November 30, 2019

Children born out of wartime rape must not remain silent

topic:	Women's rights
located:	Bosnia and Herzegovina
editor:	Katarina Panić

Jasmila Žbanić's movie 'Grbavica' won the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin film festival. It is based on a true story about a single mother in Sarajevo, desperately trying to keep the secret that her child is born out of wartime rape. It took almost a decade until both mother and child decided that their identity be revealed. After they spoke loudly once, they kept doing it ever since, not wanting to be invisible anymore, only wanting to be treated equally and without the stigma so deeply associated with their circumstance. 

The daughter, Ajna Jusić, is now 26. This week she addressed United Nations representatives at the official commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. She spoke on behalf of children born of wartime sexual violence and children whose fathers were members of peacekeeping missions throughout the world.

“As I stand here and as long as I walk this earth, I will fight for the future of all children born of war. I will fight that they do not go through everything I went through. And I have experienced peer violence, mental struggles with myself, I fought together with my mother against the unfair government and frightened and uneducated society. Today I fight that all of us children born of war can claim our rights, that we can be educated without discrimination, that no child has to look down ashamed at the medical counters, like I have done explaining every time that I do not know my father's name because my mother survived rape”, Ajna told in New York on Monday.

Under the banner 'Orange the World: Generation Equality Stands against Rape', she spoke as part of a broader UNiTE campaign, which is organised by UN Women and has the goal to eliminate violence against women by 2030 and marks the start of 16 Days of Activism.

“My mother has been hiding the truth from me for 15 long years. I believe, the worst period in her life. I spent nights thinking about my father. I made so many scenarios in my mind, but just not the one that I was born as a result of war rape. I discovered that I came to this world as a result of the worst and most serious crime against the human body, as a result of my mother's biggest trauma”, she said.

Ajna is a psychologist, human rights activist and she runs the Forgotten Children of War Association which creates a model for working with children born of war and the first who try to make a unique law on children born of war just as the movie “Grbavica” made the victims of rape to be recognised as war victims.

“My mother's heroism has no measure, her struggle for me has been incredible and is still today. She fought for a child who had been deprived of a fundamental right, to know her origin, a child who did not know and will never know her family ties, a child who has no idea of her genetic predispositions but who was born with a heart defect, a child deprived of identity. She fought for me”, Ajna concluded.

Image: www.polyvideo.at