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March 20, 2007
Children of war


"I'm doing this for justice."




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In the 1990s, Yugoslavia dissolved into a series of bitter conflicts that claimed 200,000 lives. War crimes were committed on all sides resulting in terrible atrocities -- but one crime stands out as being particularly shocking -- the systematic rape of thousands of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbs.

Tens of thousands of women were raped during the war; estimates of the number of babies born as a result of rape are hard to come by, but range from a few hundred to more than 5,000. No one really knows. The Serbian rape policy has left a confronting legacy in socially conservative Bosnia; it is little talked about in this predominantly Muslim society.

In the country today, the children born of rape are growing into teenagers and some are beginning to ask difficult questions about their origins. In many cases the women tell their children that their fathers were killed in the war rather than expose them to the truth. Now it's feared that the children born to those women will be ostracized from society, rekindling ethnic tension that fueled the war to begin with.
Posted by World Untold Stories Producer: 1:17 PM
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