Between Two Worlds (30 page)

Neither Amjad nor I cried when she did; we instinctively knew that would take away the dignity of her own tears. But when we got back to the hotel, we lay there and held each other and just sobbed together. We toured Croatia for a week and learned of horrors I still can barely comprehend. Eighty-year-old grandmothers and girls as young as four were raped in village squares, then discarded with their organs ruptured. Sons were ordered to rape their mothers. Fathers were ordered to rape their daughters. The most educated women were selected to be raped in front of their towns-people. Some Serbian soldiers were ordered to rape to prove their manhood and machismo. One captured soldier who refused described being ridiculed by a commander who took off his own pants, raped a woman in front of him, and told him “
This
is how it’s done” as fellow soldiers laughed at him.

There was nothing random about these acts. There had been thousands of rapes and thousands of witnesses to the rapes. There are those who say that soldiers of all armies rape, but there was only one army, the Serbian army under control of Slobodan Milǒsević, that organized rape camps. These weren’t informal bivouacs in the forest; the Serbian Army took over hotels and schools and public buildings for this purpose and were continuing to operate under the international public eye virtually unstopped. Then they would release their victims late into pregnancy so they could not abort their “Serbian” babies, and their families would feel shamed and abandon them. The United Nations counted sixteen rape camps organized by the Serbian Army. Rape was every bit as much a strategy of war as the ethnic cleansing fought with guns, perhaps more so because it didn’t just eliminate individuals, it destroyed whole families and societies. Serbian soldiers were encouraged to hate Bosnians because the Ottoman Empire had once controlled the Balkans, and to hate Croatians because their ancestors were assumed to be Ustasha, Nazi sympathizers, during World War II. They had been told they were avenging crimes committed against their grandfathers by the grandfathers of these women.

As if women were a field of battle where two old enemies met to set scores straight.

Most of the women we met had a small bag with a few pieces of clothing and perhaps some things they thought to grab as they fled their homes, proofs of lost lives in which a high school diploma or a deed to a house mattered. Some were lucky enough to have a picture to pull out and say, Here’s my son, the one they killed, or Here is my husband, have you seen him? I remember one woman talked impassively about how she escaped from her home when Serbian soldiers attacked her village. She grabbed her two sons and ran, looking back to see her house burning behind her, then running to save her boys’ lives. For two days, they ran in a dark forest, a story I would hear over and over again, a running into the heart of a strange darkness you don’t know, but you know you have to run and run and run and leave behind your memories and your community and sometimes the bodies of your loved ones. Except for her trembling hands, this woman might have been telling someone else’s story. There was very little affect in her voice.

We went to Croatia to help rape victims, but members of women’s groups in Croatia and Bosnia showed us why that instinct, while natural, would not help reintegrate them into society. Some of these women reminded me of my mother as they smoked cigarettes, whispered together, and even laughed good-naturedly at my seriousness of purpose. “Do you really want to set up lines of women who receive sponsorships every month while their neighbors point and say, Look, there go the raped women?” one of them asked me. “Isn’t it enough that some of them are living in refugee camps with signs saying ‘rape victims’ to make it easier for the press and international workers to find them?”

That was my first lesson in professional humility. The second was that my best teachers came from women I sought to help. They had a wisdom I was hungry for. They were kind enough to share it with me, and I was grateful to have a chance to understand things that had always been forbidden to me before. I yearned to understand not only these women’s suffering, but the mental state of the men who had inflicted it. How had the men’s hearts been so twisted into believing they had a right to inflict such pain? How many Serbian soldiers had been forced into the army? How many had been told, here, Prove your loyalty by murdering and raping your enemy’s woman? How many had resisted, and at what price? Being a victim, morally speaking, was easy in some ways. It didn’t involve the same sorts of choices.

On one of our last nights in Croatia, Amjad and I talked for a long time about moral issues and personal choices.

“What kind of criminal would do these things to another human being?” he asked. He couldn’t understand.

“Sometimes the price they have to pay for refusing an order is too high for some to make,” I said.

“Not everybody had a gun pointed to his head.”

