Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page B

the fall, barricades appeared on the street. As a precaution they sent their daughter and two daughters-in-law away with the grandchildren to a safer place. Soon enough the village was under siege. Their sons managed to escape as tanks rolled into town. Most villagers ran away; those who didn’t, including Eva and Bartol, were rounded up and kept in detention. The interrogations and beatings began. Bartol was beaten to death. Eva was sent home by the commander and told to stay in the pantry at the back of the house.
    Then the men came for her. They said they were taking her to another village for interrogation, but she knew precisely where they were going—to the nearby house where the White Eagles were headquartered.
    At the door, her captors announced to the others, “Open up—we bring you the lioness.” Once she was inside, they attacked her like a pack of jackals. Six men stripped her, then raped her by turns, orally and vaginally. They urinated into her mouth. They screamed that she was an old woman and if she was dry they’d cut her vagina with knives and use her blood to make her wet. She was choking on semen and urine and couldn’t breathe. The noise was horrendous as the six men kept shrieking at her that there were twenty more men waiting their turn and calling out, “Who’s next?” She was paralyzed with fear and with excruciating pain. The assault continued relentlessly for three hours.
    When they were finished, they cleaned themselves off with her underwear and stuffed the fouled garments into her mouth, demanding she eat them. Then they marched her outside into the garden. She could hear the village dogs barking. She knew exactly where she was and she knew that the cornfield they were pushing her toward was mined. Still blindfolded, she was thrust into the field and told to run away. She stumbled through the slushy snow and sharp cornstalks, and when she was far enough away from the house, she ripped the blindfold off. Injuries from the rape slowed her down, but she was fast all the same. Then she slipped in the muddy field and fell, and at exactly that moment, bullets ripped over her head. She flattened herself into the mud as she heard the cheers of the terrorists, who thought they had bagged another kill. She waited a long time before getting to her feet and staggering on, and then wandered for three more hours, trying to focus, to think of a way to survive. Finally she stumbled into her neighbour’s garden.
    Mira had been waiting by the window all night, knowing her childhood friend had been taken away. When she heard the rustlein the garden, she rushed outside with her husband, and together they gathered up their battered lifelong friend. Mira bathed Eva, made her strong tea and cradled her head while she vomited the wretched contents of her stomach and then collapsed. The next morning Eva left the village. She didn’t come back until the conflict was over.
    I visited her again during the war and after the war was over, as well. Although she had reunited with her family and together they returned to Berak, the men responsible for the crime were still roaming the streets of her village, still gloating when Eva walked by. The last time I saw her, in 2005, she told me she still wonders why she was spared. Cradling a new grandchild in her arms, she repeated the comment she’d made when I left her in 1991: “I’ve always wondered why God didn’t take me when he took my Bartol. I think I must have been left here to be the witness for the women.”
    It took me the usual three months to get the story to our readers. But after it was published, they took up the torch for these women, and in the form of thousands of letters to the editor, they demanded that the United Nations do something about it.
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    This was rape as a form of genocide. In the rape camps, many Bosnian women were assaulted until they became pregnant. The Serbian soldiers, known as Chetnicks, viewed systematic rape as a way of planting