JOKANOVIĆ: REMEMBERING PREBILOVCI VICTIMS REFLECTS SERB PEOPLE'S UNBREAKABLE SPIRIT

TREBINJE, AUGUST 5 /SRNA/ – The nurturing of the culture of remembrance for the victims of Prebilovci reflects the unbreakable spirit of the Serb people, who, even after such horrific Ustasha massacres, found a way to return to their ancestral homes and revive their homeland, historian Branislav Jokanović told SRNA.

Jokanović stated that in that crime, 59 families were completely wiped out, 39 homesteads extinguished, and more than 800 residents were killed. He emphasized that the 1992 demolition and mining of the memorial ossuary in Prebilovci those people being killed once again. "We must speak about this to prevent the eveil from repeating," said Jokanović. The commemoration of 84 years since one of the most brutal Ustasha crimes against the Serb people begins today in Prebilovci near Čapljina, organised by the Republika Srpska Government's Committee nurturing traditions of liberation wars. The Church of the Resurrection of Christ in Prebilovci was built and consecrated in 2015 in memory of approximately 4,000 Serbs from Lower Herzegovina who were killed by Ustasha during World War II and canonized that same year by the Serbian Orthodox Church. This memorial date was established in the church calendar on the day in 1941 when Ustasha brutally killed over 850 villagers of Prebilovci – mostly women and children – and threw them into a pit in Šurmanci, near Međugorje. The exhumation of 13 pits in the region of Lower Herzegovina began in 1990, and on August 4, 1991, the remains of more than 4,000 Serbs were buried in the memorial ossuary in Prebilovci. In June 1992, during the Čagalj offensive, members of the HOS and HVO forces blew up the ossuary. After the return of Serbs to Prebilovci after the year 2000, the remains were collected, and following the construction of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ, they were laid to rest in its crypt.