Bosnian war rape victims suffer in silence, wait for justice

 Fika was 15 years old, and her sister 17, when they were captured and repeatedly raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers who swept through eastern Bosnia early in the country's 1992-95 war.

"We were forced to watch each other being raped, and I still feel my pain and the pain of my sister," she said. "They wanted us to admit we were spies, so they beat us till they knocked out our teeth."

Twenty years on, Fika is among thousands of Bosnian Muslim women whose search for recognition and support from the Bosnian state is being blocked by Bosnian Serb leaders who fear a wave of compensation claims. Her sister died at the hands of their torturers.

Rights groups are losing patience, warning that the psychological toll is only getting worse with time.

"The silence surrounding the wartime rape of women in the Serb Republic ... is deafening," Amnesty International wrote in October.

Fewer than 40 rape cases have been prosecuted in the 17 years since the war ended, and legislation at the state level to extend compensation and rehabilitation rights to rape victims of the war is gathering dust, hostage to ethnic politicking.

The lesson of Bosnia has spurred a push by Britain to raise awareness of sexual violence in war when it takes over the chairmanship of the G8 group of industrialized nations next year.

Under the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, the British government plans to send police officers, lawyers, psychologists and forensic experts to Bosnia and other conflict and post-conflict countries to work with local authorities on the issue.

"Bosnia and Herzegovina is seen as a priority country," Ann Hannah, a spokeswoman for the initiative, told Reuters. She said a team would arrive in Bosnia early in 2013.

"We have a very strong feeling there is a window of opportunity to make a significant breakthrough on this issue," Hannah said. "Without its resolution, any peace process is incomplete."

A delicate balance of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Bosnia was torn apart as federal Yugoslavia dissolved. An estimated 100,000 people died, most of them Muslims. Some estimates put the number of women raped at up to 35,000, again the majority of them Muslims.

"MY HEART IS ROTTEN"

With peace, the country was split into two autonomous regions - the Serb Republic and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, home to mainly Muslims and Croats. The country is ruled by a system of ethnic quotas, with each region enjoying a high level of autonomy and the central state often left powerless to legislate over the entire territory.

The story of Fika, as she asked to be called, is indicative. She declined to give her real name, fearing the stigma attached to many wartime rape victims in Bosnia. Reuters reached her through a non-governmental organization that helps rape victims.

Caught up in a wave of ethnic cleansing of Muslims from eastern Bosnia, Fika was captured and held at a Serb-run detention camp in the town of Vlasenica. She says she lost count of how many times she was raped by her captors.

Finally released, Fika fled to the northern town of Tuzla, now part of the Federation, dropped out of school and struggled to support her mother, who was widowed during the war, and younger sister.

Now 34 and a mother, she has not told her three children what happened to her, nor will she return to her home in Vlasenica, which is now part of the Serb Republic and where she believes her rapists still live.

Three years ago, spurred by recurring nightmares, she raised the courage to report two of them, whom she recognized as locals of Vlasenica, to police in the region, but charges were never brought.

She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and receives 250 euros ($330) per month from the Muslim-Croat Federation as compensation for her war trauma.

Those like her who live in the Serb Republic receive nothing, however, because the law there only recognizes those who can prove damage to at least 60 percent of their body as civilian victims of war, disregarding psychological trauma.

Fika told her husband what happened to her, but says she regrets doing so because of the toll it has taken on their marriage.

"I have no idea what keeps me going," Fika said. "My heart is rotten."

At least three separate bids have been made in recent years to enshrine the rights of wartime rape victims in state law, so far without success. Bosnian Muslims accuse the Serb Republic of blocking their efforts.

"We have created a nation-wide strategy designed to ensure reparation for the victims of wartime rape but from the very beginning we knew the government of the Serb Republic was hardly likely to accept it," said Saliha Djuderija, assistant minister for human rights and refugees in the Bosnian central government.

PERPETRATORS STILL FREE

Amnesty International said the Serb Republic "is still failing to acknowledge the needs of wartime rape survivors - indeed, the existence of a problem at all."

