Chetniks in Visegrad: October 1943

Image: Above is an image of Yugoslav Royalist Forces (Chetniks) entering Višegrad in October 1943. After entering Višegrad a genocidal massacre of Bosniak civilians took place in and around the town of Višegrad.

Image: The Sjemeč field (Sjemečko polje) masscare is one of the most brutal massacres committed in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. A column of Bosniak refugees from Višegrad attempted to escape from over-run Višegrad to Sarajevo. This column of civilians was brutally attacked and massacred by Yugoslav Royalist Forces (Chetniks).

Mićo Jovičić sentenced to 5 years in prison for Strpci kidnappings

Following the review and acceptance of the Guilty Plea Agreement in the case v. Mićo Jovičić, the Trial Panel of the Section I for War Crimes of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina handed down on 16 November 2016 the Verdict under which the Accused Mićo Jovičić is found guilty of the criminal offense of War Crimes against Civilians in violation of Article 142(1) as read with Article 22 of the Criminal Code of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (CC of SFRY) and sentenced to five (5) years in prison.

The Accused Mićo Jovičić is found guilty because during the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina between June 1992 and December 1995, in the territory of municipalities of Rudo and Višegrad, between the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) and Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as members of the Army of Republika Srpska namely, L.D. as a commander of the 2^nd Podrinje Light Infantry Brigade – Višegrad (2.PLPB-Višegrad), B.I. as a commander of the Intervention company within the said Brigade, and O.P., N.P., D.Š., O.K., P.I., R.R., V.R. and Mićo Jovičić, as members of the Intervention company or members of the 1^st Company, the 1^st Battalion, the 2^nd Podrinje Light Infantry Brigade Višegrad, acted in violation of the rules of international humanitarian law violating Article 3(1) a) of the Geneva Convention relative to Protection of Civilian Persons at time of War dated 12 August 1949.

Pursuant to Article 188(4) the Accused is relieved of the duty to reimburse the costs of the criminal proceedings.

The Court also rendered the Decision extending the prohibiting measures: travel ban with the seizure of travel documents and prohibition to use the identity card to cross the state border. The said measures shall be in place no later than the Accused is committed to serve the sentence and if he violates the measures he may be ordered into custody.

(Source: Court of B&H)

Bikavac exhumation 25.2.2016

 

25.2.2016 – An exhumation was carried out on the foundations of Meho Aljic’s house in Bikavac where on 27.6.1992 one of the worst war crimes was committed during the genocide 1992-95. At least 70 women and children were burnt alive by Bosnian Serb soldiers.

On 25.2.2016, the Missing Persons Institute conducted an exhumation on this location and found one piece of human bone. There were several exhumations conducted on this location but this was the first time a human bone was discovered.

The crime scene was destroyed by the local authorities during or after the war. The house was bulldozed and the site was turned into a garbage dump.

DNA analysis will be conducted on the discovered bone in order to try and establish an identity of a victim.

Photo credits: Avaz

 

Italian-Chetnik cooperation in World War Two

Image: An Italian soldier and a local Serb Royalist Soldier (Chetnik) pose for a photograph with the Chetnik flag near Visegrad in 1942.

Visegrad Genocide Quotes – 1

Dragan Sekaric sentenced for 14 years for Visegrad crimes

Image: Bosnian Serb Dragan Sekaric

Former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Dragan Sekaric was sentenced to 14 years in prison for rape and murder in the village of Kosovo Polje in the Visegrad municipality in 1992.
Sekaric was found guilty on Friday of going to a house in Kosovo Polje in June 1992 with other Bosnian Serb soldiers and taking several civilians outside, after which he raped a woman inside the house.

He was also convicted of pushing a civilian called Fatima Jamak into a burning house on the same day, and killing her afterwards.

Presiding judge Mira Smajlovic said that the Bosnian prosecution had proved that Sekaric committed his crimes with intent and that the testimonies of the rape victim and another witness who in the village were “convincing and objective”.

“The defence challenged the credibility of witnesses S1 [the victim] and S3 [the eyewitness], considering their descriptions of a person they knew as Dragan Gorazdak differed. However, the trial chamber finds that the witnesses gave satisfactory explanations for these differences. Namely, they were in a state of fear and it is clear why they did not remember details they did not find important,” said Smajlovic.

