Twelve more victims of the war crimes committed in the area of Prijedor, whose remains were recently discovered in mass graves, were laid to rest at a memorial ceremony in the nearby town of Kozarac on Tuesday.
More than 3,000 civilians from Prijedor, mostly Bosniaks and Croats, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign during the war in BiH.
The remains of some 2,500 of those victims have been found so far in hundreds of mass graves in the area, while about 500 are still missing.
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According to the Institute for Missing Persons of BiH, the victims who will be buried this year in Kozarac were killed in 1992, and their remains were exhumed from the mass graves at Koricani cliffs, Tomasica, Hrastova Glavica and at the sites Kozarac – Garevci and Jablanica – Prosara.
Many citizens, including family members of the victims, as well as top BiH officials, attended the collective funeral, which this year takes place on the day of one of the main religious holidays for Muslims, Eid al-Adha.
Among those who attended was the Bosniak member of the country’s tripartite Presidency, Sefik Dzaferovic, who argued that the crimes committed in 1992 in the area of Prijedor have “all the elements of a genocide” although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia defines them as crimes against humanity.
“The expulsion of the entire Bosniak and Croat population from the Sana valley, the killing of over 3,170 people, including 102 children and 250 women, clearly indicates the intention to eliminate the entire community. That is genocidal intent, but we must respect the decisions of international courts,” Dzaferovic said.
Bakir Izetbegovic, the leader of the main Bosniak party in the country, the Party for Democratic Action (SDA), also attended.
“It is good to talk about the process of reconciliation, forgiveness, but first we need to talk about the awareness of what happened and the strength that Bosniaks must have so that these things do not happen again. If we are weak, divided, if there are a lot of those who have a submissive reflex, the same things we survived a few decades ago can to us again,” Izetbegovic said.
The youngest victim to be laid to rest this year was Fikret Maroslic, who was 21 years old at the time of his death.
Fikret’s father, Himzo Maroslic, is the oldest victim to be buried this year – he was 47 when he was killed.
Their remains were recently discovered at the Koricani cliffs mass grave.
According to Mirsad Duratovic, a former inmate in the Omarska and Trnopolje wartime prison camps, the process of finding the remains of those still missing has stagnated in the past few years.
He strongly criticised the BiH Court and Prosecutor’s Office “not obtaining information on mass graves” as part of war crimes trials.
“We have cases regarding those who have been convicted of crimes – they receive a sentence, serve 2/3 of the sentence, are then released and walk freely in Prijedor, and we still do not know where the victims are,” Duratovic told N1.
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