(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - UP TO 2,000 Muslim Bosniaks converged on the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad yesterday to remember friends and relatives killed there by forces led by Ratko Mladic at the start of the country's 1992-95 war.
They arrived on buses to throw almost 3,000 roses into the Drina River, which divides Bosnia from Serbia. People from Visegrad who were expelled in 1992 gather every year to commemorate their dead.
Mladic was arrested in Serbia last Thursday on war crimes charges stemming from a 1995
indictment issued against him by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
"My house is some 200 metres away from here. It is always hard for me to be here, especially when I am standing on this bridge which in 1992 was covered with Bosniak blood like with a carpet," said Bakira Hasecic, a victim of a campaign of mass rape by Bosnian Serbs in wartime Visegrad.
Adila Semdo, whose two brothers-in-law and father-in-law, were killed in Visegrad in 1992, said the arrest of Mladic came too late.
"Maybe it would have meant something if he were arrested 15 years ago when he could have told us why, why he did this, but not anymore," she said
Thousands of civilians from the area of Visegrad were rounded up and killed by Mladic's troops at the beginning of Bosnia's 1992-95 war and scores of non-Serb women were imprisoned and raped.
Bodies of hundreds of victims were dumped into the Drina River from the Ottoman-era Bridge in Visegrad, or they were buried in mass graves around the town. Members of the Serbian anti-war group Women in Black joined the commemoration ceremonies in Visegrad.
Meanwhile security has been tightened throughout Serbia ahead of the protest planned for today by ultra-nationalists over Mladic's arrest. The rally in Belgrade will closely be watched by the police. Serbian interior minister Ivica Dacic said: "Security has been increased, but the situation in Serbia is stable."
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