—protected witness

A Note on the Novel

In 2000 a landmark trial took place in The Hague. The Foča case was in response to the thousands of rapes that took place during the Yugoslav wars (1992 to 1999) in centres set up as rape camps.

Prosecutors needed six years to prepare for the trial. An international team of women lawyers and researchers travelled around the world to find women witnesses, now war refugees, who dared to testify. The trial lasted for nine months.

The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was born out of Nuremberg’s remnant hope for enduring international justice. Judges were appointed from fifty-two nations. Nine hundred people from around the globe worked in the courts. The ICTY was established in 1993 to contest violations of international humanitarian law. Many trials took place during the wars.

The Foča trial in 2000 asked us to agree that never again would a woman’s body be used as a theatre of war. But always we say never again. To this day women are systematically raped as part of terror and war.

Important new jurisprudence came out of the Foča trial. The perpetrators were found guilty, not only of rape but of a crime against humanity. For the first time in 5,000 years of recorded history women were not spoils of war. Rape in war was no longer a crime against individual women but a crime against all of us.

Speak, Silence is an imaginative response, in fiction, to changing consciousness. Let us reimagine our humanity together.

—KE

Toronto, Sarajevo

They are still shooting, said Jacques Payac.

I’m going, I said. The borders are open.

I run a travel magazine, he said.

I will write a travel piece.

About war?

About film.

When the hell are you going to settle down?

Why should I settle down?

What are you hoping for?

I only want to know. To tell.

—

I had watched the war on television in Toronto for years. I watched life in a city under siege, saw people from a bread line bleeding on the ground. The cameras pulled back and I saw smoke and fire from apartment towers. My name is Gota Dobson. I saw these images on the same screen that I watched Looney Tunes with my only child. Intolerable shame. To watch old women in good leather shoes hurrying over rubble along the edges of buildings. To watch boys and girls playing on tanks. To watch people falling like broken clay pigeons in skeet practice. To change the channel. To live in the unattended moment. To be where I was not.

There was the Time cover of a crowd of prisoners behind wire fences, their ribs like empty cages, with a caption in red: Must It Go On? The war did not abate and the news remained clear and constant and the world struggled to rouse itself.

People knew. Still it went on. Year after year I watched. When Biddy was asleep at night and my work was put away for another day, I watched.