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  • EASTERN BOSNIA - APRIL 2001: This are my grandmother’s hands. She survived two wars. 2nd World War and the Bosnian war for independence. Most of her family was exterminated in 2nd world war. Pretty much the offspring of the people that killed her family in 2nd world war committed atrocities in Bosnia in early 90’s. Eastern Bosnia is on the border with neighboring Serbia with river Drina as a natural border. Through the history Bosnia was always a border country between East and West, during the Ottoman period it was the border post towards Austrian empire, before that it was border between Eastern and Western Empire. This position made Bosnia quite a unique conglomerat of ckutures,traditions,religions. Other than that it didn't bring us too much good. When the war was over, a foreign journalist came to interview my professor of poetry, Marko Vesovic. Entering his appartment, the journalist noticed my professor's dog who was lying in a corner. 'What remarkable blue eyes he has,' the journalist said. 'Well, you see,' explained my professor, 'the dog used to eat the same food we ate during the war. Now he is blind. Dogs are ageing seven times faster than we do, so with us it is different. We still have to wait for the effects on us. I never witnessed a mortar shell exploding in front of the people in the market place or a sniper shooting someone in front of my high school. I was always a couple of seconds or minutes late, or I would pass by the market place just before the shell exploded and killed more than sixty people waiting to buy groceries, or I would be running in a dark street with broken glass falling on me. But I've seen people cleaning the streets after shelling, I've seen what was left of a young man after a thirty-kilo shell exploded near him, and I've also seen the face of woman who survived this unhurt. Lately, when I was in Jerusalem for the first time, I wanted to visit the Al-Aksa mosque. At the entrance I was stopped by an Israeli soldier, a native Russian, and an Arab guard of the mosque. 'You are not allowed to enter,' said the soldier. 'You are not Muslim.' 'But I am!' I insisted. They wouldn't believe me. In Italy, I told an acquaintance of mine that I was a Muslim. He was irritated. 'But then,' he said, 'you cannot be a European.' 'But I am!' I replied. The Turks have left us with an unsolved national question. Religion and culture have always been strongly intermingled in our country. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Bosnia in 1453, the strategy it used to establish its rule was Roman: Divide et impera. Religion was the vehicle. Favouring the Muslims helped the Turks run the country, but it divided the Bosnians. In the 19th century, during the era of Romanticism, when Central Europeans began to build up their ideas of nationhood based on concepts of cultural uniqueness, Bosnians developed their own cultural identities out of religious affiliations. But these cultural identities failed to develop into the idea of a Bosnian nation: Bosnian Catholics and Bosnian Orthodox were seduced by the ideas of a Great Serbia or a Great Croatia. Today Bosnia is a resort of moderate, autonomous European Islam. Actually most of the population are Christians: Orthodox and Catholics. The Arab countries were not too impressed by the Bosnian version of Islam and their help wasn't sufficient to help us defend ourselves against the former Yugoslav Army, one of the strongest armies in Europe. The body count in the recent war was almost all Bosnian Muslim, but for the first time in the last two hundred years we have a state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a language that is recognized….We've never been closer to a nation. I'm afraid that the fact that Bosnians are white helped us a lot. Probably that's why it took only four years for NATO to intervene in Bosnia. Before the fall of Srebrenica, the UN safe haven zone, foreign involvement was on the level of bringing humanitarian aid, mostly only where the Serbian Army allowed, and counting the shells and bombs falling on Bosnian cities. Then after the fall of Srebrenica and the massacre of Bosnian Muslims that followed it, NATO bombed the Serbian positions and brought peace. The first shelling of their positions around Sarajevo came at night. I remember our windows, covered with humanitarian nylon sheeting with UN signs instead of glass, opening because of the detonations, this time on the Serbian side. My mother cooked a pie to celebrate it. Our lives during the war were reduced to the basics. Having a bath with five-litre canisters and then using the water for the toilet. Making meat pie without meat. We became experts at peeing in the dark. The path to happiness was very short, and the learning curve was steep. Once we all adopted these vital skills, and even got used to our little limbo and for a moment stopped talking about peace, our politicians signed the peace agreement. We have a new anthem now. We also have a new flag. It shows a dark blue ground on which is placed a golden triangle, a row of golden stars on one side. The triangle is meant to represent Bosnia and the row of stars I guess imply the European Union. Today we have to stand in a queue to get a visa for every European country. The writer Ivo Andric, one of two Bosnian Nobel Prize winners, described Bosnia in one of his novels as a 'valley of darkness'. The valley is surely dark; it is dark with Bosnian blood, it is darkened by American ignorance and European impotence, it is dark because of the clouds above. Yet it is our valley (Photo by Ziyah Gafic/Exclusive by Getty Images)

