Srebrenica Anniversary: “Worst Night In Life”

“I wish he had killed me instead of doing that to me. The fear inside you cannot be described with words – when it is night, when he is armed, you do not know who he is, and he makes you take off your clothes,” said a woman who wanted to be identified only by the initials ‘H. M.’ as she recalled what happened to her in July 1995 in Srebrenica.

Nineteen years later, H. M. is still haunted by that night. She was 45 years old back then, and the young man who raped her was around 20 years old, she believes. The only thing she knew about him was that he was a military policeman.

H.M. said that after Serb forces seized Srebrenica, soldiers took her and her injured husband, along with other sick and wounded people, to a nearby house where two men called Savo the shoemaker and Sulejman lived.

On their second night in the hose, the military police officer took her upstairs, pushed her into a room and onto the bed, and pointed his gun at her.

“He forced me to take off my clothes. I cried and begged him not to. He seemed to me like he was 20 years old. I was telling him: ‘I am an old woman; I could be your mother.’ He said: ‘I have been in the field for a month, I have no woman, I want to…’” H.M. recalled.

She added that he forced her to have oral sex, and that she then started vomiting.

After she dressed and left the room, she saw the young military policeman taking away her husband. But another soldier recognised her husband and told the policeman to leave him alone because he was a good man. The military policeman also later raped an elderly woman, H.M. said.

Twenty days after she left Srebrenica, she gave a statement to the police about what happened.

“I survived the fear, I was expelled from my village, I was raped, he took my man to slay him. Why should I remain silent? It wasn’t just men who were killed in Srebrenica, women were also raped. I heard that there are girls who were raped and killed,” H.M. said.

But although she has given statements to investigators several times, she has not yet been called to court to testify.

Nineteen years later, H.M. said that she still has nightmares about July 1995.

“I dream that they are coming, I am running, I beg them not to touch me, I beg them not to kill my man, I scream. When I wake up, I cannot feel my legs, I need at least an hour to realise that I am in my own house,” she said.

She said that some of the other women she has spoken to who were raped during the do not want to speak publicly about what happened, out of fear or shame.

“We were raised in a patriarchal way, this [Srebrenica] is a small village. I believe they are ashamed to tell their brothers, their children… They are afraid to say who did it; they are afraid someone will burn their house, because that has happened before,” she said.

H.M. is now living in Srebrenica again, not far from the place where she was raped 19 years ago.

“I feel very bad when I pass by the house of Savo the shoemaker and Sulejman, that semi-detached house, that image comes to my mind again,” she said.