Bosnian Peace Activists Mark Wartime Crime Locations

“Knowledge of what happened at these locations is important, as it warns against the recurrence of these events in the future, because the culture of remembrance is a mechanism that enables peace-building,” peace activist Dalmir Miskovic told BIRN.

Miskovic and other activists, with the support from the Centre for Non-Violent Action, have put up marker signs at 67 locations where people were detained or killed around the country since 2015 – ten of them this month.

The plain blue signs are headlined “Unmarked site of suffering” and their message is written in both Cyrillic and Latin script: “During the last war, inhumane acts were committed against people at this site. We express solidarity with all the victims by not forgetting these acts, so they would never happen to anybody again.”

During the war, several hundred people were imprisoned in improvised detention facilities at cultural centres, school buildings, police stations, hotels and other places, where many were abused and some lost their lives.

After the war, some of these facilities were rebuilt and began to be used for their original purpose, but the activists point out that they have never been marked as places of suffering.

Miskovic said that the activists are constantly looking for new locations, and are guided by data from court verdicts and confirmed indictments, plus advice from war victims’ associations.

He pointed out that the entire country is full of such sites, and when they are used for their original purpose again, there is often no awareness about what happened there during the war.

“It is also important that those things are heard about, because the suffering and the fate of victims at these locations are often the subject of denial, particularly in majority communities, where the current majority ethnic group committed these things or they were committed in their name,” he said.

This month, the activists marked ten locations in Vitez, Bosanski Petrovac, Kotor-Varos and Manjaca.

“In order to live together, we must know the truth,” said Hamdija Karic, who was involved in November’s actions.

“We should mark locations even if only one person got killed there, let alone hundreds or thousands,” he added.

As ethnic divisions persist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the placing of memorial markers at the sites does not always go uncontested.

“Various situations have happened, but I’ll be honest, we have never been beaten up, although some people condemned us or looked at us in a weird way,” said Miskovic.

“In one case the police even apprehended us, so things do happen, but we are determined to continue our work,” he added.

There is still no national strategy on transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina which would also regulate the issue of war memorials.

While some monuments were built by local authorities, many have been independently financed by associations of families of victims, associations of war veterans, families and private donors.

Munevera Avdic, president of the Organisation of Families of Martyrs, Killed Soldiers and Missing Persons from Vrbanja in the Kotor-Varos municipality, praised the peace activists’ efforts to ensure that sites where people were detained or killed are not forgotten.

“It is very important for all of us to see all those sites marked for the sake of new and future generations, so they can learn the lesson that the evil that happened from 1992 to 1995 must never happen again,” Avdic said.