Taken away to Be Raped

Witness RV-1 told the Court that she stayed in the Visegrad area, along with some other women and children, in late May or at the beginning of June 1992, adding that two men came one day and ordered them to come out of their houses. She said that she found out later on that one of them was Vitomir Rackovic.
 
“All women, who lived in two houses, came out. They selected six of us. We went to a minivan, which was parked in the vicinity of the houses. (…) We arrived in Crnca. They told us to get out of the minivan. As far as I can remember, two more soldiers were present at that location. When we got out, the soldiers selected those of us, whom they took to other houses or premises,” RV-1 said.
 
The witness said that she was taken to a house, where an unknown soldier raped her. As she said, after having left the house, she went back to the minivan, where she saw Vitomir and RV-5, who looked scared.
 
“When all of us gathered at that place, they told us to get into the minivan. We were then driven back home. On our way back, we, the women, did not speak. Some of us were shaking, crying…We did not speak about what had happened to us,” RV-1 recalled, adding that she had never told anybody, privately, about what had happened to her that day.
 
Rackovic, former member of the Republika Srpska Army, is charged with having participated in attacks on Bosniak villages, detention, torture, forced disappearances of persons from the Visegrad area, as well as rape, from May to the end of August 1992.
 
Second protected witness RV-2 said that she was on her way to a neighbour’s on June 12, 1992, when she noticed a truck, driving soldiers. She said that indictee Rackovic, who was “armed to the teeth”, was on the truck too.
 
“My neighbour asked him what it was. Vito responded: ‘Why are you asking me? Don’t make me kill you.’ Vito was the chief, he ran the whole thing,” she said.
 
RV-2 said that they loaded her and some other people onto the truck and drove her to her parents’ house.
 
“When my father saw me, he ran out of the house and asked Vito what was going on. I was then told to come out of the truck, while the others were told to get on. My mother told him: ‘What are you doing Vito? If you are taking them away, you should kill me too’. He told her: ‘No, I shall let you suffer’, adding that he would kill all of them in the evening,” RV-2 said.
 
She said that the truck drove her brother and father in the direction of Lijeska, adding that she had not found out anything about them since.
 
“Not knowing where their remains are is the worst thing. It hurts the most,” she said.
 
According to the charges, some of the unlawfully arrested persons have never been found, while bodies of some of the civilians were exhumed at the “Slap” location in Zepa in 2000.
 
The trial is due to continue on April 16.