In a harrowing testimony aired on Debat Plus, as part of the series “The Silence That Kills – The True Cry of War”, a woman who survived sexual violence during the war in Kosovo shared her story publicly for the first time.
With profound pain, she recounted the events she experienced at the beginning of the war, when she was forcibly expelled from her home, surrounded by Serbian forces, and ultimately forced to flee the country.
She described how Serbian forces gathered women and confined them to rooms, where they were raped and subjected to both physical and psychological torture throughout the night.
“They completely surrounded us. We didn’t even dare to make a sound. They took the men out in the open. Even though they gave them money—Deutschmarks—even then, they were killed. When we entered the ****, maybe you could hear a voice—there in the ****, they had killed them all.”
“I saw it with my own eyes. I swear to God. Some children cried: ‘Oh no, they killed our father!’ They knew. I told them, ‘No, my son, they haven’t killed your father,’ but they had—all of them were dead. I swear to God, there was a pregnant bride, and they were kicking her, hitting her there.”
She continued:
“When we went to a village, they said: ‘Come here, there’s a doctor inside.’ They made us go into a courtyard, and we stayed there. When it was around 7 or 8 PM, they called us in. They pointed with their fingers—‘you, you, you, you.’ A 15-year-old girl had her fingers broken off. They broke her fingers. She tried to defend herself. Even I tried, here’s the scar to prove it. I tried to defend myself, but it was useless. There was no way to protect yourself from them. Screams and cries—you could hear them all night. They put three or four of us in one room, gave us something to drink—something white, I don’t know if it was a drug or what. After that, we didn’t know anything. Just screaming, crying until morning. When I woke up, I was completely naked.”
“They used knives. I’m covered with scars. And I don’t even feel like this is my body anymore. I was soaked in blood. We stayed like that until morning. In the morning, they let us go—but where could I go like that? I had no clothes, nothing. A woman gave me a diaper to cover myself. When we arrived somewhere, a group of women came out. I said, ‘Oh women, do you have any skirts or anything? Look at me.’ They cried: ‘Oh God, what happened to you?’ I said, ‘Not you—it happened to us.’”
“That friend of mine found me clothes—she gave me everything she had. I got dressed. When we went to the road, buses came to take us somewhere (by the Serbs). We couldn’t go anywhere on our own. Then we tried to go in another direction, maybe to a mosque. So, we went to the mosque.”
And finally, she said:
“It would’ve been better if they had killed me than to be left alive in such disgrace.”
