PEOPLE KILLED, VILLAGE DESTROYED, AND KILLERS STILL AT LARGE

BRATUNAC, DECEMBER 14 /SRNA/ - In Bjelovac near Bratunac, 32 years have been marked today since the crime committed by Muslim forces from Srebrenica against 68 Serbs from this and two neighboring villages, and the relatives of those killed and the survivors have pointed out the injustice of the BiH judiciary because no one who killed everyone in front of themselves, mostly locals, has been punished.

On this day in 1992, early in the morning, strong Muslim forces from Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, under the command of Naser Orić, invaded these three Podrinje villages, killing everybody and everything, looting and burning Serb property. The youngest victims were fourteen-year-old Slobodan Petrović and fifteen-year-old Čedo Miladinović, and the oldest was eighty-eight-year-old Zlata Jovanović. Old woman Božana Ostojić, who disappeared then, has not yet been found. For these, as well as for numerous other crimes against Serbs in central Podrinje, no one has yet been held accountable, even though more than three decades have passed since they were committed. The survivors cannot describe the horrors that happened that morning, on December 14, 1992, in Bjelovac, when 68 locals from 76 Serb households were killed in a few hours. Every third resident of Bjelovac was killed or wounded that day. Brano Vučetić, who was only nine years old, was taken into captivity in Srebrenica with a group of women and children. On the same day, his father and older brother, who was also a minor, were killed. Today, Vučetić says with indignation that even after 32 years, unfortunately, no one has been prosecuted, let alone sentenced for the crime in Bjelovac, as well as in other villages in Bratunac and Srebrenica municipalities. "The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentences only Serbs. Serbs, civilians, died here in their houses and yards. We did not attack anyone. We slept in our houses, unfortunately, for the last time, because everything was looted, set on fire and burned," said Vučetić. After 56 days of torture, interrogation, and starvation, together with Mira Filipović and her children, three-year-old Olja and seven-month-old Nemanja, Brano Vučetić was also exchanged. On that fateful day, Slavka Matić lost her two daughters Snježana /27/ and Gordana /24/ and her husband Radivoje, and the house and property were burned. "I went early to light a fire in a nearby school. My husband and daughters stayed asleep. Shots were fired from all sides and at 10:00 a.m. I found out that my family had been killed and that I was left alone," said this old woman. The president of the Bratunac Veterans' Organization, Zoran Gvozdenović, said that the fact that no one was held accountable for the crime in the village of Bjelovac is absolutely reprehensible, and at the same time, it is the best proof of the inaction and bias of the Prosecutor's Office and the BiH legal system. The president of the Organization of Families of Captured and Killed Soldiers and Missing Civilians of Bratunac, Radojka Filipović, whose husband Dragan and father-in-law Dragoljub were killed on this day in 1992, said that the crime in Bjelovac had all the elements of genocide. As she explained, the Muslims from the 28th division of the so-called RBiH Army killed everyone, one by one, children, women and the elderly, and looted and destroyed Serb property in order to completely erase the traces of Serbian existence in this area.