SUMMARY. The experience of a Belgrade feminist now defined as Serbian by a government that she rejects is explored in this article. The organization, Women in Black Against War, of which she is a founding member, works to help women regain a sense of dignity as they move from victim to survivor. Other goals include strengthening women's rights and training paraprofessionals to participate in the healing process by witnessing the women's retelling of their experiences. The solidarity and connections that have developed among women in the Former Yugoslavia and with other women around the world is an important aspect of this process and one which undermines nationalism. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com]
KEYWORDS. War crimes, trauma, Belgrade, Women in Black Against War
For the Former Yugoslavia, 1992-93 was marked above all by the ascendancy of fascist power and the mobilization of patriarchal violence in pursuit of a demonized Other. The presumed ethnicity of an individual's name or her street address determined her destiny, whether it was life, death, rape or displacement. What was done to protect that individual's rights and liberties? For many, nothing. Thus, Serb security forces were able to run concentration camps in Bosnia according to a particularly twisted logic: men, as potential soldiers, were killed; women, as potential sexual objects, were raped. The regime currently in power in the state in which I live was responsible for these war crimes. What does it mean politically and professionally to us, as feminists living and working in Belgrade?
At the very beginning of the contlict, in October 1991, a group of us founded a pacifist organization called Women in Black Against War, under whose banner we held weekly vigils in Belgrade. We felt that it was imperative that we go out into the street in order to communicate our message to the public at large that we opposed the Serbian regime, its involvement in wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and that we opposed militarism and violence against women. Each Wednesday I would get up and think of the clothes I would wear. By choosing black in a time of war, we hoped that part of our sense of helplessness would be transformed into strength and action. So it continued, standing on the street in black and in silence, season after season, for all the years of the war.
Needless to say, the latest news from Kosovo hints at more ethnic cleansing on the part of the Serbian regime. In the face of this threat, Women in Black are currently in the process of planning the forms which our opposition to the fascist regime will take.
By 1993, our commitment to feminism had led some of us to travel between Zagreb, Belgrade and Zenica in order to gather and focus support for women raped in war. These efforts culminated in the creation of the Autonomous Women's Center Against Sexual Violence in Belgrade, which offers psychological and social support to women traumatized in this way. Thus, while volunteers visited hospitals to talk to physicians about the issues at stake and the Center's work, we devised and put into practice a counseling program. Throughout this process, we received the support of many women, who offered books, funding and their own time and energy. We were often struck by the incredible lengths to which women would go to help us and, in truth, it was these interventions that sustained us on a day-to-day basis.
Having been part of both these groups during the war, in the pages that follow I will seek to summarize what I believe to be the essence of our experience.
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Women Are the First Enemy of Men
The SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence was founded in Belgrade in 1990 as a service provided by women for women. Asthe war in Bosnia and Croatia progressed, we began to hear from women who had never contacted the Hotline before. Particularly significant in this regard were calls made at the very beginning of the war, at the same time that the regime was televising daily propaganda broadcasts in which scenes of mutilated corpses were accompanied by an emotive voice-over. Clearly, the regime's purpose was to rouse the population into a frenzy of nationalism and lust for revenge. However, the broadcasts also had another, unintended effect. Men who watched the programs would become agitated and angry, and start hitting their wives or children as a proxy for the "enemy" that was far away and not as easy to reach. For many of the women it was the first time they had been struck by their husbands, and they would call SOS asking, "What happened to him?" We named the condition "post-TV news violence syndrome." Needless to say, these incidents only serve to confirm the view that the enemy of first resort is Woman; ethnicity comes in a distant second.
Misuse of Women Raped in War by State Institutions
Seeking to make contact with female war survivors, the Autonomous Women's Center Against Sexual Violence approached numerous medical facilities in the Former Yugoslavia. However, as we undertook this task, what immediately became apparent to us was the fact that the regime was exploiting women's suffering for its own ends, identifying those with Serbian names in order to provide evidence of war-time atrocities committed against Serbs. To cite but one example, in 1994 a psychiatrist working in a Belgrade area mental health center provided a foreign journalist (known to us) with the medical histories of women who had been sexually abused during the war. Thus, not only was this hospital breaking the t1rst principle of medical ethics in the name of nationalist politics, but the women themselves were being treated as any other mental health patient, while being forbidden from meeting with the representatives of feminist NGOs.
