GOVOR ŠUTNJE

- izbor tekstova sa portala focanskidani, flickr-a i facebooka

- sve fotografije su objavljene na facebooku, focanskidani, flickr-u ekranportal13, portalima...
- priredio:Kenan Sarač

GOVOR ŠUTNJE
- izbor tekstova sa portala focanskidani, flickr-a i facebooka
- sve fotografije su objavljene na facebooku, focanskidani, flickr-u ekranportal13, portalima...
- priredio:Kenan Sarač

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Posted on 6 Januara, 2016
GENOCID U FOČI 1992. : Stradanje familije Avdagid u centru grada
https://focanskidani.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/genocid-u-foci-1992-stradanje-familije-
avdagic-u-centru-grada/

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DOKUMENTI
Genocide in Bosnia Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995
Some Acts are Not Forgivable, Genocidal Rapes in Bosnia Bosnian Muslim Rape Victims
(Bosnian Genocide)
An 18-year old Bosnian Muslim rape victim (September 1992, Bosnian Genocide).
Photo by Nina Berman,
Sipa Press
An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Bosnia recovers one day after aborting a pregnancy resulting
from rape in September 1992. This rape occurred three years before the Srebrenica genocide.
Rape was used systematically as an instrument of war in the Bosnian genocide. Photo by Nina
Berman/NOOR. (note: lower quality photo posted for ‗fair use‘ only, non-profit/educational
purposes, full credits given to photographer)
Please visit Nina Berman‘s blog for more photos. ―I was sent to the special department for the
pregnant women at Foca (see: Foca Genocide). I had one month to go. For one month nobody
touched us, and then Chetnik soldiers visited us, and took all our gold and took two women from
our room at 3 a.m. One of those women had given birth to a dead baby before that and the other
was three months pregnant. They brought them back at 9 a.m. The next night they came back and
took four women, the two from before and another two, who had newborn babies. It happened
every night. They came and took those four women all the time. When I noticed someone was
coming in the evening hours…I hid under a sink in a cupboard. Everything else was like normal.
We got food for the children. A Serb doctor told us the soldiers wouldn‘t touch us…and we didn‘t
tell them anything. I gave birth to my daughter Aida there. After some months, Munira and the
other women were told they would be freed in a prisoner exchange. One evening some soldiers
came with vehicles to take us. I thought we would be killed. Dr Cancar saved us. Don‘t worry, my
children while I‘m here nothing will happen to you. And at that moment one of the soldiers took
away the woman who had had the stillborn baby…‖ (personal testimony from ―Safe Area
Gorazde) The women knew the rapes would begin when ‗Mars na Drinu‘ was played over the
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loudspeaker of the main mosque. (‗Mars na Drinu,‘ or ‗March on the Drina‘, is reportedly a
former Chetnik fighting song that was banned during the Tito years.) While ‗Mars na Drinu‘ was
playing, the women were ordered to strip and soldiers entered the homes taking the ones they
wanted. The age of women taken ranged from 12 to 60. Frequently the soldiers would seek out
mother and daughter combinations. Many of the women were severely beaten during the rapes.
One case had a Serb soldier telling a Bosnian woman he was raping, ―You should have already
left this town. We‘ll make you have Serbian babies who will be Christians.‖ (Seventh Report on
War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia: Part II , US submission of information to the United
Nations Security Council) There were numerous rape camps in the town of Foča. ―Karaman‘s
house‖ was one of the most notable rape camps in Foca. While kept in this house, girls were
repeatedly raped. Among the women held in ―Karaman‘s house‖ were minors as young as 12
years of age. In the findings of the Kunarac trial the appalling conditions of the detention centers
being used for mass rape were described. ―Don‘t take me, I‘m only twelve!‖ Among the most
appalling and deplorable accounts of inhuman treatment and cruelty brought upon young Muslim
females of Bosnia is that of the 12-year-old Almira Bektovic, a helpless war victim for whom
virtually no compassion was shown whatsoever. Born in the town of Mostar in the year 1980, she
lived in Miljevina in the municipality of Foca, the birth village of her father, Ramiz Bektovic, at
the time of the Serb attack on these areas in the summer of 1992. Her father was taken away by
the Serbs in june 1992 and was never seen again. Almira and her mother were instead detained in
the Partizan Sports Hall with hundreds of other Bosniak women and girls under inhuman
conditions and with lack of food or water. In mid-August 1992, Almira Bektovic among other
girls was brought to ‗Karaman‘s house‘ by Radovan Stankovic, this lasted for ten days until she
was returned to her mother whom she told that ―she had worked as a waitress, washed clothes,
cleaned and cooked, and that there were many other girls there who did chores and things for the
Serb soldiers‖. Afterwards in mid-september 1992 deportation busses were prepared for elderly
Bosnian Muslim women and young children that were to take them to Bosnian-government-
controlled areas for exchange; in a bus were Almira and her mother and two sisters, however
suddenly the bus was stopped at the Drina bridge, and entered did men sent by Radovan
Stankovic, who called out the name of the girl and snatched Almira Bektovic from her mother‘s
arms, who then screamed repeatedly ―Give me back my child!‖ before losing consciousness,
Almira was heard screaming and crying ―Don‘t take me, I‘m only twelve!‖. One of the surviving
witnesses from Karaman‘s house reported that Almira was brought to the house holding her doll
tightly to her chest, apparently not knowing what was awaiting her. Soon thereafter Nedjo
Samardzic raped Almira Bektovic and reportedly bragged about ―having taken her virginity‖ and
―having fooled soldier Pero Elez (who was always looking for virgins) in who was to be the first
to take her virginity‖. Almira was found crying and vomiting after the assault (as part of rape
trauma syndrome), by one the surviving girls from the house. Over the next three months Almira
Bektovic was forced into much the same pattern as all the other women and girls detained in the
house; she had to do household chores, cook for the soldiers and sexually please these, at the age
of merely 12. Almira‘s status however was even more vulnerable than that of the other girls who
(in contrast to Almira) were ‗assigned‘ to specific soldiers who got to rape them only, Almira thus
not being assigned to any specific soldier was free to be raped by any soldier that was granted
entrance to Karaman‘s house. Radomir Kovac (Court of BiH) detained, between or about 31
October 1992 until December 1992 Almira Bektovic (and other girls). During their detention they
were also beaten, threatened, psychologically oppressed, and kept in constant fear. During this
period Almira was moved between various locations and apartments in Foca in order to ‗serve‘
Serb soldiers and friends of Radomir Kovac. On about 25 December 1992, Radomir Kovac sold
Almira Bektovic to a Montenegrin soldier (who were known among the detained women as ―more
aggressive‖) for 200 DM (100 Euro), and from there on the tracks of her are lost (probably
murdered shortly thereafter).
https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/some-acts-are-not-forgivable-genocidal-
rapes-in-bosnia/#more-501

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Genocide in Bosnia Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995
Some Acts are Not Forgivable, Genocidal Rapes in Bosnia Bosnian Muslim Rape Victims
(Bosnian Genocide)

https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/some-acts-are-not-forgivable-genocidal-
rapes-in-bosnia/#more-501

