NEWS Burial Ceremony Held for Six War Victims from Bosnia’s Prijedor

A smaller annual ceremony than usual was held on Monday at the Kamicani Memorial Centre in the town of Kozarac to commemorate the war victims of the Prijedor area, due to restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

It was originally planned that 30 victims would be buried this year, but due to the pandemic, many families of the deceased were unable to come to Bosnia and Herzegovina from abroad, so only six people’s remains were laid to rest.

“A situation is such that they have been waiting for 28 years to find the remains or at least one bone and to have a place to go and pray for the souls of their martyrs, but now it’s turned out that because of the virus, you can’t even have Muslim funeral prayers,” said Mirsad Duratovic, a wartime detainee who is now president of the Regional Union of the Association of Detainees of the Banja Luka Region.

Five of the victims’ remains that were reburied on Monday were found at the Koricani Cliffs, a notorious execution site where Bosniaks from the Prijedor area were lined up on the edge of a ravine and shot dead by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992.

The other was found at a place called Jablanica-Prosara, one of many unmarked burial sites of war victims in the area.

Duratovic expressed disappointment that so far, the mayor and city authorities in Prijedor have refused pleas by war survivors and victims’ associations to proclaim July 20 a day of mourning for all the Prijedor civilians killed in the period from 1992 to 1995.

The Prijedor area saw a series of attacks by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992. A total of 2,588 war victims from the area have been found and identified so far, and the search continues for the remains of 588 others, according to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The biggest mass grave in this region is at Tomasica, from which 435 people’s remains have been exhumed.

“The bodies of killed Prijedor residents have been found in 98 mass graves. The mass grave at the Prvi Kvart cemetery in Derventa is the last one to have been discovered. Seven bodies were exhumed from that grave in September 2019,” the Missing Persons Institute told BIRN.

A total of 38 people have been sentenced by the Hague Tribunal and the Bosnian state court to 628 years in prison, as well as one life sentence in the case of the former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, for crimes committed in the Prijedor area during the war.

An exhibition of photographs by Mujo Begic of watches found during the exhumation of victims from mass graves, entitled ‘When Time Stopped’, also opened at the Kamicani Memorial Centre on Monday.