Fresh snow makes the neighbourhood of Crkvice seem like a picture postcard as a little boy on the pavement pats a snowball he has made with mittened hands, smiling to himself as he looks for a target. But Emina (not her real name) sees none of this. She spends most of her days in bed in her tiny apartment, on the fourth floor of a nondescript block.
'Yesterday was the first time in seven years that I stepped on snow,' says the 33-year-old, at home in the central Bosnian city of Zenica. 'I had not been outside in winter in seven years. I would always go outside with two people with me but now one person is enough. I have this enormous sense of fear.'
Emina says she has to take between 15 and 18 pills a day. The medication helps her deal with the insomnia, anxiety attacks and depression that have become an everyday part of a life shattered by wartime rape. The conflict that destroyed Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia) between 1992 and 1995 was fought along ethnic lines; Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats took up arms in a war that claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people.
Emina's ordeal began when she was separated from her family near the Bosnian-Croat border in late 1992. The family, from the northern village of Kotor Varos, was among thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting. Her parents, two brothers and a sister managed to bribe their way to safety in Croatia but Croat soldiers stopped Emina.
'There were two cousins of mine, my aunt's sons, but I did not have any protection with them because everyone was taking care of themselves,' she says. 'That's the moment when you suddenly get older, when you are figuring out that there is no one else you can rely on.'
Stranded at a military barracks in the city of Travnik, Emina was raped by Croat soldiers. She was 15.
Months later, the soldiers released her and she managed to find refuge in Zenica. Alone and traumatised, she was also pregnant. Seventeen years on, she is now the mother of a teenage girl and a 12-year-old boy. Her daughter represents two irreconcilable symbols; a reminder of the repeated attacks she suffered yet also one of the few positive things in her life. Emina says she looks forward to seeing her children at the orphanages they have been placed in.
