prijava
FOČA, October 5 (FENA) - Professor of Philosophy and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, David Pettigrew, said that it should be the greatest shame for the international community that a memorial was not erected at the "Partizan" sports hall in Foča in memory of the victims, which would be a testimony to the truth.
This year, he visited the "Partizan" sports hall in Foča, where some of the most heinous crimes against Bosniak women and girls took place in the period from 1992 to 1995.
He reminded that the violence against women in Foča led to a significant verdict of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia, in which the three defendants were found guilty of rape as a crime against humanity, the first such verdict in the court's history.
The Kunarac et al. judgment included the ICTY's first conviction for enslavement. In addition, the verdict emphasized that Muslim women and girls, mothers and daughters, deprived of human dignity, were treated as slaves of the Serbian occupying forces on the orders of the three defendants.
“Despite this historic verdict, the survivors are still not allowed to place a plaque at the location of the 'Partizan' sports hall, which served as an operational center for the execution of these documented atrocities,” says Pettigrew.
Although it is not allowed to erect memorials at that place, you can see an enormous mural of the Chetnik leader from the Second World War, Draža Mihailović nearby. In September 2004, the police and local Serbs physically stopped and chased away activists who tried to place a sign on the "Partizan" sports hall.
In the judgment in the case of Kunarac and others, the Trial Chamber found that there was a systematic attack by the Bosnian Serb army on the Bosnian Muslim civilian population in the municipalities of Foča, Gacko, and Kalinovik. This widespread and systematic attack was nothing more than an elimination effort that resulted in the destruction of the Bosniak population, says Pettigrew.
In nearby Kalinovik, which is often mentioned in the verdict in the Kunarac case, survivors could not erect a memorial in the Barutni Magacin concentration camp, reminds Pettigrew, the camp from which Bosniak men were taken to the death camps.
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, stated that genocide has two phases: the first phase involves the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group while the second phase represents the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.
“Although there was no conviction for the genocide in Foča or Kalinovik, the systematic nature of the elimination of the Bosniak population, followed by the ban on erecting memorials to the victims and the installation of murals of ultra-nationalists and war criminals reveals the fundamental genocidal dimensions of these crimes,” he adds.
In the verdict in the Kunarac case, it was emphasized that the Bosnian Serb aggression was aimed to eliminate, as it included a policy of expulsion through terror, that is, persuading other Muslims to leave.
“The striking absence of a memorial plaque at the 'Partizan' sports hall is a pernicious form of denial, violation of the right to truth, and deliberate insult to the memory of the victims,” Pettigrew believes.
Therefore, he invited the high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, to meet with the leaders of the victims' associations in Foča, Kalinovik, and elsewhere, and to use his Bonn powers to erect memorials in the "Partizan" sports hall, the Barutni Magacin concentration camp, and Vilina Vlas in Višegrad, as well as in other places.
(FENA) A. B.