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DOKUMENTI
Genocide in Bosnia Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995
Children Born to Rape
Victims in the Bosnian Genocide
The Rapes in Bosnia:
A Muslim Schoolgirl‘s Account
The Washington Post 27 December 1992.
By: Peter Maass
ZENICA, BOSNIA
— Before the local Serb warlord took Jasna away from her apartment to rape her on June 9, he
told her not to cry. , Jasna a Muslim schoolgirl, would be safe with him. Then, Jasna, 17, said in a
lengthy interview here, the Serb ordered her, her 15-year-old sister and an 18-year-old friend into
a car and drove them to a motel in their home town of Visegrad. The notorious Bosnian Serb
White Eagle militia had just seized Visegrad, and Jasna sensed in a terrifying instant that the
victors were going to treat women as spoils of war. The girls were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel,
which has been described by the Slavic Muslim-led Bosnian government as one of the Serbs‘
alleged ―rape motels.‖ Jasna was locked in one room and her friend was locked in another. Jasna‘s
younger sister, Emina, was put in a room across the hall. A few hours later, Jasna heard her sister
moaning and sobbing. She never saw her again. The warlord, Milan Lukic, who has been well-
known locally for years, came into Jasna‘s room, put a table in front of the door and told her to

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undress. ―He said that if I didn‘t do what he wanted, I would never go home,‖ Jasna recalled,
speaking in a nervous but steady voice. ―Then he ordered me to take off my clothes. I didn‘t want
to do that. He said I must, that it would be better to take my clothes off myself, or else he would
do it and he would be violent.‖ Jasna paused in her narration. She tightened her hold on the hand
of her older sister, who is a student in Zenica and sat next to her throughout the interview, which
was conducted in this government-held city in an empty pizzeria decorated with a few paltry
Christmas ornaments. Jasna stared hard at a spot on the tablecloth and resumed speaking. ―I
started to cry. He said I was lucky to be with him. He said I could have been thrown into the river
with rocks tied around my ankles. But I didn‘t want to do it. He got angry and cursed and said,
‗I‘m going to bring in 10 soldiers.‘ ― And so Jasna, who said she had never had a boyfriend, tried
to stop crying as she was raped. According to the Bosnian government, more than 30,000 women
have been raped in this former Yugoslav republic‘s nine-month-old war, with some of the victims
as young as 12. The government, partly supported by testimony from Muslim victims and
captured Bosnian Serb soldiers, has accused the Serbs of employing rape as a tactic to ―boost
morale‖ among the victorious fighters and humiliate Bosnian women and their families. A
captured Serb soldier in Sarajevo, the capital, has told journalists that men in his unit were ordered
to rape. The soldier, Borislav Herak, admitted violating two Muslim women at a ―rape motel‖
outside Sarajevo and then killing them. The practice of mass rape has been condemned by the
United Nations and the European Community. Each organization is sending investigative teams to
the former Yugoslavia to interview rape victims and determine the extent of sexual crimes here.
EC leaders described these practices earlier this month as ―acts of unspeakable brutality,‖ but the
number of such incidents has not been confirmed. Most Muslim rape victims who have survived
their ordeals are unwilling to talk to anyone — spouses, siblings and especially journalists —
about what they have been through. Their code of silence may make it difficult for investigators to
collect firsthand testimony. One hindrance to disclosure is the resentment that many Muslims feel
toward Western reporters trying to investigate reports about this latest atrocity in the Bosnian war.
The Bosnian government is publicizing the rape issue in an effort to galvanize support for its fight
against the Serbs. But many lower-level officials and ordinary people view the Western interest in
mass rape as an example of how the West loves to be entertained with lurid tales of Bosnia‘s
misery — and then do nothing about it. Jasna, who escaped Visegrad a month after being raped,
agreed to talk on the condition that her last name not be divulged because her younger sister is, if
not dead, still in Serb captivity. Jasna said there was one reason why she decided to talk: ―I want
people to know the truth.‖ After a moment, she added, ―I was lucky. I survived.‖ As in virtually
all other rape cases, there was no way to independently corroborate Jasna‘s story, since there were
no witnesses and the warlord who she said raped her could not be reached. The trouble in
Visegrad reached a climax in early June when the White Eagle militia, which has been linked to
some of the worst war crimes in Bosnia, took control of the Muslim city, once a lovely tourist
draw on the Drina River near the Serbian border. The White Eagles began rounding up and killing
fighting-age Muslim men, so most of them fled to the surrounding forests to wage a guerrilla war.
The women and children were left behind. Lukic, who is described as a tall, handsome and
athletic Serb and is said by the Bosnian government to have led the ―ethnic cleansing‖ operation
in Visegrad, came to Mersiha‘s building on June 9 to inspect its vacant apartments. About 11:30
p.m., he entered the apartment where Jasna, her younger sister and mother were staying with
friends. According to Jasna, Lukic asked how old they were and, seeing the girls tremble, told
them not to worry. Lukic ordered the three girls to come with him so that they could help identify
some Muslim youths being held at the city police station. When Jasna‘s mother pleaded with
Lukic not to take the girls, he became enraged and started overturning furniture. ―I am the law,‖
he screamed. The three girls went downstairs and got into Lukic‘s car. They did not go to the
police station. They were taken to the Vilina Vlas motel, which has 20 to 30 rooms. They did not
see any other women there except for middle-aged Serb receptionists, who were joking with
soldiers milling around the lobby. The girls initially were locked in one room together. But after
about 10 minutes, Lukic came to the room with a soldier and told Jasna‘s 18-year-old friend to go

