Bosnia-Herzegovina
Report #10 – Tomašica By Peter Lippman
December 2013
2013 Report index
Report 1: Kosovo, mid-July, 2013 Report 2: Sarajevo, July 2013 Report 3: Sarajevo, continued July 2013 Report 4: Tuzla, July 2013 Report 5: Mostar, July 2013 Report 6: Srebrenica, August 2013 Report 7: Srebrenica, continued, August 2013
Report 8: Prijedor and vicinity, August
2013
Report 9: Prijedor and vicinity,
part two, August
2013
Report 10:
Tomašica, December 2013
To contact Peter
in response to these reports or any of his articles,
Tomašica, Bosnia’s biggest mass grave
Dear friends and readers,
I dedicate this final report of the present series, and
the entire series, to the brave activists of Prijedor, Banja Luka,
Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Mostar, and all of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The report that follows contains a number of unreferenced quotations
and citations, because this is not an academic writing. I am
inserting a few linked sources at the end of the report. Feel free
to contact me if you wish to know further sources of any information
contained here.
thanks for reading,
Peter
*
In early September, excavation on a huge mass grave near Prijedor
was commenced, and since then, some hundreds of remains have been
exhumed. These are the remains of some of the approximately 1,200
disappeared wartime victims still missing in this region.
In order to discuss this development I must provide a few details
about the atmosphere in Prijedor as a refresher about what kind of
place the present, arresting drama is unfolding in.
I have regularly mentioned the survivors’ and returnees’ struggle
for memory and against denial. Demands of this struggle include the
arrest and processing of the war criminals; the right to
memorialization of the war crimes at the places of those crimes; and
of course, among other things, the discovery and reburial of the
missing.
I have also described some of the actions of the local activists,
and the response of denial by local officials, all the way up to the
“Pharaoh” (as Sudbin Musić called him), Mayor Pavić of Prijedor.
This past May 31 on
“White Armband Day,”
activists from around Bosnia-Herzegovina and abroad gathered in
Prijedor, wearing white armbands in memory of the wartime
requirement – chillingly reminiscent of similar World War II Nazi
laws pertaining to Jews – that local Muslims had to identify
themselves as such by wearing white armbands.
The activists laid 103 roses on the paving stones in the pedestrian
zone in central Prijedor, recalling the number of children who were
killed in this municipality during the war. Despite the fact that
Mayor Pavić banned this demonstration, as he has previously banned
others in the same vein, hundreds of people gathered in defiance of
the mayor's prohibitions.
In response, Pavić belittled the action, saying, “Ah, that’s just
another gay parade!” But the turnout for the protest was a clear
indication that resistance to Pavić’s obstruction, and agitation for
equal rights in the Prijedor area, are growing. Significantly, not
only did local Serbs participate in the demonstration along with
Muslim returnees, but supporters traveled to Prijedor from Banja
Luka, Sarajevo and even from abroad.
Lately Mayor Pavić and his legal enforcers have been stepping up
harassment of returnees by, among other things, arresting some of
them who had been involved in the early, failed resistance to ethnic
cleansing in the area. He has also had activist Sabahudin Garibović
arrested simply for using the world “genocide” during a protest last
year. And above all, the Pharaoh continues to act as the main
obstacle in preventing the establishment of any public memorial
institution commemorating the war crimes against Bosniaks and Croats
in the region.
One of the saddest elements of this repressive situation has been
the willingness of a majority of local Bosniak representatives –
principally from the SDA and SBiH parties – to collaborate with
Pavić or to gloss over his deeds. Most of them have given in to the
temptation of their own careerism, which treats a secure job and an
income as more important than the rights of the returnees and the
victims of the wartime atrocities. Local activists have wondered
publicly why the central party organizations in Sarajevo have not
spoken up against this collaboration.
Meanwhile, Pavić regularly speaks of Prijedor as a “city looking to
the future, where there is no need to awaken the evil spirits of the
past.” This, while continuing to conduct interrogations –
“informative conversations” with activists, sometimes sending police
to visit them late at night.
