Assault by Bosnian Serb Forces
Croat, Muslim and Serb, these rape victims together represent the three major ethnic groups involved in the brutal war that has ravaged Bosnia-Hercegovina. Women who have been raped in their homes are usually attacked by soldiers who randomly enter to loot from or to terrorize the inhabitants. For example, K.S. is a housewife from a village in the municipality of Ključ, born in 1939 and illiterate.13 She could not recall the day of her assault but did specify that it had taken place approximately four months before Human Rights Watch interviewed her, probably in late September 1992. She could only identify the approximate month by the farming season at the time of her assault, which she identified as the period during which corn is harvested and potatoes are dug out of the ground. According to K.S.:
One evening soldiers pounded on our front door. They had already been in our village near Ključ. I do not want to tell you the name of the village. Six of us women and my man [i.e., husband] were in the house. The women were our relatives and neighbors. They had taken refuge in our house because the house had two cement and iron-reinforced floors, so it provided a good shelter. That night, they pounded on the door. I asked: "Who is banging? We are alone, please don't bang." My mother-in-law's bed was situated exactly below the window. After I'd spoken, they broke the window with their rifle butts. The glass shattered all over my mother-in-law. I opened the front door, and five armed Serbian soldiers came in.
K.S. testified that she recognized one of the soldiers, who was dressed in fatigues, but did not know his name. She claims that the soldier used to man Serbian barricades in the vicinity of the police station in Ključ. K.S. continued:
They lined us up in front of the house. With knives hanging from their belts, they thrust guns in our throats, yelled and threatened us. They pressed a knife up to my husband's neck and said [to me], "If you want the old man alive, give us gold and [German] marks." Then one of my cousins brought out all her gold [jewelry], so that they would spare my man. One of them grabbed me by the chest and pulled me over. "Come here," he said. I was calling for help and begging them to kill me rather than separate me from the rest of my folks. He grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me on the ground. He screamed at me, asking which of the villagers had the most gold and money. I told him that I did not know. Our men have never worked abroad; we were not rich. My man and I have lived on his pension. It took three of my man's pensions [to buy] a sack of flour. He hit me on the shoulder and threw me on the ground again. My shoulder still hurts very much. He started tearing off my clothes. Then the three of them took turns on me.
K.S. claims that her husband and the other women did not witness the rape but heard what was happening. According to K.S.:
That man took me behind the house—to the side—while the others remained in front of the house. It all took place on the concrete [floor]. I was cold and sore all over. I pleaded with them, "Children, don't. I could be your mother." Then I collapsed and knew nothing more. When I had regained my senses, they were no longer around me, but I heard their voices and the shouts coming from the front of the house.
K.S. then crawled into the house, only to be found and raped again. According to K.S.:
I crawled into the house. [I] went upstairs, found the room, lay down on the bed and slipped a blanket over my head. Then, one of them came in. He pulled the blanket, lit my face with a flashlight and roared: "Did you try to hide again? Out with [the German] marks!" I wept while telling him that we had no marks. He then spread my legs and raped me. He was very strong—you cannot defend yourself. When he was done, he inserted his hand inside me and began pinching me with his fingers, as if he wanted to pull everything out. I screamed and he grabbed my right breast and twisted it so hard that I screamed again; long afterwards my entire breast was blackened. He thrust the knife to my throat and said that, if I screamed one more time, he would slaughter me. He inserted his fingers inside me again—it hurt tremendously—and then he thrust his hand at my face and I had to lick his fingers clean, one by one. He repeated the whole thing once more.
He lowered his knife down and said that he would rip me open, He kept cursing at me and shouting: "Where is your [Bosnian President] Alija [Izetbegović] now?" He called me an Ustaša.14 I thought it was the end of me. But then, he left. I do not know why he did not kill me. Before they left, they threatened to burn everything if we told anyone what happened. I was covered with blood all over. Once they left, I vomited. I felt very ill. The women helped me; they washed me up. We were afraid that they would come back again.
K.S. claims that her husband reported the incident to the Bosnian Serb police authorities, who sent a car to take K.S. to the hospital. K.S. told the doctor and a police officer that she had been raped. However, K.S. claims that perpetrators of such crimes are never brought to justice. According to K.S.:
[The doctor] said that something like that should not be allowed to happen and that they were going to locate those who did it. But they say one thing and do another. What happened to me has been happening to other women. During the day, they tell you that that ought not to be happening, that they will find those soldiers [responsible for the rapes], and then, at night, the soldiers come again and they act as they please.