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with him for ―questioning.‖ Mersiha overheard Lukic tell the soldier in the corridor to ―question
her, but not too much.‖ Other soldiers in the hallway began laughing. The same scenario unfolded
with Jasna‘s sister, Emina. Lukic entered with a soldier and told 15-year-old Emina to leave with
the soldier. He gave the same order — question her, but ―not too much.‖ There was more laughter
in the corridor. Lukic left Jasna alone in the room for about 10 minutes. Then he came back, put
the table in front of the door and gave the order to undress, followed by the threat of rape by 10
soldiers if she did not comply. After the rape was over, Jasna began crying again. She said in the
interview that she was crying for her younger sister, not for herself. It did not matter. Lukic
taunted her, she said. ―What do you want to do to me?‖ he sneered. ―Stuff me into a big artillery
gun and shoot me to Turkey?‖ Jasna said Lukic fell asleep. Some soldiers knocked on the door
and one of them shouted to Lukic, ―We know what you‘ve got in there and we want it too.‖ Lukic
told them to go away. Then Jasna heard the voice. ―At about 3 o‘clock, I heard a loud cry when
the door across the hall was opened. The girl inside that room started to cry. I recognized the
voice. It was my sister.‖ Jasna has not seen or heard from her sister since that moment. At about 5
a.m., Lukic ordered Jasna to get dressed, and then, much to her surprise, he drove her home.
Jasna‘s terrified mother was waiting for her in the apartment building‘s entryway. ―I decided to
not tell her that I was raped,‖ Jasna explained. ―She was crying and asked me, ‗Where is your
sister and your friend?‘ I told her they were okay, they were just staying overnight. I didn‘t want
to hurt my mother.‖ Jasna and her mother stayed in Visegrad for a month more, hoping that
Emina would be freed and sent home. Even though the town‘s Muslim population was under
virtual house arrest, Jasna‘s mother went to the police station almost every day. One time, a Serb
policeman simply aimed his loaded gun at her and said, ―Leave.‖ Another time, she saw Lukic
there. ―Lukic said to her, ‗What do you want? At least I returned one of your daughters,‘ ‖
according to Jasna. With few Muslims left in Visegrad, Jasna and her mother had little choice but
to leave in a bus convoy in the middle of July. Their best hope is that Emina is still in Serb
captivity. Their worst fear is that she is dead. Jasna now lives in a student hostel in Zenica with
her older sister, Meliha, who was in this central Bosnian town when the rapes allegedly occurred.
Instead of remaining silent and withdrawing, she said she has repeatedly talked about her ordeal.
Even so, Jasna said she has nightmares every night and must sleep in the same room with her
sister. She gets frightened whenever Meliha goes out. Jasna told her story reluctantly. She avoided
talking about the rape for the first 45 minutes of the interview, but then it came tumbling out,
almost nonstop. ―I want to tell the Westerners the real truth,‖ she said. ―I want them to stop these
crimes. There are plenty of girls in a worse position than me.‖ Mass Rape in Bosnia – Breaking
the Wall of Silence By Seada Vranic Instead of a blindfold, the Serb soldiers bound Enisa‘s eyes
with their socks. The stench made her throw up, so they hit her until she learned that ‗Serb socks
don‘t smell‘. Seven ‗heroes of the nation‘ raped her and beat her for days. At first she resisted, so
they brought her to her senses by knocking her teeth out with a rifle-butt and breaking her jaw.
When she lost consciousness they would ‗give her a bath‘, i.e. douse her in cold water. Terrified
that she would be driven mad, she suddenly liked the idea and saw madness as a way out. She
began singing Serb songs louder and louder, then dancing with the chetnik who had presumably
butchered her husband. The soldiers were dumbfounded. They threatened her, held a knife to her
throat, but she only sang louder. Believing she had gone off her head entirely, the soldiers paid
less attention to her and she managed to escape, by hiding in a potato sack. When the journalist
Seada Vranic spoke with Enisa a few months later, in July 1992, she saw before her a hunched,
grey-haired old woman with a contorted face. That was just one month before Enisa‘s twenty-
eighth birthday. This is just one example of the devastating testimony presented by Seada in Pred
zidom sutnje (recently produced by the Zagreb publishing house ‗Antibarbarus‘ and forthcoming
in an English version, Breaking the Wall of Silence), a work recording and analysing the
experiences of rape victims from Bosnia- Herzegovina. The terrible statements of the half-
demented victims so shook the author, that she had the greatest difficulty in maintaining her own
psychological stability. Seada has collected the statements of young children who watched from
hiding as chetniks raped their mothers and sisters, or forced men to rape their own family

17
members. Children saw chetniks impale men on stakes after raping them, leaving them alive with
the stake in their entrails. Women, impregnated after hundreds of rapes and unable to abort,
showed Seada their breasts disfigured by cigarette burns. She recorded all their statements
verbatim. She just left out the names, and sometimes shortened the statements when the victims
recounted their ghastly experiences in too great detail. When she began collecting this direct
testimony, she believed that rape and the victims of rape were simply part of the madness of war –
a chaos without rules or system. After a certain time, however, for all her her caution she came to
the unambiguous conclusion that rapes were part of the Greater- Serbian expansionist policy,
planned at the top levels of the state. After the first wave of information about this almost
unbelievable phenomenon, world public opinion was shocked. But other tragedies in the world
soon pushed this terrible dimension of the war into the background, leaving it to sociologists,
psychologists and other such experts. Yet the truth was far more terrible than even the greatest
pessimists expected. The atrocities were even more numerous and brutal than was initially
apparent, given the difficulty of collecting the testimony of rape victims – women, men and also
children – many of whom were killed after being raped. Seada Vranic finds some relief today in
devoting herself to her family, who live not far from Geneva on the French side of the border. Her
husband, a Croat physicist, works in an institute for research into sub-atomic particles, her two
daughters attend primary school. She was born in 1949 to Bosniak parents in Travnik, where she
completed her primary and secondary education. She then studied political science at Zagreb
University, after which she worked for many years as Zagreb correspondent of the Belgrade daily
newspaper Borba. When she first met war victims of rape, she decided to investigate the
phenomenon in depth. We spoke over several days. Although today Seada is quite composed,
when she speaks of the worst atrocities she has to struggle to maintain a calm appearance. SV I
began to write on this subject almost by chance. My colleagues from Monitor (the independent
Montegrin weekly), with whom I had been working for a year already, asked me to write on some
Bosnian theme. I told them that my only connection with Bosnia was the refugees. That was at the
beginning of the war in Bosnia, in March 1992. Were your articles censored? No Could you write
about Vukovar, for example? Yes, and very emotionally, since there was no other way to write
about Vukovar at the time. The Monitor staff journalists too were writing about the shameful war
Montenegrins were then waging round Dubrovnik. I am proud of my collaboration with that
paper. I don‘t know what it‘s like today, since I can‘t get hold of it. While writing in Monitor
about Bosnian refugees, I wrote up the case of a woman with two children who had fled from
Bijeljina. I realized that she had been raped. How did you realize that? I asked her what was going
on in Bosnia. She replied: ‗They‘re cutting throats, killing, burning…‘ and then, when she
continued ‗… and raping‘, the word stuck in her throat. Tears ran down her cheeks. At the time I
barely knew what rape meant, what kind of a crime it was, what kind of social phenomenon. I
paid no special attention to her testimony. I was speaking with these first refugees at the Islamic
centre in the Folnegovic settlement near Zagreb. It was only when I began to write my article that
I realized how many women had been raped. I wasn‘t able to send the article in, since all
international links with Montenegro were cut off. While waiting, I started wondering if I couldn‘t
fill out the article with new details. I went on talking to refugees and constantly encountered rape
victims. After those first stories, however, my view on the nature of the crimes was different from
what it later became. In what sense different? At the time I couldn‘t accept the idea that rapes
were part of the Serbian expansionist war strategy. I thought: rape is a bio-psychological act that
cannot be carried out to order. Strategy implies subordination, submission to a superior. I had no
doubt that Karadzic was a sufficiently monstrous being to be able to devise and initiate such
atrocities; nor did I doubt that the hordes who‘d arrived from Serbia to slaughter and kill were
capable also of rape. It wasn‘t that I thought any morality would restrain them from it, but I felt
sure erection couldn‘t be achieved to order. However, after four months the ‗mosaic‘ took shape
for me. I noticed the congruences in events in wholly different localities and I began to enter them
on the map. I had victims from everywhere except eastern Herzegovina. So then you changed
your opinion about the nature of the violence? Talking with the victims had already begun to open

