The Autonomous Women's Center expresses regret for this 11-year-old girl, and for all women who are raped by Serbian soldiers and soldiers from other military units in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and especially crimes like this that are never publicized. We ask for the assailant to be punished (for rape and murder) and we want the punishment to be announced.
Murdering women after raping is especially a part of military policy, meaning this kind of violence is most common in war. Raping and murdering an Albanian girl in Kosovo by a KFOR soldier is just a result of the militaristic male psychology. If her dead body had not been found, we would not have known that she was raped. How many raped women are in Kosovo? How many in Serbia?
Raping women is a type of male violence against women of all nationalities, classes, and ages, and it is a part of the patriarchal policy of controlling women, for a thousand years in all societies and states.
To understand this event, it is necessary to connect it with the fact that at this moment in Kosovo there are 40,000 men in uniform. At this moment it is the biggest NATO military base in Europe. Besides this, this case of rape and murder should be connected with widespread pornography and prostitution in Kosovo--like in all places where there are military bases. The Associated Press published information last month that in Kosovo there are brothels opening in Kosovo in which there are more and more women from the Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, and Bulgaria, who were brought there by their pimps. In an international nightclub in Slatina, 20 km from Pristina, their services are paid directly to the club manager, and women are exploited to the maximum and are without any human rights.
Pornography, prostitution, and rape reduce women's bodies to just objects for use and contempt.
Autonomous Women's Center Against Sexual Violence
Lepa Mladjenovic
Stanislava Otasevic