Situation of Bosnian women raped during the war

Oral Statement by the Society for Threatened Peoples
A few days after the arrest of the ex-president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, the Society for Threatened Peoples is mindful of the fate of 30,000 Muslim Bosnian women held in Serbian rape camps for months on end in 1992. In February 2001 Serbian war criminals were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for the perpetration of these atrocities.

In spring 1992 Serbian paramilitary units supported by the Yugoslavian Army occupied towns and villages in Western and Eastern Bosnia (in the area around Prijedor and in the Drina Valley in particular), expelling large parts of the non-Serbian population. Tens of thousands of Muslim men were taken to concentration camps and thousands of women and girls interned in special camps where they were systematically raped. These mass rapes were a feature of the Serbian/Yugoslavian strategy of war. A total of 30,000 Bosnian women were victims of organized rape. Many of the women camp inmates had been forced to watch as their fathers, husbands or brothers were killed in front of them. Approximately 80% of the married women among them lost their husbands.

During the spring and summer of 1992 the following rape camps were established in the Drina Valley (Podriinja) area alone: Partisan (Foca), Karamanova Kuca (Foca), Miljevina(Foca), Velecevo (Foca), Pelemis(Vlasenica), Rogatica High School, Vilena Vlas (Visegrad), Hotel Bikavac (Visegrad), Visegrad Fire Brigade headquarters, Caparde (Zvornik), Liplje (Zvornik) and Scocic Kula (Zvornik).

The great majority of former camp inmates are today living as displaced persons in collective shelters. Approximately 90%, the vast majority women without a partner and many with children, are without work. They have been forgotten by the international public and only in a very few cases are they receiving any form of humanitarian assistance. Many of them have been severely traumatized but are receiving no psychotherapeutic support. They include a large number of young women who, as children over the age of twelve, were systematically abused in the camps.

The Society for Threatened Peoples is calling on the United Nations to endeavour to ensure that

 

• the Serbian politicians responsible for the systematic mass rapes of Bosnian women - Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadjic and General Ratko Mladic - are handed over immediately or arrested and handed over to the International War Crimes Tribunal;

• the United Nation's member organizations, and in particular its refugee agency UNHCR and its children's fund UNICEF, work with the relief and aid agencies operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina to meet the needs of the women former camp inmates and their children;

• funding is obtained to speed up the programme of exhumations to recover the bodies of up to 29,000 missing Bosnian women and men, in order to establish the fate of the missing, presumed dead, relatives of the women camp inmates and the women murdered in the rape camps;

• financial resources are made available by the international community to provide basic and further education for former camp inmates and their children in order to ensure a worthwhile future and prospects for them in post-war Bosnia.