Authorities there, it said, "have never made a meaningful attempt to collect data on this population, to understand and quantify their problems or to develop policies that would address their specific needs."

Bosnian Serb War Invalids Minister Petar Djokic denied this, saying his government was exploring ways to resolve the issue while safeguarding against the possibility of false claims.

"We have already discussed this with some non-governmental organizations dealing with this problem to see how we can resolve this institutionally in the best way," Djokic told Reuters, "without creating another problem for ourselves through any attempted abuse of the social support system.

"We want to protect the victims of sexual violence in a just manner, but all such victims will have to prove exposure to sexual violence, though not necessarily medical confirmation of the level of bodily damage," Djokic said.

As time passes and victims are left to deal with their trauma alone, the psychological scars deepen, psychologists say, worsened often by the knowledge that the perpetrators are still walking among their victims.

"It only aggravates the condition and their experience of trauma reaches the level of psychological terror," said Teufika Ibrahimefendic, head of the ViveZene NGO and a psychologist who has worked with rape survivors for years.

"The community must recognize the rape as a war crime and each victim must be recognized."

Fika agreed: "For me, the war never ended. And it never will."  Source

'Rape-law' triggers fury in Jordan

The ordeal of a 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped and raped repeatedly for three days has infuriated Jordanians, especially when her attacker agreed to marry her to avoid going to jail.

In conservative Muslim societies like Jordan, rapists can walk free thanks to penal code Article 308, known as the "rape-law."

In April, the unidentified girl was shopping in the northern city of Zarqa when a 19-year-old man kidnapped her, took her to the desert where he had a pitched a tent and raped her for three consecutive days, judicial sources said.

Police found the girl during a routine patrol, drove her back to her family home and arrested the man.

Within days news emerged that the boy had agreed to marry the girl, while all charges against him have been dropped.

Earlier this month, another girl, aged 15, was talked into following a young man to an empty apartment in Amman where she was also raped.

Judicial sources say the young man is now desperately trying to work out an arrangement with her family to marry her, to avoid going to jail.

Article 308 allows rape charges to be dropped if the perpetrator agrees to marry the victim. He cannot divorce the woman for five years.

"This article of the law not only helps perpetrators walk free, it rewards them by allowing them to marry their victims, who get punished ... for God knows what," Nadia Shamrukh, head of the Jordanian Women's Union, told AFP.

"By applying this law, another crime is committed. How can this 14-year-old girl, who is a minor anyway, marry her rapist? Can you imagine this?"

The rape of a child under the age of 15 is punishable by death in Jordan, which recorded 379 cases of rape in 2010, according to court documents.

"In one case, we tried so hard to prevent a rapist from marrying an 18-year-old girl, who did not want to end up being his wife," said Eva Abu Halaweh, a lawyer and human rights activist who heads law group Mizan.

"But the girl's father struck a deal with the unemployed rapist, who was already married to another woman and had six children. He was unable to provide for his family and his wife was a beggar."

Abu Halaweh said the law is "inefficient anyway."

"It should be scrapped. What if a girl gets raped by more than one man? In this case, Article 308 will fail to address the problem," she said.

"Even if the victim does not resist marrying her rapist, he should not walk free ... The penalty could be reduced."

But Israa Tawalbeh, the country's first woman coroner, sees "nothing wrong in Article 308 as such."

"The problem is how some local and international human rights groups interpret the law," she told AFP.

"Actual rape cases are rare in our society. Sometimes, girls under 18 lose their virginity to force their families to accept marriage to their boyfriends. The law categorises this as rape."

Tawalbeh said the law "solves problems for some."

"Accepting marriage under Article 308 is better than leaving girls to be killed by their parents or relatives," she said.

"I think the law fits our society and reality. It protects the girls by forcing attackers to marry them."

In Jordan, between 15 and 20 women are murdered annually in the name of "honour" and at least six such killings have been reported so far this year, according to authorities.

Murder is punishable by death, but in "honour killings," courts sometimes commute or reduce sentences.

But Hani Jahshan, who is a forensic pathologist and physician at the health ministry and the Family Protection Directorate, has a quite different view of Article 308.

