A FREELANCE journalist from East Lancashire is calling for Bosnian Serb soldiers to be brought to justice for the serial rape of dozens of women.

Jean West has spoken out after a harrowing visit to the civil war hell-hole of the former Yugoslavia.

Jean, a former Lancashire Evening Telegraph journalist whose parents live in Cherry Tree, Blackburn, met a Muslim woman who had been raped by Serbian soldiers during the three-and-a-half year conflict.

She now wants pressure to be put on the international war tribunals for the prosecution of their persecutors.

She said little had been written about the plight of the helpless victims of rape.

But she spoke to a mother - too terrified to be identified - who was gang-raped by a group of soldiers and has now given birth to a boy, Ramzi, with whom she lives in Tuzla.

Medical experts believe many of the women may never fully recover physically or emotionally from their ordeals.

Psychologists told Jean that women were raped before they were forced to crawl on all fours naked through a Serbian village. Another woman was taken from a solitary confinement cell into a room where she was systematically gang-raped.

The mother from Tuzla is understood to be one of the few who has retained contact with her child. Other babies have either been aborted, abandoned to orphanages or given to childless couples.

Jean said: "Most of the Muslim rape victims want justice before war crimes tribunals to prove to themselves and others that they were not to blame.

"They want rape as an instrument of war to be condemned."

Jean travelled to Bosnia with the Lancashire Fire Brigade which delivered aid to the mother and child unit and renovated a kindergarten. The fire service mission was funded by the charity War on Want.

Donations to the charity can be made to Station Commander Colin Cunliffe at Accrington Fire Station, Manchester Road, Accrington, Tel: 01254 235211.

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