The New York Times
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Taking Two Bosnian Women’s Case to the World
By JUDITH MILLER FEB. 23, 1997
[We have added some comments in bold.]
EVEN MORE THAN OTHER WAR crimes, rape does not easily lend itself to film. This aspect of the depressing litany of man’s inhumanity to man — and woman — is hard enough to confirm without also having to depict it with camera and microphone. Rape is usually a witnessless crime, one that leaves no visible mark on its victim. There are no mass graves to photograph, no cigarette burns or jagged scars to display, no discarded canisters of chemicals or vials of nerve agents to be collected.
So creating a documentary that examines rape as a tactic of war is a daunting task. And it is doubly so in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where rape has been shown to have been part of Serbia’s campaign to rid the land of Bosnian Muslims — ethnic cleansing, using the euphemism for genocide popularized by Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. In forlorn Bosnia, who did what to whom is still fiercely debated among the country’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims, as it is by foreigners who followed the slaughter of an estimated quarter of a million people between the spring of 1992 and 1995. (Some human-rights activists estimate that at least 20,000 Muslim girls and women were raped by Serbian men between 1991 and 1995.). [In 1992 scores of western journalists travelled to Bosnia to investigate claims that 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Serbs. All returned home within a few weeks having failed to find any rape victims. No reports were filed except one by a French journalist who said that the claims were nonsense. Later attempts were made to revive the story, notably by the EU’s Warburton Commission which reported that 20,000 women had been raped. This figure was dismissed when one of the members of the Commission, the former French politician Simone Veil, revealed that this figure had been extrapolated from just 4 interviews.]
”Calling the Ghosts: A Story About Rape, War and Women,” which was show at the Toronto Film Festival last fall and is to be broadcast by Cinemax on Monday, March 3, at 11 P.M., reflects these inherent difficulties. The work of two first-time film makers, Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic, the documentary is the story of two Bosnian women, Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, who in 1992 were confined for four months at the notorious Omarska prison camp, where they were repeatedly raped by Serbian commanders and guards. The hourlong film also focuses on their decision to testify about what was done to them so that their tormentors, men they had known as neighbors, could be pursued along with more than 60 other alleged war criminals currently at large. [Jadranka Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman’s ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman. The primary source for reports which sent “piles of testimony to Western women and to the press.” Cigelj gave vivid accounts of being raped herself to western journalists but even the ICTY, which had once seen her as a star witness, decided not to call her to give evidence because there were many irreconcilable contradictions in the stories she had told to different journalists.]
Ms. Jacobson said that she and Ms. Jelincic had not wanted to make what she called ”just another victim story” or one that peddled ”a purely feminist agenda.”
”We wanted to make a film not so much about what it means to have been raped,” she said, ”but about how these women made sense of what had happened, and how they were going to reconstruct their lives. They chose Ms. Cigelj and Ms. Sivac, she added, ”because they let us into their lives in a very real way.”
It is obvious, in person and on the screen, that the heroines of the film are thoughtful, determined women who were unusual in their ability to sustain such anguished introspection. It is also obvious that they subjected themselves to reliving their terrible ordeals in order to prevent the West from forgetting what it chose for years to ignore, or rationalize.
”We had always believed, because we had always been taught, that nothing like this could happen again in Europe,” Ms. Sivac said bitterly in a recent interview.
Amnesty International has highlighted both the two women’s plight and the film as part of its campaign to pressure the United States and Europe to insist that Serbs accused of war crimes be apprehended and brought to trial before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. [Like many others, Amnesty was quick to blame Serbia for everything, solely on the basis of uncorroborated and vastly exaggerated reporting in the western media. Factual inaccuracies were legion, beginning with the myth that the Bosnian war was essentially ethnic – even though Croatians, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims are ethnically the same. The so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ was for the most part simply the movement of people in disputed areas of territory to other, safer places. As for nationalism, it was Croatia and Muslim Bosnia that wanted to leave multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and multi-ethnic Serbia which wanted the preserve the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.]
Ms. Cigelj, a lawyer, and Ms. Sivac, a civil court judge, who are tough-minded intellectuals and childhood friends, have already achieved part of their goal. In June 1996, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted eight men, charging them with sexual assault for the purpose of ”torture and enslavement.” Never before had rape been prosecuted as a weapon of war or formally classified as a ”crime against humanity.” [The ICTY was illegally created by the UN Security Council, in clear breach of the UN Charter. The UN then decided that it would be ethically wrong for it to control the court it had created. The USA immediately stepped in to take charge. The ICTY then wrote its own Statute, discarding the one written by the UN, giving itself carte-blanche to invent new international law – this despite the explicit instruction of the Security Council that the ICTY should enforce only existing international humanitarian law.]
