Seada Vranic is a journalist who documented over 300 hundred cases of women
and men raped, and the locations of ‘rape camps’, in the
Bosnian-Serb war.
Ms. Vranic was born in 1949 in Travnik, Bosnia-Herzogovina to Bosniak parents. She attended Zagreb University where she studied political science, then worked as a Zagreb correspondent for the daily Belgrade newspaper, Borba. Ms. Vranic was also awarded 'Journalist of the Year' award for "outstanding professionalism, objectivity and personal courage" in 1991 in Belgrade.
Although rape and sexual assault have historically been a part of war, Ms Vranic was one of the first to recognize and put forward the idea that rape was used as a war strategy for the purposes of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian-Serb conflict.
12 of the most harrowing stories, plus a commentary on the psychological/sociological impact of this phenomena, are contained in her book called
Breaking the Wall of Silence (Antibarbarus, Zagreb 1996).