GRAORAC: GENOCIDE WAS COMMITTED AGAINST SERBS IN PODRINJE AND THIS MUST NOT BE SILENCED

BANJA LUKA, JULY 12 /SRNA/ – The President of the Republic Organisation of Families of Captured, Fallen Soldiers and Missing Civilians Isidora Graorac told SRNA that genocide was committed against the Serb people in Srebrenica and the entire Podrinje region, and emphasized that this must not be silenced.

“Entire families disappeared – women, children, the elderly – everything that was in the path of those hordes of executioners who spread death wherever they moved. And that is why we must speak about it, we must not remain silent. All innocent victims oblige us to do so,” Graorac said. She emphasized that no one has been held accountable for the violent deaths of Serbs from Serb villages in Srebrenica – Biljača, Sase, Zalazje – for the blood shed by innocent Serb civilians and for the killing of entire families. According to her, the village of Zalazje is just one among many villages where a massacre of Serb civilians was carried out, where there is no longer life, a village that today practically does not exist, just as there are no rights or justice for Serb victims of Srebrenica. “For the world, Serb victims of Srebrenica do not exist, for all those foreign diplomats who speak humbly about others,” Graorac pointed out. She added that in Srebrenica, Serbs were killed on great Christian holidays, such as today, Petrovdan, and “they were killed in cold blood, so that their name would be erased, so that they would disappear.” “But they did not succeed, just as they did not succeed in destroying this brave, freedom-loving people, to whom they want to attribute an epithet they never were, nor will ever be,” Graorac emphasised. Graorac said that today, families of the killed will, in peace, with prayer and by lighting candles, remember all those who died because of their name and Orthodox faith. “The Serb people will never forget the Serb victims of Srebrenica and Podrinje, and will fight by all available means for the truth about the suffering of the Serb people in the past Defensive-Homeland War to be available to everyone in the world,” Graorac stated. Today in Zalazje, Srebrenica municipality, the 33rd anniversary is being marked for the killing of 69 Serb civilians and soldiers in this village and in Sase, as well as in Biljača and Zagonje in the Bratunac area. In addition to the 69 killed and many wounded on that tragic Petrovdan, 22 Serbs went missing. Of the 22 missing, 10 were accidentally found and exhumed on June 10, 2011, from a mass grave in Zalazje during the search for killed Bosniaks. The remains of the victims were identified more than a year later and buried on Petrovdan in 2012, while two were exhumed, identified, and buried earlier. Ten of the missing have still not been found, and their traces disappear in the detention facility at the former Srebrenica police station. None of the captured survived, and no one has been held accountable for their killings.