SERBIAN WOMEN AS VICTIMS OF WAR

When I began to think about the topic of women as victims of war, I was reminded of the letter Freud sent to Einstein from Vienna in September 1932. In the letter, Freud expounded how a psychological approach might help elucidate the problem of preventing war. He spoke about the relation of right and might, about conflicts between people which are in principle resolved by the use of violence. He also reflected on the rule of law and how historical experience shows its effect on the rulers and the ruled. His attitude was undoubtedly that of a pacifist who understood the social and instinct based etiology of war, and who considered that each human being has the right to their own life: war destroys this life, filled with hope, and hurls individuals into demeaning situations which force them to kill others and to wreck material goods. Freud closed this letter expressing the belief that whatever strengthens culture, that is whatever diminishes the model of aggressive reaction, also erects barriers to war.

To speak about war and not to say anything about aggression is undoubtedly an error. The primordial form of aggression can be understood and explained as a fundamental structural element of organic matter and life. The durability and primacy of the instinct of aggression explains the continuity of all organic processes. Aggression is inherent in organic matter, it lies in its deepest layer and, (according to Dr. J. Raskovic)', is not conditioned by experience. It also has great independence, is easily mustered and is mobile. Aggression is a permanent energy and existential characteristic of organic matter. Its energy serves to preserve organic processes. Aggression, therefore, serves to protect living creatures and life as such. The reactive aspect of aggression may be called its visible, usable form, which represents only a part of the whole concept. Its multiform manifestations, broadest distribution, layered nature and capacity to last, have enabled many philosophers to use some of aggression's facets when discussing what is humanizing and what dehumanizing. Although aggression resides in the deepest chasms of philogenesis (the race history of a vegetable or animal type), it is free acting, uncontained and open. This inexhaustible energy permeates all layers of the unconscious, but also those of the conscious psyche.

Aggression is, therefore, an established defense mechanism, but it also permanently eradicates other creatures and finds its own fulfillment in the destruction of everything which is natural in man and the world. The human potential for aggression is specific to the species, and more extensive and more organized than that of animals. Human brutality often takes the form of a passion and can often be appeased only by the shedding of other peoples' blood, their impoverishment and the destruction of their world. Passion is the youngest child of instinct, and aggression is the force which goes best with passion. There is a totally symbiotic relationship between passion and aggression, between the youngest and the oldest product of irrational biological processes. In itself, passion is a motivating force, an energy which needs to link itself to other impulses before it can become actively manifest in the world. There is in passion, it is true, some sexual energy, but passion is not the same as libido. Aggression is a force in human life only when teamed-up with passion; in this case, reason and foresight serve to increase the potency of this coupling.

The connection of passion and aggression seems to reach one of its peaks during the wars on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. During World War II Germans were killing people in concentration camps in a cold, calculated, "clean" way, having little if any contact with the victims, and particularly no physical intimacy. In Yugoslavia, local fascists like the Ustashi introduced into their genocidal machinery many elements of passion. Physical contact and the enjoyment of torturing was as important as the destruction of the victim. A similar situation prevails today, especially in the case of women who are victims of the war. This type of aggression is called ontogenetic aggression and is an exclusively human characteristic. It may have its roots in the archaic, phytogenetic aggression, but it remains something only found in humans. I should like to remind you that archaic aggression belongs to organic matter, and phytogenetic aggression is on the level of animal instincts, like a passion it is defensive and reactive.

Fromm classifies aggression into two types: the biological adaptive and benign aggression, on one side, and the biologically inadaptive and malign aggression which is destructive and cruel. Malign aggression is an exclusively human characteristic, biologically harmful and socially disruptive. Its main manifestations are cruelty and killing for pleasure which does not ask for any other purpose. Malign aggression is not instinctive, but it is a human possibility rooted in the very conditions of human existence. Humans are unique in their ability to succumb to impulses which drive them to kill and torture others, while this activity procures feelings of pleasure. Man is the only animal which can murder or destroy members of his own species, without rational gain, whether economic or biological. Destructive actions are one of the possible answers to psychological needs which are anchored in human condition. The power of destruction arises from conflicts between social circumstances and human existential needs. Fromm considers that passions rooted in the character may be founded in neurophysiological, psychological, and especially social phenomena. Passions manifest themselves as syndromes, for example as love, solidarity, sense of justice, pursuit of wisdom - which all belong to the "syndrome furthering life," or as sadomasochism, destructiveness, and greed - which belong to the "syndrome perverting life." Fromm attributes a special place to the destructive character of sadism, calling it a sexual perversion, because it transforms an impulse serving life into one which destroys life. The worst form of malign aggression is the desire to kill, the passion to transform being into non-being, to destroy for the sake of annihilation. I have to mention in this context also Freud's concept of thanatos, destrudo, i.e. the death instinct. This death instinct is the very essence of destructive instincts, because it links every desire of aggression and of sex with the desire for death. In this we can catch a glimpse at the connections between Freud and Fromm, but Fromm integrates instinct with character, and fills it with ethical and social contents.

