Terror never stopped, although April '92 is long over: Prosecutors must choose FUP instead of MUP in ethnic conflicts

By: Amina Čorbo-Zećo

April is the month. Always difficult, on the way to work in Sarajevo traffic, I notice military trucks, military police rotations, it's not UNPROFOR, but it's EUFOR, it's not pleasant, even knowing that military exercises are being held. Because, after all, it smells like April. To prove that everything is not a figment of imagination and bad memories, I have news from Stolac.

"Last night in Stolac, four returnee children, four golden boys, were beaten. They were ambushed on their way back from a match in the manner of the most hardened bandits by unknown perpetrators with several cars at the entrance to Stolac. Then they brutally beat them, tortured them. Such violence must be urgently and most severely punished," said Minister Nerin Dizdar.

Returnees have been targeted by fascists, chetniks, ustashas for 20-odd years, since their return to their homes from which they were expelled by genocide, UZP, and the most terrible war crimes. No adequate sanctions are enough to protect citizens throughout BiH, and often the perpetrators are never even found.

There is a series of unsolved attacks on returnees in Republika Srpska, but they are becoming more frequent in cantons with a Croatian majority where mosques, the Partisan Memorial Cemetery, and now young men – returnees – are targeted. Everything that diminishes their 'legitimate representation' bothers hooligans and young descendants of UZP.

But the reason why everything remains for months, years in police reports and prosecutorial remarks that the investigation is ongoing can also be found in the fact that cantonal prosecutor's offices are in strong collusion with cantonal police administrations and that prosecutors still do not trust the Federal Police Administration, which they certainly should, at least in criminal offenses that are ethnically colored.

Because the FUP will investigate incidents in cantons with more impartiality, which are inter-ethnic conflicts.

The Federal Police Administration points out that they can adequately respond to all tasks assigned to them, but prosecutors, especially cantonal ones, clearly avoid them.

When the police and prosecution cannot discover for months who demolished 700 tombstones at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery, it is logical that emboldened hooligans will also target people, returnees, all those who remind them that they live in BiH, not Croatia.

Therefore, the FUP should increasingly impose itself as the holder of investigation activities where national tensions are the cause of criminal offenses.

Prosecutors must respect FUP's correspondence and characterize criminal offenses in a way that meets their requirements, so that they can be involved in investigations, and analogously, so that perpetrators can be found faster.

So far, we have learned that returnees in the BiH entity Republika Srpska are attacked and terrorized by 'mentally ill patients' adorned with chetnik iconography, so the MUP of RS has justified almost every attack on Bosniaks and non-Serb population by security organs in RS.

Now in the Federation, perpetrators are searched for and searched for, until the attack fades into oblivion, and some new attacks remind us that April 1992 was indeed the beginning of the bloodiest and most difficult period for BiH citizens, but that terror never stopped! There are many such examples, and the memories are still fresh, and with the first darkness, locking oneself in houses is increasingly difficult for returnees, who are now, according to testimonies of the local population, literally in a panic.