Documentary on Systematic Rape of Bosniak Women & Girls
Matt Damon: Documentary on Systematic Rape of Bosniak Women & Girls Author: Daniel Toljaga Throughout long, difficult, strenuous history of the Bosniak people, they were subjected to racist, state-imposed, and often violent denials of their identity, their uniqueness, their culture, and even their language: the Bosnian language; the very language that produced the first printed dictionary of its vocabulary nearly 200 years before the first printed dictionary of the Serbian language. The denial, prejudice, supremacism: they are all seeds of evil, for they evolve, they expand, and if left unchecked, when they ripen, they flourish, overgrow, and unleash the violence of unimaginable proportions. They can turn seemingly good men — everyday husbands, fathers, neighbors – into psychopathic rapists, ferocious tormentors, maniacal monsters, and mass killers. It happened in Bosnia. The human ‘willingness’ to use rape as an instrument of terror in war, for the sole purpose of inflicting irreparable, long term psychological and physical trauma to defenseless women and children, became evident in the bloodstained Serb-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia, between 1992 and 1993. A preliminary European Community report, published in January of 1993, estimated that 20,000 Bosniak women may have been raped by Serb forces in Bosnia. The report also added that there was strong evidence that many women and children were killed during or after sexual abuse. ( AP, The News-Journal, p.8A, “Bosnia Rape Victim Waits to Give Unwanted Birth”, 8 January 1993. ) In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled that rape was indeed used by the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an ‘instrument of terror.’ ( Trial Judgment in the case of Kunarac et al.
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