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my eyes. I became aware that rape in such circumstances is not the same as violent sex. It is
aggression carried out by sexual means. I became convinced that in this war rape is closer to
Thanatos than to Eros. I realized how I too was misled by certain notions about the ‗violent nature
of the male‘, and by the fact that I too live in an environment where males dominate. Even serious
people sometimes say: ‗he couldn‘t restrain himself, so he raped‘. It‘s a matter of his instincts, in
other words. But this time everything came from the head. Rape cannot be committed in self-
defence. No one can say: the woman attacked me, so I raped her. In parallel with my
investigations I was reading a wide range of literature on the whole phenomenon. You were
looking for a historical dimension to the events? I wanted to know everything relevant, to analyse
various aspects: for example, how the victims react and how the perpetrators react after rape.
Your book says that victims have the feeling they have been permanently altered; that ‗someone
else has moved into their skins‘. According to Professor Kulenovic, the effects remain in the
victim at a far deeper level and for far longer than the victim herself is able to express. Those
around her are often unaware how deep these effects are. The victims are alive, their wounds are
mostly unseen, to look at they‘re not invalids – yet they are. Therapies help, but most rape victims
in this war haven‘t been subjected to any therapy. Most of them will never admit to anyone that
they have been raped. You mention certain ratios between the total number of rape victims and
those who speak out about the crime. Other people have collected these data. One sociologist,
writing about rapes in the province of Zenica in the nineteen seventies, was astounded when she
realized that in the surrounding villages only every twenty-fourth rape was reported. In the city
the ratio was somewhat less, but still horrifying. Some other studies speak of less drastic ratios,
but still conclude that, out of every ten rapes, only one is reported to the competent institutions. It
is difficult to take in this knowledge about the wall of silence, against which I myself ran up: a
mother and daughter, for example, may know about a rape, the father not. The claims in the book
about the overall number of rape victims are truly terrifying. Nobody has exact statistics for this
and the final figure will be only an estimate. There are many ‗blanks‘ in the research. In the USA
one rape is reported every six minutes. No one knows how many actually occur. In Bosnia during
this war there were tens of thousands of rape victims, that‘s beyond any doubt, perhaps as many
as a hundred thousand. Three estimates are often quoted: the Bosnian government speaks of
50,000, the Investigating Commission of the European Union of 20,000, and the victimologist Dr
Zvonimir Separovic of 30,000 rape victims, with the comment that these are not the final figures,
which will doubtless be larger. Personally I don‘t like haggling with these figures. The crime will
not be any greater if a few more thousand victims are attached to it. But in my opinion even the
number spoken of by the Bosnian government will eventually be surpassed. Is a systematic effort
still being made to establish the definitive number of victims? In Sarajevo there exists a
commission and an institute for collecting data about war crimes. Do you believe that they
approach their work in a serious and objective manner? The fact that they haven‘t made any
bombastic pronouncements is very significant. From the commission I obtained five statements by
rape victims, all of which my experience tells me were authentic. At the end of each of these
statements the victim confirms that she is ready to repeat her testimony in front of any court or
expert commission. Out of all the rape victims whose experiences those Sarajevo bodies have
collected, 1,300 have signed similar declarations. Altogether, a lot of work has gone into this. Did
the victims usually insist on full anonymity? Yes, normally. When writing my book, I had to take
care no real names crept in. I was writing under a heavy load. Just before the book was printed,
after reading it through I don‘t know how many times, I was horrified to discover that I‘d written
one real forename and surname. I tried to maintain an emotional distance from the book, thinking
I‘d stand the strain more easily in that way. All that testimony really crushed me, I was on the
brink of physical and psychological collapse. When did you have your most critical moment? At
one point I stopped work on the book. Why? One victim attacked me. The case involved a family
whose war experiences are detailed in my files, and was centred on the testimony of a woman
from Rogatica, a village in eastern Bosnia: her two daughters, four granddaughters and four
daughters-in-law had been raped, and the rest of the family burnt alive in their house. The old

19
woman agreed to talk to me, but her granddaughter attacked me physically. She broke my
spectacles. I didn‘t blame the girl, of course, but for a long time I couldn‘t compose myself. How
old was the girl? She was twelve. As soon as she heard that her granny intended to tell a reporter
what had happened to them, she attacked me. Presumably you wondered then what you were
doing, what kind of assignment you had taken on, when even the victims you sympathized with
didn‘t understand you? While writing this book, I‘ve wondered many times what I was doing. So
many victims begged me: ‗Please, don‘t write about that.‘ But people need to know the truth. If I
hadn‘t realized that a planned crime was involved, I wouldn‘t have written the book at all; but as
things were, I felt I had to do so. In discussing that criminal conception, is the number of
psychiatrists on the Serbian side in this war significant? We do not have the crucial evidence, in
the shape of a document like Nazi Germany‘s Law on Concentration Camps, which proved that
certain crimes were not just incidental, but an essential part of a policy. In the case of the Greater-
Serbian aggression, we do not have any such document. It does not exist in written form, but the
conception is clear. Look, for example, at what happened with the camps. Even civilians entered
the camps, along with entire military units: the males would be given, say, half an hour to ‗do the
job‘. They didn‘t have to ask what job they had to do, everybody knew. That couldn‘t happen in
the army without the knowledge and approval of the top military and political authorities. When
later the conspiracy of silence was broken, when people began talking about rapes, the Serb
authorities knew perfectly well what it was all about. They never called anyone to account. They
merely denied the accusations. And the pattern was repeated. In Foca, in Bijeljina… What pattern
are you referring to? The basic pattern was developed in a number of variants, depending on the
context. The task was performed in one way in Banja Luka, in another in the villages. But behind
it all lay just one idea: to expel the population of other nationalities from a given territory. Rape is
a very effective means for that purpose: if three or four raped women arrived in a village, all the
villagers would quickly take flight. They couldn‘t kill everybody, you see: Banja Luka was too
large a town for them to be able to kill all the Bosniaks and Croats there. Nor could they send all
of them to camps, or to the front. So they dreamed up a monstrous plan: they went into the houses
of non- Serbs and raped them. At Banja Luka rapes took place on a particularly massive scale,
even though the town was outside the war zone the whole time. One rape victim from Banja Luka
for a long while couldn‘t believe something like this could happen at all. She knew about this kind
of mass terror only from films about Nazism. But then, as she says, she ‗felt the fear‘. What are
the other variants of the basic pattern? The assault on Foca and its surroundings provides another
example. This involved lightning terror: bombardment, burning, killing, raping… The aim was
achieved very fast: within a few days, even a few hours in the case of the villages, the territory
was ‗clean‘. They took some people off to the camps, they killed some on the spot, and others
they raped. What happened to non-Serb women married to Serbs? One experience has stuck in my
memory. The woman was divorced from a Serb husband: for years she had consulted doctors, but
she had been unable to conceive. They raped her and she conceived. I didn‘t manage to verify
whether Bosniak or Croat women married to Serbs were protected from that kind of terror. I think
there was no rule about it. I know there were Serbs who tried to protect victims. When people
today discuss German resistance to Nazism, they usually conclude that it was very minimal, and
that almost the entire nation fell victim to the Nazi psychosis. Isn‘t it the case that a similar
conclusion imposes itself with regard to Serbs in the present war, and that only very rare Serbs
opposed this kind of terror by their co-nationals? At the beginning I was astounded, then shocked,
by the reactions of Serbs to the aggression of their army. Some didn‘t react even though no
explicit danger of reprisal could threaten them – I have in mind here especially Serbs living
abroad. Few of them condemned the crimes, even fewer protested about them. That makes the
achievement of those who did find enough civic courage to oppose the terror all the greater – I‘m
thinking here about Bogdan Bogdanovic, Mirko Kovac and a few others. But this was just a drop
in the ocean of silence. Taken as a whole, there really was a consensus to lie. With present-day
communications, satellite programmes, world radio stations, they could not help knowing the
truth. Moreover, lots of them followed the troops like vultures and looted. The majority defend

