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Bosnia director of WfW talks about war, rape, poverty and hope

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Ivana Davidovic
WVoN co-editor

The recent arrest of the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, and his extradition to the Hague war tribunal, has rekindled the media’s interest in the savage war that raged in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.

Harrowing images from Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed as a part of an ethnic cleansing campaign, became a powerful symbol of the atrocities committed during the Balkan war.

However, in the background, tens of thousands of Bosnian women suffered horrible losses.

Not only were their husbands, fathers and sons brutally taken away from them, but they also became the pawns in a twisted strategy.

Bosnia was the first country in the world where the UN officially recognised rape as a strategy of war.

Rape was not committed by soldiers out of control, but as a planned act of unimaginable brutality in rape camps, designed to degrade women and, as collateral, their whole families and communities.

One American-Iraqi woman, Zainab Salbi, no stranger to human rights abuses during Saddam Hussein’s regime, was so touched by the images of the Bosnian refugee women she saw on TV, that she and her new husband used their savings to fly to war-torn ex Yugoslavia to help.

Unable to locate any charities reaching out to destitute women and rape victims, Salbi planted the seeds of what has now grown into Women for Women International, an organisation which has since supported around 300,000 women in eight conflict and post-conflict countries.

Now, 16 years since the war in ex-Yugoslavia ended, you would be forgiven for assuming that Bosnia and its people have made a relatively successful transition from the location of some of the most horrific war crimes in history to a peaceful European country reconciled with its bloody past.

After all, neighbouring Croatia has made great progress in its quest to join the European Union and now enjoys the image of an attractive and popular Mediterranean holiday destination.

But this view is not shared by Seida Saric, a woman who lived through the four year siege of Sarajevo and is now the Programme Director for Bosnia for Women for Women International.

“The situation is very similar to the one we had during the war, only without weapons. Bosnia and Herzegovina has suffered an incredible number of setbacks.

“The economic and political situation is bad and all social issues are unresolved as a consequence,” she says as we talk at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s London offices.

This is where she just taken part in the Banking on Women conference organised by European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), J-PAL Europe and Women for Women.

Seida is patiently coping with the media attention in London, which is mainly directed at her experiences of the siege of Sarajevo and the reactions in her home country to Mladic’s arrest.

She admits that “she never thought that he would be arrested,” somewhat naively perhaps she “assumed he would take his own life rather than be allowed to get caught.”

“We go through emotions in different phases”, Saric explains, “and the first reaction was euphoria, which is now replaced by sadness.”

It is obviously difficult for the people of Bosnia to open old wounds and the sight of an old and frail man in prison does not offer satisfaction to those who have suffered so much.

Still, she acknowledges that “for the sake of justice it is extremely important that Mladic has ended up in the Hague, it sends a clear message to people that you can’t do those sort of atrocities and get away with it.”

Coming from, by many accounts, the poorest country in Europe, Saric’s focus is firmly on the economy.

In Bosnia, as in other post-war countries where men are traditionally the breadwinners, widows in particular have faced a terrible hardship.

Under Saric’s leadership, Women for Women International has helped almost 30,000 women in Bosnia to rebuild their lives by offering direct financial assistance through micro loans, rights education, vocational and skills training and leadership.

“At first people were shocked to find out that loans were available and to women in particular,” says Saric, who helped set up the first micro credit initiative in conjunction with the pioneering Grameen bank.

“At first men were saying give us the money and we will give it to our wives or the women in our village. But this was a great opportunity for women to get money directly and to start income-generating projects.”

The credit crunch impacted on Bosnia as well and, according to Saric, many women had to fold their small businesses and go back to dependence on meagre government handouts.

Some right-wing political parties used poverty for their own petty political goals. Ethnic and religious divisions, often simmering under the surface, threatened to explode.

Nevertheless, Saric believes that bureaucracy, high taxes and, most of all, corruption are the main hurdles facing entrepreneurial women trying to improve their lives and the lives of their families.

“The Bosnian government does not differentiate between a large Coca-Cola factory for example and a woman selling locally grown fruit and vegetables at a market.

“From the legislative point of view both business are treated the same, therefore it is hard to sustain a micro business and keep it legal. Changing that is our important next challenge,” says Saric.

Although Women for Women’s priority is facilitating the economic independence of women, Saric does acknowledge that it is a complex issue which goes hand in hand with female political participation, which should in theory bring about the necessary policy changes.

A system of political quotas is in place, but, according to Saric, it is often manipulated. “There are no women in politics and those few who do exist are often just the visible extension of a political party which has no interest in women’s issues.

“Women definitely do not have the power to make political and policy decisions in Bosnia.”

The importance that men hold in this still fairly conservative country is never more obvious than when we talk about the consequences of rape on the lives of women.

Although other charities officially offer support to rape victims, educational programmes organised by Saric often provide the only safe platform for many women to open up about their horrendous ordeals.

Some victims will only go only as far as to admit that “they did all sorts of things to them”. “All sorts of things” being a code phrase for rape.

How a woman deals with what has happened often heavily hinges on the reactions of her male family members.

“I once met a woman who told me how she confessed to her father-in-law that she had been raped. His reaction was: ‘what matters is that you’ve managed to stay alive’”, recalls Saric. “

Those women are going to be OK, as far as can be expected. But there are others, whose husbands abandoned them after finding out about the rape.

“We find that men play an extremely important role in a woman’s ability to accept what has happened to her and to move forward.”

The more I hear about the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the more it becomes clear why organisations like Women for Women are desperately trying to keep the focus of their donors and the international community on the situation in this country.

With so many people around the world suffering through conflicts, human rights abuses and extreme poverty, it is easy to imagine how Bosnia might slip down the ranks of the global needs scale.

Saric is keen to point out that her country still has “an enormous need for help.” It is a frail society where poverty is omnipresent, men are often lost as they can’t provide for their families and the country as a whole is still recovering from the horrors of war and economic collapse.

She fears that women there are “regressing as there is no money for anything apart from basic survival, if that.”

Still, there is a glimmer of hope for the future, despite a general feeling of concern for the present.

Women of all ethnicities and religions are coming together in their desire to forge a happier future. Since Bosnia emerged from the deepest depths of the recession, Saric has noticed a significant improvement in the percentage of business start-ups still surviving.

Women for Women offer between 5,000 and 6,000 micro loans every year and in the past 14 months almost all the new businesses to which they gave support are still going strong.

“It is definitely worth investing in women as the returns are multifaceted. We see it every day. Women support their husbands, families and communities as they want a better future I would say more than men do.

“Men tend to talk more and women work more for that change.”

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