I will never forget the day I entered the building Brena in the eastern Bosnian town of Foca, where Bosnian Serb forces sexually assaulted Muslim women during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. I was recording a story for a local channel about women who had been held inside a flat that used to belong to one of the commanders in that infamous building. You could feel the weight of what had happened there, the echoes of screams that no one had wanted to hear.

I was there because I had read a court testimony of one of those women. She is known in court documents as "Witness 87," and in 1992, she was a 15-year-old girl living with her parents, sister and brother near Foca. When the war began, her life collapsed overnight. Her family fled to the forest to escape shelling and massacres, only to be captured later. The men were separated; the women and children taken to what became one of Bosnia’s most notorious camps for sexual abuse.

Her story is almost impossible to digest: she and one other girl were later sold for 500 Bosnian marks, around $250, to different soldiers. She was moved from place to place and recalls days when she was assaulted by a dozen men. I felt sick for days after just visiting that place.

Academic research has long explained what politics has refused to confront: sexual assault is not an accident of war; it is a weapon of war. Many scholars have shown that sexual violence in conflict is often systematic and used deliberately to terrorize communities, force displacement and assert dominance. Armed groups employ it to instill fear, punish "enemy” populations, and cement group cohesion among fighters. It is a form of political violence, an instrument of power and control.

Historically, sexual violence in war was ignored or its impact minimized. For centuries, it was seen as an unfortunate byproduct of conflict rather than a prosecutable crime. It was not until the early 1990s, with the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda, that the international legal order began to change. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its counterpart for Rwanda (ICTR) transformed international law by recognizing sexual violence and enslavement as crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of genocide.

In the landmark Foca case (Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic), the ICTY delivered the first international conviction solely for sexual crimes as crimes against humanity. The three Bosnian Serb soldiers were found guilty in 2001 for running a system of detention and sexual abuse camps in and around Foca, where women and girls, some as young as 12, were imprisoned and sold among soldiers. The tribunal established that rape was used deliberately as a weapon to destroy the Muslim population, asserting that these crimes were not isolated acts of individual soldiers but part of a broader campaign of persecution.

The judgment was groundbreaking. For the first time, an international court recognized sexual crimes as instruments of war and as crimes against humanity in their own right and not merely as secondary or "lesser” violations. The tribunal defined it in legal terms, emphasizing the coercive environment of armed conflict and affirming that the lack of consent can be inferred from the circumstances of detention and terror.

Yet, despite this progress in international law, impunity persists. In Bosnia-Herzegovina alone, some reports suggest that more than 35,000 women and girls were subjected to sexual violence between 1992 and 1995.

30 years, no change

Women in Sudan have been living the same nightmare for decades, and with the latest wave of violence in Darfur, thousands of women are reliving their mothers' nightmares. One of them said, "And once again, they kill and torture us.” She is a mother forced to flee, "Like my mother did about 20 years ago, I had no option but to take my children and leave.” Another Sudanese woman said she was detained and held in a house for 30 days and sexually abused.

In Sudan, some reports suggest that sexual assault is again being used to cleanse entire communities and to destroy the social fabric that holds them together. United Nations experts describe it as "a campaign of terror.”

And still, this type of violence remains the most invisible weapon of war, often absent from peace negotiations, ignored in cease-fire talks, and dismissed as inevitable collateral damage. I sometimes feel that many people feel uncomfortable when discussing this matter. But these are women’s lives, and those who survived them never managed to recover.

If the lessons of Bosnia are to mean anything, it is that those who suffered deserve not just our sorrow, but our justice.

Today, in Sudan’s Darfur region, justice feels further away than ever. Only a few thousand people have managed to reach the nearest displacement camp since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of el-Fasher in North Darfur, raising fears for tens of thousands still trapped in the besieged city. Aid groups report widespread atrocities, including killings, sexual violence, and the targeting of hospitals where, according to the World Health Organization, at least 460 people have been killed. Once again, women’s bodies have become battlefields, their pain reduced to numbers in reports, their voices lost amid the world’s indifference.

When I think back to Foca, I remember the smell of that building. It’s been renovated now, and people rent the same apartments. But the silence of the untold is still so loud. I think of Witness 87, hoping she has managed to find some comfort in this cruel world. I have thanked her silently so many times for being brave enough to speak out and help the courts do their job. I hope she knows she has helped change the history of war crimes prosecution. And I think about what she feels when she reads about the Sudanese women who, decades later, are living the same horror – forced to flee, silenced by shame, ignored by the world.