Over a thousand of parents of the killed Prijedor children, citizens and activists gathered on Friday in that northwestern Bosnian town to traditionally mark the White Ribbon Day in memory of 3,176 persecuted and killed victims, including 102 children.
Edin Ramulic, one of the organisers, told Fena news agency that they gathered to commemorate victims but also to ask the authorities to construct a memorial to the killed children of Prijedor.
“It is our goal to have a dignified memory of the killed Prijedor residents,” he said.
According to him, the parents want the authorities to reconstruct the bridge connecting the old town and Prijedor centre into a memorial bridge but that due to, as he said “a discrimination” the authorities won't allow that.
“However, it is interesting that the memorials to the fallen soldiers of the RS army are not a part of spatial plans of the City of Prijedor either,” stressed Ramulic.
May 31 or the White Ribbon Day is symbolically marking the anniversary of the period in 1992 when Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor ordered all non-Serbs in the area to wear white ribbons and to mark their houses with white sheets.
“The Serb citizens, join your army and police in the search for the extremists. Other citizens, Muslims and Croats, must put white sheets on their houses and apartments and put white ribbons on their arms. Otherwise, they will bear harsh consequences,” a local radio said on
Many Prijedor residents who heard the call from the radio were found in Tomasica mass grave in 2013, the largest mass grave ever seen.
According to associations of victims, 3,173 victims were killed in Prijedor and 31,000 were kept in camps around the town. Sarajevo-based Investigative-Documentation Centre said that 5,209 Prijedor residents of which 4,093 were Bosniaks, 898 Serbs and 182 Croats died or went missing in direct military operations during the 1991-95 period.
In memory of all the victims and those who survived the suffering, people across the world but mostly in Bosnia are wearing a white ribbon every May 31.
