A short, and depressing, read on American and Russian official indifference to the ethnic war in Kyrgyzstan:
Why isn't anyone taking Kyrgyzstan's calls?
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Crisis in Kyrgyzstan a Test for International Community
The following article from Radio Free Europe gives a brief sketch of the chaos and violence in Kyrgyzstan:
Humanitarian Crisis Deepens In Kyrgyzstan
It will be interesting to see if the international community learned anything from Bosnia and Rwanda.
Humanitarian Crisis Deepens In Kyrgyzstan
It will be interesting to see if the international community learned anything from Bosnia and Rwanda.
Fantastic Critique of Diana Johnstone's Dishonesty
I highly encourage my readers to check out the following article from the New Left Review by Jasmin Mujanovic:
A Fool’s Account: Diana Johnstone, Yugoslavia and Her Delusion
In the comments section below the article, Muhanovic publishes a response from Johnstone; it is typically incoherent and borderline racist Muslim-baiting, and little else. Johnstone has long since abondoned any pretense of being open to easily verified information and well-documented fact, and so her response almost feels perfunctory. She will keep repeating the same tired lies over and over again in defiance of contrary information, or reality itself.
Mujanovic's reply to this rebuttal ends with this bold, clear statement:
"I invite Ms. Johnstone to detail her vision for the Bosnian people. As it stands right now, readers understand her as an active genocide-denier and continued supporter of an apartheid regime which has institutionalized in Bosnia a system of discrimination, revisionism, racism and, most of all, dispossession. I would certainly hope that she has more to offer the Bosnians than the provisions for comfort of their persecutors, exterminators and plunderers."
This gets at the heart of Johnstone's nihilism, and the ammorality of all Balkan revisionists. They have no positive vision for the region, no genuine committment to furthering peace, stability, and justice in the region. Her vision, and that of Michael Parenti and others, is all negative--they know what they don't like, and they seek to fit reality to fit that vision. The fate of the actual people who are the theoretical subjects of their intellectual exercise is of no concern to them.
A Fool’s Account: Diana Johnstone, Yugoslavia and Her Delusion
In the comments section below the article, Muhanovic publishes a response from Johnstone; it is typically incoherent and borderline racist Muslim-baiting, and little else. Johnstone has long since abondoned any pretense of being open to easily verified information and well-documented fact, and so her response almost feels perfunctory. She will keep repeating the same tired lies over and over again in defiance of contrary information, or reality itself.
Mujanovic's reply to this rebuttal ends with this bold, clear statement:
"I invite Ms. Johnstone to detail her vision for the Bosnian people. As it stands right now, readers understand her as an active genocide-denier and continued supporter of an apartheid regime which has institutionalized in Bosnia a system of discrimination, revisionism, racism and, most of all, dispossession. I would certainly hope that she has more to offer the Bosnians than the provisions for comfort of their persecutors, exterminators and plunderers."
This gets at the heart of Johnstone's nihilism, and the ammorality of all Balkan revisionists. They have no positive vision for the region, no genuine committment to furthering peace, stability, and justice in the region. Her vision, and that of Michael Parenti and others, is all negative--they know what they don't like, and they seek to fit reality to fit that vision. The fate of the actual people who are the theoretical subjects of their intellectual exercise is of no concern to them.
National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina Newsletter on Ibran Mustafic Stand
National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (NCR B&H) ONLINE NEWSLETTER – International No. 672 Jun 17, 2010
1. DEFIANT STAND OF MR. IBRAN MUSTAFIC AGAINST POLICE OF GENOCIDAL REPUBLIKA SRPSKA
On June 10, 2010, Mr. Ibran Mustafic received a decree "to remove in 48 hours five flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the poles located nearby to the Memorial Center in Potocari". The decree was signed by Mr. Munib Avdagic, a Communal Policeman and a Muslim collaborator with the genocidal Republika Srpska. Ibran Mustafic responded to this decree by attaching four banners in between the flag poles on which are displayed quotations from the legally binding judgment of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro and a quotation from Professor Francis A. Boyle that "the final judgment of the International Court of Justice supersedes all constitutional arrangements that are offered today to the victims of genocide including Annex 4 to the Dayton Agreement". One of the banners carries a demand by the victims of genocide for the implementation of the legally binding judgment of the international Court of Justice. Today, on June 17th, 2010, Mr. Ibran Mustafic received a written order from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Republika Srpska to report tomorrow, Jun 19th 2010 at 8:00 a.m. to the Police Station of genocidal Republika Srpska in Srebrenica regarding the flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the four banners placed in between the flag poles. Mr. Mustafic does not recognize the institutions of genocidal Republika Srpska. He will not report tomorrow at the Police Station in Srebrenica. He is ready to resist an arrest attempt by the police of genocidal Republika Srspka. The Muslim collaborators with genocidal institutions in Srebrenica are comfortable with the Serbian Orthodox church that was built illegally during the aggression and genocide on the property of Ms. Fatima Orlovic in Konjevic Polje nearby Srebrenica, but they are disturbed by the flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina placed by Bosniaks, victims of genocide, on their own property.
2. STATEMENT FROM PROFESSOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE
The following is a statement of Prof. A Francis: Why should he [Ibran Mustafic] report to the genocidal monsters who exterminated 8,000 of his comrades from Srebrenica? Why should a "Jew" report to the SS? I remember during our March [on July 11, 2005] for the tenth anniversary on the way to the Memorial Center at Potocari surrounded on both sides by RS Police, the President of the Mothers turned to me and said about them: "These are the men who committed the genocide." Historically it would be as if the Jews decided to have a march to Dachau and the security was provided by the SS.It just shows how afraid they are of Ibran, the Mothers, The RBIH Flag, the Golden Lilies etc. Consciousness of Guilt--as we lawyers say. NOTE: Prof. Francis A. Boyle is an attorney representing the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje. This statement is in response to the written order from Ministry of Internal Affairs of Republika Srspksa to Mr. Ibran Mustafic, President of the Association, to report on June 19th 2010 at 8:00 a.m. at the Police Station in Srebrenica in regard to the display of the flags of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on private property.
3. COMMENT ON B&H MEDIA COVERAGE OF THESE EVENTS
The above-released news is self-explanatory. We wish to comment instead on the reaction of the Bosnian media to these events, which in itself is revealing of the current political situation in Bosnia. Testifying to the importance of these events is the fact that the TV network of the illegally occupied and ethnically cleansed territory known as the "Republika Srpska" featured this news in their main nightly news broadcast, showing the banners with the notes of the protest at the flag site. In contrast, all Bosniak media and Muslim Bosniak politicians completely ignored these heroic acts of defiance. Bosniak Muslim politicians and their media regularly comment on humiliation and defeats of Bosniaks at the hands of the genocidal Republika Srspka, with the underlying objective to demoralize and squash Bosniaks’ desire to resist continued ethnic cleansing on the occupied territory. The same Muslim Bosniak politicians and media are very active in stirring up interest in the "monument of shame to the United Nations" which is being built from the pile of old shoes?! The purpose of that monument is to remove the spotlight from the true perpetrators of genocide: Serbia and Republika Srspka. The Muslim Bosniak media are repeatidly and intentionally marginailzing the judgment by the International Court of Justice, that Serbia and Republika Srspka are the true perpetrators of genocide. NCR B&H
4. KINGDOM OF THE GOLDEN LILIES
The following poem is written by Nermin Bajramovic, a survivor of genocide in Srebrenica. NOTE: The Golden Lily is a symbol of the Bosnian Kingdom, Bosnia and Bosniak people.The flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a flag with "Golden Lilies" EARNING MY RIGHT by Nermin Bajramovic, Srebrenica I come from a valley Of the blue sunrise, Kingdom of the Golden Lilies And the warriors with a dragon heart The promise land is the country of mine. I might not be a prestigious child of life Or my work words of the profound, But as you read this verse I am earning my right, To walk the footsteps Of the noble ones. Mortal I may be I am Bosnian 'til I Die Do you know who you are?
5. PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE EVENT
"Golden Lilies", flags of the Republic Bosnia - Herzegovina and banners in between the flag poles:
http://republikabih.net/content/odgovor.htm
http://republic-bosnia-herzegovina.com/?p=670
Decree to Ibran Mustafic to remove flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the private property of his family:
http://www.republikabih.net/images/rjesenje.pdf
Support group for Ibran Mustafic on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1455848549900&sk=messages#!/group.php?gid=105887249460745
1. DEFIANT STAND OF MR. IBRAN MUSTAFIC AGAINST POLICE OF GENOCIDAL REPUBLIKA SRPSKA
On June 10, 2010, Mr. Ibran Mustafic received a decree "to remove in 48 hours five flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the poles located nearby to the Memorial Center in Potocari". The decree was signed by Mr. Munib Avdagic, a Communal Policeman and a Muslim collaborator with the genocidal Republika Srpska. Ibran Mustafic responded to this decree by attaching four banners in between the flag poles on which are displayed quotations from the legally binding judgment of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro and a quotation from Professor Francis A. Boyle that "the final judgment of the International Court of Justice supersedes all constitutional arrangements that are offered today to the victims of genocide including Annex 4 to the Dayton Agreement". One of the banners carries a demand by the victims of genocide for the implementation of the legally binding judgment of the international Court of Justice. Today, on June 17th, 2010, Mr. Ibran Mustafic received a written order from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Republika Srpska to report tomorrow, Jun 19th 2010 at 8:00 a.m. to the Police Station of genocidal Republika Srpska in Srebrenica regarding the flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the four banners placed in between the flag poles. Mr. Mustafic does not recognize the institutions of genocidal Republika Srpska. He will not report tomorrow at the Police Station in Srebrenica. He is ready to resist an arrest attempt by the police of genocidal Republika Srspka. The Muslim collaborators with genocidal institutions in Srebrenica are comfortable with the Serbian Orthodox church that was built illegally during the aggression and genocide on the property of Ms. Fatima Orlovic in Konjevic Polje nearby Srebrenica, but they are disturbed by the flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina placed by Bosniaks, victims of genocide, on their own property.
