About this film:

The Forgotten Women, is a documentary on the use of systematic rape as operational military doctrine, and a survivor's quest to shed light on the international community's failure to acknowledge the effects this crime has on women's lives, long after the war has ended.

Females are nonstop targets during wartime, as demonstrated by the mass rapes implemented as a policy of genocide during the Bosnian war. Because this atrocity is grossly ignored by the international community and international tribunals, this film revisits one survivor who continues to fight for justice on behalf of others all over the world. From her tiny smoke-filled office on the shrapnel-damaged outskirts of Sarajevo, to her monthly sojourns to the Hague, her goal is for perpetrators to be brought to justice. To this day, survivors continue to join her group, finally sharing their stories with this woman who will ensure their testimonies are heard in the local courts or the Hague.

About systematic rape:

Systematic rape (or mass rape as it's sometimes called) are often employed to carry out ethnic cleansing. During the conflict in Bosnia, systematic rape was implemented as a military policy for the purpose of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia by the Yugoslav Army, the Bosnian Serb forces, and the irregular Serb forces known as Chetniks, along with several mercenary groups. It was this coverage of the mass rapes during the "ethnic cleansing" carried out by the Serbian forces which first began the analysis over the use of rape as a tool of war, and being a part of genocide, rather than a byproduct of war.

About Bakira:

Bakira Hasečić* is a Bosniak woman from Višegrad, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992 during the ethnic cleansing of Višegrad that took place in the early days of the war in Bosnia, she was raped in the Višegrad police station by Bosnian Serb soldiers, members of the Army of Republika Srpska, and then taken elsewhere where she was raped by a soldier from Serbia.  Her sister, who had lived in Germany for 20 years, returned to her hometown merely a year before the war started, subsequently dying in a Serb rape camp (her husband was killed and buried in a mass grave).

Bakira's experiences led to her becoming one of the most prominent human rights activists in Bosnia, if not Europe.  She has worked with organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. She campaigns to secure justice for women victims of the war in national and international courts, particularly for victims of rape and sexual abuse.

She is President of the Association of Women Victims of War (Udruzenje Žene-Žrtve Rata), based in Sarajevo.  The organization campaigns for the rights of women who were victims of rape and similar crimes during the war, gathering evidence and information about war criminals and rapists hiding in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia with a view to securing their prosecution.  The Association provides key testimony in rape and sexual abuse trials linked to the conflict and has helped obtain justice, as well as financial and psychological aid, for many of its thousand-plus members.

Bakira was one of the victims of the notorious Milan Lukic and campaigned prominently to have rape charges included in the indictment against Milan and his cousin Sredoje Lukic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. 

Bakira has led efforts to encourage Bosniaks to return to Visegrad but she told Human Rights Watch that by 2005 she had resigned herself to the fact that "the return has failed, because war criminals continue to live freely there. Almost nobody returned to the town."  Why?  Returnees have often found themselves surrounded by low-level war criminals as their neighbors. In many cases, names of war criminals have been supplied to the Hague and other criminal courts, yet most of them continue to work and live freely.

The perpetrators:

The chain of command went from local civilians who joined the Bosnian Serb army out of their own free will - as well as those expected/pressured to join - to career soldiers and paramilitary, to mid-level commanders, to the most high-ranking officials and politicians, who were behind orchestrating, implementing, and enforcing this crime.

Paramilitary groups were comprised of not just soldiers from the country invading, but also included many highly-trained career mercenaries from countries like Russia, Greece, and Romania.

Another reason seeking out, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of these war criminals, whose names are known, is because as free men, they may be very likely to continue to do what they do best. For example, it has been established that former Serbian mercenaries/paramilitaries have joined pro-Russian forces in their attacks against the Ukraine. 

About the filmmaker:

Ivana Ivkovic has an MFA from the University of Southern California, where she received a full scholarship. After graduate school, she worked at small production companies and large studios, familiarizing herself with all facets of the industry; from executive assistant to producers, to becoming a junior development executive, as well as on the worldwide distribution end by helping manage international clients for a major studio.

As a result of her work interviewing survivors of genocidal rape during the war in Bosnia and Croatia, as well as translating their testimonies and traveling into enemy-occupied territory to deliver food and medical supplies, she was interviewed twice by NPR, by a number of domestic newspapers, and was invited to speak at the University of Stockholm and University of Uppsala. This film will shed more light on the issue of sexualized violence during times of conflict - specifically genocidal rape and its long-term effects (on both the individual and society) - and the undeniable need for justice.