The judge also said that Sekaric’s alibi – given by his uncle, who testified that the defendant was in Serbia – was not convincing.

Smajlovic said that while considering the 14-year sentence, the court took into account the fact that he was a family man with two children as a mitigating circumstance and the brutality of his crime as an aggravating circumstance.

The verdict however acquitted Sekaric of taking part in an attack on Kokino Selo in Gorazde, robbing and taking away a man and his son from Visegrad, both of whom were never seen again, and beating a prisoner in the Uzamnica detention camp.

Smajlovic said witness testimonies about the attack on Kokino Selo only offered “second hand and imprecise” details about Sekaric. She said that the testimony of a witness about the Visegrad incident was also not convincing.

Regarding the prisoner abuse charge, Smajlovic explained that the Bosnian prosecution had failed to call a victim to testify.

“Because of the procedural mistakes of the Bosnian prosecution and the lack of evidence, the trial chamber had no other options then to acquit the defendant of this charge,” said the judge.

RADOMIR ŠUŠNJAR AKA LALCO SUSPECTED OF WAR CRIMES IN VISEGRAD ARRESTED IN FRANCE.

After months of operative activities the Prosecutor and Investigators of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, located the suspect in France. The French authorities were requested to arrest and extradite him to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Following months of verifications and investigative activities the Prosecutor of the Special Department for War Crimes of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH has, together with Investigators of the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, located the suspect Radomir Šušnjar in the territory of the French Republic.

After he was located, the French judicial and police authorities were requested to arrest him immediately and to extradite him to the Judiciary of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Significant cooperation was achieved with the Office of the ICTY Prosecutor in The Hague during the course of these activities.

Radomir Šušnjar is suspected of being personally and directly involved in committing a horrible crime, publicly known as the “living bonfire” at a house located in Pionirska Street in Višegrad, together with Milan Lukic, who is on trial at The Hague Tribunal, and some other persons.

In July 1992 more than 60 Bosniak civilians, including women and children, from the area of Višegrad were captured in that house and then set on fire, while at the same time automatic weapons were used to fire inside the house.

On that occasion 59 people were killed and only seven of the victims managed to escape and survive.

The suspect Radomir Šušnjar is under investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH and is suspected of having personally participated in the incarceration of the victims in a house in the Pionirska Street and its subsequent setting on fire.

The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH would like to thank the Embassy of France in BiH, the BiH Embassy in Paris, the Judiciary and the Police of the French Republic, the Interpol office in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Central Office of Interpol in Lyon, the Court of BiH, the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICTY and all other institutions that have helped in tracing, locating and the arrest of this suspect.

The Prosecutor’s Office of BiH expects that he will soon be extradited to BiH Judiciary hence the activities in the aim of indicting continue. The aforementioned event is a clear message to all war crimes suspects that the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH and law enforcement agencies will locate and prosecute the suspects no matter where they are hiding, all n the interest of the rule of law, peace and reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Killing Bosnia’s Ghosts: Fighting to Remember the Balkan War Genocide

On  the day that Bosnian Serb authorities finally went to remove the word “genocide” from the memorial plaque commemorating the mass killing of Muslims in Visegrad in 1992, Bakira Hasecic woke up early, along with a few other women.

She had stayed overnight in the house she still owns in the eastern Bosnian town, although she now lives in Sarajevo. The morning was brisk but not particularly cold, a rarity in those January days.

Their intention was to stop what they saw as desecration of the memorial. They were too late.

When she arrived at the Straziste Muslim cemetery, 150 police in riot gear were lined up along the road, some shaking off the crisp mountain air, others laughing at her.

Visibly distressed and with her legs shaking, Bakira hurried to cover the gravestones bearing the names of Serb war criminals Milan and Sredoje Lukic and T-shirts printed with the names of those who died.

A local woman discreetly wrote “genocide” back on the memorial in lipstick. The inscription, once chiselled into the stone, had been removed by a workman with an angle grinder.

The Stražište memorial in VisegradIBT

“They are bothered by the word ‘genocide’. They cannot face the truth,” Bakira, a survivor of the Balkan war who was raped multiple times by Serb paramilitaries led by Milan Lukic, told IBTimes UK.