2. STATEMENT FROM PROFESSOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE
The following is a statement of Prof. A Francis: Why should he [Ibran Mustafic] report to the genocidal monsters who exterminated 8,000 of his comrades from Srebrenica? Why should a "Jew" report to the SS? I remember during our March [on July 11, 2005] for the tenth anniversary on the way to the Memorial Center at Potocari surrounded on both sides by RS Police, the President of the Mothers turned to me and said about them: "These are the men who committed the genocide." Historically it would be as if the Jews decided to have a march to Dachau and the security was provided by the SS.It just shows how afraid they are of Ibran, the Mothers, The RBIH Flag, the Golden Lilies etc. Consciousness of Guilt--as we lawyers say. NOTE: Prof. Francis A. Boyle is an attorney representing the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje. This statement is in response to the written order from Ministry of Internal Affairs of Republika Srspksa to Mr. Ibran Mustafic, President of the Association, to report on June 19th 2010 at 8:00 a.m. at the Police Station in Srebrenica in regard to the display of the flags of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on private property.
3. COMMENT ON B&H MEDIA COVERAGE OF THESE EVENTS
The above-released news is self-explanatory. We wish to comment instead on the reaction of the Bosnian media to these events, which in itself is revealing of the current political situation in Bosnia. Testifying to the importance of these events is the fact that the TV network of the illegally occupied and ethnically cleansed territory known as the "Republika Srpska" featured this news in their main nightly news broadcast, showing the banners with the notes of the protest at the flag site. In contrast, all Bosniak media and Muslim Bosniak politicians completely ignored these heroic acts of defiance. Bosniak Muslim politicians and their media regularly comment on humiliation and defeats of Bosniaks at the hands of the genocidal Republika Srspka, with the underlying objective to demoralize and squash Bosniaks’ desire to resist continued ethnic cleansing on the occupied territory. The same Muslim Bosniak politicians and media are very active in stirring up interest in the "monument of shame to the United Nations" which is being built from the pile of old shoes?! The purpose of that monument is to remove the spotlight from the true perpetrators of genocide: Serbia and Republika Srspka. The Muslim Bosniak media are repeatidly and intentionally marginailzing the judgment by the International Court of Justice, that Serbia and Republika Srspka are the true perpetrators of genocide. NCR B&H
4. KINGDOM OF THE GOLDEN LILIES
The following poem is written by Nermin Bajramovic, a survivor of genocide in Srebrenica. NOTE: The Golden Lily is a symbol of the Bosnian Kingdom, Bosnia and Bosniak people.The flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a flag with "Golden Lilies" EARNING MY RIGHT by Nermin Bajramovic, Srebrenica I come from a valley Of the blue sunrise, Kingdom of the Golden Lilies And the warriors with a dragon heart The promise land is the country of mine. I might not be a prestigious child of life Or my work words of the profound, But as you read this verse I am earning my right, To walk the footsteps Of the noble ones. Mortal I may be I am Bosnian 'til I Die Do you know who you are?
5. PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE EVENT
"Golden Lilies", flags of the Republic Bosnia - Herzegovina and banners in between the flag poles:
http://republikabih.net/content/odgovor.htm
http://republic-bosnia-herzegovina.com/?p=670
Decree to Ibran Mustafic to remove flags of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the private property of his family:
http://www.republikabih.net/images/rjesenje.pdf
Support group for Ibran Mustafic on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1455848549900&sk=messages#!/group.php?gid=105887249460745
Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #4
Bosnia journal #4
June 18, 2010
Srebrenica and Bratunac
Hello folks,
From Bijeljina I traveled last week to Srebrenica, where I spent a few days catching up with old friends and meeting with all kinds of activists. I was confronted with two conflicting visions of the place: first, that Srebrenica is a dying town -- or even a museum of death. On the other hand, there are committed activists, including many young people, who insist that there is hope for the town, and that they will struggle as long as it takes to revive Srebrenica.
The first image was the most obvious -- in fact, two people I knew in Srebrenica have died since I was last there, and people were telling me that the burden of the history of Srebrenica, and the accompanying trauma, are destroying people.
As I sat in the small pubs where people casually meet -- as if they are lounging in the town’s communal living room -- old friends and new acquaintances alike told me that Srebrenica was a “dying town.” One evening Hakija Meholjic said, “Look up at that apartment building, and see how few lights are on. The whole street above us is empty. On the weekend you’ll see who really lives here.” Many of the people who work for the municipality go back to their postwar homes (i.e., the places in the Federation to where they were displaced during the war) on Friday. They are called “vikendaši” -- weekenders. Others returned to live in Srebrenica in the early 2000s and, usually with the assistance of an international relief organization, repaired their homes. But many of these people have also returned to the Federation (one of the two “entities” comprising Bosnia, the other one being the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska - RS), or moved abroad.
Each time I go to Srebrenica I notice something new, something that looks a little better. Last time it was the new department store that dominates the center of town, replacing the empty old eyesore, and making it possible for people to buy a needle without having to travel to Bratunac. This time there was less improvement: a few new kafanas, but some of the old ones were closed. There is a pleasant outdoor kafana in the town’s central park, but the grass could use a mowing. The entrance hall to the Dom Kulture (community center) has finally been painted and the place is not as gloomy as before. Even the restrooms on the third floor are now presentable.
The biggest change in town is the completion of the gleaming new mosque, at the upper end of town just below the old (reconstructed) White Mosque. Hakija commented, “They will close the old mosque and open this one, but who will go there?”
I walked up to the house of Amela, where I would sleep. She told me, to my dismay, that my friend Salih had died last year. Amela returned to Srebrenica from Tuzla in 2005. Her husband, the first person to return to Srebrenica after the war, died this year. She is lucky to have employment in Srebrenica. She said, “You have to be strong. The municipality doesn’t care about us. We ordinary people don’t like them. They will pretend to be reasonable, to you (as a foreigner), but they don’t take care of us. People here are sick, many have died. This place is ruining people, physically.”
I visited my friends at the organization “SARA.” They are finishing one project and have applied for support for others, but things are going very slowly. They have not received answers. “Bice bolje” -- “It will be better,” says Stana, the director.
I ate lunch at Omer’s cafe. He told me “They have paved the roads to the villages, to Suceska, and all the way to Osmace. Now they are paving the road to the lake. Meanwhile we are working, and we get money, but no one is producing anything in Srebrenica.” I said hello to his wife and asked her how’re things, and she said, “Treba biti zadovoljna” -- “One should be satisfied.” They are among the few who are employed.
I met Danis, who is employed in a factory in Potocari. He came back to Srebrenica four years ago. Danis said that things are hard in the winter: “It’s ok until September. But returnees leave; it’s better to be unemployed in Sarajevo than unemployed in Srebrenica…There are no new factories in the municipality. There was talk about some projects, but then the economic crisis hit.”
Danis lost one brother and a brother-in-law in the Srebrenica massacre. The brother-in-law and his whole family were found, but of Danis’s brother, they have only found part of his skull and one arm bone. Danis explained to me that the surviving family of a victim has the right to decide when to bury the victim’s remains after 50% of the body has been identified.
*
From last week’s newspaper: In 2010, so far, 17,633 people have lost their jobs in the Federation. The total unemployed is 357,115. Of that number, one quarter are in Tuzla Canton (89,945); another 67,000 in Sarajevo Canton, and 66,000 in Zenica-Doboj Canton. The total unemployed includes 71,779 war veterans. …These figures only cover unemployment in the Federation. Elsewhere I read that the number of unemployed for all of Bosnia-Herzegovina is around a half million, in a country that numbers approximately four million.
*
HOUSE OF TRUST
I met with Melika Malesevic at the Kuca Povjerenja, “House of Trust.” Ms. Malesevic described programs that her organization implements, such as training young people from Srebrenica in trades and providing equipment so that they can set up shop and stay in the municipality. They implement projects not only in town, but in some of the villages; Ms. Malesevic told me that thirty percent of the population of the municipality is in the villages.
Kuca Povjerenja brings doctors to Srebrenica and provides medical exams and medicines to people in Srebrenica. Ms. Malesevic told me, “We have even been introducing Reiki therapy, which is starting to catch on -- even in the villages.” Kuca Povjerenja helped equip the first dental clinic to open (just a month ago) in Srebrenica.
One of the projects the organization works on is a weekly seminar on “collective memory,” in collaboration with the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights based in Belgrade. The organization “connects people so that they can form their own understanding of recent history,” says Ms. Malesevic.
Another way Kuca Povjerenja works to foster coexistence is in the sports arena: “We support sports activities, because that is a venue where people can come together. We have provided football equipment and prizes. We have also sponsored cultural activities, such as Srebrenica Days, organizing games for the children, and concerts. We will help promote the Guber spa, by writing up local oral legends of the place. We hope to restore the old vibrancy to Srebrenica.”
Arguing against the notion that Srebrenica is a dying town, Ms. Malesevic summed up by saying, “Life in Srebrenica is different from what you see in the media. The image of Srebrenica that the media presents is a big lie. There is a future here. There is life in Srebrenica. I am certain of that. It is with the youth. The situation is not wonderful, but there is a future.”
At the end I told Melika that I had the impression she must have done something before this work, to prepare her for such a responsible position. She said, “Yes. I was a logoraš (a concentration camp prisoner). Afterwards, I spent ten years doing research and advocacy for an organization of camp survivors.”
SREBRENICA YOUTH COUNCIL
I walked down to the youth center run by the Savjet Mladih (Youth Council). Milena Nikolic Mikica is the director of the center. I had a good long talk with Mikica, a very energetic and articulate young woman. The Youth Council was started in 2002, and the next year young people got together and cleaned out the building that they presently occupy, without asking permission from anyone. They had the good luck subsequently to get support from then-Mayor Abdurrahman Malkic, and the municipality consented to allow the youth group to use the building for fifteen years.
