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.”
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.
