Hampered by terrified victims, a lack of funding for witness protection and an indifferent world community, international war crimes prosecutors are unlikely to bring to justice those responsible for the campaign of mass rape as an instrument of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The charge of rape against the first war criminal convicted after a full trial before the United Nations tribunal at The Hague was dropped quietly because his accusers and witnesses refused to testify.
Similarly, the tribunal’s 33 other pending rape cases, as well as potential rape indictments under review, also will be extremely difficult to prosecute, if they come to trial at all. Only three men charged with sexual violence in the thousands of rapes committed during the Bosnian war are even in custody.
This picture emerges from an investigation into the disposition of Bosnian rape cases, based on review of court records at The Hague and interviews with rape victims, victims-rights activists and legal scholars in the U.S., Western Europe and the former Yugoslavia.
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia acknowledges that the lack of protection available to rape victims makes it unlikely that prosecutions can be successful in indictments for rape, the signature act of the ethnic conflict in Bosnia.
“There is no question it will affect our capacity to be successful on that front,” Justice Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal, said in an interview at The Hague, the Netherlands site of the court.
“The critical issue is what, really, can we offer these people in the longer term, after they’ve given their evidence,” Arbour said.
“Even if we had the financial capacity to develop witness relocation type programs, why should these people have to pay the price of having to abandon their roots and go and live somewhere else as a price for cooperating with justice?”
The reluctance by victims and witnesses to cooperate with the international court is rooted in a number of obstacles facing those who argue that no real peace is possible in Bosnia without moral reckoning for the crimes committed in the name of creating ethnically pure states.
First among the many obstacles facing prosecutors is the tremendous difficulty of developing skills among interviewers and translators for helping victims recall profoundly painful wartime experiences, especially in a conservative culture where women do not speak easily with strangers about a subject as intensely personal as rape.
Moreover, as in traditional criminal proceedings for rape in Western industrialized nations, the judicial process established by the UN for Bosnian war crimes, from initial interviews to final cross-examination in court, is distressing and, essentially, adversarial.
The greatest problem is that victims and witnesses do not trust the tribunal in The Hague, and by extension, the international community it represents, to guarantee their safety if they testify.
No procedures have been established nor funds set aside to protect victims in their homes in the former Yugoslavia, elsewhere in Europe or even in the U.S. before and after they would testify in any war crimes proceeding.
“They are very concerned about their security,” Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian government’s ambassador to the UN, said of women raped during the war in his country. “Inadequate measures have been taken to protect these witnesses against reprisal, as well as in dealing with the expected psychological traumas.”
Sacirbey was referring to Bosnian Muslim women systematically raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers and paramilitary troops during the war in his republic, the largest single group of victims. Evidence gathered by international war crimes investigators shows that soldiers from all sides in the conflict committed rapes.
Antonio Cassese, the tribunal’s presiding judge, has told the UN General Assembly that the court’s work is threatened by lack of funds from the world body and that no individual nation or group of countries has stepped in to underwrite the effort to assure justice for war crimes victims.
Of the 74 suspects indicted by the war crimes tribunal, only eight are in custody. Rape charges have been brought against only three of them, although the general crimes of “persecution” and “ethnic cleansing” brought against some of the others could cover alleged war crimes that include rape.
Among the 66 suspects still at large are Radovan Karadzic, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serbs, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, his military commander. Although neither holds a formal position today, both continue to wield great authority.
Not only are Karadzic and Mladic not in custody, but their paramilitary officers and troops also walk the streets–some in police uniforms of the new Serb Republic in Bosnia.
The war in Bosnia witnessed the widespread use of irregular, paramilitary organizations whose members have blended back into the population at large.
“As a result, victims live in fear of returning to their homes and encountering their persecutors, and witnesses are understandably reluctant to tell their stories, ” said M. Cherif Bassiouni, the DePaul University law professor asked by the UN Security Council to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
Bassiouni said the problem in prosecuting rape stems from the “political resistance, bureaucratic hurdles and lack of funding” that hobbled first the work of his investigators and now that of the tribunal.
