May 31st, 1992 – 2012
On 31 May 1992, the Bosnian Serb authorities in Prijedor, a town in north western Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued a decree for all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or sheets and to wear a white armband if they were to leave their houses. This was the first day of a campaign of extermination that resulted in executions, concentration camps, mass rapes and the ultimate removal of more than 94% of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the territory of the Prijedor municipality.
This was the first time since the 1939 Nazi decree for Polish Jews to wear white armbands with the blue Star of David that members of an ethnic or religious group were to be marked for extermination in this way.
Members of the European Commission Monitoring Mission testified that while visiting a mixed Serb/Muslim village as late as August 1992 they saw that the Muslim houses were marked with white flags in order to distinguish them from the Serb houses. The campaign of persecution of non-Serbs that ensued was judged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to amount to actus reus of genocide.
Thousands of people were killed, detained, tortured, deported or raped and the community that was known as Prijedor was changed forever.
Bosnia and Herzgovina is today a country that functions on the basis of a peace agreement signed in 1995 which left Priejdor in the hands of Bosnian Serbs.
Victims of the genocidal campaign carried out in Prijedor have not received any acknowledgement of their suffering from the municipal authorities to this day. The mayor Marko Pavic and the local government refuse to publicly acknowledge any of the crimes committed in Prijedor, despite numerous judgments of international and local courts. Memorials honoring victims of this campaign have been forbidden and access to sites of their suffering denied by the likes of ArcelorMIttal, a company that now owns the site of the former concentration camp in Omarska.
We invite you to show your solidarity with victims of mass atrocities committed in Prijedor and around the world on 31 May by wearing a white armband or placing a white sheet or flag on your window.
This action is intended to raise awareness of the struggle for acknowledgement of millions who suffered injustice and harm. From Prijedor to Johannesburg, from Jakarta to Lima, let’s make this a day to raise our voices against the denial of truth about past atrocities. On 31 May, let’s be the voices of countless victims who were targeted for their race, ethnicity or political beliefs.
Wear a white armband, place a white sheet on your window on 31 May! Let the victims in Prijedor and around the world know they are not alone.
Send in your comments and share stories of victims being denied their right to truth and remembrance.
podržavam svaki vid borbe za pravdu
I republished your invitation to mark White Armband Day, but I deleted the term “Bosnian Muslims” and replaced it with a term Bosniaks (which symbolizes our nationality).
See here http://bosniagenocide.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/genocide-in-prijedor-31-may-marks-white-armband-day-worldwide/
Board of eight NGO’s formed to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Prijedor atrocities, gathered on 21 May in Sarajevo to present the planed program under a banner “Genocide in Prijedor – 20 years.”
However, they opened the press conference with information received from Serbian authorities preventing the group from staging commemorative gathering. In the rejection letter MUP RS states that, “due to different nationalities and sentiments it could come to violence, and if the commemorative gathering takes place there is a real danger to public safety and could place people and property at risk.” However, a march of Serbian ultra-nationalists wearing black uniforms was previously held in the Prijedor with authorities approval.
“We came to Sarajevo because it is also the responsibility of our country’s capital to help us commemorate with dignity the anniversary of killings and persecution of our loved ones” said Edin Ramulis, activist from “Izvor.” He explained that organizers wish was to present key facts and evidence of war crimes committed in Prijedor, so that continues Genocide denial would be prevented in this municipality.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=306037906146373&set=a.306037902813040.74992.303505719732925&type=1&theater
Rios Montt already is facing a genocide trial after being charged in January for allegedly causing the displacement of 29,000 Indians and the killings of 1,771 Mayans. His lawyers are seeking to block the trial, arguing an amnesty law covers Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala in 1982-83.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/efrain-rios-montt-genocide_n_1535216.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
Marko Pavic, the Prijedor mayor, on 22 may openly stated he will not allow any events to take place in Prijedor to mark the 20th anniversary of crimes against non-Serb citizens. He will explicitly ask the RS police to stop any public events, especially those planned for public spaces in the city or any areas belonging to the city administration. He accused the victims groups and ‘some Bosniaks from diaspora’ of aiming to portray Prijedor negatively and damaging ‘its reputation’. At the same time, he asserted that the victims should forgive for what happened to them and their loved ones ‘for the sake of a better future’.
