30th Anniversary of Children’s Deaths in Sarajevo Shelling Mourned
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A ceremony was held on Victims of Fascism Street in the Otoka neighbourhood of Sarajevo on Friday, marking the 30th anniversary of the deaths of nine people who were killed when three mortar shells were fired from positions held by the Bosnian Serb Army.
Five of the dead were children; 38 other people were also injured in the attack on November 10, 1993.
Attending the ceremony were relatives of the victims, including Sevala Heco, who lost her daughter Amina, who was eight at the time.
“As the elderly say, all injuries are close to your heart, but when a child is concerned, you can never live as you lived before, but I still say that I am all my friends are continuing to live, with God’s help, but not in the way they should live,” Heco said.
“Every time I laugh louder, the image of someone who is no longer with me appears before my eyes,” she added.
Darko Minic, a representative of the Otoka local community authority, said that the massacre caused grief all over Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in the neighbourhood.
“Those children would have been grown-up people now, people with families and their own children,” Minic said.
The commemoration was attended by representatives of Sarajevo Canton, City of Sarajevo and the Novi Grad Municipality, as well as pupils from various local schools and kindergartens and representatives of war victims’ associations.
Elma Geko, Slavojka Govedarica, Semir Haseta, Amina Heco, Ajdin Hodzic, Ibrahim Huskic, Vinko Loncar, Silvijo Macorovic and Bozidar Suka were killed in the artillery attack on Otoka.
They were among more than 11,000 Sarajevans, including around 1,600 children, who were killed during the 44-month siege of the capital.
Wartime Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as well as the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Stanislav Galic, were sentenced to life imprisonment for waging a campaign of terror against Sarajevo’s civilian population through sniper and artillery attacks.
Dragomir Milosevic, who also commanded the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, was sentenced to 29 years for terrorising the civilian population during the siege of the city.
