Sexual violence is a terrible inevitability of any war-zone. Lejla Damon was born of rape during the Bosnian war. She speaks to the Mirror about finding her birth mother and discovering her roots
Smuggled across a border at just nine days old, Lejla Damon knew little of her birth mother. But as she grew up, she discovered that her beginnings were rooted in conflict.
Speaking to exclusively to The Mirror, Lejla tells me she is a child of sexual violence carried out during the Bosnian war. We spoke about the first time she met her birth mother and returning to Bosnia, where staff at the maternity unit knew her story before she did.
Lejla was born on Christmas Day 1992 in war-torn Bosnia. Her mother had endured an horrendous ordeal. Lejla’s birth mother, who we will not be identifying here to ensure her privacy, was held for seven months in a school at the beginning of the conflict. It was during this time that she was repeatedly raped and tortured.
She said: “The premise of it was to impregnate and hold on to the women for as long as possible knowing that they wouldn’t be able to get an abortion and then let them go when they were too heavily pregnant.” She explains that the aim of this was “to change the genetic makeup of a society.”
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So when the two journalists who would go on to become Lejla’s parents met her birth mother, she was in a state of extreme suffering. Dan and Sian Damon were in Bosnia to report on the conflict for a British news broadcaster, when they interviewed Lejla’s birth mother.
In that video interview, Lejla tells me that, her mother said: “I would become like the men that raped her and that if she held me that she would strangle me.”
Talking to me now, she says she has enormous sympathy for her mother. She explains: “It takes courage to give your child up for adoption no matter what you went through… she allowed me to have an incredible life full of extreme privilege.”
Growing up in the UK, Lejla said she felt, like all kids, the intense urge to fit in with her peers. But when in primary school, her class were tasked with creating an ‘About Me’ Powerpoint slide, she came to know more about her roots.
Lejla was able to research the day she was born, but when she asked her mother about the time, she was told about being adopted from Bosnia during the conflict. Later, before she went off to university, her parents told her that she was a child born of rape.
Return to Bosnia
At university, she met a documentary student, and travelled to Bosnia in search of her birth mother. This set off an incredible chain of events. Lejla visited the new maternity hospital, where a nurse recognised her. “There was a nurse there that knew who I was, who knew who my adoptive Dad was,” she says.
“He was like, ‘I can’t believe you’ve come back’… This is a person that knew what had happened before. There’s things about my story that I don’t remember,” she adds.
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But it wasn’t until later that same year when she made contact with her birth mother. Lejla was able to track her mother down through the Bosnian Embassy in the UK. After finding her birth mother, the embassy connected the pair. When Lejla heard the news that her mother was found, was alive, and wanted to be put in contact with her, she said it felt “really intense and it was amazing.”
But then the practicalities of contact crept in, she said she then thought: “I don’t speak Bosnian. I wasn’t just going to call”. So instead, they opted to write letters to each other, to allow one another to digest their feelings and take the time they needed to respond. The Bosnian Embassy in the UK translated these letters on behalf of the mother and daughter.
They then agreed to meet in person, so Lejla flew out with her parents to Bosnia to meet her birth mother. She tells me about the strangeness in entering the room, about the tears shed upon seeing her mother, whose facial features resembled her own, their cheek-bone structure echoing the others. All these new emotions – of who this new person is – was heightened as her parents had already met her birth mother, during that fateful interview in 1992.
Her birth grandmother forbade them to meet, but had passed away by the time the mother and daughter made contact. Lejla said that having a baby born of sexual violence, “there’s stigma attached to that going back to the family. There was great stigma in my story… There is a huge amount of shame connected towards it.”
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Ongoing wars
Lejla now works with War Child, where she has built connections with other children who were conceived in this way. When the news of the Ukrainian war hit headlines, Lejla says she couldn’t help but think of the terrible inevitability of sexual violence.
She said: “A conflict without sexual violence isn’t a thing, so there will be many different children born out sexual violence whether it’s Ukraine [or] any of the conflicts that are going on [in] Sudan [and] Gaza.”
There is “no real deterrent” for sexual violence committed during war-time, Lejla says, as many perpetrators are never brought to justice. She describes how in Bosnia many victims live in the same villages as those who raped them during the war, who carry on living their lives unheeded. In this context, Lejla explains that “justice and accountability is a real challenge” as by coming forward, victims are giving up their right to anonymity.
She adds: “Nothing really happened to the perpetrators that committed these crimes. Where is the deterrent of doing it in future conflicts?”
Working with the charity Remembering Srebrenica, Lejla is an advocate for learning from the past to ensure that genocides never happen again. We discuss the on-going genocide in Gaza. There are similarities between the atrocities of the past in Bosnia and the atrocities of the present in Palestine.
Lejla says: “It’s blatant annihilation, this isn’t a small thing: food, withholding aid, bombing hospitals… The conflict [in Palestine] is playing out in the same way [as] the Bosnian war was not that long ago.” She adds: “It’s like we’ve not ever learned from what’s happened previously, all the atrocities that have happened before [and] all the genocides.”
Lejla says that, “across the world there is a lot of lack of empathy.” She adds: “Ultimately we need to do more within policy to actually take action against the countries that are committing genocide.”
If you have been affected by this story, contact Rape Crisis England & Wales for free confidential support and information on 08088029999 or their website or 08088010302 if you’re calling from Scotland. You can contact the Domestic and Sexual Abuse helpline on 0808 802 1414 if you are in Ireland.
Got a story? Email: aimee.walsh@reachplc.com
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