ON SATURDAY, 32ND ANNIVERSARY OF SUFFERING OF SERB RESIDENTS FROM BJELOVAC

BRATUNAC, DECEMBER 12 /SRNA/ - On Saturday, December 14, In Bjelovac near Bratunac, a memorial service will be held for 109 Serb victims, 68 of whom were killed on that day in 1992.

Of the total number of dead and killed in the attack on Bjelovac and the neighboring Serb hamlets of Sikirić and Loznička rijeka, two thirds were civilians. The oldest victim of the Muslim crime was the eighty-seven-year-old Zlata Jovanović, whose son Milan and granddaughter Radenka were killed in front of the house where three generations of the family disappeared in one hour. The youngest victim was a fifteen-year-old boy, Čedo Miladinović, and Slobodan Petrović, a year older, and seventeen-year-old Milenko Vučetić were also killed. A memorial service for the victims will be held at 1:00 p.m. in the gate of the Church of the Holy Prophet Ilija in Bjelovac, and then flowers will be laid at the memorial to the local victims. The great Serb suffering and crimes against civilians in Bjelovac and its surroundings occurred in the early dawn of December 14, 1992, when strong Muslim forces from Srebrenica and numerous Muslim villages, under the command of Naser Orić, invaded these villages on the banks of the Drina river and committed a massacre. over the population that was still sleeping. The villains massacred and killed the poor in the houses and burned everything they reached - women, children and the elderly. After the massacre, Muslim forces completely looted Serbian property, then burned these three villages, and took a group of captured women and children to a camp in Srebrenica, where they were abused and tortured. The President of the Municipal Organization of Families of Captured and Killed Soldiers and Missing Civilians from Bratunac, Radojka Filipović, told SRNA that it is absurd that there is no case at all in the BiH Prosecutor's Office related to the crimes in Bjelovac on December 14, 1992. Her husband Dragan and father-in-law Dragoljub were killed that day in Bjelovac, along with 66 other villagers. "My mother-in-law Dostana and sister-in-law Mira Filipović, Mira's seven-month-old children Nemanja and three-year-old Olivera, as well as nine-year-old wounded neighbor Brano Vučetić, were captured and taken to the Srebrenica camps," Filipović remembers. Five captured women and children were exchanged after 56 days of torture and starvation. As a result of the torture, Dostana soon fell ill and died. Permanent traumas remained on the other prisoners, that is, inmates. Brano Vučetić, who survived capture and mistreatment in the Srebrenica camps, previously told SRNA that remembering the suffering in Bjelovac causes him nightmares, inexplicable moodiness and sadness, but also pain due to the injustice that no one was held accountable for those murders. Missing old woman Božana Ostojić has not been found even after 32 years. Every Serb house in Bjelovac lost an average of two household members in the last war. These villages have not yet been completely rebuilt and some surviving villagers still cannot return, because even after 32 years their houses have not been rebuilt. For this, as well as for all other crimes committed against Serbs in Podrinje, no one was held accountable, although numerous evidence and testimonies about the crimes committed were submitted to the judicial authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, the prosecutors are obstructing and do not want to consolidate the evidence and file an indictment against the suspects, waiting for the surviving witnesses to die and the criminals to live free as long as possible. The families of the deceased are outraged at the work of those authorities, which promise them every year that these processes will be initiated in the following year, and the years go by. The Serb families of those killed in this area have lost their trust and hope that the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina will prosecute the perpetrators, that is, the executors of Orić's orders, and hope only for God's justice.