Of the 3,176 victims of the massacres that took place in the northwestern town of Prijedor during the 1992-1995 war, 102 were children and the annual commemoration of the atrocity is particularly hard for the parents who survived it a difficult day.
Fikret Bacic argues he did not ‘lose’ his children decades ago. They were killed.
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“It’s not like they were a key or some item for them to be lost. My children were killed by a firing squad, forces of the Army of Republika Srpska did it, they shot 32 people then. My six-year-old daughter, my 12-year-old son and another 18 children and 14 women were shot. They killed 29, three of them survived,” Bacic told N1.
On May 31, 1992, the Bosnian Serb local government ordered all non-Serbs in the Prijedor area to mark their houses with white sheets and to wear white ribbons on their arms.
It was also the day the Omarska prison camp was established, where 3,300 of those people would end up.
About 50,000 people were exiled from Prijedor, while about 30,000 non-Serb men, women and children ended up in prison camps such as Keraterm, Trnopolje, Omarska and another 54 similar places.
Bacic told N1 that he is still waiting for a monument for the killed children in Prijedor to be erected. He said that the Mayor promised to discuss the topic and that the city assembly will form a working group which will lead the project.
“We agreed that it will be a complex of monuments, on one side there will be a monument for the children killed during WWII and on the other for the children killed in the past (1992-1995) war,” he said.
