Bosnian ‘White Ribbon Day’ Honours Prijedor War Victims

A series of commemorative events was held across Bosnia and Herzegovina on Thursday to mark the annual White Ribbon Day, which honours thousands of people killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Prijedor at the start of the war in 1992, as well as the rest of the country’s war victims.

In Sarajevo, white armbands were handed out to the capital’s residents at Oslobodjenje Square, and banners were displayed with slogans like “Solidarity with all civilian victims” and “We choose to say that war is pointless”.

“Today we want to send out a message of peace, a message of coexistence,” said Aldijana Okeric of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights NGO.

The organisers say the white ribbons are used as a symbol for the commemoration because on May 31, 1992, the Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor issued a decree for all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or sheets and to wear a white armband if they left home.

In the months that followed, according to court verdicts, more than 3,000 non-Serbs – including 102 children – were killed in Prijedor, while thousands of others were imprisoned in detention camps.

“We chose this day to emphasise the fact that no memorial to the children killed in Prijedor has been erected,” Okeric said.

Okeric also said that there should be at memorial at Kazani, just outside Sarajevo, where Bosnian Serb and Croat civilians were killed and dumped in a ravine in 1993.

She said that the organisers will plant a tree in At Mejdan park in Sarajevo as a symbolic gesture in memory of all innocent victims.

Sarajevo resident Mirsad Kurtagic said he was attending the White Ribbon Day commemoration to show solidarity with the victims from Prijedor and all other victims.

“Unfortunately, the town of Prijedor has not found an adequate place in The Hague, as no verdict for genocide has been pronounced, but, similarly, Kazani is a stain on Sarajevo,” Kurtagic said.

Bosnian Serb political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were both acquitted by the UN war crimes court in The Hague of committing genocide in 1992 in Prijedor and several other Bosnian municipalities.

Other events to mark White Ribbon Day were being held on Thursday in Prijedor, Banja Luka, Bosanska Krupa, Zagreb, Sisak, Varazdin, Stockholm in Sweden, Chicago in the US, Oslo in Norway and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

The Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre NGO has also announced that it will commemorate White Ribbon Day by placing an art installation in front of the city assembly building in the Serbian capital.