NIKOLIĆ: INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY REPRESENTATIVES MUST SHED LIGHT ON MURDER OF SERBIAN CHILDREN IN GORAŽDEVAC

BELGRADE, August 13 /SRNA/ - Chair of the Serbian Parliament's Committee on Kosovo and Metohija Danijela Nikolić has called on the international community, the UN, KFOR and EULEX to, as she stated, show enough courage and shed light on the crime against Serbian children in Goraždevac, 22 years after it was committed.

She pointed out that the international community and its officials have been silent for years about crimes committed against Serbian children and the Serbian people in Kosovo and Metohija, stressing that every unresolved crime is a stain on the international community in the sea of injustice that has befallen the Serbian people. "We will never forgive you for the children. In the face of unbearable injustice, you remain mute and blind to see and condemn crimes against a people who only cry out for human freedoms, rights and justice. We will insist on the truth until the very end, because such a crime must not and will not be forgotten," Nikolić said. She stressed that while the image of Goraždevac has long faded for part of the international community and for Priština, for the Serbian people it will always be a wound shared with the families over violently interrupted childhoods. "By keeping silent and hiding the truth, they have shown us that not even in pain are we equal," Nikolić said, according to a statement from the parliamentary Committee on Kosovo and Metohija. She noted that the instigators of this unpunished terrorist attack are today pursuing the same ideology aimed at expelling Serbs and creating an ethnically pure Kosovo and Metohija. "On that day, August 13, 2003, during so-called peace and in the presence of thousands of armed KFOR soldiers and numerous international police officers, Albanian extremists fired bursts from automatic weapons at our youth and our future. The burst of death mowed down childhood, joy and hope for a better tomorrow in Kosovo and Metohija," Nikolić emphasized. Twenty-two years ago, Albanians fired from automatic weapons at Serbian children swimming in the Bistrica River in the Serbian village of Goraždevac near Peć. Pantelija Dakić /12/ and Ivan Jovović /19/ were killed, while Đorđe Ugrenović /20/, Bogdan Bukumirić /14/, Marko Bogićević /12/ and Dragana Srbljak /13/ were seriously wounded. The murder of Serbian children on the Bistrica River is considered one of the four most serious Albanian crimes against Serbs after the arrival of the international mission in Kosovo and Metohija.