The Guardian: Kosovo women's struggle for rights to victims of sexual violence

When the war had begun in Kosovo, Feride Rushiti was studying medicine at the University of Tirana in Albania. After she specialised, she began working as a volunteer to treat civil victims of the conflict. In March 1999, she traveled from Kukes, the border with Albania, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had gathered to flee the ethnic cleansing campaign that Serb forces were making.

It was hopeless, confusing and heartbreaking, she says about the British newspaper “The Guardian”, while she talks about the biggest “exaudes that had occurred in Europe since World War II”.

Rushiti, Albanian from Gjilan, eastern Kosovo, has been working during the day with the United Nations Agency for Child Protection and during evenings with “Doctors without borders”. Despite the chaos of the first few days, she met a woman whose story would change her life from that moment onward and also relate to the account of hundreds of thousands of other Kosovo women.

The woman had just had an abortion. And she didn't have a chance to bury the child,” says Rushiti. It was hard to know how to support it. I asked her where her husband was. She said, “They took my husband.” At that moment, I started to cry, and I did. But her cry was unimaginable. I had never heard such a sound. I kept it and, on the other hand, I was trying to close the tent because there were people outside. She was raped”.

Rushiti, then 28, had spent the largest time of the 1990s studying secret medicine in Kosovo, in parallel institutions as they closed educational institutions and other institutions for ethnic Albanians. But in Kukes she returned to her studies and focused on survivors of sexual violence during the war. The things I was seeing, the stories I heard I couldn't imagine that human beings would do that. I knew I had to think beyond my profession as a doctor. I should have been their voice. “It was not just psychological trauma that hit it: in Kosovo's deeply patriarchal society, rape was seen as a stain in the honour of the family; major strategies of stigma and guilt were ahead of”, she says of the “The Guardian”.

Following the June 1999 peace agreement, Rushiti founded the Kosovo Centre for the rehabilitation of Torture Victims (QKRMT). A year later, Human Rights Watch described the widespread use of rape, often police rape, paramilitary and Serb soldiers led by Slobodan Milosevic as a “through systematic ethnic cleansing”, to humiliate, terrorise and displace ethnic Albanians. Many survivors were thrown out by their husbands; even the children's survivors were isolated and silent by their families. Estimates vary, but some sources have claimed that as many as 20,000 women (and some men) were victims of sexual violence during the war.

In the years immediately after that, no one wanted to talk about it, Rushiti says. I'm gonna go into communities, but everyone would say: “nobody was raped here. Why are you talking about it? “Actions were very high. Men did not want their wives and daughters to talk because of the stigma and because they would admit that they could not protect”, she told about the “The Guardian”.

Rushiti opened centers in the most vulnerable communities to treat physical wounds before creating enough faith to treat psychological ones. Her work was not safe. It was warned against opening a centre in Skenderaj in Drenica, one of Kosovo's poorest areas and a bastion of the Kosovo Liberation Army amid concerns that it would be threatened or beaten. "I would knock at the door of a house, looking for office space, and they would say:” Who's your boss? Bring me a man. I was shocked. I couldn't believe this discrimination was happening.

Gender-based violence remains common; a 2015 study suggested that up to 68% of Kosovo women experience domestic violence, writes the Guardian”.

If someone would ask me if I would do this job, I would say no to”, Rushiti says. I didn't know the risks. I was young and passionate. But slowly, women began seeking treatment; today, KRCT has more than 400 women under treatment.

While the QRC and other Rushi NGOs have helped break the silence during wartime sexual violence, no survivor had ever spoken publicly until last year, when Vasfije Krasniqi, a Kosovar living in Dallas, Texas, posted on her Facebook page an open letter that kidnapped and raped her.

Krasniqi was taken with weapons from her home on April 13th 1999 by a man in uniform. In her letter, she recalls how she asked him to kill her on the spot. It starts: I was 16 years old and had not experienced life. I was innocent. You understood about my young people and you stole from me without a bad look”

Speaking to a journalist for the first time, Krasniqi, 36, says through Skype that she wrote her letter to empower others. I'm not ashamed or scared. I'll do my part. Everyone knew a Serb policeman took me. Everyone knew you didn't get a 16-year-old girl to get a “statement.

Since her Facebook post, Krasniqi has become ambassador for survivors of other wars. Last month, she spoke to women from Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the UN in Geneva and will soon travel to South Korea to talk to others who were forced into Japanese military homes during World War II. The “was very exciting”, she says of her trip to Geneva. We were from different backgrounds, cultures and religions, but we all have the same stories, with stigma and guilt. Destroys my heart “.

Atifete Jahjaga, president of Kosovo between 2011 and 2016, recalls a bad “debat” in parliament in 2013 as a personal turning point. “I was watching TV in the office,” says, explaining that the president is allowed in parliament only once a year if he doesn't get cold. While politicians debated whether the definition of a war veteran should be expanded to include survivors of sexual violence, lawmakers suggested they should undergo gynaecological tests a move that caused anger among activists. I told my council team: Get ready. ) There will be an open fight between the presidency, the institutions of our country and the public”.

In a parliamentary democracy, Kosovo's president has a largely ceremonial role. But Jahjaga, formerly deputy director of the Kosovo police, used its platform to promote compensation. A year earlier, in 2012, she had hosted an international summit that led to Pristina Principles, which affirmed women's rights for political and economic participation, as well as access to security and justice. Its priorities were to recognize survivors of sexual violence.

“I don't want this to be a taboo subject,” she says. I told people:” This is your mother, your sister, your daughter “. As a state, it is our duty to treat men and women who have suffered the freedom and independence of this country equally. We've known the suffering of war veterans, heroes. But in a country where there are so many battlefields, these women's troops returned to war fields by Serbia's paramilitary forces. They're also our heroes”, she says of Guardian.

There was another turn a year later, in 2015, when artist Alketa Xhafa Mripa discovered her Tunking installation Of You (I think of You) at the football stadium in Pristina. Jahjaga, whose council sponsored works of art, describes it as a moment #Me Too” that made titles worldwide. Thousands of garments donated by survivors of sexual violence and others were hung on the washing lines, a powerful memory of war, and the symbolism of the washing of stigma.

Now 37 years old, Xhafa Mripa left Kosovo in 1997 to study good art at Central Saint Martins in London with her husband and now four children. She thinks she heard about rape in the war period immediately after the “conflict, but then she disappeared. People haven't talked about this”.

Years later, while visiting the family in Kosovo, she was hit by a TV interview with a woman who spoke about war. Her face was hidden from a curtain. She talked about silence over wartime sexual violence. I thought, my God, how can we fail the most fragile people in our society? They experienced war twice and suffered the most. When everyone was released and celebrated, their voices were not heard “.

What do you remember when you think of Kosovo? I remember the hospitality, solidarity and warmth of people. Kosovo is my home and I grew up with nature. But there was always war and fear people were oppressed. I see my children having their thoughts and thoughts and expressing them freely. My childhood was happy, but we were always afraid of what could happen. It was like he was under occupation. It was a scary day for days.

“has hope for Kosovo. Or of course, there are corruption and other issues that we have to fight. But the country is heading in the right direction. “So far, 600 survivors have applied for retirement, a small percentage of thousands believed to be right. When I ask if 20 years has been a long time for survivors to wait, Atifete Jahjagan. She wants them to have greater recognition, and for Serbia to apologise for its crimes. “Yes, it was very long,” she says. “War has never ended for them. /The Guardian/