Buildings Used for Torturing and Raping Women

In her written statement RM-70 said that Serb forces captured her at the beginning of July 1992 and killed ten civilians from her village right away. After that women were separated from men and transferred to an electric power-plant construction site in Buk Bijela, where they were subjected to sexual abuse.

When asked what Serb soldiers used the building in Buk Bijela for, the witness said: “They used it for torturing and raping women, female Muslim detainees.”

In a summary of her statement, RM-70 said that, after some time female Bosniak detainees were transferred to the school building in Foca, where they were victims of “daily merciless rape, sexual and non-sexual torture.”

According to the charges against Ratko Mladic, former Commander of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, Foca is one of the seven municipalities, where the persecution of Bosniaks, which included sexual violence, reached the scale of genocide. Mladic is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, genocide in Srebrenica, terror against the local population in Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.

Bosniak women were held in sexual slavery in the “Partizan” sports centre, as well as Karaman’s house, where they were subjected to group rape, witness RM-70 said.

She said that women were given better food than before for about fifteen days before being informed that “a TV crew would come in order to make footage on how they protected us, guarded us, saved us.”

“I just wonder who they saved us from. Who attacked us, so they had to save us? I was supposed to say that he saved me and guarded me – 20 of them raped me each night. I was supposed to say that he guarded me and protected me… That was their goal…to have me say that he rescued me…From whom? He killed my mother, he killed my brother…” witness RM-70 said bursting into tears.

According to RM-70’s testimony, Serb soldiers sexually abused a twelve-year old girl in Karaman’s house.

The witness said that Zelenovic, Gojko Jankovic and Milorad Kecman came to Karaman’s house in late October 1992.

“They lined eight of us up. They asked us what our names were. All of us told them some Serb names. He said, let’s see whether you learned how to cross yourselves… I began crossing myself using all my fingers. He jumped up and said: ‘Do you want me to cut your hand off? You should not cross yourself with all, but only three fingers’…Sorry, I did not know,” RM-70 said.

When asked by the Prosecutor whether she had ever found out what “the reason and goal” of the sexual abuse of Bosniaks in Foca was, the witness said: “The goal was to destroy, to kill, to blackmail. To destroy our spirit as much as they could, because there is no cure for a raped woman… I can never wash myself. Never. But I keep striving, I am striving. My life is destroyed, my family is destroyed. They killed my dearest ones… They killed my happiness. I used to be happy, more than happy.”

Mladic’s Defence attorney Miodrag Stojanovic began and completed the cross-examination of RM-70 by expressing his regrets for all the things she experienced. Responding to a suggestion by the Defence attorney, the witness confirmed that two Serb soldiers helped her leave Foca and go to the former Titograd town via Bileca. “Yes, I am thankful to them for as long as I live,” she said, pointing out that “I would not be here today” if there were no “good people” too.

The trial of Mladic is due to continue on Tuesday, October 1 this year.