The Steering Board of the BH Journalists Association has sent a strong letter of protest to Bosnia’s High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, HJPC, after its Vice-President on social media likened the work of BIRN BiH to “the Gestapo”.
The Bosniak and Croat victims were selected, transported and executed at Mount Vlasic by Bosnian Serb police, their bodies tossed into a pit.
‘Invisible Child’, a film directed by Muhammed Ibrahim Sisman that includes interviews with the daughters of women raped during the Bosnian war, will have its first public screening in Sarajevo on August 19.
Ajna Jusic, one of the interviewees in the documentary, said she believed that the film can help other children in similar situations and encourage them to fight for their rights.
Jusic, who is the president of the Forgotten Children of War association, said that “the film is very important because it provides a completely different picture of the surviving women and children”.
“The film tells how strong women really are, that they were able to build a life after such a crime and trauma, and it sheds light on a topic that has been completely forgotten and squeezed out, both from society and the political system,” she added.
‘Invisible Child’ also features Lejla Damon, who was born in wartime Sarajevo to a mother who had been raped in a detention camp and then adopted by two British journalists.
Damon has given a series of speeches at events in Britain to highlight the plight of Bosnian war victims.
A previous film about the child of a wartime rape victim, ‘An Invisible Child’s Trap’, which was released in 2015, also confronted the stigma which still surrounds the issue in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is unclear how many women were raped in Bosnia during the conflict but estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000.
An exhibition in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia aims to remind people of the stigma and discrimination that children born in the 1992-5 war as a result of rape, or who were fathered by foreigners, still face.
A group of activists are continuing their campaign to put up temporary memorials at places where crimes took place during the 1992-5 war – whether the local authorities like it or not.
A metal horse sculpted 25 years ago was ridden through the streets of Sarajevo on Wednesday on a tram – symbolizing the heroism that people displayed in May 1992 when a city tram was hit by a missile and set on fire at the start of the Bosnian war.
Former detainees of the infamous Bosnian Serb-run death and detention camp near Prijedor intend to mark the 27th anniversary of its closure by erecting a plaque – despite not getting official permission to do so.
Former detainees who were imprisoned by Bosnian Croat forces in a hospital for bone diseases in the town of Stolac will hold a commemoration for those who were tortured and died at the wartime detention facility.
A new photographic exhibition in Sarajevo presents images of ‘children of war’ who were born as a result of rape or were children of foreign peacekeepers or aid workers in the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ahead of the former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic’s war crimes verdict this week, BIRN has compiled all its reports on the landmark case into a free, downloadable e-book.
BIRN published a new e-book on Tuesday entitled ‘Radovan Karadzic: Wartime Leader’s Years on Trial’, ahead of the former Bosnian Serb wartime president’s final trial verdict on March 20.
The e-book, which is downloadable free of charge, contains all BIRN’s reports on the case, from the period when Karadzic was on the run to when he was caught and extradited, and throughout the whole of the trial that followed.
Published in English and in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, it includes over 570 articles and runs to more than 1,100 pages.
This is the third e-book published by BIRN. The first was an in-depth e-book containing reports and analyses about the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, while the second one was a compilation of reports on Ratko Mladic’s trial.
Karadzic’s trial began in 2009, lasted for 499 days and heard 586 witnesses.
He was initially indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995. He then spent 12 years on the run, and was finally arrested in Belgrade in 2008 and extradited to the UN tribunal.
The first-instance verdict in 2016 found him guilty of the Srebrenica genocide, the persecution and extermination of Croats and Bosniaks from 20 municipalities across Bosnia and Herzegovina, and being a part of a joint criminal enterprise to terrorise the civilian population of Sarajevo during the siege of the city. He was also found guilty of taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
To download the e-book, click here.
Sva prava zadržana BIRN BiH.
