Dealing with Caco and Kazani

Moll, who has lived in Sarajevo since 2007, published a study titled “Sarajevo’s most known public secret: Dealing with Caco, Kazani and crimes committed against Serbs in besieged Sarajevo, from the war until 2015”.

In his study the historian gives an overview of the happenings – from the arrest and liquidation of Topalovic in 1993 to glorification of the former commander of the Tenth Mountain Brigade of the Bosnian Army as a heroic defender at “the spectacular funeral at the Kovaci Shahid/Martyr Cemetery”.

The publication shows the public attitude towards this and other events that took place in Sarajevo during the war, as well as the way the politics and the media have been dealing with it, including a discussion on whether Topalovic was a hero or a criminal.

Moll concluded that the glorification of Caco has still not stopped, but it has decreased.

“On the other hand, admission of his crimes and his victims has become more acceptable for the society and causes less public resistance, but it remains incomplete and limited, leaving many questions open,” Moll said.

According to his publication, the state and military elites in Sarajevo can be credited for ending Caco’s crimes in October 1993 and bringing some of his soldiers to court for crimes at Kazani in 1994.

“However, at the same time they did everything to sweep the remembrance of the crimes under the carpet or reduce it. Also, they have done little or nothing at all to confront Caco’s glorification, not to mention the fact that, to say the least, they tolerated his criminal activities during the first two years of the war,” Moll says.

He points out that certain media have played a central and decisive role in critical dealing with crimes at Kazani after the end of the war. Civil society and international community, as he says, have not contributed to this issue.

When it comes to judiciary, Moll has noted that it has not been dealing with Kazani for 20 years already.

“On the other hand, they have sent diverse signals, which can be illustrated by their hesitation over the verdicts in the case against Samir Bejtic,” Moll says.

His study is a part of a “Friedrich-Ebert” Foundation’s publication titled “Between remembrance, denial and oblivion”. The two others are dedicated to crimes committed in Prijedor, as well as Grabovica and Dretelj.

“Showing their own victims only, while neglecting the suffering and sorrow of others, is a key deficiency of the culture of remembrance in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the long term such culture leads to non-harmonized joint narratives about the past, which results in existence of divided communities inclined to misusing their memories and creation of potentials for new conflicts,” says research associate Nermin Kujovic of the Foundation.