BOSNIAN VICTIMS

AIM, ZAGREB, April 6, 1994

It was Bosnia's fate to be on the line dividing the Roman Empire into the Eastern and Western; then to be the meeting point of the two greatest civilizations of the world

• Islam and Christianity, later Judaism too. It was its fate too to have the interests of the greatest world powers, from the Ottoman Empire to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, intermingle in its territory. Thanks to the constant meeting of different civilizations, philosophies and cultures, Bosnia at a very early stage developed a way of life and standards which are to a large extent today considered to be the postulates of the civic European society, guarding the graveyards of its peoples from its earliest past to date. And today, prehistoric and medieval tombstones, crosses, Moslem tombstones, Austro-Hungarian and modern memorials are being destroyed so as to make Bosnia what it never was before - a country of hatred and always new graves.

The bloody pages of the history being written by our times will contain, for instance, such a fact: over two million shells fell on the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the months - long seige from the "hills". This means that 2,960 missiles on average fell every day, that every square meter of this suffering town has "its" 27 grenades, i.e. that a lead lethal rain of 50,000 tons of iron and explosives fell on Sarajevo! In the appaling figures, which will show the victims of our war, everyone's private sacrifice, every unnecessary tragedy will be cruelly itemized under the pattern of group suffering and, as it happens in such cases, become a disembodied mass to impregnate new myths for those who have learned nothing and to whom group tragedy and suffering should become more important than the possibility of group betterment.

How will, tomorrow, this time of violence of people over people be called if the former are people at all and if the latter ever get a chance for human forgiveness and peace, will be determined by the ruins and traces of that violence. The stamp of the Bosnian - Herzegovinian tragedy left in the wake of camps, burned and destroyed cities, howitzer, tank and mortar grenades against civilians, mass killings and mass graves, rape, expelling and organized ethnic cleansing, vandalism against religious and national symbols, will be expressed through mere numbers. For instance, in the first twenty months of the war, according to data available so far and classified, 140,797 persons have been registered as killed, missing or dead of hunger and cold. Of that horrendous number 16,303 were children. In that period 9,357 people, of which 1,509 children, were killed in Sarajevo. 156,361 citizens , of which 39,256 children, were wounded. Over a half of the Bosnians and Herzegovinians have been displaced. Over 80% of economic facilities have been destroyed, over half of the housing area of B&H demolished beyond repair... These figures are far from being final!

War analysts already estimate that in Bosnia and Herzegovina the percentage of multiple wounding was as high as 90 percent, this disgraceful record being held until this war by the Arab - Israeli war with 70 percent, Indochina 30% and World War I 10%. Mass killings already have their morbid gradation: killings in concentration camps, mass killings in retaliation for military defeats or mass killings in a "live shield". The State Commission for gathering facts on war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina states: Hrustovo, Sanski Most, June 1, 1992, chetniks killed and slaughtered 150 villagers, Sevarije, Doboj - 40 villagers, Kasaba, Vlasenica

• 29 villagers... Then mass graves: Ilijas, Vogosca, Gracanica, Rogatica, Vlasenica, Kotor Varos, Zvornik, Visegrad, Brcko, Bijeljina, Zepa, Kalinovik, Foca, Sanski Most, Kljuc... Camps: Omarska, Kozarac, Sekovici, Dretelj, Trnopolj...Destroyed mosques, churches. Old graveyards razed to the ground.

Article 147 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention reads that "the civilian population and individual civilians will enjoy general protection from dangers arising from military operations"; it says that "attacks are forbidden on civil facilities, repression is forbidden"; it says that the "starving of the population as a method of conducting war, is prohibited"; that personnel extending assistance "will be respected and protected" and hundreds of other things which do not exist in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian war. Those who wrote such provisions of international war law claim that in the war here these provisions are being violated, and the consequence are appaling numbers of victims of war and ethnic cleansing. Regrettably, the architects of the Bosnian

• Herzegovinian war started it and planned it precisely on the violation of such principles and they consider its bloody consequences their success.

When history counts the final numbers of those killed and wounded in this war, all the victims of nationalist - fascist ideologies, it will lack that immeasurable number of "people with no address" whose future was buried not only within the entire Bosnia and Herzegovina but also without its state borders.

DRAZENA PERANIC