After 20 years, a bitter struggle over collective memory still haunts this sleepy town in Republica Srpska, the ethnically cleansed enclave carved out in the 1992-95 conflict.

“What Bosnian Serbs did to Muslims in 1992 they are still doing today, minimising and concealing those crimes.”

Bilal Memisevic

In August 1992, while the capital Sarajevo was under siege, Visegrad, strategically located on the majestic River Drina between Bosnia and Serbia, was taken over by Serb forces and purged of its majority Muslim population in a campaign of terror carried out by Lukic and his cousin Sredoje.

Muslim men were rounded up and murdered. Hundreds of women were detained and mass-raped at the spa, the infamous Vilina Vlas. Women, children and elderly people were locked in houses and burnt to death.

A widespread culture of denial in Visegrad is now being encouraged by Serb nationalists who want separatism from Bosnia.

“What Bosnian Serbs did to Muslims in 1992 they are still doing today, minimising and concealing those crimes,” says Bilal Memisevic, president of the local Muslim community.

Barimo

Barimo is a hamlet nestled in the folds of the hills, at 15-minute car ride from Visegrad, along the emerald waters of the Drina.

Only 78 Bosnian Muslims lived there before the war, in modest houses overlooking green meadows and plum orchards on the riverbanks. In the early hours of August 1992, Serb forces entered the village for a killing spree. Twenty-six people – mostly women and children – were massacred.

Memorial in Barimo for those who were killed in 1992IBT

Resident Suljo Fejzic was sheltering with his family in a village above Barimo. He sneaked into the village that morning, finding his way among the bushes and the mountain pines.

“When we entered the village all the houses were burning. Everything was burning,” he recounts.

“At the bank of the river they executed 12 people and put the bodies in a pile, at the place where the stream joins the river Drina. Later when we got back to the village, we came across people who had been killed trying to escape, we found people who had been shot in the head while lying on the ground”.

The river

The oldest victim was Hanka Halilovich, who was born in 1900, and the youngest was 12-year-old Fadila Bajric. As late as 2004, Fejzic and other villagers kept finding bodies in half-burnt houses, the victims executed with their faces in the dirt.

“But the largest mass grave is the river,” he tells IBTimes UK, pointing to where a silent stream meets the Drina.

“Bodies of lifeless Muslims were floating on the Drina like ants. My house was near the bank of Drina, which was filled with blood.”

Bakira Hasecic

The river and the grand 16th-century bridge built on 11 arches that decorates Visegrad were made famous by the 1945 masterpiece by Nobel prize-winning writer Ivo Andric in The Bridge on the Drina. The novel captures the construction of the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge and the uneasy relationship between the cultures of Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, a relationship that still exists albeit in a different form.

A Unesco World Heritage Site, the bridge became during the war the nightmarish bloodsoaked centre of the town, a place where Bosnian Muslim men, women and children were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces and thrown into the river. Lukic troops used to grab any piece of glass they could find and slit the throat of innocent civilians. One victim was found with a screwdriver in their neck.

The Bridge on the Drina river in VisegradIBT

“Bodies of lifeless Muslims were floating on the Drina like ants. My house was near the bank of Drina, which was filled with blood,” says Bakira Hasecic.

This immense, underwater graveyard is the perfect metaphor for Visegrad, where the past is “unforgiven, unforgotten, unresolved” as correspondent Alec Russell put it.

Before the war, 63% of the town’s 25,000 people were Bosnian Muslims. Despite the Dayton peace agreement calling for the Bosnian Muslims to be able to return to their homes, only around 5% have come back.

“Only a few have returned to the town itself. Most have gone back to the surrounding villages where they can be with other returnees, earning a living from livestock and agriculture,” says Jasna Causevic, of the German group Society for Threatened Peoples.

Sometimes, though, the past emerges in full force from the swamps of history.

When in 2010 the water levels of the reservoir behind the Bajna Bast hydroeletric dam – called Lake Perucac – further downstream were lowered the remains of more than 160 civilian victims from Visegrad were found in a 50km-stretch of lake bed.

Forensic expert from the International Commission On Missing Persons uncovers human remains near the eastern Bosnian town of VisegradAFP/Getty Images

At least 3,000 Muslims were massacred in the eastern Bosnian town. But to many Serbs the 1992 attack was a preventive strike whose aim was to avoid a repetition of past slavery under the Ottomans.

