In search of peace
During the Bosnian war thousands of women were tortured and raped by Serbs. But 10 years after the conflict began, most of the victims are still seeking justice. Diane Taylor reports
[Our comments in italics below)
Tuesday January 22, 2002
The Guardian
It was in the summer of 1992 that tales of horror began to emerge about concentration camps in Bosnia. Men were slaughtered slowly, using methods that would cause maximum suffering, while women were raped, some in the detention camps of Omarska and Trnoplje, many more in their homes or as they fled from their neighbourhoods. [On his deathbed in October 2003, former Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic confessed to Bernard Kouchner, the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and Richard Holbrooke, Assistant US Secretary of State) that there had been no death camps in Bosnia. He excused his false claims during the Bosnian war on the basis that it was the only way to get the international community to intervene on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. Kouchner published a full transcript of the conversation in his 2007 autobiography].
Between 1992 and 1995, tens of thousands of women were raped by Serbs; the figure is only an estimate because many were too traumatised to ever speak of what had happened to them. [No evidence has ever been produced to support this propaganda. When the British press descended on Bosnia to follow up the initial claims of mass rapes, they found precisely nothing and came home without filing any stories].
But a picture has emerged from those who did speak out that the rapes were not random acts of brutality, but a systematic plan to impregnate them. Many were told: “Now you will have Serbian babies who will grow up to kill your people.” [These stories emerged later when the Coatian and Bosnian ‘information services’ had got their act together and offered to the media victims who had been carefully coached to give testimony. As these witnesses gave their testimony to the Hague Tribunal remotely, with their identities fully protected, the court had virtually no basis to test their various claims. The few journalists who followed proceedings noted that they seemed to have been very heavily coached and gave very similar, broad-brush accounts].
Between 3,000 and 5,000 babies were born of war rapes, many abandoned to live in orphanages either because their mothers rejected them or because of family pressure to give the babies up. Most of the women attacked were Muslim, although Croatians were also targeted. [As is so often the case, no source is given for these ridiculous figures. Most of these claims were originated by the Croatian information service and taken, unchecked, at face value by western media. The disgraced Hague Tribunal, which carried out no professional investigations of its own, was happy to admit uncorroborated evidence from anonymous witnesses as established proof.]
In April it will be 10 years since the start of the Bosnian war. Since then, a small number of the women who were raped have testified at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague, and a handful of their rapists have been jailed.
It was at the tribunal that rape was ruled for the first time to be a crime against humanity; also for the first time sexual enslavement was included on the charge sheet. But what of the women themselves? [This alone demonstrated the breathtaking inadequacy of The Hague Tribunal which had been ordered by the UN Security Council to enforce only existing international humanitarian law and explicitly told that it should not introduce new law of its own making.]
Ankica Gostajn, 35, was tortured at Trnoplje camp for eight months in 1992 and after her release was raped at her home in Bosnia by three Serbian soldiers. She gave birth to a baby as a result of the rape. She is one of the many who is unable to return to the comfortable flat she had shared in Bosnia with her parents and her son Stevo, who was four when war broke out.
“Some people have returned home but I believe that it is those who, like me, have really suffered who will never feel able to return home,” says Gostajn. “I had a good job working in the kitchens of a local school before the war and everything was very comfortable for us. I’m Croatian, but in Prijedor, where I lived, Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Roma all got along together. In the camps I was forced to watch Muslims, Croats and Roma having limbs chopped off, tongues cut out and nails ripped apart before being dumped in deep pits and covered in earth.”
Gostajn was assigned cleaning duties, and whenever the Serbs told her to start vacuuming she knew it meant that the rapes were going to start in the room next door. “I could hear the screams. Some of the girls were as young as 14 and they even raped a 71-year-old grandmother who only had one leg. It was just a matter of luck whether they raped you or left you alone.”
She and her family were unable to return to their flat in Prijedor and fled to a house they had in the countryside. But it was often too unsafe to remain indoors at night, so like many other families they slept in the forest. One rainy night the family decided to risk sleeping indoors; that was when the three Serb soldiers came, locked the rest of the family in another room and raped Gostajn. On February 9 1996 her daughter Sanja was born; it was only three days after the birth that she was able to accept the child. “She was so innocent. Why should she suffer for her father’s sins?”
After the war Gostajn was placed in a refugee camp outside Zagreb in Croatia, where she remains, still haunted by her or deal and struggling to survive financially. She knows who her rapists were, but no action has been taken against them. Now a Serbian woman who used to be a friend lives in her family’s flat in Prijedor. [This story is typical of the propaganda generated by the Croatian information service, much of which was originated by the now-discredited Jadranka Cigelj. “Tongues cut out”, “nails ripped apart” , “testicles cut off” were stock-in-trade accusations, but none were ever substantiated by proper legal process.]
Only 80 men have been indicted for war crimes at the international criminal tribunal – 49 are currently involved in proceedings while 31 remain at large. The list includes former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who has been charged with genocide and other atrocities. His trial for war crimes in Kosovo begins on February 12 but a date has not yet been set for alleged crimes committed during the Bosnian war. [Slobodan Milosevic was illegally abducted to The Hague and stood trial between 2002 and 2006, when he died mysteriously in captivity having being denied specialist medical treatment. Even the prosecution admitted that, after more than 4 years of trial, they had not substantiated any of the charges in their indictment against him.]
In February, three Bosnian Serbs – Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic – were the first to be jailed by an international court for war sex crimes in a case involving sex enslavement. Sixteen women who had been raped went to the Hague to testify against them; their youngest victim was a girl of 12. [For The Hague Tribunal, any anonymous account was sufficient basis for guilty verdicts. All established legal principles were abandoned to allow ICTY judges, many of whom had little on no courtroom experience, to asses ‘guilt’ on a purely subjective basis.]
The court heard evidence that Serb paramilitary soldiers entered detention centres and selected women and girls for nightly gang rapes and sexual torture. Judge Florence Mumba who presided described the men as “morally depraved”. In her evidence one woman, who was 15 at the time of the rapes, said: “I think that for the whole of my life I will feel the pain that I felt then.”