In this human rights desert activists have carried on, strengthening
their efforts rather than giving up – although you can imagine that
it is a thankless and wearying struggle that they and the survivors
they represent are waging. Two families of activists I know
celebrated the important religious holiday of Kurban Bajram together
while I was in the region, with a total of twelve people present.
For us in the West, that may seem like a decent number, but at least
thirty or forty of their relatives were absent – either buried in
the local Šehid cemetery, or still missing in some pit or mass
grave.
In the area of Prijedor there were 59 concentration camps and other
spaces where prisoners were held during the war. Of the more than
3,200 people who were killed, remains have been discovered in
various parts of the Krajina in over a hundred clandestine graves,
of which around sixty were located in the Prijedor municipality. To
date the biggest one was Kevljani II (mentioned in a
previous report), but now a larger mass grave at Tomašica, a
mining site near the small town of Ljubija, has been opened. The
mines at Ljubija are part of the mining and mineral processing
complex
bought by Mittal, together with Omarska, in 2004.
In a little over two months, well over four hundred remains have
been uncovered.
In fact, parts of Tomašica had been excavated in 2004, when 24
remains were exhumed, and in 2006, when another ten were discovered.
But somehow, it was not understood that the extent of the burials
was much greater than what had already been seen, and thus for
another seven years the place lay ignored, except by the occasional
shepherd, grazing his flock on the surface above the bones of
hundreds of victims.
Then this year, a couple of former soldiers in the Serb army felt
pangs of conscience and let authorities know that the gravesite held
far more victims than had been supposed. These soldiers had
participated in the transporting of bodies to the site in 1992. One
of them led investigators directly to the site of the mass grave. He
said, “I can’t comprehend what my people did to the Bosniak people.”
He did not ask for money in return for revealing the grave, only
that his name never be mentioned. He spoke of the neighbors who, in
the postwar years, had protested about the grave, calling for it to
be removed because of the odor, which was reaching to their houses
even via the underground water. But they were not prepared to let
the families of the missing know about this place.
The scope of the mass grave became obvious only gradually. In early
October it was reported that 47 complete bodies had been exhumed and
some 50 incomplete remains. Excavation was taking place as deep as
ten meters under the surface. More remains came to light every day,
and towards the end of the month some 271 victims had been exhumed,
some with identifying documents and personal effects such as watches
and photographs. On October 31st a count of 380 remains
was reported. Some of the remains still included hair, skin, and
even body tissue, because they had been buried so deeply, in clay,
and packed together. These gruesome facts may contribute to
identification, which will nevertheless mostly be done through DNA
comparison.
Early on, the grave was reported to cover an area of five thousand
square meters, but in the course of the excavation new sections have
also been uncovered.
Tomašica is what is known as a primary grave, which means that the
remains that are found there have not been moved from anywhere else.
The majority of mass graves stemming from the Srebrenica massacres,
on the other hand, are secondary and even tertiary graves, holding
remains that were removed from their original resting place in order
to conceal the crime.
Since early November it has been predicted that the number of
exhumations at Tomašica will break the record 629 recovered remains
from the mass grave of Srebrenica massacre victims at Crni Vrh, near
Zvornik. In fact, there is a secondary grave, Jakarina Kosa,
associated with Tomašica. There, in 2001, 373 remains were exhumed,
and they were said to have been removed from Tomašica as early as
July 1993.
By mid-November the number of complete and incomplete remains
reached 430, and then 470. It is expected that hundreds more remains
could be exhumed, although as of early December, fresh snow will
slow excavation during this season. Given this – and especially
taking into account those removed to Jakarina Kosa – Tomašica should
be considered the biggest single mass grave to be encountered in
Europe since World War II.