“That is probably true for most of them. But that would make it easy. If someone pointed a gun to your head, it’s easy to say I would rather die than do that. What if it’s other people’s lives that are being threatened, the people you love, your mother and father, your wife and children, a whole family of cousins? Tell me, Amjad, if somebody with a gun said, ‘Here, kill this stranger or I’ll kill your wife,’ whose life would you choose, mine or the stranger’s?”

He looked at me with his wonderful eyes.

“Someone has to say no,” he said.

We started from different places and wound up with the same conclusion. We could not change the history that made people hate. But we pledged to each other that, no matter what the circumstances, neither of us would be party to propagate it. We gave each other permission to watch the other killed rather than to be coerced into killing another human being.

 

 

Three months later, I went to back to Croatia on my own to deliver the first sponsorship money we had raised. I spent my twenty-fourth birthday at a refugee camp in a place called Split on the Croatian coast. I met there a woman five years younger than I named Inger, who spoke very good English and who talked to me about how much she missed her father in Bosnia. She introduced me to families living in classrooms in what used to be a school. Twenty people were forced to sleep together in a small room with few blankets and very little water. I was extremely thirsty, and one woman must have understood because she said something in Serbo-Croatian, and her daughter went to a corner and brought out a hidden bottle of precious water they shared with me. I was always awed by the generosity of refugees. When I boarded a bus for the twelve-hour ride back to Zagreb, Inger stayed behind.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Why was I sitting in a bus on my way to a hotel room while she had to suffer? A fluke? Luck? God’s mercy?
Al hamdilalah. Al hamdilalah. Al hamdilalah
. Thank God. Thank God, that I did not have to suffer the way Inger or other refugees were suffering. As Amjad kept on telling me, if not for my horrible marriage, I would never have gone to Washington or met him or had a chance to do this work. Fighting the injustice Amjad and I had seen became the centerpiece of our lives. With the help of All Souls Unitarian Church, students holding fundraising concerts, and volunteers joining us from all over the country, we were able to raise enough money for an office and a move out of Amjad’s parents’ basement—but not enough money to pay me to run the organization. So Amjad set aside his lifetime dream of getting the doctorate that would lead him to become a full-time professor, and began working full-time as a temp to support our work.

American women, Canadian women—even Bangladeshi women—began signing up as sponsors who sent a monthly check along with a letter to a victim of war. I felt very strongly that this cash should go directly to the women, because it represented freedom to make a choice again in their lives, even if it was a small one. They could buy medicine for their children or fruit or cosmetics if they chose. It was their choice, not ours. Later, we began setting up a few programs to help them transition back into society, including support groups that would help replace the social networks they had lost and allow them to discuss larger issues like women’s role in war, economy, politics, and society. These “invisible refugees,” as I came to call them, didn’t fit the stereotype of refugees starving in tatters. Basic traits and hygiene habits don’t change, even if lives do. I knew that from my own experience. I never changed the way I spoke or put on lipstick or carried myself when I lost almost everything I had. Why did so many people assume that all refugees look and act alike, as if their culture and upbringing had been stolen from them along with their material possessions? Just because they wore clean dresses or spoke well didn’t mean these women didn’t need help. Sometimes putting on lipstick or a clean dress meant that a woman was resisting giving up that last hope that every shred of her old life was gone. I had to make hard choices when it came to something as simple as the pictures we used on our brochures; people would give more money to pictures of women in head scarves who looked hungry and oppressed. There were many such women, but for me, portraying these refugees that way was only another way of robbing them of their dignity. Eventually we would also start micro loan programs for small businesses and job training programs, including classes in nontraditional skills I had studied in junior high and high school.

Each sponsor wrote letters to her “sister,” and her sister wrote back. Every day I would sit with volunteers as we processed letters and stuffed envelopes. I had originally envisioned these letters as helping war victims feel they weren’t alone. But as the letters came back from women in Bosnia and Croatia, I realized the survivors of war were using these private letters to tell strangers about the pain they felt they could share with no one else. Through them, they could retain their own identity and yet remain anonymous. The letters were testaments, and the letters the women’s sponsors wrote back bore witness to their suffering. They had a powerful effect on me, like a silent tide of emotions in which women talked not only about war and loss, but also about their families and their gardens. Some were poetic, some incredibly profound. “I got your letters,” one Bosnian woman from Sarajevo wrote to her sponsor. “I experienced them like rays of sunlight that reach to the bottom of a dark cave. I lived through the shelling and all the other suffering, but they killed the ‘I’ in me.”

