Bosnia marks White Ribbon Day in honor of 1992 massacre victims
BELGRADE, Serbia – Bosnia and Herzegovina marked White Ribbon Day in honor of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the western town of Prijedor in 1992.
On May 31, 1992, the Serbian administration in Prijedor ordered the non-Serb population to wear white stripes on their arms when they left their houses- an order followed by extermination, murder and persecution.
Thousands of people in Prijedor, Banja Luka, Brcko, Tuzla, Sarajevo and other cities and towns wore white ribbons on their arms to mark the 30th anniversary of the massacre.
An event was organized in the square in front of the cathedral in the capital Sarajevo to mark the day.
A group of 102 children helped show how the same number of children were killed in the Prijedor massacre.
Nihad Alickovic, one of the organizers of the program, said that they wanted to demonstrate that 102 is not a small number.
“We want to show with these children that 102 is not just a number. The screams you hear here belong to the children killed in Prijedor,” said Alickovic.
Many relatives of the victims with white ribbons on their arms attended the event, which was held without a march for the first time since 2012, due to a police ban.
Relatives of the victims and members of local NGOs left 102 roses in the city’s Zoran Karlica square.
Sefik Dzaferovic, chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the ban on the White Ribbon Day march was “unacceptable” to the victims’ relatives.
For years, the city administration has been delaying the construction of a monument in memory of the children killed in the city, Dzaferovic added.
The Bosnian War began on March 1, 1992 and lasted until December 14, 1995.
More than 100,000 people lost their lives in the war, while around 2 million were uprooted from their homes.
The country suffered greatly during its war of independence, which included the siege of Sarajevo and genocide of Srebrenica, Europe’s worst wartime atrocity since 1945.
Among the 3,176 civilians killed in Prijedor, 102 were children and 258 women. Some 30,000 others suffered in concentration camps at Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje on Prijedor’s outskirts.
Most of the killings took place between May and August 1992.
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