It should be noted as well that there was a general reluctance on the part of medical facilities to collaborate with the Center, a reluctance that was in all likelihood due to our strong disavowal of Serbian nationalism. In this way, state-run health care institutions proved themselves to be more interested in serving the nationalist cause than serving the needs of the women under their care.
Rape in War Is Part of a Continuum of Male Violence Against Women
Although the Center has evidence to show that women from all ethnic groups-Serbian, Croat and Muslim-were raped during the war, most of our work was with women possessing Serbian names, simply because they were the ones who felt safest in Belgrade. At the same time that the Center denounces the Serb regime and its genocidal policies, war rapes must be understood in the larger context of male violence. In short, we believe that atrocities committed against women in wartime are driven by the same dynamics that have resulted in so many women calling the SOS Hotline after having been raped, battered or humiliated by their husbands or boyfriends.
WHAT DO WE DO? WHAT ARE OUR POLITICS?
Enhancing the Dignity of War Victims
Humiliation is intrinsic to every war crime. Thus, in our work, we have sought to create the conditions necessary for women to regain their sense of dignity, a journey which takes them from victim to survivor, and possibly to transformation of the social conditions that led them to be victimized in the first place. Central to this process is the development of spaces of dignity, through the establishment of non-hierarchical relationships and respect for women's bodies and otherness.
Strengthening Civil Rights
Wars, by their very nature, circumscribe the rights and lives of those who are forced to live through them. Our experience has been no different, and to survive under these suffocating conditions we have engaged in a number of strategies. These include working with women from the conflict zones, publishing statements denouncing war crimes and their perpetrators, holding weekly peace vigils, and promoting nonviolent means of conflict resolution. We also sought to undermine the nationalist agenda by exchanging letters with friends across the front lines, and ensuring that women's NGOs were places where women of all ethnic names could gather in dignity and solidarity.
Witnessing Pain
If one is to work with female survivors of war, one must learn to listen, to act as a witness for the pain they have suffered. In this capacity, we have sought to provide women with support that does not categorize, question or judge their experiences. Of course, there are many other feminist groups in the region that played a similar role, each of us bearing witness at both the political and personal level.
Undermining Nationalism Through Personal Narratives
Over the years, the regime in Belgrade has been unswerving in its efforts to arouse hatred of the other nations in the war, while hiding from the population the fact that these "others" have also faced great suffering and deprivation. Given this lack of knowledge, we have learned that a single person's story can have an enormous impact upon people's perceptions, and break the cycle of ethnic chauvinism and hatred. Thus, we have devoted considerable energy to the task of bringing the Other into our communities, through the publication of life histories, the production of film documentaries and the organization of face-to-face encounters. To recount one particularly telling example, the political views of many Belgrade women changed abruptly in 1995 after the Center screened documentary footage from the massacres in Kozarac and concentration camps in Omarska.
BEYOND THE HIERARCHY OF DISCRIMINATION
If one accepts that the production and reproduction of hierarchies plays a key role in sustaining patriarchal power, one will not be surprised to learn that we were faced with many such hierarchies in our work with female war survivors.
Hierarchy of Pain
Each region in the war was left with its own legacy of trauma and pain, and individuals laden with so much suffering of their own that they had little capacity left to feel empathy for others.It is important for those working with women war survivors to recognize and understand the implications of this process, which typically involves the creation of a circuit of blame and guilt whereby women from one region ask those from another, "Where were you during the shelling?" Needless to say, the effects of such questioning are highly pernicious: women who live outside of the war region feel guilty; women who have had only one family member killed feel guilty; female refugees who return home are made to feel guilty, as are those who do not go home. The cycle is never-ending, with patriarchy being the only real beneficiary of this process. If we are to avoid falling into the circuit of blame, we must all try to come to terms with our own guilt feelings.
Hierarchy of Rapes in War
Although some feminists distinguish between "ordinary" and "genocidal" forms of wartime rape, there are others, myself included, who would argue that any such distinction is dangerous, since it posits a rape hierarchy that places the violation of nations ahead of that of women.Whether one sees such rapes as instruments of war or of genocide, they are all acts of torture, war atrocities, and crimes against humanity.
