ON BREAKING SILENCES AND OPENING SUITCASES

Testimonies of women refugees - Bosnia, Croatia and India

Ranjana Saxena

And there are no remaining witnesses to the events,

And no one to weep with, no one to remember with.
And slowly the shades withdraw from us,
Shades we no longer call back,
Whose return would be too terrible for us……
-Anna Akhmatova {In Judith Hemschemeyer’s translation}

“The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions
of history. Never before or since have so many people exchanged their
homes and countries so quickly. ... Estimates of the dead vary from 200
000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate)
but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted.
As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women
are thought to have been abducted or raped by men of religions different
than their own (and indeed by men of their own religion).”1

“Women are the primary targets of the fundamentalists. As properties of

the men and the State, women are violated, seized, abducted as part of
spoils of the war. They constitute the majority of refugees in all wars and in
all conflicts, in any location in the world, and now the majority of women
refugees are ‘Muslim’. The horrendous stories told by women refugees
from ex-Yugoslavia are no different in essence from those told by women
who escaped fundamentalism in Algeria....., or those of the 1971 liberation
war of Bangladesh, .... Or the stories of the ‘comfort women’ abducted and
reduced to sexual slavery in the camps by the fascist Japanese army.”2

Introduction
In the above piece of poetry Anna Akhmatova refers to the catastrophic
past of Russia that we all are aware of. She evokes the memory of this

1 Butalia U. The Other side of Silence. Voices From the Partition of India. Penguin
Books. 1998 p.3
2 Helie-Lucas M. The Suitcase. Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia. Meritus

J.,Tesanovic J. Metikos H. Boric R. (Ed.) University of California Press, 1997 p.205.

past when the Russians suffered irrepairable damages at the hands of
their own State. The poetess is also raising critical issues linked with
‘memory’ and ‘history’ paradigm. Does the memory of the incident vanish
along with the people who had experienced it?

The first excerpt is from Urvashi Butalia’s book The Other Side of
Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. It refers to the tragic fate of
the women of all communities and religions who were caught in between
the worst partition drama enacted by the men of the Indian subcontinent in
1947.

The second excerpt is from the Suitcase – Refugee Voices from Bosnia
and Croatia. Through the accounts of the victims/refugees this book
highlights how women became handled situations of violence, rape torture
and all kind of brutalities during war in the former Yugoslavia. Since times
immemorial the oral histories of warfare have been written and rewritten
over their bodies.

We are aware that conflicts have been an integral part of the evolution of
human civilizations. Be it for religious ethnic and/or ideological supremacy,
be it for dismantling or establishing kingdoms or empires. Each conflict
situation has been followed by quest for justice, reconciliation, peace and
harmony. These processes have contributed further towards the project of
enlightenment. It is also true that conflicts and post conflict resolutions
have also defined and redefined the bottom-line of morality and human
behavior the world over.

More than this, conflicts have also provided reasons for emergence of
critical sociological theories. Many theorists attempted to explain the rise of
fascism, genocide in Europe in terms of breaking up of the Enlightenment
project in the twentieth century. The war for ethnic cleansing in the former
Yugoslavia belied all hopes of engagement with a modern society. It also
shattered the very idea of a multicultural civilizational coexistence.

The history of the XX century, apart from the two major world wars and the
holocaust tragedy, is also a history of major ethnic and religious conflicts
resulting in dislocation, degradation and dishonoring of the human kind all
over the world. In each conflict women happen to be at the worst receiving
end, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or class or community.

For the Indian subcontinent the partition of the country into India and
Pakistan in 1947 was a major tragic event that involved huge loss of
human lives and resources. For the women of the subcontinent, regardless
of their religion, it spelt doom and disaster.
In this paper the voices of the women, as produced by the editors in the
book Suitcase (1995) edited by Jasmina Tesanovic and others and in
Silence (1998) by Urvashi Butalia, would be analyzed. Both the works
have made extensive use of oral narratives that are based on memories
personal and/or collective, personal letters, diaries, poetry etc. Both the
works are an attempt to look at history from the point of view of the women
and represent her stories in their own voices. These are untold stories,
mostly of women. These oral narratives tell not so much about the event
as much they inform us about the impact it had on the bodies and souls of
the victims, the women and children. The basic premise of both the
authors and editors is that official history has ignored the real life stories of
the ‘small players’, those people to whom history happens, the people who
have little role to play in creation of that catastrophic history but become
it’s worst victims.

