Voices from a war zone.

Route E-70 south from Zagreb is nearly deserted. In former times, this was a main road for trucks traveling from Slovenia through Croatia to Belgrade and beyond. But no more. Just south of Pakrac is the border of Serb occupied Croatia, beyond which non-Serbs dare not travel. It's Saturday morning, the summer sun is already hot, and to either side of the highway cornfields sway in tidy rows to a horizon of rolling hills.

I'm traveling with two counselors from the Kareta Women's Group, heading for the town of Lipik at the edge of Serb-occupied territory. Kareta, founded in the spring of 1990 after the first free elections in Croatian history, works with refugees and rape survivors from Croatia and Bosnia Hercegovina. At the United Nations Protective Forces (UNPROFOR) checkpoint, Jordanian soldiers--some behind sandbags, one perched behind a machine gun on an armored personnel carrier--check our identification and wave us through. This roadblock marks the high water mark of Serb conquest in Croatia, before the U.N.-brokered ceasefire allowed the Serbian army to turn south to destroy Bosnia,Hercegovina.

On the unoccupied side, it's still possible to believe that these are normal times in a rural backwater in central Europe. Driving on, though, the scene changes. Lipik has been completely destroyed, not a house or building left standing. I'm reminded of Lidice, the Czech village desolated by the Nazis in World War II. Lipik was attacked in 1991 by Serbian artillery and heavy weapons. Each shattered wall, without exception, is scarred by machine gun fire, some of them marked with the black letters "JNA"

More than 250,000 people have been killed in the push for a "Greater Serbia" There are roughly 100 concentration camps in the occupied territories of Croatia and Bosnia, Herce govina, and inside Serbia itself. More than a quarter of Croatia and three quarters of Bosnia-Hercegovina have been occupied by Serb militia together with Serbian troops armed and supplied by the Milosevic government in Belgrade. More than two million Bosnians and Croatians have been driven from their homes. And according to the European Commission, there are 20,000 women survivors who have been systematically raped as part of the Serbian campaign of "ethnic cleansing" The Bosnian government puts that figure at 50,000 for Bosnia-Hercegovina alone.

"First they bombed Lipik,' our driver tells us as we wind through streets recently cleared of rubble. "Then they shelled it. Their tanks blasted at the buildings from point-blank range. After that they went through tossing hand grenades into whatever buildings were still standing"

The Serb attack on Croatia, launched in March 1991, was premeditated and brutal. Roy Gutman, in A Witness to Genocide, describes how "paramilitary forces organized in Serbia began the offensive by launching military attacks on cities in eastern Slavonia, but after it was clear that no outside power would intervene, the [Serb dominated Yugoslav] army took the offensive in August... " The JNA, or Yugoslav National Army, is one of the largest in Europe. Against its heavy artillery, tanks, and jet aircraft the Croatian police and civilian volunteers had mostly rifles and pistols. "In September [1991], at American and British behest, the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia and all its component parts. The Serbs, who enjoyed an enormous advantage in weapons, were supportive" It is estimated that as many as 25,000 Croatians and other non Serb citizens of Croatia were killed or disappeared during the first six months of the attack.

It's important to recount this history because Western perceptions of what happened in Croatia, and what is happening now in Bosnia Hercegovina, have been clouded by four years of disinformation. Some of this comes from ignorance, as when the JNA was described by the international press as impartial and trying only to separate the warring parties. But some of this appeared blatancy self-serving, as when Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State for the Bush administration, initially denied that there were systematic killings in the Serb concentration camps, saying only that conditions were "un-pleasant" In the 1980s, Eagleburger was a member of the board of directors of Yugo America (the state owned Serb auto company), president of Henry Kissinger Associates (a lobbying firm under contract by Yugo America and other Serb owned enter prices), and a crony of Slobodan Milosevic. From the opening days of the attack on Croatia, the Western media echoed the Bush administration's characterization of the struggle there and in Bosnia as a "civil war" where all sides were equally responsible, an incomprehensible ethnic bloodbath impossible to stop. And if the causes and nature of the Serb aggression were obfuscated, so, too, has the purpose and nature of the mass rapes, the femicide against non Serb women. All sides, we are told by the-pundits, have committed atrocities, and so all parties are equally to blame. And if everyone is guilty, how can anyone be brought to justice?

