It was a sign of life from a boy reaching out to his long-lost mother. Yet in a country scarred by war, his words dug deep into wounds gouged more than a decade ago.
“Greetings to my mom … from your son Rade,” read the scrap of paper the boy sent in the mail along with his photograph.
There is something 13-year-old Rade had never been told: his Bosnian Muslim mother became pregnant with him after being raped repeatedly at the age of 15 by an enemy Serb fighter — who went on to raise him.
Ten years after the end of the worst carnage in Europe since World War II, the focus here is on jobs, investment and eventual European Union membership. While ethnic mistrust persists, Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims now cooperate in a federal government.
But the war is not over for children like Rade. As these war babies reach adolescence, they are beginning to ask questions about their past — and those with the answers are faced with the choice of keeping them in the dark or telling them the agonising truth.
“The mother is now in Austria, is happily married and wants nothing to do with the child,” said social worker Bakira Hasecic, herself a Bosnian war rape victim who is now helping others come to grips with such horrors.
Rade, who bears a striking resemblance to the mother who abandoned him, was raised in the Serb village of Arilje. He sent his letter to a village just 13km away on the Bosnian side of the border where he was told she moved after giving birth.
“The grandmother, who opened the letter, is devastated,” said Hasecic, whose own sister died in a Serbian rape camp. “She is trying to screw up the courage to have the boy visit … but then, he would have to know the whole truth — that he was a child born of hate.”
While Serb and Croat women also were raped, Bosnia’s Muslims were the main victims. An estimated 20 000 Muslim women were raped during the two-and-a-half-year conflict that ended in 1995 with hundreds of thousands of people dead or missing and more than one million displaced.
Most of the perpetrators were Serbs, who often used mass rape as a weapon of terror.
Many women were dragged to concentration camps and raped repeatedly. Some were brought back to their homes and dumped in front of their husbands. Other women were violated in their husbands’ presence as part of a shock campaign.
The systematic use of rape led to the United Nations war-crimes tribunal trying those accused of atrocities in the Bosnian conflict to recognise ethnically motivated rape as a war crime, part of the Serbs’ campaign of ethnic cleansing.
‘Hidden population’
A just-completed UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) draft report — the first to look at Bosnia’s war babies — says anecdotal evidence suggests many of the babies were killed at birth and calls the unknown number who survived a “hidden population … particularly vulnerable”.
The report, made available in advance to The Associated Press (AP), says many of these children remain unwanted and in state-run orphanages as they enter their early teens.
The children who remained with their families face ostracism in their home communities if their origins are revealed. Some suffer trauma because of the hatred the mother bears for the father.
“One family … taught their daughter’s child to explicitly identify his existence as a mistake, forcing him to introduce himself to household guests as, ‘I am the product of my mother’s shame,'” says the Unicef report.
Most of those who adopt, however, invent stories of fathers who fell in the war or mothers who disappeared.
“As long as their origins are kept secret, such children are in the best possible situation … they are neither at risk of neglect or attachment disorders, nor are they facing discrimination,” says the Unicef draft report.
But sometimes parents feel compelled to tell the truth before their child is hurt by hearing it from somewhere else
“One girl I know has begun asking, ‘Who is my father?'” said Fadila Memisevic, head of Bosnia’s Branch of the Society of Threatened Peoples, who also counsels women raped during the conflict.
“Her mother says, ‘He was a hero who fell in the war,’ but she won’t accept that for an answer — in a strange way she is starting to sense her origins.”
Recovering from trauma
Alen Muhic, a 12-year-old boy who was adopted by Muslims in Gorazde, appears to have recovered well from the trauma of learning he is a product of wartime rape.
A Boy from a War Movie, a 2004 documentary of his case, shows him happily playing with school mates, tussling with his adoptive father and sitting contentedly at home with his two adoptive siblings.
At the age of nine, “some kid told me I was adopted, that the family was not mine”, he says, a half-smile on his lips as he looks into the camera. “I immediately ran to my father and told him what happened — he put me on his lap and told me who my mother was and how I was born.”
But the film does not reveal the extent of the hurt inside that began when some townsfolk started calling him “Pero” — a typically Serb name.
Citing family acquaintances, the Unicef report says Alen suffered through a suicidal period because of teasing at school and for a while tried desperately to contact his biological mother — who angrily refused his overtures.
Advija Muhic, Alen’s adoptive mother, cried as she told the AP of Alen’s schoolyard encounter with the truth.
“We went through hell after that,” she said, sobbing. “He ranted and raved for days, screaming and crying, ‘Why have you betrayed me? Why have you lied to me?’
“‘You said you carried me here!’ he screamed, pointing at my stomach.” — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writer Aida Cerkez-Robinson contributed to this article