Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong Read Free Book Online

soldiers who were rounding up Bosnian Muslim women and dragging them off to rape camps. Every journalist knows that one of the first casualties of war is the truth, and I thought that what I was hearing was propaganda. This was two years before the horror of Rwanda, before Darfur, before Congo. But as the day progressed, I kept hearing about the rape camps from more and more credible sources. At that time I was the editor in chief of a magazine, and magazines have a much longer lead time than newspapers. If this story was true, it was breaking news that needed to be published immediately; it couldn’t wait the three months it would take to get it to my magazine readers.
    I gathered everything I could—mobile phone numbers, names, details about Muslim wives and sisters and daughters being gang-raped eight and ten times a day. When I flew back to Canada, I went straight to a media outlet and handed over the file to an editor I knew. I said, “This is a horrendous story. Give it to one of your reporters.” I went back to my office and waited for the headline. Nothing. I waited another week and another—still nothing. Seven weeks later, I saw a four-line blurb in Newsweek magazine about soldiers gang-raping women in the Balkans. I called the editor I’d given the package to.
    As soon as he heard my voice, he started to giggle—nervously. “Oh, I knew you’d be calling me today,” he said.
    “What happened?” I wanted to know.
    “Well, Sally,” he said, “it was a good story but, you know, I got busy and, you know, I was on deadline and, you know, I forgot.”
    I was astounded. I said, “More than twenty thousand women were gang-raped, some of them eight years old, some of them eighty years old—and you forgot?”
    I hung up and called my staff together and told them what had happened. We decided to do the story ourselves. I was on a plane back to the war zone two days later.
    Six women who were refugees in Zagreb, Croatia, were willing to be interviewed, but they were reluctant to have their names used as they knew they’d be rejected by their families if word of the rapes got out. While most women did not become pregnant, some did. Of those who were pregnant, some managed to get abortions; some had been kept in prison until abortion was impossible. And still others had escaped but couldn’t find medical help in time for an abortion. Many who gave birth left the newborns at the hospital. Mostly I talked to frightened women who badly needed health care and counselling and were too traumatized to share their stories. I worried about asking a woman to relive the horror and began to wonder how to best tell a story that most preferred to be silent about.
    Then I met Dr. Mladen Loncar, a psychiatrist at the University of Zagreb, who told me about a woman who was furious with the silence around this atrocity and had plenty to say. He promised to call her and ask for an interview on my behalf, and when he did, Eva Penavic said yes, she would talk to me. Getting to her was a problem, though, as she was living as a refugee on the eastern border between Bosnia and Croatia, near the city of Vukovar. The area was being shelled day and night.
    The photographer I drove with accelerated through towns where buildings were still smoking from being hit by rocket-propelled grenades (and turned up the volume on a Pavarotti CD to blockout the sound of grenades exploding in the distance). We finally arrived late in the afternoon at the four-room house Eva was sharing with her extended family of seventeen. For the next seven hours, I listened while she described the hideous ordeal she’d survived.
    Eva told me that she thought the men pounding at her door in the little eastern Croatian village of Berak in November 1991 had come to kill her. Rape was the furthest thing from her mind when they shot off the hinges of her door. After all, she was regarded as a leader in this village of eight hundred people. She was forty-eight years old.