Muslims used to prosper under the Ottoman Empire but the Serbs were serfs, uneducated and exploited for manual labour.

President Slobodan Milosevic’s idea of a “Greater Serbia” appealed to many of his local countrymen and laid the foundation for the massacre that followed.

At the start of the 1992 war, short-term actions of resistance by Bosniaks provided the perfect excuse for an alternative Serbian narrative of the war. A small group of Bosniaks took control of the Bajna Basta dam on Lake Perucac and threatened to open it, threatening massive flooding downstream and sabotaging the electricity supply to parts of Serbia.

Adem Omeragic house

The battle for memory and the power to write history are entangled in the bare bricks of another key building of the town. On Pionirska Street, the Serb administration wants to demolish Adem Omeragic’s house, where one of the worst atrocities of the war was committed by Milan Lukic.

Such was its ferocity that it was singled out by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

At least 59 Muslim women, children and elderly people were locked in the house and burned alive after they had been rounded up, raped, sexually abused and robbed. Some witnesses put the death toll higher.

“Some of them who survived sexual abuse were killed in one of the rooms in the basement. There were the remains of more than 70 of them, 49 women alone and about 20 children after the burning and devastation,” says Bakira Hasecic.

With her Association of Women Victims of War, Hasecic rebuilt the house in two weeks and says she has been given permission by the owner to turn it into a memorial.

Adem Omeragic house in Pionirska StreetIBT

“We reconstructed the house from the same material, exactly the way it used to be before, identical to how it was before it was burned with people inside,” she says.

“However, I encountered resistance in the municipality of Visegrad. What I had to suffer on those days when we started rebuilding the house in some moments was more difficult than 1992. Every day, for about 12 days when we began to work behind the house, some 15 to 20 police officers would come in, obstruct us, and put pressure on us.”

“Serbs are not allowed to make any kind of memorial in Sarajevo, where I lived for some 18 years”

Slavisa Miskovic

The municipality claims that according to the town’s planning map, a road was due to be built through the place where the house stood. The mayor of Visegrad, Slavisa Miskovic, confirms that  “manipulacija”, political manipulation, is playing a part.

“No one denies that a crime happened there, but what is happening now is to do with the building of the road. I didn’t come up with this proposal, these proposals were inherited from the previous administration,” the mayor says.

Bakira HasecicIBT

In the gentle wrinkles of her face, Bakira still shows the psychological scars of sexual violence and abuse.In 1992, she was forced to watch as a group of Serbs that included her next-door neighbour raped her 18-year-old daughter.

The girl’s head was cracked with a rifle butt but she managed to survive. Her sister, however, was raped and killed by Lukic troops in the infamous rape camps of Vilina Vlas spa. Bakira herself was raped countless times in her home and at the local police station.

“I was a happy woman, I worked in the municipality, 90% of my friends were Serbs and they killed everything that was beautiful in me,” she says.

Erasing the past

The Serb Democratic Party (SDS), which has run Visegrad municipality since October 2012, denies that there has been any “disturbance” against Muslim returnees in the town and seizes on legal jargon to erase memories of the 1992 genocide.

Slavisa Miskovic, the mayor, is an outspoken and animated man who at first sight bears no resemblance to the perpetrators of the war. He talks of respect for all victims of war, regardless of nationality and ethnic origin, and cautiously admits that not enough has been done for Bosniak returnees in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

But when he turns to the disputed Stražište memorial commemorating the Bosniak genocide, the alternative reality of the war re-emerges in full force.

Slavisa Miskovic, mayor of VisegradIBT

He says the “genocide” inscription was removed from the memorial because there was no planning permission granted and because the word itself was dangerously emotive and had no legal basis.

“Serbs are not allowed to make any kind of memorial in Sarajevo, where I lived for some 18 years,” he says.

“Regarding the disputed monument on Stražište there are no arguments or legal basis for the use of such a word [genocide] and it causes destabilisation in the municipality of Visegrad,” Miskovic adds.

Those responsible for the massacres, Milan and Sredoje Lukic, are serving respectively a life sentence in Estonia and 27 years in Norway. But the mayor argues that there have been no convictions at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague for genocide.

