Humanitarian aid to war-torn countries usually consists of blankets and beans, but the Balkan Womens Empowerment Project has taken a different approach to the war in the former Yugoslavia. Instead of bandages, BWEP has sent hundreds of books on feminism, rape, domestic violence, and war. Instead of funding a hospital, it is helping Croatian feminists start a women’s center in Zagreb, where 65,000 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, mostly women and children, now live.
Soric, a graduate student in feminist theology who’s of Croatian descent, had gone to Zagreb in 1984, staying two years, and had visited relatives in the country just before the war. The reports of the rapes “scared me and shocked me,” she says. “I feared for some of my cousins who were living in Bosnia. It became a very personal issue for me.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yet NONA will also become an archive, documenting womens experiences during the war. Soric calls the mass rapes genocidal rape. “It’s not just a man raping a woman. It is a Serbian man instructed to rape a non-Serbian woman for the sake of humiliating her, destroying her, possibly and often impregnating her so she could carry a Serbian child. All of these objectives are genocidal, carried out through rape.” Wielechowski adds that soldiers deliberately carry out the rapes publicly. “All of these women are going to see their friends, their sisters, their daughters, their mothers being raped, and then they’re going to tell their friends, their sisters. And they’re not going to want to come back, even if the UN manages somehow to broker some peace in the region and a resettlement plan. It’s a very efficient way to terrorize a population–to get them to leave and never come back.”
BWEP is now a three-woman operation; Mary Ann Rukavina, who’s also of Croatian descent, joined in October. The three are looking for funds to help keep NONA alive–for rent and office equipment–as well as to buy things like toys and sewing machines. They also need money to run BWEP and hope to fund another trip to Zagreb this spring. They’re selling T-shirts for $15 at Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 769-9299; they’re also trying to find local women’s, church, and college groups who would want to raise funds for specific NONA projects: write to BWEP, 4516 N. Ashland, suite 2W, Chicago 60640, or call 907-9576.
