviction for rape in the ground-breaking 2001 Foca verdict, which confirmed the use of rape as a crime against humanity. In the Balkans, after all the international attention, the success of local courts in prosecuting rape cases as war crimes is being questioned, particularly in Bosnia.

Spoils of war

English kings Richard II in the 14th century and Henry V in the 15th both declared rape a capital offence. So did the Leiber Code, the Union Army’s military code during the American Civil War, which also made rape punishable by the death penalty. The Hague conventions at the turn of the century were based on the Leiber Code and emphasized that rules forbidding rape applied as much during times of war and occupation as during peace. Germany’s “rape of Belgium” in the WW I remains a controversial period for the extreme claims of barbarity, but the metaphor tends only to mask widespread incidences of actual rape. The 1929 Geneva Convention proclaimed that “women shall be treated with all consideration due their sex” - intending to prevent rape but with the awkwardness of a euphemism.During the WW II, many French women along with concentration camp inmates fell victim. And Red Army soldiers raped many thousands of women during the liberation of Berlin in 1945. After the war, the 1949 Geneva Convention spelled out more clearly than its predecessor that “women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution or any form of indecent assault.”
According to Human Rights Watch, the verdict was the first time an international court had punished sexual violence in a civil war; and the first time that rape was found to be an act of genocide when it was committed with the intent to destroy a particular group targeted as such.

In Bosnia, Serbs also raped women systematically. Memisevic says she alone has interviewed or received statements from around 10,000 female rape victims.

“Sometimes I would receive about 20 letters a day from Germany, from Bosnian women who live there as refugees and who have been raped,” she said. “They simply had the need to tell someone about what happened to them. Sometimes a woman would write to me begging me never to tell anyone the things she told me, because her husband was taken away, but she still hoped he would come back.”

Bakira Hasecic was raped in 1992 in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, infamous for its Vilina Vlas spa hotel - a rape camp from which few victims ever returned.

“When they raped me, they screamed, ‘You won’t give birth to little Turks anymore, but to little Cetniks,’ ” she said, using Serb extremists terms for Muslims and Serbs. “Such hatred has been passed on by every generation since the time of the Turkish conquest here. That was the motive and the cause of all of this. Because I’m not a Serb, but a Muslim, a Bosniak woman, that was my guilt.”

But it was for prosecuting sexual crimes in Foca that the Yugoslav tribunal made history in February 2001. Tribunal judges found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of raping Bosnian Muslim women - some as young as 12 and 15. They were also accused of selling or renting women and girls for forced prostitution to other soldiers. The U.N. force in Bosnia, General MacKenzie, consistently blamed all sides for the carnage, but never explicitly named the Serbs. However, his espoused opinions to Congress, the media and think tanks, (like Heritage) must be viewed with skepticism since he disingenuously never mentioned SerbNet, a Serbian lobbying firm, paid him.

http://voiceyour2cents.com/html/worl...world_013.html

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Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

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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, Helena Smith reports on the awful fate awaiting the offspring of conflict

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.'

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Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

Proud American!

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.'

__________________
Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

Proud American!

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'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/apr/16/balkans

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Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

Proud American!

ORGANIZED RAPE ASSISTS PLAN FOR 'ETHNIC CLEANSING'


January 23, 1993 – (Hamilton Spectator) Throughout the ages, rape has often been a byproduct of war, but rarely has it been practised on such a mass scale as now in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

What is unique about the tens of thousands of rapes primarily of Muslim women is that they were a goal of the Serbs' war of aggression in Bosnia, a clear strategy to assist the odious practice of "ethnic cleansing."

Dean Ajdukovic, a University of Zagreb psychologist, questions "whether anything like this has ever happened in recorded human history."

As the raped women's stories come to light a European Community body estimates at least 20,000 Bosnian women have been raped investigators grope for explanations of how this could have happened.

The answer, says Dr. Mladen Loncar, who probably knows more than anyone else about the raped women, lies in intense Serbian brainwashing that replaced normal internal inhibitions and ethics with ferocious nationalistic propaganda. Within this twisted set of values, "a man who rapes enemy women is a hero instead of a beast," said Loncar, director of the documentation centre on the rapes in the Croatian health ministry. He has interviewed 70 of the rape victims, collecting evidence that may someday be used in trials, although rape is not now considered a war crime.