During the day, the Serbian neighbors greet you and pretend that everything is as usual, but at night, these very same people shoot at windows and raid houses. The policeman who took me to the hospital was writing something down but they put on a big act, you know. They leave it all alone.
K.S. believes she was assaulted because her husband refused to sign over their house to the Bosnian Serb authorities. According to K.S.:
[My husband] said he did not want to leave, although most of the people had left our village by that time. I was not aware of the fact that somebody would provide for us in this way [i.e., as in the refugee camp]. I thought we would be hungry. That's why they did it, so that we would have to leave. The next morning, after that all had happened, my man signed everything of ours over to them, just so they would let us leave.
In regions where Bosnian Serb forces retain absolute control over territory, rape is used as one of many terror tactics to force the flight of the non-Serbian population from the areas. Serbian soldiers attacking houses in the Banja Luka area have raped women and girls in their homes, andsometimes in the presence of family members. I.T., a married woman with two children, describes how she was raped:15
On the third of May 1993, a group of Serbs came to our house; they all wore uniforms of the Serbian Army. I was on the second floor when they surrounded the house, broke the main entrance and came upstairs. I was in the bedroom with my children and our neighbors—a husband, his wife and their daughter. The Serbs wore black ski masks which covered their faces, but in spite of that, I recognized Mišo Trivić our neighbor who was in the Serbian Army; he used to come into the shop where I worked for many years. They [the soldiers] told us to lie down on the floor, after which they covered us with blankets. Mišo asked me to give him our money. I told him we had 1,400 German marks [approximately US $875] and brought it to him. He cursed me all the time.
Then Trivić and three other soldiers took me into the living room and raped me there. The name of the second man was Siniša Milovčić; the third man I didn't know. The fourth man left the room; he didn't rape me. My neighbor was raped too. My husband and children were in the adjoining room while all this was happening. Before they left, Trivić said that he'd take my son if I didn't pay him another 5,000 German marks [approximately US $3,125], and hit him a few times. They took all our documents—driver's license, passports, everything.
The next morning our neighbor, S.N., went to the ICRC to tell them what had happened. Two police inspectors came the next morning to take our statements. But nothing was done until August, when the same men who attacked and raped us did the same thing to another girl in Vrbanja whose surname was Hodžić; after raping her, they killed her. But after that, they raped and killed a daughter of some Serbian general from Banja Luka; she was thirteen years old. Themother of the girl who was killed told me that the Serbian general visited her and said that the men will be caught.
L.D., a sixty-seven-year-old Muslim man from Prjnavor, and his Serbian wife were evicted from their home in Bosnian Serb-controlled territory in February 1994.16 After being evicted, they lived in the house of L.D.'s sister-in-law. The couple was forced to move into the basement of the sister-in-law's house because it had been occupied by a Serbian military officer. According to L.D. the military police officer, N.E., was rarely home, but his wife A. was there. The entrance to the house was upstairs, and L.D. and his wife rarely left the basement or said anything in front of them. Three months prior to our interviewing L.D. and his wife, three male youths claiming to be "Serbo-Četniks" came to their basement apartment. It is evident that the men must have entered through the military officer's entrance, because that is the only door into and out of the house. Two of the men raped L.D.'s wife. L.D. believes that the men were working in conjunction with the military police officer who lived upstairs, because the officer came to the door after they had raped L.D.'s wife and told the rapists to"cut it out." The three youths then went upstairs and spent about an hour drinking with the military officer.
L.D. reported the rape to the local Red Cross who then reported the rape to the police. The police questioned L.D., his wife and the military officer who lived upstairs. Ten to fifteen days later, L.D.'s brother-in-law went to see the police inspector, and was told that the three rapists had been caught and that the case had been sent to municipal court. Three months later, L.D. and his wife received a notice in the mail from the public prosecutor's office, stating that the charges against the three men had been dropped because there was no basis for the indictment. L.D left Prjnavor, but his wife [a Serb] did not want to leave because of the Serbian media propaganda depictions of Muslims persecuting Serbs in Bosnian government-controlled territory.