War has somehow taken over our part of the world. Malign aggression reigns and the culture of the instinct of death grows in its purest form in the spaces of prewar Bosnia and Hercegovina as if it had been placed in laboratory specimens of nutrient media. This malignity has now somewhat subsided in Croatia, but there is an ever present danger of recurrence. Patriarchal culture includes war and violence. This culture is based on the possession of property and land. Women are part of that patriarchal culture which is ruled by males. Responsible for the birth and continuation and protection of life, women cease in war to be subjects. They become objects, instruments for the accomplishment of goals. If it is a matter of giving birth - then it is the "Lebensborn" programme (of Nazi inspiration), if it is "le repos du guerrier" (the relaxation of the warrior) - then it is rape and sexual battering, if it is "giving the ruler his due," - then it is separation from and loss of loved ones: sons, fathers, and husbands.

The males wage war, women are bound to protect the home and family. Males are supposed to protect the land, women to save lives, that is all that which gives meaning to a territory.

In Serbia and Montenegro there are 950 thousand refugees. Working as a psychiatrist in Belgrade, I encountered and helped women who may be classified into three groups: women who are direct victims of war; women from one of the war zones who were exposed to incessant fear, frustrations, and the expectation of some calamity; and women who lived outside of the war torn region, that is in the present Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but who have experienced the horrors of war because of the grievous loss of family members, usually sons who had left for the front lines.

The Information Center of the Serbian Congress, a non-state apolitical association of independent scholars, writers, and other intellectuals from Belgrade has compiled a voluminous documentation about all forms of human rights violations, about the ethnic cleansing and other abuses of power against Serbian populations in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina during the war years of 1991 to 1993. Part of this documentation concerns the problem of rape and sexual mistreatment of women belonging to the Serbian nationality. My own decision to study this problem is not motivated by a desire to counter the media campaign against the Serbs. The work I have undertaken in this respect, as well as the work done by my female and male colleagues, is to highlight the fact that the war has victimized women civilians who have not taken up arms. In this war the malignant thrust of Thanatos was aimed at them. Rape, sexual battering and torture, have nothing to do with Eros. These victims, which have been abandoned by the world community, cannot even count on basic health care services, which only augments their suffering.

The most extensive rapes and the most drastic forms of sexual victimization of Serbian women have taken place in Croatian concentration camps and places of temporary internment in Hercegovina and Northern Bosnia, as well as in camps run by Muslim authorities in Central Bosnia and the city of Sarajevo, especially in those camps which were visited by missions of the International Red Cross quite late or not at all. I have a map which reproduces information compiled so far about the sexual mistreatment of women in camps and other places where such events had an organized character. Internment camps vary as to the conditions of life and exposure to brutality, as well as by the number of women involved. This number ranges from a low of about 18% to a high of about 34%, which is in the percentage for the notorious camp Dretelj in Hercegovina.

Rapes, and sexual molestation which essentially corresponds to rape was an inherent part of a stay in such camps. Rape is sexual sadism, because the sexual pleasure derived from intercourse consists of the infliction of physical and mental pain to the victim. A rapist is stimulated by the suffering and debasement of other persons. Kron considers sexual violence to be a special type of anti-social behavior which is accompanied by a perturbed structure of moral values and characteristics, as well as a defective super ego. The lack of moral restraints and low social standards of behavior, accompanied by malign aggressiveness and strong destructive passion characterize rapists.

But let us return to the women victims. During the year 1992/1993 thirty patients were received in the Belgrade Psychiatric Hospital "Dr. Laza Lazarevic." They all claimed to have been raped. After the psychotic phase was alleviated, some of them withdrew the initial claim; they seemed fearful of the environment's reaction, especially that of their husbands. The environment tended to forget their sufferings quite rapidly; these women and girls were, therefore, first exposed to short lived interest, and then to distrusts and openly poisonous ambiguous comments. This applies particularly to the husbands of the victims, who, feeling "dishonored", often felt that they have to react with harshness and accusations against their wives. For the victims this meant the continuation of hell.

At the Gynaecologic and Maternity Clinic in Belgrade ten sick women were hospitalized because of the sequels to interrupted pregnancies caused by systematic rapes in camps. (The data about these women are contained in Appendix II).