As I began traveling back and forth between America and Central Europe, I realized why Ajsa had been selected to be the first person to talk with us. She had had time to begin to come to terms with what had happened to her. Almost all of the other women I had met spoke with dead, dry eyes. Crying, I learned later, was the first sign of healing. I wasn’t a therapist, and I often just sat with women and held their hands and tried to bear witness to whatever individual grief they chose to share. If a woman talked about rape, I came to understand that she would rarely say it had happened to her. It had always happened to someone else, a neighbor perhaps, or even her whole village except for her. Were these women too embarrassed to talk about their bodies because their sexuality was tied to the honor of their families, as it was in Iraq? Was it
ayeb
for them to talk about it? I wasn’t sure, but I also knew that the pain of rape transcended mere cultural issues. I hated it when people suggested Muslim women somehow felt rape differently than other women. Why on earth should they? Except for on talk shows where women got money or seconds of celebrity in exchange for exclaiming about intimate things—a bizarre trend I found desensitizing to women—women in America were reluctant to talk about rape too.

The refugees I met were so traumatized by so many things that I found many of them sitting in silence with dead eyes outside their tents for hours as small children jumped around them ignored. “I’m too helpless to be helped,” one woman told me when I tried to interview her. Every story I heard made me feel more grateful at my good fortune, yet every story also fed some pain deep inside me I knew came from the same place as these women’s. I was obsessed with my work, grateful to be working with women, as I had told my mother I wanted to on my fifteenth birthday. I spent days and evenings giving speeches everywhere I could, to women’s rights organization, churches, synagogues and mosques, schools and universities. I wanted to rally people to rise up and stop the atrocities that were happening in front of our eyes. I lambasted the United Nations peacekeepers for standing back and observing crime instead of preventing it. I demonstrated at the White House—the Bush administration had done nothing about Bosnia, and the Clinton administration had not acted on its promises in its first couple of years. Taking the bullhorn, I led chants to stop the genocide, stop the rape. For the first time in my life, I felt the thrill of being able to speak publicly about my own opinions.

Saddam Hussein had publicly announced his support for Serbian leader Slobodan Milǒsević, and increasingly I began to see parallels between the two. From the back of my brain, I pulled out warnings from Ehab and rumors about women being raped by the Mukhabarat, and videotaped in the process, only to be told they had to become informers or the tapes would be released, subjecting some to rejection by their husbands and families and even to honor killings. The sister of Mohammed Bakr Al-Sadr, Iraq’s most respected Shia cleric, had been raped—I remembered Aunt Samer telling me in the Hunting Club pool about how they had raped her at the same time they were torturing him—then released her pregnant. I knew I couldn’t attack Saddam Hussein, so I attacked Slobodan Milǒsević. I couldn’t fight in Iraq, so I fought in Bosnia and Croatia. Milǒsević was a criminal and I publicly demanded he be tried for war crimes. I told no one in Iraq about my work for fear that Amo would punish them for my political activism.

I did little else except go to classes, finish my homework, and go to the office. I remember walking across my college campus and seeing hundreds of students laughing, chatting, flirting, and reading around me, and wishing I had made more friends at school. But there was no time; I was always running from class to work. Nothing mattered as much as my work. I dreamed about it, breathed it, lived it. Haunted by that woman who said she was too helpless to be helped, I sometimes couldn’t force myself to walk out the office door. The organization began to grow, and the demands on me and Amjad grew with it. Every penny we raised went into the program, and it still wasn’t enough. We were behind on our bills, and every time the telephone rang, I was afraid it was a creditor. Bosnia was all either of us talked about, and I know some of our friends got bored with us. Even some of Amjad’s family told us, “You’ve done good work, but you have to grow up, get real pay-checks. Look what a toll this is taking on both of you.” We considered letting go, but every time we did, there was the memory of Ajsa and a check from a donor that I took as a sign we were meant to keep on going.