ABSTRACT
I met Marijana in a hospital in Zagreb. Her doctor told me she had arrived from Bosnia three days earlier. Though our interview was difficult, seventeen-year-old Marijana was beyond tears: dry, tense little face, child’s body. She didn’t exactly tell me what had happened; I had to coax the words out of her, one by one. One day in April, Serb irregulars came to the village near Tesanj, in Central Bosnia, where Marijana, a Muslim-Croat, lived with her family. Marijana, her mother, and her seven-year-old sister were tending their vegetable garden. The soldiers raped Marijana and her mother there, then loaded Marijana on a truck, along with twenty-three other women from the village. This was the last time she saw her mother or her sister. Raping continued on the truck. The soldiers took the women to an improvised camp in the woods that operated as a military brothel. Women between the ages of twelve and twenty-five were kept in one room and raped daily. Marijana became pregnant in the first month. After four months, the soldiers let her and seven other visibly pregnant women go. Marijana says, “They told us to go and have our Serbian babies.”