Today trees grow inside the roofless houses of Lipik. Here and there a few residents have returned to repair their homes, trusting the UNPROFOR to keep them safe. The Serbs are just across a wooded field. "Go straight down this road and you run into them," our driver says. "But I wouldn't advise it" Indeed, two weeks after our visit, the Serbs would fire on a car passing through this same district, killing its driver and severely wounding his passenger. These murders occur periodcally and are rarely (if ever) mentioned in the international media.

Dr. Mladen Loncar is a Croatian expelled from the formerly autonomous republic of Vojvodina, lying between Croatia and Hungary, now annexed by Serbia. He is also a survivor of the Begejci concentration camp, where he was in carcerated from October to December 1991. A psychiatrist at the main hospital in Novi Sad, he was picked up during a sweep meant to terrorize the region's Croatian and Hungarian population, though the camp also contained Ruthenes, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Serb opponents of the genocide. Today he works with concentration camp survivors under the auspices of the Medical Center for Human Rights in Zagreb, documenting the experiences of men who have been raped, sexually tortured, and even partially castrated in the Serb camps. He has written about his own experience as a camp survivor for Acta Medica Croatica, the journal of the Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences.

"The camp consisted of abandoned stables which had been used before for cattle.... People were allowed to get out from the stable only when guards allowed it or when they were brought out for beating" During his incarceration the camp contained 527 inmates--the youngest 14, the oldest 80. Thirty of the prisoners were women. Dr. Loncar's report describes what happens when people are starved, kept in unsanitary conditions, and tortured: "Hematomas, rib fractures ... blindness, injuries of the genitals, attempts of castration... "

Like almost everyone I met in Croatia who works with the survivors of the atrocities, Dr. Loncar seems to subsist on cigarettes and endless cups of Turkish coffee. The first time we met he was more than an hour late, explaining how that afternoon he had had to intervene in three attempted suicides.

"Men don't want to talk about this" he said. "There is a conspiracy of silence, where men who are survivors are ashamed to discuss it, and men who know survivors are too embarrassed or too frightened to offer support:" which is why only a few dozen men have come forward to discuss their personal experiences of sexual torture. (Another factor is that men who are fully castrated generally bleed to death.)

Loncar draws for me a diagram of a typical camp: one rectangle enclosed by another. Outside the larger rectangle are mine fields and guards to prevent escape. The prisoners are kept inside the smaller enclosure. "This space in between is where the rapes and the tortures occur" he explains. Victims are called out by name or simply grabbed and dragged away. "One indication that this is systematic is that so many of the camps have the same design" Even the words the guards use as they assault their prisoners reveal the premeditated intent of the torture:

Ten or 50 men [will] be lined up and systematically

beaten on the genitals, accompanied by Serbian

guards saying, "You are never going to give birth to

any more little Croats [or Muslims]" Another method

is where they use the baton as a weapon of sexual

torture, as a substitute penis shoved down the inmates"

throats. Or they will line people up as a public

spectacle, to make

sure that all the inmates see this, and force two inmates

to rape each other anally, or to do oral sex on each

other. Or they force them to bite each other's testes off.

We're putting together information from all different

concentration camps, and it's not just some asocial 

guards who do that, but rather a widespread

occurrence.

"People hear the words mass rape," says Judy Darnell, "and they think of a woman being raped on one occasion by four or six soldiers." Darnell is an American registered nurse who came to Croatia as a volunteer in January 1992. "What people don't understand is that many of these women are raped 100 to 300 times over the course of a month or more."

The numbers alone can't describe what is happening here," says Asja Armanda, a cofounder of Kareta. "The European Commission says 20,000 women, which we think is low. But even if you accept that figure, and remember that each of these women is raped multiple times--maybe hundreds of times-- then you realize we're talking about hundreds of thousands of rapes."

Adolescent girls are particular targets for this treatment. The standard minimum stay in one of the rape camps is 28 days--a complete menstrual cycle--in order to ensure impregnation. Survivors report that the beatings often subside after it is obvious they are pregnant with a "Chetnik" (Serb) baby.

"These are more traditional societies," says Darnell, "especially in Bosnia, and so the woman is the center of the home or the family. If you want to destroy an entire nation, you go after the base, you go after the women. Many of these women were virgins. If your first sexual experience is so violent, and your first child is the product of that, what woman will ever want to have sex again, let alone reproduce? Maybe their body is so damaged they won't be able to have children. The purpose, clearly, is to destroy Muslim and Croat society"--and to use women as incubators for "Serb" babies.

