The director of the Kosovo Center for the Rehabilitation of Torture Survivors (KCRT), Feride Rushiti, and this organization were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few days ago. For more than two decades, this center has treated many women and men who were sexually abused during the 1998-1999 war. On Wednesday, Rushiti spoke in a public discussion about her journey and the fight for justice for survivors of sexual violence.
She first met sexually abused women and girls in March 1998 in Kukes. She was serving there as a doctor for Kosovars who were forcibly displaced by Serbian forces.
Amidst emotions, she recounts her first conversation with a woman who was raped in the presence of her husband and children.
“I remember the first meeting when I was summoned as a woman and as a doctor, to visit a woman in the Italian camp. There were dozens of international journalists standing next to that tent. When I entered that tent, I found a woman with her two children holding them tightly in her lap, and she continued with an emotionless rhetoric, she had a physiological numbness and said that ‘I left the child for dead, the dogs ate it, I couldn’t bury it, what happened to it’. She asked these questions and I found myself challenged and didn’t know what to do with her… I remembered to ask her what happened to her husband, because she was standing alone in that tent holding the children. And when I asked her ‘what happened to the husband, where is the husband, she said, “Oh, sister, they took my husband, because the moment they wanted to rape me, he reacted and I don’t know what happened to him.” That moment was very embarrassing for me personally and I started crying,” said Rushiti.
In meetings with dozens of sexually abused women and men, Rushiti said that the survivors did not talk about the horror they experienced but about their urgent needs at that time.