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Žrtve ratne torture u Republici Srpskoj će po prvi put biti uključene u javni poziv za banjsku rehabilitaciju

Written by TRIAL International - Ured u BiH on . Posted in Novosti

zrtve ratne torture banjska rehabilitacija banja rvi

Organizacije TRIAL International, Fondacija „Udružene žene“ i Fondacija „Lara“ pozdravljaju Odluku Vlade Republike Srpske kojom je data saglasnost za raspisivanje Projekta banjske rehabilitacije za ratne vojne invalide, članove porodica poginulih boraca Odbrambeno – otadžbinskog rata i, po prvi put, žrtve ratne torture u Republici Srpskoj. Iako Zakon o zaštiti žrtava ratne torture predviđa ovo pravo za pojedince sa ostvarenim statusom, nijedan do sada raspisani javni poziv nije uključivao ovu kategoriju.

Raspisivanje javnog poziva rezultat je zalaganja TRIAL International-a i partnerskih organizacija, Fondacije „Udružene žene“ i Fondacije „Lara“, kao i rada predstavnika institucija i međunarodnih organizacija. Evropska unija je bila aktivni zagovarač implementacije ovog prava kao jednog u nizu koraka koje vlasti trebaju poduzeti kako bi obezbijedili realizaciju ključnog prioriteta u procesu evropskih integracija koji se odnosi unapređenje okruženja pogodnog za pomirenje a sve u cilju obezbjeđivanja reparativnih mjera za žrtve ratnih zločina.

Adrijana Hanušić Bećirović, viša pravna savjetnica organizacije TRIAL International, pozdravila je ovaj veoma značajan iskorak za osobe sa priznatim statusom žrtve ratne torture u Republici Srpskoj, prvenstveno preživjele ratnog silovanja. „Prije tri godine, žrtve su u razgovorima s nama i drugim pružateljima podrške počele sve intenzivnije artikulisati potrebu za banjskom rehabilitacijom, obzirom na to da višestruke posljedice koje već decenijama trpe zbog pretrpljene torture starenjem postaju sve izraženije. Republika Srpska je na ovaj način učinila značajan iskorak u regionu, te se nadamo da će i Federacija BiH koja je ovo pravo, u  odgovoru na naše zahtjeve, predvidjela u nedavno usvojenom zakonu, bez odlaganja osigurati implementaciju u praksi i za civilne žrtve rata u Federaciji BiH.“

Ministarstvo boračko-invalidske zaštite Republike Srpske je za Projekat banjske rehabilitacije ove godine izdvojilo 500,000 КМ. Gorica Ivić,  izvršna direktorica Fondacije „Udružene žene“ iz Banja Luke pohvalila je ovu odluku: „Nadamo se da će žrtve imati priliku da kontinuirano koriste ovo pravo bez dodatnih administrativnih prepreka te da će status biti dovoljan osnov za korištenje rehabilitacije u zdravstvenim ustanovama koje pored medicinskih usluga nude i i psihosocijalnu podršku od strane stručnih lica koji su senzibilisani za trauma orijentisan rad.“

Potreba za banjskom rehabilitacijom za žrtve ratne torture naglašena je i na nedavno održanim događajima u Banjoj Luci i Bijeljini, prilikom kojih je predstavljena i Analiza „Izazovi u implementaciji Zakona o zaštiti žrtava ratne torture Republike Srpske“. Zagovaranje za unaprijeđenje implementacije aktivno je počelo inicijativom TRIAL International-a i partnerskih organizacija još u oktobru 2022. godine. Pored banjske rehabilitacije, inicijativa se fokusirala i na produženje ili ukidanje roka za sticanje statusa žrtve ratne torture.

Radmila Žigić iz Fondacije „Lara“ takođe je pozdravila odluku Vlade RS: “Nadamo se da će pristup pravimo da se ostvaruje bez komplikovanih administrativnih procedura. Takođe, nismo još

izgubili vjeru da će naša zakonodavna i izvršna vlast prepoznati potrebu da se produži rok za podnošenje zahtjeva za ostvarivanje statusa i prava za brojne žrtve ratnog seksualnog nasilja i drugih oblika torture koje ova prava još nisu tražile i očekujemo da će izmjene Zakona o zaštiti žrtava ratne torture ući u agendu rada vlasti u Republici Srpskoj u 2024. godini.” 

Aktivnosti ka adresiranju ovih važnih potreba za preživjele podržala je Vlada Ujedinjenog Kraljevstva.