“Citizens of Serb nationality, join your army and police in hunting down these extremists. Other citizens of Muslim and Croat nationality must hang white flags outside their houses and flats and wear white ribbons on their forearms, otherwise, they will bear grave consequences,” said a radio transmission on May 31, 1992, in Bosnia's north-western town of Prijedor, marking the slaughter of 3,173 innocent civilians and locking up of 31,000 civilians in concentration camps.
For this reason, many Bosnian citizens and people across Europe will wear white ribbons on their forearms and hang white sheets outside their windows, remembering the Prijedor victims.
Many Prijedor residents who heard this broadcast were found in October 2013 in a village Tomasica, the biggest mass grave in the country, holding close to 1,000 Bosniak and Croat civilians killed by Bosnian Serb forces.
The call to mark their homes and forearms and the propaganda from the beginning of the war in Prijedor aided the national polarization between residents of this town, creating the atmosphere of fear and setting the groundwork for crimes against humanity and other inhumane treatment of civilians.
On this occasion, Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic called on the local authorities “to step up the preparations for the memorial for the killed children” in this town, recalling that 102 children had been killed in this town alone
Tmw we commemorate the thousands of people, incl 102 children,killed in #Prijedor in '92. I salute the work of HR defenders on preserving the memory of the victims & I call on local authorities to step up the preparations for the memorial for the killed children #DanBijelihTraka pic.twitter.com/ncnsR1LFeM
— Commissioner for Human Rights (@CommissionerHR) May 30, 2020
Prijedor does not have a single memorial remembering the innocent victims that were killed there, and only occasionally human rights defenders and volunteers hold a reading of names of the killed residents.
