Multiple rape of a 15-year-old girl

In mid-May 1992, together with other family members, she left her house and hid in the woods. Occasionally, they came to take food, as was the case one morning when she came with her father. Her neighbors then detained them. She was taken to the Directorate of the “Sase” coal mine.

“The soldiers pointed their fingers at me and two other girls. The commander ordered us to go with them. They took us out in front of the building and put us into a civilian car. We moved towards Bratunac. Along the way, I saw that my parents’ house had been burned down as well as a few others.

While entering Bratunac, we were joined by another soldier and they forced us to sit in their laps. We stopped next at some house and they ordered us to get out. When we came out, we were ordered to enter the house. We were ordered to sit down on the floor of the house. While we were sitting, the three of them talked about life, where they went to war, what kind of combat they were engaged in. We kept silent.

Around 11 p.m. or 12 a.m. they began to discuss who is going to go to bed with which one of us… Then we realized … We were silent, heads down. Through their conversation, I concluded that two of those three soldiers were brothers.

These two pointed fingers at two girls who were with me. The third said: ‘I’ll take her.’ The two brothers stood up and ordered the girls, who were sisters, to go with them. I still remained seated. They left living room and took them to another room. The soldier ordered me to take off my clothes. I did not want to do it. He grabbed me by the arm and forced me into the bathroom, and told me to take a shower.

I wanted to stay alone in the bathroom, but he did not want to leave. He stood and watched the whole time while I was taking a shower. When I was supposed to get out of the bathroom, I went to dress myself, but he didn’t allow me to do so. He forced me out of the bathroom. He threw me on the sofa. He started to rape me. I screamed… It lasted… I know that I did not have the strength to resist. As I yelled, he slapped me. While he was lying on top of me, he was holding the gun pointed at the temporal bone.

In the end, when he already got tired of me, he wanted to sleep. He took the handcuffs, and tied our hands. He put the gun under my head. I didn’t dare to move,” she says.

As she said, when he awoke, he ordered her to take a shower. When she finished, he stood by the door and told her to sit down on the table. Soon, those two girls and soldiers entered the room. After conversation, one soldier came and said that he was guarding them while the others went somewhere. After sitting on the table the whole day, she said that one of them got the courage and asked the soldier if we can go to lie down.

“We went into the bedroom and all three of us lay on one bed. The soldier stayed in the room and played some music. We locked ourselves in the room and after ten minutes we heard a noise. Someone started pounding the door of the room where we were. We were afraid to get up and open the door. The soldier, whom I know, crushed the door and forced us into the living room. There, we were told that we would not stay here. ‘Get out of here’”, she recalled.

Rape after rape

According to her, they forced them to enter into some cars and they had to sit in their laps. After driving through Bratunac, they stopped in front of some house and were “forced out of the car and I remember that we were being pushed down the stairs.”

“When we went up on the floor, there was some room there, where there was a bed. One soldier threw me onto the bed. They took one girl to one room and another to another room… I started crying and yelling. He tore my clothes off and started to rape me. When he raped me, he lifted me off the bed and hit me in the back. I fell down close to the door,” she said.

Not long after that, as she said, one girl was thrown out of the room and a soldier who was with that girl grabbed her by the arm, pushed her onto the bed again and raped her.

When he finished, another soldier entered. As she said, she screamed and resisted, but the soldier took a knife and put it under her neck, saying that he would “slaughter her if she yelled.”

After he raped her, as she said, the next soldier entered and raped her, too. Since she resisted, the soldier pushed something into her mouth and tied her hands to the bed.

“My nose was stuffy from crying. As he put that paper in my mouth, I could not breathe and at times I was losing consciousness. When I came to my senses, I saw that my head was wet, that they had poured water on me.

They took the paper from my mouth. I saw this leader beside me and the soldier who raped me. The leader left the room, and the soldier continued to rape me,” she said, adding that her hands were still tied to the bed.
When the soldier finished, the next one came, the one that already raped her and he did it again.

“The night was already over. For the whole time while they raped me, I heard one of the girls screaming in the other room. Then, I did not understand what was happening to me, as if I was a different person, as if this happens to someone else, not to me,” she said.

After the rape she was returned to “Sase” coalmine, where she told the commander what had happened to her.

Marriage like a detention camp

She was taken from the coalmine to the military police building in Bratunac, and then to one restaurant which was in the vicinity and which was stained with blood. From this facility, she was taken to a house in Bratunac, where she stayed for several days.

“On the eighth day, one soldier with the Military Police band came, and gave us a pen and paper to write a statement in which we were not supposed to mention anything bad. He said that when we wrote the statement we will be taken for temporary work in Serbia,” she says.

After that, they were taken to refugee center in Loznica, where, in addition to their names, they also wrote “a Serbian name and surname.”

She said that she stayed in Loznica for about two months, where she met her former husband, who was a refugee from Zvornik.

From Loznica, she went to Subotica, and then to Hungary, from where she returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina in January 1993.

Before she started to live with her husband, she says that she told him what she had survived. In the beginning, as she says, he supported her, but a few months later he started to abuse her.

“The marriage was like another type of detention camp. During my marriage, I survived physical and psychological maltreatment. He refused to believe that I survived all that and started to beat me. He was telling me that I had wanted that,” she said.

When problems in the marriage started, she says that she was already pregnant with her first child, who was born in 1993. Two years later, she gave birth to another child.

“He was beating me even when I was nine months pregnant. He beat me and kicked me in the back. (…). I could not bear such physical abuse. If he was not beating me, though he often did, than he was killing me mentally,” she said.

She said that she was married until 1999, when she decided to divorce, after which she started to clean the houses in order to feed her and the children. After the divorce, she requested medical help in 2000.

“I will have to seek medical help for the rest of my life. (…) The nightmares had begun immediately after the rapes. Images from the war are returning to me hundreds of times a day,” she said.

What she has learned is that the more she speaks about the war events, the more it helps her to oust the pain that she carries inside herself.

“Every time I talk about this, I feel lighter and more powerful. When I speak, I think that I help those persons who are still silent, to those for whom it is still difficult to talk,” she says.

Also, one of the reasons why she speaks about what she survived is because of those who did not manage to survive.

“God has left me alive to speak, if not for my sake, then for the sake of those who were murdered. It’s the kind of power that makes me want to speak about it. I’m always in favour that one should speak, because as long as we keep silent about perpetrators, we give them a chance to repeat it and never be punished,” she concluded.