Srebrenica Rape Victim Testimony: ‘A pain that will stay with me’

She fled Srebrenica after managing to survive the Serb shelling. Her husband told her to go to the UN peacekeepers’ base in Potocari, while he tried to escape through the woods to territory controlled by the Bosnian Army with his brother, father and father-in-law. Later she found out that they were all killed.

H.T. remembers seeing bodies near the road to Potocari – a child, a woman and a man, hit by grenades. She saw an elderly woman whose chin had been cut off by a shell. “I took a nappy from my baby to put her chin back, since it was all ripped to pieces,” she recalled.

Once she reached the battery factory, she saw people fainting because of the heat and because there was no drinking water. “I saw a bucket near the road, from humanitarian aid. I saw dry cookies, but they were all green. I wiped the green stuff off the cookies and gave them to my son to eat,” she said.

During the night, H.T. recalls hearing the screams of women and children. In the morning, the children are crying again and there is no water to drink.

“I went through the field to the stream, but I saw bodies of men so I couldn’t get water, since I was too afraid. I returned to the factory,” she recalled.

Soon afterwards, she said, Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic came with a convoy.

“He told us not to be afraid and that we would be given food, and threw us some bread. He didn’t give us bread, but threw it, and people were pushing and trampling each other to get the bread. People were stamping on each other, suffocating,” she said.

Later she was promised food for her baby, taken to a tent and told to wait until it arrived. But instead, she was assaulted.

“A hand appeared and struck me on the head. As I was hit, I fell and lost consciousness. In the morning I heard my son crying. He told me to get up and that I was bleeding,” recalled H.T.

Then she saw that her shirt was torn and her breasts were wet.

“I looked at my legs and saw blood. I couldn’t stand and walk. I crawled on my knees, but I couldn’t and I fell unconscious again,” she said.

The next thing she recalls, she said, was waking up in the doctor’s office in Kladanj, where a doctor came and put her baby to her breast.

“She smelled so great. I will never forget the smell of her body. She smelled of something beautiful and innocent, something willing to live. She just wanted to live, she smelled of life,” H.T. said.

After ten years of psychological help, she finally managed to talk about what she went through that day in Potocari.

“I could no longer cope with the problem. It was a burden inside me, under my skin, in my core, in my bones. I felt I would burst and my brain wasn’t functioning. I could no longer talk, I was suffocating, I was afraid and I couldn’t breathe, so I had to talk to someone,” she said.

But she believes that she may never really recover.

“It is a pain, a stain that will stay with me until I am dead,” she said.