MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR SERBS KILLED IN RATKOVIĆI

SREBRENICA, JUNE 21 /SRNA/ – A memorial service will be held today in the Srebrenica village of Ratkovići for twenty-four Serbs who were brutally killed 34 years ago when Muslim forces from Srebrenica and neighbouring villages raided the village.

The memorial service will begin at 11:00 a.m. at the memorial dedicated to the victims, where surviving residents gather once a year to pay their respects, lay flowers, and light candles. It is an opportunity for former Ratkovići residents, now dispersed throughout Serbia and Republika Srpska, as well as their descendants, to meet and remember their killed relatives and ancestors, along with the life they once shared in a village that today exists only as a geographical name. The commemoration is organised by surviving relatives of the victims with the support of the Municipality of Srebrenica. Continuing the ethnic cleansing of the Serb population from villages in the Srebrenica area, which began in April 1992, strong Muslim forces from surrounding villages and Srebrenica raided the Serb-populated village of Ratkovići at dawn on June 21, killing unprotected civilians while looting and burning everything they found in what were mostly households inhabited by elderly residents. They were murdering and mutilating women, elderly people, the blind, and the deaf and mute, burning them in their homes. Six elderly women were among those killed. A small number of villagers managed to hide and escape certain death, thanks, as they later recounted, to the morning fog and their familiarity with the terrain. Hidden in thickets and brush, they were watching Muslim soldiers killing, looting and burning Serb property. No one has been convicted for this crime, nor for other mass crimes committed against Serbs in the Central Podrinje region, even after 34 years. The District Court Bijeljina acquitted Ibro Jakupović and Huso Salihović of charges related to war crimes against Serbs in Ratkovići, citing, as the courts usually say it, a lack of evidence that they had committed the crimes. The Prosecutor's Office of BiH has not gathered sufficient evidence for any crime committed against Serbs in the Central Podrinje region. No one within the BiH judicial system has wondered how it is possible that, despite the deaths of more than 1,500 Serb civilians in the areas around Srebrenica, Bratunac, and Milići, no case has resulted in sufficient evidence for prosecution more than three decades after the war. What are the prosecutors who are on the cases doing? The obstruction of the investigations into crimes against Serbs is obvious and being tolerated. As time passes, the number of witnesses continues to decline as people die, raising concerns among survivors that they may never see the Prosecutor's Office and the Court of BiH prosecute anyone for the crimes committed in Ratkovići, so that they be allowed to say how Serbs were being killed there and who did it. Although earthly justice has not reached the perpetrators, the victims' families say they believe in divine justice and that it is already being fulfilled in some way. Ratkovići was completely burned and destroyed 34 years ago. After the war, a memorial to the slain residents was erected in the devastated village, now overgrown with vines and brush. Evidence that a village once stood there can still be seen in several reconstructed houses occasionally visited by their owners, dried fruit trees, a few chimneys remaining from burned homes, and stone walls from which trees have grown and which have not yet been completely overtaken by vegetation. Also visible are damaged gravestones and crosses in the village cemetery, alongside gravestones that relatives later rebuilt for their ancestors, because the villans destroyed gravestones and desecrated graves during the assault on the village in an effort to erase traces of Serb existence in the area.