In Prijedor ‘White Tibbits’. Remembering a terrible ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosniaks

In Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, on Saturday, « White Strip Day » was celebrated in memory of thousands of killed and exiled Croats and Bosniaks that end from May 1992 when paramilitary forces of Bosnian Serbs took control of that city, starting a campaign of mass ethnic cleansing.

Hundreds of displaced persons and the current residents of Prijedor gather and by passing silence to the central town square recalled the fact that more than three thousand Croats and Bosniaks were killed in that city, including 102 children, and more than fifty thousand people of non -Serb nationality were expelled from their homes in the wider Prijedor region.

The irrefutable proof of these crimes is the mass grave of Tomašica discovered only in 2013, which found as many as 435 bodies.

The beginning of these crimes is related to May 31, 1992, when the Serbian paramilitary occupied Prijedor, and after that they asked Croats and Bosniaks to recognize their authority by reporting white sheets to home and carrying white ribbons when they exit their homes.

Associations gathering the exiled Prijedorcans and the victims of various abuse of the years unsuccessfully seek from local authorities to allow the erection of a monument to the killed children and repeated this request on Saturday when they laid 102 white roses in the central square in memory of them.

Fikret Bacic, head of the Association of Parents of Killed Children, said the erection of the monument is directly blocking the current mayor of Prijedor Slobodan Javor from the Union of Independent Social Democrat (SNSD), headed by Milorad Dodik.

« Today’s mayor does not want to talk to anyone about it, » Bacic told reporters.

Among the victims of the persecution was Fikret Alic from Kozarac, a man whose tormented body was behind the barbed wire of the Trnopolje camp on the cover of US Time in 1992.

Today he says that he is the hardest thing for him to have those who still deny these crimes  »

« Thirty -three years are the same, the same is still denied by the crime they have done in Prijedor. They are still trying to portray through their propaganda that it has not been, and the whole world has seen that it has been. More more lies and loops, » Alic told Dnevni Avaz.