Bosnia’s Disturbing Torture Camps for Women

Some places enter the history books for good reasons. They may be holy sites, the birthplaces of heroes, or the location of some great invention or human achievement. And then there are places whose names echo through history, not from glory or success, but from atrocities that showcase the worst of humanity.

The town of Foca in Bosnia is one of those places. From 1992 to 1995, Foca would see crimes so awful and on such an unprecedented scale that the world would have to invent entire new categories of war crimes just to punish them. This is the story of Foca’s mass camps.

The Bosnian war was caused by the collapse of communist Yugoslavia. With Croatia and Slovenia breaking away, Bosnia and Herzegovina became a separate independent nation. Its population was about 45 percent Bosniak Muslims, 32 percent Orthodox Serbs, and 15 percent Catholic Croats, each with deep historical animosity with the others.

So it was almost immediately plunged into intense ethnic conflict. The republic officially declared independence on February 29, 1992. However, the Bosnian Serbs boycotted the vote and declared their own independence with the support of Serbia.

The Bosnian Serbs launched an aggressive campaign to cleanse their lands of Bosniak Muslims and established the independent Republika Srpska for ethnic Serbs. The conflict was seen in explicit ethnic and religious terms, and the Serbs openly pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing against their rivals.

As a result, the Bosnian war would see the worst ethnic violence in Europe since the Second World War. The town of Foca was especially vulnerable to this sort of violence. Before the war, its 45,000 inhabitants were about 50 percent Bosniak Muslims and 45 percent Orthodox Bosnian Serbs.

However, the Muslims were mostly unarmed while the Serbs were very much armed. As order began to break down in the country in early 1992, the town Serbs began organizing a crisis committee to prepare for the inevitable outbreak of violence.

Foca, on the border of the land the Serbs claimed, was one of the first towns to be hit with this violence. Bosnian Serb forces aided by local residents attacked the Muslims and government forces on April 1. Rather than risk a firefight, most of the damage was done by hitting the town with artillery from a distance.

It worked, and the Bosnian Serbs dominated the fighting. Thousands of the town’s 22,500 Muslims fled as quickly as they could. The Serbs waited until they had decimated the local soldiers before sweeping into the shelled-out ruins and going building by building to hunt down the remaining non-Serbs.

Hundreds of people were killed in the initial capture. Surviving men were rounded up, disarmed, and kept as prisoners or executed depending on the whims of their captives. Thirteen of the town’s fourteen mosques were burned to the ground.

As is common in war, the first crimes occurred in this initial conquest. Women were found in their homes and attacked by rampaging soldiers. As a symbol of humiliation, they were often raped in front of their families.

However, the horror in Foca was only just beginning. The Serbs quickly established their control of the town. With a loyal militia and the cooperation of local police, they turned Foca, which they renamed Srbinje, meaning place of the Serbs, into a miniature hell for the Muslims who remained in the town.

The former Yugoslav military facility at Lika Foca became the first prison camp. Over the first few weeks of the occupation, hundreds of victims were taken there. One survivor described the conditions.

Food was distributed randomly. There were no hygienic conditions, and the accommodation was full of water. The Serbs simply weren’t willing or prepared to look after large numbers of prisoners.

Before long, the Serbs began separating out the men and the women. Men would be sent to Foca’s central prison, the KP Dom, one of the largest prisons in Bosnia, where Serb forces would torture them. According to one male survivor, the guards came around every day to beat them.

Each night around 8:00 PM, they selected some of the prisoners to be taken away. A few hours later, there would be gunshots, and those prisoners were never heard from again. Of the 18 men who went into his cell at KP Dom, the survivors claimed only eight survived.

Half of the men who entered KP Dom died there. The women were taken to other locations like the Partizan Sports Hall downtown where their nightmare was only just beginning. The Serbs put the women into separate prisons where they were free to abuse the unprotected women.

They were, in effect, prisons existing purely to keep women nearby for the purposes of abuse by Serb soldiers. There were at least 14 of these prisons in or around Foca. One of the first camps was Foca’s high school.

In early July 1992, 70 women and children were taken to the camp where they were all shoved into a classroom for two weeks straight. Every woman between the ages of 15 and 45 was raped repeatedly by soldiers. After two weeks of this hell, they were transferred to the Partizan Sports Hall where the daily rapes continued.