20
themselves by saying they never saw anything with their own eyes, but then neither do they have
any desire to know anything about it all. It‘s like walking past a starving beggar and turning your
head away in order to avoid being aware of his hunger. Perhaps people in Serbia didn‘t know the
details of the terror their co-citizens were inflicting, but in principle they all knew what was
happening. Perhaps at the beginning there were some naive souls who believed Vukovar was
being destroyed by its own inhabitants, but after a few months everyone knew who was
destroying Vukovar. They knew Sarajevo was under siege, with shells raining down on it. It was
only after the great shock of Germany‘s defeat that the Germans experienced a catharsis. The
Serbs haven‘t… The Serb nation too will come to its senses. But the success Milosevic is having
at acting the role of peacemaker makes it clear this will not happen very soon. Your book
catalogues appalling crimes and appalling sufferings. The case of raped women who then became
pregnant must be among the most dreadful traumas of this war. Out of all the rape victims I spoke
to, only eleven admitted to having become pregnant. Nine of these terminated the pregnancy, but
two reached a late stage of pregnancy while still in prison, so that it was too late to terminate by
the time of their release. They reached Zagreb and gave birth. This was at the time when a
campaign was under way in Croatia to limit abortion rights, which added to the victims‘
sufferings. The number of eleven raped women who became pregnant doesn‘t even come close to
representing the true state of affairs. Almost 80% of rape victims were between 15 and 35 years
old, i.e. at the age of maximum fertility. Many victims were in prisons and camps, where they
were subjected to mass rape. Some of these women were raped by soldiers and civilians literally
hundreds of times. I spoke, for example, with one victim immediately after she left the Petrova
Street hospital in Zagreb. When I asked her if she had become pregnant, she answered: ‗No, I
certainly didn‘t!‘ That kind of attitude was typical. You have paid special attention to the strange
reaction of certain feminists, who have explained the entire phenomenon as a gender conflict
rather than as aggression by one nation against another. Unfortunately many individuals have
compromised themselves with such views, including one wing of the feminist movement. I am not
a feminist myself, but I consider that the feminist movement has an important place in the
civilized world and great merits for improving the position of women in society, so I am
intentionally expressing myself with great caution here. Perhaps the feminists I mentioned had no
hidden political agenda, but they spoke as though rape victims were always women. So rape
becomes a result of male nature and has always existed: even Zeus changed into a bull and raped
Europa. And that‘s how things still are today, in war and in peace. Many women still think this
theory is correct. But the victims are not just women. In the war in Bosnia- Herzegovina and
Croatia, men and children were raped too. All those victims have forenames and surnames. If
more than 80% of victims were of one nationality, then that is no accident. There were no rapes
where perpetrator and victim belonged to the same nation, or if there were any the number was
statistically insignificant. Yet certain feminists still spoke in terms of gender war. In reality, it is
quite clear in this case that certain men raped specific Don‘t you pay special attention, at one point
in the book, to the question of rapists among the HVO [Croatian Council of Defence] forces?
International sources and various commissions have concluded that soldiers of the HVO
committed many rapes at the time of the Croat-Bosniak conflict. There were indications that rapes
in this conflict too served the purpose of ethnic cleansing. But there was no evidence that what
was involved here was a military strategy devised by the HVO‘s military and political command. I
didn‘t come across a single source pointing to that. Out of 202 rape victims with whom I spoke,
there was just one Serb woman and one Ukrainian. Serb rape victims suffer no less than those of
other nations, nor are Bosniak rapists in any sense justified by the fact that their nation has been
the victim of Serbian aggression. But no balance exists among the different nations in this case –
neither among the victims nor among the perpetrators – however much international politicians
may have disseminated the notion of a civil war of all against all. Yet some feminists were against
any counting of rape victims. Not to look at the figures, however, would mean ignoring the
problem. But don‘t you mention in your book how American feminists were responsible for
warning about rapes at the time of the aggression against Croatia? Certain American women

21
spoke out very early on about rapes and the policy of ethnic cleansing in occupied areas of
Croatia. Very little was said or written about this in Croatia during the war of independence. Even
today I don‘t know why it was hushed up. The problem of rape is a universal civilizational
problem, about which all the world‘s citizens should know much more than they do. In Croatia
this problem has long been ignored. That‘s why I‘d like as many people to read this book as
possible. I didn‘t write it to provoke intolerance between nations. I tried to be cool, but that wasn‘t
entirely possible. I wasn‘t a cold observer, I was on the victim‘s side. I presented the raw facts,
irrespective of whom they might upset. If the facts I uncovered had indicted my own nation, I
would still have written them down. My book wasn‘t the result of any search for proof of given
theses. And I checked all the statements in it several times over. The publisher of your book is
working with you on a series of events to promote the book in Croatia and throughout the world.
It would be very useful for public opinion in Serbia too to be informed about the book. If some
courageous organizer were to be found for a promotional meeting in Belgrade, would you accept
an invitation? I would go there. I‘m ready to hear uncomfortable accusations. My book tells how
several tens of thousands, perhaps even a hundred thousand, rapes have been committed in the
name of one nation. This is a terrible accusation for that nation. If someone says such a thing and
then presents solid evidence, the reactions cannot but be stormy. Despite the evidence, many
people will claim that the book is anti-Serb. It will be hard for me to prove I haven‘t written a
book of hatred, nor will I attempt it. A crime has been committed that in numerical terms is not
the greatest in the history of warfare. But for the first time in the history of warfare rape has
become a part of military strategy. For the first time human sexuality has been used for the
purpose of what has euphemistically been termed ethnic cleansing, but which is in fact classic
genocide.
https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/children-born-to-rape-victims-in-the-
bosnian-genocide/

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23
DOKUMENTI
Genocide in Bosnia
Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995 HORRIFIC ACCOUNTS OF RAPE OF BOSNIAN MUSLIM
WOMEN AND GIRLS DURING THE BOSNIAN GENOCIDE leave a comment » Serbs Gone,
But the Horror Remains – Recovery uncertain for all rape victims
By Nancy Nusser The Tuscaloosa News p.2F / Cox News Service 18 April 1993.
TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina
— The pale woman sitting in the health clinic said she hates the son she just delivered and could
not bring herself to look at him before nurses took him away. She is Bosnian, and the baby‘s
father is the Serb soldier who raped her. ―The child is a Chetnik,‖ she said, using the derisive
word for Serbs. ―I hate the child. My brother was in a concentration camp for 10 months and I
was raped by Chetniks,‖ she said. Pope John Paul II urged the raped women of Bosnia to bear the
children. Some, like this 30-year-old Muslim woman, do give birth, but say that keeping the child
is beyond the limit for them. What some call hate of the baby, other victims describe as fear, said
Amra Mesic of Tuzla, who has counseled some of the rape victims. ―We are afraid that deep

