PRISTINA: Dresses and skirts donated by Cherie Blair and Rita Ora were among 5,000 pegged to washing lines in a Kosovo stadium on Friday in an art installation drawing attention to the stigma suffered by victims of wartime sexual violence.

While there are no precise figures of the number of women and girls subjected to sexual violence during Kosovo’s 1998-99 war, non-governmental organisations say it may run to the thousands.

Many have kept silent about what Serbian forces and paramilitaries did to them, while some of those who have spoken out have faced being ostracised by Kosovo’s conservative and mainly Muslim Albanian society.

“They received the blame and the shame,” said Alketa Xhafa-Mripa, the 34-year-old Kosovo-born, London-based artist behind the exhibition, called ‘Thinking of You’. “I was lucky to be in London during the war and I always thought this could have happened to me as it happened to these women,” she said.

Dresses and skirts of all different colours blew in the wind under bright blue skies in Kosovo’s main football stadium, usually the domain of male sports fans. They were collected from all over the country of 1.8 million people.

Published in Dawn June 13th, 2015

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