Other women are interned in makeshift prisons where they are routinely raped. B., a forty-year-old Muslim woman from Doboj, recounted to Human Rights Watch that Serbian forces assumed control of Doboj on May 1 or 2, 1992.17 People were allowed to leave the city of Doboj, so B. fled with her family to their home in the village of Grabska. Thereafter, Serbian forces started shelling Grabska and B.'s son, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law were evacuated. B. and her husband chose to stay because they hadhelped to found the local chapter of the predominantly Muslim Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcija—SDA) and felt an obligation to remain. On May 10, according to B.:
They [i.e., ground troops] were coming from two sides, forcing everyone to come out of their houses and burning the houses. They forced some women and children to lie down in the main road; they threatened to drive over them with tanks if those in hiding did not emerge.
After everyone had emerged from their houses, the Serbian soldiers gathered them on the main road and separated the men from the women and children. According to B., the Serbian soldiers had lists from which they called out women's names; they directed these women to board buses. Some children appeared to have boarded the buses with their mothers. B. was among those women who boarded one of the three blue-and-white buses after her name was read from a list. The men were left standing in a group.
The women and children first were taken to a school in Srpska Grabska. They were then transferred to a factory warehouse used by the Bosanska company that produced jams and juices in Doboj. B. then was transferred to a high school in the Usara section of Doboj, where she was held for twenty-eight days. According to B.:
It began as soon as I arrived. They told us not to look at the soldiers so that we wouldn't remember them. We were not allowed to talk with each other. During the day, we stayed in a big sports hall. The guards were always there. If they caught us talking, they would take a woman out, beat her and more than the usual [number of men] would rape her. They liked to punish us. They would ask women if they had male relatives in the city; I saw them ask this of one woman, and they brought her fourteen-year-old son and forced him to rape her.
Some of us were selected by name; some would just get chosen. If a man could not rape [i.e., if he was physically unable] he would use a bottle or gun or he would urinate on me.
B. remembers that four different types of soldiers were present at different times in the camp: local Serbian militia; the Yugoslav army (JNA); police forces based in the Serbian-occupied town of Knin in Croatia;18 and members of the "White Eagles" (Beli Orlovi) paramilitary group, who wore an insignia bearing three eagles and kokarda19 on their hats.
B. claims that local Serbs, including several doctors whom she knew from the hospital where she had worked, also raped women detained at the high school. According to B.:
Some of the local Serbs wore black stockings on their heads to disguise their faces because they didn't want to be recognized. [Nevertheless,] I recognized many of them. [They were] colleagues—doctors with whom I worked. The first [man] who raped me was a Serbian doctor named Jodić. I had known Jodić for ten years. We worked in the same hospital. I would see him every day in the employees' cafeteria. We spoke generally, "Hi, how are you." He was a very polite, nice man. Another doctor whom I had previously known also raped me; [his name was] Obrad Filipović. I wasn't allowed to say anything. Before he raped me he said, "Now you know who we are. You will remember forever." I was so surprised; he was a doctor!
B. claims that women were most frequently raped in classrooms of the high school.
Once I saw the face of a woman I knew; her daughter was with her. Three men were with them inside [the classroom]. I was brought in by one man, and another four men followed. On that occasion, I was raped with a gun by one of the three men already in the room. I didn't recognize him. Others stood watching. Some spat on us. They were rapingme, the mother and her daughter at the same time. Sometimes you had to accept ten men, sometimes three. Sometimes when they were away, they wouldn't call me for one or two days. I wanted nothing, not bread, not water, just to be alone. I felt I wanted to die. We had no change of clothes and couldn't wash ourselves.
B. remembers that the school hall where the women were forced to sit during the day with their knees pulled up to their chests was packed full of women of all ages. A woman sitting close to B. tried to speak with her, but B. feared punishment and did not respond. The guards took the women to the bathroom only at designated times. They also placed a pot in the middle of the room and told the women to use it to relieve themselves. However, the pot was punctured and if the women used it, urine and feces would leak in the area where other women were sitting.
The guards also brought a man who they said was a gynecologist to the school and submitted the younger women to gynecological exams. Recalls B.:
A gynecologist would come to the hall, to one of the classrooms. They told us that he was a doctor, but I'm not so sure because he didn't realize that I had an IUD and he examined me internally. Only the younger women would see the doctor. I think they were checking to see if we were pregnant because he would say, "You're not pregnant." The Serbs said to us, "Why aren't you pregnant?" Once they brought girls not older than seventeen into the hall. They were clean and dressed nicely. They said, "See how well we treat them. They are pregnant."