"This law is a stark violation of rights of women and children," he said "Sexual violence has a deep impact on victims that could last for a long time, and if a raped girl marries her rapist, her suffering will only be aggravated."

Jahshan blamed social misconceptions.

"Society believes that a female's virginity must be preserved until marriage. This forces girls to marry their rapists in order to protect her reputation and avoid social problems," he said.

Jordanians, particularly women activists, have held several street protests against the law.

"This issue must be effectively addressed," Nadia Hashem Alul, Jordan's first state minister for women's affairs, told AFP. "I think Article 308 should be amended to ensure justice to rape victims." source

Citizen Alya Al-Ghamdi

EVERY DAY we hear of heart-wrenching stories of divorced or separated women whose rights have been blatantly denied. Perhaps the most regretful is the tendency of former husbands to deny a woman’s natural right to see her children.

Alya Al-Ghamdi, who has allowed her real identity to be published, is one of those mothers with a deeply disturbing story. Previously married to a Saudi, Alya was divorced after a few years with three children. Subsequently she married a British Muslim working in the Kingdom.

Her woes started when her former husband denied her the right to see her children for a whole year on the pretext that her British husband will molest her daughters, although Islamic Shariah law accords the status of Mahram (male legal guardian) to a step-father over his wife’s daughters born in a previous marriage.

To stop Alya from meeting her children, he included conditions that her present husband should not be present when she met the children. He also changed his telephone number so that she would not be able to contact the children. When she tried to meet her daughters at their school, the school principal threatened her that she would call the police as their father did not want the mother to have any contact with them.

The desperate mother’s next attempt was to meet the children on the sly at their father’s house when the man went out. But once the ex-husband discovered that, he changed the entry door lock to prevent the children from letting their mother in while he was away.

As a last resort, Alya would wait hidden nearby until he left the house. She would then throw small stones at the first floor apartment windows. Her six-year old son would open the window and thrust out his body saying that he would eat plenty of food so that he will grow up fast and be with his mother.

This ordeal continued for three more years until her oldest daughter was 14. It was this daughter who cooked for and looked after the other two while their father was away. Later the mother was finally allowed to meet the children but only the daughters. She noticed that the eldest girl had cut off her long hair. When Alya asked her to let her hair grow like other women, the girl’s reply was that she had shortened her hair like boys because a woman had no public existence.

Following the death of her father and with meetings with her children becoming more difficult and rare, Alya left the Kingdom with her husband engulfed by the dream to see her children whenever she wanted and without any restrictions. The former husband’s justification for his denial of her rights was that she is not eligible to meet the children. But what eligibility is weightier than a mother’s unrestricted right to see her children?

The primary right of a mother to her children is unequivocally affirmed by a well-known statement of the Prophet (peace be upon him) that “paradise lies under the feet of the mother”.

I pray to the Almighty to return Alya’s children to her just as He returned Moses (peace be upon him) to his mother. I also request the Minister of Justice to grant Alya the right to see all her children in the company of her present husband who is her and all her children’s Mahram, whenever she feels to see them or whenever they yearn for their mother’s embrace.

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'My mother was wronged, gravely wronged'

A quarter of a century after the historic Supreme Court judgment on the maintenance lawsuit of Shah Bano and the ensuing storm which made the then Congress government rework the law, her youngest son Jameel Ahmed Khan recalls the deep financial distress and mortifying shame his mother suffered.

"My mother was wronged, gravely wronged," said Jameel, 60, as wrinkles on his face rearranged themselves in remembrance of circumstances triggered by her fight for maintenance.

"My mother was a simple, purdah-observing woman. Being divorced at such a late age (60, by most accounts), the publicity, paper-baazi… she was very ashamed of all this. She didn't say much but kept stewing over it."

This bottling up of emotions took its toll. "She developed high blood pressure and frequently fell ill," said Jameel, a 'property broker' (local euphemism for somebody without a steady job), who lives in a modest house in Indore. Shah Bano died of brain haemorrhage in 1992.

