Bosnia

I was very young when Yugoslavia was dissolved. I don’t remember everything clearly except a particular exhibition my political activist mother took me to. It had many pictures and documentaries of children crying, wounded men and women in war struck Bosnia. To this day, the images are hard to forget.

A decade later when I read that a former Bosnian Serb soldier was sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping and torturing Muslim women and girls in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, those images returned. I wanted badly to know how this nation had recovered from such a huge tragedy.

After hours and hours of extensive research I realized, it really hasn’t. Children who had been born out of the systematic raping of Bosnian women had all grown up. They had started questioning who their fathers were. Some women had given up their babies to orphanages scared of the fact that they might never be able to love them. Suzannah, a rape baby living in an orphanage has no birth certificate or bank account. When she was born the Croatians refused to register her. To this day, donations for Suzannah cannot reach her directly. Unfortunately, Suzannah isn’t the only one with a sad story in the orphanage.

The state does nothing for the abandoned and sexually abused women and children. The rapes were committed in order for these Bosnian women to give birth to Serbian children. No counseling or help has been given to them. They were shunned from their communities left by their husbands with little babies to raise. Most were teenagers when this mental and physical abuse occurred. Some raped women find it difficult to hold jobs and are extremely impoverished. Very few of them have kept their babies while majority of them have given them up to orphanages.
One of the rape victims detailed that she was imprisoned in her own house for a year and raped in front of her children. She suffers from extreme depression and has tried to commit suicide a number of times. It is sad how no international organization has focused their attention on the women and children of post war Bosnia. The war has still not ended for many Bosnian women. They can still see the perptrators around their community. The police and the state are well aware of their identities but do nothing to catch them. Some abused women have photographs of their abusers but are not willing to come forward with this evidence. Some are scared of the response of their coommunities or that the Serbs might come to take revenge once again. Very few women have testified and government has started paying a minimal amount to rape victims.