The [pregnant girls] were from outside, and I didn't know them. I didn't pay too much attention. I think they wanted to know who was pregnant in case anyone was hiding it. They wanted women to have children to stigmatize us forever. The child is a reminder of what happened.
Non-Serbian women were raped while interned in concentration camps. J., a thirty-nine-year-old Croatian woman from the town of Prijedor,was raped by a reserve captain of the self-proclaimed "Republika Srpska."20 According to J., the reserve captain named Grabovac took her into a separate office away from the other prisoners. Other men entered the office but, due to faulty electricity, J. could not see the other assailants. J. was then beaten by these men. The men called J. an Ustaša and said she needed to give birth to a Serb. "Then she would be different," they said. After the other men left the room the reserve captain, Grabovac, raped J.
Selima,21 a Muslim woman in her forties, was arrested in her home in Prijedor on May 30, 1992, and detained in a former local government building for four days. She was allowed to go home but was arrested again on June 11, 1992, and then detained in the Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje camps. While in Keraterm, Selima states she was raped by an unknown assailant and by Zoran Sikirica, whom she claimed was the commander of the camp. Other former Keraterm detainees interviewed by Human Rights Watch identified Sikirica as a soldier at the Keraterm detention facility. Selima was summoned to give a statement at the local police station by policemen she knew. Selima was not apprehensive about giving her statement because she believed herself to be guilty of "nothing." She was not politically active and was not a member of any political party. However, after giving her statement, she and two other women were taken to the Keraterm camp, which had been a factory for bricks and ceramic tile. The women were separated. While locked in one of the halls, Selima was raped by Sikirica. Selima also heard the screams of men who were being tortured in the same building. After Sikirica left, three other young men entered her detention hall. One of the men raped Selima while the other two laughed, insulted Selima and cheered the rapist. Another soldier intervened and stopped the abuse. Later, when asked by soldiers if she had been abused, Selima replied,"no" fearing for her life.22
Human Rights Watch interviewed a young married couple, both Muslims, from Čarakovo. A Serbian soldier named Rajko Dragić broke into the house where the couple was staying with their four-year-old daughter. Rajko Dragić, whom Selim identified as part of the Serbian Army because he wore a camouflage uniform with a bullet belt and a red beret, looted their home of a videotape player and a television. Intimidating the family with a machine gun, he raped Senada in front of her husband and their child. He then burned down their house. The young couple fled with their family after the house was set on fire, but did not report what had happened for fear that they would be killed.23
13 Interview, refugee camp in Croatia, January 22, 1993. All names withheld by Human Rights Watch unless otherwise indicated.
14 During World War II, with the backing of the Nazi and Italian fascist governments, Croatian fascists (known as Ustaše) established the puppet Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska - NDH). Under the Ustaša regime, thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others were killed between 1941 and 1945. Some Muslims were members of the NDH government and some Muslim forces fought on the side of the Ustaša regime during World War II. Serbian military and paramilitary forces commonly refer to Croat and Muslim forces in the current war as "Ustaša." Both Croats and Muslims reject the label and vehemently deny that they are Ustaša sympathizers or fascists.
15 Interview, Croatia, February 27 and 28, 1994.
16 Interview, Han Bila, Bosnia-Hercegovina, September 24, 1994.
17 Interview, Zagreb, Croatia, January 1993.
18 B. referred to the police forces from Knin as "Martičevci," because their one-time commander was Milan Martić, now president of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina in Serbian-occupied areas of Croatia. B. also claims that the forces from Knin wore high black hats and an insignia on their uniforms.
19 The kokarda is a Serbian emblem which depicts a double-headed eagle and is worn by some Serbian paramilitary groups.
20 Interview, Zabreb, Croatia, October 15, 1992. Human Rights Watch interviewed two other women who had been held in Omarska, and they confirmed that women had been raped in the camp.
21 Interview, Zagreb, Croatia, February 22, 1993. The woman provided her name to Human Rights Watch but asked that it remain confidential. The name here is a pseudonym, and other identifying features have been deleted to protect the confidentiality of the witness.
22 Selima believes Zoran Sikirica personally sent a soldier the next day to ask if anyone had molested her, but she did not indicate to Human Rights Watch how she knew that her assailant had personally sent a soldier to question her.
23 Interview, Zagreb, Croatia, January 1993.
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