Nobel prize winner Ivo AndrićIBT

He says the activists demanding recognition of what happened to the Muslim community in those dark days are manipulating that community. His administration, he maintains, is adhering to all legal procedures and prefers to look to the future.

He proudly displays an architectural plan of the controversial Andricgrad theme park, a “town within a town” dedicated to literature that will be inaugurated in June with the aim of providing jobs to Bosniaks and Serbs alike and boost tourism.

This geometric reverie, a sort of half-deserted pastiche of Bosnia’s histories and architectural styles, has been conceived and will be built by two-time Cannes Film Festival winner Emir Kusturica, a Serbian. It is being raised on the site of a former sports centre that was used as a detention camp during the 1992-95 war.

“The thing that prevents peace from being stabilised is those who seek to be revisionist towards history.”

Paddy Ashdown

Bosnian Serbs are willing to accept that atrocities were committed during the war but use explanations, excuses and diversions. The crimes, they say, were purely the actions of a psychopath such as Milan Lukic.

Recognising that genocide took place in Republika Sprska – that ethnically cleansed enclave hacked off from Bosnia, which is pushing for annexation with Serbia – would mean acknowledging that their state existed as a result of mass murder.

Paddy Ashdown served as international community’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 to 2006 and was highly praised for his proactive efforts to bring Bosnian Serb war criminals to justice and strengthen the central state institutions.

Paddy Ashdown, international community’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina 2002-06IBT

He is highly critical of the secessionist policies of Republika Srpska and maintains that there was a positive verdict on the genocide charges.

In an interview with IBTimes UK, he says: “I know that the thing that prevents peace from being stabilised is those who seek to be revisionist towards history, to pretend that Srebrenica never happened. If you cannot come to terms with your past, you cannot build your future.”

Visegrad may prove to be the exception.

Bosnia the Surreal: Emir Kusturica’s Fantasy Town Erasing the Brutal Past

By Gianluca Mezzofiore
April 11, 2014 12:13 GMT

Entering Andricgrad, the controversial and ambitious “town within a town” built by filmmaker Emir Kusturica in celebration of literature and culture, is like something out of a Jorge Luis Borges book.

Every stone in the town, from the 19th century-like Spanish ‘Francisco Goya’ café to the Orthodox Church that rises like a lighthouse on the Drina River, echoes The Bridge on the Drina, the 1945 masterpiece by Nobel prize-winning writer Ivo Andric.

The book, published in 1945, captures the history of the uneasy relationship between the cultures of Christian Europe and the Islamic Ottoman Empire through the bloody story of the 16th century Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge that was built in Visegrad.

Everything from Thomas Mann Street to the multiplex cinema “Dolly Bell” breathes art and literature. Andricgrad also features an Austro-Hungarian academy of fine arts, a wine-tasting bookshop promoting Kusturica’s own book, an opera house dedicated to Italy filmmaker Luchino Visconti where Kusturica plans to stage the premiere of his opera, based on Andric’s masterpiece.

A joint project between Kusturica (who has 51% of the share) and the government of Republika Srpska, the Serbian enclave carved out after the 1992-95 war, the theme park cost between €10m and €12m.

Fantasy town

The project is controversial to say the least as it has been raised on the site of a sports centre that was used as a detention camp during the war. About 3,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in Visegrad on or near the 11-arched bridge. Before the war 63% of the town’s 25,000 inhabitants were Bosnian Muslims. Despite the Dayton Peace Agreement, which called for the Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks) to be able to return to their homes, only around 5% have come back.

Bosniak activists such as Bakira Hasecic, who was raped at Visegrad police station by Serb paramilitary leader Milan Lukic and after the war founded the Association of Women Victims of War, say they would never put a foot in Kusturica’s fantasy town.

“I would never enter Andricgrad even if my life depends on it,” she told IBTimes UK. “On 26 May 1992 along [what has become] the access road to Andricgrad the first buses for Bosnian Muslims who were forced into exile [by Serb forces] used to pass. In the sports centre where we took our kids to play there was the biggest concentration camp for Bosniaks.”

Supporters of Andricgrad dismiss those claims as propaganda. They maintain that the construction provided much-needed jobs to Bosniaks and Serbs alike.

