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Horror witness faints at war crimes trial
02/08/2000 11:18 - (SA)
New York - A Croatian woman haunted by memories of repeated rapes by Bosnian soldiers fainted in front of a jury deciding if former Bosnian leader Radovan Karadzic should pay damages for war atrocities committed by his soldiers.
The collapse on Tuesday brought a dramatic close to the first day of a trial to determine how much money, if any, Karadzic should be ordered to pay. The Bosnian Serb leader is already under indictment by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of genocide. He is an international fugitive and was not in court on Tuesday.
The witness who fainted was identified only as "NS" and is among 10 victims accusing Karadzic of crimes against humanity. The group is suing him in US District Court in Manhattan under a
221-year-old law that allows foreign citizens to sue foreign officials and citizens for violating the law of nations.
Ramsey Clark, a lawyer who has represented Karadzic in the past, did not immediately return a telephone message.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the case resulted because women were "raped in captivity with factory-like
efficiency".
Another lawyer, Maria T. Vullo, called the plaintiffs "refugees who are asking you to tell them and the world that what happened to them is wrong and should never happen again".
"Money could never remedy damage like this but this suit is all they have," she added.
The plaintiffs allege that Karadzic personally planned and ordered a campaign of murder, rape, forced impregnation and other torture.
NS said she was living with her husband and two children in Bosnia in the early summer of 1992 when soldiers gathered outside her home, including a neighbour who had propositioned her weeks earlier and threatened her when she declined.
She said they took her and the children in a car to a barn where she was raped by the neighbour, who told her she would be forced to deliver a Serbian child and that she was now under the control of an invincible Serbian army.
For weeks afterward, she said, she was repeatedly raped by Serbian soldiers who wore pictures of Karadzic on their pockets.
"I was very humiliated that this was happening to me," she recalled tearfully as she spoke through an interpreter. "I was thinking of killing my children and then committing suicide."
She said she feared the soldiers would attack her 8-year-old daughter because they threatened to treat the girl as they had her mother.
"I begged them to do to me whatever they please but to spare my children," she said. "One of the soldiers took her hand and I fainted and collapsed."
She said she later awoke with her children at her side, happy she was alive.
'"They're gone, mommy. They didn't touch me,"' she said her daughter told her.
Months after their ordeal began, the three were rescued by a man who drove them to the International Red Cross but warned: "Don't you ever tell anyone who saved you, who brought you here."
NS was the first witness in the trial being heard by a six-person jury.
US District Judge Peter K. Leisure said Karadzic had already been found in default, so the jury must only determine the value of damages.
NS said she was testifying in the hopes that others would learn that what happened in Bosnia should never happen anywhere, regardless of nation or race. She now lives in Croatia with her
family, and said she occasionally suffers fainting spells because of the trauma.
After she fainted in court, pictures of Karadzic were taken down and ambulance workers who treated her were asked to remove their uniforms because of the memories they might revive.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs had taped a photograph of Karadzic to the chair where the defendant would ordinarily sit. A larger picture of him also was placed on an easel before the jury.
"He couldn't destroy me," NS said she would like to tell Karadzic. "We are alive. He couldn't destroy us just because we are Muslims."
- AP
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