Mohammed Ahmed Khan, an affluent and well-known advocate, took a younger woman as second wife 14 years after he had married Shah Bano. After years of living with both wives, he threw Shah Bano and her five children out. When he stopped giving her Rs 200 per month he had apparently promised, she fought and won a seven-year legal battle for maintenance.

Prominent Muslim organisations opposed the Supreme Court verdict, which they felt, encroached on Muslim personal laws. The Congress government, which had the biggest majority in India's Parliamentary history, reworked the law — by enacting the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 — barring Muslim women from getting maintenance after divorce under civil laws.

A provision of the Act limited the husband's liability to pay maintenance to his divorced wife only for the period of iddat (roughly three months immediately after the divorce).

"Izzat ki ladai thi (It was a fight for self-respect). It was a fight against our izzat being maligned in the locality and a family matter," Jameel said.

Although Jameel, a god-fearing Muslim, was careful not to criticise his father, he conceded that Mohammed Khan increasingly favoured his younger wife's children after the two households became separate.

"It came to a pass where he'd only come on Eid, and even then my chhoti vaalida (stepmother) would send for him even before we could serve sevaiyan," he said.

In fact, it was a festive day attempt at rapprochement that finally tore things asunder. "Around two years after my mother had moved out, my brothers and I went to meet my father on Eid and asked him to forgive and forget. But he slapped me and threw us all out," said Jameel.

When the Supreme Court in 1985 upheld Shah Bano's maintenance claim, a political blizzard broke out.

"Former diplomat and prominent Muslim leader Syed Shahabuddin visited our house as did ulema (clergymen) from Indore and other cities, who told us that the verdict was against the Shariat," said Jameel. "We didn't know much about it (Shariat provisions for maintenance etc) then… our mother was illiterate. Clergymen from India and abroad contacted us and told us that there had been a mistake and explained how things should be according to the Shariat."

He added, "Several people including (names a well-known cleric from Gujarat) had offered money and even a job abroad (for refusing maintenance). But I was clear that if we refused, it would not be for material gain but Fi Sabeelillah (for Allah's cause)." Once the matter became public, journalists from India and abroad started landing up. "The pressure became such that I felt winning the case wasn't so good. It would've been better if we lost," said Jameel. "Massive processions against the judgment were staged across the country. In Mumbai, traffic was held up for hours. Even in Indore there was a lakh-strong rally which passed in front of our house. Even if every rallyist threw a pebble each, our kuchha house would have crumbled. This creates terror."

Simultaneously, the family started getting invitations from liberals in the community. "We accepted these thinking 'let's see what they have to say'," he said. A group from Ahmedabad organised a felicitation for Shah Bano.

In the meantime, the family received a message from then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He wanted to meet them. Shah Bano and Jameel travelled to Delhi and met him.

"He said the situation was very critical, serious. 'We have to find a way,' he said," recalled Jameel. "I told him (I'd since read up on Shariat directives about marriage and maintenance) there was no provision for maintenance, except for money to be paid during iddat and mehr (money to be paid at the time of divorce). I told him the law should be amended. He, in turn, asked us to announce that we were refusing the maintenance."

Jameel was candid about vote-bank politics. "Muslims across the country were ranged against the verdict. The elections were approaching. Political parties think about their interests. It was felt that if Muslims voted en bloc against the Congress on the issue, the party would lose power."

After returning to Indore, Shah Bano held a press conference to announce that she was forsaking the maintenance because it was against the Shariat. "I thought if we didn't backtrack now, azaab (grief) would be on us. Since it was a matter of religion, I didn't want us to become a precedent," he said.

"I thought, 'My mother will live for another two, five, 10 years. But if we agree (to accept the judgment), we'll be forever branded as the people who got the government, or the courts, to interfere in the Shariat. There's no point in living with such a taint on you."

Almost immediately, the whole situation changed. "My mother was feted at public functions (by orthodox Muslims) and showered with titles like 'Deeni Bahan' (Righteous Sister) and 'Islami Behen' (Islamic Sister)," Jameel said.

"Although a section of the media continued to report that our decision was the result of pressure by the clergy, we chose not to respond. We also decided to withdraw a case for recovery of mehr, which was 3,000 kaldars (silver coins), but my father only paid Rs 3,000," he added.

