Significant difference between male and female experiences in connection with violence is based on the fact that the essence of armed struggle lies in the struggle for power in which men and women participate in different ways. For public, rapes are synonymous with with the violence against women; sexual violence can also be taken as a symbol of a war. However, women suffer from additional types of torture: they are murder victims, suffer from malnourishment, fear, psychological and physical mistreatment. They also suffer because of the loss of or forced separation from their children, husband, relatives, different types of discrimination and violence in exile. Even when she is not physically hurt, a woman can suffer severe psychological consequences. "Aren't manipulations with women and children refugees also a type of violence? Isn't it violence when you have to queue to buy milk, when you wait for a blackout to end, when you are cold? When you have to go from one state official to another and cannot accomplish anything?"
SEXUAL AND PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: Nevertheless, for the majority of women, the first association with violence was sexual and related physical violence. Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic explains this by "not only the nature of this crime as the most specific and one of the most severe types of violence against women in general, but also the strong media campaign which followed the cases of rape in the war and which in practice made rape synonymous with violence against women." In the interview for Vreme she says that because of that the authors chose to avoid using statistics in the book. "Regardless whether one talks about Belgrade, Zagreb or Sarajevo, rapes were promoted in order to achieve certain goals. There was no protection for women. They were used for political means. We know that certain foreign journalists used to visit refugee camps and inquire whether among the refugees there were raped women who spoke English." Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic believes that the manipulations with the number of raped women are usually counterproductive as far as the attitude of the public with the respect to the problem is concerned. "If one were to speak about a smaller number of raped Muslim women, that meant that one was trying to deny the guilt of the Serb side, while if one were to reveal a smaller, again more realistic, number of raped Serb women, that was usually greeted with ironic questions: 'Only that many?' and 'What is that compared with thousands of raped Muslim women?' It is hard to avoid the impression that certain circles are sad that the number of raped women is not larger, so that they can use the women as a cover for their attitudes and actions."
"A group of Muslim soldiers broke into the apartment of a girl who worked for IRS. They tortured her, beat her, all of them raped her and finally pushed a bottle into her vagina. The girl died from the received injuries. By the way, she was very pretty and well known in Sarajevo because of her public criticism of Muslim authorities and the current events," testifies Lepa. Cruelty of rape is amplified in war with the fact that in the eyes of the rapist the victim often symbolizes the enemy. In accordance with patriarchal values, women are viewed as the property of the enemy - a man. Therefore, we can view rape as a final symbolic expression of the humiliation of the enemy. On the other hand the society has a hard time in accepting raped women: "Her husband who had been raised patriarchally, told my brother that he had a hard time accepting that his wife had been raped although he knew that it wasn't her fault," says Gordana. She testifies about rapes motivated by revenge: in Deretelj, Croatian jail for Serbs and Muslims, a woman, a physician and an educator, " was exposed to extreme torture because they were 'impressed' by her status and education (other prisoners were mostly young women). The physician, an 38-years-old Serb, had been raped several times a day and told that she wouldn't be released until she gave birth to an Ustasha. Fortunately she didn't conceive... She was raped by people whom she had helped hundreds of times in the past."
MILENA, EMINA, BLAZENKA: The authors explore the use of rape in ethnic cleansing, and demonstrate its strong links with the patriarchal culture: women is considered to be an object, a "vessel" which passively accepts male seed and doesn't add anything to it. "Milena, we have to procreate Balije children," a Muslim soldier responds to Milena's plea to enter the room and save her friend who is being raped by the soldier's friend. The authors emphasize that this is a war crime of forced pregnancy which still hasn't been defined by the international community nor by the International tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia:" to feel the rapist's child in your womb and be convinced that everyone will know that this is a child of the enemy, and to know at the same time that the child is yours as well is one of the most cruel types of torture of women in war. Rapists are also telling to the husbands of the raped women that they [the women] are worthless since they are giving birth to the children of their enemies. The most horrible thing is that the husbands really feel that way."