Women and the reproductive health of Bosnian and Croatian society are targeted in other ways. During the attack on Croatia, in town after town--in Vukovar, Osijek, Sisak, Karlovac, and Dubrovnik--hospital maternity wards and gynecological clinics were among the first sites hit by Serb aircraft and artillery. Again, this was no accident, since the Serb milities and JNA often relied upon informants in the communities to pinpoint their targets. This pattern was repeated in Bosnia Hercagovina, where targets included what Armanda describes as "women's spaces"--for instance, the tram and bus stations, bread lines, and market places of Sarajavo.

The international press, human rights groups, even European and American feminists were, according to Armanda, slow to acknowledge what was happening in the occupied territories. And any progress that's been made treating the survivors, says Darnell, "is because of the women in Croatia and Bosnia. They identified the problem; they brought it to the world's attention. Not the governments, not the United Nations, not the humanitarian groups, not the human rights organizations."

A case in point is the Bosnian Muslim doctor I spoke with one afternoon at Kareta. A general practitioner in Sarajevo for 17 years, she and her family were forced to flee that city two years ago. Since then she has worked to provide medical services to Bosnian refugees in Croatia. "In the first six months, we did 70,000 examinations," she reported. "All this was organized by refugee physicians and nurses, entirely women, entirely unrecognized by any government group or international relief agency. Some men came later, but for the first year and a half only women doctors were working with these people. At the beginning the doctors themselves had practically nothing to eat. We are all refugees, too."

It isn't only soldiers and militiamen committing the rapes and murders in Croatia and Bosnia Herce-govina. A central strategy of "ethnic cleansing" is to involve the civilian populace in the atrocities. This serves a dual purpose: first, to make them complicit so that they have a stake in driving non Serbs from their towns and villages; and second, so that survivors will feel unsafe returning, knowing it was their friends, neighbors, colleagues, physicians, and teachers who committed these crimes. Personal jealousy, greed, and avarice are harnessed to serve genocide, and civilian Serbs are encouraged to act on their most vicious inclinations.

I first talked with S--(she would prefer her name not be published) at Nona, the Zagreb Women's Center. "Everyone who is a refugee has a story," she told me, "every person from every village" She was 18 when the Serb tanks first arrived at her village in northern Bosnia.

In the first two days, they attacked the Muslim part of

town with guns, with grenades, with everything. We

couldn't leave our houses for five days. Then we had

only two hours--from eight in the morning until ten, to

go out, to go shopping or whatever. It was crazy. They

just entered the houses, you know. They just entered

the apartments, and they could do whatever they

wanted.

Four times they were in my apartment. They were looking for my father because he is Muslim [but he was overseas]. At the end they told me, well, we're going to take you or your mother to a rape camp.... Three of them raped and killed my mother. In fact, they wanted to kill us all--me and my brother, too--because they wanted our apartment. This guy took me by the arm, and he had a knife, which he had used to kill my mother, and he told me, "Now it's your turn"

You cannot forget that feeling. After two years, there are a lot of things you can forget, but that feeling you cannot forget, that's for sure....

S--ran downstairs while a neighbor--a Serb--delayed the rapists long enough for her to escape. Then she jumped out of a second story window. Two days later, this same neighbor used his car to smuggle S--and her brother to the Bosnian army lines. "It was a very dangerous thing for him to do," she acknowledged. "He had a lot of trouble after he got us out of there. I heard how some Serb wanted to rape his daughter because he had helped us. The town is still a huge concentration camp, because people cannot go out. They can be beaten on the street, they can be killed, they can be every thing"

Kareta, together with Zene BiH (the Bosnia Hercagovina Women's Group), the international Initiative of Women of Bosnia and Hercegovina (Biser), and other Croatian and Bosnian women's groups, has asked American attorney Catharine MacKinnon to represent them pro bono, with the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund as co-counsel, as the United Nations begins its war crimes tribunal for atrocities committed in the territories of "the former Yugoslavia." These groups believe that, unless the criminals are identified and brought to justice, the two million plus refugees will never feel safe returning home. In the same way, allowing the crimes to go unpunished would be to abandon those Serbs, like S--'s neighbor, who have risked their own lives to resist the genocide. And it would set a dangerous precedent, wherein the international community would be seen to condone a greater Serbian state explicitly founded upon mass rape and genocide.

There is the fear, though, that, rather than pursue the evidence no matter where it leads, the United Nations will instead attempt to downplay the genocide of non Serb peoples (and, in particular, the use of genocidal rape) as a way of making more palatable to world opinion a "compromise" agreement rewarding Serb aggression. And Kareta is concerned that little provision is being made to acknowledge that many survivors are afraid to come forward and state their names and localities of origin for the record, as is generally required in any prosecution, for fear of their own lives or the lives of loved ones remaining in the occupied territories.