Mikica Nikolic described the origins of her organization: “The first thing that connected us all was the prejudice from the outside against Srebrenica, that there was no youth here, and no creativity. We took this as a challenge, to show that it was not true. We held performances here; our activities were mainly cultural. We helped create space for creativity, organizing young people in the local community.
“Our first action was during Dani Srebrenice (the annual festival, “Srebrenica Days”) in 2003. This building was in ruins then; it was being used as a public toilet. That day we pulled off a guerilla action, cleaning the building. From then, step by step, we have created the basis to work. We lobbied to get use of this space. First we cleaned the building, then we asked for the resources to use it.”
The young people of Savjet Mladih started from scratch in learning how to become activists,
create an NGO, organize projects, and lobby for youth services. Activists from the group now collaborate nationally, in both entities, with the most prominent and effective youth organizations. Says Mikica, “We are working on the local, entity, and state level advocating for the creation of official youth policy. Now, since 2006 there has been a law regarding youth policy in the RS. This is in regard to youth organizing. And finally, three months ago, a similar law was passed in the Federation. These laws advocate for better conditions for young people. We have called for a local commission for youth and for the development of a strategy for youth services.”
These are critical issues in a country where the leading politicians are much more concerned with crooked privatization and lining their own pockets than with renovating schools and playgrounds, or providing young people with access to the internet and to computer labs.
Mikica describes the uphill battle of her organization and the irresponsibility of some local authorities: “We are struggling for basic things; it is as if we still have to prove ourselves, to get approval from the municipality. We have received only 1,000 KM of support for this year -- that’s perhaps enough for toilet paper. We should not have to prove ourselves -- they should be coming to us to show us why they deserve our support.”
Mikica works in one activist capacity or another every day of the week. She told me that some of her friends say to her, “You’re so boring, always talking about politics,” but she responds “This is not politics, this is my life.”
While at the youth center I talked to a couple of youngsters who frequent the place and perform in a local rock band. One was wearing a t-shirt that showed the logo of the rock group, “KUD Idiota.” On the back of his t-shirt it read, “We’re only here for the money.” They told me, “This is a great place; it has spirit. But there’s no economy, and few people. The government doesn’t allow us to get jobs here.”
“Voting doesn’t seem to help anything,” they continued. “The politicians are just campaigning in order to have four more years of good salary. People are leaving because there is no work here. A huge number of those who finish college elsewhere stay there.”
On the positive side, one of the teenagers told me, “There’s no hate here among us young people. I think that’s normal; why would I hate someone?”
ODISEJ in BRATUNAC
I took an afternoon trip to Bratunac to spend some time with Stane and Mirko of the organization Odisej. Odisej is the organization that fought for coexistence and cooperation between Serbs and returned Bosniaks at a time when it was dangerous to do so, and they made a difference. Their web site is www.ooodisej.site11.com. See also my report on their work from 2008 at http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-4.htm
Odisej now has a clean little office nearer the center of town, instead of the dark (though rich in atmosphere) youth center they had before, which was always under threat of expropriation from the nearby school. I recalled Odisej’s escapades with the police in previous years. Mirko and Stane told me that they now have “exceptionally good relations with the police,” but that they are still regarded with suspicion by the city authorities. They said there is no longer any tension in Bratunac, except if there is an “incident,” and if there is an incident, the tension subsides more quickly than before.
Recalling the early days of the group, they said, “When the first Muslims came back to Bratunac, we couldn’t go in the kafanas with them. They would be kicked out. So we made a plan, we arranged for two of us to meet, a Serb and a Bosniak, and to have a big hug in a very public place. Then we went back into a kafana together. There, a Serb in the kafana criticized one of us for associating with Bosniaks. So then there was tension between Serbs; the Muslims weren’t relevant. In a way, that is progress.”
On the subject of confronting the past, Stane said, “We are always looking at who did what to whom during the war, but people are not prepared to lay wreaths together for each other’s victims. …There are some people who are stuck, who have pathological problems. But ordinary people can’t sustain this hate; they live on money, not on hate.
“We are in favor of doing slow work with quality. Little by little, until people become more mature. When we (Serbs in Bratunac) first began to talk about Srebrenica, we were called traitors. And women who report domestic abuse are also called traitors. But we are trying to transform that mentality. A victim is a victim.”
Mirko and Stane described one project to me, where they were collecting charity aid for the needy, as a way to try to get people to give without asking for something in return. Only material goods were solicited; no money changed hands. “The main point of this was for people to have a feeling that they were helping someone. We don’t have that initiative. For fifteen years, twenty years, people have not helped each other out of the goodness of their heart. Now, in this project, people were helping out without asking whom the aid went to.”
Among other projects, Odisej works to help people find employment by creating a database of unemployed people’s skills and talents, and then hunting down jobs -- sometimes by going door to door. The organization has around ten volunteers who help with projects.
Both Mirko and Stane were themselves displaced during the war. Reflecting on their years of activism, Mirko commented, “We activists who are around 25 to 30 years old, we have no careers; we don’t dare start raising a family. We are thinking about how to bring peace to the people, not how to buy our third car. We lost our childhood, our chance to take vacations at the sea. But what we have done is not in vain, because our children will be able to have a normal life.”
Stane mentioned ideas for the popularization of the practice of “confronting the past.” This is a term that is in currency among activists and NGOs today. The dominant trend is to sweep the painful history of the 1990s under the rug, which is the least healthy way to deal with it. But here and there, especially among young people, activists are trying to encourage the airing of exactly what was done to whom, and who did it, in the war. Odisej has been involved in this task, which has to happen on a very local, personal level.
There has been much vague talk about “reconciliation,” without generally defining the word. People who are sometimes called “humanitarian profiteers” flocked to Bosnia -- especially in the several years after the war -- and made a business of teaching “reconciliation.” But I think that long before there can be talk about reconciliation, folks in the villages and towns have to be “confronting the past” in an honest way. That also happens in The Hague, of course, but it’s not enough.
Stane broached one manner of confronting the past openly, and in a way that is accessible to young people: presenting the message through local rock and rap bands that are very popular here. He mentioned the popular performer Edo Maajka, who lives in Croatia, but is from Bosnia and performs here regularly. I have noticed also that there is at least the embryo of an underground rock scene that expresses dissent and anti-nationalist sentiments, but I would not say that it’s a strong movement at this point.
MORE SREBRENICA
I went down to Potocari to visit my friend “Munevera.” Her husband Salih died last October. Munevera has a farm, and she still works all day. She seems very sad. She told me that “it was the lack of justice that killed Salih; he could not get used to the new system, and that ate him up.” Salih was 60. She said, “Sixty, that’s not really many years.”
Munevera has six milk cows, some calves, and a bull -- altogether, 12 animals. Here’s an example of the new “system” that Munevera mentioned: she told me that the Republika Srpska government classifies milk they produce in different grades. She is paid based on the grade of the milk. The milk is then sold to a company in Tuzla, in the Federation. But the RS pays Munevera for a lower grade than the milk really is, and then tells the Tuzla company that it is a higher grade.
Munevera, discussing the economic crisis, says, “There are people from here who live in Germany, and they come here two or three times a year. They have started coming less often, ‘because of the economic crisis,’ they say. If the crisis affects them that way, then how does it affect us? However, people won’t work here. They have gotten used to humanitarian aid. Some people received tractors and sold them; I need a tractor, but I can’t get one. So much international humanitarian aid has come into Srebrenica, the place should be paved with gold. But people fixed their houses and then went back to the city. That was a mistake.”
Munevera forgets that not everyone has a farm or some other opportunity to work, but her remarks about corruption and profiteering are well-placed.
She continues, “But I’m not afraid of the crisis, after what we lived through in the war, with no food, always worrying that someone would get hurt or killed. Now we can work on the farm. So the crisis doesn’t interest me.” But Munevera works seven days a week; she says, “The cows don’t know about Ramadan, and they don’t know about Christmas.”
*
I went to the memorial cemetery, at the other end of Potocari from Munevera’s farm. The sun burned as I walked around the silent complex, which is noticeably more full of graves now than a couple of years ago. The wooden grave markers of last year’s reburials have been replaced with gleaming white stone.
I had been told about a cross that had been erected above the memorial cemetery as a provocation. However, I did not see it, and a tour guide told me that it had been placed near an excavated mass grave at Budak, just over the hill from Potocari.
The guide invited me to go with his group to the museum across the street, set up in part of the old battery factory where the Dutch troops had their base during the latter part of the war. The huge empty hall has been converted into a simple memorial with two rooms, one for movie projection, and one with photos and text about some of the victims of the massacre.
On my way back to town I ran into Muhamed, who works for the municipality. We chatted for a while; I told him of my two impressions of Srebrenica. “He said no person is complete without carrying an involvement with the past, the present, and the future within him.”
GUILTY
The biggest news from Srebrenica last week was the conviction, in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), of seven men who were involved in the top levels of command that carried out the massacres at Srebrenica fifteen years ago. Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara received life sentences for genocide, and all seven were convicted of crimes against humanity (or aiding and abetting such crimes) and violation of the laws and conventions of war.
The ICTY’s decision is significant because it reinforces other somewhat less definitive court findings about genocide. General Radislav Krstic was earlier convicted of genocide, but on appeal, his conviction was reduced to that of “aiding and abetting” genocide. That says that someone committed genocide, but that Krstic did not plan it; he only helped implement it.
In another legal decision from a few years ago, the International Court of Justice (also known as the World Court) found that Serbia “failed to prevent genocide.”
The legal definition of genocide very clearly states that proof of intent is required in order to define a crime as genocide. The two legal decisions that I just mentioned found that genocide was committed -- this requiring prior intent (i.e., planning) from someone. But that “someone” was not identified. Here, Popovic and Beara were identified as guilty of genocide. Another culprit, Drago Nikolic, was convicted of aiding and abetting.