The mayor of the town, Slavisa Miskovic, accuses media of political manipulation. “No one in Visegrad is against Andricgrad,” he told us. “Andricgrad is supported by the majority of Visegrad inhabitants.”

But his remarks are dismissed by the president of the Islamic community, Bilal Memisevic. “The mayor lies. The mayor does not support Andricgrad. His ‘grace’ still has not had a coffee in Andricgrad.”

Rationalist architecture and metaphysical art

Erected on a stretch of land between the emerald green Drina and a tributary, Andricgrad strikes the visitor as a pastiche of Bosnia’s different history and stiles, where rationalist architecture and metaphysical art meet literary theme park.

Labelled a “time machine” by the official guide, it resembles more a nightmarish but fascinating caprice of genius. Behind a Serbian castle, Ottoman houses lead to a Byzantine tower; the main street is a clear example of Austro-Hungarian style.

Music pours out of Goya café into the empty Nikola Tesla town square, built in Renaissance style, where Ivo Andric’s black figure stands, unaware of controversies.

Kusturica himself is a controversial figure. He renounced Islam, despite being born Bosniak, and aligned himself with the Serbs. Local papers described project as “the unfortunate encounter between a limited imagination and poor knowledge of the past”.

Memisevic says: “It is politically dangerous because once the construction work has finished, Emir Kusturica is planning to shoot a movie based on Ivo Andric’s novel.

“The novel itself is a masterpiece in literary terms, but ideologically it is very dangerous work, because as every educated Bosnian Muslim knows it was commissioned by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts of that period.”

Memisevic says that in the book and in the film script the role of Bosniaks “will be mocked in relation to what we really are”.

“We are native European and with the Ottoman Empire we have nothing in common besides religion,” he says.

“The director says that Andricgrad is a time machine through Visegrad. Every culture is represented there besides mine. What kind of time machine is that?”

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

The Guardian, 23 March 2014

Serb nationalists trying to suppress reminders of atrocities committed against country’s Muslims 20 years ago

After survivors and bereaved families put up a memorial to the mass slaughter in 1992 of Muslims in Višegrad, the response of the Serb authorities in the eastern Bosnian town was as unsubtle as it was symbolic. They ordered the word “genocide” chiselled off the stone monument.

A group of Višegrad widows soon restored the word in lipstick, only for it to be obscured by municipal white paint a few days later. This is a battle the town hall is not prepared to lose. When it sent a surveyor and workman into the town’s Muslim cemetery with an angle grinder to erase the offending term on 23 January, they were accompanied by 150 policemen in riot gear. The message was clear.

The graveyard spat is a skirmish in a much bigger battle being fought in Bosnia – the continuation by bureaucratic means of the murderous four-year war of two decades ago. It is a struggle over collective memory and the power to write history.

“Those who committed the war crimes against us are still winning. They are killing our truth,” said Bakira Hasečić, a Višegrad survivor who was raped multiple times by Serb paramilitaries at her home and in the local police station in 1992. Her sister was raped and killed. Her 18-year-old daughter was raped and had her head smashed by a rifle butt, but survived.

Hasečić now runs the Association of Women Victims of War. She and other Višegrad rape victims tried to protect the monument last month but failed because the town authorities turned up an hour earlier than announced, and in force.

“The huge numbers of police in their uniforms and caps brought back the memories of 1992. You relive those moments. My legs were shaking. When we arrived, we had no idea they had already done that to the monument. People started crying when they found out. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.”

However, the same morning and less than 200 yards away, Hasečić and other Bosniak survivors were successful in stopping another act of demolition. The Serb authorities want to knock down a house on Pionirska Street, where 59 Muslim women, children and pensioners were locked into a single room and incinerated on 14 June 1992. Relatives of the dead, with Hasečić’s help, are trying to restore the house as a memorial.

The town council has countered by expropriating the building, claiming the road needs to be widened. Yet the house is set well back from the existing road and the immediate Serb neighbours – who have mostly been supportive of the Bosniaks’ restoration attempts, offering to help withwater and electricity connections – say no other houses on the street have been targeted in the same way.

But no one in the neighbourhood believes the issue is really about town planning. Serb nationalists are striving to suppress reminders of atrocities committed in the name of separatism, mostly against the country’s Muslims (known as Bosniaks) and to construct an alternative history in which Serbs were the principal victims. Many Bosniaks and outside observers fear that this refusal to come to terms with the past means there are few guarantees that such acts will not be repeated.