The Chicago area has the highest concentration of Bosnian war victims of any city in America, and word that rape charges may not be prosecuted at The Hague already is spreading alarm through the local refugee community.
Meghan Kennedy, executive director of Sisters Empowering Survivors Through Resources and Action, a volunteer organization that counsels Bosnian refugees who resettled in the Chicago area, warned of the ramifications if those who ordered and carried out rape as a weapon of war in Bosnia are not prosecuted.
“If justice is not served,” she said, “there will be no peace.”‘
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Call her Victim One.
She gave her name as Marijanna, but it really is Mirsada, and she was the first woman to come forward and tell her story to the world, in an article that appeared in Aug. 6, 1992, editions of the Tribune.
Her obstetrician described her as “a young, chubby girl” and “silent all the time.” But for her first interview, she summoned the courage to push aside the veil of terror and shame, and her whispered tale blew away the fog of war to expose the Serb campaign of systematic mass rape of Muslim and Croat women.
Pale-skinned and brown-haired, she sat in the maternity ward of Petrova Hospital in Zagreb, Croatia, a mere 45 minutes from the day’s front lines, wearing a corduroy robe over a light nightgown, arms wrapped around her waist, rocking back and forth.
In her womb was ever-growing evidence of the ever-expanding horrors of the Balkan war.
Before the war, she lived with her Croatian Catholic mother and Bosnian Muslim father near the quiet agricultural town of Teslic, a regional hub of 59,000 people in north-central Bosnia.
When the area fell under Bosnian Serb control, Muslim and Croat men of fighting age were taken away, some to the most vile prison-torture camps of the war, at Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje.
Many women between the ages of 12 and their mid-40s were rounded up as well, and Mirsada was imprisoned with her mother and two dozen others in the basement of one of the newer buildings in town. She and her mother watched as the Serb soldiers took her father away.
Concerns that the rape charges at The Hague are slipping away have moved far beyond discussions among international legal scholars and the lobbying of victims-rights activists.
In a landmark ruling May 7, the war crimes tribunal handed down its first conviction after a full trial, against Dusan Tadic, a Serb cafe owner, karate teacher and sometime prison camp guard at Omarska. He was found guilty on 11 counts of “persecution and crimes against humanity,” including beatings, cruel treatment and inhumane acts.
But Tadic, 41, escaped all scrutiny on his indictment for rape, because the charge was dropped quietly before the trial began.
According to a former tribunal investigator, who has left the court for private practice in the U.S. in corporate and international law, three of the rape witnesses refused to travel to The Hague to testify because “they were simply too afraid.”
A fourth refused to testify because “she didn’t want her husband to learn what had happened to her,” said the former war-crimes investigator, who discussed the case on condition that he not be identified.
The effect of the Tadic verdict and the dropping of the rape charge have been demoralizing for those who fled the war for the safety of the Chicago area.
“These refugees are watching Court TV, they are paying attention to what is going on at The Hague, and it is devastating to the women, and to the men as well,” said Kennedy, the executive director of the local volunteer group for Bosnian war victims known by its acronym SESTRA, a name based on the Slavic root word for “sister.”
“Rape is as powerful a weapon of war as a tank or a bomb,” Kennedy said. “In its psychological effect, it shatters a community. When Bosnian refugees here watch the tribunal’s verdict, they have no hope of ever going back.”
Among the Bosnian refugees who have resettled in the Chicago area are many victims of the mass-rape campaign, although the exact number is impossible to determine, Kennedy said.
“They know these rape charges may not go through, because victims cannot come forward, for the obvious reason,” Kennedy said. “With no protection, they fear for their lives.”
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Mirsada’s jailers were Bosnian Serb irregulars, who raped her and the two dozen women in the basement prison, and forced them to have sex with uniformed Bosnian Serb troops deploying through the area.
