“It's enough for four prosecutors to punish war crimes”: Husiq: Kosovo to learn from Bosnian mistakes

Sabiha Husic, who heads Bosnia's oldest female organisation, considers it important that women and men talk about the tortures they have experienced by Serb criminals.

“First of all, the state should create a safe environment for the survivors themselves who have spoken or will talk about their trauma, when I say a safe environment, I also have the opportunity to give freedom when it, when they want to speak and apply for their status, and that will surely motivate and encourage women to give their testimony so that the perpetrators of this war are prosecuted. So indeed, from experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we can say how important it was for women themselves to testify to punish the authors, and of course the state must pass laws that will sanction this war crime”, Husic says of Kosovas Prees.

For punishing war crimes, Husic adds that four prosecutors are not enough, as Kosovo currently numbers.

It's a very difficult question, I'll say again based on my experience that I've been working for 30 years that really isn't enough, these capacities aren't enough because it's about such subtle crimes... subtle war, criminal acts where it really takes a lot of time, until we know it's about thousands of women who survived rape and sexual violence, then really it's not even four, not five, not seven, nor seven prosecutors, Huq adds.

The director of the organisation “Medica Zenica” estimates that Kosovo should learn from the mistakes Bosnia and Herzegovina has made in preparing the genocide indictment against Serbia.

I think that Kosovo can learn much from Bosnia and Herzegovina's mistakes, that it should take mistakes from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and return to its good practice, I think Kosovo can achieve much more as a state, both at the national and at the international level. So a serious approach to war crimes, a serious approach to authors and an objective approach without political games, because let's not forget that the people in Kosovo mostly suffered. That people should take a stand-up like it was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, unfortunately I can say that Sabiha Husic, Bosnia and Herzegovina has not had a good time with all of this, genocide was only known at Srebrenica. While we know that in many parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina has become genocide, let Kosovo take away our mistakes and return to its positive practice, so that the mistakes of Bosnia and Herzegovina are not later repeated”, says “Medica Zenica”.

In the interview for Kosova Prees, it shows that over three decades now, hundreds of services have been provided to survivors of sexual violence, domestic and community violence. She adds that they have provided psychological, legal, economic empowerment and work in rural areas.

This subject is taboo to this day, and it is not seriously treated, despite the war being completed 25 years ago. Now we are looking at the transgenerative transmission of trauma and stigmatisation is also present by the community itself, that is, stigmatization in the sense that women's behaviour is still being questioned, that they are not believed, that they often try to find the blame that women themselves caused to be abused, abused, and similar. And what we're trying to do in the field of de-tigrattisation, so let's talk about this subject, talk to the young people so they can be informed of this specific trauma, but at the same time we can speak up and say rape and sexual violence can't be the fault of women or girls, nor of men of course. On the contrary, the community and family are obliged to accept, to help create a safe environment that will not re-traumatize” again, she adds.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina so far, there are 1300 women and men who have won the status of civilian war victim.

So we have more than 1300 women and men who have achieved their status as civilian victims of war, it's still not enough, when we remember that as many as 50,000 women and girls have been raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the aggression of the years dealt with92-95. And statistics show that somewhere around 3,000 men have been raped during aggression in Bosnia and Herzegovina, these are actually just basic statistics, we really think these statistics are much higher, because how we're going to talk about women who are really quiet anymore, they don't talk about the trauma they've experienced in what statistics we need to count”, she says.

However, Husic says the exact number of victims will hardly be known, since many of them have died and others have left their country after the war.

About 20 thousand women and men have been sexually raped during the recent war in Kosovo by Serb criminals. So far by local courts, only a ten-year sentence for sexual rape for criminal Zoran Vukotic has been pronounced. Meanwhile, there have recently been two indictments in absentia by the Special Prosecutor.