Estimates say there are tens of thousands of survivors of sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that only a third of those responsible for such crimes have been prosecuted before domestic and international courts. Survivors are rarely willing to speak about it, but one of them decided to share her experience with N1.

The woman N1's Ika Ferrer Gotic spoke to was raped by two soldiers during the war in Bosnia. She said that she does not like to remember what happened, but that it is necessary to do so.

“I did not talk about it and remained silent for a long time. I thought I could suppress it (…) but it was just piling up inside of me and I felt it was going to escalate,” she said, explaining that eventually, she decided to tell someone about it.

The survivor said that she was in her early 30s when it happened, staying at home alone while the city was under a blockade.

“In the morning I heard a knock on the door. The police came. You couldn’t live peacefully in the city if your family members were members of the BiH Army. There had been petty harassment and provocations before,” she said.

“Hoping it would be the same again, I opened the door. They blocked our city, turned off our phones and electricity. The city was a prison camp,” she explained.

She said that what she saw was a group of masked men wearing army uniforms. Two of them entered her home. One asked her to present her ID, while the other one said “no need for that, she’s a ‘balinkura’,” – a derogatory term for a Bosniak woman.

She said she believes she was targeted because her husband and brother were in the Bosnian army.
“It is such a shock and at that moment I could not imagine what would happen to me. I thought they were just raiding, searching for someone or something and that it would end there. Unfortunately, it didn’t,” she said.

“They beat me, they hit me in the lower back with their rifle butts. I was raped by one of them, and then he just said ‘cobra, now you go’. After that they left me there,” she said.

“They left me and told me I was not allowed to go out, threatening that they would come back, that they knew I had children and that they would kill them if I went out,” she said, adding that she had two boys, one in third and one in first grade.

She recalled how she was left on the floor kneeling and bleeding, wondering if she was still alive and if it was all just a dream.

“It is such a nightmare in my mind, such a mess,” she said. “I don't know how much time passed, how long I've been here… Then I realized – yes, I'm alive. I got up, grabbed my robe, covered myself and tried to get out of the building,” she said, adding that she was in such a state that she reconciled with the possibility that she and her boys would be killed.

She was found by a neighbour who then called her aunt to pick her up.

“Then my late aunt showed up and took me to her place. She didn't ask me anything. I was under the impression that she understood everything,” she said.

She explained that she lost any sense of time in the days following her ordeal.

“And then they somehow brought my kids to me. I was asking for them. When they brought my children, then something happened to me. I shut down and stopped talking. I remember just staring at one spot and my aunt bringing me something to eat and drink. I would nod even though I didn’t want to eat and drink,” she said.

She said her aunt contacted a nurse who worked with a gynaecologist and brought her some medication against the bleeding.

“This lasted for a while, that was my condition until the (BiH) army entered our city. My younger son had a birthday at the time. I could hear them (celebrating), but I could not speak,” she said.

The trauma did not end there, as the shooting continued even after the BiH army entered the city.
“At one point, I realized that there was no space for fear left inside of me, that I am about to explode,” she recalled.

She said her marriage failed after she told her husband what happened but that the children stood by her.

She explained that rape is not something that one can overcome, but that she did find forgiveness.
“I forgave the people who were manipulated into doing it, but I did not forgive the system, those who organised these things. Someone organised it, did it according to a plan, and manipulated some youth. I learned to live with it and deal with the pain.”

She said that she does not feel hatred and that she trusts in the “mind and reason of the youth.”
“We need to learn to raise our children with love, not hate. I succeeded in this with my own children, thank God,” she said.