The book also says that, besides prostitution as a strategy for survival which some of the women used in order to protect themselves from the loss of dignity, some women were forced to accept sexual blackmail and humiliations in order to realize some of their rights, to leave a besieged city, join their children in exile etc. Emina tells a story about a cousin who, in order to obtain a permit to leave Mostar, had to have sex with a Croat who issued the permits. He told her that he wouldn't let her go until she gave birth to an Ustasha, although he was aware that she had three children. He let her leave Mostar when she was in the fourth month of her pregnancy. She doesn't want to give birth to that child and is afraid that her children, brother and the rest of the family will reject her. She is afraid that her husband will tell her: "You came here to give birth to an Ustashe bastard."
Physical maltreatment and murders of women in war have basically the same motives as sexual maltreatment. However, through analysis of the testimonies the authors detected a discrepancy between the rape as a war tactics and individual physical assaults and murders of the women compatriots. On one hand women are forced to bear the children who will belong to the rapist's nation while on the other hand their children are murdered in order to cause suffering. The authors also mention examples in which, in the middle of an ethnic conflict, women married to men of different ethnicity become victims of their husbands and because of their husbands. "Croatian Guardsmen broke into the apartment of a woman, a Croat, whose husband was a Serb and an officer. They threw her out of the apartment, together with her children. They dragged her to the building entrance where she was tortured. The guardsmen cut off her arms, one for her husband and the other one for the husband's brother. The children ended up in hospital after that," testifies Blazenka.
HATE BECAUSE OF A HUSBAND: Hate towards wives of military personnel, as the consequence of resentment towards the Yugoslav Peoples Army, was expressed with cruelty regardless of the nationality or actual military involvement of the male members of a family. Slobodanka Konstatinovic-Vilic in the chapter about psychological violence explains that in Slovenia armed phase of the civil war was preceded by a long period of special war which was directed towards the members of the Army and their families. "My husband is a YPA officer, an ethnic Serb who has spent all his life in Slovenia. I am by birth Slovenian, without a doubt a member of the aryan Slovenian nation. I've had a horrible time during the preparations for war, attacks on Serbs, YPA and maltreatment because I was a wife of an officer. I suffered terribly, for example when they showed the picture of my husband on TV with titles saying that he was a Serb Chetnik [derogatory term for Serbs, World War II Royalist Serb partisans] and gave his full name," says Katja.
The women who participated in the study emphasized that they also experienced violence in exile. Those women who hadn't established themselves as independent personalities, but had based their identity on the fact that they were "somebody's wives" had the hardest time. Separation from their families hit especially hard those women who were in mixed marriages - they had betrayed their own nation while failing to establish a corresponding position among the husband's compatriots. Women suffer because of being in a passive position, being torn between the need to express solidarity with the loved ones who stayed in the war stricken region and taking care for the future of their children. Long term separation brings alienation in husband-wife relationships and the relationship between parents and children. "I had to ask my husband to turn of the light when I started to take my clothes off, before going to bed at night; I had a feeling that I was taking clothes off in front of a stranger. I felt the need to be courted again by my husband in order to gradually achieve the former intimacy," says Metka.
In exile, women are faced with impoverishment, which is especially troublesome for those who had been wealthy before the war: "this status is worse than fear. There, I was afraid for my life, that I would be killed; here, I am afraid that I will die because of poverty, uncertainty," says Mirjana.
A large number of women are forced to suffer various humiliations because of their poverty: "My boss was flattered when I would make and serve coffee to him and his friends. He boasted to his friends: I have an employee, a woman with the Masters of Arts degree in economics, and she prepares coffee for me." The authors mention that employers, landlords, directors of refugee centers, Red Cross employees sometimes use their position to blackmail and harass refugees. "Women made ends meet in any possible way, some of them engaged in prostitution. All kinds of things happened. I also lost some sort of my dignity. That man, a widower, also asked me to go with him to Vojvodina. I know a woman who got married, left a husband who is still alive in Zenica [in Bosnia-Hercegovina]. Women loose their dignity. Poor and sad were those women who were in Perucac [refugee center in western Serbia] and had sex for ten eggs. They had to; I found an excuse for them: they had to when a child said 'I'm hungry!'"
Talking about future, most women emphasized that the biggest help would be a job in their profession. The authors state that this would be a first step towards the new environment and the old status and away from hard psychological crises. Women suffered in this war from several types of violence although they did not want this war to happen.
Because of that they have a full moral right to demand from the host country and the international community to provide conditions in which their and their children's future will be secure and better than today.