Memorial service to Ivan Jovovic (19) and Pantelija Dakic (13), who were murdered from an ambush nine years ago on the bank of the Bistrica River in Gorazdevac near Pec, has marked another sad anniversary since the terrorist attack, for which nobody has been held accountable to this day. The report of Mladen Bijelic.
Terrorists fired 90 shots from the direction of the Albanian village of Zahač, and four youths were wounded in the attack – Marko Bogicevic (12), Dragana Srbljak (13), Bogdan Bukumiric (14) and Djordje Ugrenovic (20). Although the crime was condemned by then heads of UNMIK and KFOR, officials of the EU, USA, France and Russia, as well as the authorities in Pristina, while promising that they would all together “turn over every stone to find the perpetrators”, to this day nobody has been held responsible for that heinous act. Moreover, the EULEX investigators stopped the investigation in late 2010, due to what they called “the lack of evidence”, and prosecutor Sagmajster Ranciger from Slovenia only notified the families of the killed boys on February 9, 2011.
These days, Head of the Serbian Government’s Office for Kosovo and Metohija Aleksandar Vulin has called upon EULEX to reopen the investigation and bring the perpetrators to justice, while assessing that it is incomprehensible how nine years later nobody has even been suspected of involvement in the abominable deed committed four years after the conflict in Kosmet. “I invite EULEX to reopen the investigation and at least try to regain the trust it has so thoroughly lost within the Serbian community”, explained Vulin.
Historian Cedomir antic, the President of the Progressive Club, the only organization in Serbia that monitors the realization of the political rights of the Serbs in the region, has condemned in his statement for our radio the inadequate reaction of the international community. Antic also reminded of the systematic threats, not only to political, but also to citizen rights for the Serbs in the surrounding countries and the region, and especially in Kosmet.
In comparing the state of the human and political rights in the Republic of Srpska, Croatia and Kosmet, Antic says: “Since 2000, in the Republic of Srpska there have been 12 murdered returnees from the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, all those crimes have been investigated and almost every one was committed by a member of the same ethnic community, and not by Serbs. In Croatia, which will soon join the EU despite failing to reinstate many rights to the expelled Serbs, 85 Serb returnees have been murdered, while in the territory of Kosmet, from 1999 to this day, 950 people have been murdered, mostly Serbs. They were killed just for not being Albanians”, says Antic. He adds that the grand majority of those crimes remained uninvestigated and unpunished. The crime in Gorazdevac is one of those, and according to Antic, it is even more brutal because the targets were innocent children on school vacation, while taking the bath in the river.
“This crime is also the best indication of just how much the attitude of the authorities in Kosmet is anti-Serb! If the so-called fighters for human rights really wanted to defend the human rights in the Province all these years, they would have joined us in the battle against the non-democratic regime in 1990s. However, all they ever wanted was to take Kosovo and create an independent and ethnically cleansed Albanian state in the lap of the Serbian state! Regardless of the support of many big forces they had, the state of Serbia has also made lot of mistakes when it comes to the activities it failed to take, with the goal of defending the national interests. The same omission was done when it comes to the usurped rights of the Serb refugees from Croatia, with the consequences that we still feel today”, concluded Cedomir Antic.