Bosnia - Children of the War

http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2006/s1564305.htm

In the 1990s Yugoslavia dissolved into a series of bitter conflicts that claimed 200,000 lives. War crimes were committed on all sides resulting in terrible atrocities - but one crime stands out as being particularly shocking - the systematic rape of thousands of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbs.

“It was a planned action... they were raped so they would give birth to Serb children”, former Bosnian Police Chief, Edhem Godinjak told reporter Evan Williams. “They held them until they were heavily pregnant and after that they’d release them”.

Tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were raped during the war. Estimates of the number of babies born as a result of rape are hard to come by, but range from a few hundred to more than five thousand. No one really knows.

In the Bosnian city of Zenica scores of raped women arrived seeking refuge at Medica, a women's centre which today still offers support to those who had rape babies while they were in their teens. Local Islamic leaders also tried to protect the victims, telling their communities such women should be supported, their children embraced.

But there are many who put the blame on the women themselves for allowing the rape to happen, or condemn them for giving birth to a Serbian child - and the women live in shame.

Safeta was one woman who, as intended by her captors, became pregnant. Unable to get an abortion she gave birth to a son, named Edin.

At first Safeta rejected the boy and he was sent to an orphanage. Eventually, however, maternal love defeated the hate she felt for the men who raped her, and she decided to raise the boy herself. “A child as a child is not guilty of anything”, she says.

In Bosnia today, the children born of rape are growing into teenagers and some are beginning to ask difficult questions about their origins. In many cases the women tell their children that their fathers were killed in the war rather than expose them to the truth.

The Serbian rape policy has left a confronting legacy in socially conservative Bosnia. It is little talked about in this predominantly Muslim society.

Safeta is now sick and fears she has not long to live. She faces an agonizing choice: to tell her son about his origins, before he is ready, or wait and risk leaving the task to someone else.

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Categories: Documentary » History

Channels: Documentaries , Social Media

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Children of the War.DivX.mkv

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