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Category Archives: Bosnia

Ratko Mladic guilty of genocide, sentenced to life in prison

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide

By James Masters, CNN

Wed., November 22, 2017

(CNN) – Former Bosnian Serb army leader Ratko Mladic was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after being found guilty of genocide for atrocities committed during the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995.

Mladic was charged with two counts of genocide and nine crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, during which 100,000 people were killed and another 2.2 million displaced. He was found not guilty on one charge of genocide, but received a guilty verdict on each of the other 10 counts.

The trial, which opened in 2012, took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. The ad hoc court was established to prosecute crimes committed during the Balkans conflict.
Mladic was accused of orchestrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing, including the slaughter of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. It is the worst massacre to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War.
 

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I used to call it Home

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Prijedor, Remember Me

By Sanela (August 10, 2017) 

Vuka Karadžića 23, Prijedor, Bosnia 

Today marks exactly 24 years since I moved to America. Although the circumstances under which I had to move were unbearably painful, I can’t help but feel fortunate and incredibly lucky to be given such a privilege – a second chance at life. Chicago is and forever will be my home, however, I’ve been feeling so nostalgic today; memory after memory to the point of feeling sick to my stomach. I had to go there even if only via Google Earth. And I found it – home. One of only two buildings there that haven’t been renovated; our and Johnny’s grandmother’s building across the street. I’m so glad they still look the same as they did back then. — feeling emotional.  Continue reading →

I Remember

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Prijedor

danasmojeimeToday is a very sad day in my home town, Prijedor. We are putting to rest 284 bodies of innocents who were found in the largest mass grave in Bosnia. (Google Tomasica).

Although we are happy to finally be able to put to rest our family members who were lost to us for the past 21 long years, the pain is just as strong as it was back in 1992 when they were taken out of their homes and shot to death in cold blood by the Serb Army because they were not Serbs.

Today, I am with my mom and dad, my aunt Nefira, her son, Adnan who lost his dad, uncle, granddad and many cousins, I am with my uncle Ahmet and his son Velid, I am with my uncle Nuno and his dad, with my cousin Lejla, with my friend Ajla and her dad, I am with my friends Samir and Admir, with Pasa and Izeta…I am with the 284 innocent souls. May they all rest in peace. They will never be forgotten and their killers will never be forgiven.

Remembering Srebrenica (July 11, 1995)

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide

During the Balkans conflict of 1992-1995, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica was declared a UN Safe Area in 1993, under the watch of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR).

In July 1995, General Ratko Mladić and his Serbian paramilitary units overran and captured the town, despite its designation as an area “free from any armed attack or any other hostile act”.

In the days following Srebrenica’s fall, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically massacred and buried in mass graves. Thousands of women, children and elderly people were forcibly deported and a large number of women were raped. It was the greatest atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

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Remember!

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Prijedor, Remember Me, Sanela Ramic Jurich

sa vrpcomOn May 31st 1992, the Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor (My birth town) in north western Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued a decree for all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or sheets and to wear a white armband if they were to leave their houses. This was the first day of a campaign of extermination that resulted in executions, concentration camps, mass rapes and the ultimate removal of more than 94% of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the territory of the Prijedor municipality.

Never forget Prijedor, 1992; Tomašica, 2014!

Don’t forget to Remember Me.

Sanela Ramić Jurich is an author and a public speaker. Born in Prijedor, Bosnia in 1976, she was fifteen years old when the war first started. Her books, Remember Me and Haunting from the Past were based on her own memories of that war. She now lives in Chicago with her husband and two sons.

 

Attack on Hambarine, May 23, 1992

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Prijedor, Sanela Ramic Jurich

By: Sanela Ramic Jurich

My uncle Emsud's house in Hambarine. Photo was taken after the war in 2001 by me. © Sanela Ramic Jurich
My uncle Emsud’s house in Hambarine, destroyed by the Serb army in May of 1992.
Photo was taken after the war in 2001 by me.
© Sanela Ramic Jurich

On May 23, 1992, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother in Hambarine, not knowing that a war criminal, Radmilo Zeljaja, had given an order to the Serb army to start bombing my mother’s home town that day.

Heavy artillery, which has long been set on the hills around Prijedor and directed toward the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat (Bosnian Catholic) villages, started spitting its fire. The entire afternoon, the sky above Prijedor was rocketed and falling onto unprotected, innocent people and their homes in Hambarine.

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It never ends!

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Remember Me

 

Bosnian Serb authorities backed by police officials have removed the word "genocide" from a memorial plaque erected in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad for the Bosniaks killed during the 1992-1995 war.
Bosnian Serb authorities backed by police officials have removed the word “genocide” from a memorial plaque erected in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad for the Bosniaks killed during the 1992-1995 war.

It’s been a little over 20 years since the GENOCIDE committed by the Serbs in Bosnia. They are now removing the word “genocide” from our memorials as if by removing the word they’ll be able to erase the history and the reality that they did, in fact, commit genocide. As if by removing the word “genocide” from the concrete tombstones, they’ll, somehow,  be able to remove the memory of our loved ones from our hearts and minds.

No matter what you do now, the fact remains, you did commit genocide over civilians; you raped women and children and then you locked them up inside a house and burned alive!

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Mirsad Duratovic found remains of 10 members of immediate family

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Prijedor

Posted by Sudbin Music on January 19, 2014 in Drustvo

MirsadDuratovicTomasica

A few tenths of DNA findings related to victims exhumed from the largest mass grave, Tomasica, in the Prijedor area, arrived to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina. These are the remains of civilians from surrounding villages:  Bišćani, Sredice, Carakovo, Rizvanovići and Zecovi, confirmed Lajla Cengic, a spokesperson for the Institute.

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Remembering and Mourning the victims of Republika Srpska

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Genocide, Prijedor

By Sanela Ramic Jurich

Vuka Karadžića 23, Prijedor - my old address
Vuka Karadžića 23, Prijedor – my old address

Two years ago I visited my birth town, Prijedor in Bosnia. One day, I took my husband to town to show him the building where I grew up. I couldn’t show him our condo, because we were never able to get it back from the Serbs who forced us out of it, back in 1992, stealing our condo and everything in it.

My father’s land, about ten minute drive from town, however, wasn’t so easy to steal. Our ancestors owned that land in Ćela since the beginning of time and have survived all of the Balkan wars; Turkish Empire, Austor-Hungarian Empire, World Wars I and II and now, Serb-Invasion.

Our house in Ćela near Prijedor
Our house in Ćela near Prijedor

On our way home to my parents’ house on my father’s ancestral land, we decided to take a cab, but when we told the cab-driver we wanted to go to Ćela, he told us he didn’t know where that was. I looked at him, puzzled. It’s only a ten-minute ride if that. I figured he probably wasn’t from there if he didn’t know where Ćela was. So I told him I’d give him instructions on how to get there.

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Dark Holidays

Posted on by Posted in Bosnia, Prijedor

While most of us are excited about the holidays and are happy to be spending them with family and friends, others are still searching for their loved ones in mass graves all over Bosnia. After searching for two decades, chances are slim that their children, parents, siblings, husbands, wives, relatives, etc… will ever be found alive. Many are hoping that their remains be discovered in Tomasica. However, forensic experts will quit exhumations during the winter at a mass grave in northwestern Bosnia believed to be the largest found so far from the Bosnian 1992-95 war.

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