WMC Women Under Siege

Her Hands in His: One Family Contends with Kosovo’s Legacy of Sexualized Violence

(Valerie Plesch)

Nezir* holds his daughter Tina’s* hands in his on a warm July afternoon in 2019. We’re in a village in central Kosovo visiting Tina’s parents’ home.

Tina, now 38, was 16 years old when she was gang raped by eight Serb policemen in a basement on March 29, 1999 — about a week after NATO began its air campaign to remove former-President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic’s forces out of Kosovo, then a province of Serbia. Her mother and relatives were held upstairs and beaten before the policemen took Tina downstairs.

“Don’t kill her,” Tina remembers one of her rapists saying to another. “Leave her. They deserve to live like this.”

“I was crawling behind them and begging them to kill me,” she told me.

Before the war, Tina was an energetic and free-spirited teenager, a student who had envisioned a bright future after finishing high school. After that day in late March, everything changed.

The war for Kosovo’s independence was fought between Kosovar Albanian liberation fighters on one side and Serbia’s paramilitaries, led by Slobodan Milosevic, on the other. Kosovo had become a police state controlled by Serbia after Milosevic became president in 1989, revoking Kosovo’s autonomy, removing Albanians from state jobs in Kosovo, and shutting down most Albanian language schools and newspapers.

Most of the war crimes were committed between March and June 1999 as Milosevic’s forces retaliated against the civilian ethnic Albanian population during the NATO bombings. It was also during this time that an estimated 850,000 Albanian refugees were forced out of Kosovo into neighboring Macedonia and Albania — and when women were taken from the refugee columns and raped.

Rape was used as a weapon of systematic “ethnic cleansing” in which the ultimate goal was to destroy an ethnic Albanian’s honor and identity. Those who remained behind were also targeted for rape and torture as Serbian forces swept through towns and villages searching for Albanian male fighters and their relatives.

National silence and impunity

“We will always live with the traumas from the war,” Tina said.

After spending months in Kosovo in 2018 and 2019, photographing and interviewing dozens of wartime rape survivors, Tina’s quote stuck with me as I documented stories from survivors who still grapple with the trauma, in a society that continues to stigmatize and shame them.

Sources estimate roughly 20,000 women and men were raped by Serbian police and Yugoslav forces during the war — and even that number may be an undercount. Recording exact figures remains difficult, as many survivors have not come forward with their story. Some have died over the years without ever seeing justice for those crimes against them, despite the several trials that took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the few in Serbia and Kosovo since the end of the war. One of them was brought by Marte Tunaj, the first survivor to testify against her rapist in Kosovo, who was sentenced to jail in 2000 but was later acquitted in 2002. Tunaj died in 2016 without ever seeing her perpetrator face justice.

Kosovo is a small country — with a population of only 1.8 million people — and most survivors have not told their children, spouses, or other relatives about what had happened to them.

“Wartime rape is seen as an experience that violates social norms in society,” said Ardiana Shala, a researcher from Kosovo at Nottingham Trent University, who focuses on the impact of social identities in dealing with war trauma and gendered experiences of war. She traveled with me to villages in Kosovo to meet survivors as part of her research. “It is to be understood as a collective trauma, rather than individual [trauma], especially when we talk about 20,000 victims.”

Because of this national silence and a fragile justice system — which international rule of law missions in Kosovo, run by the United Nations and European Union, have tried to assist over the last two decades — not a single perpetrator has been sentenced to prison for wartime rape.

The ICTY closed on December 31, 2017, and only four of Yugoslavia’s senior military and political leaders from Serbia were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual violence in Kosovo.

No one has ever been convicted solely for rape.

But as Kosovo continues to move forward as a new nation, while continuing to deal with its recent wartime past, different factions of society are slowly coming together to embrace and recognize survivors.

In 2014, Kosovo’s parliament amended a law on the status of civilian victims and veterans from the war to include survivors of sexual violence. And in 2018, a new monthly government pension of 230 euros — around 90% of the average woman’s monthly salary in Kosovo — became available for survivors of sexual violence from the war. However, pensions are approved by a special commission set up to review all applications, with their supporting documentation and evidence, during a five-year period. Many who work with survivors argue that the timeframe for survivors to come forward with their applications is too short. What’s more, to qualify, survivors must provide details of the crime, with thorough documentation and evidence of the rape — including medical records, psychosocial counseling notes, and witness testimonies.

It is a lengthy and painful process for survivors to face if they want to be legally recognized as a victim of the war. Many survivors apply in secret if their relatives do not know about the rape, and if they do know, some are forbidden from applying. The process of reviewing and approving the applications has also been extremely slow: since the commission started receiving applications in 2018, roughly 1,500 have applied, 800 have been approved, and more than 200 have been rejected for lack of evidence.

