Salon.com > Ed Vulliamy

“Whatever the price, I had to tell the truth”

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:52:00 +0000

By the time she was in her early 20s, Rania al-Baz had become one of the best known and best loved faces in her home country of Saudi Arabia. As presenter of a program called "The Kingdom This Morning" on state-owned television, her hair was always covered by a hijab, as is required, but her face remained uncovered, and she would choose head scarves of defiantly flamboyant colors to cover her immaculately styled hair. She became, for hundreds of thousands of Saudi women, admirable, enviable and challenging -- and, thus, an implicit threat to a society in which women are forced to cover themselves, are not allowed to drive, cannot vote or participate in political life, cannot leave home unless accompanied by a chaperone or travel without authorization from a father or husband, and cannot establish a business without a male sponsor.

Then, suddenly, on April 13, 2004, Baz disappeared from the airwaves. When she emerged two weeks later, her face was all over the newspapers, but it was barely recognizable. Her husband had savagely assaulted her, slamming her face against the marble-tiled floor of their home until it suffered 13 fractures. He was disposing of what he assumed to be her dead body when she showed signs of life and, panicking, he took her to the hospital, where doctors gave her only a 70 percent chance of survival.

In pursuit of reconciliation

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 15:11:00 +0000

A spectral silence hangs over the buildings: a cavernous rust-colored hangar containing heavy industrial plant and piles of tires, a deserted complex once used as a canteen, and an empty, smaller building known as the White House. Underground, there lies a seam of iron ore, which has remained untouched for 12 years since a hurricane of violence blew through this corner of Bosnia. But soon, this place will be teeming again, with the rattle of machinery and the business of its original use as a mine. And the man who has acquired it, who aims to restart the Omarska iron ore mine, is none other than Britain's richest resident, Lakshmi Mittal, who in October became the biggest steel producer in the world.

But there are ghosts here too: This was the site of the infamous concentration camp of Omarska, operated by the Bosnian Serbs for the internment, torture and mass murder of Muslim and Croat prisoners during the summer of 1992. From that once-crammed hangar, men were called for barbaric execution. In that White House, they were slaughtered by the hundred. Above that canteen, women were serially raped. On an L-shaped strip of concrete land in between, an orgy of killing and torture was unleashed.

“Fingers stuck up at the Serbs”

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 15:28:00 +0000

They walk in slow procession across a field of summer flowers, through the scent of mint into the nightmare of their memories. They arrive this time as survivors, not prisoners. Or else they come to pay homage to dead relatives at this accursed place: the now disused iron ore mine at Omarska, in northwest Bosnia. In 1992 it was a concentration camp, the location of an orgy of killing, mutilation, beating and rape, prior to enforced deportation for those lucky enough to survive. The victims were Bosnian Muslims and some Croats, the perpetrators their Serbian neighbors.

They move, tentatively, on this day of commemoration among desolate, rust-colored industrial buildings, haunted by what happened within them. Nusreta Sivac places a flower on each space of floor where her dead friends once slept in the quarters for women who "served food and cleaned the walls of the torture rooms, covered with blood" -- quarters just across a hallway from the now empty office where she was, like them, serially raped, night after night. And she passes the window from which she watched the slaughter of men on the tarmac below, day in, day out.