NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9416

Text File | 1992-12-18 | 10.9 KB | 214 lines

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From: Shahid Imran - MBCL <[e-mail]>
Subject: Rape After Rape After Rape
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Hello,

    What follows is an article from the New York Times.  Why am I posting
it here?  I feel that some of the issues pertain to at least some of the
threads I have seen in this group (and the other groups that I am posting to).
The article is about the calculated destruction of the Bosnian Muslims.  The
article contains extremely graphic descriptions of brutality, torture, and
rape.

    I hope this article makes you uncomfortable.  I hope this article makes
you act.  Perhaps you will make your friends aware of the situation in Bosnia.
Perhaps you will write to your elected officials and ask them to act.  I am
doing my part by bringing this to your attention.  At the end of the article I
have included a copy of a letter that I sent to the senators of my state (New
Jersey).  If you wish feel free to use it as is, or to plagiarize from it, or
better yet write something in your own words.

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    Copied without permission from:
     The New York Times OP-ED Sunday, December 13, 1992

    Rape After Rape After Rape

    ZAGREB, Croatia.  What is happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina to
Muslim and Croatian women seems unprecedented in the history of war crimes.
Women are raped by Serbian soldiers in an organized and systematic way, as a
planned crime to destroy a whole Muslim population, to destroy a society's
cultural, traditional and religious integrity.
    The numbers are chilling: In October, the Ministry of Interior of
Bosnia and Herzegovina estimated that 50,000 women and girls had been raped,
and many impregnated on purpose.  It is feared that since then the number has
risen even further.  The ministry collected and documented 13,000 cases.
    Journalists and feminists have interviewed women in refugee camps in
Croatia, and it is through their stories that the world has discovered the
tragedy.  In the civilized world rape is a crime.  Mass rape is a method of
genocide that should become a war crime and outlawed in all international
conventions.  The lives of tens of thousands of women have been destroyed; the
world owes them at least that.
    Here are accounts by three women.  "E.'s" account will appear in the
January-February issue of Ms. magazine.  -SLAVENKA DRAKULIC

    Z.N., age 40.
    As soon as Chetniks [Servs] came into our city, they selected women,
children and the old people; men were taken to a concentration camp with an
excuse that they were mobilized.  They put hundreds of us in a school in Doboj
and they turned it into a kind of camp.  Our Serbian neighbors locked us in.  I
knew many; they used to visit our house.  As soon as we entered a camp,
"marticevic" [followers of Milan Martic, a Serbian leader] came in with guns
and selected younger women and girls.  They put them in the halls and told the
Chetniks to do with the women what they pleased.
    There was silence.  Then the crazy, dirty, stinking, Chetniks jumped at
the women like animals; they tore off their clothes, pulled their hair, cut
their breasts with knives.  They'd cut the belly of the women who wore the
traditional Muslim baggy trousers.  Those who screamed would be killed on the
spot.
    In front of a few hundred prisoners they raped and tortured women and
girls for days.  It was unbearable to watch girls being raped in front of their
fathers.  In the evening, after heavy drinking, the Chetniks would come in the
hall with lamps.  Stepping on us, they would look for girls, not older than 12,
13.
    The girls cried, holding on to their mothers.  As they were taken,
pieces of their mother's clothes remained in their hands.  While doing that,
the Chetniks would shoot at us.  Later they would leave the girls' dead bodies
in the hall, so we had to see them.  We cried until morning.  Then they would
throw the bodies in the river.
    Every day the same picture was repeated; they would rape and kill in
front of hundreds of us.  Once a young woman with a baby was taken in the
middle of the hall.  It was in June.  They ordered her to take off her clothes.
She put the baby on the floor next to her.  Four Chetniks raped her; she was
silent, looking at her crying child.  When she was left alone, she asked if she
could breast-feed the baby.  Then a Chetnik cut the child's head off with a
knife.  He gave the bloody head to the mother.  The poor woman screamed.  They
took her outside and she never came back.  The biggest criminals in Doboj are
Bosko Jeitic, Milenko Varnjes, Mico Tuca, the brothers Stankovic and Jorgovic.
    I was raped and tortured too, because they knew that I am a wife of a
leader of the Muslim party.  My neighbor tortured me the most, the one my
husband respected as his own brother.  By the end of June, Chetniks brought
another neighbor of ours and with a gun pointed at him they forced him to rape
a 14-year-old girl.  He stood trembling and stuttering with fear.
    Then he turned to a Chetnik he believed was a leader and said, "Don't
make me do it.  I have known her since she was born - her father and I drank to
her birth."  They beat him in front of us until he died.  It was an example to
the other Serbs that there is no pity, that one must do what leaders order them
to do.
    In August some prisoners were exchanged including me and my sons.  Many
women and girls who were pregnant remained in the camp.  They were transferred
to a hospital and fed twice a day because, as the Chetniks said, they had to
bear their offspring.

