Roy Gutman

When the Bosnian Serb Army invaded areas of Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, it expunged most of the regions' Muslim inhabitants. This process of ethnic cleansing was an attempt to establish a Serb-only nation out of land wrested from Bosnia. Muslim men who were not killed were usually sent to concentration camps while Muslim women were often held in makeshift bordellos where they were raped, often repeatedly, by Serbian soldiers.

In the following excerpt from his book, A Witness to Genocide, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning dispatches on the Bosnian war, American journalist Roy Gutman interviews some of these Muslim rape victims. Gutman learns that Serb soldiers were ordered to rape the women in order to shame and insult them.

Serb forces in northern Bosnia systematically raped 40 young Muslim women of a town they captured early [in the summer of 1992], telling some...