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.
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.
He smirked a little and asked: “Do you mean you want to go to Petrovo?”
“No,” I said, “I told you, I need to go to Donja Ćela.”
“Honey,” he chuckled as if he was enjoying my confusion, “Donja Ćela doesn’t exist any more, it’s now called Petrovo.”
I thanked him kindly and got out of his cab. I called my dad to come and pick us up. He confirmed that Ćela is now, in fact, called Petrovo.
This is one of many things that the Serbs changed since the war.
Tomorrow, January 9th, the Serbs are trying to celebrate the creation of Republika Srpska. My home town, Prijedor is now in Republika Srpska. The thing is, they didn’t win the war fair and square to be able to claim this land as their own. Republika Srpska is the creation of genocide and those who neglect the genocide still celebrate. They celebrate others’ distress; the distress of those who were slaughtered, killed, burned alive and their families…
The Tomašica mass grave is proof of the genocide committed in Prijedor by the Serbs.
Tomašica mass grave near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia was discovered at the end of 2013 and is estimated to hold the body remains of about 1,000 Bosniaks and Croats who were tortured and killed in concentration camps in that part of the country. These people were murdered for one reason only, they were not Serbs.
Neither they were criminals or terrorists. They did not own weapons of mass destruction; they were regular, working people, farmers, unarmed civilians, women and children. People like you and me. I was one of the lucky ones; I survived, but my family and I are still searching for many who were not as lucky as we were.
Tomašica mass grave is recent news, not some event of centuries ago and the recognition of the genocide that occurred in Prijedor should be as commonplace as the recognition of the Holocaust.
According to the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian families are still searching for bodies of around 6,500 victims of war and genocide in the country.
Please join me tomorrow in remembering and mourning the victims of Republika Srpska.
“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” Matthew 5:4
Click here for more on Tomasica mass grave.