The revelations at Tomašica surpass
the mere fact of numbers, staggering though they are. Those being
exhumed at this mass grave are the missing loved ones of people who
have been waiting for them for two decades. The
uncovering is a painful experience for the survivors, and at the
same time a bitter satisfaction. On one hand, it brings back to the
fore all the dreadful memories of the horror and atrocities that
took place during the war, and throws into high contrast the feeling
of injustice at the indifference and denial of citizens of Prijedor,
from the neighbors of Tomašica on up to the highest local officials
and beyond.
On the other hand, there is certainly satisfaction for many people
who have been waiting for twenty years to bury their loved ones to
know that they will finally be able to do so. Activist Mirsad
Duratović said, “This is a big relief for the families that have
been searching for their missing loved ones for the last twenty
years. After each funeral their fear increases, the fear that they
will never find their disappeared relatives, and that is something
that causes the greatest pain and fear among the families of the
disappeared.”
Relatives of the missing, including activists, have been visiting
Tomašica since the new excavations began. Unable to stay away even
though they cannot participate in the excavation, it is as if they
feel they must be involved, and that their relatives must be found.
People from specific villages such as Zecovo, Čarakovo, Rizvanovići,
and Bišćani came in the hope that their relatives who were killed in
those villages, or taken away to be killed, would be discovered.
In Zecovo, seventeen children and fifteen women were killed.
I noted that the villages mentioned above are all in that group of
locations that were attacked by extreme nationalist Serb forces as
part of their concerted move westwards, as described to me by Kemal
Pervanić in an
earlier report.
Aida Đugum, from Prijedor, was quoted as saying, “Whenever they
discover another mass grave, I hope that they will find my brother
and father.”
Mirsad Duratović's colleague Sudbin Musić wrote, “I am reeling from
the pain, and mute from the horror. And I don't know, I really don't
know how to bear this.”
And Duratović, also missing the better part of his family, wrote,
“All of us who are waiting to discover our loved ones hope that this
grave will uncover the long-hidden, heavy secret of the
disappearance of our dear ones. It is difficult and painful, but may
God grant that all of our martyrs, and we, may finally find peace.”
It did not assuage the pain of the survivors at all, in this
sensitive period, when Mayor Pavić declared that the remains found
at Tomašica were of people who “perished and were buried.” I must
explain that in English, “to die” means simply “to die,” but in
Bosnian, there are different verbs for “to die” (a natural death),
“to perish” (to be killed while fighting during a war, or in a car
accident), and “to be killed,” that is, to be murdered. So these
people were not killed while fighting; the vast majority of them
were civilians, along with a few captured soldiers.
Likewise, in English, “to bury” means “to bury,” in various senses.
But in the Bosnian language there are distinct verbs for burying.
You can’s use the same verb for throwing someone in a pit that you
use for giving someone a decent burial.
Details have come out gradually about the nature of the “burials.”
Excavators found bullet cartridges at the gravesites, revealing that
at least some of the victims had been killed on the spot. And
recently, a Swedish journalist recounted that immediately after the
signing of the Dayton agreement at the end of 1995 he had researched
the story of Tomašica and had received information about it from
human rights researchers in Croatia. Croatian human rights activist
Ivan Zvonimir Čičak
recalled that he had been informed about Tomašica by an employee of
the mine there. The employee told him that “a mass of live people”
had been buried there. Ćičak was also told that hundreds of people
were machine-gunned at the edge of pits, and that lime was dumped on
top of the bodies before they were bulldozed into the ground.
In two New York Times articles, published on January 11th
and 14th
of 1996, Chris Hedges wrote in as much detail as was known about the
missing at that time. The crucial name of the Tomašica site was
absent, but Hedges reported that one nearby resident told him,
“Buses were coming day and night. They were full of people, and then
they returned from the mine empty. We heard shooting day and
night...that lasted more than two months.” Hedges noted that two
American reporters who came to investigate mass graves in the area
were arrested by Serb forces and deported from the entity.
