Bosnia’s Snagovo Massacre Commemorated as Killers Remain Unpunished

The killings of 36 Bosniak civilians in the village of Snagovo near Zvornik in eastern Bosnia on April 29, 1992, are being commemorated on Monday with a religious ceremony, a lecture for young people and a visit to the cemetery where the victims are buried.

Zlatija Mujanovic, who lost her 14-year-old sister and her mother, who was eight months’ pregnant at the time, told BIRN that she is upset that no one has been convicted of the massacre so far.

Mujanovic, which was 15 at the time of the killings, recalled how she was captured that day by Bosnian Serb troops.

She said the soldiers arrived in the village and began separating men from women, then took them to Rasidov Han, near Snagovo, where a mass shooting began.

“I started running. I took my younger sister with me. She was six. I hid in an outhouse and that is how I managed to stay alive,” she recalled.

“They killed everybody – children, women, pregnant women. My mother Ismeta, who was eight months’ pregnant, and younger sister Edina, who was 14, as well as grandmother Derva, were killed that day,” she added.

She said that when she heard heard that the soldiers were leaving, “I went there with my sister and saw the dead bodies”.

After the massacre, she continued, “the Serb army returned and burned all the people who were killed in order to hide the crime”.

One of the organisers of the commemoration in Snagovo, Nedim Civic, said that the victims’ families are still bitter because the Bosnian state prosecution has not yet indicted those who were responsible for the crime.

“I will remind the public in Bosnia and Herzegovina that people were shot here, some survived, but they were then thrown onto a pile with animal remains, with sheep, and burned alive,” Civic said.

“That will remain embedded into every part of our lives forever,” he added.

In November 2007, the Bosnian state court handed down a second-instance verdict acquitting former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Zoran Jankovic of participating in the capture and shooting of the Snagovo villagers due to a lack of evidence.