CHERYL GOODENOUGH, Durban | Tuesday
FOR two months Nusreta Sivac, a former Bosnian judge, was detained in a concentration camp in northern Bosnia where she was tortured and raped.
Fifteen-year-old South African Lorraine Nesane was painted white after being accused of shoplifting by a white manager.
At age 10, Afro-Brazilian Crueza Maria de Oliveria worked for a white family as their domestic worker and caregiver for their two-year-old child.
The three are among countless people from all over the world who have been given the opportunity to tell the World Conference Against Racism their experiences of hardship and discrimination.
In April 1992, Serbs took over Sivac’s town in northwest Bosnia. Arriving at work, Sivac was told that her name was on a list of people who didn’t work there anymore. On Jun. 9, 1992, she was arrested without explanation and taken to the Omarska concentration camp.
She spent two months there with “thousands and thousands of men and 36 women,” she recalled. The women had to clean rooms and serve the one meal that the prisoners got each day. “If we didn’t eat in two minutes – and the meal was a piece of bread and a little bit of beans – you would be beaten, sometimes to death,” she said.
In the evening, before the women lay down on the floor in the rooms in which they slept, they would have to clean up blood “because during the day the rooms were used for questioning and torturing people”.
“I saw terrible sights there, (the) torturing and killing (of) people. Some people were dying because they were hungry, some because of the conditions. I started my day in the camp by counting the dead,” Sivac said.
At night, the guards would take the women one by one and rape them. “I can never forget that. I thought they would spare me because there were younger women there, but they didn’t,” Sivac told her audience here with tears streaming down her face.
After two months, Sivac and the other women were moved from Omarska to another camp. She later found out that a Red Cross delegation accompanied by international media was expected to visit Omarska, which the Serbs had always described as a facility for male war prisoners.
Sivac was released after five days in the other camp. She left Bosnia in October 1992 for Croatia, where she lived as a refugee for four years. In 1996, she returned to live near her former home. “It is still too early to talk about the number of the dead,” she said.
“Even today there are many mass graves that are being opened. I found two of my friends in one of them. I’m still looking for another three of them.”
Fifteen-year-old Nesane went to a clothing store in Louis Trichardt, South Africa, in August 2000 to buy new clothes. A white manager accused her of stealing and instructed a black employee to cover her with white paint from her head to her waist.
“He asked me to take off my shirt. I refused. Then he took it off and painted me,” she said.
When Nesane was told to leave the shop she asked for the money that she had been carrying and the shirt that she had been wearing. “The woman said that I looked beautiful and should just go,” said Nesane.
In a subsequent court case, one black employee was found guilty and fined the equivalent of about $177. The white manager was acquitted.
Asked whether she had hope that black and white people could live together in South Africa, Nesane said: “No, because white people always look down on blacks and think they’re the best.”
Describing her experiences in Brazil, De Oliveria said that at the age of 10 she was employed by a family and told that she would be schooled. However, she never received an education.
Instead, her boss made fun of her hair, fed her food that was left over from the children, and made her eat out of a dish that was not used by other members of the family. “I was beaten and labeled lazy and ugly,” she said. When her boss was away, a male family member showed De Oliveria his genitals and asked her to fondle them.
Now grown up and an activist for domestic workers’ rights, De Oliveria said that domestic workers in Brazil are not treated much better today. “They continue to be disrespected, abused and exploited.” – IPS