The Youth Initiatives for Human Rights (YIHR) in Serbia and Montenegro reminded the public of the responsibility of state institutions of the two countries for war crimes in Strpci, BIH, against the citizens of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, demanding that the full responsibility of perpetrators be established and that trials be accelerated.

The two non-governmental organizations recalled that on this day in 1993, members of the Army of Republika Srpska (the then breakaway region of Bosnia) brought out and killed 20 non-Serb civilians from a train travelling on the route Belgrade-Bar at the Strpci railway station.

They pointed out that the families of the victims in Serbia continue to be discriminated against in terms of the status of civilian victims of war.

The NGO’s also note that the families’ lawyer Velija Muric filed criminal charges against 14 senior former officials on May 20, 2002, including former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and FRY Dobrica Cosic, Prime Minister Milan Panic and Chief of General Staff Zivota Panic, and forwarded them to the federal state prosecutor, the Public Prosecutor's Office of Serbia, the Senior Prosecutor in Bijelo Polje and the State Prosecutor of Montenegro.

Muric’s report states that the abduction in Strpci was planned and that the accused knew about it, “because they had strictly confidential information about the abduction and did not take any action within their authority to prevent it from happening.”

Most of those officials have died in the meantime, but the judicial authorities of Serbia and Montenegro are still obliged to investigate and shed light on the abduction case in Strpci, according to the Youth Initiative for Human Rights from Serbia and Montenegro.