Between Two Worlds

by Zainab Salbi

  I didn’t feel safe just because I was in America. Every Iraqi knew the Mukhabarat had spies around the world. There were many stories of Iraqis in exile who were attacked in their own homes or assassinated, and in one case, a videotape that contained images of the rape of a dissident’s sister was sent to him in exile as a blackmail. But my fear, like that of many Iraqis, was not based on reason alone. I feared Saddam with every part of my body and mind and soul, and that organic fear would never leave me, not even in the comfort of my marriage in Virginia. I shuddered to think how close I had been to Amo. Sometimes I envisioned fear as a part of my body, like my cells, like my blood. I’m sure my friends thought of me as odd. When I went to one friend’s house and saw a bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey, I asked him to put it away. When guests came over, I instinctively turned up the stereo if anyone mentioned politics or even personal gossip. One night, I accidentally used Amo’s fork as a serving utensil, and when an Egyptian friend picked it up and studied the insignia, I snatched it away and never put it out again. A careless slip. How could I ever explain how I had come by that fork? How could I explain to American authorities that my father was the one who flew Iraq’s commercial airliners to Tehran for safekeeping during the Gulf War and my mother had given Saddam moisturizer when he complained his face felt dry? I never shared any of these thoughts with anyone except Amjad. If we referred to him, I always said “Amo” because I was afraid to say “Saddam Hussein” out loud, even in my own home. I never participated in classroom discussions on Iraq. I never wrote school papers about Iraq. After a while, few people asked me about it. Millions of Iraqis were embarking on a decade of pain in which they would pay the price for the tyranny of a man almost everyone wanted overthrown. Americans were on to other issues.

  So was I. Amjad and I had been married for six months when I read a story in TIME magazine about “rape camps” in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia where women were being held and raped day and night, apparently by Serbian soldiers. There was a picture of women sitting on what seemed like a hospital bed. Some were teenagers; some seemed to be their mothers. Something in those magazine pages triggered a pain so deep inside me and so sudden that I just started weeping. Amjad was in the kitchen with some friends cooking dinner, and he came running out, trying to see what had happened to me.

  “We have to do something,” I said, showing him the story as he tried to both comfort me and read the story that was the source of my pain. “I have to do something to help these women.”

  The next day, I went to the library and checked out as many books as I could find about the region. I needed to understand where it was, who its people were, what its history was, and what the fighting was about. I wasn’t sure what drove me—my own rape, my understanding of what it felt like to live in a war, my outrage at the social injustice, or maybe just the possibility that I could actually do something to help—but I felt as if I were on a mission. I got out the yellow pages and called women’s groups to volunteer to help support their projects in Bosnia and Croatia. To my surprise, I couldn’t find any organization working with these women. “Call us in six months,” one woman told me. “Maybe we will be doing something then.” Six months? How could we wait six months to respond to mass rape? From my reading, I now knew that people had explained the lack of action against the Nazi Holocaust by saying they didn’t know about it. No one could say that with Bosnia. Hundreds of thousands of Bosnian and Croatian civilians were being killed in a genocide that was practically being committed on television. Twenty thousand women had already been raped—twenty thousand. How could this be allowed to happen? What excuse did we have this time for the lack of action?

  One night at a coffee shop, I told Amjad and his brother Eyad about an idea I had that was sort of like international programs in which families sponsor children, and we talked about it. A program could be set up in which one woman at a time would sponsor a rape victim, send her money each month that she could spend as she chose to help get herself going again, and write her letters of support so she would know she wasn’t alone. The next day, I tried another round of calls offering to help organizations set up such a program and was able to get an appointment with the All Souls Unitarian Church. I walked into their board of directors meeting a week later with my father-in-law’s briefcase, thinking it would make me look older and more serious. I had read Quranic verses asking God to release my tongue as he did Moses’ when he faced the Pharaoh, and the church board of directors agreed to allow me to start such a project under their nonprofit umbrella. They would advise me as needed and do the bookkeeping for the donations raised. I had one year to turn my project into an independent nonprofit. It was perfect!

  Amjad was excited and supportive. We would start this organization together. He worked on incorporation papers as I drafted brochures with the help of some church volunteers. His family’s basement became our operations center where his parents volunteered to fold and collate. After two months of networking and fundraising, Amjad and I were cofounders of Women for Women International’s predecessor, which we called Women for Women in Bosnia. Between the money we raised and the savings we had been keeping for a honeymoon in Spain, we had enough to go to Croatia and start work. Judy Darnell, a Philadelphia nurse with a long history of volunteer work in Croatia, helped us make Women for Women International a reality on the ground. I had called her to ask for help, and she said, “Count me in.”

  When we landed in Zagreb, she had meetings already set up to educate us and help us get going. Our first meeting was with Ajsa, a woman with short dark hair, a face puffy and reddened, and a polite smile. She had been recently released from a camp in a prisoner exchange—soldiers freed in exchange for imprisoned civilian women. She sat across the table from us in loose, donated clothes and started talking matter-of-factly, almost in a rote manner, after we explained to her that we were there to set up a program and needed to better understand women’s needs so we could respond to them properly.

