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• Donate to the Global Fund
Help the Global Fund for Women promote women's efforts to protect their communities from the tragedy of war.
• 16 Days of Activism: Nov 25-Dec 10
 Be part of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. Click above to find an event in your community, or for the toolkit to organize your own.
STATISTICS:
•In Bosnia and Rwanda rape became a deliberate aim of war. More than 20,000 Muslim women were raped in Bosnia in a single year, 1992, and a great majority of the female survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide were assaulted.
•An estimated quarter of a million people lost their lives during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rape and sexual abuse of women and girls occurred on a massive scale.
Safeta
Zainab Salbi
IraqGALLERYCONVERSATION
Safeta and her family are marginalized even by postwar Bosnian standards. Her husband finds seasonal jobs when possible. Safeta cleans homes and picks wild berries to sell. They fear the onset of winter.

Now 36, she remembers a time when she was a young and in love and so beautiful her husband was nervous about the looks other men gave her. When she became pregnant, she remembers thinking, her life was “perfect.” Then Serbian forces attacked Bosniak settlements, burning and looting homes in a town where Catholics and Muslims and a small Serbian Orthodox population had long lived as neighbors. Many Bosniaks fled or were forced out. Her husband was taken to a concentration camp. “People who were our neighbors one day became the enemy the next day,” says Safeta, who gave birth while he was gone. “Busovaca became the ghetto for Bosniaks.”

Her husband was eventually released from prison, but was required to do forced labor 48 hours at a time. He was away digging ditches the night militants banged on their door and threatened to kill her baby if she screamed. She recognized some of the men as neighbors and begged for mercy, but they marched her off to an abandoned house and raped her repeatedly. She still remembers the voice of the man who wore a mask. No need to kill her, he told the others when they were done. She will kill herself.

But she didn’t. Instead, she camped out for days at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, successfully pleading for safe passage for her family to a free territory. After the war ended, she and her husband returned to Busovaca only to find their home in ashes. Safeta was invited to testify against her attackers at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, but no one could provide her family asylum afterward, so she refused.

Today, the modest home she shares with her husband and two sons exudes warmth and order. “I am a happy and cheerful woman because I have my family alive and well,” she says. Yet, whenever she hears the voices of men outside, she goes to her window.

“I follow with my eyes men who are passing by,” she says defiantly. “In case it is one of them, I want them to see that I am still alive, that they did not kill me, neither body nor soul, nor will they ever be able to do it.”

This story appeared in "The Other Side of War - Women's Stories of Survival and Hope" by Zainab Salbi of Women for Women International (http://www.womenforwomen.org/index.htm) published by the National Geographic Society (c) 2006 Women for Women International. Photograph by Sylvia Plachy.
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Living with Conflict
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hey wajdi is that you? email me at saher2k@hotmail.com
your old body saher
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