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For the Record: Brcko Bosniak Recalls Month of Rape and Terror

09 September 2008  ‘A.S.’, who still lives in Brcko, was one of thousands of Muslim women who were captured, raped and held hostage by the Bosnian Serbs in summer 1992. The difference was she lived to tell her shocking tale.


By: Nidzara Ahmetasevic (Belgrade)

A.S., who does not want to give away her real name, as she still lives in the same house where her torment began, remembers Mayday 1992 as the start of a nightmarish summer. At the time, she was 26 and newly married.


That day, she recalls, “our neighbors in the part of town where my husband and I lived ran away. I did not know what was happening. The shooting started the very next day and together with a group of neighbors I hid in the basement of a nearby house. There were women, children, old men…


“After two days, we were hungry and thirsty, so when the shooting subsided, one of the neighbors tried to go out and get food but he was killed by a sniper. We tried to drag his body back inside but the sniper kept shooting in our direction. After a while, that same day, a freezer truck came to the house. It stopped in front, some men picked up the body and left. We saw everything that was happening from that basement. I think I was pregnant. The fear and stress caused me to bleed.”


After two days spent in the basement of the house, A.S. and her fellow companions moved to the house of another neighbors. There, their real troubles began, with the innocent-sounding ring of a telephone. As A.S. recalls, the sound of the phone filled everyone with disbelief. But at first, fear turned to relief when it turned out that the caller was the son of the neighbour, living abroad, phoning to find out what was happening.


But as soon he hung up, the phone rang again. This time the voice on the other end was more sinister. “It was that of Ljubisa ‘Mauzer’ Savic, chief of the local hospital,” A.S. recalled. Savic was commander of the Panthers elite unit that fought alongside the Republika Srpska Army, and subsequently chief of police in Brcko.


“He said we were surrounded and had to surrender. Immediately, we heard voices and banging on the door, calling us to come out. I don’t know why but I was the first to go to the door. When I came out, I saw a soldier who immediately started hitting me.


“Everyone then filed out and they lined us up against a wall, beating us, interrogating us and searching for weapons. They lined us up as if to shoot us, but then we heard the sound of a radio and someone said something and they put down their weapons and took us to a playground.


“There, we were again put in single file and we heard them say that Mauzer was coming. He showed up in a doctor’s uniform, with white clogs on his feet and surrounded by three or four guys who walked like they were his bodyguards. Mauzer then started beating us too… He too ordered us to be shot, but they then abandoned the idea. Instead they took us to a nearby house.”


On the way, A.S. saw a number of Bosnian Serb soldiers. The sight was far from reassuring. “They were drunk. I saw some of them take drugs. They shouted and sang… It was truly horrible.” Once in the new house of detention, the beatings and interrogations started again. “They gave my then husband a liter of whiskey to drink and they did the same to some other men, in order to make them talk,” A.S. said.


Her troubles were just beginning, however. As A.S. recalls, a Russian whose name was never revealed to her suddenly appeared and ordered her to go with him up the wooden stairs to the floor above. “He told me to undress,” A.S. said. “I told him I had ‘women's problems’ and was bleeding but he just took out a knife from underneath his left trouser leg and started cutting my clothes.”


A.S. was then subjected to a particularly violent and ferocious rape. “As he was raping me, he hit me and threw me against the walls,” she said. “And when he had finished, he invited the others up, saying: ‘Come here if you want some’. I heard the sound of boots coming upstairs but I was dead by then. I felt sorry I had stayed alive.”


When three Bosnian Serb soldiers entered the room, A.S. recalled only that she was covered in blood and smelled of blood. Her sorry appearance may have saved her from a repeat ordeal because the soldiers left, “saying the whole place smelled of blood”.


A.S. was still locked in the room with her Russian tormentor, who clearly felt there was unfinished business. “The Russian hit me once more and kicked me down the steps,” she said. “I rolled down to the spot where all my neighbours were and some of the women lifted me up and gave me a fresh dress to wear. Then we heard the words, ‘Adolf is coming’.”


