Witness for the persecution

How did you come to be involved in documenting the war in the Balkans, and in particular, the experience of women during the war?

I was just there. I was born in Croatia -- Yugoslavia -- and all my life lived there. So, when the war started, it was my natural reaction -- the reaction of a journalist and a writer to articulate events. These events, or the war, were so terrifying and changed people around me so much, that I felt compelled to describe that in order to try to understand what war does to people ... to myself as well. And I am a woman. So I decided that these were the stories I wanted to tell. The war stories are about destruction and battles and number of killed and heroism, rarely about a woman or women.

You set out to write a nonfiction account of the "women's rooms," the experience of rape in the prison camps, but then chose the genre of fiction and created a fictional "everywoman" instead to tell this story. How did that decision come about? Were the Muslim cultural stigma of rape or the desire to protect the identity of the victims factors in your decision?

Rape is an incredibly strong cultural stigma in the patriarchal Muslim culture. And of course the identity of victims should be protected, but these concerns weren't my real problem.

In 1992 I wanted to do a book of documents, of witness accounts of the victims of rape, with my introduction. That was my original idea. But the more witnessing I heard or read, the less I was convinced that they would work for the reader of such a book. The way stories were told -- they were similar, repetitive and very ... poor, limited somehow. So the effect was not one of identification, but of boredom.

In short, I realized that the terrible human drama was not fully present in the witness accounts. And I wanted people to listen, not to simply skip it. The only solution was to tell the story of a fictional woman, and through her all these stories.

What was the post-war experience of women who were defiled in the camps? How were they treated by their families and communities?

This is hard to say. There is no systematic evidence. Generally, the women do not talk about rape; they try to hide it. There are very few of them who come out in public and use their names. But there is a lot of anonymous witnessing.

Just recently one such book of witnessing accounts was published by CID, the Center for Investigation and Documentation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Witnesses' identity was protected, of course. But what is distressing is that those women, or men, who were camp inmates do not have even the minimum of legal rights or means of recourse. By publishing that book they are trying to fight for their rights.

Is the experience of S. a typical experience? How much of what happened to her and what she observed -- being moved to the women's room, being beaten and tortured, becoming pregnant, observing other women killing their babies or committing suicide -- comes from factual or anecdotal evidence collected during your research?

My character, S., is fictional, but everything that happens to her is true. Every detail comes from someone's witnessing. Unfortunately. And how typical? Well, that is hard to say. I read that 80 percent of the imprisoned women were raped in the camps. There were about 600 camps with over 200,000 prisoners, of which 38,000 died or were killed. But what can you say about statistics, if for example one women was raped over a hundred times? Statistics don't take this kind of fact into account.

Could you describe the nature of the research you did with the Center for War Crimes? How many women did you interview, and were most Muslim? How comfortable did they feel telling their stories?

Well, my research went on through years ...

I first met some of these women in the late autumn of 1992 in refugee camps in Zagreb and Karlovac. They were mostly Bosnians, Muslims, but some were Croats as well. Then I dropped the whole idea, as I described. Then I read more witnessing, books, talked to more women ... It was a long and painful process for me. For them, well, it was difficult to get stories out of them. They were very, very uncomfortable talking about it.

Later in my process as a writer I read a number of books on the psychology of victims and understood why they do not want to, and cannot, talk. No victim of any kind of trauma can speak. When they can begin to articulate their trauma, it means that they are recovering. I understood, then, why the witnessing of these women had seemed so reduced and repetitious.

Next Page: What has happened to the "rape babies"?

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