The Natashas by Victor Malarek

Author:Victor Malarek
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2012-07-23T16:32:47+00:00

8

BOSNIAN

NIGHTS

We had a Christmas party where they had all these slaves there. One guy brought three girls to the party.

—BENJAMIN JOHNSTON, A FORMER DYNCORP WORKER HIRED TO REPAIR HELICOPTERS AT A U.S. MILITARY BASE

IN DECEMBER 1995, in the wake of a brutal forty-two-month war against Serbian-led forces, more than 50,000 NATO peacekeepers marched into Bosnia and Herzegovina to restore law and order. A number of Serbian fighters were rounded up, charged with rape and sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. But in the peacetime that followed, thousands of women and girls—abducted from Eastern Europe and forced to work as sex slaves in the bars and brothels that dot the mountainous Bosnian countryside—became fair game for the tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers and international aid workers who poured into the region. The irony is ugly. During war, the rape of innocent women and children by soldiers is deemed a heinous war crime. During peacetime, it’s a different story.

OLENKA, A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD UKRAINIAN, sits across from me in a coffee shop chain-smoking cigarettes. She is tall and thin, her skin is pale and her dyed-blond hair cropped short. She stares nervously down at her ruby red fingernails as she recounts her six-month descent into hell as a sex slave in a bar in the northern Bosnian town of Tulza. Olenka was just seventeen at the time, but the nightmares still haunt her. She takes a long drag from a cigarette and begins her story.

“I went with between eight and fifteen men a night. I did not want to have sex with any of them. If I did not do as I was told, my owner said I would be beaten to death. This man was cruel and vicious. You did not cross him.”

In the months she was held captive, Olenka figures she was raped more than 1800 times. The men each paid the owner $50. She never saw a penny. On one particularly harrowing evening she was passed around to a dozen soldiers. The men were rambunctious, celebrating a birthday in the bar. One of their buddies had turned twenty-one. She was the birthday present . . . for the entire platoon. Whatever the peacekeepers wanted, she was forced to give.

“The entire time, I must smile and make them believe I am enjoying this humiliation,” Olenka said in a barely audible whisper. “These men were animals. They cared nothing that I was there as a prisoner. They simply wanted sex.”

She doesn’t know the names of any of the men who used her over that period, but she remembers the uniforms and the insignias emblazoned on their shoulders—American, Canadian, British, Russian, French. Many were soldiers. Some were police officers with the UN. Others were among the thousands of workers—with either the myriad international agencies or the UN—that flooded the region after the conflict. Many times, she would plead for help. Some of her international “patrons” had cell phones dangling from their belts. She asked them to let her make just one call.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.