A.S. said she was barely aware at that point of “Adolf”, as Goran Jelisic was nicknamed, remembering only that he walked with a limp. But she remembered that “Adolf” put her and her friends in handcuffs us and put them in a police van one by one.


Again, it appeared likely she would be shot dead, because at one point Jelisic took her out of the van as if to shoot her. A.S. no longer cared. “My brain was already completely dead by the time Adolf had loaded his rifle and I just prayed he would kill me as soon as possible,” she said. “He was holding the rifle. But then he put it down and told me my eyes were telling him that he ought not to kill me, though he also told me that I was going to shed blood.”


After this strange exchange, she was returned to the police van with the others. A.S. noticed a great number of soldiers on the road at that point and soon realised she was passing the site of a recent massacre. “There were troops all around us,” she said. “But as they were driving… through the centre of town, I saw a massacre had taken place there. There were so many bodies that a car could barely pass”.


When the vehicle reached the settlement of Srpska Varos, they were thrown out in front of the house of a woman A.S. recognised. It was the home of Verica Simeunovic, a neighbour. “She came out of the house and saw us in the crowd. Later, she told me that she had recognised me by my eyes alone. Then she called her son, Kole (Kosta Simenunovic), who was among the soldiers, and told him to save me. But they just put us back in the police van and took us to Luka.”


A.S. had survived near-certain death only to fall prey to a new peril. Luka was one of the more infamous Serb-run detention centers in Bosnia. As A.S. recalled, “there was nothing but fear there. The hangars were full of our people, residents of Brcko. I remember hands sticking out through the bars”.


Along with her companions, A.S. was escorted into an office. “It was a big room, in a complete mess,” she remembered. “On the floor was a broken picture of Tito, papers were all over the place. Inside there were troops wearing black-and-white shirts with skulls and other uniforms as well. We kept quiet, waiting to see what would happen and spent the night in that room. In the morning a soldier came and took me to another office where I found some 20 people. I recognised some as my professors from school. Then most of them left and only four remained.”


A.S. was reluctant to tell her Serbian interrogators in Luka what had happened to her, and when they asked if she had been raped, she said no. “They asked me who beat me; I said I didn’t know. They asked me my name and I told them, though I don’t know why, I gave them my maiden name, not my husband’s name. Then one told the others to go out. They told me, ‘Lucky you, spring chicken’.


“When we were left alone, he asked me my father’s name. When I answered, he said he knew my father who had died before any of this happened. He then said, ‘I’m Uncle Pero from Milosavci. Your father helped me a lot in life. Since you father helped me, I am going to help you.’”


On 9 May, a week after her terrifying ordeal began, “Pero” issued her with a permit allowing her to leave Luka. A.S. was determined to help her companions and asked for the others to go with her, which was agreed. “I came out at 11 o’clock and went home,” she recalled.


Back in Brcko, A.S. was far from a free woman. She was assigned “compulsory work”, in effect, forced labour, cleaning local houses. At one point, she recalled, her job was to grimly scrape traces of blood from the walls of the local gym. “We wiped away the traces,” she recalled. “God forbid that such things ever happen to anyone again.”


A.S. stayed in Brcko until September 1993, when she was exchanged. But after several years spent as a refugee, she returned to her hometown in 2000 and now lives in the same house she inhabited when the war began.


The fate of some of her tormentors was varied. Ljubisa “Mauzer” Savic was murdered in 2000. Goran “Adolf” Jelisic, meanwhile, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to the crimes for which he was charged. The judges at The Hague Tribunal concluded he had not displayed true remorse.


A.S. told her story on 5 September at a conference in Belgrade organised by the Humanitarian Law Center and the Hague Tribunal’s Outreach Programme.


A story was recorded by Nidzara Ahmetasevic, a Justice Report editor. nidzara@birn.eu.com


The column "For the record" is a special addition to Justice Report where we try to record the life stories of people who survived the horrors of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and who are living among us.

Balkan Investigative Reporting Network invites you to send us your stories about the war, which we will publish regularly within our magazine. Please write to us at urednik@birn.eu.com