Haris Rovčanin

At the end of this month, White Armband Day will be marked in the city of Prijedor and tributes paid to those who were killed in 1992, including 102 children. In this edition we’ll try to find out how their parents in the city feel today, what revives their traumas and whether post-war returnees are now leaving the town because of what happened in the past, or for other reasons.

On July 10, 1992 in Biljani, which is several kilometres from Kljuc, Bosnian Serb Army soldiers and police took men from their houses and killed more than 200 local residents in one day. The bodies of those who had been killed were found and exhumed from two mass graves right after the war. But locals are still resentful because the judiciary, the Bosnian prosecution in particular, hasn’t prosecuted those responsible even though 30 years have passed since this major crime. Families of victims told BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina what happened that day in July 1992, talking about how men were taken away to the local school and their memories of their last encounters with them.