BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: VILINA VLAS – THE FAIRY’S HAIR

Nuniwatched the Serb paramilitaries slaughter her child before her eyes. Soon after, the same people led her to Vilina Vlas, an old, gloomy hotel just outside Visegrad. The rooms had been turned into cells and the hotel itself had become a concentration camp for Bosnian Moslem women. In order to survive, the women had to become sex slaves for the Cetniks. “There were about two hundred of us. Only a handful came out alive. They even had 13-year-old girls there,” says Nuni, who, to this day, lives with the fear that her rapists will return and take revenge on her. During the war in Bosnia, the group rape of women was used as a weapon by all sides. Rape, a synonym for degradation, was also used as means for ethnic cleansing. What took place at the Vilina Vlas hotelmakes up one of the darkest pages in the history of the war in Bosnia.