Ascent of Women (6 page)

Eva was canning tomatoes in a little stone pantry at the back of her house when her door splintered open, twelve men rushed in, subdued and blindfolded her. Hissing profanities in her ear, they bullied her out the door and beat her about her legs as she stumbled along a path to a neighbouring house, which an extremist Serbian group known as the White Eagles had moved into just the week before.

Born of Croatian parents, Eva knew every house in her home village, every garden, the configuration of the town centre, every bend of the creek that flowed around it. Her best friend, Mira (her name has been changed), was Serbian. Along with the other kids, they spent their days chasing geese through the middle of town to the Savak Creek. The game was always the same, the kids shrieking wildly as they chased baby geese, with the big geese in hot pursuit of the kids. Eva became a sprinter of such calibre that she was selected to represent first her village, then her district in regional track meets.

As a young woman, she fell in love with a man named Bartol Penavic, and on November 17, 1958, they were married. Together they raised three children, saw them married and settled, and in time became grandparents. Life was good.

The countryside surrounding the village resembles a mural crayoned by children—a clutch of clay-coloured houses here, a barn there. On one side of the village stretches a patchwork of rolling hills and thick oak forest so green and purple and yellow that the colours could have been splashed there by rainbows; on the opposite side is flat black farmland with hedgerows of
venerable old trees. The town itself is an antique treasure, a three-hundred-year-old tableau of muted colours and softly worn edges—as unlikely a setting for ugliness as could be imagined.

By the time spring began to blossom in 1991, Croatia had declared its independence from Yugoslavia and there were rumblings of trouble. But no one paid much attention. Eva said, “We’d lived together—Croats and Serbs and Muslims—for fifty years. How could anyone change that?” Bartol had told her, “Now is the time for us. Our children are settled. It’s time for us to enjoy life.” They’d had their share of grief: Eva’s father had been killed during the Second World War, and the uncle who assumed charge of her was appalled that she dared to choose the man she would marry. Bartol’s family saw Eva as a peasant, hardly a match for the son of the biggest landowner in the surrounding villages. Despite the odds against them, their thirty-three-year marriage had been rich with the promise of happily-ever-after.

Then in the fall, barricades appeared on the street. As a precaution they sent their daughter and two daughters-in-law away with the grandchildren to a safer place. Soon enough the village was under siege. Their sons managed to escape as tanks rolled into town. Most villagers ran away; those who didn’t, including Eva and Bartol, were rounded up and kept in detention. The interrogations and beatings began. Bartol was beaten to death. Eva was sent home by the commander and told to stay in the pantry at the back of the house.

Then the men came for her. They said they were taking her to another village for interrogation, but she knew precisely where they were going—to the nearby house where the White Eagles were headquartered.

At the door, her captors announced to the others, “Open up—we bring you the lioness.” Once she was inside, they attacked her like a pack of jackals. Six men stripped her, then raped her by turns, orally and vaginally. They urinated into her mouth. They screamed that she was an old woman and if she was dry they’d cut her vagina with knives and use her blood to make her wet. She was choking on semen and urine and couldn’t breathe. The noise was horrendous as the six men kept shrieking at her that there were twenty more men waiting their turn and calling out, “Who’s next?” She was paralyzed with fear and with excruciating pain. The assault continued relentlessly for three hours.

When they were finished, they cleaned themselves off with her underwear and stuffed the fouled garments into her mouth, demanding she eat them. Then they marched her outside into the garden. She could hear the village dogs barking. She knew exactly where she was and she knew that the cornfield they were pushing her toward was mined. Still blindfolded, she was thrust into the field and told to run away. She stumbled through the slushy snow and sharp cornstalks, and when she was far enough away from the house, she ripped the blindfold off. Injuries from the rape slowed her down, but she was fast all the same. Then she slipped in the muddy field and fell, and at exactly that moment, bullets ripped over her head. She flattened herself into the mud as she heard the cheers of the terrorists, who thought they had bagged another kill. She waited a long time before getting to her feet and staggering on, and then wandered for three more hours, trying to focus, to think of a way to survive. Finally she stumbled into her neighbour’s garden.

