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Bosnian Rape Victim Protests Lightness of War Crimes Sentences
SARAJEVO, Nov 3 (News Agencies) - One of the many victims of rape during Bosnia's war expressed bitterness on Saturday at what she saw as lenient sentences handed down by the U.N. war crimes tribunal against her Bosnian Serb attackers.
Nusreta Sivac, who was raped and tortured in a camp in 1992, said she believed all her efforts to amass evidence for the prosecution had been in vain.
"Commanders of a camp where thousands of people were tortured and raped were sentenced to only five and seven years in prison," she commented bitterly.
Sivac herself was the victim of Bosnian Serb soldiers, many of them former neighbors, while held in a camp at Omarska for more than two months in 1992.
A day after the Hague war crimes tribunal sentenced her tormentors, Sivac said she now regretted having made so much effort to contribute to an historic decision last February by the U.N. court to treat rape as a crime against humanity.
"I now see that my efforts were pointless," she said: "I am so disappointed that I do not know if I should do anything any more.
"There is no point in arresting fugitive war crimes suspects any more if this is the way to punish those responsible of torturing thousands of people."
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Friday passed sentences ranging from five to 25 years on five Bosnian Serbs found guilty of murder, torturing prisoners and sexual assault at Omarska camp, near the town of Prijedor.
Zoran Zigic, a reserve policeman during the Bosnian war, got 25 years and Omarska shift commander Mlado Radic 20 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But Omarska's first commander, Miroslav Kvocka, and his successor, Dragoljub Prcac, received more lenient sentences of seven and five years respectively, while shift commander Milojica Kos was sentenced to six years.
Sivac's work collecting evidence together with another former victim contributed to indictments against the men responsible for rape and torture in the camp.
But Sivac questioned whether being a prosecution witness in pending cases of crimes committed in the Prijedor region "has any point any more."
"There were one hundred of us who testified at the trial, but I now regret having done that," Sivac told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Over 6,000 Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats were held in horrific conditions in Omarska and two other camps in the Prijedor area between May and the end of August 1992.
After being released, Sivac and childhood friend and co-sufferer Jadranka Cigelj, both legal specialists, interviewed survivors to amass evidence for the ICTY's hearings.
United States filmmakers Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic made a documentary in 1996 called "Calling the Ghosts" in which Sivac and Cigelj described their suffering and work on collecting testimony for the ICTY.
"Calling the Ghosts" became the focus of a worldwide human rights campaign to declare systematic rape and sexual enslavement in time of war a crime against humanity.
During the campaign, Sivac and Cigelj met United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and members of the U.S. Senate and Congress.
An ICTY prosecution spokeswoman said prosecutors were looking into the possibility of an appeal to secure longer jail terms for Zigic, Radic, Kvocka, Prcac and Kos.
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