The significance of this decision, in addition to providing a small measure of symbolic justice for the victims, is in the connection it makes between the local perpetrators of the genocide and the command chain that goes all the way up through Karadzic and Mladic to the military command in Serbia. The present genocide conviction should reinforce the case against Karadzic, who is himself currently on trial for genocide, among other things.
Here’s an excerpt from an article on the conviction by one commentator:
“What the UN court's June 10 ruling does establish is that Popovic, Beara, and Nikolic were all in the chain of command of General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander who remains a fugitive 15 years after he was indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
“Critically, it also establishes that there was a premeditated plot by the Bosnian Serb leadership to carry out genocide against Bosnian Muslims. The judges wrote that the defendants' most brutal crimes were carried out under a directive issued by Karadzic to create ‘an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival’ for the Srebrenica population.”
(From a June 11th Radio Free Europe report by Ron Synovitz:
http://www.rferl.org/content/UN_Genocide_Rulings_Bolster_Case_Against_Karadzic/2068903.html)
It is to be hoped that the recent conviction, and an eventual conviction of Karadzic for genocide, could help to prove legally that Serbia was involved in the attack and genocide in Bosnia. Of course, everyone who is the least bit interested in this history knows that is true -- but there are political reasons why Serbia, the EU, and the United States wish to leave this entire issue buried forever.
The day of the conviction, I sat in Zahida’s kafana in the middle of Srebrenica and waited for the bus to take me out of Srebrenica. On the radio the newscaster announced the conviction of seven men. Alija, sitting near me, just said one word: "Mashallah," meaning, roughly, “than
June 18, 2010
Srebrenica and Bratunac
Hello folks,
From Bijeljina I traveled last week to Srebrenica, where I spent a few days catching up with old friends and meeting with all kinds of activists. I was confronted with two conflicting visions of the place: first, that Srebrenica is a dying town -- or even a museum of death. On the other hand, there are committed activists, including many young people, who insist that there is hope for the town, and that they will struggle as long as it takes to revive Srebrenica.
The first image was the most obvious -- in fact, two people I knew in Srebrenica have died since I was last there, and people were telling me that the burden of the history of Srebrenica, and the accompanying trauma, are destroying people.
As I sat in the small pubs where people casually meet -- as if they are lounging in the town’s communal living room -- old friends and new acquaintances alike told me that Srebrenica was a “dying town.” One evening Hakija Meholjic said, “Look up at that apartment building, and see how few lights are on. The whole street above us is empty. On the weekend you’ll see who really lives here.” Many of the people who work for the municipality go back to their postwar homes (i.e., the places in the Federation to where they were displaced during the war) on Friday. They are called “vikendaši” -- weekenders. Others returned to live in Srebrenica in the early 2000s and, usually with the assistance of an international relief organization, repaired their homes. But many of these people have also returned to the Federation (one of the two “entities” comprising Bosnia, the other one being the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska - RS), or moved abroad.
Each time I go to Srebrenica I notice something new, something that looks a little better. Last time it was the new department store that dominates the center of town, replacing the empty old eyesore, and making it possible for people to buy a needle without having to travel to Bratunac. This time there was less improvement: a few new kafanas, but some of the old ones were closed. There is a pleasant outdoor kafana in the town’s central park, but the grass could use a mowing. The entrance hall to the Dom Kulture (community center) has finally been painted and the place is not as gloomy as before. Even the restrooms on the third floor are now presentable.
The biggest change in town is the completion of the gleaming new mosque, at the upper end of town just below the old (reconstructed) White Mosque. Hakija commented, “They will close the old mosque and open this one, but who will go there?”
I walked up to the house of Amela, where I would sleep. She told me, to my dismay, that my friend Salih had died last year. Amela returned to Srebrenica from Tuzla in 2005. Her husband, the first person to return to Srebrenica after the war, died this year. She is lucky to have employment in Srebrenica. She said, “You have to be strong. The municipality doesn’t care about us. We ordinary people don’t like them. They will pretend to be reasonable, to you (as a foreigner), but they don’t take care of us. People here are sick, many have died. This place is ruining people, physically.”
I visited my friends at the organization “SARA.” They are finishing one project and have applied for support for others, but things are going very slowly. They have not received answers. “Bice bolje” -- “It will be better,” says Stana, the director.
I ate lunch at Omer’s cafe. He told me “They have paved the roads to the villages, to Suceska, and all the way to Osmace. Now they are paving the road to the lake. Meanwhile we are working, and we get money, but no one is producing anything in Srebrenica.” I said hello to his wife and asked her how’re things, and she said, “Treba biti zadovoljna” -- “One should be satisfied.” They are among the few who are employed.
I met Danis, who is employed in a factory in Potocari. He came back to Srebrenica four years ago. Danis said that things are hard in the winter: “It’s ok until September. But returnees leave; it’s better to be unemployed in Sarajevo than unemployed in Srebrenica…There are no new factories in the municipality. There was talk about some projects, but then the economic crisis hit.”
Danis lost one brother and a brother-in-law in the Srebrenica massacre. The brother-in-law and his whole family were found, but of Danis’s brother, they have only found part of his skull and one arm bone. Danis explained to me that the surviving family of a victim has the right to decide when to bury the victim’s remains after 50% of the body has been identified.
*
From last week’s newspaper: In 2010, so far, 17,633 people have lost their jobs in the Federation. The total unemployed is 357,115. Of that number, one quarter are in Tuzla Canton (89,945); another 67,000 in Sarajevo Canton, and 66,000 in Zenica-Doboj Canton. The total unemployed includes 71,779 war veterans. …These figures only cover unemployment in the Federation. Elsewhere I read that the number of unemployed for all of Bosnia-Herzegovina is around a half million, in a country that numbers approximately four million.
*
HOUSE OF TRUST
I met with Melika Malesevic at the Kuca Povjerenja, “House of Trust.” Ms. Malesevic described programs that her organization implements, such as training young people from Srebrenica in trades and providing equipment so that they can set up shop and stay in the municipality. They implement projects not only in town, but in some of the villages; Ms. Malesevic told me that thirty percent of the population of the municipality is in the villages.
Kuca Povjerenja brings doctors to Srebrenica and provides medical exams and medicines to people in Srebrenica. Ms. Malesevic told me, “We have even been introducing Reiki therapy, which is starting to catch on -- even in the villages.” Kuca Povjerenja helped equip the first dental clinic to open (just a month ago) in Srebrenica.
One of the projects the organization works on is a weekly seminar on “collective memory,” in collaboration with the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights based in Belgrade. The organization “connects people so that they can form their own understanding of recent history,” says Ms. Malesevic.
Another way Kuca Povjerenja works to foster coexistence is in the sports arena: “We support sports activities, because that is a venue where people can come together. We have provided football equipment and prizes. We have also sponsored cultural activities, such as Srebrenica Days, organizing games for the children, and concerts. We will help promote the Guber spa, by writing up local oral legends of the place. We hope to restore the old vibrancy to Srebrenica.”
Arguing against the notion that Srebrenica is a dying town, Ms. Malesevic summed up by saying, “Life in Srebrenica is different from what you see in the media. The image of Srebrenica that the media presents is a big lie. There is a future here. There is life in Srebrenica. I am certain of that. It is with the youth. The situation is not wonderful, but there is a future.”
At the end I told Melika that I had the impression she must have done something before this work, to prepare her for such a responsible position. She said, “Yes. I was a logoraš (a concentration camp prisoner). Afterwards, I spent ten years doing research and advocacy for an organization of camp survivors.”
SREBRENICA YOUTH COUNCIL
I walked down to the youth center run by the Savjet Mladih (Youth Council). Milena Nikolic Mikica is the director of the center. I had a good long talk with Mikica, a very energetic and articulate young woman. The Youth Council was started in 2002, and the next year young people got together and cleaned out the building that they presently occupy, without asking permission from anyone. They had the good luck subsequently to get support from then-Mayor Abdurrahman Malkic, and the municipality consented to allow the youth group to use the building for fifteen years.
Mikica Nikolic described the origins of her organization: “The first thing that connected us all was the prejudice from the outside against Srebrenica, that there was no youth here, and no creativity. We took this as a challenge, to show that it was not true. We held performances here; our activities were mainly cultural. We helped create space for creativity, organizing young people in the local community.
“Our first action was during Dani Srebrenice (the annual festival, “Srebrenica Days”) in 2003. This building was in ruins then; it was being used as a public toilet. That day we pulled off a guerilla action, cleaning the building. From then, step by step, we have created the basis to work. We lobbied to get use of this space. First we cleaned the building, then we asked for the resources to use it.”
The young people of Savjet Mladih started from scratch in learning how to become activists,
create an NGO, organize projects, and lobby for youth services. Activists from the group now collaborate nationally, in both entities, with the most prominent and effective youth organizations. Says Mikica, “We are working on the local, entity, and state level advocating for the creation of official youth policy. Now, since 2006 there has been a law regarding youth policy in the RS. This is in regard to youth organizing. And finally, three months ago, a similar law was passed in the Federation. These laws advocate for better conditions for young people. We have called for a local commission for youth and for the development of a strategy for youth services.”
These are critical issues in a country where the leading politicians are much more concerned with crooked privatization and lining their own pockets than with renovating schools and playgrounds, or providing young people with access to the internet and to computer labs.
Mikica describes the uphill battle of her organization and the irresponsibility of some local authorities: “We are struggling for basic things; it is as if we still have to prove ourselves, to get approval from the municipality. We have received only 1,000 KM of support for this year -- that’s perhaps enough for toilet paper. We should not have to prove ourselves -- they should be coming to us to show us why they deserve our support.”
Mikica works in one activist capacity or another every day of the week. She told me that some of her friends say to her, “You’re so boring, always talking about politics,” but she responds “This is not politics, this is my life.”