Asked if he had taken issue with clergymen who approached him after the verdict for ignoring Shah Bano's plight earlier, he said, "The first question I asked them was, 'Where were you all these years?'"

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PAKISTAN: Tormented by stigma after rape

The three-room house in the Korangi area of the Pakistani city of Karachi, occupied until two months ago by Alam Din and his family of six, stands empty.

Neighbours say Din, a street vendor, left suddenly after his 14-year-old daughter was raped by several local youths while on her way home from an evening lesson. The crime was never reported; Din and his brothers felt to do so would damage family honour and instead Din apparently bundled his family and possessions on to a truck and left in the dead of night for Punjab province.

“The girl had to be carried out,” said Aleena Bibi, a neighbour. “She had been injured. It is a tragedy this should happen to a child, but now people also consider the house unlucky and are reluctant to buy.”

Many rapes in Pakistan, due to stigma, are never reported, and there are no precise figures on how many occur. However, the US Department of State, in its 2010 Human Rights Report states 928 cases of rape were reported.

“Prosecutions of reported rapes were rare. Police and NGOs reported that false rape charges sometimes were filed in different types of disputes, reducing the ability of police to assess real cases and proceed with prosecution,” it said.

“NGOs reported that police at times were implicated in rape cases. NGOs also alleged that police sometimes abused or threatened victims, demanding that they drop charges, especially when police received a bribe from suspected perpetrators.”

The autonomous Human Rights Commission of Pakistan states in its annual report for 2010 that 2,903 women - almost eight a day - were raped last year.

The Karachi-based NGO War Against Rape, in a statement released last month, said data collected from three hospitals and police showed that the average age of victims had fallen from 18 years last year to 13 this year in the city. WAR also noted only a minority of the cases reported from hospitals had been brought to the notice of police.

“The insensitive attitude of police, and the fact [that] women face further harassment at the hands of police, discourages them from reporting abuse,” Sarah Zaman, director of WAR, told IRIN.

There have been some horrendous reports of abuse by police, including that of a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Natasha Bibi, raped over 21 days while she was held by police in the northern Punjab town of Wah Cantt.

“It is the growing brutalization of our society and its patriarchal nature that allows incidents of this kind to happen,” said Gulnar Tabassum, a consultant for the NGO Shirkatgah, based in Lahore, which works for the rights of women.

“My daughter, who was only 12 years old at the time, was violently raped last year by her cousin. We did not report the matter to avoid a scandal, and to protect her from stigma. But even now rumours fly, my child refuses to leave my side and says she feels ‘dirty’ and we wonder who will marry her with this dark stain hanging over her,” Gulab Bibi, 40, told IRIN in Karachi.

In rural areas, the reluctance to report rape runs even deeper. Laiq Muhammad, a farmer in the Khairpur district of Sindh, says his nine-year-old sister was raped by the son of a powerful land-owner in the area. “These people have connections, they would simply bribe the police, and I have daughters and another younger sister’s safety to consider,” he said. “We cannot run the risk of further punishment.

“My sister’s life has changed for ever. She is only a child, but we are powerless to help her,” Muhammad told IRIN.

The reluctance to report cases also means the survivors frequently receive no psychological support.


“A victim of sexual assault needs counselling and help. The fact that in our society she is not even able to talk of the incident in most cases only makes matters worse for the thousands of women who suffer rape each year,” Saima Akhtar, a Karachi-based psychiatrist, said.

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Pakistan's blasphemy laws have left even judges in fear of their lives

So he's going to swing – perhaps. On Saturday a Pakistani judge sentenced Mumtaz Qadri, the police bodyguard who assassinated the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, to death by hanging. The young policeman smiled and thanked God. "My dream has come true," he reportedly said.

It was a predictably theatrical turn from Qadri, a former nobody who murdered Taseer in cowardly fashion – shooting the governor 27 times in the back – and who has since revelled in the notoriety of his blood-stained celebrity. Equally predictable, alas, was the reaction on the streets outside.

