Serbia: Muslims Mourn Murdered Relatives

At the village of Strpci, the train line from Serbia to Montenegro loops into Bosnian territory – a geographical quirk that sealed the fate of 19 Muslims form Serbia 15 years ago.



As they traveled, they thought, from one part of their country to another, their train was stopped by Bosnian Serbs, and they were abducted and killed.



A decade and a half later, the location of their bodies is still unknown. This week, their surviving relatives gathered at this small train station to remember them and to plead for their murder to be investigated.



“We know they were killed, but not where their bodies are. I hope I will, one day, find the body of my father and know that he has a grave with a monument over it,” said Selma Memovic, whose father Fikret was among the victims.



She was one of a group of 60 relatives who gathered at the site of the abduction of the 19 Muslims, and said her family had never received support or information from the state to help them get over the loss.



“I am lost and I am constantly turning back to the past and thinking about my father,” she told IWPR.



The abduction was carried out by a Bosnian Serb paramilitary group calling itself the “Revengers”, which the year before had killed 16 Muslims from the Serbian village of Sjeverin after pulling them off a local bus.



Some of the victims of the Strpci abduction were killed near the train station. The rest were taken to a primary school in the village of Prelovo where they were tortured and beaten. Soon after that, the group was driven by truck to an unknown village on the road to the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad. In an abandoned garage, near the river Drina, they were killed.



War crimes prosecutors accuse Milan Lukic of having led the paramilitary group, which was part of the Bosnian Serb army, VRS. He is currently in detention in The Hague, awaiting trial.



Only one member of the group has been prosecuted. Nebojsa Ranisavljevic was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a court in Montenegro in September 2002.



According to documents submitted at the trial, the Serbian train company ZTP had information about the planned abduction as early as January 1993 and passed it to the government on February 1 of that year.



Although top officials from the police, the secret service, the army and ZTP discussed the intelligence, they concluded the operation was intended by the VRS solely “for making the conditions for an exchange of prisoners and the dead”.



That decision is enough for the victims’ relatives to blame the government of involvement in the killing. Among the relatives, anger at state officials is widespread.



Sandra Orlović from the Humanitarian Law Fund said the crime was very unusual, since the victims were Serbian citizens, who were abducted and killed in Bosnia by Serbs.



“The families feel betrayed by the Serbian state, because the state didn’t react in the proper way to this crime. We have a situation when, even after 15 years, the state institutions still don’t care. The state considers those who were abducted to have been second-class citizens,” Orlovic told IWPR.



Nine of the abducted civilians were from the Serbian town of Prijepolje - just over the border from Strpci - where in 1993 the 50,000 residents were almost exactly half Serbian and half Muslim.



On February 27, five support groups and the victims’ relatives staged a remembrance ceremony in the centre of town, which has the same ethnic mix today, but where residents say there is no ethnic tension.



Relatives of the victims then traveled to Strpci station where the abductions took place to lay flowers. It was for many relatives their first time at the scene of the crime, and they prayed together at the site.



The station is now abandoned. But a train, specially arranged for the occasion, passed through the station at 3.48 pm, the exact time, 15 years ago, that the 19 Muslims were abducted.



“The people who abducted and killed my brother were inhuman, without any conscience,” said Sefket Kajevic.



“We don’t ask anything of [the officials] except that they give us [our relatives] alive, if they are alive, and if not, that they give us their bones to bury with dignity and according to our religious customs.”



Aleksandar Roknic is an IWPR reporter in Sarajevo.

Also see Story Behind the Story, published 2 Mar 08, TU Issue 544.

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