Women And War
September 14, 2006 by sparklematrix
“He was a healthy little boy and Mirveta had produced him. But birth, the fifth in her short lifetime, had not brought joy, only dread. As he was pulled from her loins, as the nurses at Kosovo’s British-administered university hospital handed her the baby, as the young Albanian mother took the child, she prepared to do the deed.
She cradled him to her chest, she looked into her boy’s eyes, she stroked his face and she snapped his neck. They say it was a fairly clean business. Mirveta had used her bare hands. It is said that, in tears, she handed her baby back to the nurses, holding his snapped, limp neck. In Pristina, in her psychiatric detention cell, she has been weeping ever since.
‘Who knows? She may have looked into the baby’s face and seen the eyes of the Serb who raped her.’
The words are uttered coolly, undramatically, by Sevdije Ahmeti almost as a matter of course. Ahmeti, tireless human rights activist, mother and member of Kosovo’s transitional government, does not want me or anyone to sensationalise this poor woman’s plight. ‘She is a victim too. She is just 20 years old and cannot read or write. She has been abandoned by her husband. Psychologically raped a second time.’
She reels off Mirveta’s details from a thick, yellow notepad. ‘She is repenting, of course, but the attitude that she is a cold-blooded murderer is wrong. Who knows what this poor girl has been through? Who knows why she didn’t abort?
‘There were marks, signs of bites and bruises over her body, her intimate parts. We want to protect her; we will try to get her a new lawyer.’
This is what Ahmeti does: she speaks for the estimated 20,000 women now carrying Kosovo’s dark secret. The innumerable women who were raped, and impregnated, abandoned by family and friends. The women outcasts violated, tortured and left for dead; the ‘touched’ women, who have now heaped shame on the houses of their husbands. The women who see the war every day, in their minds, in their bodies, through their rape-babies.”
This is an old article, which I have had for a few years highlighting what war can do to women and women only. It broke my heart the first time I read it and six years on it still does.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,194119,00.html
I was a UN trooper in Yugoslavia. What they describe is not rare at all. I have seen women who were raped, and whose husbands ( Albanians are mostly Muslim) pooured battery acid in their vaginas to make them abort.
Thank you for this post - even though it made me bawl it is important that we don’t forget how the women of Kosovo are still suffering.
Let’s not forget the women of ALL wars.
And in peacetime as well.
MEN RAPE.
ya know, the idea of killing att heterosexual males seems more and more atractive by the minute.
The collective anger and rage of women is becoming so strong now that there will be no choice but to wage war on many men. The evil in the hearts and minds of many men leaves no room for any humanity towards women at all. There are no words for the hatred I feel towards them.
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