A war is not over when the weapons are silent. The Bosnian war (1992-1995) has left deep psychological wounds in the survivors through its immeasurable cruelty. Since the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia, women have been raped on all sides. By far the largest number concerned Muslim women, at least 25,000 of whom were systematically raped by Bosnian Serbs, both young and old. The aim of these brutal acts was, among other things, the ethnic expulsion of Muslim Bosnians from areas of today's Republika Srpska. But the systematic rapes were not only a weapon of war as a brutal means of ethnic cleansing, they were also a war against women themselves. The aim was to destroy the women of an ethnic population group or a culture and thus deprive them of their livelihood in their homeland.
Silent Witness