Bosnian Muslim women who lost their relatives look at human remains found in a mass grave in the village of Cerska, near eastern Bosnian town of Milici (AFP Photo/STR)
When the actress Angelina Jolie wanted to travel to Sarajevo to shoot a love story for her debut as a director last October, she faced trouble. The actress’ permit to film in the Bosnian capital was revoked after groups representing Bosnian war rape victims pressured the authorities because they were unhappy with the “misleading” plot of Jolie’s film, described as a love story between a Serbian man and a Bosnian woman who met on the eve of the war in the country in the early 1990s.
To the victims it was more a story of a Serbian rapist and his Muslim victim, and they pressured authorities to refuse to grant a permit. It was a small victory for the NGOs representing the victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before that, in 2010, several NGOs took to the streets to ask for the prosecutor’s office to start investigating the rape victims’ cases in order for them to be able to file lawsuits against the perpetrators.
While in Bosnia victims organized themselves as early as the mid-1990s and often took to the streets asking for justice and to participate in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in Lebanon there is no NGO representing the victims of political assassinations the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is investigating. The STL has a Victim Participation Unit that gives victims the right to be part of the trials and then use the sentences to file their own lawsuits in order to get compensation from the perpetrators. But officials told NOW Lebanon that some victims in Lebanon might be afraid to speak up or get involved in the tribunal’s investigations for fear of retribution.
Some of the relatives of victims of assassinations targeting politicians and journalists in Lebanon since 2004 said that they do feel the need to organize and speak up. “I do feel the need for an NGO to speak in my name and call for a collective right that maybe I alone cannot fight for,” said Linda Daou, the mother of a 23-year-old man who died in the explosion targeting Kataeb politician Antoine Ghanem in September 2009. “In an NGO there would be many of us sharing the same suffering, and through group effort we can achieve something that one alone cannot, and make ourselves heard,” she added.
Others say they are either afraid they might be used politically or feel that their relatives’ lives are simply not important enough for the Lebanese authorities. “Who am I to ask for justice?” said Krikor Sogomanian, the son of 75-year-old Haigaz Sogomanian, who died in a bomb attack in Geitawi, Achrafieh in September 2005. “What am I going to ask? ‘We want the truth?’ Who are we to ask? Who are we? Justice is something, but if I would like to know who did it is something else. I would like to know. But how would I find out? I'll go file a lawsuit against an unknown person? Where would I file a lawsuit?” He recalled how, after the bomb that killed his father exploded, he had to fight with security forces simply to let him into the coffee shop where his father and four of his friends had been sitting to see if they were alright.
“We, as civilians, do not matter much for the tribunal, and therefore the current quarrels about it being politicized or not are not of much concern to us,” said Elias Azar, the 33-year-old son of a state prosecutor who was killed in an explosion targeting ISF Captain Wissam Eid in 2008. Civilian casualties got the least attention from the Lebanese security forces, the international investigation committee and the media, he told NOW Lebanon.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina the sectarian and ethnic situation is not much different from Lebanon’s. While over 6,000 NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina represent war victims or deal with the protection of victims' rights, according to a report by the International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, the groups are divided along national grounds. Some represent victims from the federation inhabited by Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, and others from Republika Srpska, inhabited by Serbs.
Despite their divisions, NGOs keep pressuring their governments. Many of them are women’s rights groups representing rape victims and relatives of massacred Bosnians. “The first victims to speak up were women victims in Srebrenica,” Bosnian journalist Nidzara Ahmetasevic told NOW Lebanon. “For 15 or 20 days after the fall of Srebrenica, they went out on the streets and they asked to know where their husbands and their children were. They stayed on the streets for a long time, because nobody could give them the answer, but they were asking, they were demanding because they were desperate. This was the beginning of the whole movement,” she said.
