Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told had their men with them. Many women described how they would try to make themselves as unattractive as possible. Sometimes their own family would not recognize them as they arrived in the refugee camps because they were so dirty and untidy. One 15-year-old girl described how she and two friends dressed up as old women as they were going to a nearby village to get some food. They put on old women's dresses and scarves on their heads. In this case, however, the ruse failed. The interviewee reported: "As we were heading home, a jeep stopped us with paramilitaries. They tried to take me but I gave them some gold and they let me go. One of my friends did not have any gold or money to give them so they took her with them into a nearby house. We could hear her scream and cry but then the paramilitaries told us to leave or they would kill us. After some time my friend came to my house and she told me she had been raped by two men. Her body was full of bruises, also on her neck and she was bleeding from the groin. She told us that they had done what they wanted to her and then they had released her. We wanted to take her to a doctor but there was no doctor around. We couldn't help her." 5 The following statement from a Kosovo Albanian woman illustrates how ever-present the threat of being raped was: "On 24 March four policemen entered our house in Pristina. They shot around them, killing one person, and then they set the house on fire. They forced us to enter another house and there they took a group of women and girls to the second floor, among them were my two daughters and three daughters-in-law. Upstairs the women were then raped by the police and I could hear them scream. Afterwards we were ordered outside and a lot of shooting began. In the confusion I lost my daughter but I still had her two children. I hid in a house for two days, but then the owner got scared and told me I had to leave. So I went to the railway station." This interviewee also reported that there had been many rapes at Pristina station, and that as the train she was on neared the border at Djeneral Jankovic/Hani i 6 Elezit, young women were separated and taken away. Another 28-year-old women told how she and her friends were stopped by five police officers on a street in Pristina. The women were made to enter a 7 house by the police and there the 28-year-old woman was forced to perform oral sex. Rape during attacks on villages. One of the situations where women would be at great risk of being raped was when Serb forces attacked the villages. A common scenario was as follows: the village would be surrounded by Serb forces, who would gather the villagers together. Men would be separated from women and the women would be gathered in a house. From the house "young and beautiful" women would be taken and returned after some time. A typical case is described below. From the statements of refugees this pattern was repeated in villages all over Kosovo. As the inhabitants of a village outside Gnjilane/Gjilan were hiding in the mountains nearby in mid-April, they were surrounded by a group of paramilitaries. The inhabitants were forced back to the village and women were separated from men. One pregnant woman was immediately singled out by the commander who started to molest her publicly. The women were all put into a big house and from the house the paramilitaries would single out women they found most attractive. Some of the women were taken to a nearby house and others where driven away. When the women returned to the house, some of them showed signs of ill-treatment such as bite marks or bruises. Some also behaved as if they had been drugged, acting erratically and walking unsteadily. This continued for a day; the following day the villagers were forced to leave for the border. 8 http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch7.htm (5 of 17)12/5/2003 11:51:55 AM