Worst of all, she and her mother each had to watch as the other was gang-raped about three times a day, every day, throughout Mirsada’s four-month ordeal.
She and two other victims were set free only when they became visibly pregnant. By the time they reached safety and medical facilities in Zagreb, the fetuses were too developed to be aborted.
“When we were released, they told us to go to Zagreb to bear their Serbian children,” said Mirsada, who was 17 at the time.
Jadranka Cigelj, 49, is a lawyer by training and was active in Bosnian Croat political circles before the war. Today she is a leading voice who argues that protections offered by the tribunal are not enough to earn the trust of victims and witnesses of mass rape. She is vocal in her doubts that the court in The Hague is capable of making the charges stick.
The issue is intensely personal for Cigelj, not a theoretical argument in a legal brief. She, too, is a victim of rape in the Bosnia war.
Her personal target is Zeljko Mejakic, former commander of the notorious Omarska concentration camp, who, when he first was accused of allowing his guards to rape the female inmates, laughed off the charges.
Of Cigelj, his accuser, Majakic snickered that she was too “old and unattractive” to be of interest to him or his men.
“I wouldn’t lean a bicycle on her, let alone rape her,” Mejakic said in an infamous written reply to the accusation.
Rape, experts say, is not about prettiness or sexual pleasure. It is a crime of violence and violation, of power and control.
In Bosnia, an orchestrated policy of rape became an appallingly effective instrument of “ethnic cleansing” when thousands of women were rounded up and systematically raped by members of the warring armies.
Incontrovertible evidence–in the form of unwanted babies– proves that each of the parties to the conflict, Bosnian Croat, Muslim and Serb, used rape to further their political aims.
In a historic leap of legal tradition, the tribunal has determined that rape used as a weapon of war is a war crime, a “crime against humanity,” and not just a criminal act. Among those it has indicted is Zeljko Mejakic.
His chief accuser, Cigelj, heads an organization that has compiled testimonies from 437 rape victims. She operates out of a small, cluttered office in Zagreb decorated with a poster of Gen. Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader who tops The Hague’s most-wanted list, yet remains free in Serb-governed areas of Bosnia.
Her own case and that of another woman from the town of Prijedor in north-central Bosnia are the subject of a new documentary film about mass rape in the former Yugoslavia, “Calling the Ghosts.”
Over the course of six weeks at Omarska, Cigelj said she was raped repeatedly by a man she identified as Nedeljko Grabovac. This was done with the knowledge and approval of Mejakic, she said. According to the depositions of several other victims, Majakic took cruel delight in visiting the women on mornings after they had been raped and asking them if they had slept well.
The Hague tribunal has charged Mejakic with genocide. Although he has not been arrested, he is not hard to find. Journalists recently discovered him not far from the scene of his alleged crimes–in the village of Omarska, where he was working as deputy police chief.
His presence there was well-known to aid workers and others from international organizations working in the area.
When Mejakic’s whereabouts were revealed last November, Bosnian Serb authorities officially “suspended” him and several other accused war criminals who were employed by local police. Relief workers interviewed earlier this month say Mejakic and the others are still on the job.
With men like Mejakic not only at large but also in positions of authority with local police departments, it is perhaps not surprising that victims are afraid to testify.
“The international community refuses to arrest these people, so the women are like sitting ducks,” Cigelj said.
“The only time you get physical protection is when you go to The Hague to testify. When we are here, we are very exposed. I am getting threats all the time,” she said.
She opened a file cabinet and pulled out a thick stack of hate mail. Others have received more than threats, she said. One victim who was prepared to testify at The Hague barely escaped with her life, she said, when she was beaten by Serb thugs in Vienna.
The Hague court responded by creating a telephone “hot line” for witnesses who feel threatened.
“So when they come to kill you, you say, `One moment please, while I call the hot line,’ ” Cigelj said. “You have to ask yourself if you really want to go through with this.”
