![]() ![]() At the time, this sounded like a pipe dream. She wanted the baby to be used as evidence in a war-crimes trial, so, from a distance, she kept tabs on what became of him. She knew his name-he had been a neighbor, a married man with a grown child. When we first met, back in 1996, Selma told me that she wanted her alleged rapist to stand trial for war crimes. Her kids, who went to school during the day, stayed with her at night. ![]() ![]() Her husband, who worked nights, stayed with her during the day. I learned that she rarely left the house, and was never left alone. She was struggling with multiple ailments. In between cigarettes-her fingers trembling as she smoked-she gestured for her husband to hand her the bag of pills sitting on the table. “The only one who ever did anything for me was God, because God sent me my husband and he has taken care of me.” “None of them did anything for me,” she said. The Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, which campaigns for the rights of women who were raped, didn’t help her. The aid organizations that flooded in to Bosnia after the war didn’t help her. She said she felt betrayed, not just by what happened during the war, but by the post-war institutions that were supposed to help her. But when I brought up Bosnia, she grew agitated. As we chatted about what had transpired over the years-we had both married and had children-Selma was calm, engaging, polite. She said her life was good in New York-she felt safe and was grateful for her husband and children.īut as the afternoon wore on it became clear to me that Selma had not found peace. The photos were organized in albums, neatly labeled by date. She showed me photographs chronicling her life over the past couple of decades in the United States-the births of her children, picnics in the park, visiting Bosnian friends in New York City. Selma cooked a lunch of chicken, rice, and broccoli, flavored with Chinese spices, followed by a spread of cookies, pastries, and coffee. They lived in a tidy three-story house, with a garden. She was married now, with two American-born teenagers. In New York, it appeared that she had succeeded in doing so. She left the baby at the hospital and tried to go on with her life.īosnian Muslims refugees evacuate a town in eastern Bosnia near Selma’s in April 1992 as Bosnia descended into war. I wanted to strangle him,” she told me then. “When I heard him cry, I asked the doctor to bring him to me. She saw the baby as an extension of the man she says raped her, a reminder of the pain and torture she had endured. She had become pregnant and given birth to a baby boy. Tormented and destitute, she counted herself as one of what was estimated to be more than 20,000 women who were raped during the four-year conflict. I had not seen her since 1996 when I was reporting a story for Newsweek about rape and the children born from it during the war in Bosnia.īack then, Selma was living in a ruin of an apartment on the outskirts of battle-scarred Sarajevo. To protect her privacy, I am not naming the town she lives in, and Selma is a pseudonym. I had heard that she wanted to put the past behind her and I didn’t know if she would want to talk to me. I wrote her a letter, dropped it in a mailbox, and hoped for the best. Selma had no social media presence and no listed phone number, but a $4.99 People Search brought up an address in upstate New York. ![]()
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