WUNRN
CROATIA – COMPENSATION FOR SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE, 20 YEARS AFTER THE WAR!
“It’s a long story. It’s a twenty five-year-long
story, actually.” As long-time women’s rights activist Nela Pamukovic explains,
Croatia’s newest law on sexual violence is long overdue.
On May 29th, the Croatian parliament passed the first
law in the country recognizes rape as a war crime – the Act on
the Rights of Victims of Sexual Violence during the Military Aggression against
Republic of Croatia in the Homeland War. Set to go into effect in January, the
law will compensate war rape survivors with a monthly financial stipend and
access to free counseling, as well as legal and medical aid.
Throughout the war for independence in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s, systematic rape
was used as a weapon to intimidate communities and assert power
over women. In the twenty years since the formal end of the war in 1995,
survivors of sexual violence have had no status as civilian “victims of war” in
the eyes of the Croatian government – meaning they have had no rights to compensation
or to psychological or medical services.
“Women survivors, with the exception of rare cases,
were generally without financial support, unemployed and with significantly
decreased labor capacities as a consequence of survived trauma,” explains Nela
Pamukovic, co-founder of the Centre for Women War Victims (ROSA) in Zagreb,
Croatia, a long-time Global Fund for Women grantee partner. “They have been
living with their traumas kept inside.”
ROSA Co-Founder & Activist, Nela
Pamukovic
Founded in 1992 by Pamukovic and other women’s rights
activists who were focused at the time on ending gender-based violence and
elevating women’s voices in the anti-war movement, ROSA is focused on
empowering women – including survivors of sexual violence in conflict – on many
levels. ROSA offers economic and leadership activities, access to legal
services, and psychological support, and works to advance women’s rights and
equality in Croatia.
In 2010, ROSA started the Women’s Court Initiative –
together with six other women’s groups from the former Yugoslavia – in order to
give women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence a safe space to
share their stories and learn their rights, to provide access to legal services
for those filing criminal charges against perpetrators, and to strengthen
cross-border solidarity between women. While this is helping more women speak
up and share their stories, the stigma remains – even twenty years after the
war.
“Before this law, the problem [of war rape] was not
visible and if women spoke out about it, there was a stigma,” explained
Pamukovic. “But now – if they can get something to improve their lives and the
lives of their families – they will have some motive to ask for their rights.”
ROSA has been working to make the issue of sexual
violence in conflict visible since 1992, and has been a proponent of the new
law since 2009.
“We recognized that we should [take action] about the
status of women who survived rape and became invisible,” said Pamukovic,
explaining how ROSA began to focus its advocacy efforts on the new law. “Nobody
was interested – even among our colleagues in women’s networks. Some of them
said, ‘the war is over, why do we have to go back?’ or ‘we have more urgent
issues’.”
But ROSA was determined and began collaborating with
other organizations that supported women survivors of war rape.Because of its
advocacy efforts over the years and its work providing legal and psychological
services to war rape survivors, ROSA was appointed to the working group created
by the Ministry of War Veterans to draft the new law.
Over two years, ROSA made several critical
recommendations as part of the working group, elevating issues the organization
had been documenting since the end of the war. ROSA also lobbied and intervened
after each of the two readings of the draft law in parliament – last year and
this year.
While the version of the law that was passed has
several shortcomings, according to ROSA, it does incorporate some of ROSA’s language
recommendations and reflect its advocacy efforts. For instance, the Ministry of
War Veterans, in the first draft, wanted to provide only a one-time payment to
women survivors so ROSA joined with other organizations to lobby that this was
not sufficient. They proved that women survivors needed monthly stipends in
order to raise their quality of life.
“Many of these women survivors live in very poor
conditions; many of them are deeply traumatized by the situation – they haven’t
told anyone,” expressed Pamukovic. “Many of them hadn’t even asked for their
basic rights that they have as poor citizens because they are so traumatized.”
Still, Pamukovic emphasizes that the fact of financial
compensation – though a major step in the right direction for Croatia and for
women who experienced sexual violence in conflict – is not an end goal for war
rape survivors. Pamukovic shared the story of one of the women ROSA works with:
“One of our clients who lives in the countryside – her good friend came to her
[after the law was publicly announced] and said, ‘Oh, now you will have lots of
money’ so she stopped talking to this friend and said, ‘my trauma is so deep
and this cannot really heal me’.”
ROSA will continue to fill a critical gap in Croatia
by providing women with a safe space to share their stories, meet other women
who were raped during the war, and access legal services and psychological and
medical counseling sessions led by other survivors of gender-based violence.
With the goal of empowering women driving its work
forward, ROSA has a key role to play as Croatia’s new status law is
implemented. Women will have to submit applications to be recognized as
survivors in order to secure compensation, and ROSA will support them in
submitting the applications, guiding them through government requirements and
providing psychological support.
“I’m afraid – what kind of experiences will women face
when they apply [for financial compensation under the new law]? Because we
know, that’s why we’ve worked from the beginning supporting women survivors of
violence – because in any institution they come to ask for their rights, they
are not understood, they are not supported, they are not trusted. They are very
often harassed,” said Pamukovic. “I believe it will happen with this law.”
ROSA will now focus on addressing issues in the final
version of the law because, as Pamukovic explains, it “is not in favor of the
victims” and narrowed the scope of rights for survivors, removing mention of
housing assistance or the right to continuing education, for instance. In
addition to these advocacy efforts, ROSA plans to set up a special website to
try to reach as many women as possible who might be able to access rights under
the new status law. ROSA will also reach out to psychiatric hospitals where
many women go for trauma counseling and support, and will train doctors and the
directors of hospitals to provide information on the new law.
“These women have been living in silence, at the margins of our society, surrounded by their painful memories. They did not speak at all, or spoke very rarely about their hard experiences,” expressed Pamukovic. “Therefore it is of great importance that this law was finally brought, even after more than 20 years from the time when the crimes were committed."