The director of the Kosovo Center for the Rehabilitation of Torture Survivors (KRRT), Feride Rushiti, and this organization were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few days ago. For more than two decades, this center has treated many women and men who were sexually abused during the 1998-1999 war. On Wednesday, Rushiti spoke in a public discussion about her journey and the fight for justice for survivors of sexual violence.

She first encountered sexually abused girls and women in March 1998 in Kukës. She was serving there as a doctor for Kosovars forcibly displaced by Serbian forces.

Amidst emotions, he recounts his first conversation with a woman who was raped in the presence of her husband and children.

"I remember the first meeting when I was invited as a woman and as a doctor to visit a woman in the Italian camp. There were dozens of international journalists standing next to that tent. When I entered that tent, I found a woman with her two children, whom she was hugging tightly in her lap and continued with an emotionless rhetoric, she had a physiological numbness and said that 'I left the child for dead, the dogs ate me, I couldn't bury it, what happened to him'. She asked these questions and I myself found myself challenged and didn't know how to continue with her... I remembered to ask her what happened to her husband because she was standing alone in that tent hugging the children. And when I asked her 'what happened to your husband, where is your husband', she said 'oh my sister, they took my husband because the moment they wanted to rape me, he reacted and I don't know about his fate'. He "It was a very embarrassing moment for me personally and I started crying," Rushiti confessed.

In meetings with dozens of sexually abused women and men, Rushiti showed that the survivors did not talk about the horror they experienced but about their urgent needs at that time.

Even after the country's liberation, the KRCT director indicated that victims of sexual violence faced challenges, stigmatization, and a lack of justice.

The Nobel Peace Prize nominee stated that this topic has not had space or social discourse in the past among parliamentarians. She mentioned the parliamentary sessions of 2013 and 2014 when the inclusion of victims of sexual violence within the framework of the Law on War Values ​​was opposed.

"There was no social discourse on sexual violence, there was no space to talk. Members of parliament have been part of this stigmatizing and prejudiced society. And it took a long time to work with them... The discrediting language was painful, a language of hatred, a language of disbelief about the way this wound was spread that completely reflected the social mass in how they think and reflect. Then those verifications through the gynecologist without even thinking that men were also part of the rape, then they discussed the number and so on, but all this type of discourse that prevailed has served to mobilize us and to work even more strongly," Rushiti declared.

In 2018, Vasfije Krasniqi publicly confessed the horror she experienced for the first time.

Her courage to tell the world what happened to her at the age of 16, Rushiti said, was a breaking of the veil of shame that prevailed in society.

"Vasfije's courage to share her story in detail has touched the souls of every survivor who was present and what they saw through the medium, I think that the entire Kosovar society has been brought out of its dormant lethargy, from these labels, the types of stigmatization that were given to survivors... We were at a meeting in Albania and on the way to the border one of the policemen there says to me 'excuse me, do you have Vasfije Krasniqi' and stops her passport, says 'do you have it with you', we say 'yes'. He says to us 'can you take me out' and we were saddened by what was happening to her because it was a period when she was at her peak where everyone wanted to hug her. He had been the son of a martyr and when Vasfija came out she said 'Excuse me sister, can I hug you because my father died for freedom and when your story went public you raised my father alive and I sympathized with you'. Rushiti added to the participants.

KRCT Director Feride Rushiti also spoke about the importance of health insurance for survivors of sexual violence and the necessity for their voices to be heard at the institutional level.

The number of people raped during the recent war in Kosovo is unknown, but reports suggest around 20.000. Their stories are not known because survivors still fear stigma and prejudice, and remain silent.

In Kosovo, since 2014 there has been a law for the recognition of their status, but so far only about 2.000 have received it. The deadline for applying for recognition of the status of a victim of sexual violence is until May 15, 2025.

Only Zoran Vukotić was convicted for sexual violence by the local courts, with a final decision.