I will now present the case of a twenty-eight year old woman who after months spent in camps came to the Gynaecologic and Maternity Clinic in Belgrade asking for the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. The circumstances surrounding her arrest were unusual. She was returning from Germany where she was visiting an aunt when the bus she was traveling in on January 28, 1992 was stopped on the freeway shortly before Sisak (in the Republic of Croatia). After the control of documents, she and six other young persons were segregated from the passengers. The driver of the bus was ordered to continue, and the apprehended persons were lead to the police station, where they were divided into two groups. One group was sent to Slavonski Brod and the other to Slavonska Pozega. The woman, let us call her Eva was transported to Slavonski Brod and into a camp. In less than two days, she understood what was happening there. Young and pretty women were segregated and carefully raped to allegedly give birth to "Croat children of high quality" and to as many as possible. Another group of young women, to whom Eva also belonged, served for the pleasure of the warriors and were at times subjected to extreme brutality. Rapes were always conducted by gangs. On the days when they were not raped, the women and girls were not given either food or water. They were housed in a shed for containers with gasoline. As the barrels were empty, the hangar served as a kind of dormitory. The women had only one thin blanket and the clothes in which they had been arrested; throughout the stay in a camp, which could last for months, they were given no change of clothes or underwear.

Eva recalls that armed men returned one night to the camp angry and nervous because of the loss of some military positions. Women were the obvious target of their malign and revengeful aggressiveness. The soldiers bound a few barrels together and then in groups of four began to rape women. In this orgy of violence, one man tried to cut off Eva's arm with an axe, but did not succeed in his drunkenness. Another man menaced to sever her leg, but it seems that he was only playful in "his handiwork". During this time, the four were taking turns in raping Eva who lost conscience in the process.

When they would learn that a woman had become pregnant, which was frequently the case, the men would leave them in peace. N. was among these women. The Lebensborn programme had triumphed again.

When the refinery was burned down, the female prisoners were transported on the 22 of April, 1992, to Odzak and a transit center, which was a kind of camp, this one run by Muslims (in that period, the Croats and Muslims were still collaborating). The mistreatment of the pregnant women continued, but with less passion. They were now subjected to forced oral and anal intercourse.

Shortly before the fall of Odzak, the women began to collect all the money they had been able to hide, in the hope of buying their freedom. Eva had some German marks into the hem of her slacks, which she now put into the box which meant freedom. She was among the women which were separated to the left side; what happened to those who did not have any valuables and who were sent to the right side, Eva does not know to this day, but she has dark suspicions. In the second half of July, a sick Eva came to Bosanski Sumac with the help of the military unit Krajiski corpus, and later to Brcko. In Brcko she spent recuperating almost a month in the general hospital, because she had lost 30 kilograms and had serious heart trouble. All that time she had no news from her family and she was haunted by flashbacks and memories of the sufferings, horrors, sexual abuse, maimings, and mutilations. Images of morbid events were also rekindled by the child of some monster which was growing in her body. Her body, which was imprisoned until recently, was now a prison for this unnatural growth. Medical and psychiatric reasons did not permit the interruption of this pregnancy. The sick woman was in every way too weak for this. She gave birth to a little girl who died soon afterwards, Eva's tortured body was able to give life to a baby, but did not have the strength to sustain it any more.

What is the meaning of such mistreatment and rape in a prisoners' camp for this woman. Is it sufficient to talk of a grave violation of another human being? That human being had been transformed into an object which should be destroyed with more or less passion. Each one of these abused women went through a serious narcissistic traumatism, a traumatism of identity and self-respect. The psychic life of Eva but also of other raped girls and women, was dominated by feelings of victimization, shame, and guilt. In such camps women were subjected to the systematic destruction of everything which made up their essential identity. I sometimes ask myself, in a flight of fancy perhaps, whether narcissistic traumatism is a new illness given rise to by this horrible war, or is it rather the universal key to the understanding of a woman's psyche?

A team of experts from the Institute for Mental Health and Military Psychology at the Military Medical Academy examined a group of men and women released through prisoner exchanges. The circumstances under which these people were deprived of their liberty varied. They ranged from the most common in their homes, while watching TV, or in the streets or on highways, to more particular incidents-while returning from a wedding, working in the fields or even in a hospital-which happened to a physician.

