• !FOTO 01-0177
  • !FOTO 02-0232
  • VH-Majke-Presuda-Karadzicu-7

  • VH-Srebrenica-2

  • VH-Srebrenica2015-27

  • VH-Trnopolje-Sudbin-Music-6
  • EASTERN BOSNIA - APRIL 2001: This are my grandmother’s hands. She survived two wars. 2nd World War and the Bosnian war for independence. Most of her family was exterminated in 2nd world war. Pretty much the offspring of the people that killed her family in 2nd world war committed atrocities in Bosnia in early 90’s. Eastern Bosnia is on the border with neighboring Serbia with river Drina as a natural border. Through the history Bosnia was always a border country between East and West, during the Ottoman period it was the border post towards Austrian empire, before that it was border between Eastern and Western Empire. This position made Bosnia quite a unique conglomerat of ckutures,traditions,religions. Other than that it didn't bring us too much good. When the war was over, a foreign journalist came to interview my professor of poetry, Marko Vesovic. Entering his appartment, the journalist noticed my professor's dog who was lying in a corner. 'What remarkable blue eyes he has,' the journalist said. 'Well, you see,' explained my professor, 'the dog used to eat the same food we ate during the war. Now he is blind. Dogs are ageing seven times faster than we do, so with us it is different. We still have to wait for the effects on us. I never witnessed a mortar shell exploding in front of the people in the market place or a sniper shooting someone in front of my high school. I was always a couple of seconds or minutes late, or I would pass by the market place just before the shell exploded and killed more than sixty people waiting to buy groceries, or I would be running in a dark street with broken glass falling on me. But I've seen people cleaning the streets after shelling, I've seen what was left of a young man after a thirty-kilo shell exploded near him, and I've also seen the face of woman who survived this unhurt. Lately, when I was in Jerusalem for the first time, I wanted to visit the Al-Aksa mosque. At the entrance I was stopped by an Israeli soldier, a native Russian, and an Arab guard of the mosque. 'You are not allowed to enter,' said the soldier. 'You are not Muslim.' 'But I am!' I insisted. They wouldn't believe me. In Italy, I told an acquaintance of mine that I was a Muslim. He was irritated. 'But then,' he said, 'you cannot be a European.' 'But I am!' I replied. The Turks have left us with an unsolved national question. Religion and culture have always been strongly intermingled in our country. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Bosnia in 1453, the strategy it used to establish its rule was Roman: Divide et impera. Religion was the vehicle. Favouring the Muslims helped the Turks run the country, but it divided the Bosnians. In the 19th century, during the era of Romanticism, when Central Europeans began to build up their ideas of nationhood based on concepts of cultural uniqueness, Bosnians developed their own cultural identities out of religious affiliations. But these cultural identities failed to develop into the idea of a Bosnian nation: Bosnian Catholics and Bosnian Orthodox were seduced by the ideas of a Great Serbia or a Great Croatia. Today Bosnia is a resort of moderate, autonomous European Islam. Actually most of the population are Christians: Orthodox and Catholics. The Arab countries were not too impressed by the Bosnian version of Islam and their help wasn't sufficient to help us defend ourselves against the former Yugoslav Army, one of the strongest armies in Europe. The body count in the recent war was almost all Bosnian Muslim, but for the first time in the last two hundred years we have a state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a language that is recognized….We've never been closer to a nation. I'm afraid that the fact that Bosnians are white helped us a lot. Probably that's why it took only four years for NATO to intervene in Bosnia. Before the fall of Srebrenica, the UN safe haven zone, foreign involvement was on the level of bringing humanitarian aid, mostly only where the Serbian Army allowed, and counting the shells and bombs falling on Bosnian cities. Then after the fall of Srebrenica and the massacre of Bosnian Muslims that followed it, NATO bombed the Serbian positions and brought peace. The first shelling of their positions around Sarajevo came at night. I remember our windows, covered with humanitarian nylon sheeting with UN signs instead of glass, opening because of the detonations, this time on the Serbian side. My mother cooked a pie to celebrate it. Our lives during the war were reduced to the basics. Having a bath with five-litre canisters and then using the water for the toilet. Making meat pie without meat. We became experts at peeing in the dark. The  path to happiness was very short, and the learning curve was steep. Once we all adopted these vital skills, and even got used to our little limbo and for a moment stopped talking about peace, our politicians signed the peace agreement. We have a new anthem now. We also have a new flag. It shows a dark blue ground on which is placed a golden triangle, a row of golden stars on one side. The triangle is meant to represent Bosnia and the row of stars I guess imply the European Union. Today we have to stand in a queue to get a visa for every European country. The writer Ivo Andric, one of two Bosnian Nobel Prize winners, described Bosnia in one of his novels as a 'valley of darkness'. The valley is surely dark; it is dark with Bosnian blood, it is darkened by American ignorance and European impotence, it is dark because of the clouds above. Yet it is our valley (Photo by Ziyah Gafic/Exclusive by Getty Images)

