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You Cannot Run On One Leg
by
Neeraj K Singh

Some days back, in the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, I came across an interesting example of the application of the code for involuntary manslaughter. There was once a pregnant woman who tried to mediate in a quarrel between two men. The men however ended up firing their guns at each other though neither was hurt. Not long afterwards, the woman gave birth to a stillborn infant. She alleged that the child was stillborn because of the noise of the guns that the two men had fired. The matter went before the Elders but they could not decide on a judgement. Then the most experienced of them led the Elders to a milk-shed where there was a pail of milk with its cream smooth and undisturbed. The first Elder walked some distance away from the pail, drew a pistol and fired two shots in the air. To their amazement the Elders found that the cream had got completely mixed with the milk in the pail. The first Elder then said: “A pregnant woman is like the cream of the milk. The noise of the guns jolted the woman, as it did the milk in the shed. This frightened the woman and led to the death of the child in her womb.” Convinced, the Elders unanimously held the two men liable for murder.

At the time I had just read it in passing as an interesting anecdote from the Middle Ages. The parallel drawn with the cream of the milk did reflect, however, a certain tenderness with which pregnant women were treated by the tough mountainfolk even in those days when man would kill man on the slightest provocation. The other day, while going through the Police Daily Situation Report, I was confronted with a harsh reminder of the anecdote. In Urosevac town, a K-Albanian male reported to UNMIK Police that on the 14th of August four K-Albanian men had assaulted his pregnant wife. Injuries caused by the assault had compelled the doctors to abort the unborn child.

Even in its frigid objectivity, the police report had a melancholic strain to it that filled me with a sense of anguish I could not immediately explain. After all there was nothing apparently out of the ordinary in the report. Just another life cruelly and senselessly snuffed out among the myriad killings in the recent past. Just another addition to the crime statistics. Then what was there that I found profoundly disturbing about it? The anecdote from the ‘Kanun’ kept coming back to me. In those days of savagery, in their own crude way the Elders had discovered that even so much as firing a gun in the presence of a pregnant woman could render the firer responsible for harming the child she carried. Today, as we step into the 21st century, a helpless pregnant woman is assaulted by four ‘valiant’ men to an extent where her child is aborted. Is this the modern civil society we seek to create in Kosovo?

The fundamental issue for the people of Kosovo in their struggle against Serbia has been the quest for ‘liberty’ and ‘individual dignity’. Are these ideals sought for the men of Kosovo alone while the women continue to be demeaned? The women of Kosovo have suffered more than the men in their struggle against oppression. They have not only sacrificed their sons, husbands, fathers and brothers for the cause, but have been subjected to the worst form of personal indignities at the hands of the marauding forces of ethnic hatred. Should they now continue to suffer the same indignities in silence simply because the present perpetrators are their own people? Should their pain be mitigated by the knowledge that it is inflicted by men from their own ethnicity? The reality is that the enemy no longer stands apart but is one of their own people.

Ten years back there was an intensive propaganda in the Serb media about the rape of Serb women in Kosovo by Albanian men. In 1990, an independent committee of Serbian lawyers and human rights experts carried out a study to verify these allegations. On analysing all the statistics on rape and attempted rape for the 1980s, they found that the frequency of the crime was significantly lower in Kosovo than in other parts of Yugoslavia. While inner Serbia, on an average, had 2.43 cases per year for every 10,000 men in the population, the figure in Kosovo was 0.96. Their findings also negated the allegations of wide scale rape of Serb women in Kosovo.

Contrast this with the present incidence of violence against women in Kosovo and the picture that emerges is not very encouraging. This month, between the 1st and 15th of August, there have been 9 cases of rape, 6 of attempted rape and 7 cases of abduction or attempted abduction of women reported to the police. In just these 15 days, there have been 18 cases of assault on women, half of them by their own husbands. In almost all those cases, the victims and assailants were both K-Albanian. In more than half the cases, the rapist was a friend or acquaintance.

When going by police reports in making an assessment of the prevalence of sex crimes, one must bear in mind that very few women are willing to report such crimes to the police. I also admit that occurrences over such a short period of 15 days cannot be taken as a reliable indicator of long-term trends. Yet I could not resist the temptation to attempt a projection of the figures to see how they compared with the study carried out in 1990.

The method adopted by me was at best a crude analysis based on rough estimations of population data and I do not claim any statistical authenticity. In the absence of precise census figures I have taken the total population of Kosovo to be 2 million as estimated in 1991. In fact the 1991 figures were also merely a projection from the earlier data, since the Albanians had boycotted the census. It is estimated that 60% of the population of Kosovo is below 24 years of age. Based on these estimates, we may presume that the adult (over 18 years) male population of Kosovo would be approximately 600,000. If we were then to project the 15 days figure of 15 reported cases of rape and attempted rape for a whole year, it averages out to 6.08 cases for every 10,000 men in the population – more than six times the figure for Kosovo in 1990.

Part of this escalation in sex crime figures can be explained by the possibility that Albanian women are now more willing to report such crimes to the UNMIK Police and KPS than they were to the Serb Police. Even discounting for this factor, such a quantum jump in sex crimes is a grim reflection on the deteriorating status of women in Kosovo as it moves towards self-governance. Here I would like to stress that this is more a social problem than a matter for the police to resolve. The police cannot prevent incidents like domestic violence or sexual assault on women by their friends and relatives. UNMIK Police has been intent on creating a security environment that addresses the women’s concerns as much as those of the men. One indicator of this is the fact that out of its overall strength of 4,019, the Kosovo Police Service today has 764 women officers, that is 19% of the total.

Initiatives taken by UNMIK Police have helped instil greater confidence in women and encouraged them to stand up for their rights and report violations to the police. What is required however, is a wider social movement to address the issue. Real progress will come only when there is a solemn resolve to promote a fraternity in Kosovo assuring the dignity of the individual as well as liberty and equality for all its citizens irrespective of sex, ethnicity and creed. If you try to move on one limb, ignoring one-half of the population, you can only manage to limp.