Rape Victim’s Relatives Testify Against Bosnian Serb Soldiers

The two relatives of the teenage victim told the Sarajevo court on Tuesday that a Serb soldier lined them up in front of their house on June 28, 1992, and then took the girl towards a van on the road.

“When he ripped her from my hand, he fired into the air,” said the mother of the victim, adding that she heard people calling the soldier ‘Pedja’.

She said that her daughter, who was taken at around 9pm, returned home after midnight and could not speak for crying.

“She said: ‘I was raped, I don’t even know where they took me,’” the witness recalled.

She said her daughter told her that there were four soldiers in the van.

The prosecution charges Bosiljko and Ostoja Markovic, former members of the Kotor Varos Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, with raping a minor.

The brother of the victim said that a man called Predrag Cicvanovic, alias ‘Pedja’, who he already knew from before, took his sister that evening. He added that he next saw his sister in the morning, when their mother told him she had been raped.

“She told me there were several of them, she later told me there were four of them… She told me that it happened in the van,” the witness said.

He pointed out that he heard that other women from the village were also raped in the same van, and that some of the female neighbours recognised the perpetrators.

“It was Ostoja and Bosiljko Markovic,” the witness said, adding that he heard that when he was imprisoned in the Kotor Varos area later in 1992.

The defence presented a statement that the witness gave in June 2010 in Banja Luka, in which he said that he only learned that year from someone called ‘Marijan’ that Bosiljko and Ostoja Markovic participated in the rape as well as Cicvanovic.

“I am not sure, but I think that Marijan told me that in the prison as well,” the witness responded.

The trial continues on September 9.