While at the youth center I talked to a couple of youngsters who frequent the place and perform in a local rock band. One was wearing a t-shirt that showed the logo of the rock group, “KUD Idiota.” On the back of his t-shirt it read, “We’re only here for the money.” They told me, “This is a great place; it has spirit. But there’s no economy, and few people. The government doesn’t allow us to get jobs here.”
“Voting doesn’t seem to help anything,” they continued. “The politicians are just campaigning in order to have four more years of good salary. People are leaving because there is no work here. A huge number of those who finish college elsewhere stay there.”
On the positive side, one of the teenagers told me, “There’s no hate here among us young people. I think that’s normal; why would I hate someone?”
ODISEJ in BRATUNAC
I took an afternoon trip to Bratunac to spend some time with Stane and Mirko of the organization Odisej. Odisej is the organization that fought for coexistence and cooperation between Serbs and returned Bosniaks at a time when it was dangerous to do so, and they made a difference. Their web site is www.ooodisej.site11.com. See also my report on their work from 2008 at http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-4.htm
Odisej now has a clean little office nearer the center of town, instead of the dark (though rich in atmosphere) youth center they had before, which was always under threat of expropriation from the nearby school. I recalled Odisej’s escapades with the police in previous years. Mirko and Stane told me that they now have “exceptionally good relations with the police,” but that they are still regarded with suspicion by the city authorities. They said there is no longer any tension in Bratunac, except if there is an “incident,” and if there is an incident, the tension subsides more quickly than before.
Recalling the early days of the group, they said, “When the first Muslims came back to Bratunac, we couldn’t go in the kafanas with them. They would be kicked out. So we made a plan, we arranged for two of us to meet, a Serb and a Bosniak, and to have a big hug in a very public place. Then we went back into a kafana together. There, a Serb in the kafana criticized one of us for associating with Bosniaks. So then there was tension between Serbs; the Muslims weren’t relevant. In a way, that is progress.”
On the subject of confronting the past, Stane said, “We are always looking at who did what to whom during the war, but people are not prepared to lay wreaths together for each other’s victims. …There are some people who are stuck, who have pathological problems. But ordinary people can’t sustain this hate; they live on money, not on hate.
“We are in favor of doing slow work with quality. Little by little, until people become more mature. When we (Serbs in Bratunac) first began to talk about Srebrenica, we were called traitors. And women who report domestic abuse are also called traitors. But we are trying to transform that mentality. A victim is a victim.”
Mirko and Stane described one project to me, where they were collecting charity aid for the needy, as a way to try to get people to give without asking for something in return. Only material goods were solicited; no money changed hands. “The main point of this was for people to have a feeling that they were helping someone. We don’t have that initiative. For fifteen years, twenty years, people have not helped each other out of the goodness of their heart. Now, in this project, people were helping out without asking whom the aid went to.”
Among other projects, Odisej works to help people find employment by creating a database of unemployed people’s skills and talents, and then hunting down jobs -- sometimes by going door to door. The organization has around ten volunteers who help with projects.
Both Mirko and Stane were themselves displaced during the war. Reflecting on their years of activism, Mirko commented, “We activists who are around 25 to 30 years old, we have no careers; we don’t dare start raising a family. We are thinking about how to bring peace to the people, not how to buy our third car. We lost our childhood, our chance to take vacations at the sea. But what we have done is not in vain, because our children will be able to have a normal life.”
Stane mentioned ideas for the popularization of the practice of “confronting the past.” This is a term that is in currency among activists and NGOs today. The dominant trend is to sweep the painful history of the 1990s under the rug, which is the least healthy way to deal with it. But here and there, especially among young people, activists are trying to encourage the airing of exactly what was done to whom, and who did it, in the war. Odisej has been involved in this task, which has to happen on a very local, personal level.
There has been much vague talk about “reconciliation,” without generally defining the word. People who are sometimes called “humanitarian profiteers” flocked to Bosnia -- especially in the several years after the war -- and made a business of teaching “reconciliation.” But I think that long before there can be talk about reconciliation, folks in the villages and towns have to be “confronting the past” in an honest way. That also happens in The Hague, of course, but it’s not enough.
Stane broached one manner of confronting the past openly, and in a way that is accessible to young people: presenting the message through local rock and rap bands that are very popular here. He mentioned the popular performer Edo Maajka, who lives in Croatia, but is from Bosnia and performs here regularly. I have noticed also that there is at least the embryo of an underground rock scene that expresses dissent and anti-nationalist sentiments, but I would not say that it’s a strong movement at this point.
MORE SREBRENICA
I went down to Potocari to visit my friend “Munevera.” Her husband Salih died last October. Munevera has a farm, and she still works all day. She seems very sad. She told me that “it was the lack of justice that killed Salih; he could not get used to the new system, and that ate him up.” Salih was 60. She said, “Sixty, that’s not really many years.”
Munevera has six milk cows, some calves, and a bull -- altogether, 12 animals. Here’s an example of the new “system” that Munevera mentioned: she told me that the Republika Srpska government classifies milk they produce in different grades. She is paid based on the grade of the milk. The milk is then sold to a company in Tuzla, in the Federation. But the RS pays Munevera for a lower grade than the milk really is, and then tells the Tuzla company that it is a higher grade.
Munevera, discussing the economic crisis, says, “There are people from here who live in Germany, and they come here two or three times a year. They have started coming less often, ‘because of the economic crisis,’ they say. If the crisis affects them that way, then how does it affect us? However, people won’t work here. They have gotten used to humanitarian aid. Some people received tractors and sold them; I need a tractor, but I can’t get one. So much international humanitarian aid has come into Srebrenica, the place should be paved with gold. But people fixed their houses and then went back to the city. That was a mistake.”
Munevera forgets that not everyone has a farm or some other opportunity to work, but her remarks about corruption and profiteering are well-placed.
She continues, “But I’m not afraid of the crisis, after what we lived through in the war, with no food, always worrying that someone would get hurt or killed. Now we can work on the farm. So the crisis doesn’t interest me.” But Munevera works seven days a week; she says, “The cows don’t know about Ramadan, and they don’t know about Christmas.”
*
I went to the memorial cemetery, at the other end of Potocari from Munevera’s farm. The sun burned as I walked around the silent complex, which is noticeably more full of graves now than a couple of years ago. The wooden grave markers of last year’s reburials have been replaced with gleaming white stone.
I had been told about a cross that had been erected above the memorial cemetery as a provocation. However, I did not see it, and a tour guide told me that it had been placed near an excavated mass grave at Budak, just over the hill from Potocari.
The guide invited me to go with his group to the museum across the street, set up in part of the old battery factory where the Dutch troops had their base during the latter part of the war. The huge empty hall has been converted into a simple memorial with two rooms, one for movie projection, and one with photos and text about some of the victims of the massacre.
On my way back to town I ran into Muhamed, who works for the municipality. We chatted for a while; I told him of my two impressions of Srebrenica. “He said no person is complete without carrying an involvement with the past, the present, and the future within him.”
GUILTY
The biggest news from Srebrenica last week was the conviction, in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), of seven men who were involved in the top levels of command that carried out the massacres at Srebrenica fifteen years ago. Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara received life sentences for genocide, and all seven were convicted of crimes against humanity (or aiding and abetting such crimes) and violation of the laws and conventions of war.
The ICTY’s decision is significant because it reinforces other somewhat less definitive court findings about genocide. General Radislav Krstic was earlier convicted of genocide, but on appeal, his conviction was reduced to that of “aiding and abetting” genocide. That says that someone committed genocide, but that Krstic did not plan it; he only helped implement it.
In another legal decision from a few years ago, the International Court of Justice (also known as the World Court) found that Serbia “failed to prevent genocide.”
The legal definition of genocide very clearly states that proof of intent is required in order to define a crime as genocide. The two legal decisions that I just mentioned found that genocide was committed -- this requiring prior intent (i.e., planning) from someone. But that “someone” was not identified. Here, Popovic and Beara were identified as guilty of genocide. Another culprit, Drago Nikolic, was convicted of aiding and abetting.
The significance of this decision, in addition to providing a small measure of symbolic justice for the victims, is in the connection it makes between the local perpetrators of the genocide and the command chain that goes all the way up through Karadzic and Mladic to the military command in Serbia. The present genocide conviction should reinforce the case against Karadzic, who is himself currently on trial for genocide, among other things.
Here’s an excerpt from an article on the conviction by one commentator:
“What the UN court's June 10 ruling does establish is that Popovic, Beara, and Nikolic were all in the chain of command of General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander who remains a fugitive 15 years after he was indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
“Critically, it also establishes that there was a premeditated plot by the Bosnian Serb leadership to carry out genocide against Bosnian Muslims. The judges wrote that the defendants' most brutal crimes were carried out under a directive issued by Karadzic to create ‘an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival’ for the Srebrenica population.”
(From a June 11th Radio Free Europe report by Ron Synovitz:
http://www.rferl.org/content/UN_Genocide_Rulings_Bolster_Case_Against_Karadzic/2068903.html)
It is to be hoped that the recent conviction, and an eventual conviction of Karadzic for genocide, could help to prove legally that Serbia was involved in the attack and genocide in Bosnia. Of course, everyone who is the least bit interested in this history knows that is true -- but there are political reasons why Serbia, the EU, and the United States wish to leave this entire issue buried forever.
The day of the conviction, I sat in Zahida’s kafana in the middle of Srebrenica and waited for the bus to take me out of Srebrenica. On the radio the newscaster announced the conviction of seven men. Alija, sitting near me, just said one word: "Mashallah," meaning, roughly, “than
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #3
Bosnia journal #3
June 16, 2010
Bijeljina
Before I left Tuzla, I ran into my friend Zoran, a displaced person from Bijeljina, a mid-sized town in the northeastern corner of the Republika Srpska. He was sitting with his friend Mustafa, and I sat with them for a while. Zoran, 70, was expelled from Bijeljina at the beginning of the war. So was Mustafa. Neither were of Serb origin, and that fact doomed them to exile. Zoran told me he has not gone back to Bijeljina for nine years and that he will never go back. He owns land there, and he won’t sell it for a low price. Mustafa goes back once in a while.
