Rape, the Unspeakable War Crime: An Interview with Slavenka Drakulic and Juanita Wilson on the Award-Winning Filmic Rendition of as If I Am Not There

In the following interview, conducted in March 201 1 at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, acclaimed Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic discusses the filmic adaptation of her 2001 novel with its director and scriptwriter, the Irish filmmaker Juanita Wilson. Based on several real life stories, As If I Am Not There (published in the USA under the title S: A Novel about the Balkans) deals with the mass rape of women in 1992 in Bosnia during the war. Alice Kuzniar, Professor of German and English as well as Chair in Croatian Studies at the University of Waterloo, leads the discussion on the choices the novelist and filmmaker make in their respective media when they represent atrocities committed against women. Given the unspeakable nature of war rape, Wilson and Drakulic address their commitment to having such suffering recognized by the international community. Even as fate as 1994-96 when he was the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Justice Richard Goldstone assessed Rape has never been the concern of the international community, even though the 1949 Geneva Convention expressly prohibited wartime rape and enforced prostitution. There are two possible misperceptions behind this opinion: one, if rape is perceived as something personal and sexual, it is depoliticized. Two, women are seen as mere causalities of war, so that rapists are perceived as not having to be prosecuted in war crime tribunals. However, a 2001 verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) stipulated that rape and sexual enslavement were crimes against humanity, challenging the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war. ICTY found three Bosnian Serb men guilty of rape of women and girls (some as young as 12 and 15 years of age), in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore two of the men were found guilty of the crime against humanity of sexual enslavement. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped in the war in Bosnia. As If! Am Not There tells the story of these events through the eyes of one woman's horrific experiences. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Born in Croatia in 1 949, Drakulic is one of Europe's foremost women authors. She has published in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Book Review, and The Nation. Her writings include How we Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1 991), Cafe Europa: Life After Communism (1996), They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague (2005), and Frida's Bed (2008). Her most recent work, A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism (2011), is a series of fables told from the perspective ot various animals. In the words of historian Timothy Snyder it beautifully renders the dilemmas of life under Communism as sharp instances of moral tragedy. ... Literature here is an aide-memoire, not just of historical experience, of why we choose to forget (jacket cover). For her filmic rendition of As If! Am Not There (201 0), writer and director Juanita Wilson was named in 2011 as one of Variety's Top Ten Directors to Watch, the only woman on the list. As If! Am Not There recently received three Irish Film and Television awards for Best Film, Director and Script, in addition to awards at international festivals in Phoenix, Long Island, Rhode Island, Istanbul, and Seattle. Wilson's short film The Door (2009) was nominated for an Academy Award for best live-action short film. As If I Am Not There is her first feature film. In Ireland and the UK, it has been released by Element Films. KUZNIAR: Slavenka, at the start of your novel you cite Primo Levi, the Holocaust survivor and writer, as saying: but I cannot help noticing that my listeners do not follow me. In fact, they are completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was riot there. One can understand the title of the novel in various ways, first and foremost, that S. …

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