The Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR BiH) has started a civic initiative to raise the memorial to the victims of the crime at Kazan.
Activists of this organization will visit the locality of Kazan today to focus on the victims of this terrible crime.
Before the visit, there will be a lecture on the crimes at the Kazan by Dr. Nicolas Moll, author of the publication “Between Memories, Denial and Forgetting: Three Case Studies on the Culture of Memory in BiH 20 Years After the War”. Also, Moll is author of “The Most Famous Public Secret of Sarajevo: Facing Caco, Kazan and the crimes committed against Serbs in the besieged Sarajevo, from war until 2015”. The lecture will take place at YIHR’s premises in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
29 bodies have been exhumed so far from the caves in Kazani, all of them belonged to civilians from Sarajevo and most of them were Serbs. However, the exact number of the victims killed there has never been established. This is one of the objectives of Association of the families of the victims in the Sarajevo-Romanija region.
On this matter Izetbegović only said during his visit that there had already been criminal trials during the war and he hoped that the cases that had not been completed yet could be closed, so that the full truth could be established.
So far, 14 members of the Army of BiH have been on trial for the crimes committed in Kazani, yet these were never found to be war crimes, but only ordinary murders. Hence, the indicted were given prison sentences ranging between 10 months and 6 years.
Since Caco died during the blitz organized to arrest him in 1993, the only war crimes case for the Kazani crimes has been that against member of the 10th brigade Samir Bejtić, which has been going on for over a decade and has been re-started 4 times, most recently in February 2016. Bejtić’s defense lawyer, Fahrija Karkin, even argued that it was not fair that his client be prosecuted for war crimes while the other perpetrators of the same crimes got away with ordinary murder sentences. However, as the director of the Research and Documentation Center Mirsad Tokača underlined in an interview on the Kazani facts, crimes where civilians are dragged out of their homes and killed by members of the military clearly classify as war crimes, as civilians are protected under international law. According to Tokača, there was enough evidence to prosecute all Kazani perpetrators for war crimes, but there was no political will to do so.
Such designation is necessary to underline the gravity and sensitivity of the crimes, and the reluctance of the Bosnian judiciary testifies to the political significance of the Kazani case. The fear that the admission of these crimes could lead to an equalization of victimhood as well as the enduring celebration of Caco as a hero by part of the population has prevented an open debate about what happened in Kazani.