"In other wars, rape most often occurred in the first moments when the aggressor entered an area," Dr. Loncar explained. "Usually when some kind of authority was established, rapes stopped. What is unique in his war is that when authority is established over the area, the number of rapes grows."

Special brothels

The designated victims are held in prison camps, or in special brothels set up for Bosnian Serb fighters. The Croatian government says at least 17 brothel-camps are still operating, despite the recent blaze of international publicity about mass rapes.

One Croatian expert claims to have seen written orders directing Bosnian Serb irregulars to rape Croat and Muslim women during their territorial conquests. But Loncar doubts the Bosnian Serbs who have seized 70 per cent of the territory in the former Yugoslav republic would be stupid enough to put such directives in writing.

Whether written orders exist, rape is clearly part of the Serbs' war strategy, as numerous international investigating bodies have reported.

Also in contrast to other wartime rapes, the Bosnian crimes have usually been committed in the most public and brutal way, to underscore the message to all local inhabitants to flee.

Croatian investigators note that mothers and daughters are often raped at the same time by gangs of soldiers in front of husbands, brothers and children. Girls as young as six and women as old as 80 have been victims.

The Serbs' successful policy of ethnic cleansing has driven 1.5 million non-Serbs from their homes and villages in Bosnia. Men were often massacred or herded into inhuman prison camps.

Public, brutal rape was the coup de grace to ensure that the remaining women would never want to return to their homes.

"These women psychologically want to leave the place of the rape," said Loncar. "The possibility that they will return to this place is remote."

In the past month or so, Bosnian Serbs have released a number of Muslim women in advanced stages of pregnancy who are forced to bear unwanted children.

These women, a number of whom have made their way to Zagreb, bring a special message "we have the power to rape with impunity. You can't do anything to stop us."

In the undisciplined ranks of the non-professional soldiers fighting for a Greater Serbia, not only are there no deterrents to rape, but it is actually rewarded.

Loncar interviewed two young Serb deserters now being held in a prison in Orasje, Bosnia, who said they were ordered to rape and murder for the amusement of their commander.

Dr. Veselko Grizelj, a Zagreb gynecologist who has treated five women impregnated during rapes, finds it hard to grasp the stories his patients tell. "I ask myself how is it possible that 10 Chetniks (Serbs extremists) at the same time are all ready to perform the sexual act?"

Dr. Jarmila Skrinjaric, a psychiatrist treating four Bosnian rape victims, says the rapists often excused themselves, saying they would be shot if they did not violate the women.

However, some victims report cases where Serbs were either unable or unwilling to rape them, but begged: "If they ask, say I raped you."

http://www.peacewomen.org/news/Bosni...organized.html

__________________
Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

Proud American!

Hundreds of Kosovo-Albanian Girls and Women
Raped by Serb Border Guards

Groups of silent women speak volumes, writes Sam Kiley from Kukes

"They are burning our houses and killing the men. In the town there have been many rapes, but no one will speak of it. We need to be saved before there is nothing left for Nato to worry about. Please tell the world that we are worth it, we are human beings not animals to be slaughtered," she cried.

NOT satisfied with using young men as human shields against Nato and Kosovo Liberation Army attacks, nor with shooting dead children and the burning of homes to accelerate the exodus of Kosovo Albanians, Serbian border guards have taken to adding one more atrocity - rape.
Their victims are reluctant to talk about what happens in the border post at Monice, through which more than 200,000 people have been herded over the last few weeks. But the faraway stares in their tearful eyes, their torn clothing and the despair of the families of the victims speak volumes.

Just as the extremists of Bosnia's Serb Republic pursued a campaign against Muslims which included the forced impregnation of many Bosnian women, so the border guards of Monice clearly hope to father scores of Muslim children carrying Serb blood.

According to human rights groups and investigators from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, and the victims themselves, Kosovo Albanian women are being picked out at the border as they wait with their families to cross into Albania, taken to a building not far away and violated.

