Today is the Day of Remembrance of the Murdered Children of Sarajevo

"Today is the Day of Remembrance of the Murdered Children of Sarajevo as a memorial to all the murdered children from 1992 to 1995.

According to the Association of Parents of Killed Children, during the siege of Sarajevo, which is considered the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, 1,601 children were killed.

Some of the children were killed by sniper shots, while they were playing in the yard or on the way from home to school or back.

Fikret Grabovica, president of the Association of Parents of Murdered Children and a parent whose daughter was murdered, said that the pain borne by parents does not diminish and that the saying that "time heals everything".

"For many, the pain is actually greater as time goes on, especially for those parents, and there are a significant number of them, who killed two children each, or were left without children. Regardless of all that, it is certain that all parents carry this pain both in the past years and today, and the emotions will be especially heightened when this May 5th, the Day of Remembrance of Murdered Children comes around".

He added that every year the parents have mixed emotions – from endless sadness to pride that they commemorate the Day of Remembrance of the murdered children in an appropriate way and to send messages that the children who were brutally murdered during the siege of the city of Sarajevo are not forgotten.

"It is especially important for us to send the young people who will be present, and there will always be a significant number of them, a message that they must not forget, that they should remember, not to hate or to glorify themselves, but to know what happened, to be in the future very carefully, to protect their homeland and city in an appropriate way"Grabovica emphasized.

The Association of Parents of Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo often drew attention to the fact that BH. the judiciary did not do enough to prosecute the crimes against the murdered children of the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Grabovica repeated that the families of the murdered children are still saddened the most by the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not filed a single indictment in the past more than three decades.

"What is particularly difficult for us is the knowledge that no one has ever been held accountable for such terrible crimes, for 1,601 murdered children, and that the prosecutor’s office has never filed a single indictment. It’s just incredible. If I hadn’t witnessed all of this in the past years and had appeared from somewhere else, I wouldn’t have believed it. There is no particular dilemma as to who did it. Commanders are known, snipers are known who also killed… Reconciliation is mentioned, but without catharsis and punishment there is no reconciliation. It can be tried, talked about, but these are the conditions that lead to reconciliation"said Grabovica, whose 11-year-old daughter Irma was killed in a grenade explosion in besieged Sarajevo on March 20, 1993.

In 2019, the Government of Sarajevo Canton made a decision that May 5 will be commemorated as the Day of Remembrance for the Murdered Children of Sarajevo.

This year, the Day of Remembrance for the Murdered Children of Sarajevo will be celebrated on May 7, and the organization of this event has been taken over by the Ministry of Education of Sarajevo Canton.

In Sarajevo, there is a Museum of Wartime Childhood whose exhibits remind of the horrors that children went through and what their everyday life looked like. In the center of the city there is a memorial to the children killed in 1992-1995, as well as a memorial room.

The siege of Sarajevo began on April 5, 1992, and ended on February 29, 1996. It lasted 1,425 days. During that time, about 350,000 inhabitants were exposed to daily fire from members of the former JNA and paramilitary formations, and later from members of the then Army of the Republic of Serbia, from almost all types of weapons, from positions located on the surrounding hills. They did not manage to descend and occupy the city only thanks to the great will, desire and efforts of the defenders, the majority of citizens who responded to the call for defense, and at the beginning, almost bare-handed, in sneakers and jeans, with minimal weapons, stood up to the defenders of the city.

During the siege, 11,541 citizens of Sarajevo died, including 1,601 children. According to post-war research, most of the inhabitants, almost four fifths of the total number of dead, died in the first two years of the war."

Text: AA