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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Discrimination |
|---|---|
| located: | Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia |
| editor: | Katarina Panić |
People in Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot agree about what happened during the 1990s war – who started it, who was the first victim, or who was guilty of what.
The politics heavily exploit ethnical divisions among three dominant groups – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, persistently creating an enemy image of each other. Accordingly, facing the past has been approached rather selectively – by commemorating your victims only and by denying the war crimes committed by your ethnic group. Furthermore, the majority groups usually have a kind of monopoly for remembrance, not allowing minority groups to commemorate their victims as they would like to.
Therefore, a group of human rights activists from Bosnia and Herzegovina initiated the White Armband Day. They had been contemplating: if the authorities do not want to allow the building of memorials or commemorative public gatherings like they did back in 2012, they still do not have the power to forbid anyone from wearing the armband while walking around.
Last Sunday, the White Armband Day took place in Prijedor for the ninth year in a row. Like the previous eight, it was run by the human rights activists group called Jer me se tiče, meaning 'Because it concerns me'. From the very beginning, the activists have operated with two main goals in mind: to keep away this date from politicians and to show the victims as human beings in the first place, not as members of a particular ethnic group. Over the years, the activism has been slowly redirected towards the victims who were killed before even becoming aware of their ethnic identity at all.
"We commemorate the thousands of people, including 102 children, killed in Prijedor in 1992. I salute the work of HR defenders on preserving the memory of the victims, and I call on local authorities to step up the preparations for the memorial for the killed children," Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights tweeted.
Being repeatedly verbally attacked by radicals from all ethnic groups, the activists believe they are doing the right thing. "The local government in Prijedor finally agreed that the killed children should have a monument. It will also be a monument to our common struggle for equality and the right of all victims to remembrance," said Edin Ramulić, one of the activists, in the eve of this years' White Armband Day.