The paper would attempt to look into these personal stories and/or
testimonials to understand the underlying issues. The paper would also
analyse the relationship between oral narratives and written histories. The
breakup of the former Yugoslavia into many ethnic regions and beginning
of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the region is reminiscent of the ‘partition’ of Indian
subcontinent into Pakistan and India in 1947.

1. WRITTEN ON THEIR BODIES AND SOULS

The book Suitcase deals with the stories of women and children, now
refugees, - victims of war, ethnic cleansing, dishonored, disgraced and
displaced form the region formerly named Yugoslavia.

The war that broke out in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, in Croatia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, perhaps can be termed the most tragic, as far
as, human loss, the loss of faith in humanity is concerned. This war has
often been described as the deadliest conflict in Europe since the WW II.

The Suitcase is a book that attempts to bring the voices of women and
children who were rendered homeless as the conflict began in the 1990s in
the region of former Yugoslavia. We are aware that the wars in Yugoslavia
were fought amongst republics that demanded sovereignty on one side
and the government in Belgrade on the other side. It was in 1991 that
Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Then Macedonia declared
independence, as well as, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The government in
Belgrade wanted to prevent this process and exerted controls.

This resulted in major conflict situation amongst the peoples of different

ethnicity. The first major wave of refugees began in 1992, when the
Yugoslav army and Serbian troops attacked cities in Eastern Slovenia
forcing thousands of Croatians to flee westwards. Waves of refugees also
began in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1992. There were more than two million
displaced people from the war in Bosnia.
The book consists of stories of women and children of varied ethnic groups
inhabiting this region, who had to flee away from their home location. The
book Suitcase does not try to judge which ethnic group suffered the most
or the least. It is an effort of the ‘collectors’ of these stories to bring the
dark side, the unsaid story out. The voices in this book are interspersed
with brief editorial comments to place the stories in the context of the
historical events in Bosnia. The ‘editors’ or the ‘collectors’ of these stories
deal with the voice of the women refugees, as over 80% of refugees from
Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia were women and children.

According to the editors “this book is not a collection of testimonies for a

war crime tribunal or other court. While some of the stories speak about
potentially prosecutable crimes, most of them point mainly to the
destruction of the human spirit – alone an offense for which there is no
law”.3 The editors are conscious of not turning these women into the ‘other’
and have no intention of appropriating their stories. The stories have been
written by the refugees themselves or told to the editors who then
transcribed.

Though we all are aware that it is not only women and children who are the
end sufferers of ‘man-made’ calamities, but it is important to look at the
voices of women, as in war and refuge, they are violated in many ways in
which men are not. Women become victims of rape, torture, genocide,
starvation and brutality of watching their children and loved ones killed and
tortured.4

3 Meritus J., Tesanovic J., et al. The Suitcase. Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia.
Meritus J.,Tesanovic J. Metikos H. Boric R. (Ed.) University of California Press, 1997
p. 6.
4 See. Skjelsbæk I. Victim and Survivor: Narrated Social Identities of Women Who

Experienced Rape During the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina in Feminism & Psychology

© 2006 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
www.usip.org/sites/default/files/missing-peace/Inger-Skjelsbaek.pdf
At the end of 1992, the Bosnian government released a figure stating that the number of women who had
been raped was about 14,000 (Olujic, 1998: 40). Later the same year (in December), the European
Community set the number of women of Muslim ethnicity who had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers at
around 20,000 (Drakulic, 1993: 270; Meznaric, 1994: 92; Olujic, 1998: 40; Nikolic-Ristanovic, 2000: 43;
Wing and Merchan, 1993: 11, note 54). The Bosnian Ministry of the Interior set the number at around
50,000 (Olujic, 1998: 40; Nikolic-Ristanovic, 2000: 43; Wing and Merchan, 1993: 11, note 54). In a report
by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) (Becirbasic and Secic, 2002), it is stated that the
From the small stories of the women refugees it becomes clear that nearly
all of them waited for times when they could go back to their homes.
“Some of them knew where they were headed, but most knew only that
they were going “out”, wherever that was, to “some place safe”. They left a
month’s supply of cat food on the floor for their pets, their laundry hanging
in the yard, their jewelry buried underneath a wooden fence, their winter
preserves carefully stored in the cellar; they all knew that they would be
back “soon”.5 Or they so hoped. Apart from losing their homes, their shared
childhood friendships, spaces and families, the worst nightmare for the
women was the for their grownup girls. All efforts were directed towards
saving them from a possible threat of rape.

