Ethnic Divisions Set in Stone

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/ethnic-divisions-set-in-stone

‘Hero’ fighters, massacre victims and alleged war criminals are being commemorated with new monuments across the former Yugoslavia, many of them reinforcing the disputes that originally led to the conflicts.

Elvira M. Jukic, Sinisa Jakov Marusic, Milena Milosevic, Boris Pavelic, Edona Peci, Marija Ristic

BIRN

Sarajevo, Skopje, Podgorica, Zagreb, Pristina, Belgrade

Memorial to Muslim soldiers on Dobrovoljacka Street, Sarajevo

Dobrovoljacka Street in Sarajevo, May 3: on one side of the road, the Bosnian Army’s Muslim Green Berets units are holding a ceremony in front of a plaque that commemorates the deaths of eight of their soldiers on this day in 1992; on the other side, Bosnian Serb officials and families of Yugoslav Army troops are holding a rival commemoration for their men who died in the same clash.
The Serbs, protected by cordons of Sarajevo police, have brought their own temporary memorial, a piece of wood decked with white roses, while the Bosniaks’ plaque is permanently fixed to a wall.
Both groups also have their own version of the truth.
According to the president of Sarajevo’s Stari Grad chapter of the Green Berets, Vahid Alic, the clash between Bosnian and Serb-led Yugoslav forces 21 years ago was crucial in “resisting the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
According to Bosnian Serb veterans minister Petar Djokic, it was “a war crime against Serbs”.
No court case has established the facts and the rival memorials are an indication of the bitterness of the dispute between the two ethnic groups about how many were killed and who started the violence.
Fights have sometimes broken out during the rival commemorations, but not this year, although emotions still ran high; a BIRN reporter was mistaken for a Serb mourner and spat upon.
New monuments have proliferated across the Balkans since the conflicts and, as the Dobrovoljacka Street conflict illustrates, have sometimes become the subject of bitter disputes themselves.
Since the start of this year, ethnic Albanians have taken to the streets of Presevo in Serbia after Belgrade sent in riot police to take down a memorial to their guerrilla heroes, a monument to fallen Bosnian Army troops has been blown up in a night-time attack in Mostar, Serbian gravestones and a Yugoslav World War II monument have been destroyed in Kosovo, while a row has broken out over the building of a Serbian Orthodox church near the Srebrenica genocide memorial.