  “I was imprisoned in a rape camp for nine months, and they released me when I was eight months pregnant,” she said very fast, almost as if she were talking about someone else. “I had my baby two months ago, but she died because of health complications. I didn’t know how to feel about that child. I loved her because she was my baby, but every time I looked at her, I remembered what the soldiers kept saying as they raped me: ‘You are Muslim. You are a Turk. You deserve to be raped. This is to avenge what your ancestors have done to our people.’ They never stopped with their slurs, their spitting, and their raping of me.”

  She didn’t know which one was the father of her child. She couldn’t even remember them all. I felt the blood draining from my face as she periodically stopped her recital for the interpreter, and used that time to sniff back tears before resuming. She talked about the life she used to have, a loving husband and two children and a farm with sheep.

  “I had a life, and now it is all gone. Everything was taken away from me in a matter of moments. I don’t know why. What did I do to them? What did my husband do? I haven’t seen him or my children since the day they captured me. I don’t know if I will ever see them again. If I do, will they accept me? Will they be able to love me again after they see me in this shape? Look at me. Look at me!”

  Neither Amjad nor I cried when she did; we instinctively knew that would take away the dignity of her own tears. But when we got back to the hotel, we lay there and held each other and just sobbed together. We toured Croatia for a week and learned of horrors I still can barely comprehend. Eighty-year-old grandmothers and girls as young as four were raped in village squares, then discarded with their organs ruptured. Sons were ordered to rape their mothers. Fathers were ordered to rape their daughters. The most educated women were selected to be raped in front of their towns-people. Some Serbian soldiers were ordered to rape to prove their manhood and machismo. One captured soldier who refused described being ridiculed by a commander who took off his own pants, raped a woman in front of him, and
told him “This is how it’s done” as fellow soldiers laughed at him.

  There was nothing random about these acts. There had been thousands of rapes and thousands of witnesses to the rapes. There are those who say that soldiers of all armies rape, but there was only one army, the Serbian army under control of Slobodan Milǒsević, that organized rape camps. These weren’t informal bivouacs in the forest; the Serbian Army took over hotels and schools and public buildings for this purpose and were continuing to operate under the international public eye virtually unstopped. Then they would release their victims late into pregnancy so they could not abort their “Serbian” babies, and their families would feel shamed and abandon them. The United Nations counted sixteen rape camps organized by the Serbian Army. Rape was every bit as much a strategy of war as the ethnic cleansing fought with guns, perhaps more so because it didn’t just eliminate individuals, it destroyed whole families and societies. Serbian soldiers were encouraged to hate Bosnians because the Ottoman Empire had once controlled the Balkans, and to hate Croatians because their ancestors were assumed to be Ustasha, Nazi sympathizers, during World War II. They had been told they were avenging crimes committed against their grandfathers by the grandfathers of these women.

  As if women were a field of battle where two old enemies met to set scores straight.

  Most of the women we met had a small bag with a few pieces of clothing and perhaps some things they thought to grab as they fled their homes, proofs of lost lives in which a high school diploma or a deed to a house mattered. Some were lucky enough to have a picture to pull out and say, Here’s my son, the one they killed, or Here is my husband, have you seen him? I remember one woman talked impassively about how she escaped from her home when Serbian soldiers attacked her village. She grabbed her two sons and ran, looking back to see her house burning behind her, then running to save her boys’ lives. For two days, they ran in a dark forest, a story I would hear over and over again, a running into the heart of a strange darkness you don’t know, but you know you have to run and run and run and leave behind your memories and your community and sometimes the bodies of your loved ones. Except for her trembling hands, this woman might have been telling someone else’s story. There was very little affect in her voice.

  We went to Croatia to help rape victims, but members of women’s groups in Croatia and Bosnia showed us why that instinct, while natural, would not help reintegrate them into society. Some of these women reminded me of my mother as they smoked cigarettes, whispered together, and even laughed good-naturedly at my seriousness of purpose. “Do you really want to set up lines of women who receive sponsorships every month while their neighbors point and say, Look, there go the raped women?” one of them asked me. “Isn’t it enough that some of them are living in refugee camps with signs saying ‘rape victims’ to make it easier for the press and international workers to find them?”

  That was my first lesson in professional humility. The second was that my best teachers came from women I sought to help. They had a wisdom I was hungry for. They were kind enough to share it with me, and I was grateful to have a chance to understand things that had always been forbidden to me before. I yearned to understand not only these women’s suffering, but the mental state of the men who had inflicted it. How had the men’s hearts been so twisted into believing they had a right to inflict such pain? How many Serbian soldiers had been forced into the army? How many had been told, here, Prove your loyalty by murdering and raping your enemy’s woman? How many had resisted, and at what price? Being a victim, morally speaking, was easy in some ways. It didn’t involve the same sorts of choices.

