In the name of (in)justice: Everything exists except the will to speak the truth loudly and forever - no crime was committed in Dobrovoljačka!

By Amina Čorbo-Zećo

There is a country where truth is not enough for justice. There is a nation that survived a siege, buried children, put out fires in their own apartments, dug trenches around schools and maternity wards – and today is told it is guilty.
And these memories especially awaken at the beginning of May.

There is a street – Dobrovoljačka – that defended an entire city, and a hundred interpretations that want to turn it into a crime scene. And there is a judiciary – with weak knees, bowed heads, and closed eyes.

Dobrovoljačka is not a judicial case. It is a mirror of what the BiH judiciary has become: a system without courage, without consistency, and without a true sense of the victim. And the victim in this case is truth.

The BiH Prosecutor's Office is not an independent institution. It is a space where national, international, and personal agendas are turned into indictments, into "opinions", into silence. Silence is the most common instrument of the Prosecutor's Office in the Dobrovoljačka case. The silence of those who did not raise their voice when Milanko Kajganić and Mladen Vukojičić copied an indictment from Serbia, prosecuting the heroes of the defense. Injustice is not accidental. It is systematically built.

Defending Sarajevo in 1992 meant opposing military force, tanks, shells, and saying we won't give up the city. Today, those who did it walk the world with arrest warrants behind them. They are detained at airports, interrogated, proving they are not criminals. And they are not. The prosecutors, the judges, and the politicians who ordered these warrants know this.

Because if they were guilty – they would have been convicted at The Hague. But they were not. They were not even indicted there. They are not even formally suspected, NOR DID THIS CASE APPEAR ON THE LIST THAT THE HAGUE FORWARDED TO THE BiH JUDICIARY. But the BiH Prosecutor's Office holds them hostage today in a case that is a direct desire of revisionism. To show that all are the same – both those who attacked and those who defended themselves. The JNA column was a legitimate military target, as The Hague determined, but today the BiH judiciary tells us otherwise. They claim that a terrorist army on the soil of the sovereign, internationally recognized Republic of BiH could not be a military target, and that Alija Izetbegović was a free man!

Therefore, the Dobrovoljačka case is a tool. It is used to maintain false narratives, balance negotiations, and buy political points. All at the expense of truth. At the expense of those who truly defended Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the expense of children who grew up without parents, women who lost their husbands, fighters who lost their health, and today, their dignity.

The Dobrovoljačka case is a paradigmatic example of how defense turns into accusation, how the state abandons those who created it, how institutions betray the citizens they are supposed to protect.

There are UN documents. There are statements from international officers. There are recordings. There is a legal context. Everything exists – except the political will to speak that truth loudly and forever: no war crime was committed in Dobrovoljačka.

But the judiciary remains silent. And while it is silent – it commits a crime against the truth.

I am not writing this for history. History is written by the victors, and negotiations about who the victor is are still ongoing here. I am writing this for dignity. So that someone, somewhere, finally says what the institutions dare not: that those who defended their city are not criminals.

That there is a difference between an aggressor and a defender. That there is a judiciary that had a chance – and threw that chance away.
The truth is that justice has never been further away. But likewise – it has never been more needed.