The rape victims, she said, “see that nothing is happening. For what reason should they talk? For the satisfaction of the press? To help some lawyers get big names? So sociologists can examine us?”
All of this has served to undermine the credibility of the tribunal, which, in turn, makes it more difficult for prosecutors to put together their cases and build credibility.
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On Oct. 26, 1992, Mirsada gave birth to a healthy, 9 1/2 pound girl. Mirsada refused to see the baby.
The Zagreb maternity ward staff, mainly Croatian Catholics not expert in Muslim names, called the baby Emina, inspired by a romantic but sad poem by one of Bosnia’s favorite poets.
The second day after the birth, a friend came to visit Mirsada at Petrova Hospital. That afternoon, the nurses noticed that Mirsada was not in her room, nor in the ward nor anywhere on the hospital grounds.
Mirsada never contacted the hospital again, and efforts by the maternity ward nurses and the obstetrics-gynecological medical staff to track her down through various social services and the Bosnian government have proved futile.
Sexual violence in time of war is as old as war itself, and wide-scale rape is no stranger to this century that has witnessed both the heights of human progress and the depths of wartime savagery and genocide.
The Japanese operated rape prisons, euphemistically called “comfort camps,” in which thousands of Korean women were held captive for use by the troops during World War II.
The Soviet Union, which was granted a prestigious chair at the table of Allied judges meting out justice to the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, did little to stop its troops from raping their way across Prussia and into Berlin.
But neither the Japanese nor Soviet armies perpetrated sexual violence upon women in captured territory as part of a wide-scale, carefully orchestrated strategy.
By contrast, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia took sexual violence “to new levels,” said Bassiouni, the DePaul law professor.
Rape during the war in Bosnia was of a historically different nature, Bassiouni said, “not only in the scope and scale of the crime, but in its systematic use to force civilians from their homes and ensure they will never return. This policy, created and enforced at the highest levels, has become known as ethnic cleansing.”
Under the rule of Bosnian Serb leaders Karadzic and Mladic, the program of ethnic cleansing included a system of prison death camps for Muslim and Croat men of military age and rape-torture camps for the women. In its own perverse way, the campaign proved a savagely successful strategy to terrorize and control populations in recently captured areas.
As word of the policy of ethnic cleansing spread, civilian populations in the path of the advancing army were terrorized into fleeing their homes, perhaps forever, before the Bosnian Serbs arrived. Thus, the Bosnian Serb army was able to capture large swaths of territory without firing a shot.
Bassiouni, president of DePaul’s International Human Rights Law Institute, summarized the 3,300 pages of his UN report in a monograph titled “Sexual Violence: An Invisible Weapon of War in the Former Yugoslavia,” whose publication was underwritten by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In traditional Balkan societies, “women who have sexual relations outside of marriage are considered tainted, even when the relations take place by force,” Bassiouni wrote. “Unmarried women become unmarriageable; married women become outcasts in their own families.”
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Her father unknown, her mother vanished, Baby Emina became everybody’s favorite at the hospital. Five years later, the obstetrician’s voice still trembles with excitement each time he mentions her. Three maternity nurses, in the smoking room on their coffee break, talk of how beautiful and sweet Emina was.
The nurses kept the baby in the same room with the other newborns, but newborns usually stayed in the hospital for only a week. With no mother to care for her or claim her, and wartime being a bad time to quickly find a home for adoption, Emina stayed longer.
She soon outgrew the hospital bassinet, so the maternity nurses made a large one for her by using an old incubator.
“I would come to the door and call her by name, and she would look at me smiling,” one nurse said. “She had a little mark on her left ear. I am sure I would recognize her, even now,” said another nurse. “I remember we were all bringing her diapers, and mothers were happy to give us some milk for her,” added a third.
When Emina was 4 months old, the hospital gave the baby to Caritas, the Catholic charity, for adoption.