Ahmetasevic added that some women’s organizations started offering psychological help to victims suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome as early as 1993, though the government, as in Lebanon, doesn’t offer any kind of access to counseling. “The government does not help the victims at all. Some survive with money from international donors, but never from the Bosnian government, unfortunately. The state just doesn’t care about the rights of these people,” Ahmetasevic said.
Nadine Elali contributed reporting to this article.
To the victims it was more a story of a Serbian rapist and his Muslim victim, and they pressured authorities to refuse to grant a permit. It was a small victory for the NGOs representing the victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before that, in 2010, several NGOs took to the streets to ask for the prosecutor’s office to start investigating the rape victims’ cases in order for them to be able to file lawsuits against the perpetrators.
While in Bosnia victims organized themselves as early as the mid-1990s and often took to the streets asking for justice and to participate in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in Lebanon there is no NGO representing the victims of political assassinations the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is investigating. The STL has a Victim Participation Unit that gives victims the right to be part of the trials and then use the sentences to file their own lawsuits in order to get compensation from the perpetrators. But officials told NOW Lebanon that some victims in Lebanon might be afraid to speak up or get involved in the tribunal’s investigations for fear of retribution.
Some of the relatives of victims of assassinations targeting politicians and journalists in Lebanon since 2004 said that they do feel the need to organize and speak up. “I do feel the need for an NGO to speak in my name and call for a collective right that maybe I alone cannot fight for,” said Linda Daou, the mother of a 23-year-old man who died in the explosion targeting Kataeb politician Antoine Ghanem in September 2009. “In an NGO there would be many of us sharing the same suffering, and through group effort we can achieve something that one alone cannot, and make ourselves heard,” she added.
Others say they are either afraid they might be used politically or feel that their relatives’ lives are simply not important enough for the Lebanese authorities. “Who am I to ask for justice?” said Krikor Sogomanian, the son of 75-year-old Haigaz Sogomanian, who died in a bomb attack in Geitawi, Achrafieh in September 2005. “What am I going to ask? ‘We want the truth?’ Who are we to ask? Who are we? Justice is something, but if I would like to know who did it is something else. I would like to know. But how would I find out? I'll go file a lawsuit against an unknown person? Where would I file a lawsuit?” He recalled how, after the bomb that killed his father exploded, he had to fight with security forces simply to let him into the coffee shop where his father and four of his friends had been sitting to see if they were alright.
“We, as civilians, do not matter much for the tribunal, and therefore the current quarrels about it being politicized or not are not of much concern to us,” said Elias Azar, the 33-year-old son of a state prosecutor who was killed in an explosion targeting ISF Captain Wissam Eid in 2008. Civilian casualties got the least attention from the Lebanese security forces, the international investigation committee and the media, he told NOW Lebanon.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina the sectarian and ethnic situation is not much different from Lebanon’s. While over 6,000 NGOs in Bosnia and Herzegovina represent war victims or deal with the protection of victims' rights, according to a report by the International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, the groups are divided along national grounds. Some represent victims from the federation inhabited by Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, and others from Republika Srpska, inhabited by Serbs.
Despite their divisions, NGOs keep pressuring their governments. Many of them are women’s rights groups representing rape victims and relatives of massacred Bosnians. “The first victims to speak up were women victims in Srebrenica,” Bosnian journalist Nidzara Ahmetasevic told NOW Lebanon. “For 15 or 20 days after the fall of Srebrenica, they went out on the streets and they asked to know where their husbands and their children were. They stayed on the streets for a long time, because nobody could give them the answer, but they were asking, they were demanding because they were desperate. This was the beginning of the whole movement,” she said.
Ahmetasevic added that some women’s organizations started offering psychological help to victims suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome as early as 1993, though the government, as in Lebanon, doesn’t offer any kind of access to counseling. “The government does not help the victims at all. Some survive with money from international donors, but never from the Bosnian government, unfortunately. The state just doesn’t care about the rights of these people,” Ahmetasevic said.
Nadine Elali contributed reporting to this article.
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