  On one of our last nights in Croatia, Amjad and I talked for a long time about moral issues and personal choices.

  “What kind of criminal would do these things to another human being?” he asked. He couldn’t understand.

  “Sometimes the price they have to pay for refusing an order is too high for some to make,” I said.

  “Not everybody had a gun pointed to his head.”

  “That is probably true for most of them. But that would make it easy. If someone pointed a gun to your head, it’s easy to say I would rather die than do that. What if it’s other people’s lives that are being threatened, the people you love, your mother and father, your wife and children, a whole family of cousins? Tell me, Amjad, if somebody with a gun said, ‘Here, kill this stranger or I’ll kill your wife,’ whose life would you choose, mine or the stranger’s?”

  He looked at me with his wonderful eyes.

  “Someone has to say no,” he said.

  We started from different places and wound up with the same conclusion. We could not change the history that made people hate. But we pledged to each other that, no matter what the circumstances, neither of us would be party to propagate it. We gave each other permission to watch the other killed rather than to be coerced into killing another human being.

  Three months later, I went to back to Croatia on my own to deliver the first sponsorship money we had raised. I spent my twenty-fourth birthday at a refugee camp in a place called Split on the Croatian coast. I met there a woman five years younger than I named Inger, who spoke very good English and who talked to me about how much she missed her father in Bosnia. She introduced me to families living in classrooms in what used to be a school. Twenty people were forced to sleep together in a small room with few blankets and very little water. I was extremely thirsty, and one woman must have understood because she said something in Serbo-Croatian, and her daughter went to a corner and brought out a hidden bottle of precious water they shared with me. I was always awed by the generosity of refugees. When I boarded a bus for the twelve-hour ride back to Zagreb, Inger stayed behind.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Why was I sitting in a bus on my way to a hotel room while she had to suffer? A fluke? Luck? God’s mercy? Al hamdilalah. Al hamdilalah. Al hamdilalah. Thank God. Thank God, that I did not have to suffer the way Inger or other refugees were suffering. As Amjad kept on telling me, if not for my horrible marriage, I would never have gone to Washington or met him or had a chance to do this work. Fighting the injustice Amjad and I had seen became the centerpiece of our lives. With the help of All Souls Unitarian Church, students holding fundraising concerts, and volunteers joining us from all over the country, we were able to raise enough money for an office and a move out of Amjad’s parents’ basement—but not enough money to pay me to run the organization. So Amjad set aside his lifetime dream of getting the doctorate that would lead him to become a full-time professor, and began working full-time as a temp to support our work.

  American women, Canadian women—even Bangladeshi women—began signing up as sponsors who sent a monthly check along with a letter to a victim of war. I felt very strongly that this cash should go directly to the women, because it represented freedom to make a choice again in their lives, even if it was a small one. They could buy medicine for their children or fruit or cosmetics if they chose. It was their choice, not ours. Later, we began setting up a few programs to help them transition back into society, including support groups that would help replace the social networks they had lost and allow them to discuss larger issues like women’s role in war, economy, politics, and society. These “invisible refugees,” as I came to call them, didn’t fit the stereotype of refugees starving in tatters. Basic traits and hygiene habits don’t change, even if lives do. I knew that from my own experience. I never changed the way I spoke or put on lipstick or carried myself when I lost almost everything I had. Why did so many people assume that all refugees look and act alike, as if their culture and upbringing had been stolen from them along with their material possessions? Just because they wore clean dresses or spoke well didn’t mean these women didn’t need help. Sometimes putting on lipstick or a clean dress meant that a woman was resisting giving up that last hope that every shred of her old life was gone. I had to make hard choices when it came to something as simple as the pictures we used on our brochures; peop
le would give more money to pictures of women in head scarves who looked hungry and oppressed. There were many such women, but for me, portraying these refugees that way was only another way of robbing them of their dignity. Eventually we would also start micro loan programs for small businesses and job training programs, including classes in nontraditional skills I had studied in junior high and high school.

  Each sponsor wrote letters to her “sister,” and her sister wrote back. Every day I would sit with volunteers as we processed letters and stuffed envelopes. I had originally envisioned these letters as helping war victims feel they weren’t alone. But as the letters came back from women in Bosnia and Croatia, I realized the survivors of war were using these private letters to tell strangers about the pain they felt they could share with no one else. Through them, they could retain their own identity and yet remain anonymous. The letters were testaments, and the letters the women’s sponsors wrote back bore witness to their suffering. They had a powerful effect on me, like a silent tide of emotions in which women talked not only about war and loss, but also about their families and their gardens. Some were poetic, some incredibly profound. “I got your letters,” one Bosnian woman from Sarajevo wrote to her sponsor. “I experienced them like rays of sunlight that reach to the bottom of a dark cave. I lived through the shelling and all the other suffering, but they killed the ‘I’ in me.”