All stories emphasize that rape has been used as a tool, a war strategy of
intimidation, silence and coercion of the entire community. Rape of girls
and women in front of their men, family and the whole community served
this purpose. It should be understood that war-rape experiences are
exceptional and unlike other war-trauma experiences. Roy Gutman, a
journalist with the Newsday was the first one to report the first instances of
rape and what appeared to be systematic sexual violence against women
in Bosnia to the international public. His accounts tell of mass rapes
seemingly carried out under orders in a systematic campaign of ethnic
cleansing.6

The mass terror that was unleashed against the women came to light and
“as early as December 18, 1992, the UN Security Council condemned
mass rapes in Bosnia, finding that Bosnian Serb soldiers in particulars had
raped Muslim and Croat women, both in detention camps and in individual
towns and villages, as part of a strategy to coerce non-Serb residents to
leave their homes. Evidence gathered by the United Nations and
independent human rights groups indicates that although all sides have
committed rape, the bulk of the evidence of “Systematic rape” – rape as
part of an apparent war strategy to terrorize and eliminate a population –

European Union (EU) Commission estimated the number of victims at 50,000. At a conference entitled
‘Violation of the Human Rights of Women in Bosnia and Herzegovina During the War 1992–1995’, held in
Sarajevo on 10–11 March 1999, the President of the Organizational Committee, Mirsad Tokaca, stated that
the Commission for Gathering Facts on War Crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina set the number of raped
women at 20,000 (Tokaca, 1999). Drakulic (1993) reports that the Sarajevo State Commission for
Investigation of War Crimes estimates that the number up until October 1992 was 50,000, and she adds that
these numbers are highly controversial. Meznaric (1994: 92) writes that the report of the Coordinative
Group of Women’s Organizations of Bosnia and Herzegovina estimates that between 20,000 and 50,000
women were raped.
5 Meritus J.,Tesanovic J. Metikos H. Boric R. The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and
Croatia. University of California Press, 1997, p. 22.
6 www.usip.org/sites/default/files/missing-peace/Inger-Skjelsbaek.pdf
points us to Bosnian Serbs raping Muslim and Croatian women”.7

The book gives a piece of poetry that expresses the condition of the
women, who had experienced so much of brutality, whose bodies and
souls had been deeply scarred and wounded:

I Believed:
I used to believe that the world was full of many colors now I know it’s just
black.
I used to believe that all people are kind now I know only some of them
are.
I used to believe that my friends would be with me all of my life now I know
that none of them would give any part of their body for me.
I used to believe that I could trust people now I know that I should be
careful.
I used to believe that people made friends to help people but now I know
people make friends out of self-interest.
I used to believe that I would have a good life with my neighbors but know I
know it is easy for them to kill in war.
I used to believe that no one could force me away from my homeland but
now I know this isn’t a dream. I couldn’t believe that my generation could
be worse than the older generation but now I know they are. I used to
believe in everything but now I believe nothing.
I used to believe in happiness but now I cannot even believe my eyes. I
used to believe that I would live by my wishes but now I know that I will live
by other people’s wishes.
What I couldn’t believe, I now believe”.8
These victims of war and ‘ethnic cleansing’ lost all that they had, their
children, husbands, fathers. Young girls lost their youth to the genocide
and children lost their innocence. In the following heartrending poem piece
of poetry we come across the pain of a young girl from Sarajevo who had
lost much more besides her home, her mother, her city, her dreams…

Untitled: What is left behind me?

Nineteen years of wonderful living, My mother in tears,

My big white house, 

Unforgettable friendships. Sarajevo,

7 opcit. pp.30-31.
8 Ibid. pp. 80.
Sleepy in the mist, 

Startled, My statistics textbook opened midway, the essay on morals half
accomplished,
One love story, half begun...
 Half of me left, half of me stayed. Now,

Two halves of one soul and one body, Unknown to each other.

