Vlasenica

The Sušica camp was established on 31 May 1992 by order of the commander of Brigade Bircanska, Army of the Republic of Srpska (VRS) and operated until October 1992. During this time, 8,000 Muslim civilians passed through the camp, of which around 3,000 people left the camp dead. Detainees of both sexes and all ages passed through the Sušica camp. It was later converted into a prison and functioned as such until the end of the war. From early June to late September 1992, female prisoners in the Sušica camp were subjected to sexual assaults by camp guards, special forces, local soldiers, and other men.

Women were abused in different places: in the guard house, in the houses around the camp, in the Panorama Hotel, in a military headquarters and in places where they were taken for forced labour. On the one hand, Dragan Nikolic personally selected female prisoners to be raped. He repeatedly gave other men access to female inmates. He allowed women prisoners, including girls and older women, to be subjected to degrading sexual threats and assaults in the presence of others and encouraged these forms of war crimes. In the first half of June 1992 at around 11pm, Goran Viškovic took Witness 8 from the Sušica camp. He took her to a guardhouse next to the hangar where several of the camp’s guards were standing.

He said, ‘Shall we do it as we know it?’ He then handcuffed her, first hitting her hand and foot, and after one of the Serbian soldiers pushed her onto the iron bed and held her hands, he stripped her of her clothes, raped her, and then drove a police baton into her genitals.’ Testimony of an elderly witness before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague: ‘We women were terribly ashamed,’ reported the only witness, a sixty-three-year-old woman. She appeared calm and collected until she described how the Bosnian Serbs selected a group of around twenty-five young women. ‘Some were still children, just fourteen years old. There was also a pregnant woman and a mother who was separated from her three-year-old child. It was so awful. We will show the Muslims what our seed is!’ she said the soldiers shouted.