  • Ziyah_Gafic_4_(c)ZiyahGafic

POČELI RAZGOVORI O IMPLEMENTACIJI ODLUKE UN KOMITETA PROTIV TORTURE

Deset mjeseci nakon donošenja Odluke – i dalje bez konkretnih koraka implementacije

TRIAL International u saradnji sa Ministarstvom za ljudska prava i izbjeglice BiH organizovao je danas u Sarajevu ekspertski sastanak na kojem je pokrenuta diskusija o implementaciji Odluke 854/2017 koju je UN Komitet protiv torture prošle godine donio protiv države Bosne i Hercegovine. Odluka je donesena zbog neispunjavanja obaveza prema žrtvi ratnog seksualnog nasilja kojoj je onemogućeno efektivno i provodivo pravo na adekvatnu i pravednu naknadu, kao i što potpuniju rehabilitaciju. Rok za informisanje Komiteta o koracima koje je BiH poduzela za implementaciju ove Odluke istekao je prije sedam mjeseci, a ekspertski sastanak organizovan je uoči Međunarodnog dana podrške žrtvama torture koji se 26. juna obilježava širom svijeta.

Osjećala sam se grozno, iznevjereno od sistema. I danas živim sa tim. Naknada mi znači puno. Bol se ne može naplatiti, ali naknada preživjelima daje samouvjerenost da idu dalje i da se bore za pravdu do kraja“, istakla je preživjela ratnog seksualnog nasilja po čijoj predstavci je donesena Odluka. Odlukom se, između ostalog, nalaže Bosni i Hercegovini da joj se isplati naknada štete te u što kraćem roku osigura pružanje odgovarajuće i besplatne medicinske i psihološke pomoći kao i javno službeno izvinjenje.

Naglašavajući da konkretni koraci i dalje izostaju, Lamija Tiro, pravna savjetnica iz organizacije TRIAL International, istakla je da neispunjenjem obaveza prema oštećenoj “A“ BiH krši ne samo UN Konvenciju protiv torture, nego i niz međunarodnih konvencija čiji je potpisnik. “Neispunjenjem i ove odluke nastavila bi se loša praksa nepoštivanja odluka međunarodnih tijela što bi dodatno narušilo ugled naše zemlje. Važno je napomenuti da BIH prije svega ima pravnu i moralnu obavezu prema žrtvama ratnih zločina kojima duguje konačno ozbiljan pristup po pitanju iznalaženja rješenja za ostvarenje njihovih prava. Ohrabrujuće je da smo danas započeli ozbiljniji razgovor sa predstavnicima institucija o ovoj temi, a naredni period će svakako biti test za BiH vlasti da pokažu postoji li istinska spremnost za implementaciju ove odluke“, navela je Tiro.

Nadamo se da će ova tema u narednom periodu biti u fokusu bh. vlasti, a posebno zbog činjenice što u narednom periodu predstoji novi ciklus izvještavanja prema UN Komitetu protiv torture.