“I remember the day she was leaving,” the obstetrician said. “All the nurses put on some extra lipstick, and in the end her little face was all covered with pink and red kiss marks.”
In February 1994, the war crimes tribunal at The Hague established a Victims and Witnesses Unit, which became operational only a year later. The unit has a permanent staff of five and soon will add one more member.
The judges are “much aware of the importance of the witnesses for the development of the cases and proceedings, and of the need to provide them with protection, support and counseling,” said Christian Chartier, the court’s spokesman, in a written response to questions submitted by the Tribune.
In 1996, the unit handled 214 witnesses arriving from 20 nations, and each was budgeted about $2,500. That sum was to cover round-trip travel to The Hague, estimated at $1,000; accommodation and meals for eight days, estimated at $400; a daily allowance of $25. The rest was compensation for lost earnings.
Protection of the witnesses en route to the tribunal is the responsibility of the host country. Security of the witnesses while they are in the Netherlands is provided by the Dutch police. Inside the tribunal, witnesses are under guard of UN security.
Various procedures are in place to protect the witnesses during their testimony. These procedures include video-conferencing to the courtroom, banning public disclosure of witness identity, prohibiting media photography or videotaping, sealing records of witness identity and location, and altering the voice and appearance of a witness on court television monitors.
The tribunal has neither the personnel, the resources nor the legal jurisdiction to assign guards to protect witnesses once they return to their homes in the former Yugoslavia or elsewhere in Europe or abroad where they may have resettled.
From that point on, war crimes victims are on their own.
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When 4-month-old Emina was transferred from Petrova Hospital to Caritas, the staff at the Catholic charity changed her name to the more Croatian name of Ida.
Caritas contacted the Bosnian government, and two weeks later, on March 9, 1993, the Red Cross office in Zagreb representing Bosnian interests took the child.
Bosnian government officials and the social service agencies involved declined to discuss the current status of the child, citing the same rights to privacy as govern adoption matters in the U.S. It is believed the child is in Bosnia.
Of her mother, Mirsada, the first woman to come forward and discuss her ordeal as a victim of the Serb campaign of systematic mass rape, little is known.
After quietly walking out of the maternity ward of Zagreb’s Petrova Hospital when her baby girl was 2 days old, Mirsada was rumored to have traveled to a refugee center in Split, on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea. Published reports that she was treated at a psychiatric clinic established especially for rape victims on the island of Pag proved erroneous; the reports confused her with a different rape victim.
Social service agencies report that Mirsada may be in Sweden, Germany or even back in Bosnia.
Wherever she is, she is not formally seeking justice against her attackers. Her name does not appear on the roles of witnesses to be called at The Hague. Nor is she among those who have contacted victims-rights attorneys bringing separate civil lawsuits against the architects of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the war in Bosnia.
The U.S.-led NATO force imposing a fragile armistice in the former Yugoslavia has 30,000 troops on the ground. Their mission, as described in the Dayton accords that brought an uneasy halt to hostilities in Bosnia, requires the arrest of any indicted war criminals–whether Bosnian Croat, Muslim or Serb–encountered by the foreign troops.
Wanted posters with the mug shots of the more notorious men under indictment are prominently displayed at all NATO military facilities and at checkpoints.
Thus far, however, the U.S. and its allies have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure their forces never bump into any of the suspects. The explanation is that NATO’s armed troops are not law enforcement officers; the unspoken concern is that aggressively pursuing those under indictment might bring a violent response, and mar the near-perfect peacekeeping mission.
When it comes to war crimes, too, after 18 months in Bosnia the American-led force has an unblemished record: zero arrests.
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This account was reported and written by Tribune staff writers Thom Shanker in Chicago and Washington and Tom Hundley in the former Yugoslavia. Tribune special correspondents Mirta Jusic in Zagreb and Lauren Comiteau at The Hague also contributed to this report.