Mira had been waiting by the window all night, knowing her childhood friend had been taken away. When she heard the rustle
in the garden, she rushed outside with her husband, and together they gathered up their battered lifelong friend. Mira bathed Eva, made her strong tea and cradled her head while she vomited the wretched contents of her stomach and then collapsed. The next morning Eva left the village. She didn’t come back until the conflict was over.

I visited her again during the war and after the war was over, as well. Although she had reunited with her family and together they returned to Berak, the men responsible for the crime were still roaming the streets of her village, still gloating when Eva walked by. The last time I saw her, in 2005, she told me she still wonders why she was spared. Cradling a new grandchild in her arms, she repeated the comment she’d made when I left her in 1991: “I’ve always wondered why God didn’t take me when he took my Bartol. I think I must have been left here to be the witness for the women.”

It took me the usual three months to get the story to our readers. But after it was published, they took up the torch for these women, and in the form of thousands of letters to the editor, they demanded that the United Nations do something about it.

~

This was rape as a form of genocide. In the rape camps, many Bosnian women were assaulted until they became pregnant. The Serbian soldiers, known as Chetnicks, viewed systematic rape as a way of planting Serbian seeds into Bosnian women and therefore destroying their ethnicity and culture. It wasn’t enough that the women felt their families would reject them because they had been raped, a shame to Islam. The women’s suffering was twofold,
just like that of the women of Rwanda and Congo in the years that would follow.

I often wondered what made Eva tell her story when others were too afraid to speak. She told me that in her opinion the vanquished need a face and a name. Atrocities need a date and a time. Telling the truth is the only way to heal. “It’s not enough to say, ‘You raped me,’ ” she said. “When I say it happened, where it happened and what my name is, it makes the rape something to be responsible for.”

But even with worldwide attention on the mass rape of women in the Balkans, and the enormous pity for them and fury for the perpetrators that resulted, the stigma of being raped stuck to those women. One of the problems with stopping the scourge of rape in zones of conflict and post conflict is eradicating that stigma. What everyone needs to understand is that these women and girls are just like everybody’s mothers and daughters. They are women who had jobs to go to, mortgages to pay; their children, just like the children of their rapists, just like our children, also got croup and forgot to do their homework or ducked out of doing family chores. They had friends over for dinner, took holidays, went to the park, watched over their kids on the swings, the seesaws, the jungle gyms.

But somehow when we hear stories like Eva’s or stories about the women in Rwanda or Congo, we turn the victims and their attackers into “others.” We listen to foolish remarks such as “They’ve been at this for centuries; let them kill each other.” Or “They always treat their women like this; it’s not my business.” Perhaps it’s a way of separating ourselves from something we feel powerless to stop. But we do have power. We can write letters to the United Nations to demand action. We can speak up when
others dismiss these atrocities as cultural or religious or worse—none of our business. It took a brave collection of women from Bosnia to do something about rape. They took their dreadful stories to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They risked being rejected by their families by telling their stories to the world. But they gave the international tribunal the tools to do what courts and governments have avoided throughout history. It made rape a war crime. In 1998, the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal, also in The Hague, made rape and sexual enslavement in the time of war a crime against humanity. Only genocide is considered a more serious crime.

~

I believe the shift in thinking about the role of women and the issues that women deal with in the first decade of the third millennium will go down in history as a turning point for civilization. Issues, such as sexual assault, that had been buried, denied and ignored suddenly began to be explored in groundbreaking research papers and to figure in legislative reform.

Two books published in the spring of 2011 brought facts to light that might have put the international community on alert against the mass rape in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo. In one of them,
At the Dark End of the Street
, Danielle McGuire exposes a secret that had been held for sixty-five years. It’s the story of the iconic Rosa Parks, the tiny, stubborn woman who defied the Jim Crow segregation rules in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to comply with a white man’s order to move to the back of the bus. That solitary act of defiance was the catalyst that in 1955 gave rise to the civil rights movement. But McGuire’s research
brings out a more astonishing piece of the story. For ten years prior to her famous bus boycott, Rosa Parks was an anti-rape activist.

