THE WORST moment in Ziba's life occurred when a dozen drunken Serbian militiamen stormed into the school gymnasium in which she and more than other young Muslim women were being held along with their infant children. Now you are going to have our children. You are going to have our little Chetniks. Ziba, 26, mother of two, was among the first 12 women and girls to be selected by the Serbs at the Kalinovik camp. They thought I was going to be killed. Ziba and 11 other young women - the youngest, Sanela, was only 16 - were driven to Kalinovik's only hotel.
Five of the women, including Ziba, were from the eastern Bosnian town of Gacko, the rest from Kalinovik itself. No one was shouting any more.
They gave us bread and meat and water. After the food they told us to go with them to the rooms. Two Chetniks took me upstairs. They were both drunk, both dirty. They had huge beards which were filthy. I could smell the drink on their breath. I asked if I would see Yasmin and Mirnes her two infant boys again and one of them said I would. I was terrified they were going to kill the children while I was in the hotel. He said if I didn't do what they wanted, they would cut my throat. I believed them.
So they both raped me, one after the other. It took half an hour. Then they took me out and put me with the other women who had been brought back from the rooms. We were all told to clean the hotel again and after we had done this they took us back to the gymnasium. From that day it never stopped. The rapes went on day and night for a month. The day was 2 August and all but 10 of the women held prisoner in the gymnasium were to be gang-raped over the following 26 days, some of them by as many as seven Serb militiamen.
Their suffering was endured by thousands of other Muslim women in August and September of last year as Serbian forces 'ethnically cleansed' the Muslim villages of eastern and western Bosnia. What makes the ordeal of the Kalinovik women so important, however, is the extraordinary detail which is emerging of their mistreatment.