Hierarchy of Rape in War and Rape in Peace
We know that men have been raping and abusing women continuously over the past three thousand years. We know that the trauma suffered by war survivors is very similar to that experienced by women who have been battered or sexually abused by their partners. Finally, we know that an invisible war has been waged by men against women from the origins of civilization until the present. Given that we know all these things, why is male violence against women not considered a war crime? Clearly, there is ample scope for feminist jurisprudence to intervene in this area and lay the groundwork for a new understanding of war atrocities.
Hierarchy of Rights in Wartime
In times of war, there is usually room for only one human rights issue, namely that of who is to live and who is to die. While it is by no means surprising that this is the case, one of its consequences is that other forms of rights, along the lines of gender, ability, sexual orientation or race/ethnicity, are all too quickly forgotten or subsumed under the individual's will to survive.
Although it was not uncommon for human rights organizations, along with the peace movement in general, to fall into this trap, it was important for those involved in Women in Black Against War to avoid reproducing this hierarchy of rights. As such, we devoted considerable energy to the task of ensuring that the rights of all women, whether older or younger, lesbian or heterosexual, Roma or Serb, were respected and cherished.
Solidarity with Women Across the Front Lines
Throughout the war years, feminist groups in Belgrade were in constant communication with their counterparts in Croatia and Bosnia. We sent news, food and books, as well as making the journey ourselves across the front lines in order to meet with our sisters face-to-face. Building solidarity with women across the lines was both a personal and political objective, and remains a priority today in face of growing tensions in Kosovo.
International Solidarity with Women Around the World
In September 1992, we welcomed three women who had come to Belgrade from the small Italian town of Mestre in order to visit the SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence. They knew no one here, had never been to Belgrade before, yet, because of their work against the war in Iraq, had decided that they should show their solidarity with women who were facing a similar prospect in the Former Yugoslavia. At the time, we did not really understand why they had traveled 14 hours by train in order to bring us chocolate and soap, visit with us, and then get on the train again to go back to Italy. Of course, at the time we also did not know what the war would entail nor the true meaning of women's solidarity in wartime. Only later did we come to understand these three incredible women. They were the first angels of support who would be followed by many others in the difficult years that followed, all of whom made personal sacrifices for our sake.
After five years of war there are many of us here who can say that women's solidarity in war has profoundly intluenced our work and lives as feminists. We have welcomed countless women into our midst who have come to the Former Yugoslavia on their own initiative, using their own savings, to offer us support at both a material and emotional level. At the very beginning of the war, women from The Netherlands and Germany provided us with training in crisis intervention. Women from Austria gave lessons in self-defense, while women from Lausanne showed us how to take and develop photographs. A group of women drove trucks laden with foodstutis all the way from Great Britain; these we distributed among women living in the refugee camps. Women from Seville and Madrid traveled to Belgrade in order to ask how we were and to mount an impromptu Flamenco show. Women from Freiburg sent us our tlrst computer. Women in the United States sent us care packages which we gave to female refugees who were in need. Women from Australia sent us glittering paper stars that would reflect the sun if hung from the window. A few of the women who came decided to stay on in Belgrade, and are with us even now.
However, of all those who provided assistance and support over the years, few had a greater impact than the sixteen women from Switzerland who visited in December 1992 and told us, "Set up an organization for women raped in war and we'll provide you with the necessary financing." This is how the Autonomous Women's Center Against Sexual Violence came into being, and is what gave many of us a chance to become political activists in the full sense of the word. In this way, the solidarity that was part of our everyday lives during the war became inscribed in our minds and souls, and as such will remain with us for the rest of our lives.
Lepa Mladjenovic is a Belgrade feminist and founding member of the organization Women in Black Against War.
Address correspondence to: Lepa Mladjenovic, Women's Center, Tirsova SA, 11000 Beograd, Serbia.
[Haworth co-indexingentry note]:"Beyond War Hierarchies: Belgrade Feminists' Experience Working with Female Survivors of War." Mladjenovic, Lepa. Co-published simultaneously in Women & Therapy (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 22, No. 1, 1999, pp. 83-89; and: Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia (ed: Sara Sharratt and Ellyn Kaschak) The Haworth Press, Inc., 1999, pp.83-89. Singleor multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-342-9678,9:00a.m. -5:00p.m. (EST). E-mail address: getinfo@haworthpressinc.com].
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