Ante Maric, almost three decades since the last message received through the Red Cross, is looking for his mother Ilka and sister Ruza, whom he last saw in early May 1993, when the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) occupied Grabovica, a place between Jablanica and Mostar, where a crime was committed against civilians of Croatian nationality.
Ilka Maric, who was 72 years old, and her 37-year-old daughter Ruza, as well as 14 other civilians, were never found. Their names are on the monument to the 33 victims of Croatian nationality who were killed on September 8th-9th, 1993 by members of the BiH Army.
In Grabovica, a place located about 30 kilometers north of Mostar, according to the story of the locals, before the war there were about 45 houses, buses and trains were used by residents to go to school and work.
At the beginning of May 1993, soldiers of the Army units that occupied Grabovica were also accepted in those houses. Ante Maric escaped with several other men of military age towards Mostar, while his mother and sister remained in the house.
“We parted in the morning when there was an attack on Grabovica and I left, I thought okay they were civilians, no one would touch them. And they really didn’t touch them for four months. According to the messages, according to the information I received from some people, from friends, there were robberies, but they were not harassed,” mentioned Maric.
“They were in their house. I received the last message from the Red Cross on September 2nd, 1993. They wrote: ‘We are fine, we are not hungry’, because you know that in the countryside you always have something,” Maric recalls.
He says that a few days after that last message, civilians, mostly old men and women, were killed in Grabovica, because there were no men of military age in the village. When the crime happened, as he says, access to both the Red Cross and UNPROFOR was prohibited. Only two boys survived the murders, whose mother, father, sister, grandmother and grandfather were killed.
“According to some information, a lot of bodies were thrown into Neretva,” told Maric, who never found out what happened to his mother and sister.
Maric stressed that he is ready to reward anyone who has information about the location of the bodies of the missing members of his family, but that he has never been asked for money for the information.
The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH replied to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) BiH’s inquiry that “colleagues from the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office of the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton (HNC) are working on the case.
On the other hand, the HNC Prosecutor’s Office states that “after checking the records, i.e. inspecting the TCMS database, they found that currently, of the cases that are under report or investigation in this Prosecutor’s Office, not a single case related to the above crime in the town of Grabovica has been registered, in the specified period.”
“I will say for myself that I am losing both patience and hope, because absolutely nothing is being done. I know many cases of individual murders, so they are solved. I didn’t say it shouldn’t be solved, but isn’t it a priority to solve these major crimes? It’s a lot to kill one person, not 33,” says Maric and states that all victims should be treated in the same way, but that, unfortunately, this is not happening.
“We in BiH have to live and we cannot live without each other. I want us to help each other, to continue to do better. Just as I want the situation here to improve and that we find one bone, I also want others to find the remains,” concluded President of the Association of Croatian Victims “Grabovica ’93”, Josip Dreznjak, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
