One group of people included an old man called Sharif Kapitanovic. 'One day, they arrested 120 young men and cut the throats of 10 of them in front of us. 'We knew something terrible would happen because we saw the murders,' another rape victim recalls. Around 37 per cent of the region's 10,000 population was Muslim, although Muslims formed the middle classes and constituted a majority inside the town itself. The horrors of the Bosnian war began for most of the women in early June and July when Serbian forces started arresting young men in the area of Gacko. Emira's elder boy, Hasan, trembles whenever his mother talks of the camp. Several four and five-year olds were held to a table while knives were placed at their throats in an effort to persuade their mothers to part with jewellery and money. Many of the children who were held in Kalinovik are still traumatised by their experience.

The women have also been able to name some of their Serbian tormentors, all of whom belonged to the 'White Eagles' of Vojislav Seselj, identified as a war criminal by Washington but whose Serbian Radical Party gained a dramatic success in the December elections in Serbia. They say that the local Serbian police in Kalinovik knew of the rapes and murders but made no attempt to help them.ДЄt least one of the Kalinovik inmates kept a secret diary in which she recorded each day the humiliations heaped upon the Muslim women. Survivors, living now in shell-damaged buildings in Jablanica and in the ruined city of Mostar on the Neretva river, have also recorded the names of young men who were brutally murdered in their presence and of the fate of at least 71 other women who were machine- gunned to death in a neighbouring village. Senad Saric, a gynaecologist from Gacko who has performed seven abortions on the survivors, has compiled a complete list of the names and ages of all the raped women along with those of five girls who were taken away by the Serbs and apparently forced to work as prostitutes.

What makes the ordeal of the Kalinovik women so important, however, is the extraordinary detail which is emerging of their mistreatment. Their suffering was endured by thousands of other Muslim women in August and September of last year as Serbian forces 'ethnically cleansed' the Muslim villages of eastern and western Bosnia. The day was 2 August and all but 10 of the 105 women held prisoner in the gymnasium were to be gang-raped over the following 26 days, some of them by as many as seven Serb militiamen.

Men of war assault squad 1 towns