NOTORIOUS SILOS CAMP - EXAMPLE THAT FORCE PREVAILED OVER LAW IN BiH

SREBRENICA, JANUARY 27 /SRNA/ – The notorious Silos camp in Tarčin, where more than 600 Serb civilians were tortured and 24 of them did not survive the abuse, is just one of the examples showing that justice failed in BiH and that force and bias prevailed over the law, President of the Organization of Families of Captured and Killed Fighters and Missing Civilians of Srebrenica Branimir Kojić told SRNA.

Kojić emphasized that Serbs are neither naïve nor foolish not to know that the judiciary in BiH did everything to protect those responsible for imprisoning their former neighbors. "The Court of BiH knows that if Serb camp inmates were to see justice served, the narrative of Sarajevo as an `occupied city` would collapse, because during the last war alone there were 126 camps for Serbs in that city," Kojić stressed. He noted that 157,000 Serbs were expelled from Sarajevo alone, but that even this is not enough to compel the judges now working in the building of the former Viktor Bubanj Barracks, where there was also a camp for Serbs during the war, to act in accordance with justice. Kojić recalled that today marks 30 years since the closure of the notorious Silos camp, within whose walls more than 600 Serbs were detained. "These people were exposed to daily psychological and physical abuse. People close to me spent 1,335 days in Silos, and what they endured could be the subject of a horror film. They were forced into hard labor on the front lines, starved to the point of unconsciousness and, unfortunately, some to death," Kojić said. However, Kojić pointed out that in such a distorted and unsustainable BiH, one can receive a harsher prison sentence for congratulating General Ratko Mladić or SNSD leader Milorad Dodik on their birthdays, as Vojin Pavlović did, or for raising a photograph of the first President of Republika Srpska Radovan Karadžić and former Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska General Ratko Mladić at a public gathering, as in the case of Miodrag Malić. The Association of Camp Inmates of Republika Srpska will mark today in Tarčin, in the Sarajevo municipality of Hadžići, 30 years since the disbandment of the notorious Silos camp, where more than 600 Serbian civilians endured the most horrific torture, physical and psychological abuse, beatings and starvation, of whom 24 did not survive. Silos, a concentration camp for Serbs run by the so-called Army of BiH, was opened on May 11, 1992, in a facility that had stored wheat before the war, and was closed on January 27, 1996. The camp, one of a total of 126 in the area of wartime Sarajevo, primarily held civilians from Tarčin, Pazarići and other nearby settlements. The youngest detained civilian was fourteen-year-old Leo Kapetanović, while the oldest was Vaso Šarenac, who was over 85 years old and died in Silos, where the temperature was always 10 degrees lower than outside. In July 2021, the Court of BiH handed down a final verdict sentencing six former members of the so-called Army of BiH to a total of 42 years in prison for heinous crimes committed in the Silos camp.