Child Deaths in Bosnia’s Besieged Gorazde Still Unpunished

"There was a fierce attack on Gorazde from the left bank of the River Drina. There was shelling and smoke all over the place," Mirsada Causevic told BIRN, recalling a Bosnian Serb artillery assault on Gorazde in eastern Bosnia that led to the death of her eight-year-old son Haris on April 14, 1994.

"People were fleeing to the right bank of the river. We were hiding, but then, all of a sudden, it all went quiet, the shells stopped falling," Causevic said.

As the attack seemed to have stopped, Haris went outside the house to play with nine-year-old Eldin Basic and eight-year-old Ervin Usanovic.

"A shell exploded at five past 12. It killed all the three boys. A piece of shrapnel hit my son's coronary artery. The two other boys were mutilated by shrapnel pieces," Causevic said.

"A neighbour told me she saw Haris calling for his mum to help him. I suppose his heart was still beating a little."

Gorazde was besieged by the Bosnian Serb Army for 1,336 days, during which time around 2,000 civilians were killed, including 148 children, according to war victims' associations.

The shelling was particularly fierce in April 1994, during the Bosnian Serb Army's 'Zvijezda 94' operation. Twenty children were killed in less than a month, among them Haris Causevic and his two friends.

No one has yet been prosecuted, either in Bosnian courts or at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, for the shelling of Gorazde during the siege. The only case in which it was mentioned was the Hague prosecution of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 before the end of his trial.

There are two ongoing cases against Bosniaks for wartime crimes in Goradze. Former policemen Ibro Merkez, Predrag Bogunic and Esef Huris are on...

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