Posted on 02/13/2006 8:32:47 AM PST by voletti
BERLIN, FEBRUARY 13: A moving drama about Bosnia's post-war trauma and the lingering impact of the systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serb soldiers won cheers at its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday.
Grbavica spotlights a hushed-up topic of mass rapes in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo with a tear-jerking story of a Muslim woman who tries to hide the grisly truth of the past to protect her daughter.
The film, seen by critics as one of the Berlinale's best so far, is told against the backdrop of Sarajevo's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of the 1992-95 war and deftly touches on the myriad problems now haunting the multi-cultural city.
"We wanted to give a voice to these people and reflect on something that actually exists in Bosnia," said director Jasmila Zbanic, a native of Sarajevo, which has turned into a cinematic hotbed since Danis Tanovic's Academy Award in 2002.
"Rape was a war strategy to humiliate these women," added Zbanic, 30, at a news conference in Berlin. "They were kept in concentration camps until abortions were no longer possible. "There are very many such children. No one has kept track of exactly how many. Many are orphans or were given away for adoption. The official number of women raped is 20,000 but the real number is probably much higher, maybe 50,000."
Named after a suburb of Sarajevo, the film's title Grbavica also has a second meaning: woman with a hump, which symbolically refers to the raped women. Zbanic spent months listening to women who were raped as well as their therapists.
"War heroes and families of soldiers killed are supported by the state in Bosnia," Zbanic said. "Raped women are not
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Film on Beheadings deemed to be insensitive.
Not to condone war rapes etc but wonder why I get the feeling that if there were a film about muzlim war crimes on serb civilians in Bosnia and kosova (i) th Berlin film fest wouldn't be quitethis enthusiastic 9ii) even if it were, Reuters wouldn't be considering it newsworthy (iii) even if reuters were reporting it, it would've ben to point out some flaws in the filming or giving coverage to lib-secular "critics".
The answer I suspect lies in the fact that serb civilians are white christians and not quite the 'ideal victims' group its chic to support.
Another problem solved by a DemocRat. Kept Monica off the front pages, so what's the problem? Course no raping done by Muslims on Christians!
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
Don't forget the Inquisition! It's all the same thing you know!
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
I don't even know if I believe the rape stories. It is the nature of the muslims to lie. To the westerners.
Rapes The idea of "rape camps" was positively outstanding. The media hysteria was general (titles : "Rape by order", "Rape horror", "Rape camps", "A pattern of rape"...), and people started to believe in the existence of a "systematic rape plan". In reality, rapes happened not more than in any war, and have been performed by all sides. In 1992, the Bosnian government claimed that 50,000 muslim women have been raped, information abundantly relayed by the media. After investigation, Amnesty International published in January 21, 1993, a report where the issue of rape was qualified as a "propaganda weapon". Later on, the UN Commission of Experts on War Crimes identified only 800 victims - Muslim, Serb and Croat -. The hyperbolic inflation of numbers is well illustrated by the following testimony: "When I was at 50 kilometers from Tuzla, I was told 'go to Tuzla high school ground, as there are 4,000 raped women'. At 20 kilometers, this figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers, only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only 4 women willing to testify." (French television reporter Jerome Bony, Envoye Special, quoted in French magazine Le Point).
As a proud wife of a Serbian man, I must say that the Bosnians are lyinig scum and I wouldn't believe a word they say.
Thank you. When the mass graves were never discovered it was a big tipoff that maybe all of the stories of the Serbian atrocities were lies.
I am ashamed of what this country has done to Serbia, and I personally extend my apologies. All I can say is that the way the conflict was presented by the media, I could not keep straight which side was which or what they represented. I was not an avid news/politics watcher then as I am now.
One day I believe this country will apologize to Serbia, and hopefully make restitution. I do not know if I will live long enough to see it, but it was a low point in the history of the USA.
Brock has a detailed and convincing deconstruction of the claims of rape camps and rape as a Serb military tactic and exclusive (chapter 5). While certainly never denying Serb rapes, he shows that there is not the slightest evidence that Serb rapes were more numerous or organized than those of Bosnian Muslim or Croatian forces. He points out that the documentation of Serb rape victims is more extensive and of better quality than that of victims of Serbs, despite the sizable resources put into collecting evidence of the latter. The Serb data just never could attract the interest of the pack (and the same was true of the pack’s treatment of Serb dossiers of war crimes and prison camps in which Serbs were victims). The bias confused the media—Paul Lewis writing in the New York Times on “Rape Was Weapon of the Serbs” (Oct. 20, 1993) noted that a UN report had identified “800 victims by name,” but Lewis failed to mention that they were Serb women. The estimates of 50,000 or 20,000 rape victims of Serbs were based on no evidence whatsoever (the exact same numbers given by the woman in the article -- confirming the existence of the campaign of lies), and the belief that rape was a special Serb crime rested strictly on the overwhelming political bias of the pack and superior public relations and propaganda activity of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. (A January 1994 UN report evaluating all the documentation on rapes, excluding evidence from the Serbs, listed 126 confirmed victims. This finding did not interest the media.)(full article)
See: Media Cleansing
Bassiouni devised a ploy how to process fake accounts into something that resembled document based on statistical data analysis. If was all forgery.
The total number of rapes was around 2000 on all three sides.
Something else. In Balkan wars of 1912 perverts across the Europe peddled pornographic postcards depicting soldiers in varius uniforms raping women. In WWI, allied propaganda depictd the Huns (Gertmans) raping Belgian nuns. It was all fake, but effective for propaganda purposes.
The lie of 50,000 raped Bosnian Muslim women is merely exploitation of the old propaganda tool.
This movie and Buttcrack Mountain make a nice duo, perhaps should be advertised as Liberal Dream combo.
I stoped to eat-myself-out because of media-lies like this crap of film.
I am only sorry that in US and in Serbia, noone is making films on true events and Anti-Christian war in Bosnia nad Kosovo.
Europeans are anti-Christian monsters.
Bump!
The Bosnian Serb women sent testimony of hundreds raped BEFORE the Muslims started on this propaganda of rape camps in the fall of 1992. The copied the same things the Serbs said, but their claims were pushed by the press, while Serbs' claims were muted.
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