Bosniaks and Croats have also been slow to allow memorials to civilian victims from other ethnicities, but it is in the Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, where the scale of the killing was by far the greatest, and where the culture of denial is now the deepest.

Višegrad is a grim example. An eastern Bosnian town set dramatically along a break in the white limestone ravines of the River Drina, it is home to Bosnia’s best-known cultural artefact, the 16th century Mehmed Paša Sokolović bridge, a graceful span of 11 masonry arches made legendary by the Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić.

In his 1945 novel, the Bridge on the Drina, it is silent witness to atrocities across generations. In 1992, it was spattered with blood once more. Serb paramilitaries calling themselves “The Avengers” and the “White Eagles” went on a killing spree through the town and surrounding villages, executing Muslims. Men, women and over a hundred children were slaughtered, many on the bridge itself, and their bodies dumped in the Drina.

The practice of barricading people into houses and setting them alight with grenades was reproduced several times. In another incident in nearby Bikavac, there were 60 victims, against mostly women and children.

A couple of miles outside Višegrad, young women and girls as young as 14 were held captive and repeatedly raped in the Vilina Vlas spa hotel. It was where the paramilitaries led by a pair of sadistic local cousins, Milan and Sredoje Lukić, made their wartime base. Muslim men were routinely tortured next door to where the women were raped and killed.

The estimates of the total number of victims in the Višegrad municipality range from 1,600 to 3,000. The rest of the area’s Muslims fled; most made their way south to Goražde, which became a Bosniak enclave and survived a three-year Serbian siege. Before the war, the Višegrad municipality had a population over 21,000, two thirds Muslim. Now the population is 12,000, 1,500 of them Bosniaks.

A Bosnian Muslim woman prays over a casket containing her relative’s remains during a mass burial ceremony in Višegrad in 2012. Photograph: Elvis Barukcic/AFP/Getty Images

Today’s survivors are post-war returnees to the Višegrad outskirts, often living in villages or houses where their loved ones were executed. Twenty years after the bloodletting they remain a marginalised community, routinely denied the meagre social benefits doled out by Višegrad’s authorities.

After an interregnum in which slightly more moderate parties held sway, the Serb Democratic Party (or SDS for Srpska Demokratska Stranka) regained control of the municipality in October 2012. The extreme nationalist party of Radovan Karadzic, which hacked out the Republika Srpska and oversaw the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats, is back in charge in Višegrad and 24 other Serb towns with its own version of what happened between 1992 and 1995, and its own way of doing things. Hence the municipal use of angle-grinders and bulldozers.

“With the old mayor we could co-operate much better. We had different opinions but it was discussed in a more civilised way,” said Bilal Memišević, the head of Višegrad’s Islamic community council. Both his parents were murdered in 1992, when he was studying abroad. “Since the SDS came to power, they started ignoring us. They don’t mention employment, or the economy. It’s all about the war and the manipulation of 1992. They have been able to target a vulnerable population and they have been successful. They have built an alternative reality.”

That alternative reality is visible everywhere in town. In the main square, there is large statue of a knight bearing a cross and a sword, dedicated to “the defenders of the Republika Srpska, with the gratitude of the people of Višegrad”. Nearby a large swath of land had been expropriated for a literary theme-park, Andrićgrad, masterminded by Emir Kusturica, Serbia‘s most famous film director, twice awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The complex, a pastiche on the town’s history, due to be completed in June this year, is being built on the site of a former sports centre that was used as a detention camp by Serb paramilitaries.

In mid-March each year, hundreds of Serbs come from around the region to parade through the town to commemorate Draža Mihajlović, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Chetnik movement during the second world war, who carried out a series of atrocities against Muslims in the Drina valley. They come as Chetniks, with long wild beards, fur hats, and black skull-and-crossbone flags. Many of the killers in 1992 dressed exactly the same way. It is a terrifying annual spectacle for Višegrad’s remaining Bosniaks, all the more so in 2010 when Mitar Vasiljevic, a Lukić henchman sentenced 15 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal for his part in the 1992 killings, made a triumphant return after early release. He paraded in full Chetnik garb and was given a hero’s welcome, complete with patriotic music and a motorcade through the town.