My things all over the room,

A date I never went to,

My youth, stayed behind.9

These voices bring us very close to the losses of the refugees, their loved
ones killed, connections destroyed, homes and countries left behind, as
well as, pieces of one’s own self left behind. The pain, the helplessness,
sometimes anger and shame – all describe the experience of the women,
who had to suffer these tragic historical events that could have been
avoided. The women had lost the pictures of themselves, which meant,
“You lose your spirit, your soul, your self.10

Butalia’s book Silence is also an attempt to look at the partition of India

through the eyes of the victims and beyond the narratives of historical
evidences of the partition. Silence is about the human tragedy that shook
the Indian subcontinent after the political partition of India was announced
in 1947.

The book informs us that between a short span of some months

approximately 12 million people crossed over the boundaries between
India and the East and West Pakistan. Millions of people died. About
75,000 women are said to have been abducted and raped by men of the
‘other’ religions. In the book Butalia highlights the ‘human dimensions’ of
the something that forms part of history. She deliberately shifted the
attention from the major political players of the partition story like Gandhi,
Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten etc. to the ordinary victims of this political
decision.

While focusing on the ‘small’ stories of the ordinary women, men and
children, the author turn these people into ‘real people’ in flesh n blood.
People who were, so far, simply part of statistics come alive through their
narratives. “Thus, although partition is the subject of this book, the reader
will not find a chronology of events leading up to partition, or indeed the

9 Ibid. p. 173.
10 Ibid. p. 214.
many ‘political’ negotiations that followed it.”11

Though the process of partition impacted the life of one and all, but women
and children were the worst victims. There were women who were
abducted raped, killed. Sometimes if nothing of this happened to them, the
partition just entered as a volcano and ruptured their lives. There was a
whole generation of such women.

The book has been aptly called Silence, as the truth that comes out had
not been articulated, these were the ‘truth’ to which people referred to
hushed tones. Butalia has made an attempt to break the silence about
many issues concerning the fate of the women and children that have not
been written and/or talked about. In order to construct an alternative test to
‘real histories’, Butalia has taken into account personal, oral narratives,
testimonials, memories etc.

Butalia’s book also gives an account of women’s fate during partition as

given in a book in Gujrati by Kamlaben Patel, who had, apparently, worked
with abducted and raped women during partition. According to Kamlaben’s
story nearly “75000 women, she recounted, had been raped and abducted
on both sides of the border at Partition. This figure would probably have
been higher if Kashmir had been taken into account – perhaps close to
100,000. Apart from the rapes, other specific kinds of violence had been
visited on women. Many were paraded naked in the streets, several had
their breasts cut off, and their bodies were tattooed with marks of the
‘other’ religion; in a bid of defile the so-called ‘purity’ of the race”.12

For long Kamlaben Patel did not write about her findings. The reason for
her silence, as told to Butalia was “The reason I did not write my book
earlier was because I could not accept what I saw during that time. I found
it difficult to believe that human beings could be like this. It was as if the
demons had come down on earth.... It is when the dance of death and
destruction....it was as if this spirit had got into everyone, men and women.
Partition was like a tandav nritya.... I have seen such a abnormal things, I
kept asking myself, what is there to write, why should I write it...”13

From both side there was a massive campaign to ‘recover’ the girls and
women and sent them back to their families, but this process had its own
complexities as the families did not want to accept them back to their fold,

11Butalia U. The Other side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India. Penguin
Books. 1998 p. 11.
12 Ibid. p. 132.
13 Ibid. p. 133.
defiled and dishonored, the women had become ‘impure’. As recounted
the government had to set up ‘ashrams’ (homes for destitute women) in
North Indian cities to house the ‘retrieved’ girls and women. This recovery
process continued for almost a whole decade after partition.

The partition discourse about recovery of ‘our women’ from the Indian side,
as well as, from Pakistan was completely woven into a very patriarchal
mind set. Butalia quotes one such argument: “if there is any sore point or
distressful fact to which we cannot be reconciled under any circumstances
it is the question of the abduction and non-restoration of Hindu women. We
all know our history of what happened in the time of Shri Rama when Sita
was abducted. Here, when thousands of girls are concerned, we cannot
forget this. We can forget all the properties, we can forget every other
thing, but this cannot be forgotten.... As descendants of Ram, we have to
bring back every Sita that is alive.”14 Though it was understood to be
perfectly normal for these women to land up in ‘ashrams’, rejected by their
families for having become ‘impure’.