British troops stationed in the area after the signing of the Dayton
agreement reported finding corpses in all manner of places – in
basements and under floorboards – in the course of their patrols,
but that they had no mandate to search for missing persons or mass
graves, which would be a diversion from their main goal. One
commander said, “Our job is to separate forces, not to look for mass
graves.”
In his second article, Hedges recalled that after World War II,
“the Germans were not allowed to deny their Holocaust,” but that
such an endeavor of denial was already well underway among Serbs, in
“a new war against memory.” And Hedges criticized NATO troops’
“nuanced aloofness,” contrasting it with the practices of British
and American troops in Germany fifty years earlier.
In 2005, the Sarajevo weekly magazine Dani published an article
by Snježana Mulić discussing Mittal’s at best irresponsible approach
to its grim acquisitions in Prijedor municipality. Mulić estimated
that there were still 1,700 bodies hidden within the mines at
Ljubija, but noted that this did not stop the Mittal Steel Company
from continuing to mine ore. She recounts how Jasmin Odobašić,
working for the
Bosnian-Herzegovinian Federal Commission on Missing Persons, guided
Ljubija mines manager Muraree Mukherjee, a Mittal employee, to the
Kevljani mass grave in 2004 and showed him hundreds of remains.
Mukherjee promised Odobašić that he would
“do everything so that all the graves...were discovered.” But
Mukherjee did not follow through on his promise, and spokespersons
for Mittal have even denied that there are any mass graves on the
property that the company controls.
On the subject of mass denial, the writer and commentator Nedim
Seferović had this to say, in early December:
“On the other side of a chillingly painful reality embodied by the
pile of human corpses of the innocent killed and buried people at
Tomašica…[there is]
the irrational denialist way of life of a huge number of residents
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, flatly uninterested in the repercussions of
the massive crimes that were committed just a short ways from their
doorsteps.
“That
distancing is
astonishing and unexplainable; in its full capacity it is
collective, ever-present and deafening in its cowardly silence. It
is the reflection of the dominant group attitude towards the crimes
committed in the past and towards the results of those crimes. In
its totality it encompasses the refusal to admit and accept the
essential existence of Tomašica, [] as a pile of human bodies killed
under the force of the all-encompassing value system that justified
and supported crime… That distancing, primarily of a Nazi-fascist
character, no longer may be excused today on the basis of an
exceptional social climate wherein one could lose one’s head simply
because of a dissenting outlook. Today, it [denial] is a matter of
choice.”
*
In a
related political development, in early November Mirsad Duratović,
who is a member of the Prijedor municipal council, was removed from
his seat on the Commission for Regional Cooperation and Inter-ethnic
Relations. This was the culmination of the deterioration of
relations between him and the most powerful Bosniak member of the
municipal council, Muharem Murselović.
Murselović is also a landlord, and he had been renting office space
to Duratović’s organization of concentration camp survivors,
Prijedor 92. After that organization and other activists criticized
Murselović for joining a parliamentary coalition with Mayor Pavić’s
party, he tripled the rent on their office, forcing them to move.
Then, in a further retaliatory move, he supported the expulsion of
Duratović from the Commission. In fact, all the other Bosniak
members of the municipal assembly voted for the expulsion as well.
Duratović noted that his income from membership in the Commission
was a mere 125 KM a month (around $80) – not anything to live on,
but his only steady income. However, he said, “I’m not going to keep
quiet about Tomašica because of a 125-KM income.”
*
A week into November, Mayor Pavić found it within himself to visit
the mass grave at Tomašica. While there, he spoke with a court
investigator, and expressed “deep sorrow for all that happened, and
especially for the families of the disappeared and the exhumed
victims.” He also stated that the city of Prijedor was prepared to
offer assistance “so that the exhumations could be carried out in a
dignified manner.” It should be pointed out that the families of the
disappeared have financed one of the three bulldozers working to
uncover the remains.
