Wartime Rape in Bosnia: A Daughter’s Search for Truth

“I am a rape baby. That’s what I am,” says Lejla Damon.

“It’s a horrible term because those are two words that you would never want to put together. But realistically…”

Damon, now 25, is relaxed as she speaks to BIRN at London’s Frontline Club after an event to mark the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres last week – but she has been grappling with this definition for seven years.

She grew up in Britain, where her adoptive parents told her aged seven that she was adopted from the war zone in Bosnia. Then, at 18 years old, she learned more.

She was born in Sarajevo on Christmas Day, 1992. Her mother had been raped in a detention camp in Foca by Serb soldiers before somehow making her way to the capital, where she gave birth at Kosevo Hospital.

Two British journalists, Sian and Dan Damon, who were both based out of the hospital that year, happened to interview her mother. The deeply traumatised Bosniak woman said in the footage that they filmed that she feared that she might “strangle” the days-old child, or that the baby might grow up to be like the men who raped her.

“We were in Sarajevo, filming horrific scenes in orphanages and the suffering that was going on – and then this babe appeared. What could we do?” explained Sian Damon, speaking at the Frontline Club event.

“We could not leave this tiny, nine-day-old child,” she told the audience.

With the blessing of Bosnian officials, the two British citizens procured emergency evacuation papers and fled with young Lejla to Slovenia on January 3, 1993, and then to Hungary.

They returned with her to the UK, where the little girl led a comfortable childhood in the Manor House area of north-east London, far from the war that ended in 1995, its tortuous aftermath, and the ongoing emotional suffering of the child’s birth mother.

But by the time Damon hit her teenage years, the spark of curiosity was burning.

“I began to read literature on the things that happened in Bosnia – the women that were raped, the camps,” she says.

She could see it with the benefit of distance. “When my parents did sit me down and said, ‘Your birth mum was raped in a concentration camp’, it didn’t come as a massive shock. I wasn’t sat there in floods of tears, but that’s probably because I’m not living in Bosnia.”

According to the Bosnia UK Network, there are about 10,000 Bosnians living in the UK, a significant proportion of whom lost family or friends or suffered themselves during the war.

But growing up, Damon didn’t know any of them. Instead she lived one life in London, where her teenage friends were blissfully unaware of the conflict, at the same time feeling there was “a whole other section of my life that is continuing in Bosnia”.

So when she was 18, Damon went on a three-week holiday to her birth country. “By that time I had more of an understanding on a female level, I suppose, because I was in my early adulthood and I was beginning to think what it might mean,” she says.

By ‘it’, she means rape – a theme that has since resonated with her, especially during the #MeToo movement that began last October.

Rape isn’t taken seriously enough because it’s seen through the framework of sex rather than as violence, she believes – a perspective that the brutal injustice of genocidal wartime rape can help shed light on, she says. Nobody knows how many women were raped in Bosnia during the conflict but estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000.

These things spurred Damon into an adventure to find her mother. When she was 19, a university friend made a documentary about her story for which she travelled to Sarajevo, visiting the Kosevo Hospital with a press officer.

Incredibly, when she spoke to one nurse, he remembered her. “He said, ‘Oh my God, you’re the one – you’re the one that got out,’” she remembers.

The Bosnian embassy in the UK meanwhile tracked Damon’s birth mother from the name she had given them. They sent a police officer to check their lead on an address was correct, and then handed over some contact details.

Damon wrote to her, and they corresponded that way for the next three years. But, she says, “It was very surface value – ‘I hope you’re OK, I want you to know I’m OK’, and that’s about it really.”

Damon wanted more. So in August 2017, a friend she’d met on one of her trips to Bosnia – also a child of wartime rape – went to visit Damon’s mother on Damon’s behalf.

“She said, ‘I’ve met Lejla, she’s amazing’ – trying to big me up a bit, selling me to her, and asking if she would meet. That was important because in her letters, she talked about meeting up, but I didn’t know if she was just trying to be nice.”

When the day finally came last October, it was as fraught as one might imagine.

“There was a lot of anxiety about whether she was going to pull out last minute. She didn’t have to meet me, there was nothing to say that she needed to.”

Her adoptive parents entered the room first, followed by the friend who’d brokered the meeting, and Damon last of all. “It was one of those things where I lingered. Then she held my hand, and then she gave me a hug. And it was that point where we broke down so many boundaries that had been building for the last ten years, since I’d found out about my origins,” she says.

The pair sat together with an interpreter showing each other photographs from the past 25 years. “You know that show ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ It was a bit like that,” she says, referring to a British TV programme in which people trace their family roots and are often surprised by what they learn about their heritage.

There is still much that Damon doesn’t know: who raped her mother – who now suffers from epilepsy and Parkinson’s – or how she got to Sarajevo from the concentration camp in Foca. “It’s probably a lot easier that way,” she admits.

But although her mother is still a relative stranger, Damon was particularly moved by the Bosnian woman’s resilience.

“The strength of that woman, just to keep going,” she marvels, eyes wide. “She’s not well physically, and emotionally I’m sure it’s the same, but the strength to continue – and the strength to see me – that takes so much. I think she’s an amazing person, and she is a complete inspiration and role model.”

During the annual commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide last week, Damon was speaking at a series of events with the UK-based non-profit organisation Remembering Srebrenica, which raises awareness about the massacres.

She says that the work she has done so far has helped her make sense of who she is and brought her a sense of peace. “I have come to terms with it, and I suppose that’s why people find it so hard that I’m not sat here crying,” she explains.

“I’m not saying that I don’t feel drained sometimes – oh my goodness, talking about rape and genocide and sexual violence and toxic masculinity is hard. It drains you, because there’s no one answer.”

She pauses, then asks: “But at the same time, if not me, then who?”