24
inside they might also be Chetniks,‖ she explained. In Bosnia, Muslim woman generally are
Westernized in clothing and education. Many look as though they would be comfortable in an
American mall. Though not intensely religious, many still hold tight to traditional values —
opposing sex outside of marriage and convinced that rape is almost like death. More to the point
for those who were raped, the aggressors were Serb soldiers who in many cases also killed or
imprisoned the women‘s families, and burned their homes. ―If I had gotten pregnant and couldn‘t
have an abortion, I would probably have killed myself,‖ said an 18-year-old rape victim, also
interviewed in Tuzla. She and the 30-year-old withheld their names. ―It‘s like mental death for
them,‖ said Dr. Mladen Loncar, a psychiatrist for the Croatian Ministry of Health who has
conducted studies of the rapes. Estimates of the number of women raped ranges from a
conservative 2,400 to about 20,000. Estimates of the percentage of victims who became pregnant
are equally far apart. Dr. Loncar said researchers have no idea how many quietly arranged illegal
abortions. Estimates of how many delivered a rapist‘s child range from 10 to 1,000. All of the
figures could be skewed because many women try to hide the rapes, and those who are helping
them through the post-rape trauma often cooperate, Dr. Loncar said. ―I didn‘t tell anyone‖ the 30-
year-old new mother said. ―Anytime someone mentioned being pregnant, I was ashamed.‖
Recently, her husband has been in Pakistan, and so she successfully hid the pregnancy from him.
Her two children do not know, but her mother has figured it out, she said. She was raped last June,
when Serb soldiers occupied rural villages in north-eastern Bosnia. Zineta Durakovic, 29, who
also was among those captured at that time, was willing to allow use of her name. She said that
after the soldiers rounded up the Muslim women and children and older men, they loaded them
into buses and drove them from village to village, collecting other non-combatants. Along the way
she saw bodies floating in a river, Durakovic said. In a furniture store, Serbs separated out about
40 women and girls, and the soldiers began choosing from the group, she said. Durakovic was
taken to a burned house and raped once by a man covered in blood, she said. When she pleaded
with him to let her go, he told her he merely wanted to make love to her, she said. When it was
over, he asked her, hypothetically, whether she would marry him. Afraid, she told him she might
have under different circumstances. The 18-year-old said she was being raped in another house at
roughly the same time. When the women and girls were being chosen, an officer told her to go to
one corner of the room, the 18-year-old said. Later, he took her to a house and told her to clean it,
which she did. After that, he raped her ―eight or nine times‖ in the hours of the night, she said.
She was 17 at the time. She said she didn‘t even think about losing her virginity, only about the
physical pain. She said her 15-year-old sister was taken off by a 17-year-old soldier who couldn‘t
bring himself to rape her because he had a sister that age. So they just talked all night. But she
said the next day her little sister went to a local well to get water, and was raped by another
Serbian. Many of those raped believe it was a deliberate policy, rather than a breakdown of
discipline in Serbian ranks. ―They planned to do it because they know how difficult it is for
Muslim women,‖ the new mother said. Most Serbians are of Christian heritage. She said the man
who raped her said,‖You shouldn‘t just deliver Muslim babies. You should also have Chetnik
babies.‖ She said she didn‘t have an abortion because by the time she realized she was pregnant it
was too late. ―In the Islamic religion, affairs before or during marriage are not done,‖ said Dr.
Munevera Fazlic, who directs a Tuzla organization that delivers medical supplies to hospitals and
aid groups. ―The trauma is worse for Muslim women because they‘re closed. It‘s their shame,‖
Dr. Fazlic said. ―They will not talk about it.‖ But Dr. Loncar attributed the intensity of their
trauma more to traditional rural values than to their Islamic beliefs. He described the rapes as a
kind of Serb-enforced ethnic cleansing — a brutal way to making them reluctant to return to
villages where everyone would know what had happened to them. ―It is harder for women to find
a husband because they carry the stigma of rape,‖ Dr. Loncar said. Those who are already married
―expect marriages to break up, and it does split up families,‖ he said. The three redacted to their
rapes in different ways. Durakovic, an articulate court stenographer, said she understands that the
rape was not her fault and should not be a source of shame. But she no longer feels marriageable.
The new mother was tightly wound up, months after her rape. She spoke only in a low, flat voice,

25
and wrapped her arms about herself. Dr. Loncar said the pain is particularly deep for women who
give birth because of the conflict between their urge to mother their child and their decision not to
raise it themselves. The 18-year-old seems to have coped, or at least succumbed to teenage
optimism, in the year since she was raped. ―At first I thought I would never marry and have a
family, but now I‘ve begun to realize it‘s not my shame,‖ she said. ―Maybe my husband will think
about it, but if he loves me he will not care.‖ In an interview that lasted more than two hours, she
even smiled or laughed at times. Her words stumbled only when she was describing how hard she
tried to stop screaming when the Serb officer told her that he would tell other soldiers to join in if
she did not stop making so much noise.
https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/horrific-accounts-of-rape-of-bosnian-
muslim-women-and-girls-during-the-bosnian-genocide/

26
27
DOKUMENTI
Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995
↓ Bosnian Genocide
There are four legally validated genocides that occurred in Bosnia-Herzegovina, other than
Srebrenica. The Bosnian Genocide is the event referring to brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of
at least 500,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) coupled with the killings of 65,000 to 75,000
Bosniaks during the 1992-95 war of Serbian aggression.
The three international judgements confirming Genocide in Bosnia, other than Srebrenica,
include: Prosecutor v Nikola Jorgic (Doboj region), Prosecutor v Novislav Djajic [Dzajic] (Foča
region), Prosecutor v Djuradj Kuslic [Kusljic] (Kotor Varos) and Prosecutor v Maksim Sokolovic
(Kalesija, Zvornik region). All three cases were tried in Germany — at the request of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — to ease caseload of the
ongoing trials at the Hague.

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29
DOKUMENTI
Entire villages, such as Miljevina in eastern Bosnia, may have been converted to rape camps.
About 100 people, ―all young Muslim women and girls, were raped,‖ says a 20-year-old named
Aida. Her attacker was Dragan J., a Serb policeman and neighbor, who excused his behavior, she
says, on the ground that ―‗It is war, you can‘t resist, there is no law and order‘.‖ Rasema, a 33-
year-old mother, offers a similar account. She claims that her assailants raped her in front of her
two girls. When she resisted, they threatened, ―We will cut out your teeth! Do you want us to
slaughter your children, to watch us cutting them into pieces, piece after piece?‖ In his own
defense, one attacker told Rasema, ―I have to do it, otherwise they will kill me.‖
Genocide in Bosnia
Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995 Element of Bosnian Genocide, Systematic Rape of Muslim
Women A pattern of crime: Serbian soldiers repeatedly raped Bosniak women and girls as young
as 6 and 7.
January 04, 1993. NEWSWEEK
About all she has left is her name, which she prefers to keep to herself, and the shocking
memories of last July. That‘s when Serbian troops stormed the northwest Bosnian village of
Rizvanovici, and S., a 20-year-old Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] woman with a ponytail, was
rounded up with 400 other women in the yard of a neighbor‘s house. Two soldiers, wearing
camouflage uniforms and Serbian crosses around their necks, picked S. and her friend I. out of the
crowd. ―They brought us to an empty house and there they did what they wanted to do,‖ says S.
dully. ―First we had to excite them and then we had to satisfy them.‖ Afterward the Serbs traded
partners. The girls had been virgins. ―They were laughing at us,‖ S. recalls. ―They said we were
pretty girls and [that] we saved ourselves for them.‖ Her ordeal didn‘t end there. After being raped
and dumped at the yard, one of the soldiers came back to bring S. to his commander. ―He told me
to take off my clothes and to lie down on the bed,‖ she says. ―Then he did the same thing. He
started to kiss and to caress me. He saw that I didn‘t feel anything. I looked into his eyes and
asked him if he had a wife. He said no. I asked him if he had a sister. He said he had one. Then I

