"White ribbon day" to commemorate 3,176 Bosnia's victims

The wartime campaign to eliminate all non Serbs from the Prijedor area took 3,176 lives, mainly at the start of the 1992-1995 war.

The victims include 102 children, and this years’ commemoration will focus on them.

When Bosnian Serbs took exclusive control of Prijedor in 1992, they ordered the non-Serb population to wear white ribbons around their arms and put white sheets in their windows.

“The white ribbons are one of the things proving the intention to commit a genocide in Prijedor, as the group was marked in a visible and clear way for extermination and expulsion from that territory,” former inmate at the Omarska, Manjaca and Trnopolje concentration camps, Mirsad Duratovic, told the Fena news agency.

The portions militarily controlled by the Serbs remained a part of Bosnia but were turned into a semi-autonomous entity called Republika Srpska. Prijedor is now in Republika Srpska and non-Serbs who survived the ethnic cleansing and returned to Prijedor are dedicating  this year’s commemoration to their attempts to build a monument to the children killed in town, an idea the Serb city authorities reject.

‘Women in Black’, an NGO promoting peace and reconciliation from belgrade will also mark the “White ribbon day” in Serbia’s capital.

Several wartime Serb soldiers and police officers who committed the crimes in Prijedor were sentenced to a total of 770 years behind bars, in 51 final instance verdicts.

“Those verdicts are aimed at Prijedor’s Serb nationalist citizens, and there is not a city in the world where that many of its citizens were sentenced for war crimes committed against their neighbors,” Duratovic said.

He added that there are still 37 ongoing trials at the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and expressed hope that the perpetrators will be held accountable for those crimes.