The 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of Croatian civilians in the village of Grabovica, between Mostar and Jablanica, was marked on Saturday with the laying of wreaths and a holy mass.
On this day in 1993, in the action “Neretva 93.” members of the BiH Army killed 33 civilians, including a four-year-old girl, Mladenka Zadra, while the oldest victim was 87-year-old Marko Marić. Of the 33 killed, 17 are still missing, and only parts of the bodies of most of the victims were found.
The president of the Association of Croatian Victims of “Grabovica 93”, Josip Drežnjak, said that 30 years after the crime, what hurts the relatives of the victims the most is that to this day, it is not known where the bodies of half of the victims are.
“We received one exchange in 1994, two bodies were complete, and the rest had incomplete remains. We don’t have 18 or 16 bodies by any means. Someone had the task of killing civilians, someone to hide them. Where did they hide them? Institutions can do their work there, and the results show that even after 30 years, we have not found a single body,” said Drežnjak.
He again appealed to state institutions, the court and prosecutor’s office, as well as politicians, to help shed light on this massacre.
“The key evidence in the judgment in The Hague was omitted, the directives for the crime came from the command post in Jablanica and they were signed there, and the result was the “Neretva 93” operation. Members of the BiH Army occupied Grabovica on May 10, 1993, life here, if you can say so, went on normally. When they were preparing for that operation, they settled in Pere Marić’s house, killed him and his wife, and in the morning they killed everyone else,” reminded Drežnjak.
The president of the HDZ of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian National Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dragan Čović, said that 30 years of waiting is too much even for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“Every year we come here and say that we must function as a legal state, following the example of Grabovica. 33 innocent victims of a crime, a crime whose aim was to evict and displace what is Croatian in these areas, especially in our Mostar and Herzegovina. There are too many execution grounds in BiH for which those who committed the crime were not held accountable, and the indictments are sitting in the drawers,” Cović believes.
He emphasized how terrible it is that the remains of the murdered victims have not been found to this day.
“These people here incorporated their sacrifice into the freedom of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian people. It is terrible that we are not able to find a good part of the remains of these people because the criminals do not have the courage to admit the crime and say what they did to the victims. That is the picture of Bosnia and Herzegovina at this moment, and perhaps today is a good example to send a message to everyone, to solve the crime problem in Grabovica: who ordered it, who committed it, and that we can bury all the victims, but also to send a message that no crime in the future will make sense,” said Čović.
He added that the main responsibility lies with judicial institutions.
“The judicial and investigative institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina should do their work professionally, so that no politics can put pressure on the process, that is, no one can prevent the perpetrators of crimes from being punished,” he said.
The commemoration of the crime in Grabovica was also attended by members of the Association of Civilian War Victims of the City of Mostar. Adnin Hasić from that association said that all the innocent victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina should be honored.
“Today we are here in Grabovica, we were in Raštani, Trusina, Ahmići, last year we were also in Srebrenica. Grabovica is an integral part of the city of Mostar and we will always be here and anywhere, where the civilians died, to pay our respects so that this evil will never happen again anywhere,” said Hasić.
He pointed out that it is a “civilizational shame” that 30 years after the crime, the remains of 17 murdered people are still being searched for, and he added that for the sake of truth, these processes must be brought to an end.
For the Crime in Grabovica, former members of the RBiH Army were held accountable before the domestic courts for individual murders, while no one was held accountable for the war crime against the civilian population and command responsibility.
Mustafa Hota was sentenced to nine years in prison, Enes Šakrak to ten years, while Nihad Vlahovljak, Sead Karagić and Haris Rajkić were sentenced to 13 years in prison each.
The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia for the crime in Grabovica legally acquitted Sefer Halilović, Chief of the Main Staff of the Supreme Command of the RBiH Army, of criminal liability.
