Foča massacres

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The Foča massacres were a series of killings committed by Serb military, police and paramilitary forces on Bosniak civilians in the Foča region of Bosnia-Herzegovina (including the towns of Gacko and Kalinovik) from April 7, 1992 to January, 1994. In numerous verdicts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled that these killings constituted crimes against humanity. In a 1997 judgement against Novislav Đajić, the Bavarian Appeals Chamber ruled that the killings in June 1992 were acts of genocide.^[1] Asides from mass murder, the campaign against non-Serb civilians in the region also included ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, and the deliberate destruction of Bosniak property and cultural sites.

All Bosniaks were expelled from the area. Some 2,704 people from Foča are missing or were killed during the massacres period. ^[2] Additionally, Serb authorities set up locations - commonly described as rape camps - in which hundreds of women were raped. ^[3]^[4]

Numerous of Serb officers, soldiers and other participants in the Foča massacres were accused and convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

1 Ethnic cleansing
2 Mass rapes
3 Individuals accused of war crimes
4 Individuals convicted of war crimes
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Ethnic cleansing

At the outset of the Bosnian war, Serb forces attacked the non-Serb civilian population in Eastern Bosnia. Once towns and villages were securely in their hands, Serb forces - i.e. the military, the police, the paramilitaries and, sometimes, even Serb villagers – applied the same pattern: Bosniak houses and apartments were systematically ransacked or burnt down while Bosniak civilians were rounded up or captured and, sometimes, beaten or killed in the process. Men and women were separated, with many of the men detained in local camps.^[5]

Virtually all traces of Bosniak presence and culture in the area were wiped out in the campaign. Almost no Bosniaks remained in Foča. All mosques in the city were destroyed. On 22 April 1992, Serbs blew up the Aladža Mosque - one of the most famous mosques in the Balkans. Eight more mosques, from the 16th and 17th centuries, were also damaged or fully destroyed. On January 1994, the Serb authorities renamed Foča “Srbinje” (Serbian: Србиње), literally meaning "place of the Serbs" (from Srbi Serbs and -nje which is a Slavic locative suffix).^[5]

[edit] Mass rapes

Bosniak women were kept in various detention centres where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions and were mistreated in many ways including being repeatedly raped. Serb soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centres, select one or more women, take them out and rape them. All this was done in full view, in complete knowledge and sometimes with the direct involvement of the Serb local authorities, particularly the police forces. The head of Foča police forces, Dragan Gagović, was personally identified as one of the men who came to these detention centres to take women out and rape them. There were numerous rape camps in Foča. “Karaman’s house” was one of the most notable rape camps. While kept in this house, the girls were constantly raped. Among the women held in "Karaman's house" there were minors as young as 15 years of age. ^[5]^[6]

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women were specifically targeted as the rapes against the Bosniak women were one of the many ways in which the Serbs could assert their superiority and victory over the Bosniaks. For instance, the girls and women, who were selected by convicted war criminal Dragoljub Kunarac or by his men, were systematically taken to the soldiers’ base, a house located in Osmana Đikić street no 16. There, the girls and women, who Kunarac knew were civilians, were raped by his men or by the convicted himself. Some of the girls were just 14. Serb soldiers demonstrated a total disregard for Bosniak in general, and Bosniak women in particular. Serb soldiers removed many Muslim girls from various detention centres and kept some of them for various periods of time for him or his soldiers to rape.^[5]

The other example includes Radomir Kovač,convicted also by ICTY. While four girls, were kept in his apartment, the convicted Radomir Kovač abused them and raped three of them many times, thereby perpetuating the attack upon the Bosnian Muslim civilian population. Kovač would also invite his friends to his apartment, and he sometimes allowed them to rape one of the girls. Kovač also sold three of the girls. Prior to their being sold, Kovač had given two of these girls, to other Serb soldiers who abused them for more than three weeks before taking them back to Kovač, who proceeded to sell one and give the other away to acquaintances of his.^[5]