“I am the Avdo you are looking for,” Avdo Palic told Zdravko Tolimir, starting negotiations with Ratko Mladic to ensure a safe exit for women, the elderly, children, the sick and the wounded from Zepa, which was supposed to be a UN protected zone.
Palic’s death was the “price” of rescuing civilians.
Avdo Palić, Colonel of the Army of the Republic of BiH and Commander-in-Chief of the Defense of Zepa during the aggression, was during that time of war in Zepa, where he traveled to Aid al Fitr (Bajram) in 1992 to visit relatives, Klix.ba news portal writes.
Before the war, he lived in Vlasenica and worked as a high school teacher. He stayed in Zepa for the next 3.5 years, where he organized resistance.
Palic was captured and brutally killed after the fall of Zepa in 1995, when he started negotiations with Ratko Mladic. At the negotiations on the evacuation of civilians from the so-called protected zone of Žepa, on 27 July 1995, in the UNPROFOR camp in Bokšanica near Žepa, together with Palić, Mehmed Hajrić and Amir Imamović were cowardly captured.
Palic was taken from Zepa on August 4 to a secret military prison in Bijeljina, from where he was taken by Captain Dragomir Pecanac and VRS member Zeljko Mijatovic on September 5, 1995, on the orders of the RS Army General Staff, to exchange prisoners.
That date, September 5, is considered the day he was killed. Palic’s remains were exhumed from a mass grave in November 2001 in Vragolovi near Rogatica, along with the remains of eight other victims. The search for the bones lasted 14 years. The mass grave in Vragolovi was discovered in 2001 by Jusuf Karahmet, a few months after he returned to his home.