The power of one – Emir Hodzic, whose brother and father were inmates of the Omarska concentration camp, near Prijedor in north-western Bosnia and Herzegovina, standing silently with a white armband in Prijedor’s main square on 23 May 2012. On the same day he was denied a visit to Omarska by the ArcelorMittal guards. The white body bag in front of him symbolizes the crimes committed against women in Prijedor. There was supposed to be an installation with 266 white body bags and red roses representing 266 women and girls killed in 1992. Prijedor mayor Marko Pavic did not allow the installation, saying that any marking of the 20th anniversary of genocide in Prijedor would ‘harm the city’s reputation’.
http://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/emir-hodzic-se-sjetio-zrtava-genocida-u-prijedoru/120524181
DENIAL is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav or Rwanda Tribunals, or an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or an International Criminal Court may not deter the worst genocidal killers. But with the political will to arrest and prosecute them, some may be brought to justice.
genocidewatch.org
It seems that Prijedor’s mayor Marko Pavic has done us a great favour with his insulting and harsh statements about the victims’ right to remembrance in Prijedor. He ignited people’s pride and revolt against the police decision to forbid events marking the suffering of citizens of Prijedor in 1992, so much so that the annual visit to Trnopolje had three times as many people than last year. Some 500 people turned up and were standing shoulder to shoulder as one. We were connected not only through the pain suffered in the Tronopolje camp by innocent men, women and children, but through our thirst for dignity and equal rights for all in Prijedor. Today, as part of the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of Genocide in Prijedor, in Trnopolje camp, where some 23000 people suffered, we have given another chance to the municipal administration led by Pavic to seriously start the reckoning with our dark past and stop discrimination of their own citizens. It is up to them to take this opportunity so that we can build a better Prijedor together, based on healthy atmosphere and acceptance of each other. Prijedor that will not continue to hide the bodies of more than 1000 dissapeared from their families. Prijedor which will give the victims of rape, former camp inmates and victims’ families a minimum of dignity they don’t have today. Prijedor where we will together mourn innocent victims no matter which ethnic group they belong. Prijedor that will not tolerate killers and rapists walking its streets freely. Prijedor that will have the names of 102 children killed in 1992. in a city square memorial, to serve as a reminder not to let something like that ever happen again.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=308668762549954&set=a.306037902813040.74992.303505719732925&type=1&theater
70 years ago, on 27 May 1942, 168 prisoners were shot at the execution wall in the courtyard of Block 11 in Auschwitz I. They belonged to the group of Polish painters, artists and actors who were arrested on 16 April 1942 in the Artists’ Cafe in Krakow and sent to Auschwitz on 24 and 25 April. The prisoners were taken to the courtyard four at a time and shot. The Block master uttered the following sentence: “For the murder of the head of the Luftwaffe in Krakow, you are condemned to death”. Then they were killed with individual shots from a small-caliber weapon. Present at the execution were the head of the Political Department Maximilian Grabner, Protective Custody Commander Hans Aumeier and the head of the Labor Deployment Department Heinrich Schwarz.
On the same day in Prague Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated.
Podrzavam inicijativu. Mislim da treba dodati, na onom mjestu gdje se pominje ArcelorMittal, nesto optrilike ovako:
ArcelorMittal is the biggest steel company in the world co-owned by Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the world. In London Mittal flaunts his philanthropy by sponsoring the ArcelorMittal Orbit – a steel sculpture, Britian’s largest piece of public art, soon to be opened in the London Olympic Park. (http://www.arcelormittalorbit.com)
Whilst in Bosnia Mittal denies survivors of concentration camps a right to commemorate by a simple act of laying flowers at the place of their suffering. ”
Takodje mislim da bi ste/smo trebali pisati pismo Mittalu i Anish Capoor koji je dizajnirao skulpturu, i reci da ce prezivjeli logorasi redovno protestvovati u blizini skulpture u Olimpijskom parku i dijeliti pamflete o Mittal-ovom sramnom ponasanju u Prijeddoru. Pamfleti ce sadrzavati sliku logorasa iza bodjikave zice, pored slike Orbit skulpure u u Stratfordu.
Pozdrav.
This is the first time I heard about white armband movement. I know about crimes and massacres in Bosnia in ninetees. My mother was in concentration camp during the WWII, father was a war prisoner. I chose to wear a yellow arm band with well-known phrase “Arbeit macht frei” in 1998. in Serbia to state my protest. Those were the times of Milosevic’s Law on Universities and we were persecuted if did not comply with it. We were also fighting the regime from 1990 till 2000, trying to rise awarness of crimes and genocide in Bosnia. I have a lot of friends – Bosniaks and I am proud of that. I wish you success and I will wear the white armband on May 31st, though I am at present abroad. By the way, I am half Serbian – half Slovenian, but above all I hope I am just a human being.
God bless you all and Alahu ekbar (sorry if I did not spell this right).
Professor
May God bless you. Greetings form Sarajevo.
I am an Canadian UNPROFOR veteran from Srebrenica 1993 and I returned to BiH last year for the first time and met with some great old friends. I didn’t serve in nor visit Prijedor but I plan to visit Bosnia again this year. My deepest respects go to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I do her a home away from home.
we appreciate that a lot, thanks a million.