Parks began investigating rape in 1944, collecting evidence that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women. That evidence was ignored. All these decades later, McGuire is the first to tell what she calls “the real story—that the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s long struggle against sexual violence.” And she argues that given the role rape played in the lives of women—that it was ongoing, that it fuelled the anger and powered the movement as much as the Jim Crow laws did—the history of the civil rights movement needs to be rewritten. She sees the infamous Montgomery bus incident as an event that was as much about women’s rights as civil rights. As McGuire eloquently writes, “It was a women’s movement for dignity, respect and bodily integrity.”

Gloria Steinem agrees. In a review of McGuire’s book, Steinem wrote, “Rosa Parks’ bus boycott was the end of a long process that is now being taken seriously. What Rosa Parks did was expose [to the leaders of the civil rights movement] the truth about sexual assault as well as the widespread ugliness of rape as a tool to repress, punish and control women during the civil rights movement. Her work was meant to be a call for change in America. And yet until the fall of 2011, hardly anyone even knew about it.”

Why didn’t we know this before? Why has so much history involving women been either ignored or suppressed? How is it that the stunning facts Rosa Parks gathered were never published at the time? And would the world have changed had the information been available sooner?

The rape of black women as an everyday practice of white supremacy wasn’t the only revelation in 2011. The other book,
Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust
, is a collection of essays edited by Sonja Hedgepeth, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and Rochelle Saidel, executive director of the U.S.-based Remember the Women Institute. As I read the book, I had to put it down from time to time to catch my breath. With all the documentation and literature of the Holocaust, all the memorials and reminders, how can it be that this appalling information about the gang-raping and sexual abuse of Jewish women has been left out until now? No one knows how many women and girls were sexually assaulted while they were isolated in ghettos or incarcerated in concentration camps, and no one ever will. Some women were murdered, and others chose to remain silent, as rape carries a stigma even in the chambers of death: even though a woman was raped, she was “having sex” with the enemy. The authors refer to this kind of shame as the most effective of all social weapons. And they say that women caught in war zones invariably face “a dilemma of fatal inclusion or unbearable ostracism.”

The men who raped these women in Nazi concentration camps were obsessive about keeping records—of inhuman medical experiments performed, of the elimination of men, women and children in the gas chambers or by shooting or hanging. But they kept no list of who was raped. There is not a word in the vast accountings of the Nazi regime about the sexual assault of women and girls. The story is simply missing. Seen as sexual objects as well as a biological danger by the Nazis, Jewish women were the target of sexual depravity and rape. And yet their story was suppressed. As the essays in this important book show, the survivors shared details before the trials at Nuremburg, but not a word was spoken during the trials.

In an interview with me, Gloria Steinem said, “The judges at Nuremberg didn’t want crying women in the courtroom. And some Jewish historians didn’t want to admit their women had been sexually assaulted and/or denied it had happened. It’s taken sixty years for that to come out.” She believes that the floodgates began to open when rape became a war crime and told me that women owe a debt of gratitude to Navi Pillay, the judge who made that historic ruling at the International Criminal Court. Because of her, and the recent work of other scholars and activists in the public sphere, the crime of rape is no longer seen as either inevitable or the fault of women.

“Think about Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo,” Steinem said. “If we had acknowledged what happened to Jewish women in the Holocaust or black women in the civil rights movement, we’d have been better prepared for what happened in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo. It’s not about war, it’s about genocide. To make the right sperm occupy the wrong womb is an inevitable part of genocide. The publication of these books is a warning to the world that sexual violence is a keystone to genocide, and they make it clear that today there’s a shift in the sense that rape is now noticed and even taken seriously. That wasn’t true before.”