The indictment against 13 members of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (RBiH) in Gorazde leaves no hope for justice.
Among other things, the indictment charges two commanders, Ferid Buljubasic and Ahmet Sejdic, with war crimes against victims of Serbian nationality in the town of Josanica near Foca, and Sejdic additionally with crimes in the villages of Klisure, Bursici and Hadrovici in Visegrad, and Buljubasic with crimes against civilians of Serbian nationality in the villages around Cajnice.
With reason, due to the weight of the allegations in the indictment, which, among other things, mentions the commission of crimes of genocide, but also the fact that to date no one has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the city that rightly bears the epithet of the hero city, due to the incredible resistance to the aggression against the RBIH.
In the past ten years, there have been attempts to portray the only free city on the Drina, a shelter for thousands of refugees from ethnically cleansed Foca, Visegrad, Cajnice and other cities of Eastern Bosnia, under siege for 1,336 days, without electricity, water and food, shelled, a city where mass murders of civilians and children were committed, as a city of war criminals, with the continuous prosecution of its defenders.
Who are the killers of children in Gorazde?
It has long been clear to everyone in Gorazde that the truth about the ‘90s is being tried to be hidden and distorted because those who defended their lives are being tried, and that the latest in a series of indictments are well thought out attempts to change the character of the war in BiH by equating the victim and the criminal.
It is paradoxical that no one deals with, for example, the mass murders of children in Gorazde, even though the circumstances under which they were killed and all the facts are documented in the book by Muamer Dzananovic from the Institute for Researching Crimes Against Humanity and International Law at the University of Sarajevo. During the siege of Gorazde, more than 7,000 people were killed, killed and wounded, of which more than 550 were children, among whom at least 120 were killed. Among the murdered children, as many as 40 percent are of preschool age, and mass murders of children were committed in the first months of the war.
The attempt to change the character of the war, the celebration of crimes and the mocking of the victims, as well as new indictments and lengthy processes as one of the ways and methods of “reckoning with the 1990s” that will serve as a political tool in the hands of genocide deniers, who still enjoy the greatest support in Serbia, which in the same way as participated in the aggression against the RBIH also participates in the last stage of the genocide, its denial.
The accused are mostly unavailable to the prosecuting authorities
According to data from the OSCE Mission to BiH from September 2022, 44 are hiding in Serbia, 38 in Croatia, and 19 accused are hiding in Montenegro, Sweden, Switzerland and France, which is a total of 101 people.
According to High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC)data in 2022, 4,099 persons were registered in all prosecutor’s offices in 465 cases awaiting processing, and 2,752 of them are not yet under investigation. War crimes cases are processed in BiH at the state, entity, cantonal, and Brcko District levels. The only encouraging fact is that war crimes offenses do not have a statute of limitations. By 2022, the courts in BiH have handed down verdicts in around 600 war crimes cases, and 42 cases are resolved annually, on average.
The action of the Prosecutor’s Office in BiH, which processes less complex cases, fragments cases in order to comply with norms, investigates and prosecutes only Bosniaks, changing the essence and character of war operations in this area, is particularly controversial in the example of Gorazde, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