Families of the victims were not particularly gratified by Pavić’s
statements, saying that Pavić would have much more to do before they
could be convinced of his sincerity.
It should not be difficult to understand the survivors’ frustration
– certainly with Pavić, but also with pretty much anyone else who
comes to Tomašica for a photo opportunity. This includes Bosniak
politicians who have come up from Sarajevo to be seen at the
gravesite, but who otherwise have given precious little support for
the survivors’ ongoing struggles. Meanwhile, survivors have invited
President of the Hague war crimes tribunal Theodore Meron to visit
the site. Members of survivors’ associations visiting Holland called
on Meron to come to Tomašica and to “experience the smell of
genocide.”
Meron’s visit, which took place at the end of November, was added to
a trip that he took to Sarajevo at that time in order to attend a
conference marking the anniversary of the International Criminal
Tribune for the former Yugoslavia. But, considering his recent
record of reversing the convictions of some of the most notorious
war criminals, his appearance was met with a very ambivalent
response on the part of survivors.
Another reason for the heightened sensitivity of the survivors is
the media silence that has reigned in the region. This is to be
expected from the media in the Republika Srpska, unfortunately, and
there, it has been nearly complete. However, it was reported that a
journalist from Banja Luka came to the gravesite and became sick
from what he saw. Another one, from Belgrade but working for a
German television station, broke down in tears, overcome by the
crimes that were committed “in the name of his people.”
*
A note about journalists in the RS: There are, in fact, more than a
few very honorable journalists based in the Republika Srpska, some
of them working for news outlets in the Federation or abroad. Dragan
Bursać, a professor of philosophy, is a columnist and journalist for
the indispensible RS-based web portal “buka” (noise), represented in
the Cyrillic as “6yka.” (Click
here for the outlet’s main page.)
Bursać castigated the mainstream RS press for ignoring Tomašica as
much as it could, recalling how during World War II, Serbs
themselves were killed in vast numbers in ways not much different
from the more recent massacres. He asked rhetorically, “Has this
people perhaps forgotten?” He continued, “What is with all of us,
twenty years after? Do we have the morality, the honor, and the
humanity, to look at ourselves in the mirror and to seek
forgiveness? …no, the media, nursed on the fast food of nationalism,
does not give this nation the chance even to look in that mirror of
reality.”
Touching on historical amnesia, Bursać continued, “Remember, there
are things worse than death. And that is death buried in oblivion
and disinterest. In one way or another, this nearly one thousand
people [referring to those exhumed at Tomašica] will at least be
saved from that, and their families will give them a dignified
burial…but, who will mourn for the chronically uninformed and
uninterested, when they are no more, when they cross from physical
obedience to eternity on the other side? Is that what they were born
for, to keep silent and to be dead throughout their entire life?”
And there is the reporter Nađa Diklić. I am mentioning her because
she was in the news late last month, after
her car was damaged by an unknown attacker. This is the third time
that Diklić's auto has been attacked, reflecting a pattern that's
standard practice against dissidents and whistleblowers in the
Republika Srpska. It is not uncommon for this kind of attack to
constitute a warning, portending physical attacks and even the
murder of the target.
Diklić contacted the police after each attack on her car. This time,
the police declared that it was a case of attempted grand theft.
Diklić wondered why someone would try to steal a seventeen-year-old
Golf worth less than a thousand KM (~$700), when there were other,
much more valuable cars nearby.
Nađa Diklić’s offense against the Republika Srpska authorities has
been to write about corruption in that entity for many years. In the
earlier part of the previous decade, she wrote for the
Sarajevo-based daily Avaz. In 2006 she wrote an article about the
wealth of Milorad Dodik, who at the time was prime minister of the
RS, earning the animosity of the boss of that entity.
In recent years Diklić, who finished degrees in political science
and journalism, has been a correspondent for the Sarajevo-based
weekly muckraker Slobodna Bosna. For that magazine she has
covered economic scandals of the RS, such as the crooked
privatization and wrecking of the large “Birač” aluminum processing
plant.