Other camps included the Hotel Zelengora and a number of apartments and houses seized from the former Muslim occupants. Similar prisons were found elsewhere in Bosnia with multiple camps reported around major towns or cities like Visegrad and Sarajevo.

One witness identified only as LK described her experience in the Partizan prison in vivid detail. She and 250 other women were taken to the sports hall on the same day that the Serbs suffered a minor defeat at the hands of the Muslims near Gorazde.

Initially, the soldiers said they were going to execute them. But when news came that another group of Muslim civilians had been massacred nearby, the soldiers decided that these girls would be made to suffer in another way instead. They were added to the crowds already imprisoned in Partizan.

They beat us, raped us. No electricity, no water. We slept on the floor. LK said the Serbs came every night to rape more people.

Many of the attackers were people that the victims already knew. LK recalled the story of one woman who recognized one of the Serbs from Foca. She begged him to help her and he agreed, telling her to gather up her friends and he would come back to rescue them the next day.

Sure enough, the Serb returned the next day and selected the woman with four of her friends. But it was not a rescue. The women were taken to a nearby village and raped for hours. Only four of them ever returned.

The local police were well aware of the camps but did nothing. Most of the officers were Bosnian Serbs themselves who had no interest in helping Muslims. In fact, the chief of police, Dragan Gagovic, was one of the men accused of using the camps, and the Partizan Sports Hall itself was right next door to the town police station.

A culture of mass crime took over, leading to many camps set up by even small squads of soldiers. One witness described how a squad of Serbian soldiers gathered up about 28 Muslim women and set up their own personal camp in a group of houses in Foca. For a month between July and June, the witness and the other women were kept in the house and raped repeatedly by the soldiers.

The soldiers often took two or three women at a time with an apparent preference for mothers and daughters at the same time. Survivors rarely kept count of how many times they were attacked. Many women lost count at 100.

Some continued as high as 150. Some were attacked as many as six times in a single night. And these are only the testimonies of those who lived to tell about it.

Gang rape was commonplace with women enduring multiple attackers at once. I counted 29 of them. Then I lost consciousness. One survivor said these prisons became outlets for angry Serbs.

With a war still raging elsewhere in the country, soldiers who lost friends or family fighting Muslims could go to the prisons and take out their anger on innocent civilians. While numerous men participated in these attacks, a few specific cases should be highlighted.

Radomir Kovac kept four Muslim women inside his small apartment where he raped them repeatedly over a series of weeks, sometimes inviting his friends to join as well. When he grew bored of them, he sold them to other Serbs to be abused all over again. One survivor described how Kovac held her at gunpoint and forced her to dance naked for him.

If any of the girls tried to resist him, he threatened to slit their throats and throw them in the river. Another known participant was Dragoljub Kunarac who commanded the reconnaissance unit of the Bosnian Serb army in the area. He was a Foca native, but his familiarity did not restrain his terrible intentions.

Kunarac raped countless women during his time in Foca, including at Kovac’s apartment. The 15 men under his command also included serial abusers who preyed upon the town’s Muslim prisoners. The men would, according to one survivor, come inside looking for girls, select them as many as they wanted, and then they would take them with them.

Other survivors claimed to have been raped by Kunarac 20 times in the span of a month. Zoran Vukovic was another prolific criminal, a member of both the military police and the local paramilitary. He was also a friend of Kunarac and would often be with him when they picked girls to abuse.

Vukovic had a particular preference for younger girls. One witness who was 15 at the time described how Vukovic took her and raped her. “You’re the same age as my daughter,” he said after he was done. “I could do more, so much more, but I won’t do it now.”

The abuse was systemic. One survivor later claimed that the soldiers said they’d been ordered to rape the women as part of a strategy to destroy the Muslim community. Bosniak Muslim culture prized female honor and chastity, which the rapes destroyed.

The attacks were both a direct crime against the women and a psychological and moral blow to their family and community who suffered the humiliation and failure of not being able to protect their women. One reason that the rapes were especially brutal was that the Serbs were intentionally trying to inflict so much physical or mental trauma that the women could never reproduce, undermining the ability of the Muslim community to repopulate in the long run.

By making the experience as traumatic as possible, they also made it harder for the women to return to the site of their victimization. As one prosecutor later observed, the Serbs knew that one of the main purposes of the campaign was to terrorize the Muslim civilian population in a manner that would make it impossible for them to ever return. There was also an element of ethnic replacement.