Practically the first thing that Zoran told me was, “If I had an atom bomb, I would drop it on Belgrade.” His mother is Muslim. Mustafa’s brother, sick and on crutches, was killed in Bijeljina. Zoran helped his brother-in-law escape from Srebrenica by getting a Serb to take him out. That person lost 76 relatives, from age 3 to 89. Neither Zoran nor Mustafa has any relatives in Tuzla except for their wives. Mustafa’s sons are in Germany; his grandsons don’t know the Bosnian language. Zoran said, “It’s the end for us, we’re finished.”
Zoran told me how is mother saved nine Jews during WWII. He pulled a worn piece of paper out of his pocket, a certificate from Germany, stating in German that his father had been in a labor camp in Germany during that war. He said his father was in a camp, as was his grandfather, and then he was in a camp in the recent war in Bosnia.
BIJELJINA
I took the bus to Bijeljina and walked over to the main square to meet my friend Salem Corbo. Nearing the square, I heard music. Salem told me that there was some kind of military demonstration. I said that I thought the music sounded like religious music. He said, “Oh, now the military and religion are one and the same.”
Salem is the director of “Povratak,” a regional organization for refugee return to Bijeljina. “Before the war,” he explained, “the region around Bijeljina had a population of about 60,000 people, and there were about 35,000 in the city. The population of the city was about 2/3 Bosniak. I was expelled from my work place in April of 1992. Around 35,000 people were expelled from this municipality; we had to sign documents that said we were giving up our property. We had the right to carry one plastic bag of our belongings. Some women were subjected to gynecological examinations to make sure they were not carrying out gold.
“At the end of the war, there were only around 5,000 people left in the city; that is, about 25,000 Bosniaks had been expelled, and about 5,000 other people left as well. Then people from nearby villages, and displaced Serbs from other areas, came to the city. Around 6,000 to 7,000 Bosniaks have returned, and between 1,000 and 2,000 Roma. Now there are between 50,000 and 60,000 in the city. But there were more children in school before the war than now. There has been a lot of emigration, and it is the older people who are staying. And the villages are emptying.”
I commented, “It looks like returnees have had to start life over again from point zero.”Below point zero,” Salem said. “There is no one who was born in Bijeljina who is in an executive position in the government. The biggest obstruction to return is the lack of work. 99% of the property has been returned, but few of the returnees have work. In ElektroBijeljina there are 765 workers, and only one of them is a Bosniak returnee. Before the war, 75% of the workers there were Bosniaks.
“Another problem is fact that few of the war crimes cases have been processed, especially in this region; there has only been one case processed in Bijeljina, in all these fifteen postwar years.”
The non-Serb population of Bijeljina suffered attacks and expulsion in the spring of 1992, even before the war arrived to Sarajevo. Salem said, “Bijeljina is the most important city for the Republika Srpska (RS). It was the number one target at the beginning of the war. Today, most goods from Serbia must come in through Bijeljina. This is the cornerstone of the RS, and the SDS [Serb nationalist party Radovan Karadzic] has had a hold on this town for twenty years. Serbs from the countryside and other towns are flooding into this city; every day more of them arrive, around 8,000 to 9,000 per year.”
In the last four years RS prime minister Dodik and his SNSD (Party of Independent Social Democrats) have consolidated control over most of the entity and, in the process, put pressure on the SDS mayors who control a few municipalities, notably Bijeljina and Doboj. The leaders of the two parties compete for the title of “most corrupt.” An SNSD candidate in the 2008 municipal elections nicknamed incumbent mayor Mico Micic “Mico Trecina,” that is, “Mico One-Third,” because, allegedly, he takes one-third of the profit from every major sale or infrastructure project. Salem says that in Bijeljina municipality, Micic’s friends receive the contracts for all infrastructure development (just like Dodik at the entity level).
The atmosphere of Bijeljina, as I have noted before, seems to have been “cleansed” of any non-Serb cultural influence, and it seems a conscious policy to discourage healthy inter-ethnic coexistence. Salem recalled, “In the activities May 9th, observing ‘Day of European Culture,’ there was no mention of anti-fascism. They have removed the monuments to anti-fascism here. They changed the name of ‘Trg zrtava fasistickog terora; [Square of the Victims of Fascist Terror] to ‘Trg Djenerala Draze Mihajlovica’ [General Draza Mihajlovic Square] after the WWII Chetnik commander. It is as if a bust of Hitler were put up in Berlin. But there, it would only be an incident; here, it is the opposite, an ongoing provocation that we can do nothing about.”
Nor does Salem have favorable words for the leading party of the Bosniaks, saying “The SDA is the worst thing that has happened to the Bosniaks. It was good that during the war people were united around one group to defend themselves, but everything they have done since then has been a mistake.” He mentions competition among Bosniak returnees, who should help each other in solidarity, but there are some who cooperate with the local government to the detriment of their own people.
Salem is not a gloomy man; he is interested in everything alive, it seems. We talked for hours about language, history, film. But his prognosis is dismal. He says, “Economically, we are on the edge of desperation. People are poor; it is hard to live. 90% of the people here (returnees) are unemployed. People lack money to put their children through school. There is social exclusion; we do not exist in public life. What is this refugee return? There is the mosque; people come back, they die, that is all.”
Salem’s return organization coordinates volunteer work to help people. He said, “Serbs come to me too -- everyone has the same problems. This is a strange thing, the way people become united. People see that we all have the same problems. We all lived together before, after all.
“Ninety percent of the Serbs in town think like this. There is a substrata of good, normal, quality people who didn’t agree with Radovan Karadzic. In fact, there was a big part of the RS army that refused to take part in the massacres; that’s why they called in the special forces to Srebrenica. In ongoing court proceedings, the main witnesses are Serbs who saw corpses. They aren’t blood-drinkers, but the system of nationalist exclusion is perpetuated under the name of the Republika Srpska.
“Our relationships with other people are ok. There are villages where people [Serbs and Bosniaks] are roasting lambs together, as if there had never been a war. The problem is with the state. This is not a serious state. We have the laws, but we must respect them, and establish a meritocracy. We have lost our moral values and our sense of responsibility. Only little crimes are prosecuted. The courts only get involved in thefts up to 2,000 KM.
“This all leads to more violence. Problems are possible in Bosnia. It is a sick society. There is less and less laughing and enjoyment of life. The speed of disintegration of morals is faster than I can follow. There was a culture of neighborliness here, where relationships with neighbors are even more important than with brothers. Traditionally, each house had a courtyard, and there was a big gate in front. But on the side, opening to the neighbors, there was a small door in the wall where the neighbors could enter. Neighbors had priority -- until the war. You used to sit under the grapevines and talk; it was a sort of social therapy. The connections were strong. Now there has been too much suffering.”
Before the war Salem held a position in a local cultural institution. Among many other things, he had run a film club there, and organized art film festivals. I asked him if he could do something similar now. He answered, “They don’t allow such a thing. And this city is a village now; people don’t have that kind of interest. Now I work for the return organization, and we have a million problems. The government makes the problems, not the people. They exacerbate ethnic tension in order to divide the voters. If things were normal, then people would understand what the politicians are doing.” Salem expects that the upcoming national elections in the fall will be a period of turbulence.
*
I spoke with Jusuf Trbic, a leading journalist in the region before the war. Now he serves on the municipal council, and runs a kafana as well. The kafana is a gathering point for some of the returnees. Jusuf describes the general situation of returnees for me: “The only people who have work are those who are farming; otherwise there is nothing. People are looking to leave. The only positive thing now is the security situation; there are no more incidents. The ordinary people are much better than those in the government.”
Trbic is as pessimistic about the upcoming elections as is Salem: “In the elections there aren’t going to be changes. The same people, or similar, will win. Essentially, there won’t be any change without a change in the constitution. A stronger state could guarantee equal rights. This state has accepted international conventions that put human rights above the constitution, but that is not important [to the domestic politicians who could implement the conventions].”
On the current political state of affairs in the RS and the much-discussed and long, drawn-out EU entrance process, Jusuf says, “Dodik’s pockets are full [from corrupt practices]; he and those like him could would only go to the EU if they could continue to behave as they do now; otherwise they will not consent to go. Dodik has made himself equivalent to the state. So any change would amount to a loss of power for Dodik.
“We have always had strong leaders, and people were happy with that kind of situation; they are not politically mature. Unfortunately, that is not democracy; maybe in one hundred years they will be ready, but we don’t have that much time. It is too bad for someone to talk that way about one’s own people, but that is the way it is.”
Trbic places his hopes on international pressure for change: “There should be a new international conference where they impose new governmental institutions; then there would be cooperation.”
I asked Trbic if international pressure would make a difference. He answered, “Believe me, it would take so little to change things. There will be no change without some pressure. It is good that things are peaceful, that there are no incidents. But…if Dodik’s position were under question, he would make problems. It is easy to make problems in the Balkans.”
I asked further if Trbic thought that there were any chance for grassroots activism to change things. He said that there was is “no possibility,” and elaborated, in his orderly journalistic fashion:
“Vasilija Andric Vajo is the chief of the police now, and he was during the war. What can we expect from him? He was involved in Srebrenica. Dragan Davidovic is the director of RSTV; he was the minister of religion during the war, while they wrecked all those mosques. Imagine what kind of government this is, when they have that kind of media and police chief.
“There has been almost no prosecution in this district, only one. Novak Kovacevic was the military prosecutor in Srebrenica during the war; now he is the head prosecutor. There are no Bosnian directors in the RS; none in the television, and there won’t be. So if you have that kind of system, what kind of hope can you have, what can you expect? These problems can’t be solved in the present system, where there is no punishment.