    E.N., age 14 and her mother.
    E.N: That commander was big, fat, dirty old guy.  He had gray hair with
a white tuft at his forehead.  He stank of brandy, really stank.  He had a mask
on.  He nodded toward me and ordered me angrily to stand up.  We went in one
room; my legs trembled, I couldn't walk at all.  He then pushed me but I
trembled terribly and inside me everything trembled.  I thought he would
slaughter me and I couldn't ever pray.  He asked me crudely if I had ever had
sex.  "Please, don't" - I beg him.  Then he pushed me, hit me and threw me on a
bed, tore off my dress and hit me again.  He put his hand over my mouth.  I
screamed again.  He hit me; he shouted at me.
    The mother:  I heard my child screaming.  She called for help.  I heard
his grunting, his howling.  My womb hurt as if someone is pulling it out.  My
mind darkened, but there was nothing I could do.  My child was suffocating
under his fist.  I heard him: "Is it good, you dog?"  He was more and more
violent.  He repeated the same question until she nodded yes.  He asked if she
wants more.  I heard her pleading, "Please, don't."  He went out of the room
and said angrily to me, "Don't let anyone touch the little one."
    In other rooms, my sister's daughters were raped in the same way.
While this was going on, one Chetnik guarded me and my sister.  We found my
sister's dauther unconscious and naked.  My dress was torn apart and she had
visible injuries on her body.

    E., age 16.
    The massacre after the attack on my village had been the greatest
tragedy of my life.  I did not know then that destiny had something even worse
in store for me.
    Several Chetniks arrived.  One, a man around 30, ordered me to follow
him into the house.  I had to go.  He started looking for money, jewelry and
other valuables.  He wanted to know where the men were.  I didn't answer.  Then
he ordered me to undress.  I was terribly afraid.  I took off my clothes,
feeling that I was falling apart.  The feeling seemed under my skin; I was
dying, my entire being was murdered.  I closed my eyes, I couldn't look at him.
He hit me.  I fell.  Then he lay on me.  He did it to me.  I cried, twisted my
body convulsively, bled.  I had been a virgin.
    He went out and invited two Chetniks to come in.  I cried.  The two
repeated what the first one had done to me.  I felt lost.  I didn't even know
when they had left.  I don't know how long I stayed there, lying on the floor
alone, in a pool of blood.
    My mother found me.  I couldn't imagine anything worse.  I had been
raped, destroyed and terribly hurt.  But for my mother this was the greatest
sorrow of our lives.  We both cried and screamed.  She dressed me.
    I would like to be a mother some day.  But how?  In my world, men
represent terrible violence and pain.  I cannot control that feeling.


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                        December 16, 1992

                        Shahid Imran
                        Systems Administrator
                        Waksman Institute
                        Rutgers University
                        Piscataway, NJ 08855-0759




Senator Bill Bradley
Room 731, Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Bradley,

    I am writing to urge you to take action on the Bosnian situation.  The
organized destruction of the Bosnian Muslims is a crime against humanity.
Once again there is the specter of genocide.

    Our current policy of wait-and-see is at best the abdication of duty.
At worst it is a form of realpolitik that demonstrates that we have lost all
sense of compassion.  We as a country are still determining our post Cold-War
role in global politics.  We have taken a few tentative steps in the right
direction with our relief efforts in Somalia.  We must continue in this
direction.  We must take aggressive measures, including the use of U.S. forces,
to prevent the genocide that is occurring in Bosnia-Herzegovina from reaching
completion.

    I am enclosing a recent Op-Ed article from the Sunday New York Times
which I would like you to read.  The article is a graphic account of some of
the atrocities that have been committed on the Bosnian people.  They are beyond
human comprehension.  They bring to mind words like Treblinka, Auschwitz, and
Babi Yar.  We cannot let this happen again.

    I would appreciate it if you would bring these issues to the attention
of the other members of Congress and to the attention of the President of the
United States of America.

Sincerely Yours,


Shahid Imran

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If you've read so far you have my thanks.

Shahid.

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Shahid N. Imran, Systems Administrator   || Phone:    [phone]
Molecular Biology Computing Laboratory   ||
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