"There have been so many credible reports of this sort of thing that we are convinced it is part of a systematic campaign of sexual abuse. The whole level of atrocities being committed in Kosovo has overwhelmed us. We are going to have to bring in extra investigators," said a member of the tribunal team in Kukes, the nearest town to the border crossing.

The Serbs' method is simple. They select the women they fancy tormenting as they approach the final crossing point with their families, who are ordered to keep travelling into Albania.

They are then taken away, weeping and begging for their lives. Hours, perhaps a day passes for the families, and then those who survive the ordeal are sent on their way with a casual wave.

At Monice their families keep a vigil standing in silent huddles by the metal barrier. Reluctant to admit what is happening to their daughters, these members of a society who view rape as the ultimate shame for a woman, say: "We were separated, and praying that the Serbs will let them live."

When the young women are reunited with their families, there is no celebration that they have survived. They fall in silence into their parents' arms. Hiding their faces they rejoin the huge throng of miserable humanity - again in silence.

Overwhelmed by the logistics of coping with an influx of refugees which is expected to reach 250,000 in the next day or so, and climb to half a million or more, the Albanian authorities and the few aid agencies which have reacted to the Kosovo catastrophe have been unable to offer any kind of help to the rape victims.

"There is simply nothing we can do but hope that the families of the victims are strong enough and supportive enough of these young women. But if any are pregnant as a result, they face a miserable future of possible rejection by their families, or of raising a child conceived in hatred. That must be the worst thing anyone can inflict upon a woman," said a British aid worker in Kukes.
There have been reports of rape and the use of Kosovo Albanian women as sex slaves since the beginning of the forced exodus which came close on the heels of the start of Nato's air bombardments of Yugoslavia. But the latest revelations appear to carry more weight with human rights groups who stand alongside the families of abducted women and teenage girls, helpless to do anything about what they are certain is going on behind the bulletproof glass of the Monice crossing.

Young men have been spared rape, but their life expectancy behind Serb lines can be calculated in minutes. Hague investigators are looking into a number of credible reports that up to 500 men were marched into a field close to where the KLA has been fighting a rearguard action against the Serbs on the Albanian border.

Once in the field their resistance was allegedly broken down by being forced to stand in freezing rain for several hours. They were then driven like cattle back into a barn and ordered to dress in rags provided for them.

Then, at gunpoint, they were ordered to stand in front of Serb trenches while the Serb artillery fired mortars and heavier weapons at KLA positions, confident that they would not be the first victims if fire was returned.

So far, The Hague said, there had been only a handful of survivors from this latest alleged atrocity.

In Kukes, the refugees said that they were now pinning their hopes on Nato and the dim expectation of ground forces to save those still left in Kosovo.

Risolta Unico, a student from Dajkovica who crossed into Albania in her slippers, had been spared the rapists because at Qafae Pru(*)(*)(*)(*) the border is manned by professional Yugoslav soldiers who maintain a keen-eyed watch on their Albanian counterparts.

"They are burning our houses and killing the men. In the town there have been many rapes, but no one will speak of it. We need to be saved before there is nothing left for Nato to worry about. Please tell the world that we are worth it, we are human beings not animals to be slaughtered," she cried.

When told that the US had ordered 24 Apache attack helicopters to Albania she broke into a broad smile. "First there will be helicopters, then there will be soldiers. Nato will not let us down. If they do not send troops, then what was the point of the bombing?"

The Times ©, April 7, 1999

http://boes.org/child/tragedy/times1.html

__________________
Jesus beat the devil with two sticks. Colossian 2:13,15

Proud American!

Sadly, the true figures of women AND children raped by Serbs will never be known as its too shameful for many women to admit. Add to this the unknown number of babies born as a result of this. Many rural kosovar women subjected to this abuse were "unwordly" in the sense that they liived simple lives, knew only one man who was their husband, and to whom this degradation was the worst thing possible. I have many testimonies of women who have been through this hell. But out of respect wont post any details, throwing pearls in front of pigs springs to mind.

I think you should also add topic "USA raped non-adult"
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/as...ary/index.html

I think that only a "idiot" could write "Serbia raped women”. I shows that the author has spend most of his live accompanied by goats and sheep.
And Albanian men should not talk about women wrights, because we all know how they treat women!!!