Today, delegations from Canton Sarajevo, politicians, victims’ families and survivors will mark defending of Dobrinja settlement.
In early morning hours of June 17, 1992, upon the order by Ratko Mladić, the Serb forces reinforced with a unit of the Yugoslav People’s Army entered the Aerodromsko Naselje settlement with transporters and tanks. Forty civilians were killed, and their remains were later found in a mass grave in Vlakovo.
Formation Niški specijalci took civilians out of their houses and apartments, and then executed them and slaughtered them. According to the surviving civilians, one-third of the killed victims were Croats and Serbs, whom the Serb forces represented as victims of the Army of the Republic of BiH.
The intrusion was also performed in Dobrinja 3, where men were taken to prison Kula, from where they were exchanged in the middle of the night several days later.
On that June 17, detonations echoed every 30 seconds. Attacks were performed until late that night. June 21 was fateful for Dobrinja settlement. Defenders of Dobrinja, reinforced with special units who arrived in the night between June 21 and June 22 upon the order by the President Alija Izetbegovic, after talking to the war commandant of Dobrinja Ismet Hadžić Mutevelija, managed to break the Serb occupation.
“Dobrinja did not surrender. When the first barricades were placed, we responded with barricades, we did not let them close us,” Ismet Hadžić Mutevelija recalls.
The Dobrinja settlement was not only of operational, tactic importance for the aggressor but also of strategic importance. Thus, even before the armed intrusion into Dobrinja the aggressor frightened the population, trying to talk them into giving up on resistance.
Small groups were organized in different parts of the settlement. Already on May 5, Dobrinja was targeted by Serb forces that entered with transporters into the settlements Dobrinja 1, 3 and 5, and the Aerodromsko Naselje settlement.
The Chetniks entered during the night via Trapar, where the first transporter of JNA was destroyed with a shot fired by Zajko Vatrenjak.
The Lukavica road was their main road (preset Želimira Vidovića Kelija Street).
One of the transporters carried a flag on which it was written “Arkan”, so the fighters had an additional motive to destroy it.
In the film “Dobrinja – siege within the siege” by Avdo Huseinović, one of the most important heroes of Dobrinja Fikret Kereš Fića states that they got a manual missile launcher and that no one dared to fire it, except Zijo Vatrenjak. Then Fića took over and managed to destroy ten transporters and four tanks before getting wounded.
