Rape victims of Balkan war say Jolie’s film on event will re-ignite their hell

LONDON - Actress Angelina Jolie’s planned film on the Balkan war has not been met with favour by the women who were victims of rape and abuse during the war, as the idea of their stories being retold would recreate the torture they were forced to endure.

Many Muslim girls and women were repeatedly raped for weeks or even months by Serb soldiers, before managing to flee in the summer of 1992, and since then they have had to live with the trauma of what happened.

When Jolie, 35, announced recently that she is making a film, which will allegedly tell of the love between a Serb rapist and his Muslim victim, the victims could not bear the thought of having to relive the ordeal.

And for Bakira Hasecic, the 55-year-old head of the Women Victims of War (WVW) association, there is no way anyone can turn the trauma of Bosniak women into a film.

“What we have gone through cannot be filmed,” the Independent quoted Hasecic in Sarajevo as saying.

Originally from Visegrad in Bosnia, she was also a victim of repeated rape and has dedicated her life to finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice.

“I’m doing all this to prevent our ordeal from ever happening again… but revenge leads nowhere,” she said.

Enisa Salcinovic, 58, who was repeatedly raped in front of her children when the conflict broke out, said that she only lives for her children and to identify the man who raped her.

She now heads the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors (ACCTS) in Sarajevo, one of several NGOs that gather together some 20,000 women, all victims of rape in Bosnian war that ended 15 years ago.

Jolie’s eight-sentence synopsis does not mention rape but says the young characters Lejla, an inmate, and Danijel, a prison camp commander, are separated by the war, and meet again later, under changed circumstances.

“Danijel tries to find the best solution that would be acceptable for all. The question is if such a solution exists at all,” the synopsis read. (ANI)