Milan Lukić himself was transferred from the Hague this month to serve his life term in Estonia. His cousin Sredoje is serving 27 years in Norway.

The most powerful man in town now is Miroslav Kojić, a soldier and secret policeman for Republika Srpska during the war and now Višegrad’s SDS representative in the Republika Srpska parliament.

He provides a legal defence of the municipality’s actions, arguing that there have been no convictions at the Hague tribunal specifically for genocide that would justify the disputed memorial. (Višegrad was taken from the list of municipalities in Karadzic’s genocide indictment to slim the charge sheet and speed up his trial, but the tribunal has declared the town was subjected to “one of the most comprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict”). As for Pionirska Street, Kojić says the issue is a long-running non-political town planning matter.

Of his own wartime role, Kojić – an energetic man with a piercing stare – is heated, launching into a strangely inverted version of Višegrad’s wartime history, in which Bakira Hasečić supposedly tortured Serb policemen and soldiers, and Višegrad’s Serbs withstood a brutal Bosniak siege in 1992 and 1993.

The narrative of Serb victimhood is pieced together from sporadic Bosniak acts of resistance during the war. After the former Yugoslav National Army bombarded Muslim areas of Višegrad at the outbreak of conflict in the first week of April 1992, a group of armed Muslims took some Serb policemen hostage and threatened to blow up a nearby hydroelectric dam if shelling continued. The dam was retaken by the army which then withdrew on May 19, handing the town over to Serb nationalists and paramilitaries that carried out the atrocities against Bosniak civilians.

In summer 1992, survivors of the concentration camps helped form a Bosniak First Višegrad Brigade which fought a guerrilla campaign for a year in the wooded hills on the west bank of the Drina, but never came close to surrounding or threatening the city before being driven back into the Bosniak enclave of Goražde in 1993. After surviving multiple rapes, Hasečić, did join the Bosnian army, but there is no evidence of her mistreating Serbs.

Today the Bosniak resistance effort is the justification for public memorials in central Višegrad for Serb soldiers and even Russian volunteer fighters on the Serb side, and the absence of equivalent monuments to Bosniak civilians. It is a pattern repeated around the Republika Srpska. Further up the Drina is the town of Foca which became a byword for mass rape during the war. Bosnian Serbs imprisoned Muslim women and girls and raped them on such a scale the town made legal history. As a result of what happened in Foca, such systematic rape was finally classed as a crime against humanity.

There is no sign of such a grim history in Foca now, just another granite and marble monument to the Serb fallen. There is also no plaque at the most notorious concentration camp at Omarska, now within an iron ore mine run by a Luxembourg-based multinational steel corporation, ArcelorMittal, which says it is a matter for the Serb-run local authority in Prijedor to decide. In the neighbouring camp, at Trnopolje, where torture and rape were rife and where hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were killed, a concrete memorial to fallen Serb soldiers has been placed at the entrance inscribed with an ode to “freedom”.

In Višegrad, the remaining Bosniaks have become accustomed to the official state of denial. Omar Bosankić and Elvedin Musanović, two Muslim men in their mid-30s out strolling one recent afternoon on Višegrad’s bridge, insist that relations with their Serb neighbours are fine as long as the war is not mentioned.

“No one wants to admit anything. They never want to talk about it,” Bosankić said. As a 14-year-old boy, he helped fish bodies of murdered Muslims out of the Drina at night in his home village of Barimo, five miles downstream. “I still have images that come back all the time. There a woman with her hands tied behind her back and a man with a screwdriver still stuck in his neck.”

Musanović says that Bosniaks on the bridge were slaughtered with whatever the Lukićs’ “Avengers” or “White Eagles” could find, often blades of broken glass. A water tanker would come in the evening to wash away the gore from the ancient stones of the bridge where they now take their daily walk. In the absence of any jobs, there is not much else to do.

The two men are unimpressed by the municipality’s legal objections to the Bosniak memorial.

“What else happened here but genocide?” Bosankić asked. Twenty-six people were murdered in his village in August 1992, the youngest, Emir Bajrić, was only 12 years old. He points out that the fact that no one has so far been convicted for the crime does not mean it did not happen. “Everybody who lives here knows what happened.”