TV-BOSNIA: ‘Calling the Ghosts’ Puts Spotlight on Wartime Rapes

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 13 1997 (IPS) - A TV movie depicting the horrific incidence of rape, used to subjugate women during the conflict in Bosnia- Hercegovina, has jolted TV viewers across the United States.

The documentary ‘Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women,’ directed by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelinc has been showing on the Home Box Office (HBO) network. It reveals exactly what it means for women to survive the trauma of rape during wartime.

The film first aired on HBO’s Cinemax channel in March and has since been awarded a gold plaque at the Chicago Film Festival. It focuses on Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, two women who were lawyers and friends together in the Bosnian city of Prijedor before the breakup of Yugoslavia.

“Those were the loveliest days, when we couldn’t even guess what would happen to us,” Sivac tells the filmmakers.

But when war broke out in Bosnia in 1992, the two women were rounded up with other residents of Prijedor at the notorious Omarska camp. Along with their female companions, both Cigelj and Sivac were raped, and suffered continual harassment, detention and the threat of execution at the hands of their Bosnian Serb captors, led by camp commander Zeljko Mejakic.

“What the Serbs had was a plan to humiliate systematically these women,” Sivac says in the film. “All along, the goal was ethnic cleansing.”

Added to the brutality of what happened to them, the Omarska victims have had to grapple afterward with the fact that the rapists remain free, and even scoff at charges that they have done anything wrong.

Mejakic, whom Cigelj accuses of personally raping her, denied to a U.S. reporter that he could ever have done such an act — because, he said, Cigelj is 20 years older, and “the person in question is bad and unattractive.”

The film traces the path the two women take from leaving Omarska as victims – Cigelj’s son says she was “a matchstick” when she returned from the camp – to helping themselves and others to bear witness to the crimes committed in Bosnia.

Both lawyers have also served as witnesses at the International Tribunal for War Crimes at the Hague and, while Sivac says their ordeal is often too painful to revisit, the film shows how they encourage all those who survived the horrors of Omarska to honour those who died by telling their story.

The ordeal depicted in the documentary, Sivac says, is “just a drop in the ocean of horrors that have taken place.” But whether even telling their stories will lead to justice against the criminals of Omarska remains doubtful.

Even in the case of Dusan Tadic – an Omarska warden who this month became the only Bosnian Serb to have been sentenced for war crimes by the International Tribunal at the Hague – there is reason to doubt that future convictions will occur, they say. As Sivac noted to IPS, Tadic was only convicted on 11 of 30 charges afainst him — winning acquittal on the key charge of murder.

“Justice sometimes comes on crutches, but it does arrive,” Cigelj affirms. Certainly the film is a first attempt to seek justice over a crime — the rape of women in war — that has never been redressed before.

Jacobson and Jelinc make that point effectively, juxtaposing at the end of the hour-long documentary the scenes from Omarska and shots of Rwandan refugees, Korean “comfort women” and other victims of wartime rape.

“The policeman who raped the ‘woman on the street’ in Omarska is sitting there, reading the morning paper, smoking a cigarette,” Jacobson and actress Julia Ormond, one of the show’s coproducers, say in a statement.

“Peace, reconstruction, reconciliation – none of that can happen with him there.”