30
said, ‗How would your sister feel if somebody did the same thing to her that you are doing to
me?‘ Then he jumped up and told me to get dressed and leave.‖ S., who now lives in a refugee
center in northern Croatia, is a survivor of what may be the most sadistic violence to haunt Europe
since the Nazi campaigns: ―ethnic cleansing.‖ Now, on top of documented cases of systematic
torture and murder in Bosnia, come charges of a new Serb atrocity-mass rape. No one knows how
many victims there are, though estimates range from 30,000 to 50,000 women, most of them
Muslim. In the last few months, a torrent of wrenching first-person testimonies from refugees has
emerged, suggesting widespread sexual abuse by Serb forces. They tell of repeated rapes of girls
as young as 6 and 7; violations by neighbors and strangers alike; gang rapes so brutal their victims
die; rape camps where Serbs routinely abused and murdered Bosniak and Croat women; rapes of
young girls performed in front of fathers, mothers, siblings and children; rapes committed
explicitly to impregnate Muslim women and hold them captive until they give birth to wanted
Serbian babies. Many reports are unconfirmed, and some may never be independently
corroborated. But as anecdotal evidence piles up, Western media and women‘s groups are
pressuring their governments to take some kind of action. So far it has resulted in little more than
intelligence gathering by the United States and the European Community. The U.N. Security
Council, citing ―massive, organized and systematic detention and rape,‖ voted unanimously on
Dec. 18 to condemn ―atrocities committed against women, particularly Muslim women, in Bosnia
and Herzegovina.‖ In blithe defiance of international outrage, the Serbs continue to attack
Bosnian towns. Do the Serbs have a deliberate policy of‘ rape? Have they, as Bosnian Foreign
Minister Haris Silajdzic alleges to NEWSWEEK, used rape in the ―systematic humiliation and
genocide of the Bosnian people‖? U.S. government analysts haven‘t yet uncovered anything as
obvious as a speech or direct order by a Serbian leader calling on troops to violate Bosniak
women. But there does seem to be a widespread pattern of on-the-ground commanders
encouraging-or even ordering-their men to rape. The testimonies of so many victims and
witnesses, and of some captured Serb perpetrators, have a consistency that cannot be accidental.
―It‘s hard to believe that all these Serbian men, no matter how animalistic you think human nature
is, would suddenly get it in their heads to find a 7-year-old girl and rape her,‖ says the lead State
Department researcher. Rape is an integral part of ethnic cleansing, of eradicating entire areas of
their historic Muslim populations through brutal intimidation, expulsion and outright murder. In
such Bosnian towns as Brcko, Bjeljina, Kljuc, Sanski Most, Prijedor, Kotor Varos, Zvornik,
leading citizens-anyone who owned a business, participated in the Party of Democratic Action,
held a university degree-were hunted down and liquidated. The rest of the male population was
packed off to prison camps. Rape clearly was the coup de grace delivered to tens of mortally
wounded towns, a way of ensuring that women would never want to return to their homes. For 12-
year-old Vasvija [Bosnian Muslim girl], the terror began after she was evicted from her village of
Jelec in August. During her first night in Partizan Hall, a Serb-run detention camp in the nearby
eastern Bosnian town of Foca, two soldiers picked her from among the 70 detainees, all women,
children and elderly civilians. ―They brought me to a flat, an empty flat,‖ she says, a single tear
running down an otherwise passive face. ―They raped me.‖ Both soldiers? ―Both.‖ Over nine
consecutive nights, Vasvija endured the same hideous treatment at the hands of different men.
Once she was taken out with her mother and another inmate. They were all raped by the same
Serbian soldier. Exchanged on Sept. 17 for Serb prisoners, Vasvija, her siblings and her mother
now live in a refugee center near Sarajevo. No one has heard from her father, who was beaten and
dragged off to a different prison camp when the Serbs overran Jelec. How many women are
victims of rape? The Bosnian government commission on war crimes in Sarajevo claims that there
are 30,000; the Ministry for Interior Affairs goes as high as 50,000 women. When pressed,
Bosnian officials concede that their estimates are extrapolations based on a relatively small
number of testimonies. There‘s no procedure for reporting such crimes and little willingness by
victims to come forward. Battered by fear and shame, most survivors keep their stories to
themselves. ―They have been brought up in the Islamic spirit,‖ explains Dr. Muhamed Sestic,
chief of the neuropsychiatric department at the hospital in Zenica, in central Bosnia. ―Sexual

31
intercourse is a very serious act, no matter if it‘s done with or against the will of the woman.‖
Families, he says, often conceal rape to spare a woman from marrying beneath her station-or to
keep the knowledge from her husband. Muhamed Sacirbey, leader of the Bosnian Mission to the
United Nations, has a grimmer explanation for the relative paucity of confirmed reports: ―We
believe many of the women who‘ve been raped have been murdered. But a thorough search can‘t
yet be conducted of the victims‘ whereabouts.‖ The Serbian forces, after all, still occupy 70
percent of Bosnia. Proving mass rape is difficult. No allegation is so emotionally charged-or so
susceptible to exaggeration and propaganda. ―It will be years before the full picture of what has
transpired emerges,‖ reports a U.S. government specialist. ―When we finally can survey the
interior of Bosnia, I think we‘ll find a mass grave associated with each and every camp and
village that was ethnically cleansed. And in every one of them will be women who were raped.‖
The attempt to pin down numbers enrages some advocacy groups. ―What happens to men is called
politics, what happens to women is called culture,‖ says Gloria Steinem. She has a point: rape has
historically been treated as an incidental atrocity of war. Along with groups like the International
League for Human Rights and the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy, the Ms. Foundation has
labored to place rape in Bosnia at the center of international attention. Many organizations hope to
provide psychological support to rape survivors. But a chief aim is to prosecute war criminals.
Says Steinem: ―These people must be held responsible.‖ But sorting out ―these people‖ won‘t be
easy. In his call for a war-crimes trial, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger lumped together
the chief architects of a Greater Serbia-including Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and
Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs-with
low ranking henchmen like Borislav Herak. A 21-year-old Serb laborer from Sarajevo, Herak
admits to raping seven Bosniak women and to killing two of his victims in addition to the 18
murders to which he has already confessed. ―We were ordered to rape so that our morale would be
higher,‖ he says from a military prison in the Bosnian capital. ―We were told we would fight
better if we raped the women.‖ He claims that he and fellow soldiers frequented the Sonja Cafe-
one of several alleged ―rape camps‖ outside Sarajevo-which maintained a population of 70
Muslim women and girls; those who were killed were quickly replaced. Entire villages, such as
Miljevina in eastern Bosnia, may have been converted to rape camps. About 100 people, ―all
young Muslim women and girls, were raped,‖ says a 20-year-old named Aida. Her attacker was
Dragan J., a Serb policeman and neighbor, who excused his behavior, she says, on the ground that
―‗It is war, you can‘t resist, there is no law and order‘.‖ Rasema, a 33-year-old mother, offers a
similar account. She claims that her assailants raped her in front of her two girls. When she
resisted, they threatened, ―We will cut out your teeth! Do you want us to slaughter your children,
to watch us cutting them into pieces, piece after piece?‖ In his own defense, one attacker told
Rasema, ―I have to do it, otherwise they will kill me.‖ He may have been telling the truth. Two
young Serb deserters, Slobodan Panic and Cvijetin Maksimovic, now being held in a prison in
Orasje, Bosnia, told NEWSWEEK they were ordered to rape and murder for the amusement of
their commander in Brcko, in northeastern Bosnia, last May. Panic says he balked when two
battered women, each about 18, were brought to him in a room in a warehouse where 500 to 600
civilians were imprisoned. Serb soldiers ―Said they‘d kill me if I didn‘t‖ rape them, he recalls,
insisting that he ―only did a little‖ to his screaming victims, not consummating the act. Three
other women were dragged out for the same humiliating display. During these episodes, Panic
says, soldiers stood around in a circle and laughed. Then they hauled two badly beaten Bosniak
prisoners before Panic and handed him a gun. ―I said, ‗I can‘t, they‘ve never done anything to
me‘,‖ he remembers. ―‗You have to or else we‘ll kill you‘,‖ Panic says he was told. He shot each
man in the chest. Two more male prisoners appeared. A soldier handed Panic a knife. ―Butcher
them,‖ he commanded. When Panic protested, the soldier replied, ―I‘ll show you how it‘s done.‖
Then, holding Panic‘s hand around the knife handle, he seized the man by the hair, jerked back his
head and cut his throat. Death, at least, brings an end to suffering. Rape victims who became
pregnant relive their horror every day. Sofija, a 30-year-old Muslim, was released from a school
turned prison camp in the village of Parzevic in mid-September, after being raped every night for

