Srebrenica - the Serbian Graveyard

Author: P. Vasiljevic
The article published in: Vecernje Novosti,
Belgrade, June 15, 2005

At least 3,227 (three thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven) Serbs were murdered or have died after horrible torture in concentration camps in the Srebrenica district during 1992 - 1995 time period. The torture and murder was perpetrated by Bosnian Muslims.

The list of murdered Serbs is still not complete.

We got the above information from Center for Research of Crimes Perpetrated on the Serbian People, an organization which meticulously traces and records every victim of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war.

After obtaining the "bloody harvest," the Center revealed that in the town of Srebrenica itself, 446 Serbs were murdered. The crimes were perpetrated by 469 criminals. In the [adjacent] town of Bratunac, 447 Serbs perished at hands of 254 criminals, and in the town of Zvornik [a bit North of Srebrenica], 100 murderers ended the lives of 954 Serbs. These shocking numbers are well documented by the Center as every name of the victim as well as the criminal is listed and supported through a number of photographs, witness accounts, accounts obtained from relatives, the county lists of deceased people as well as graves, grave-stones and documentation obtained from priests.

"We have all of the proof, the archives, the description of the crimes -- all. All these monstrous, undeniable facts," Mr. Milivoje Ivanisevic, President of the Research Center, tells us as he shows us the archived documentation. "It can not be that someone is alive and we still have them in our list of the murdered."

As the first knife was drawn in Bosnia, Mr. Ivanisevic, then completely alone, left Belgrade by bus and traveled through Valjevo [in Serbia] and Zvornik [in Bosnia] to remote villages where the crimes occurred.

After a few months, a dozen people joined his effort and today the organization has four fully employed individuals who deal with the archive. The organization also has 97 associated experts who are collecting documentation on the ground.

The entire Crime Archive is partitioned such that every village, every town in Bosnia and Herzegovina has its representation. The forms used for the documentation are copied from the famous Jewish organization Yad Vashem, which used those forms to collect documentation about Jewish victims who perished in WWII. The Center obtained the forms from the Jewish Center in Belgrade.

The sources that supplied documentation to the Research Center: local county administrations, notaries, courts that got the crimes as criminal cases, non-governmental organizations, families of the victims, and associations of surviving concentration camps' inmates...

The Center is financed exclusively from private donations. The President complains that the Center does not have any support from the Government [of Serbia] and that that is one of the main reasons why the collected truth has a hard time in leaving the neat shelves and reaching the general public. This is how we have a situation where only "Bosniaks" get to forward what only they call the truth.

"We are doing our best so that anyone who asks for information gets it right away."

"For example, people from the Hague Tribunal were visiting our office and asked for documentation in the case of the [Muslim] war criminal Naser Oric. Also, thanks to our documentation, Muslim criminals who committed atrocities in the Celebic concentration camp were sentenced," the members of the research center told us.

To this date, the documentation collected by the Center lists 26,818 Serbian victims who were killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the time period of 1992-1995. Some 19% of these victims are soldiers, 10% are women, while children are less than 1%. [In other words, 80% of Serbian victims were - civilians.]

Our note: Mr. Ivanisevic is author of the book "Chronicle of our graveyards, or a word about the suffering of the Serbian people of Bratunac, Milici, Skelani and Srebrenica," published in Belgrade in 1994.

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