She is right, of course. In Kosovo, everyone at some stage has been a victim and you do not have to go far to bump into one. Seated in front of Ahmeti, interviewing her, is 29-year-old Luljeta Selimi, a journalist who trained as a gynaecologist (a profession never allowed to flourish under the Serbs). 'Please excuse my English. I used to speak it very well, but last April the Serbs arrested me helping a friend give birth. They kept me in water for nine hours, beat me until I fainted and then threw me on a rubbish dump. It was Gypsies who saved me and took me to Macedonia,' she said. 'You will never find these women. I have had to spend weeks in villages posing as a doctor, gaining their trust, staying at their homes.'
Selimi, it turns out, has collected testimonies from 200 rape victims; each case documented in black notebooks and on cassette. 'I want the world to know what happened to my country, to these women. Thousands of women who now have nothing.'
Over the course of the next week she brought me three victims; women who are young, educated and angry with the world. Angry that Nato did not intervene or send in ground troops earlier; that help has not been more forthcoming; that they have been left to drift, dependent on small kindnesses. They have come to me, because they could never have me go to them - it would raise too many suspicions. They are willing to talk because they want the world to know that they exist. They have lost their homes, they have lost their valuables (extorted by the rapists) but they are still the lucky ones. At least they have been spared becoming pregnant.
'They stopped our car as my husband, son and daughter were driving towards the Macedonian border on 22 March, two days before Nato intervened,' said the school-teacher from a hamlet south of Pristina. 'They were paramilitaries, some wore bandannas, some masks.
'They made us get out and walk over the hills and then _ and then they took me, they made me comb my hair and they did what they did. When my husband tried to stop them, they shot him dead. My children were there, watching.'
The two other women were similarly stopped, one as she tried to flee across the Albanian border, the other as she hid with her family in the forest, hours after the Serbs had torched their village in the middle of Kosovo.
Both were virgins before and both have avoided sex since. Both hardly leave their homes. And both have the saddest, most vacant eyes I have ever seen.
'So what do you think I should do?' asked the one with red-dyed hair, the one who was raped for hours in the forest.
I looked at her and thought: 'Yes, what next?' Here I am, privy to the most painful event this woman will ever endure and I have no ready answer; no relief to proffer, only the ability to make her, and the children of war, 'exist'.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/apr/16/balkans