“Bosniaks with children are sending them to school in Tuzla. The people in power here think that if it stays like that, they will succeed in their long-term ethnic cleansing project. It looks like that is true.”
Hearing this vividly pessimistic evaluation, I said to Mr. Trbic, “That is astonishing.” He just shrugged, in a gesture that here expresses profound fatalism.
For more information on Bijeljina, see my report from 2008 at http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-7.htm
June 16, 2010
Bijeljina
Before I left Tuzla, I ran into my friend Zoran, a displaced person from Bijeljina, a mid-sized town in the northeastern corner of the Republika Srpska. He was sitting with his friend Mustafa, and I sat with them for a while. Zoran, 70, was expelled from Bijeljina at the beginning of the war. So was Mustafa. Neither were of Serb origin, and that fact doomed them to exile. Zoran told me he has not gone back to Bijeljina for nine years and that he will never go back. He owns land there, and he won’t sell it for a low price. Mustafa goes back once in a while.
Practically the first thing that Zoran told me was, “If I had an atom bomb, I would drop it on Belgrade.” His mother is Muslim. Mustafa’s brother, sick and on crutches, was killed in Bijeljina. Zoran helped his brother-in-law escape from Srebrenica by getting a Serb to take him out. That person lost 76 relatives, from age 3 to 89. Neither Zoran nor Mustafa has any relatives in Tuzla except for their wives. Mustafa’s sons are in Germany; his grandsons don’t know the Bosnian language. Zoran said, “It’s the end for us, we’re finished.”
Zoran told me how is mother saved nine Jews during WWII. He pulled a worn piece of paper out of his pocket, a certificate from Germany, stating in German that his father had been in a labor camp in Germany during that war. He said his father was in a camp, as was his grandfather, and then he was in a camp in the recent war in Bosnia.
BIJELJINA
I took the bus to Bijeljina and walked over to the main square to meet my friend Salem Corbo. Nearing the square, I heard music. Salem told me that there was some kind of military demonstration. I said that I thought the music sounded like religious music. He said, “Oh, now the military and religion are one and the same.”
Salem is the director of “Povratak,” a regional organization for refugee return to Bijeljina. “Before the war,” he explained, “the region around Bijeljina had a population of about 60,000 people, and there were about 35,000 in the city. The population of the city was about 2/3 Bosniak. I was expelled from my work place in April of 1992. Around 35,000 people were expelled from this municipality; we had to sign documents that said we were giving up our property. We had the right to carry one plastic bag of our belongings. Some women were subjected to gynecological examinations to make sure they were not carrying out gold.
“At the end of the war, there were only around 5,000 people left in the city; that is, about 25,000 Bosniaks had been expelled, and about 5,000 other people left as well. Then people from nearby villages, and displaced Serbs from other areas, came to the city. Around 6,000 to 7,000 Bosniaks have returned, and between 1,000 and 2,000 Roma. Now there are between 50,000 and 60,000 in the city. But there were more children in school before the war than now. There has been a lot of emigration, and it is the older people who are staying. And the villages are emptying.”
I commented, “It looks like returnees have had to start life over again from point zero.”Below point zero,” Salem said. “There is no one who was born in Bijeljina who is in an executive position in the government. The biggest obstruction to return is the lack of work. 99% of the property has been returned, but few of the returnees have work. In ElektroBijeljina there are 765 workers, and only one of them is a Bosniak returnee. Before the war, 75% of the workers there were Bosniaks.
“Another problem is fact that few of the war crimes cases have been processed, especially in this region; there has only been one case processed in Bijeljina, in all these fifteen postwar years.”
The non-Serb population of Bijeljina suffered attacks and expulsion in the spring of 1992, even before the war arrived to Sarajevo. Salem said, “Bijeljina is the most important city for the Republika Srpska (RS). It was the number one target at the beginning of the war. Today, most goods from Serbia must come in through Bijeljina. This is the cornerstone of the RS, and the SDS [Serb nationalist party Radovan Karadzic] has had a hold on this town for twenty years. Serbs from the countryside and other towns are flooding into this city; every day more of them arrive, around 8,000 to 9,000 per year.”
In the last four years RS prime minister Dodik and his SNSD (Party of Independent Social Democrats) have consolidated control over most of the entity and, in the process, put pressure on the SDS mayors who control a few municipalities, notably Bijeljina and Doboj. The leaders of the two parties compete for the title of “most corrupt.” An SNSD candidate in the 2008 municipal elections nicknamed incumbent mayor Mico Micic “Mico Trecina,” that is, “Mico One-Third,” because, allegedly, he takes one-third of the profit from every major sale or infrastructure project. Salem says that in Bijeljina municipality, Micic’s friends receive the contracts for all infrastructure development (just like Dodik at the entity level).
The atmosphere of Bijeljina, as I have noted before, seems to have been “cleansed” of any non-Serb cultural influence, and it seems a conscious policy to discourage healthy inter-ethnic coexistence. Salem recalled, “In the activities May 9th, observing ‘Day of European Culture,’ there was no mention of anti-fascism. They have removed the monuments to anti-fascism here. They changed the name of ‘Trg zrtava fasistickog terora; [Square of the Victims of Fascist Terror] to ‘Trg Djenerala Draze Mihajlovica’ [General Draza Mihajlovic Square] after the WWII Chetnik commander. It is as if a bust of Hitler were put up in Berlin. But there, it would only be an incident; here, it is the opposite, an ongoing provocation that we can do nothing about.”
Nor does Salem have favorable words for the leading party of the Bosniaks, saying “The SDA is the worst thing that has happened to the Bosniaks. It was good that during the war people were united around one group to defend themselves, but everything they have done since then has been a mistake.” He mentions competition among Bosniak returnees, who should help each other in solidarity, but there are some who cooperate with the local government to the detriment of their own people.
Salem is not a gloomy man; he is interested in everything alive, it seems. We talked for hours about language, history, film. But his prognosis is dismal. He says, “Economically, we are on the edge of desperation. People are poor; it is hard to live. 90% of the people here (returnees) are unemployed. People lack money to put their children through school. There is social exclusion; we do not exist in public life. What is this refugee return? There is the mosque; people come back, they die, that is all.”
Salem’s return organization coordinates volunteer work to help people. He said, “Serbs come to me too -- everyone has the same problems. This is a strange thing, the way people become united. People see that we all have the same problems. We all lived together before, after all.
“Ninety percent of the Serbs in town think like this. There is a substrata of good, normal, quality people who didn’t agree with Radovan Karadzic. In fact, there was a big part of the RS army that refused to take part in the massacres; that’s why they called in the special forces to Srebrenica. In ongoing court proceedings, the main witnesses are Serbs who saw corpses. They aren’t blood-drinkers, but the system of nationalist exclusion is perpetuated under the name of the Republika Srpska.
“Our relationships with other people are ok. There are villages where people [Serbs and Bosniaks] are roasting lambs together, as if there had never been a war. The problem is with the state. This is not a serious state. We have the laws, but we must respect them, and establish a meritocracy. We have lost our moral values and our sense of responsibility. Only little crimes are prosecuted. The courts only get involved in thefts up to 2,000 KM.
“This all leads to more violence. Problems are possible in Bosnia. It is a sick society. There is less and less laughing and enjoyment of life. The speed of disintegration of morals is faster than I can follow. There was a culture of neighborliness here, where relationships with neighbors are even more important than with brothers. Traditionally, each house had a courtyard, and there was a big gate in front. But on the side, opening to the neighbors, there was a small door in the wall where the neighbors could enter. Neighbors had priority -- until the war. You used to sit under the grapevines and talk; it was a sort of social therapy. The connections were strong. Now there has been too much suffering.”
Before the war Salem held a position in a local cultural institution. Among many other things, he had run a film club there, and organized art film festivals. I asked him if he could do something similar now. He answered, “They don’t allow such a thing. And this city is a village now; people don’t have that kind of interest. Now I work for the return organization, and we have a million problems. The government makes the problems, not the people. They exacerbate ethnic tension in order to divide the voters. If things were normal, then people would understand what the politicians are doing.” Salem expects that the upcoming national elections in the fall will be a period of turbulence.
*
I spoke with Jusuf Trbic, a leading journalist in the region before the war. Now he serves on the municipal council, and runs a kafana as well. The kafana is a gathering point for some of the returnees. Jusuf describes the general situation of returnees for me: “The only people who have work are those who are farming; otherwise there is nothing. People are looking to leave. The only positive thing now is the security situation; there are no more incidents. The ordinary people are much better than those in the government.”
Trbic is as pessimistic about the upcoming elections as is Salem: “In the elections there aren’t going to be changes. The same people, or similar, will win. Essentially, there won’t be any change without a change in the constitution. A stronger state could guarantee equal rights. This state has accepted international conventions that put human rights above the constitution, but that is not important [to the domestic politicians who could implement the conventions].”
On the current political state of affairs in the RS and the much-discussed and long, drawn-out EU entrance process, Jusuf says, “Dodik’s pockets are full [from corrupt practices]; he and those like him could would only go to the EU if they could continue to behave as they do now; otherwise they will not consent to go. Dodik has made himself equivalent to the state. So any change would amount to a loss of power for Dodik.
“We have always had strong leaders, and people were happy with that kind of situation; they are not politically mature. Unfortunately, that is not democracy; maybe in one hundred years they will be ready, but we don’t have that much time. It is too bad for someone to talk that way about one’s own people, but that is the way it is.”
Trbic places his hopes on international pressure for change: “There should be a new international conference where they impose new governmental institutions; then there would be cooperation.”
I asked Trbic if international pressure would make a difference. He answered, “Believe me, it would take so little to change things. There will be no change without some pressure. It is good that things are peaceful, that there are no incidents. But…if Dodik’s position were under question, he would make problems. It is easy to make problems in the Balkans.”
