In 2006, Kaloper and other activists started talks with officials and political parties in Bosnia to persuade them to grant wartime rape victims a specific status in law, which would qualify them for welfare benefits as well as providing official recognition of what they suffered.
“What hurt us the most was the attitude of one parliamentary representative at the time, also a woman herself, who said: ‘If you want to prove your status, you need to go to a gynaecologist,’” Kaloper recalls. “This was something that made us even more angry.”
But the struggle has yielded results.There are now laws establishing the status of wartime sexual violence survivors in both Bosnia’s political entities, the Federation and Republika Srpska, but not at the state level. Nevertheless, Kaloper is proud of the advances so far.
“With our activism, we managed to fight for and achieve what we have to date – and we’re not planning to stop until every woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina, without any discrimination on a religious or national basis, has her own rights,” she says.
She also says that “in the last eight to nine years, [discrimination and denial] has decreased”. There are still occasional comments by those who deny that war crimes happened in Foca, or blame the women for what they suffered, “but it’s a small percentage of people who say those kinds of things.
Kaloper’s organisation is one of the few in Bosnia that has worked to gain the trust of male survivors of wartime sexual violence.
“Even before assuming my duty as president of the Association of War Victims Foca ’92-’95, I had the opportunity to work with male war rape victims and I’m going to humbly say that I was the first one to speak with men from the Zvornik area [who were sexually assaulted]. In personal conversations, I managed to persuade them to say what they had survived – to speak up and to bring perpetrators to justice.
“They were the first to speak out about that horrific crime they endured in those [detention] camps in the area around Zvornik and in Zvornik itself. After that, I am also proud that I managed, to a significant extent, to convince some men from Foca to speak up about the crimes they survived during the war.”
Kaloper explains that because of the social stigma, the men found it difficult to tell the “harsh truth” about what actually happened to them. But now, she says, they are “fighting together with us for a better position [for survivors] in society in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
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