QUOTE - Tja, het heeft een beetje een normatief karakter, deze titel, want hoe kun je nou ‘verkeerd herdenken’? In dit geval mag die normativiteit denk ik wel, wanneer ergens, na een gruwelijke oorlog, de daders herdacht worden in plaats van de slachtoffers. Balkan Insight heeft in dit kader een interessante longread over de Bosnische stad Visegrad. Voor u gaat lezen: u mag één keer raden welke grootmacht hier een lelijke rol speelt en de regio probeert te destabiliseren.
In 1991, the municipality of Visegrad had a population of 21,000, of which 63 per cent identified themselves as Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks). Then in the spring of 1992, Milan Lukic and his White Eagles, a self-styled Chetnik paramilitary group, came to town.
Sentenced to six life sentences by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY for murder, extermination, cruelty, persecution and inhumane acts, Lukic’s numerous crimes in Visegrad include the massacre of thousands of local non-Serbs on the Drina bridge, the killing of women and children in the now infamous Pionirska Street and Bikavac fires, and the rape and murder of hundreds of women at the hotel Vilina Vlas.
Yet not a single public marker exists to commemorate those events, nor to recognise that more than 3,000 Bosniak civilians that were killed in Visagrad from 1992 to 1995.
But the town does have Russian monuments – concrete markers of Moscow’s regional foreign policy tactic of destabilisation.