Višegrad: Bosniak Women Use Human Shield to Stop Serbian Nationalists from Demolishing Memorial

Bosniak human rights activists, led by Ms Bakira Hasečić, prevented on Tuesday the nationalist Serb authorities from demolishing a memorial house in which Serb soldiers set on fire sixty-five Bosniak civilians in Serb-led 1992 assault on the Bosniak-majority municipality of Višegrad.

In 1992, Ms Bakira Hasečić and her two daughters, aged 13 and 18, were repeatedly gang raped by Serb soldiers. Ms. Hasecic’s sister was even less fortunate. Her home was turned into a rape camp by the Serb forces and she died there after repeated sexual assaults. There were at least 20 rape camps in the municipality of Višegrad where Serb(ian) soldiers kept Bosniak women and underage girls/children as sex slaves. Some men and underage boys were also raped.

The house where Serb soldiers barricaded and then burned alive Bosniak women, children and elderly has been restored to its original condition and turned into a memorial. To local Serb nationalists, the house represents a ‘threat’ that war crimes associated with the Serb(ian)-led onslaught on the pre-war Bosniak-majority eastern Bosnia won’t be forgotten.

Bosniaks claim that the plan developed by the Serb authorities to destroy the house in order to make space for the widening of a nearby road was just an excuse to destroy a crime scene and erase a memory of it. Families of the burned victims have reconstructed the house in Pionirska Street and visit it often to lay flowers, cry and pray.

“This house is sacred to us,” said Bakira Hasecic, a victim of the Serb assault on Visegrad, who now heads Bosnia’s association of women raped during the war.

“We will not allow it to be demolished.”

The U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, sentenced several Bosnian Serbs to decades in prison for the Visegrad killing spree that saw scores of Bosniaks burnt alive in two houses.

When sentencing ringleader Milan Lukic to life imprisonment in 2009, judge Patrick Robinson said the burning of at least 119 civilians to death “exemplified the worst acts of inhumanity that one person may inflict on others” and and “ranked high in the long, sad and wretched history of man’s inhumanity to man”.

Lukic’s group barricaded the victims — including a two days-old baby — in one room of the house and set it on fire. Then they fired automatic weapons at those who tried to escape through the windows. A few days later they repeated the crime in another house, killing nearly 70. His unit may have had killed more civilians by burning them alive, but there were no survivors to testify for other crimes.

The crimes in Višegrad were among the first carried out by nationalist Orthodox Christian Serb forces on the local Muslim Bosniak population during the war. The assault by Serbian-controlled Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) and supported by local Serb nationalists armed by Serbia, started at the very beginning of the war in April of 1992.

Between April and December 1992, after 3,000 civilians were killed, thousands of women and underage girls tortured as “comfort women” for Serbian soldiers in rape camps of Višegrad, and others expelled, no residents of Višegrad were Muslim Bosniaks. Before, they accounted for two-thirds of the 25,000 population. The municipality had been “ethnically cleansed.”

The Office of the High Representative and of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe yesterday jointly called on the authorities in Višegrad not to demolish the monument.

“If the planned enforcement and demolition on 24 December goes ahead, it could be seen as a very negative step recalling some of the most difficult days of this country’s history,” the two organisations said.

Human rights activists, including representatives of the Islamic community and members of an association of women war victims, formed a human shield to stop them from approaching the building.

Shortly afterwards, representatives of victims’ families prevented the removal of a monument at the local cemetery Stražište erected in remembrance of the victims of the 1992 Višegrad Genocide.

The International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) at the Hague sentenced two cousins Milan Lukic to life and Sredoje Lukic to 27 years’ imprisonment for burning alive at least 120 Bosniak women, children and elderly, and scores of other war crimes against Bosniaks in Višegrad.

The ICTY failed to prosecute Milan Lukić for rapes committed under his authority because the Trial Chamber rejected the Prosecution’s submission to include new charges of rape and sexual slavery, ruling that such an amendment to the indictment would prejudice the right of the accused to have enough time to mount a defence.