The woman hunting down war criminals
It’s hard to get a rape conviction in the UK, so imagine trying to get justice in a country where the perpetrators are in positions of authority. In researching her book about rape as a war crime, renowned war correspondent Christina Lamb found much that
‘my hobbies are smoking and hunting war criminals,’ says Bosnian Bakira Hasecic in her husky voice. She also likes shopping at Primark. She is not joking. The 60-something in jeans and a jumper, with cropped, bleached hair, speaks with quiet determination as she explains how she has tracked down over 100 perpetrators of sexual violence in the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.
Raped by three men in her hometown of Visegrád during the war, the hardest thing, Bakira says, was seeing her 18-yearold daughter raped after policemen stormed into their house. Worst of all, her daughter, who had just started work as a hairdresser, blamed Bakira, because she’d moved them back to the town after the war had started.
When the war ended and Bakira returned to Visegrád in 1998 with a group of other women to visit their burnt-out houses and the graves of relatives, they were horrified to recognise some of the Serbian police escorting them. ‘The very war criminals who had been killing and raping had been rewarded for their deeds with jobs keeping public order,’ she says. ‘They laughed in our faces and taunted us, “Have you come back for more?”
‘I realised our biggest revenge was prosecution of these people,’ she adds.
That’s easier said than done, of course. While there was jubilation last month over the conviction of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein for rape and forced oral sex, it had taken a series of brave women to come forward at great personal cost.
Here in the UK, rape convictions are at a shocking all-time low, despite an increase in reporting. Imagine, then, trying to get justice in a country where the rapists are running things, or work as police who you might bump into in the local shop.
The launch of the #Metoo movement in 2017, when a series of actresses publicly accused Weinstein of sexual assault, was a massive sea-change that led to thousands of women coming forward about harrowing experiences. Columnist Janice Turner described his conviction as ‘the end of the age of sexual impunity’.
But in dozens of countries in conflict round the world, nothing has changed. Rape is the world’s cheapest weapon and as much a weapon of war as the Kalashnikov. It has always been used, going right back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks who captured Troy were rewarded with Trojan women as sex slaves. But in recent years, armies, militias and terrorist groups from Bosnia to Rwanda, Iraq to Nigeria, Colombia to the Central African Republic have used rape as a deliberate strategy, almost a weapon of mass destruction, not just to destroy dignity and terrorise communities, but to empty areas and wipe out rival ethnicities or non-believers. Some force their captives to give birth like a real-life version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Yet throughout history the voices of women and girls in war have been silenced as history is largely told by men.
And although rape has officially been a war crime for more than 100 years, these women have seen no justice – rape being seen as something that ‘just happens’ in war, along with looting. Neither the ‘comfort women’ raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II, or the Germans raped by Soviets, or the thousands of Yazidis kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters have seen a single conviction.
As a reporter covering war and conflict for the last 33 years, it seems to me the last few years I’ve seen more brutality against women than ever before.
I was so angry at what I was seeing that I decided to give a voice to these women. I spoke to hundreds and hundreds of survivors on four continents. I heard horrific stories, such as the Yazidi girls used as ‘lucky dip’ prizes for ISIS fighters and sold on to 12 different men as if they were goats. Rohingya women forced to choose which child to save as Burmese soldiers rampaged through their villages, tied them to banana trees and gang-raped them. The Argentinian women kept as playthings of military officers in torture centres and then silenced for years.
But I also found incredible heroes. Some were men like the beekeeper from Aleppo who risked his life to rescue hundreds of abducted Yazidi girls, setting up fake bakeries and renting safe houses to smuggle them out. Or the Congolese gynaeocologist Dr Denis Mukwege, whose hospital has repaired the vaginas of more than 54,000 raped women, girls and even babies.
Most were women showing strength we never imagine we could possess. I will never forget meeting the Congolese girls at the City of Joy community for women survivors of violence, singing and dancing despite all they had been through. The poor Rwandan villagers who in 1998 got the world’s first conviction for rape as a war crime. Or the quiet dignity of the Filipina grandmothers who had been abducted as teenagers by Japanese soldiers in the 1940s and have spent a lifetime fighting for an apology and acknowledgement.
High on my list of heroines is Bakira, who I met at her office in Sarajevo, where the outside walls are still pockmarked with bullet-holes and the entrance corridor is plastered with photos of wanted men.
After that first trip back to her hometown, she decided to come forward with her story and set up an organisation of fellow survivors. The women were given cameras to photograph perpetrators and she would send their locations to the international tribunal set up in The Hague.
The scale of what happened is brought home by the map on the wall scattered with red dots – each represents a rape camp and there were 57 of them for somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 women, who were subjected to rape during the four-year war.
At the time, there was international outrage over the existence of rape camps in the heart of Europe. Yet there have been few convictions and it has taken the work of Bakira and her fellow women to bring most of those to court. So far, their work has seen 29 prosecuted in The Hague and 80 in Bosnia for sexual violence and rape (although they weren’t prosecuted as war crimes).
Astonishingly, she says, ‘In Bosnia it’s better to be a perpetrator than a victim. The state pays their defence while we have to pay our own legal costs.’
Sadly, only one of Bakira’s three rapists has been convicted and she is still searching for the man who raped her daughter. She has him in her sights, though. She opens a Facebook page and shows me a man in Russia with a blonde woman and children blowing out candles on a cake. ‘I am living for the day he is extradited,’ she vows.
In the meantime her only peace, she says, comes from growing potatoes. @christinalamb
Christina’s book, ‘Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women’ (£16, William Collins) is out now