-Caveat Lector-
Women for Rape Sought by Serbs
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
.c The Associated Press
BRAZDA, Macedonia (AP) -- City by city and village by village, Serbs are
hunting down young women to rape as they loot, empty and burn Kosovo's ethnic
Albanian communities, women escaping beyond the province's borders say.
International monitors, war crimes investigators and NATO all are reporting
numerous accounts of rapes in Kosovo -- atrocities that Yugoslav and Serb
officials deny.
Witness testimony so far indicates the rapes in Kosovo are ``neither isolated
nor incidental,'' said Patricia Sellers, a U.N. war crimes prosecutor at The
Hague, Netherlands, whose workers are gathering the first accounts.
``When the police entered the town, that was the first question they asked:
'Are there any women here?''' said Valbona Rrustemi, 19, of the southern
Kosovo town of Urosevac.
Rrustemi fled Urosevac with her family April 16, the day after two girls came
running through her family's garden, saying Serb police were after them, she
said.
Minutes later, police knocked at the family's door, asking if there were any
young women, she said. Her father said no while she hid, Rrustemi said.
Word later reached her of four Urosevac women who had been caught by the
Serbs that day, she said. They included a friend who was raped in the street,
Rrustemi said. She named the friend and gave her age, 22.
The woman's cousins had confirmed the attack, Rrustemi said. No one has heard
of the woman or her immediate family since.
``I don't know what happened to them. I hoped they escaped,'' said Rrustemi,
one of several women at the Brazda refugee camp to give accounts of rapes in
Urosevac.
NATO, also citing refugee accounts, contends there have been several
instances of mass rapes, well-organized on at least a local level:
At Djakovica, near the Albanian border, Serb soldiers allegedly took women
from their families and sent them to an army camp where they were held for
repeated rapes.
In Pec, a local Serb commander allegedly held ethnic Albanian women at a
hotel, organizing a schedule by which his soldiers could come to spend an
evening.
At an ammunition factory and ferronickel plant at an unspecified site in
Kosovo, 100 women allegedly were still being held as of mid-April.
In many cases, word that Serbs were separating ethnic Albanians into groups
of women and men was enough to send families fleeing -- making rape a means
of emptying communities, as much as massacres, arson and looting.
``The intent is to not just to intimidate and humiliate the actual physical
victim but also to somehow intimidate those who are standing there either
looking at it or hear about it,'' Sellers said.
The United Nations first prosecuted rape as a separate war crime after the
1992-95 Bosnian war. In the first case to focus exclusively on rape, the U.N.
War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia sentenced a Bosnian Croat
paramilitary chief in December to 10 years in prison for failing to stop
subordinates' 1993 rape of a Bosnian Muslim woman.
Serb forces in Bosnia were widely accused of using rape as a means of
``ethnic cleansing.'' Sellers said it was too early to tell if rapes in
Kosovo were as widespread as in Bosnia.
Refugees from Kosovo say the targeting of women continued even as their
convoys were being escorted out of the province.
In one instance, Serbs looking for women stopped vehicles of residents from
the area of the southern city of Gnjilane en route to the border, but the
convoy's Serb escorts protected the women, villagers said.
Many of the accounts of Serbs seeking out women to rape come from people who
escaped rather than those who were caught.
So far, reports gathered by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe number in the dozens, ``and not many dozens,'' said Jorgen Grunnet, a
spokesman for the head of the OSCE's Kosovo mission.
Sellers predicts the numbers will rise.
``The incidents are very close right now. We notice that people are much more
willing to come forward several months ... after sexual violence has
happened,'' she said. ``Right now, some of their priorities might be actual
physical survival.''
Accounts of rapes are increasing, including reports from refugees arriving
Sunday in Macedonia that Serb paramilitaries raped four girls ages 15-20
before killing them, along with about 15 other people of their village of
Ribar i Vogel, last week.
War-crimes investigators will also have to cope with the horror with which
ethnic Albanian culture regards rape. Kosovo Albanians said many victims may
be too shattered to talk, particularly women from villages rather than
cities.
Teuta Beselica, a student forced from Pristina and now living in Skopje,
Macedonia's capital, was one of many to call rape the worst crime imaginable
-- a ``disaster'' to Kosovo Albanian families.
``It's the worst thing you can do to an Albanian male, basically,'' Beselica
said. ``Killing a man or a woman is not half as
