KUKES, Albania — Her body savaged, her family wronged and her future ruined, 13-year-old Pranvera Lokaj has taken off for the mountains of Kosovo to seek the only solace her hidebound clan accords a rape victim: to kill or be killed in pursuit of vengeance.
"I have given her to the KLA so she can do to the Serbs what they have done to us," Haxhi Lokaj said of his daughter, who has been sent to fight with the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
"She will probably be killed, but that would be for the best," the 40-year-old father said with more resignation than sorrow. "She would have no future anyway after what they did to her."
For the untold numbers of Kosovo Albanian women and girls raped by Serbian soldiers in the conflagration of hate consuming the province in southern Yugoslavia, the heartless judgment expected from their backward rural communities may prove the more enduring injury from this most humiliating of war crimes.
While rape has for centuries been committed by soldiers as a tool of terror, its power to destroy women's self-worth in the tradition-bound Balkans is intensified by the patriarchal views of Kosovo villagers who see the savagery as a shame on the victim's entire family.
Even more sophisticated urban Kosovo women say they'd rather die than bear the humiliating brand of a rape victim--a view that threatens to compound the efficacy of the Serbian forces' war crimes by driving survivors to suicide and depleting the ethnic Albanian population of women of childbearing age.
"Rape is a powerful taboo in their society. Kosovar men do not accept the women as blameless victims," said Eglantina Gjermeni, head of an international rape relief project to aid the Kosovo victims of sexual violence. "But that has to change because what has happened in these conditions of war has affected too many women."
Ethnic Albanians like the Lokajs, who are from poor, rural areas, see death as the only honorable future for those raped by the marauding enemies.
In the second week of April, according to Pranvera's parents, Serbian soldiers herded Pranvera and at least 20 other terrified girls into the cellar of an empty house in the nearby village of Bileg and gang-raped them for four nights.
Their screams pierced the floor above them, torturing their helpless mothers and brothers being held there at gunpoint, and reverberated through the wooded hills where Lokaj and other KLA rebels were dug in in hopes of ambushing the Serbs.
