The Washington Post
December 27, 1992
ZENICA, Bosnia – Two weeks ago, a 22-year-old woman made her way to the gynecology ward at the main hospital here and asked doctors for an abortion. The woman, from the eastern Bosnian town of Foca, said she had been repeatedly raped by Serb soldiers and had just escaped.
She was 4 1/2 months pregnant.
“She insisted on having an abortion,” said Sead Sestic, head of the hospital’s gynecology department. “She didn’t understand the danger for her health, that we couldn’t do it. She cried. It was painful. We didn’t know what to tell her.”
The woman, who had come to the hospital alone, left it alone, trudging off into a shabby city filled with refugees and despair. But in the saddest of ways, she was not alone. There are, according to the Bosnian government, at least 30,000 other women who have been raped by Serb soldiers.
“We see a lot of pregnant women, and we imagine that they were raped, but they won’t talk about it,” said Selma Hecimovic of the Center for the Investigation of War Crimes and Crimes of Genocide Against Bosnian Muslims, which is headquartered here. “They talk about other women being raped but not about themselves being raped.”
At the Zenica hospital, doctors perform about nine abortions a day, which is three more than they performed in peacetime. The doctors suspect that rape is the reason for the increase, but they do not make inquiries when women ask for an abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.
In conservative Muslim culture, the rape of a woman is not just a personal tragedy; it is viewed as an attack on the woman’s family. Nothing can ever be the same again. If the rapes are, indeed, aimed at demoralizing all Bosnians, as the government maintains, then the aim has been partly achieved.
“It is a double humiliation,” said Hecimovic. “The women were humiliated when they were raped, and the men were humiliated for being unable to protect them.”
