The Strongest Link: An Oral History of Wartime Rape Survivors in Kosovo (Oxford Oral History Series)

From February 1998 until June 1999, a war between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army ravaged Kosovo.The counterinsurgency quickly turned into a state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing that resulted in the killing, deportation, and rape of thousands of Albanian civilians.While it is estimated that over 20,000 women were victims of sexual violence during the war, for nearly two decades after its end, few survivors have come forward to publicly discuss what they endured.In The Strongest Link, Anna Di Lellio and Garentina Kraja aim to break that silence by presenting an oral history of women who survived weaponized rape during the Kosovo War.In their own voices, twenty women describe the war's terror, as well as the nightmares that still haunt them today.Through these narratives, readers are given a glimpse into what it's like to be a woman whose life has been altered and undone by a violent regime, war, and patriarchal rules.We see ho