"My younger son was so bright and did so well in maths," Safia recalls wistfully near the spot where she last saw her 16-year-old son. He, her husband and her eldest son were running across the street and into woodland to safety. She and her pregnant daughter-in-law fled in the opposite direction.
Nearly 18 years later, authorities have yet to find their remains in the killing fields of Srebrenica. Safia attends the annual Potočari Genocide Memorial, where the bones of those recovered and identified over the past year are laid to rest. She lives ever hopeful that one day she too will be able to do the same for her family; just three of the 8,000 victims of the Bosnian genocide.
While trying to flee the violence, her expectant daughter-in-law was taken away from her by Bosnian Serb soldiers and led into a nearby forest, along with other young girls from their truck. "Whilst I was waiting for her to return, I saw two small children crying for their mother. Soldiers had taken her up into the woods to rape her. That is where they took all the women to rape."
Over 50,000 known cases of sexual abuse were recorded during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. It is a spiralling global trend that has seen 500,000 instances of rape in Rwanda and hundreds of thousands more still being currently investigated in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo.
For women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the legacy of the war continues to cast a long shadow. They live in a country looking to exercise the spectre of genocide whilst striving towards EU integration and NATO membership. They not only continue to be defined by the patriarchal society they live in and the acts committed against them by soldiers but also by those men who survived. The extent of Bosnia's domestic abuse crisis cannot be quantified. No official statistics are currently recorded.
The Green Line Safe House in Sarajevo is a women's refuge; a project set up by the United Nations Population Fund to help survivors of gender-based violence. One of the centre's helpline operators, Nerimana Sochivica, was herself abused by her husband. Having survived the war, he returned a changed man, both emotionally and physical scarred from torture and abuse in captivity. "One night he came home drunk and grabbed a knife, shouting 'My life has no meaning and neither should yours!' That's when I decided we had to leave," she said.
It is a story known all too well in neighbouring Kosovo, itself embroiled in a war in the late 1990s where ethnic cleansing and sexual violence towards women were rife.
The Kosova Women's Network (KWN) is just one movement battling for justice for rape victims during the Kosovo conflict. Such virulent campaigns however are reopening old wounds and consolidating a sense of national shame that has in fact seen a rise in violence against women. One of the KWN's activists, Nazlie Bala, was physically assaulted outside her apartment in March 2013; the result of a television appearance in which she provided evidence of rapes committed during the war.
Nearly twenty years since the cessation of hostilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, women continue to fight for justice, but arguably have yet to strike a chord in a male-orientated Balkan society. Perhaps the most chilling evidence of this was the mocking cut-throat gesture made by Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic to the women victims present in the galleries on the first day of his trial for war crimes in May 2012.
For the majority of women, including Safia, the loss of a husband has signalled the beginning of a more enduring fight: the fight against poverty. Those who suffered sexual abuse during the war, or from the resulting domestic violence in the twenty years since, have increasingly become those most vulnerable to economic distress.
Many initially returned to homes damaged or destroyed in the war and were thrust into the role of breadwinner without essential skills or an education. The veiled threat of destitution is an ever present danger for those suffering domestic abuse in contemporary Bosnia.
For many women, programs run by NGOs like Women for Women International (WWI) have become a critical lifeline. Set up in 1993 during the war following a visit by founder Zainab Salbi, it offers financial aid, skills training, emotional support and rights awareness classes.
For 52-year-old Ahida Dudich, the courageous choice to leave her abusive husband after 30 years of marriage only came about as a result of joining WWI. Taking just a sewing machine and a few clothes with her, she has since become an entrepreneur, making and selling shopping bags.
Returning to the house in Srebrenica where she resided before and during the war was a harrowing experience for Safia, not least because of the painful memories of her family and the encounters in the street with those culpable of the town's massacre.
"I applied for a grant to reconstruct my house because all the water pipes were broken and the house, which had been built by my husband and in which I lived with my husband and my children, was the only thing I had left. For three years, I was refused a grant."
With aid from the WWI program, Safia has also gained her own financial independence and started rebuilding her life in the shadow of the killing fields. "Thanks to the microcredit programme I was able to rebuild my house. Thanks to skills training, I was able to learn about chicken rearing."
She also credits the solidarity of those she has met through WWI who likewise experienced the horrors of rape and murder and continue to live with the war's permanent scars; the women she now calls her friends.
"We still meet every week even though the program is over. Their support is so important to me. We understand each other."
Wednesday 12 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development-professionals-network/2013/jun/07/srebrenica-women
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