The indictments, however, have brought little satisfaction to the women or their human-rights champions; most Bosnian experts say that without American pressure, there is little chance the Serbs will turn over those who have been charged and that there is little chance Washington will exert that pressure. Ms. Cigelj and Ms. Sivac, who are living in Croatia, cannot return to their hometown, Prijedor, although Ms. Cigelj is an absentee candidate for mayor there, because the city is now under Serbian control, an arrangement sanctioned by the American-sponsored Dayton accords of 1995.
During a recent visit to New York, part of a 25-city American tour sponsored by Amnesty International, the women assailed both the Dayton agreement and the United States Government nearly as intensely as they did their Serbian torturers. America, as the world’s only remaining superpower, ”must understand that it has to be the policeman of the world,” Ms. Cigelj said. But it has shunned its moral and political obligations, she said, in sanctioning the the partition of her country and, in effect, the conquest of land by force.
The women had made similar comments earlier in the week during a panel discussion that followed a screening of the film at the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan. (It was the first time that women had outnumbered men at a council gathering, said Leslie H. Gelb, the council’s president.) Those present were obviously moved by the film and by the eloquence of the two Bosnian women as they answered questions about their ordeal. Particularly wrenching is a scene in which Ms. Cigelj reads a copy of a letter that a camp commander sent in response to the charges, saying he would never have raped her, because she was ugly. ”I wouldn’t lean my bicycle against her,” he is quoted as saying.
Most of the audience seemed to share the women’s indignation over the Clinton Administration’s policy on Bosnia. The spectators were unrelenting in their criticism of the United States — for what they described as its unwillingness to stop the genocide early on and its apparent hesitancy now to help bring war criminals to justice. Richard C. Holbrooke, the Clinton Administration’s former chief negotiator on Bosnia, and John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, were part of the panel. Mr. Shattuck said he would resign if the Administration did not take its obligations on human rights in Bosnia more seriously. [Both the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim leaderships knew that their chances of getting themselves the best possible terms would be greatly increased if they could bring the USA, which had always been secretly on their side, to enter the war openly to secure the military defeat of the Serbs.]
Such a response, of course, is precisely what Ms. Jacobson, who was born in South Africa, and Ms. Jelincic, who was born in Croatia and brought up in the United States, have been hoping to evoke. They purposely chose to focus on two very middle-class intellectuals and to open the documentary with shots of American corporate logos and other symbols of Western culture so that Western viewers, as Ms. Jacobson put it, would not regard the film as ”yet another tale of age-old Balkan savagery — something that could never happen in America, never to us.”
”Calling the Ghosts,” though insightful about the emotional, psychological and political consequences women face in publicly discussing such victimization, tells viewers relatively little about the origins of the Bosnian conflict and the reasons for its persistence. The film makers pointed out that their primary goal was not to rehash the political underpinnings of the war but to convince European and American viewers that if this could happen to Bosnians it could happen to them as well. Still, some experts think that the film’s approach will do little to end Western indifference to Bosnia’s plight.
Among them is David Rieff, the author of ”Slaughterhouse,” a moving account of the war and the West’s failure to intervene. He said that Ms. Cigelj and Ms. Sivac had clearly waged a heroic fight to overcome their own victimization and encourage others to testify. And yes, he added, the film was undoubtedly cathartic for those involved in its making (it took four years to make and left the women who made it in debt). But his intimate familiarity with the Bosnian tragedy made him reluctant to attend the screening, he said, because it was, the film makers’ protests notwithstanding, primarily a ”human interest story.”
”By remembering what happened in Bosnia through a series of cinematically compelling individual tragedies, one has already lost the battle,” he said. ”We will have learned nothing — about Bosnia or ourselves.”
Seeing such tragic stories has never motivated anyone to do anything about such atrocities, Mr. Rieff argued. ”You can have a good cry and remain just as passive as you were before, unless you are forced to understand that what is at stake in our indifference is not merely justice but perhaps peace itself,” he said. ”We could have another war in Macedonia, or even again in Bosnia.”
Nor do such sentimental narratives ”help us weigh the costs of intervention against those of not intervening,” he said.
Sadly, he added, women are being raped in many countries, especially in many non-European war-torn societies. Is Washington supposed to intervene in all such conflicts?
”If there is no political or broader moral context,” he said, ”you may leave the film feeling enormous sympathy for these women, or even outrage, without being able to make a better informed decision about what the U.S. should do.”