DETERMINE WHO DESTROYED THE ORTHODOX CROSSES ON JANJIĆKI VRH NEAR ZENICA

SARAJEVO, JUNE 30 /SRNA/ - The Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Serbs in the Federation of BiH /FBiH/ announced that a review of publicly available video and audio recordings reveals there are at least seven broken crosses in the Orthodox cemetery of Janjićki vrh near Zenica, and requested that the competent authorities determine who destroyed them and when.

Five of the seven crosses were broken in such a way that the left and right parts were smashed, leaving the cross looking like an ordinary pillar. "We demand that the authorities in Zenica and Sarajevo determine when the crosses were destroyed and who destroyed them. We remind you that in 1992, the Orthodox Chapel of Saints Cyril and Methodius, located in the Janjićki vrh Orthodox cemetery near Zenica, was burned down and completely destroyed," the statement said. The Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Serbs in FBiH is asking the authorities of Zenica and Sarajevo whether they have ever detained and interrogated anyone, and whether they have conducted investigative actions to determine who burned down this and 24 other Orthodox chapels that were destroyed in the Zenica area. "We promised that no broken cross, chapel, parish home, or church that they destroyed, burned, or demolished would be forgotten. We will find them and make everything publicly available. We insist on these things, among other reasons, because of the statement from March 18, when 33 Bosniak Muslim political and religious leaders wrote and signed that their army guarded and preserved the cultural and religious buildings of other peoples," the Committee points out. The Committee adds that the Orthodox chapel on Janjićki vrh in Zenica, built in 1968 and destroyed in 1992, was guarded and preserved in such a way that it could not be reconstructed; instead, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the faithful had to rebuild it from the ground up.