Šerifa
from Tuzla

At the end of April 1992, my village Liplje, Zvornik municipality, was occupied by the Serbian Army. They came in the morning and called over a megaphone for the surrender of men fit for military service. Those who were militarily able fled and did not return home. We women and children were enslaved and locked up in my house and other houses in the village. And then all hell broke loose. Every day Serbian soldiers came and took girls and women out and raped them. The women came back dishevelled and crying, some unconscious.

In the middle of May 1992, the soldiers ordered us to leave with them and took us to another house in Liplje. There we met ten to fifteen Serbian soldiers we did not know. They took our jewellery and money and started beating me. They set fire to a plastic bucket and dripped melted plastic on my hands. My mother-in-law watched, begging them not to touch me because we had already given them everything. The men stripped us naked and herded us out for all to see. They took me to SM’s house where I was raped by several Chetniks. On my naked body they wrote ‘Serbian whore’ in blue ink.

I was raped so many times that day that I lost consciousness. After the rapes, they poured cold water on me until I regained consciousness, and so they took me back to my house. In the same way, they brought other women back to the house. The next day, the same men came again and took me to the same house as the day before. In this house I found an elderly man, KS, who was seventy-six years old. All his clothes were torn off him, he was beaten, everything was bloody. The man who was beaten in this way was forced to rape me by Brzi and Tihi, two men from a Serbian special unit. KS cannot do that, he says I could be his granddaughter. Then Brzi orders them to cut off the old man’s ear in front of me. They started beating me and continued beating KS. They cut off his nose and other parts of his body with a knife. KS died on the spot.

We survived this hell every day. We never knew when they would come or what to expect. They raped us, beat us, tortured us, forced us to do all their other work, sewing uniforms, washing, etc. They put an inscription on my house: ‘Great Serbia’, and they told me that it is no longer my house. On 2 June 1992, units of the Bosnian Army came to our village of Liplje and we were liberated.