32
six months by five or six different Serb soldiers. Now she is hiding from her family in a cold
Sarajevan hospital, tormented by the thought of the unwanted child growing inside her. ―I do not
want to see the baby,‖ the mother of two says without emotion. ―I will not feed it. I do not want
anything to do with it.‖ Her roommate says that Sofija talks in her sleep every night, debating
whether to kill the baby when it arrives in mid-January. Somewhere in Sarajevo are 12 other
pregnant women and girls from the same village as Sofija who were similarly raped and held until
long past the time for a safe abortion. Earlier release doesn‘t guarantee relief: a 1978 Yugoslav
law allows gynecologists to perform abortions only up to the 10th week of pregnancy; thereafter,
cases are referred to a hospital ethics commission which, in Roman Catholic Croatia, home to
400,000 Bosnian refugees, may be more inclined to put the babies up for adoption. Rape is the
ultimate act in the Serbs‘ program of annihilation. They have robbed countless civilians of their
possessions, their land, their lives and their dignity. Bosnia will be haunted by hundreds, if not
thousands, of Serbian children forced on unwilling Muslim mothers. The Serbs do seem to be
winning their ugly war. But their crimes have guaranteed that Greater Serbia will be an
international pariah for years to come.
https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/element-of-bosnian-genocide-systematic-
rape-of-muslim-women/

DOKUMENTI
Genocide in Bosnia
Bosnian Genocide, 1992-1995
12-year-old Bosniak Girl Describes Rape by Serb Soldiers Daily News, p.2 12
December 1992. ZAGREB, Croatia
— The Serbian fighters who have seized large parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina are being accused of
systematic rape against captured Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] women and girls. The accusations, by

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Bosnian officials, foreign activists and by the victims themselves, have mounted along with
reports of murders, beatings and forced relocations of civilians in the war-torn country. In one
account, Vazima Visovic, a slender, 12-year-old Bosniak girl, described her ordeal last summer in
a Serbian camp for women in Foča, southern Bosnia. ―We were kept there for 27 days and got
almost nothing to eat. The Chetniks [Serbian soldiers] beat us, abused us and raped us, including
me,‖ she said, her stony voice sounding agonizingly adult. ―They were coming night and day,
always in groups of two or three, and took us to apartments — me, my mother and another
woman. One man raped all three of us. … I was always raped by two or three.‖ 2,000 Bosnians
Pregnant by Rape Kingman Daily Miner, p.14, 28 January 1993 GENEVA (AP) — At least 300
babies have been given up by women raped during the ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
according to a European Community report. The report, released Tuesday, cited information from
representatives of the mosque in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, who have been caring for
refugees. Officials at the mosque also said they knew of 2,000 women pregnant as a result of rape.
The whereabouts of the 300 babies, who are considered Bosnian, was not specified. But officials
have said some such infants are receiving care in Croatia, while a team of lawyers studies their
situation. Bosnian Serb fighters have been accused of raping Muslim women as part of a
campaign of terror to clear whole areas of non-Serbs. There are allegations of rape camps set up
by Serb irregulars.
https://genocideinbosnia.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/12-year-old-bosniak-girl-describes-rape-by-
serb-soldiers/#more-1485

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IKRE,UČI ČITAJ !
”Riječ nauka (el-ilm) sa svojim izvedenicama, spomenuta je tri puta, kao što je spomenuto i
pero kao sredstvo za pisanje, i sve to u prvih pet ajeta Objave, što ukazuje na važnost znanja i
čitanja u životu islamskog ummeta.
IKRE,UČI ČITAJ !
”Dok je Muhammed, s.a.v.s., boravio u pedini Hira, ušao je melek Džibril u pedinu i rekao
Muhammedu, s.a.v.s.: ”Čitaj! (Uči!)” Muhammed, s.a.v.s., odgovorio je: ”Ja ne znam čitati.”
”Onda me je” – veli Poslanik, s.a.v.s., – ”melek Džibril uhvatio i toliko snažno stisnuo da sam
njegov stisak jedva izdržao. Zatim me pustio i ponovo rekao: ”Čitaj!” Odgovorio sam: ”Ja ne
znam čitati.” Džibril me je ponovo uhvatio i stisnuo, a onda me pustio i rekao: ”Čitaj, u ime
Gospodara tvoga Koji stvara, stvara čovjeka od ugruška! Čitaj, Plemenit je Gospodar tvoj, Koji
poučava peru, Koji čovjeka poučava onome što ne zna.” (El-Alek, 1.-5.)

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MALO POZNATO SARAJEVO:HADŽI ŠABANOVA KAHVA
https://focanskidani.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/malo-poznato-sarajevohadzi-sabanova-
kahva/

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MALO POZNATO SARAJEVO:HADŽI ŠABANOVA KAHVA
Tekst o rušenju Hadži Šabanove kahvane objavljen je u Sarajevskom novom listu 14. jula
1942. godine uoči uređenja državne ceste VI, odnosno njenog dijela između Vijednice i
cestovnog tunela na Bentbaši, što je prepostavljalo rušenje čitavog niza zgrada na desnoj
obali Miljacke, među kojima se nalazila i Hadži Šabanova kahvana.
https://focanskidani.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/malo-poznato-sarajevohadzi-sabanova-
kahva/

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