Hence, women were saved and retrieved, but it was the male honor that
was at stake. It was the ‘ honor’ of the state and family that was linked to
the abduction, rape, and murder of the women, thus it was a justified act to
‘dishonor’ the women of the other religion and community. It was also an
honorable act to kill ‘your’ women before the enemy side could lay hand on
them, it was justified to force them to commit suicide. Butalia’s book gives
an eye witness account of one such episode: “But when we found we were
helpless....we had no weapons, whatever little we had they had taken.
Then they took a decision in the gurudwara that all the young girls and
women – two are there persons were assigned the task of finishing them
off. Those in the gurudwara were asked to set it on fire with those inside...
first, we killed all the young girls with our own hands; kerosene was poured
over them inside the gurudwara and the place was set on fire .... Women
and children, were could they go?”15

Finally, from these stories of violation of women we would like to drive the
point home that it is not an issue linked with one community or the other,
with one region or the other, with one war or the other. In our
understanding the issue is also linked with the high levels of political,
religious, racial and gender-based intolerance. “A Rwandan Tutsi woman,
who witnessed women and girl children being raped in front of family
members, neighbors massacred with mashetes, and who survived the
slaughter, asked, “Why was I born a Tutsi?”. She lost everyone dear to her

14 Ibid. p. 178.
15 Ibid. p. 205.
because of who she was ethnically. In areas of conflict, millions of others
ask, why was I born a Muslim? A Jew? A Hutu? A southern Sudanese? A
Palestinian an Afghan? A Socialist? A woman?” 16

Collective Memory17 vs. History

Memories of people who have been left out on the margins of history form a
critical area of investigation today. Emergence of oral narratives that are based
on memories of the marginalized peoples drive home the significant point that
“pasts, that cannot be incorporated are privatized and particularized, consigned to
the margins of the national and denied a full public voice” still have a life and lie
deep down in the depths of collective social memory.18 They become part of the oral
tradition and are passed down from generation to generations. They may spring up
at any opportune time. This past lying deep in the labyrinths of individual and/or
collective memories has the capacity to stand up to pose a challenge to history.

Generally speaking, “It was earlier considered that that arguments and conflicts
over the politics of memory about the WWII, about the Third Reich and the
Holocaust would die out with the generation that had personally experienced these
incidents. Though despite the prognosis in majority of the European countries, on
the contrary, these debates became more intensive. <….> In Poland, as in the
Nederlands and Norway, heated discussions are on on the issue of the role played by
corresponding countries during the years of Nazism, to what extent the fascist
Germany was opposed and what was level of complicity”.19

Thus, the history of conflicts show that real truth about conflicts may or may not be

16Meritus J.,Tesanovic J. Metikos H. Boric R. The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and
Croatia. University of California Press, 1997, p. 216.
17 Marice Halbwachs, the French sociologist, made foundational contribution in the
field of the study of collective memory in the begining of the XX century.
18 Alonso A.M. The politics of Space, Time and Substance:State Formation,

Nationalism and Ethnicity. Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 1994, p. 389)

19 Welzer H. History, Memory And The Contemporariness Of The Past : Memory As

The Arena Of Political Struggle. Neprikosnovenny Zapas, 2005. (40-41) p.2-3.

http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2005/2/vel3.html (translated from the original
Russian by the author of this article).
articulated, but if the process of reconciliation has to happen, it is important that a
sense of justice prevails amongst the warring groups about the reasons of the
conflict. Though the character of collective memory, according to M. Halbwachs, is
always selective and diverse groups of people may have different collective
memories, still collective memory can throw a spanner in the path of a forward
movement. Collective memories hold within their folds the truth – that is so
necessary for any reconciliation process. As Slavenka Drakulic says that the
“precondition for the reconciliation process is justice.... But there is no justice
without truth.”

The books put forward the idea that while “scientific studies lose their importance
over time and statistics keep getting replaced”, these personal stories that are
part of collective memory will never lose their importance nor they fade away
easily. These stories of how families were wrecked and divided, how friendships
got ruined or endured across boundaries, how people lived and dealt with their
fears and traumas may have not become part of history, but, nonetheless, need
to be addressed.

Finally, the purpose to document oral narratives and make the women break
silences and open their suitcases to retrieve parts of their own history is “a
methodological tool that many feminist historians have found enormously
empowering. Looking at women's narratives and testomonies, and placing them
alongside, or indeed against, the official discourses of history, has offered feminist
historiansa new and different way of looking at history “.20

20Butalia U. The Other side of Silence. Voices From the Partition of India. Penguin
Books. 1998 p. 21.