Belgrade Noir

It took quite some time before another significant piece of information came up about Zoe’s mother. Half a decade later, precisely. Two years ago almost to this very day, a confessional article entitled “Cries from Korzo Motel” appeared in a popular national weekly, signed by the well-known and quite infamous journalist M.N. She was then quickly fading in the oncology department at the Clinical Center in Belgrade. So this text can be seen as her attempt to redeem a life filled with political subservience, an extreme betrayal of the profession, and all sorts of other improprieties. This unusual and unexpected testimony on the systematic rape and sexual slavery of Bosniak women during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina complemented and shed light on what the public had only heard about from the women at the Korzo Motel.

The text was published, almost simultaneously, by several regional media outlets. It also circulated for quite a while on social media networks and was lauded, disputed, and ignored in equal measure. But since the journalist M.N., “due to a serious illness,” was first totally unavailable and then passed away quickly thereafter, the circumstances around the text’s publication added the necessary dose of mystery to the whole thing and it stayed in the public eye for quite a long time.

We read the text together, Zoe and I. Words fail me every time I try to describe the look on her face when we spotted the name on the page: Zumreta. Followed this time by a surname: Alispahić. According to M.N., the story of that particular young girl — Zumreta Alispahić — begins in the early summer of 1992, when the armed local Serbs began to wreak terror on Bosniak locals in her village. One night they broke into the Alispahić home and, after a brief altercation with Zumreta’s father, shot both of her parents right in front of her. Everything moves fast

, the journalist contended. Much faster than one thinks. People are sacks of blood, flesh, and bones, you attack them with a bullet, knife, or bayonet and they fall apart, dissolving into nothing, like deflated balloons. Nothing. People are nothing and death is nothing.

Zumreta Alispahić screamed for a long time. She trembled, huddled in a corner of the room. Much later, she was taken, along with eight other girls and women, to the Korzo Motel, that bullet-riddled building on the main road not far from the little town. A group of about thirty soldiers was already there. They greeted the women with impatient cries, wild chants, and a burst of uncontrollable, drunken laughter.

On that first night, ten men raped Zumreta Alispahić. At first, she resisted. So they hit her with their fists and thrashed her with their belts and kicked her with their boots until she could fight no more. Covered in blood, she lay motionless while the soldiers took turns.

Out of the nine women brought in the first group to the motel, three did not survive the night. The rape and torture, beatings, mutilations, and random killings continued into the days that followed. When they were not being raped, they were treated like slaves. After a while, each one of them was allocated to one of the soldiers who would occasionally reside there in the Korzo Motel. Except Zumreta Alispahić. She was, as they liked to point out, “at everyone’s disposal.”

At this point in the narrative the journalist herself makes an appearance. She also swiftly introduces a third character to the story, a certain Neđo, describing him in a few off-hand strokes as a tough, unwavering soldier assigned as her guide during her first visit to the Korzo Motel. He drove her there from Pale, that depressed little mountain town that became the political and military center for Bosnian Serbs during the war.

The journalist’s fascination with Neđo is evident throughout the text but it doesn’t affect her professional judgment. For instance, she does not fail to notice that he was nowhere near as shocked as she was with what they encountered inside the motel. And she couldn’t but notice a gleam in his eye when he caught sight of a dirty, malnourished girl, with bruises, cuts, and burns all over her body.

The journalist spent a greater part of the day interviewing soldiers. But she was strictly forbidden from speaking to the women.

Neđo, on the other hand, was free to roam around. Later in the day he approached a frightened young girl and gave her a shriveled apple that he dug out from the pocket of his uniform. The journalist remembers watching the girl from the corner of her eye as she “grabbed the withered fruit and started devouring it ravenously, like a starving little animal.”