Some thirty young people from Serbia and Croatia took part in the memorial tour, paying their respect to civilians killed during and after the military operation Storm. The activists had an opportunity to visit, together with the Initiative, victims’ associations and the Serbian National Council, the places of suffering in the vicinity of Knin – Ervenik, Varivode and Gošić, and learn more about facts established by courts on war crimes committed in August 1995.
YIHR Programme Coordinator Marko Milosavljević said that the goal of this joint visit and commemoration with young people from Serbia and Kosovo was to pay respect to all victims of crimes that took place 24 years ago.
“We started our visit in Ovčara, because, if we want to talk about crimes during the Storm, we have to talk about what happened before the Storm, what was happening from 1991 until August 1995, what led to a series of crimes, and we chose first to talk about one of the most mass murders until that moment. Everything that happened before the Storm certainly does not justify crimes committed during that Action”, said Milosavljević.
Through this memorial tour, YIHR wishes to shift focus from the perpetrators of crimes to victims, first of all because convicted war criminals have much more attention in public than their victims.
“In this way we want to educate young people, to give them the opportunity to see places where the crimes were committed, to talk with members of the victims’ families associations and to learn as much as they can in places where everything happened”, said Milosavljević.
A group of activists finished the tour with a visit to the Jasenovac Memorial Site, that is, to the site of the Ustashe concentration camp ‘Ciglana’ during the rule of the Independent State of Croatia in the Second World War.