The Serbian men wanted to force the women to give birth to Serbian children. One survivor reported how a soldier told her mid-assault that you should have already left this town, we’ll make you have Serbian babies, we’ll be Christians. Adding to the suffering was a long list of other forms of mistreatment, ranging from the physically damaging to the religiously offensive.

The women were given scraps of food and barely enough water to survive. Prisoners were rarely given blankets or clothes, leading to problems with cold and health issues that the Serbs lacked the empathy or resources to deal with. One thing the soldiers did have plenty of was alcohol, something forbidden for devout Muslims, which they forced the women to drink to make it harder for them to resist.

The abuse was almost industrial. New batches of soldiers would arrive, select the women they wanted, and return them to the prisons when they were done for the next load of soldiers. Every Serb male could participate if they chose to.

Local paramilitaries, uniformed soldiers, camp guards, police, and local civilians participated in the abuse. The soldiers made no distinction for age. Children and the elderly were raped as well.

There were also reports of disabled and sick prisoners suffering the same treatment. Some women were kept in the camps for months on end. Inevitably, many of them fell pregnant.

The Serbs typically kept the pregnant women around. Many were held while pregnant until a child was far enough along that an abortion couldn’t be performed. Only then would the women be released, having no choice but to give birth to the Serb child she was carrying.

In the honor- and shame-based culture of Muslim Bosniaks, being a victim and having to raise the child from an outside man meant social isolation and even family abandonment for the women. Of course, a great many of the women did not live that long. Every survivor knew multiple women who were taken away by soldiers but never returned.

Those who did return may have wished they hadn’t. At least two women were returned to the Partizan Sports Hall who had been treated so brutally that they died there. They were given no medical care except what the other women prisoners could provide.

In time, the women in Foca’s prison camps would be sent away as the ethnic cleansing of the town progressed. By the end of the war in 1995, virtually all the town’s Muslims had been banished. According to human rights investigators, when the war ended, just 10 Bosnian Muslims remained in the town, out of a pre-war population of 22,500.

The scale of the atrocities committed in the Bosnian war demanded investigation. While both sides were guilty of crimes in the conflict, the Serbs ultimately committed the majority of the atrocities identified by the investigators. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and a number of other Serb leaders were arrested and tried before the UN-appointed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Established in 1993, the ICTY has the responsibility of prosecuting many crimes associated with the war. Amidst the many crimes, special attention was given to Foca. Reports of the terrible crimes committed there were already spreading before the war’s end, and it became a symbol for the massive amounts of sexual abuse in the war.

In March 2000, trials began for several Serb figures for their role in Foca. The main defendants were Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, and Zoran Vukovic. They had also wanted to try the chief of police, Dragan Gagovic, but he died before the trial could begin.

Sixteen survivors testified before the war crimes tribunal under code names, representing only a tiny fraction of the total victims. The testimonies were harrowing. The women described unspeakable tortures at the hands of Serb soldiers, with many of them breaking down into tears mid-testimony but refusing to stop before their voices were heard.

The trials were unprecedented. Rape had never been prosecuted as a crime against humanity before. No one had been tried for rape at Nuremberg, for example.

However, the scale of the abuse in Foca forced a reconsideration of international law. Three men were ultimately charged with mass rape as a crime against humanity, the first people to ever be charged with such a crime. Furthermore, the tribunal determined that this was used as an intentional policy of ethnic cleansing.

The term ethnic cleansing was rarely used before the Bosnian war, but the Foca trial helped to make it a common term. Sentences were handed down in February 2001. Kunarac was sentenced to 28 years in prison for his role, Kovac got 20, and Vukovic got 12.

Kunarac remains in prison, but Kovac was released in 2013 and Vukovic in 2008. They were some of the first people to ever be convicted of rape as a war crime. Several other Serb political and military figures were prosecuted for wider crimes, but the majority of the dozens or hundreds of Serbs who ran or used the Foca camps were never punished.

Today, Foca’s Muslim population is still a fraction of what it was before the war. Only around 4,000 Muslims have since returned, and most of its mosques and Islamic institutions have not been rebuilt. Ethnic tensions remain high, with attempts to memorialize the victims of the camps fiercely opposed by Serb nationalists.

The camps may be gone, but the scars they left behind in Foca and its people are a long way from healing.