In the summer of 1992, Bosnian Serb forces massacred at least 2.000 Bosniak civilians in Visegrad and mostly used the Drina River to remove and hide the victims’ bodies. The Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic bridge, which originates from the Ottoman period, was one of the famous execution sites, from which slaughtered victims were thrown into the river.
As the water level dropped, a search for human remains began in the entire area. More than 200 bodies were found before the Serbian authorities in Bajina Basta announced that the dam would be reopened on September 10th, 2010, when the river would rise again and the undiscovered remains would disappear underwater.
Calls from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to stop the reopening of the dam were ignored, so on September 10th, the gates were closed. Only after urgent calls from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of BiH, Sven Alkalaj, did the Prosecutor’s Office of Serbia finally issue an order preventing the reopening of the dam until the end of the search.
Searches and exhumations revealed the brutality of the crimes committed and showed how difficult and complex the search for missing persons can be. It also proved that crimes cannot be hidden forever, even two decades after they were committed.
Many citizens join the search
The exhumations at Lake Perucac were a unique phenomenon, with dozens of volunteers who came to dig and break through the mud in search of more remains. Despite this, there were not enough of them to cover the entire area that was available at that time.
Preoccupied with the elections in BiH at the time, the state institutions ignored the calls for help – the army just stood by and watched, providing minimal support. What is saddest is that, in the pre-election period in which all possible means were used to get votes, no political party thought it worth trying to use the situation at Lake Perucac or to mention it.
If this were Srebrenica, you could be sure that Lake Perucac would be teeming with politicians and youth activists of political parties from all over BiH. Visegrad was simply considered not that important – there were only a few television cameras there, and the trip to Lake Perucac was too exhausting for election candidates to be interested in going there.
In the months that followed, DNA was extracted from the skeletal remains, and in 2012 the identity of the exhumed was also revealed – 162 victims of the war, mostly from Visegrad, along with about twenty from Srebrenica and Zepa. Among them were two Serbian soldiers from Gorazde, two victims of a kidnapping from a train in Strpci in 1993 and one of a kidnapping in Sjeverin in 1992.
The oldest victim was born in 1906, and the youngest in 1988. He was only four years old at the time of the murder.
With the water now covering the remains of the other victims, Lake Perucac remains one of the largest mass graves in modern European history, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