The experts classified them into physical and psychological, i.e. psycho- social, forms of mistreatment. This division is, of course, only relative, because it is often difficult to distinguish one form from the other. Some of the most frequent forms of torture suffered by women included:

- deprivation of basic physical needs, for instance leaving prisoners for days without water and food or forbidding them to relieve nature.
- hitting heads of women against the wall until they faint.
- beating them with truncheons, wire ropes, butts of guns, broom sticks, until they lose conscience.
- administration of electrical shocks with electric wires tied to the wrists or in the region of the neck or even of the genitals.
- kicking blind-folded women, so that they cannot identify the assailants, with boots, while they are lying on a concrete floor.
- stripping women naked and hitting them with boots and truncheons until they faint.
- raping women while they tied their arms and legs and were kept for days in so called "black rooms" (one of the prisoners and later patients lost 25 kilograms in the process).
- extinguishing butts of cigarettes in the mouth of victims, forcing them to swallow.
- obliging women to swallow cigarette butts previously extinguished in urine.
- plucking prisoners' hairs and compelling them to eat it.
- extracting teeth, mostly with the barrel of a revolver.
- trampling with boots on surgical scars.
- tying prisoners to a tree, in minus 15 degrees centigrade temperature, and pouring water on them so as to quicken freezing.
- carving prisoners' skin with a knife and pouring salt into the wound.
- beating the soles of bare feet with steel cables.

The most frequent forms of mental mistreatment include the following:

- putting the barrel of a pistol into a woman's mouth and a knife under her neck, threatening to slaughter her as it had previously befallen to all other members of her family.
- telling women that their children have been slaughtered.
- organizing so called night dances; male and female prisoners were forced to dance to loud music; they were half-naked, so as to facilitate arousal; afterwards they were dragged to "black rooms," where the torturers raped young female prisoners whose arms and legs were tied and stretched.
- young female prisoners were forced to swallow the sperm of about ten torturers.
- forced anal heterosexual intercourse with the victim then obliged to perform oral sex and to swallow the sperm.
- organizing so called special dances; naked female and male prisoners were forced to dance until the collapsed after four to five hours.

We do not have to ask ourselves about the physical and mental consequences of such ill-treatment. The physical health of these women is ruined. Social and psychological pressure was also directed towards the degradation of personality through the destruction of basic human dignity. This kind of ill-treatment devastates feelings of security and self-respect and leads to the questioning of life's meaning and of existence as such, fundamental doubts about God and ethics. In fact, degradation is the most effective way to destroy human dignity and a woman's identity.

We will never know the exact number of women who have been raped, sexually molested and humiliated...In our Balkan culture women are reluctant to speak about such experiences, because they consider this to be the most drastic narcissistic injury, the worst injury of their identity as women. Women who have gone through such ordeals used to say: "I ceased to be a human being"..."I became an object, a thing, a toilet bowl"..."I hate my body which has become a source of evil"..."motherhood may be repugnant". Fainting during mistreatments was at that time the only salvation and the later denial of such a reality assuredly a defense from further injury.

The women admitted at the psychiatric hospital "Dr. Laza Lazarevic" and who belonged to the three aforementioned groups, were treated as out- patients, under psychiatric supervision, or they were kept in the hospital. All of them had psychopathological symptoms belonging to the ICD-10 reactive disorders (Post traumatic stress disorder). This means that the psychological disturbances of a neurotic or psychotic nature manifested themselves immediately or shortly after the event which triggered the psychic damage. What happened was the loss of the emotional and psychological balance to a degree which impairs the mental functions of the person in question. It should be stressed that the adaptive energy is different for each individual. Acute stress reactions, which are in ICD-10 classified as F.43.0, were manifested in all but one of the patients treated because of an interrupted pregnancy. The risks involved in this disorder are high for physically exhausted persons, for instance through starvation, which was the rule in these cases.

To a different degree, these women were manifesting withdrawal, avoidance of contacts, anxiety which grows into panic, depressive and sub depressive moods. Anger and desire for revenge were shown by two of the patients out of the 40 which I treated. During the course of treatment there were frequent flashbacks of traumatic experiences, dreams and nightmares related to rapes, humiliation, and sexual violence. Three of ten pregnant patients had suicidal ideas. Suicidal ideas were also present in women who have lost children in the war. It is also relevant that the greatest frequency of psychotic reactions was displayed by women who had lived in the war torn regions and who were exposed to the greatest personal responsibility to preserve the home and children under situations of high stress.

Instead of any other conclusions, I would like to state that rape is one of the greatest traumatisms for a woman. It provokes lasting changes in her personality. In this war, women are exposed to every imaginable frustration - the loss of friends, a job, a home, material goods, the loss of so called femininity because of dirt, depravation and hunger, the loss of loved ones. In addition, there are violations or their anticipation. While the western society of material abundance is looking for relaxation and entertainment in morbid horrors, drawing on the most perverse forms of Thanatos from the unconscious, women involved in this war did not need any "as if" situations; they lived through real horror.

1. Dr. Jovan Raskovic. Narcizam, Niksic, Nio.Univerzitetska Rijec, 1988.

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