"Rape Hotel" turned Luxury Resort Reveals Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Struggle with Past

The luxury hotel was the site of a brutal ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks. (Wikimedia Commons)

Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina are circulating a petition to prevent Vilina Vlas, a hotel used for the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks during the Bosnian War, from being advertised on Google as a tourist site.

The conflict lasting from 1992 to 1995 saw Bosnian Serbs wage war to secede from Bosnia and join neighboring Serbia. Peace brokered by the U.S. through its Dayton Accords left Bosnia as two autonomous entities—Republika Srpska, populated mainly by ethnic Serbs, and the Muslim-Croat Federation—under a weak central government.

Located near the town of Visegrad in eastern Bosnia, Vilina Vlas is advertised by the government of Republika Srpska as an “aerial spa” where the water is capable of treating many diseases and conditions. In an initiative to boost the tourism sector—hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic—the tourist board has launched the promotional campaign “We are waiting for you in Visegrad” and has provided gift vouchers to be redeemed there. Visitors describe it as a “very nice and peaceful place in nature.”

Yet in 1992, Visegrad was the site of a massacre of the mainly-Bosnian Muslim residents by Serbian paramilitary forces. Hundreds of Muslims were packed into houses and incinerated alive, while others were slaughtered on the banks of the Drina River—killings so great in number that the police inspector received “a macabre complaint from downriver, from the management of Bajina Basta hydro-electric plant across the Serbian border,” that the bodies in the river were clogging up the dam too fast for them to clear the blockages.

“The bridge [on the Drina] had for centuries been a ritual place of atrocity, both in myth and recorded history, serving as a kind of public theatre in times of war and upheaval,” writes Ehlimana Memisevic, with the history of Muslim genocide at the site going as far back as World War II.

In 1992, Visegrad had 21,000 residents, approximately 2/3 of them Bosniak Muslims. The latest census shows around 10,000 residents, 90 percent of them Serbs.

As for Vilina Vlas itself, a UN Special Committee found that around 200 women were raped within its walls in 1992, many underage; as one girl was told, “in order to be inseminated by the Serb seed.” Some were lucky enough to survive, but many were killed or driven to suicide—like Jasmina Ahmetspahic, who after being raped for four days jumped out of the window of the hotel.

Inside the hotel, “not much has changed,” according to the petition. Guests sleep in “the same rooms and beds where women were raped and men were tortured, beaten and killed as the furniture remains the same.”

The creator of the petition, Amela Trokić, writes to Google, “if somebody decided to turn Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps into a wellness retreat perfect for a ‘relaxing weekend getaway,’ would you let them promote this on Google? Would you allow it to appear on Google maps as a tourist facility?”

Google has not responded yet to the petition, which was created in July. However, when contacted, Tripadvisor responded that it wasn’t “in the position to provide comments regarding the past histories of the property in question” and thus wouldn’t remove the listing.

In a time where the Bosnian Serb leader calls for dissolution of the state and perpetrators of war crimes in the Bosnian War are still being arrested, for many Bosnians this is just one more step in the direction of Serbian denialism.

“Genocide denial is pervasive in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian entity Republika Srpska and promoting Vilina Vlas as [a] touristic attraction with financial support by the Serbian government additionally confirms their complicity in genocide in Bosnia,” says Edina Becirevic, genocide scholar at the University of Sarajevo.