Reckoning with the aftermath

Shortly after the end of the war, when Kosovo was finally liberated from Serbia, Tina’s parents found a husband for her. She was 17, and the man was considerably older, but her parents assured her that he would understand her and what had happened to her.

“They wanted me to get married because they thought I would have someone’s support.”

Today, Tina lives with her husband and children in deep poverty in a remote village, where the couple can barely make ends meet to support them and their children. Though her husband was supportive in the beginning, he became increasingly controlling over Tina’s independence, especially when she would leave the home dressed up to meet friends in the nearest town for a coffee, often accusing her of being up to something else and demanding proof of her whereabouts.

“Sometimes, I get angry and tell my father, ‘It’s all your fault for the life I’m having,’” Tina said.

But, ultimately, she forgives her parents for the decision they made for her and remains fiercely close with her father. After all these years, she understands why he did it — he wanted to protect his daughter. At the time the war ended in 1999, it seemed unimaginable for Tina’s father to envision a future in which his daughter would be able to start a new life with a man who would accept her.

“He thought he had found the man who would understand me,” she said.

I was struck by the close bond Tina had with her parents, especially her father, photographed here with Tina in the village where she grew up. I wanted to capture a quiet moment between a father and his daughter, one that spoke to his continued commitment to his daughter’s healing.

In Kosovo’s conservative and patriarchal society, especially in the rural areas, it is difficult for survivors of wartime rape to find this level of support, even within their own families.

“Because of the stigma attached to it, family and the wider community reject social support to survivors, either because they blame them for what happened to them and/or they fear that they themselves will be targets of shaming and exclusion,” said Shala. “The survivor’s family and community becomes a "social curse" to them, and to avoid further negative consequences, many survivors keep silent and try to deal with the past alone.”

There are only four organizations in Kosovo that have been working since the end of the war to help and support these survivors and the lasting trauma left by the war, which killed more than 13,000 people.

Tina used to visit one of them to seek counseling and group sessions with other survivors, but, she said, she doesn’t go as often anymore. She mostly leans on her father for support, especially after a fight with her husband. Their relationship seems a testament to their resilience as well as the impact that support from close family members can have on a survivor.

‘We don’t want anything from the state but justice’

Today, former ethnic Albanian freedom fighters, including Kosovo’s president and other high-ranking officials, are currently facing war crimes charges in The Hague. The court, established by the European Union but operating under Kosovo law, is targeting ethnic Albanians, while Serbs who committed the majority of war crimes against Albanian civilians are not being sought by prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the fight for justice for wartime rape survivors remains elusive, sustained only by the survivors themselves and their advocates, who have not given up on seeking recognition and acceptance from their families and society — or on seeking justice for the crimes they suffered. Kosovo’s first female president, Atifete Jahjaga, made it a priority to give survivors legal status during her tenure from 2011 to 2016 and continues to speak on survivors’ behalf and demand justice from Serbia.

Over the last few years, the biggest change in breaking the silence around wartime rape has been social activism within Kosovo that supports survivors in speaking out and sharing their stories. One of them is Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman, a survivor who recently won a seat in Kosovo’s parliament. In 2018, she became the first woman to publicly testify on national television that she was a victim of sexualized violence during the war. Now, her mission is to advocate for survivors in Kosovo and around the world. She also addresses the lack of justice survivors in Kosovo have had to endure, including herself.

Her rapists — two Serb policemen who abducted her before raping her when she was 16 — were indicted for the crime but then acquitted by Kosovo’s Supreme Court in 2014.

On February 17, Kosovo — the second newest nation in the world — celebrated its 13th year of independence. As Kosovo continues its peace negotiations with Serbia, which still doesn’t recognize Kosovo’s independence, and moves toward integrating with the rest of Europe, while seeking more international recognition as an independent nation, it should not forget the thousands of survivors who still need justice.

“They [Kosovo government] don’t care for the people here how we live, they just look after themselves. We are between Serbia and Kosovo,” Tina said. “The Serbs harmed us, but Kosovars aren’t doing much to help us. I’m just looking for justice.”

“We don’t want anything from the state but justice. From our family members, we want protection. And from you, we want support,” said Krasniqi-Goodman in an address to Kosovo’s lawmakers on March 9, 2020. “A war crime was committed against us, and you were not there to protect us. We’ve had enough waiting.”




* Names have been changed for their protection.



More articles by Category: Gender-based violence, International, Violence against women
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