Serbian Activists Rally for Compensation for Murdered Bosniaks
This post is also available in this language: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp
Women in Black protest in Belgrade. Photo: Filip Rudic. |
Women in Black staged a protest in Belgrade on Friday, demanding that Serbia acknowledges that the relatives of the Sjeverin victims are entitled to compensation and prosecutes the commanders responsible for the 16 Bosniaks’ murders in 1992.
Protected by a line of policemen, Women in Black activists held up placards with the victims’ names and wrote “We Remember Sjeverin” in salt on Belgrade’s central pedestrian street, Knez Mihailova.
“We are here today to demand that Serbia recognises the Sjeverin victims’ families’ right to compensation,” said activist Milos Urosevic.
Urosevic said that the authorities’ official “excuse” was that the crime was not committed on Serbian soil.
On October 22, 1992, during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a bus containing the Bosniaks from Sjeverin was stopped in Mioce, just over the Serbian border, by members of a unit called the Avengers, which acted as a part of the Bosnian Serb Army.
Having checked all the passengers’ IDs, the Avengers took the Bosniaks, 15 men and one woman, off the bus.
They transported them to a motel in the Bosnian town of Visegrad, searched them and beat them. They were later taken to the banks of the River Drina, where they were shot.
A Belgrade court in 2005 convicted Bosnian Serb fighters Milan Lukic, Oliver Krsmanovic, Dragutin Dragicevic and Djordje Sevic of a war crime against civilians over the incident.
Lukic, the commander of the Avengers, was also sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Tribunal for war crimes, but not for the murders of the Bosniaks from Sjenica.
Another Belgrade-based NGO, the Humanitarian Law Centre, petitioned the Serbian courts asking for those who were killed to be awarded the status of war victims, but they were rejected because the abductions and murders happened outside Serbia.