With a cast and crew from across the Balkans, Italy and France, a new play takes on the controversy surrounding Peter Handke’s 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature and asks, ‘Can we separate the art from the artist?’
‘Dangerous Names’, a play about the 1995 genocide whose leading roles are played by a Srebrenica survivor and a former Dutch peacekeeping soldier, was given its Bosnian premiere in Sarajevo.
Policemen Milan Dumanovic and Mladen Trbovic were cleared of disclosing an official secret when they spoke publicly about covertly recording a Srebrenica genocide commemoration in 2015, when Serbian leader Aleksandar Vucic was attacked.
Villagers in Poljak, near Srebrenica, commemorated the 29th anniversary of an attack by Serb forces that left 21 people dead, including two children - for which no one has yet been prosecuted.
Former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Rade Garic’s sentence for persecuting Bosniaks from the Vlasenica and Srebrenica areas in 1992 and 1995 was reduced on appeal from 20 years to 17 years in prison.
Milenko Zivanovic, a former general and commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Drina Corps, was charged with directing armed units that attacked Bosniak civilians in the Srebrenica and Zepa areas in 1995.
Legal changes banning the denial of genocide, imposed by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s top international official, caused the Bosnian Serb leadership to threaten to pull out of the country’s tax system, judiciary and army.
Mendeljev Djuric and Petar Mitrovic, who were sentenced for the Srebrenica genocide, were examined before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina by way of the international legal assistance as defense witnesses at the trial for crimes in the village of Kravica conducted before the Higher Court in Belgrade. They denied having any knowledge of the crime in question.