Nightfall was the worst time for Nusreta Sivac in the Omarska concentration camp during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. The Serb guards would come to the rooms where she and 36 other Muslim women slept and take them away one by one to rape and sexually torture them.
Before the women went to sleep on the floor of their rooms, they had to clean off the blood of the people tortured there during the day.
"I thought maybe they would spare me from that because there were younger women there than me but they didn't," said Nusreta, struggling to hold back her tears. "I realised that no international conventions, nothing they taught me at university existed. In the camp my best friends, colleagues and relatives were being killed and five friends of mine did not survive it."
Nusreta's pain-filled face was projected on a large screen in a darkened hall in the UN world anti-racism conference at the International Convention Centre in Durban yesterday.
She is one of 26 victims from around the world who are daily recounting their experiences of racism and discrimination at a Special Voices Forum running all week.
They are the survivors of slavery, genocide, oppression, ethnic wars, race crimes and discrimination in countries ranging from Mexico to Indonesia. There is Lorraine Nesane (17), a black South African who last year was stripped to the waist and covered in white paint by white shop assistants who accused her of shoplifting.
And there is Murugesan Manimegalai from India whose husband, within months of being elected president of his village council, was killed because he was a member of the Dalit caste, also known as the "untouchables".
The voices include Mariama Oumarou (17) from Niger who was sold into slavery in Nigeria when she was 15. Her mother and grandmother, members of a Touareg minority who are enslaved to lighter skinned Touaregs, remain slaves to this day.
Mariama began to cry as she explained how she had initially thought she was going to be wed but discovered that she was exploited as a house worker and sexual servant.
Mariama escaped and returned to Niger where now she is free. With the help of a local group she lured her former master to the country and he was arrested. He subsequently escaped.
Another moving testimony came from a Rwandan couple from a mixed Hutu-Tutsi marriage who wept in turn as they spoke of the genocide in their country in 1991 during which almost one million people, mostly Tutsis, were killed.
Immaculee Mukamuhirwa, a Tutsi, and her husband, Francois Xavier Nsanzuwera, a Hutu, lost many family members. Francois, a senior government prosecutor, had denounced as unjust the arrests and murders of Tutsis. He was forced to flee to a UN camp. He returned to his home later to find his father, grandfathers and two sisters had been killed.
"They had paid with their lives for my views and statements," he said.
Immaculee's father and brother were beaten to death with machetes and clubs in a school playground just because they were Tutsi. She also lost her mother, four sisters and a further brother.
The couple said they felt they had been betrayed by the UN forces which failed to protect them against the mass slaughter.
Now living in Belgium, they said they have hope that their two-year-old son, William, "will be a citizen of the world and no one will accuse him of being a member of this or that ethnic group".
The UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, who is stewarding the world conference, listened to some of the survivors' testimonies yesterday.