When in a recent interview Diklić was asked how it is to live in the
Republika Srpska and to write criticism of the government, she
answered, “That is about like being the Israeli correspondent for
some Palestinian newspaper…here, the majority of the Banja Luka
media work within the scope of the program, ‘help the RS
government,’ and for this they have received millions of KM. And if
I publish a documented report that Milorad Dodik smuggled gas during
the war, and I supply the documentation, I’m not writing an article
about war profiteering, I’m ‘attacking the Republika Srpska’…because
here, the rule applies: ‘The state, that is I!’ [as spoken by Dodik].”
After Diklić wrote the article about Dodik’s wealth, she recalled,
“the prime minister of the entity cursed me up and down. No one in
my editorial staff responded to that, and on one of the portals
here, there were exactly 63 comments about how I should be killed,
because I’m a ‘traitor to the Serbian people.’” But Diklić expressed
gratitude that in the present case, the Association of Bosnian-Herzegovinan
Journalists has reacted. (And she promises to come up to date with
payment of her membership dues.)
Diklić conjectures that the most recent attack was in response to a
presentation she gave not long ago in Belgrade at the founding
assembly of the Balkan Anti-corruption League. There, she focused on
some of the most prominent corruption scandals in the Republika
Srpska in recent times, some of which are associated with Dodik and
his ruling SNSD party. “I
spoke about the privatization of Birač…and the political murders in
the RS,” Diklić explained. She added that more than anything else,
it apparently “bothered someone” (a very common phrase in Bosnia)
that she filed a criminal complaint against Dodik with the special
prosecutor in Serbia, for war profiteering. This complaint is based
on material that she uncovered while researching for Slobodna Bosna,
concerning a loan that Dodik received from a bank in Serbia.
*
More chilling history about the original disappearance of Prijedor’s
victims into the earth at Tomašica came to light in mid-November
during the proceedings against former top commander of the Republika
Srpska army, Ratko Mladić, on trial at The Hague for war crimes.
There, the prosecutor noted that as of mid-November, 470 sets of
remains had been exhumed. It was noted that Mladić had written about
these remains in his wartime journals, which were captured during a
raid on his Belgrade apartment in 2010, when he was still a
fugitive.
In a May 27, 1993 entry in the diary, Mladić wrote that the then
head of the Prijedor police, Simo Drljača, had requested assistance
from Mladić in the removal of “about five thousand bodies buried in
the mines.” Mladić wrote further that Drljača wanted to “foist them
on the army” and to have the army “take care of the bodies by
burning them, grinding them up, or in some other way.”
Recently, the survivor and former prisoner organizations in Prijedor
addressed a list of demands to the authorities in that city,
including the following:
--Urgently appoint two prosecutors to investigate the murder and
concealment of those buried at Tomašica.
--Finance a sufficient number of construction machines to assist in
the excavations at Tomašica.
--Form a multi-ethnic and multi-disciplinary commission that will
determine all the circumstances of the deaths of the people found in
the mass grave at Tomašica, as was done in the case of Srebrenica.
--Permit the observance of the May 31st White Armband Day
in Prijedor.
--Abolish ethnic discrimination against wartime victims and
survivors.
--Allow the construction of a memorial to the victims in the center
of Prijedor, at Omarska, and at other former concentration camps.
Discussing these demands, Edin Ramulić of the organization Izvor
wondered why no one has been prosecuted for the crimes associated
with Tomašica. Nothing has been undertaken to determine the
identities of the culprits. Ramulić noted that, in the case of the
1,900 previous exhumations already performed in the Prijedor area,
there has not been a single court case opened.
In this vein, activist Refik Hodžić wrote an article (November 12th)
stating that the phenomenon of Tomašica is the natural result of a
plan to separate peoples. He describes the consequences of such
separation: silence about the suffering of the “other” – a “leaden”
silence, which causes as much anger among the survivors as did the
original crime. The fact that the victims’ erstwhile neighbors
remained silent about the location of the gravesite is a painful one
to comprehend.