"The United Nations wants to divide responsibility for war crimes just like they want to divide territory," says Asja Armanda. Armanda is adamant that "all the war criminals--Serb, Muslim, and Croat--must be tried and punished" Still, Kareta insists that a distinction be made between atrocities perpetrated by field commanders or individual extremists or soldiers, and those which are a coldly calculated, premeditated policy of aggressive war, genocide, and femicide coordinated by Milosevic, Karadzic, and other Serb leaders. "Atrocities were committed by anti fascists and Allied forces during the just resistance to fascism in World War II," Armanda points out, "but they weren't tried at Nuremberg"

Skepticism about the impartiality of the United Nations deepened when it was reported in the American press that the former commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia Hercegovina, Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie, was paid $15,000 to go on a speaking tour sponsored by the Serb American lobbying group SerbNet, during which he urged nonintervention and opposed kiting the arms embargo. There is also the charge that U.N. forces are doing a brisk business transporting goods and gasoline into occupied Croatia and then selling these at a profit to the Serbs. Feelings against the United Nations run so high that, in July of last year, a civil disobedience campaign organized by displaced Croatians attempted to block selected UNPROFOR checkpoints as a way of protesting the fact that the United Nations had failed in its mandate to safely return refugees to their homes.

I also heard accusations that U.N. troops and officials both in Croatia and Bosnia have fueled a marked increase in prostitution and trafficking in women. The director of an international relief agency, just back from Sarajevo, told me about a bar in that besieged city that is a favorite among U.N peacekeepers looking to purchase sex. And particularly distressing to Bosnian Muslim women are the ways that some of the relief efforts from Muslim nations, run by men, are demanding that they subscribe to a much more restrictive role for women. I heard of instances where women seeking aid at such organizations were told to go home and send their husbands or not to return unless they were "properly" covered and veiled. Although grateful for the aid provided by Muslim nations (particularly given the virtual abandonment of the Bosnian Muslim community by Europe), they worry that conditions imposed on this aid will diminish their rights in what is a uniquely Bosnian Islamic culture.

I visited a half-dozen refugee centers with the Kareta counselors, each housing 50 to 200 people. Some, like the one near Pakrac, are tidy if crowded--one family to a room. Others, like Dugo Selo, smell of feces and buzz with flies. Still, people try to make do. On the walls of their rooms they hang pictures of their families or of their homes before the war. They offer a visitor Coca Cola or coffee, and children gather to have their picture taken. The Kareta counselors make deliveries of clothes, shoes, diapers, and baby formula. They counsel individual rape survivors. They take folks out for a swim, or else they just sit and listen.

Mirjana Krpan and her husband Juraj, refugees from Vukovar, live now in Zagreb and are fortunate enough to have their own apartment. Vukovar, before the war a city of some 84,000 people, is Lipik writ large. "The Yugoslav army," wrote T. D. Allman, who visited the city after its surrender, "systematically destroyed Vukovar--street by street, house by house." In three months the Serbs poured in 160,000 shells and bombs, including napalm and phosphorous, and when they finally occupied the city in November 1991, they marched off to captivity those non-Serbs who hadn't fled or been killed. According to a report prepared by the Croatian Ministry of Health, 5,000 persons were "either abducted and taken away by Serbian paramilitaries or ... simply disappeared... " Four years later, 1,183 people are still listed as missing. Mothers of Vukovar, a grassroots Croatian organization, is working to keep the issue alive, trying to convince the international community to put pressure on the Serb authorities to account for their missing daughters and sons.

Mirjana is 57 years old; her husband is 82. They stayed in Vukovar until an artillery shell hit their roof Unable to take any mementos of decades of life in that city, they have only one photograph of their old house. It is a picture of rubble taken from a poster published by the Vukovar Society. "See the bricks, behind this ruined building?" she asks me. "That's our home"

Fred Pelka's work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Poets and Writers, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. His work for Mothering magazine was nominated [or the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting in the Public Interest in 1992.

Both Kareta and the Medical Center for Human Rights are nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations. Donations (inter national money orders only) can be sent to: The Kareta Women's Group, Vlaska 70A, 41000 Zagreb, Croatia; and the Medical Center for Human Rights, Demeterova 18, 41000 Zagreb, Croatia.