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DURBAN,
Sep 3 (IPS) - For two months Nusreta Sivac, a former Bosnian judge,
was detained in a concentration camp in northern Bosnia where she
was tortured and raped .
Fifteen-year-old
South African Lorraine Nesane was painted white after being accused
of shoplifting by a white manager.
At
age 10, Afro-Brazilian Crueza Maria de Oliveria worked for a white
family as their domestic worker and caregiver for their two-year-old
child.
The
three are among countless people from all over the world who have
been given the opportunity to tell the World Conference Against
Racism their experiences of hardship and discrimination.
In
April 1992, Serbs took over Sivac's town in northwest Bosnia. Arriving
at work, Sivac was told that her name was on a list of people who
didn't work there anymore. On Jun. 9, 1992, she was arrested without
explanation and taken to the Omarska concentration camp.
She
spent two months there with "thousands and thousands of men
and 36 women," she recalled. The women had to clean rooms and
serve the one meal that the prisoners got each day. "If we
didn't eat in two minutes - and the meal was a piece of bread and
a little bit of beans - you would be beaten, sometimes to death,"
she said.
In
the evening, before the women lay down on the floor in the rooms
in which they slept, they would have to clean up blood "because
during the day the rooms were used for questioning and torturing
people".
"I
saw terrible sights there, (the) torturing and killing (of) people.
Some people were dying because they were hungry, some because of
the conditions. I started my day in the camp by counting the dead,"
Sivac said.
At
night, the guards would take the women one by one and rape them.
"I can never forget that. I thought they would spare me because
there were younger women there, but they didn't," Sivac told
her audience here with tears streaming down her face.
After
two months, Sivac and the other women were moved from Omarska to
another camp. She later found out that a Red Cross delegation accompanied
by international media was expected to visit Omarska, which the
Serbs had always described as a facility for male war prisoners.
Sivac
was released after five days in the other camp. She left Bosnia
in October 1992 for Croatia, where she lived as a refugee for four
years. In 1996, she returned to live near her former home. "It
is still too early to talk about the number of the dead," she
said. "Even today there are many mass graves that are being
opened. I found two of my friends in one of them. I'm still looking
for another three of them."
Fifteen-year-old
Nesane went to a clothing store in Louis Trichardt, South Africa,
in August 2000 to buy new clothes. A white manager accused her of
stealing and instructed a black employee to cover her with white
paint from her head to her waist.
"He
asked me to take off my shirt. I refused. Then he took it off and
painted me," she said.
When
Nesane was told to leave the shop she asked for the money that she
had been carrying and the shirt that she had been wearing. "The
woman said that I looked beautiful and should just go," said
Nesane. In a subsequent court case, one black employee was found
guilty and fined the equivalent of about 177 dollars. The white
manager was acquitted.
Asked
whether she had hope that black and white people could live together
in South Africa, Nesane said: "No, because white people always
look down on blacks and think they're the best."
Describing
her experiences in Brazil, De Oliveria said that at the age of 10
she was employed by a family and told that she would be schooled.
However, she never received an education.
Instead,
her boss made fun of her hair, fed her food that was left over from
the children, and made her eat out of a dish that was not used by
other members of the family. "I was beaten and labeled lazy
and ugly," she said. When her boss was away, a male family
member showed De Oliveria his genitals and asked her to fondle them.
Now
grown up and an activist for domestic workers' rights, De Oliveria
said that domestic workers in Brazil are not treated much better
today. "They continue to be disrespected, abused and exploited."
(END)
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