Close to the courtroom in Rawalpindi, angry young men attacked a monument to the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, defacing her image on the spot where she died in a suicide bombing in 2007. Down in Lahore, turbaned men with long sticks surged through the ancient Anarkali bazaar, thrashing traders who refused to shutter their shops in sympathy for Qadri.

Meanwhile the clerics engineering the protests – old men with soft palms and tinder-dry beards – issued po-faced statements decrying the sentence. Qadri was a good Muslim, they insisted, and Taseer got what he deserved. The governor had offended them by advocating reforms to Pakistan's antiquated blasphemy laws. In particularly they hated him for defending Aasia Bibi, a Christian mother-of-five sentenced to death under those laws last November. He deserved to die, they said.

Taseer's wife and children, in contrast, were silent. They stayed at home, busy worrying about their son and sibling, Shahbaz. The 27-year-old was kidnapped in August as he purred through Lahore in a sports Mercedes – his father's old car, in fact. Word has it he is being held in the tribal badlands of Waziristan; whether his captors are religious extremists, common criminals, or both, remains unclear.

The family is also reeling from character assaults. When Taseer was still alive, conservatives circulated photos of his children, lifted from their Facebook pages, showing them engaged in objectionable activity, such as dating and swimming in a swimming pool. After Taseer died, Qadri's lawyers aired allegations about his sex life, drinking habits and apparent taste for pork – proof, they said, of a licentiousness that justified his cold-blooded murder.

The distasteful spectacle is partly a product of Pakistan's social gulf. The Taseers inhabit the gilded bubble of a tiny elite whose westernised lives play out in Hello!-style photospreads of society magazines. In fact the Taseers own one of the most popular magazines. But it also goes to the heart of a bigger ideological crisis.

In theory, Pakistan is a country that welcomes all creeds and castes. But in practice it is proving to be anything but. Ask Faryal Bhatti, a teenage girl recently expelled from school for the crime of bad spelling.

A week ago last Thursday, the 13-year-old Christian girl was sitting an Urdu exam which involved a poem about the prophet Muhammad when she dropped a dot on the Urdu word naat (a devotional hymn to the prophet), accidentally turning it intolanaat, or damnation. Spotting the error, her teacher scolded her, beat her and reported the matter to the principal. The news soon flamed through her community in Havelian, 30 miles north of Islamabad.

Mullahs raged against Bhatti in their sermons; a school inquiry was hastily convened to examine the matter. Bhatti was expelled; her mother, a government nurse, was banished to another town, and the family has since fled Havelian in fear of their lives. All over a missing dot.

What accounts for such madness? In some parts Taseer's death has inspired a McCarthyite atmosphere in which nobody wants to seen to be soft on blasphemy. But there is also a more profound reason. Devotion to the prophet Muhammad is central to the faith of the Barelvi Sunnis, who make up the majority of Pakistani Muslims. Even a whiff of insult to the prophet can whip up feverish anger.

The core problem, in fact, is that the blasphemy furore exposes the fragility of the Pakistani state – ideological, legal and security-wise. The mixing of religion and politics has long troubled Pakistan, but over the past 30 years that dangerous cocktail has been spiked by the army's policy of nurturing extremists – hence men like Qadri who believe they have a right to kill in the name of God.

Meanwhile President Asif Ali Zardari's government has shown zero leadership when it comes to reforming the blasphemy law – in fact, cowardly ministers have run a mile from any suggestion of change. And those who do dare to stand up for progress – or just the rule of law – live in fear of the next Qadri-style hit.

In truth, Taseer's baby-faced killer is unlikely to be hanged any time soon. A lengthy appeals process is just starting, and the Zardari government has imposed an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment. But the judge who sentenced him, Pervez Ali Shah, faces perhaps shorter odds.

Judges who rule the "wrong" way on blasphemy face immense dangers in Pakistan. In 1997 extremists burst into the chambers of a high court judge who acquitted an accused blasphemer three years earlier, and shot him dead. Justice Shah will be fearing a repeat.

Reporters at Qadri's hearing on Saturday noted that the judge slipped from the courtroom via the back door. He knows he is a marked man. Now only time will tell if the discredited Pakistani state can stand up for at least one good man.

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