Bosnian Witness Says She Endured Series of Rapes

Her face was hidden by a screen, her voice scrambled electronically. Identified as Victim No. 50, she opened her private chamber of horrors Wednesday, telling the world how she and women like her were forced to become the sexual property of Bosnian Serbs.

“They would point their finger: ‘You, you and you,’ ” said the rape victim, who was 16 at the time of her Bosnian war ordeal.

During two months of terror, she was sexually assaulted so often by Bosnian Serb men that she couldn’t give a total count, she testified Wednesday.

In a landmark case, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has begun hearing the first war crimes trial under international law in which the alleged offenses are organized, widespread acts of sexual violence against women.

Rape, according to prosecutors here, was a conscious and key component of the Bosnian Serbs’ campaign to “ethnically cleanse” large swaths of Bosnia-Herzegovina of their Muslim population from 1992 to 1995.

One European Union study estimated that in 1992 alone, at the onset of civil war in the Balkan country, 20,000 women and girls, mostly Muslims, were raped by Bosnian Serbs. The same year, a U.N. commission of experts concluded that a “systematic rape policy” was being implemented by the Bosnian Serbs, including rapes in detention camps.

“They told us nothing would happen to us, but the worst did happen,” another Muslim woman who testified anonymously said Tuesday.

According to prosecutors at The Hague court, the Serbian conquerors of Foca, a town of 40,000 people southeast of the capital, Sarajevo, separated the Muslim women from the men in the summer of 1992 and interned the women in locales ranging from schools to the Partizan sports hall.

At night, soldiers, often in groups of three to five, would go to the detention centers and take women away to houses, apartments or hotels, according to tribunal prosecutors.

Women and girls as young as 12 were then allegedly subjected to sexual assaults and gang rape. One victim was reportedly raped by at least 15 soldiers for three hours.

Some of the women taken away by the soldiers were never seen again and are presumed dead, prosecutors said.

Victim No. 50’s mother, who testified anonymously Tuesday, said she too was raped as she was held captive at the Partizan gymnasium. She had her three other children with her in addition to her daughter, so trying to get past the armed Serbs guarding the hall was not an option, she said.

“Where could I escape?” the mother asked the court. “Did we have any money, any resources, any transport?”

The three defendants before the U.N.-created tribunal, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, are charged with various war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape, enslavement and torture. According to the indictment, Kovac sold three captive women to fellow soldiers.

All three accused have pleaded not guilty.

On Wednesday, Victim No. 50 said an armed Vukovic was the first man to rape her, on the first day of her detention. Kunarac, she said, raped her later.

The witness identified the two Bosnian Serbs as they sat stiffly in the courtroom section for defendants. Vukovic appeared to smile nervously; Kunarac shook his head.

The first rape apparently drove Victim No. 50 to near-suicidal despair, although she tried to conceal what had happened. “She said: ‘Why didn’t you throw me into the river? Why did you bring me here?’ ” her mother recalled.

The daughter was concealed from spectators and the media by a folding screen, but she could be seen by the other participants in the trial. Her voice was modulated electronically to disguise it, but even that, and the sedative she was taking, didn’t mask her emotion and her occasional sobs.

Even now, the woman said, she keeps details of her horrifying experience from her mother and the rest of her family. “I thought if I had to suffer,” she explained, “they didn’t have to know about it.”

Among the Bosnian Serbs who raped her, she said, were soldiers and paramilitary thugs, and an older neighbor she had taken the bus with every day who seemed to greatly relish sexually victimizing a teenage girl he knew.

A fighter from the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro threatened to use his knife to carve a cross on her back, then sexually assaulted her so violently that he left her bleeding and her stomach, back and legs aching in pain, she testified.

“What hurt me the most was that he was certainly some 30 years older--he was probably my father’s age,” said the witness, gently questioned by American prosecutor Peggy Kuo.

An estimated 50 women were held at one time in the Foca gymnasium. According to testimony, conditions were appalling: A few gym mats provided the only bedding. Food was half a jar of soup and a piece of bread daily. The women had only the clothes they had been wearing when detained. There was no soap, no shampoo, no toothpaste.

Victim No. 50 said that a unique shock came when a local man took her to his apartment and forced her to lie to his mother and say she was his Bosnian Serb girlfriend. They all drank cognac together, and then he attacked her sexually for four hours, she said.

“That night I had to use a different name, to be somebody else,” the woman said, still humiliated at having had to disavow her own identity and heritage.

She was taken out and raped by soldiers in a house across from Foca’s bus station, and in another home near a mosque, she said. Sometimes she would be left alone for two days; on other occasions she would be raped continuously for three days, she said. Throughout her time in captivity, she said, she lived in paralyzing fear.

After World War II, no rape charges were brought during the Nuremberg trials, and the Tokyo trials basically ignored the enslavement of 200,000 Korean women as “comfort women”--sexual partners for Japanese soldiers.

One of the Geneva Conventions explicitly outlaws rape in wartime, stipulating that “women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honor, in particular against rape.” The stated commitment of the Hague tribunal, founded in 1993, to prosecute rape as a war crime was seen by many as a fundamental turning away from acceptance of rape in war.

Only a fraction of the rape suspects from the Bosnian conflict will ever be prosecuted. But Patricia Sellers, a former Philadelphia public defender who handles the sex crimes dossier for prosecutors here, said she believes that a crucial precedent is being set.

“For women coming forward and their families, there will be a sense of legal resolution and justice,” Sellers said. “For the international community, we will have drawn a line in the sand to say: ‘We can diligently investigate and adjudicate and prosecute rape in wartime. It stops here.’ ”