Family members, associations of civilian victims, and representatives of the city and cantonal authorities of Sarajevo laid flowers to mark the 31st anniversary of the crime in Halaci Street when a grenade explosion killed eight and seriously and lightly wounded six citizens of Sarajevo.
On yesterday’s day in 1992, Dzenan Aljevic, Mahir Ferhatovic, Tarik Harba, Esma Muratovic, Meliha Muratovic-Spahic, Almasa Spahic, Mahira Spahic, and Ismet Suljic were killed in the explosion of a grenade fired from the position of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) while waiting in line for water.
Fikret Grabovica, president of the Association of Parents of Children Murdered in Besieged Sarajevo, recalls that three Spahic sisters and seven-year-old Esma Muratovic, daughter of Meliha Muratovic-Spahic, one of the sisters, died that day.
“The crime committed in this place is confirmation that the members of the VRS killed in a targeted, deliberate, and systematic manner. They wanted to destroy this city, expel its citizens, and take over the city, however, thanks to the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) and the citizens, they did not succeed,” says Grabovica, disappointed that after more than 30 years, the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH has not filed a single indictment for crimes committed during the siege of Sarajevo.
Samir Avdic, the deputy mayor of Sarajevo, says that the culture of remembrance and commemoration must live on for the sake of the generations to come so that the evil that the citizens of Sarajevo and the whole of BiH survived is not repeated to anyone.
“We should remember the thousand-day siege of Sarajevo, where the citizens were exposed to constant shelling and sniper fire while trying to survive because there was no electricity, water, or food,” points out Avdic.
According to the judgments of the Hague Tribunal, the former political and military leaders of RS – Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as well as the former commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the VRS, Stanislav Galic, were sentenced to life imprisonment for the campaign of terror against civilians with sniper and artillery attacks. Dragomir Milosevic, former commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, was sentenced to 29 years in prison.
During the 44-month siege of the capital of BiH, more than 11.000 inhabitants were killed, of which around 1.600 were children, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
