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Emran Feroz is an Afghan-Austrian journalist currently based in Stuttgart, Germany. He is regularly writing from Afghanistan, often focusing on the Middle East, Central Asia, drone warfare, refugee policies and human rights. Emran is writing in both German and English. His work has already appeared in international media outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Intercept, Alternet, The Atlantic or the New York Times and in various German and Austrian news papers and magazines.
The Hotel Where Bosnian Women Were Raped And Tortured
If you take a look at TripAdvisor, the Vilina Vlas spa hotel seems to be a regular hotel in Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, this is not really the case.
In fact, the hotel was used as a torture and rape camp once. It happened almost thirty years ago during the Balkan war:
In 1992 Vilina Vlas was commandeered as a headquarters by Milan Lukić, the sadistic leader of the Serb paramilitary group the White Eagles, which in a few months turned Višegrad into a charnel house and virtually emptied it of its Muslim population.
During this time, Bosnian women were raped, tortured and killed in the hotel. It is also well known that the swimming pool was used as an execution site by the Serbian militias. Nevertheless, it seems that many people prefer to forget these horrible events.
“I don’t know what happened there. I am not interested in going back to the past. Why would I read about that if I’m not interested in going back to that?”, said Mladen Djurevic, mayor of Višegrad.
Bakira Hasečić survived both the sexual violence and the ethnic cleansing campaign partly run from the spa. She established and now runs the Association of Women Victims of War and tries to give Bosnian women a strong voice.
According to her, many victims are still traumatized. She remembers how one of them, Jasmina Ahmetspahic, committed suicide by jumping from a balcony. And while today many people try to suppress what happened in Vilina Vlas, many other victim's stories remain untold.
