The youngest victim was three months old. She is one of 102 children who were killed in Prijedor in the middle of 1992.
In that city in the west of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), it is still not allowed to place a memorial plaque for the children of war victims. The local authorities have not allowed it for the last 10 years, and for the last three days, they have not even responded to the call from the Council of Europe.
Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic requested that a monument be built for the 102 children killed in that town at the beginning of the war in the 1990s in BiH. Since 2013, parents and family members have been asking for this.
In Zecovi, in July 1992, members of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS), the police, and the Crisis Staff killed more than 150 Bosniaks. The trial, in this case, began in 2015 but has not yet been completed.
3.176 people were killed in Prijedor and the surrounding towns. Around 30.000 people of non-Serbian nationality also passed through Prijedor’s Trnopolje, Omarska, and Keraterm camps.
Who responded to Dunja Mijatovic’s request?
The Vice President of the Prijedor City Assembly, Azra Pasalic, says that she replied to Dunja Mijatovic, who sent a letter to her, the mayor, and the president of the City Assembly.
When asked what she stated in her reply to the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Pasalic said that she can “speak only in her own name, not the function she performs”, because “the views of the city institutions must be harmonized”.
“So my position, position of Azra Pasalic, a citizen, a returnee to Prijedor and herself a victim of the war in 1992-1995, my parents were killed then, I was a refugee around the world, I was one of the first to return, and my personal opinion is that a monument should be made to the murdered children. Monuments are the ones that warn, that is, teach generations what they need to know,” Pasalic stated, Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