Hodžić notes that the silence in Prijedor is an “illustration of the
state of society,” whose citizens are still “imprisoned in the
impossibility of confronting their own responsibility for the crimes
that were committed.”
There is a relatively small ameliorative, mainly used among
activists: of late, concerned individuals have been communicating
via Twitter about Tomašica, regularly updating each other about
daily developments. Take a look
here.
*
In the annals of court cases pertaining to the Bosnian war, both at
The Hague and in the Bosnian courts, there have been a dozen-odd
convictions for genocide. All of
these convictions pertain to the crimes at Srebrenica, and world
opinion, where it considers genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina at all,
has primarily associated that crime with Srebrenica. But the
survivors of the crimes committed in Prijedor municipality – and the
relatives of those now being exhumed at Tomašica – have another
certainty.
According to Edin Ramulić, Tomašica is one of “the most obvious
proofs that genocide was committed in Prijedor.” “This is proof of
the system,” he states, “because hundreds of people and machines had
to have been involved in the creation of the mass grave. Military
and civilian officials had to be there, from the civil defense and
community services on. It is clear that this was part of a joint
criminal enterprise…it will certainly be useful in the cases of
Karadžić and Mladić, where [their indictments for genocide]
include Prijedor.
Mirsad Duratović has pointed out that the difference between
Srebrenica and Prijedor is that the events at Srebrenica were
covered at the time that the genocide was taking place, while the
more drawn-out genocide at Prijedor took place before the
international community was catching up with the facts – or, he
says,
“Maybe they did not even want to know what was happening in Prijedor.”
In any event, it is my opinion that once international officials
cleansed their guilty feelings through recognition of genocide at
Srebrenica, they washed their hands of the issue. I hope that the
last couple of cases before the Hague court will prove otherwise.
In this series, I have already reminded readers of the particulars
in the
1948 UN Convention on Genocide, so I will refrain from re-inserting
them here, but you can review them in this report.
It is to be hoped that in the near future, the case history will
affirm that genocide was committed not only in Srebrenica, but also
in Prijedor – and in a number of other locations around
Bosnia-Herzegovina. One possibility for the realization of this hope
is that, as has been announced recently, evidence regarding the
Tomašica graves will be introduced in the ongoing trial of Ratko
Mladić.
Odds and Ends
In an upsetting development that adds to the pain and sense of
injustice that well up during the exhumation of hundreds of massacre
victims at Tomašica, a local war criminal was released in the first
half of November. Darko Mrđa, who admitted guilt in the Korićanske
Stijene massacre, had been sentenced to 17 years' imprisonment in
2004. In the Korićanske Stijene incident, police removed prisoners
from Trnopolje camp and drove them into the mountains towards
central Bosnia, ostensibly to release them. But at Korićanske
Stijene, they shot and killed 228 men and threw them over a cliff.
Mrđa was released early “for
good behavior” after serving two thirds of his sentence, but before
the remains of all of his victims have been discovered. Muslim and
Croat returnees to Prijedor are not looking forward to seeing him
back home.
*
Slobodan Stojanović was a member of a unit of special police forces
from Serbia and has been a protected witness against accused war
criminals in that country. In late November he told an interviewer
from Slobodna Bosna that “in eastern Bosnia there is an
undiscovered mass grave that it bigger than Tomašica.” Stojanović
asserts that the grave may hold between one thousand and two
thousand remains. He explained that special police from the Leskovac
[a city in Serbia] police force participated in the massacre of
victims in this grave, and that the Serbian prosecutor’s office
“knows very well” where the grave is located.
End of Report – End of Series
Final note: As before, I heartily thank my brother, Roger Lippman,
for patiently proofreading all my texts. And thanks also to
András Riedlmayer for regularly providing me (and many others)
with important documents.