World Bulletin / News Desk

Amnesty International urged Bosnia on Thursday to seek justice for up to 50,000 women and girls who were raped during the 1992-95 war that Sebian forces attacked the Bosnian Muslims and Croats and to punish the perpetrators.

During the war, Bosnian victims, most of them Muslims, participated in systematic rape as part of widespread ethnic cleansing by especially Serbian forces but they have been denied reparations given to civilian war victims, the human rights watchdog said in a report.

More than Bosnian Muslims were the biggest victims of the Serb massacre during 1992-95 war which more than 100,000 people were killed.

The worst example of such killings was the massacre of around 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in nearby Srebrenica, seen as Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.

"It is a shame that the authorities have been neglecting the needs of the survivors for the last 14 years," Amnesty official Marek Marczynski told a news conference. "These women do not want charity, they want their right to reparation and justice."

Marczynski said that different estimates put the number of the rape victims, most of them Muslims, in the range of 20,000 to 50,000, and that impunity for such mass-scale crimes of sexual violence still prevails.

"In many places a lot of police officers who allegedly raped still hold their positions, which prevents the victims from reporting the crime," he said.

Many victims do not dare to talk because of the trauma and stigma, and suffer from nightmares, depression, flashbacks, anxiety and feelings of insecurity, shame and guilt, he said.

"This nation forgets everything. They forget about us victims. But I will never forget about what happened to me," Sabiha, a Muslim name, told Amnesty International report.

The authorities have failed to provide victims with access to adequate health care or psychological support and only non-governmental organisations offer such assistance, Marczynski said.

In addition, many women cannot get any social benefits due to the complex structure of Bosnia's judicial and welfare systems, and suffer discrimination in getting access to such help compared to other war victims.

"The authorities must ensure comprehensive investigations that lead to prosecutions of war crimes of sexual violence in the country," the Amnesty report said.

The United Nations war crimes court in The Hague has prosecuted 18 cases of wartime rape. Another 12 cases have been prosecuted by Bosnia's war crimes court, set up in 2005 to try thousands of war crimes suspects and take over lower-ranking cases from the Hague-based court.