Bosnia Herzegovina remembers victims of Ahmici massacre

By Talha Ozturk

BELGRADE, Serbia (AA) - Bosnia and Herzegovina on Tuesday remembered the 116 victims of a massacre in the village of Ahmici during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

A commemoration ceremony was held with a march by the participants from the Vitez Martyrdom monument to the Ahmici village.

Verses from the Muslim holy book of the Quran were recited and prayers were performed before a visit to the graves of the victims.

On the morning of April 16, 1993, the military forces of the Croatian Defense Council raided the Ahmici village and killed 116 Bosniaks. The youngest victim in Ahmici was a three-month-old baby.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's Defense Minister Zukan Helez said: “We should focus on military education in high schools. Our children do not know how to use weapons. If there had been a ready-made unit to defend this region, this would not have happened. People trusted their neighbors.”

Enisa Ahmic Mulic, one of the witnesses of the massacre, told the media that those killed in the massacre were also set on fire, adding that her grandfather heard the screams of his burning aunt.

"I have lived with what happened 31 years ago. After my father, they killed our neighbor and his wife. Then they killed my uncle and his 3-month-old baby, and his children aged 6 and 8,” she said.

The massacre in Ahmici, where Bosnian Croats turned against Bosnian Muslims, has been defined as the single most savage example of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

Croatian soldiers raided the village of Ahmici during the morning prayer on April 16, 1993, and murdered 116 Bosnian civilians, including 32 women and 11 children. Among those murdered in Ahmici was a 3-month-old baby whose burnt body was later taken out of the oven.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has ruled that the killings in Ahmici were crimes against humanity and gave prison sentences ranging from 6 to 25 years to the Croatian Defense Council commanders and soldiers of the period.

The Bosnian War began on March 1, 1992, and lasted until Dec. 14, 1995.

The war lasted for more than three years, over 100,000 people lost their lives, and around 2 million people were forced to migrate.

Bosnia-Herzegovina suffered great pain during its independence war, including the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.