“The third day I left the concentration camp, I confided to my wife what I had been through,” he recalled. “She helped me the most. Unfortunately, she got diabetes from a lot of stress and she passed away few months ago.”

He said he was also helped by the Medica Zenica team led by director Sabiha Husic. Medica Zenica was founded in 1993 and was the first NGO to help female survivors of sexual violence. Seven years ago, the NGO realised that it needed to start supporting men too.

“I met director Husic at a conference in Sarajevo where women’s rights were being talked about,” said the former prisoner. “There is usually talk about women who have been raped or sexually abused. And then I told them there were men who survived it.”

He said that he thinks it is much harder for men who have been raped or sexually abused to talk about it.

“There are so many questions about how can it happen… Unfortunately, it can,” he said.

“There are more men who have not spoken out, and they never will. I wouldn’t have either if things didn’t turn out the way they did. It’s hard. It has to be dealt with. I survived it and nothing can compensate for it. You carry it inside you, like a bomb,” he continued.

Medica Zenica helped him to get the officially-registered status of ‘civilian victim of war’. According to the law, registered civilian victims of war are entitled to benefits, which for survivors of sexual abuse and rape amount to 594 Bosnian marks (304 euros) a month.

Securing the status took two years and the case had to be taken to court, he recalled.

“The process was very difficult. A lot of statements have to be made, some of which are inappropriate and which again lead to severe psychological episodes in survivors who have gone through all these traumas. Undereducated and unprofessional people are working on these cases,” he argued.

He added that the financial benefits did not solve the victims’ problems and that he would prefer the state to provide “therapeutic communities for survivors of sexual abuse during the war”.

Medica Zenica’s director, Sabiha Husic, said that Bosnia and Herzegovina has no official statistics on the number of men and women who were sexually assaulted and have been officially registered as civilian victims of the war.

While working on her doctoral thesis about support for survivors of wartime sexual violence, she estimated on the basis on information she gathered from international organisations and reports that about 3,000 men were raped during the war.

“I wanted to analyse and learn from the statistics to see how many applied for the status of civilian victim of war, how many were rejected and what were the reasons for the rejection. However, this information is not available,” Husic said.

So far, seven men have achieved the status of civilian victim of war through Medica Zenica. But a large number of victims do not want to apply, as they fear intrusive or humiliating questions, or being asked why they are applying now, so many years after the war.

Husic said that such questions are unacceptable: “We have no right to question why someone decided to speak today or will decide in five days or five months. We need to create a safe situation in which survivors of wartime sexual violence will feel safe and supported whenever they choose to speak or claim their rights.”

Male rape was a taboo topic for many years, she explained.

“From the Medica experience, I can say that at first we did not think that men could also be victims of this kind of violence,” she said.

“I think the process of speaking out was more difficult for men because they lacked support,” she added.

Stigma and fear