Sead Djulic said that the Grabovica massacre still haunts him – particularly because it was committed by troops from his own army. “Someone came from somewhere else, committed the crime and left a bloody stain on all of us,” he said.
Some 25 years after the killings, Djulic was the manager of MTM (Mostar Youth Theatre) when it staged a surprise hit play that everyone in town was talking about.
Directed by Djulic, the play was about the Grabovica massacre and was named after the four-year-old girl who was killed.
‘Uspavanka za Mladenku’ (‘A Lullaby for Mladenka’) was a small, amateurish production with a cast of teenagers who were born long after 1993 when the massacre took place, but it became more popular than all the other premieres that season.
The teenage actors who appeared in ‘A Lullaby for Mladenka’ had not heard of the massacre when Djulić suggested they could do a play about it.
“One of them even asked where it was, even though it’s very close to Mostar. At that time none of them knew what happened there,” he said.
Back in 1993, few people initially knew much about what had happened. Grabovica was completely sealed off after the massacre; entering the area was forbidden even to international press and peacekeeping forces.
But even though the Hague Tribunal failed to convict Sefer Halilovic, many new facts and details emerged during the trial.
Some lower-ranking soldiers were convicted by the Bosnian state court. One of them, Enes Sakrak, a member of the Bosnian Army’s 9th Brigade, was convicted of the murders of members of Zadro family, including four-year-old Mladenka, and sentenced to ten years in prison because he showed remorse and decided to cooperate.
Sakrak testified that on the morning of September 9 in Grabovica, the troop commander Nihad Vlahovljak ordered to his unit to “murder all the locals”. Vlahovljak never said where he got the order from, according to Sakrak, but he testified that he thought it came from someone higher up in the ranks.
Another soldier, Mustafa Hota, was convicted of murdering the Maric family. He got the same sentence as Sakrak – ten years in prison. Soldiers Nihad Vlahovljak, Sead Karagic and Haris Rajkic were also convicted and got 13 years in prison each.
These five individual sentences are all the justice that the families of the Grabovica victims have got. It was never proved who gave the order to murder the civilians, most of them women and old people.
Prosecutors silent about new evidence
The Link LonkSeptember 09, 2020 at 12:46PM
https://balkaninsight.com/2020/09/09/bosnia-and-herzegovinas-grabovica-massacre-the-soldiers-who-couldnt-forget/
Bosnia and Herzegovina's Grabovica Massacre: The Soldiers Who Couldn't Forget - Balkan Insight
https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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