Bosnia and Herzegovina / Sexual Violence against Women

Rape Victims Tell Jolie to Leave Stories Untold
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
The Independent, November 1, 2010
"The women's stories are all the same, about men carrying automatic weapons and flashlights, and breaking into their homes in the middle of the night at the beginning of the Balkan war in April 1992. After the men had been taken away or killed, the Muslim girls and women were repeatedly raped for weeks or even months by Serb soldiers, before managing to flee in the summer of 1992. Since then the women have had to live with the trauma of what happened, and have spent nearly two decades looking for justice. The ordeal of the Bosniak women has been thrust into the spotlight again, after it was announced recently that Angelina Jolie is to make a film which will allegedly tell of the love between a Serb rapist and his Muslim victim. The Hollywood star is to begin shooting her first project as a director and scriptwriter, as yet untitled, in Sarajevo next month. But for victims of mass rapes in Bosnia, the idea of their stories being retold is almost torture. Their faces offer horrified expressions, their hands shake and bodies tremble as they speak, in tears, about events that changed their lives forever. For Bakira Hasecic, the 55-year-old head of the Women Victims of War (WVW) association, there is no way anyone can turn the trauma of Bosniak women into film. 'What we have gone through cannot be filmed,' says Ms. Hasecic in Sarajevo. Originally from Visegrad in Bosnia, she is also victim of repeated rape and has dedicated her life to finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. 'I'm doing all this to prevent our ordeal from ever happening again ... but revenge leads nowhere,' she told The Independent. [...]"