I asked further if Trbic thought that there were any chance for grassroots activism to change things. He said that there was is “no possibility,” and elaborated, in his orderly journalistic fashion:
“Vasilija Andric Vajo is the chief of the police now, and he was during the war. What can we expect from him? He was involved in Srebrenica. Dragan Davidovic is the director of RSTV; he was the minister of religion during the war, while they wrecked all those mosques. Imagine what kind of government this is, when they have that kind of media and police chief.
“There has been almost no prosecution in this district, only one. Novak Kovacevic was the military prosecutor in Srebrenica during the war; now he is the head prosecutor. There are no Bosnian directors in the RS; none in the television, and there won’t be. So if you have that kind of system, what kind of hope can you have, what can you expect? These problems can’t be solved in the present system, where there is no punishment.
“Bosniaks with children are sending them to school in Tuzla. The people in power here think that if it stays like that, they will succeed in their long-term ethnic cleansing project. It looks like that is true.”
Hearing this vividly pessimistic evaluation, I said to Mr. Trbic, “That is astonishing.” He just shrugged, in a gesture that here expresses profound fatalism.
For more information on Bijeljina, see my report from 2008 at http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-7.htm
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Press release from VIŠEGRAD GENOCIDE MEMORIES Blog
VIŠEGRAD GENOCIDE MEMORIES Blog
Višegrad, 8 June 2010
Press Advisory
Survivors of one of 20th Century's most horrific crimes "short-changed" by Karadzić trial
Image: The house in Pionirska Street where 59 Bosniak civilians were burnt
alive by Bosnian Serb soldiers on 14 June 1992. (ICTY photo)
On June 14 a small group of survivors and relatives of victims will revisit the site of one of the 20th Century's most horrific crimes to commemorate the day when a group of seventy Bosnian Muslim civilians - women, children and the elderly - were locked into a house in Pionirska Street in the historic eastern Bosnian town of Višegrad and 59 of them were burned to death.
In the summer of 1992 Bosnian Serb soldiers led by Milan Lukić terrified the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population of the small but strategically located town with a ferocious campaign of murders, mass rape and disappearances, including the Pionirska massacre. It was not until July 2009 that Lukić, a post-war fugitive in Argentina, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for this and other brutal crimes committed during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia's Drina Valley.
After eighteen years' wait, this year survivors and relatives will have the small satisfaction of knowing that the man responsible for a crime described by sentencing ICTY Judge Patrick Robinson as "ranking high in the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man" is finally behind bars, serving a life sentence.
Even so, they feel themselves at the receiving end of "short-change justice" from the ICTY. The man they hold ultimately responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Višegrad, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzić, is no longer facing charges for the massacre at Adem Omeragić’s house. Prosecutors in The Hague, pressed for time as the Tribunal approaches the end of its mandate, have drastically slimmed the charge sheet.
Radovan Karadzić can now forget the victims of Pionirska Street but the survivors will continue to honour their memory. The commemoration will take place outside the house in Pionirska Ulica, Višegrad, at 12 p.m. on 14 June.
[... /]
[/...]
For further information about the Pionirska Street commemoration and interview arrangements please feel free to contact Bakira Hasečić of Women Victims of War, tel. +387 61 272 000 (Bosnian) / email: udruzenjezenazrtva_rata@bih.net.ba / website: http://www:zena-zrtva-rata.ba
or Višegrad Genocide Memories Blog editor - email: visegradgenocide@gmail.com (English/Bosnian)
[Ends]
-----
Notes for editors:
The entire Bosniak population of Višegrad was "ethnically cleansed" between May and July 1992. 3000 were murdered or disappeared, another 8000 were expelled. In the thirteen years since the war only a small percent have returned to their former home.
The town's historic 16th century Mehmed Pasha Sokolović bridge, a UNESCO World Heritage site memorialised in the works of the town's Nobel Literature Prize-winning son Ivo Andrić, was the scene of some of the most brutal crimes committed by the Bosnian Serb regime.
Photographer and Višegrad survivor Velija Hasanbegović’s gallery of photographs taken at the ceremony on 29 May at Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Bridge to commemorate the start of the 1992 massacres can be seen at the Radio Sarajevo website at http://www.radiosarajevo.ba/media/s/visegrad/index.html
ICTY President Judge Patrick Robinson summed up the crimes of Milan and his cousin Sredoje Lukić as follows:
"In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man, the Pionirska street and Bikavac fires must rank high.
At the close of the twentieth century, a century marked by war and bloodshed on a colossal scale, these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive." (ICTY Press Release, 20 July 2009 at http://www.icty.org/sid/10188)
** On June 27 the Bikavac house fire will also be commemorated in Višegrad.** Around 60 Bosniak civilians were burnt alive. Only one woman managed to escape with severe burns – Zehra Turjačanin, described by Judge Patrick Robinson after she testified in The Hague as a sad and tragic but at the same time heroic person. "Witnesses ... vividly remembered the terrible screams of the people in the house, “like the screams of cats”. The Trial Chamber ... found that at least 60 Muslim civilians were burned alive." (ICTY Judgment Summary, 20 July 2009 at http://www.icty.org/x/cases/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic/tjug/en/090720_judg_summary_en.pdf)
Milan Lukić's base in the Vilina Vlas hotel was one of the most notorious of Bosnia's grim "rape camps". Milan Lukić is currently in Scheveningen Prison in the Netherlands, pending appeal.
Stories and photographs of the victim are posted at the Višegrad Genocide Memories blog at http://genocideinvisegrad.wordpress.com/
The ICTY Prosecutor's marked-up indictment for the Radovan Karadzić war crimes trial is at http://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/ind/en/markedup_indictment_091019.pdf
Višegrad, 8 June 2010
Press Advisory
Survivors of one of 20th Century's most horrific crimes "short-changed" by Karadzić trial
Image: The house in Pionirska Street where 59 Bosniak civilians were burnt
alive by Bosnian Serb soldiers on 14 June 1992. (ICTY photo)
On June 14 a small group of survivors and relatives of victims will revisit the site of one of the 20th Century's most horrific crimes to commemorate the day when a group of seventy Bosnian Muslim civilians - women, children and the elderly - were locked into a house in Pionirska Street in the historic eastern Bosnian town of Višegrad and 59 of them were burned to death.
In the summer of 1992 Bosnian Serb soldiers led by Milan Lukić terrified the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population of the small but strategically located town with a ferocious campaign of murders, mass rape and disappearances, including the Pionirska massacre. It was not until July 2009 that Lukić, a post-war fugitive in Argentina, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for this and other brutal crimes committed during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia's Drina Valley.
After eighteen years' wait, this year survivors and relatives will have the small satisfaction of knowing that the man responsible for a crime described by sentencing ICTY Judge Patrick Robinson as "ranking high in the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man" is finally behind bars, serving a life sentence.
Even so, they feel themselves at the receiving end of "short-change justice" from the ICTY. The man they hold ultimately responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Višegrad, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzić, is no longer facing charges for the massacre at Adem Omeragić’s house. Prosecutors in The Hague, pressed for time as the Tribunal approaches the end of its mandate, have drastically slimmed the charge sheet.
Radovan Karadzić can now forget the victims of Pionirska Street but the survivors will continue to honour their memory. The commemoration will take place outside the house in Pionirska Ulica, Višegrad, at 12 p.m. on 14 June.
[... /]
[/...]
For further information about the Pionirska Street commemoration and interview arrangements please feel free to contact Bakira Hasečić of Women Victims of War, tel. +387 61 272 000 (Bosnian) / email: udruzenjezenazrtva_rata@bih.net.ba / website: http://www:zena-zrtva-rata.ba
or Višegrad Genocide Memories Blog editor - email: visegradgenocide@gmail.com (English/Bosnian)
[Ends]
-----
Notes for editors:
The entire Bosniak population of Višegrad was "ethnically cleansed" between May and July 1992. 3000 were murdered or disappeared, another 8000 were expelled. In the thirteen years since the war only a small percent have returned to their former home.
The town's historic 16th century Mehmed Pasha Sokolović bridge, a UNESCO World Heritage site memorialised in the works of the town's Nobel Literature Prize-winning son Ivo Andrić, was the scene of some of the most brutal crimes committed by the Bosnian Serb regime.
Photographer and Višegrad survivor Velija Hasanbegović’s gallery of photographs taken at the ceremony on 29 May at Mehmed Pasha Sokolović Bridge to commemorate the start of the 1992 massacres can be seen at the Radio Sarajevo website at http://www.radiosarajevo.ba/media/s/visegrad/index.html
ICTY President Judge Patrick Robinson summed up the crimes of Milan and his cousin Sredoje Lukić as follows:
"In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man's inhumanity to man, the Pionirska street and Bikavac fires must rank high.
At the close of the twentieth century, a century marked by war and bloodshed on a colossal scale, these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive." (ICTY Press Release, 20 July 2009 at http://www.icty.org/sid/10188)
** On June 27 the Bikavac house fire will also be commemorated in Višegrad.** Around 60 Bosniak civilians were burnt alive. Only one woman managed to escape with severe burns – Zehra Turjačanin, described by Judge Patrick Robinson after she testified in The Hague as a sad and tragic but at the same time heroic person. "Witnesses ... vividly remembered the terrible screams of the people in the house, “like the screams of cats”. The Trial Chamber ... found that at least 60 Muslim civilians were burned alive." (ICTY Judgment Summary, 20 July 2009 at http://www.icty.org/x/cases/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic/tjug/en/090720_judg_summary_en.pdf)
Milan Lukić's base in the Vilina Vlas hotel was one of the most notorious of Bosnia's grim "rape camps". Milan Lukić is currently in Scheveningen Prison in the Netherlands, pending appeal.
Stories and photographs of the victim are posted at the Višegrad Genocide Memories blog at http://genocideinvisegrad.wordpress.com/
The ICTY Prosecutor's marked-up indictment for the Radovan Karadzić war crimes trial is at http://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/ind/en/markedup_indictment_091019.pdf
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