If I had somehow slept through the past thirty years, I wouldn’t know whether I had woken up in Milošević’s or Vučić’s Serbia. The brutality of the police today unmistakably recalls the wartime 1990s – from beating people in the streets to horrifying cases such as that of student Nikolina Sinđelić. She not only endured physical violence but was threatened with rape, and her intimate photos were used to humiliate her. Just a few days earlier, convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj publicly stated that the police should beat protesting women – not with their hands, but with their feet. Such rhetoric must not go unnoticed, because their words are not merely threats. They carry the weight of the horrors of mass rape and torture of women during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond. Does this mean that wartime tactics once used against ethnically “undesirable” enemies are now being directed at political opponents? Will women’s bodies, which were treated as spoils of war in the 1990s, once again become instruments of political intimidation?
“You whore, beg me to stop beating you. Do you want me to strip you in front of everyone and rape you?” – these are the words Marko Kričak, commander of the Police Tactical Unit, hurled at student Nikolina. Had I read them out of context, I would have assumed they came from an indictment for wartime rape, not from Serbia in 2025. She also recounted that when the other detained women were led into a police van, she was told to stay outside. At that moment, she was terrified of being left alone with Kričak and pleaded with another officer to stay near her. It is difficult to imagine what might have happened had she been left alone. Would she have shared the fate of thousands of Bosniak women in Foča and Višegrad, who endured torture and sexual violence? Rape during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a systemic pattern of violence.1 Every citizen of Serbia should remember this when they read the news about threats of rape against Nikolina.
The wars of the 1990s clearly show that rape was systematically used as a weapon. Women’s bodies were turned into territories over which wars were fought. As Cynthia Enloe points out, in war, women become symbols through which control and humiliation are imposed – their bodies transformed into political instruments of war strategy.2 When Šešelj says that the police should beat women, we must remember that his volunteers were convicted of rape by the Special War Crimes Court in Belgrade.3 Some estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 70,000 women were raped in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The perpetrators of these crimes still live among us today. This is precisely why threats of violence and rape must be taken with the utmost seriousness: as a systemic political practice that has not disappeared.
Threats of rape and violence against women, in the context of a months-long struggle for justice, are not merely indicators of the impotence of those in power, as Students in Blockade have pointed out. They represent a continuation of the violence of the 1990s, threatening to resurface in its full form through political confrontation. The sexual violence that women endured during the 1990s as a component of war crimes must not be revived today through political repression. I hope this will not happen. That is why it is essential that we remember, react, and resist – against what happened then, and against what is happening before our very eyes. So that it never happens again.
The author is a psychologist and psychotherapist from Belgrade.
Translated by Marijana Simic
Peščanik.net, 21.08.2025.
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- Žarkov, Dubravka. The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
- Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
- Zajović, S., & Urošević, M. (Ed.). (2013). “Ratni zločin silovanja.” In: Čitanka/Reader, Žene u crnom. Beograd: Žene u crnom.