Sijekovac killings

Sijekovac killings
Location	Sijekovac, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Date	26 March 1992
Target	Serbs
Deaths	59
Perpetrators	Croatian Army and militia Bosniak Army and militia

The Sijekovac killings, also called the Sijekovac massacre, refers to the killing of 59 Serbs, including 18 children, in Sijekovac near Bosanski Brod, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 26 March 1992. The deaths were allegedly unlawful, and there have been allegations that the casualties included not just soldiers but civilians. The assailants were members of Croat and Bosniak army units.

As contradictory reports appeared in the media, and the events have not yet passed a court validation, the full course of the case is unknown. The fighting in Posavina began in early March 1992, after Serbian Territorial Defense forces set up barricades in the town of Bosanski Brod and tried to seize the strategically important bridge linking the town with Croatia, prompting the local Croats and Muslims to form a joint headquarters, and to request assistance from the Croatian Army, based just across the border in Slavonski Brod. Following a ceasefire of several weeks the JNA and Serb militias once again attacked the town, launching a heavy artillery bombardment and sniper fire, and looting took place in the Croat quarter of the town.

The Croats retaliated by attacking the village of Sijekovac on the right side of the Sava River, across from Croatia. At the time, as the Bosnian War was starting, it was still populated by members of all three nations of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the initial reports in 1992, three members of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina arrived by helicopter to investigate a reported "dozen killed civilians".

The Serb authorities claimed that Serb civilians had been massacred in Sijekovac. According to a 1993 report by Helsinki Watch, there was no evidence of the use of excessive force. The report was based on interviews with some twenty Serb villagers who had fled the area, who said that those killed were armed combatants engaged in hostilities, or civilians caught in the crossfire. Under international law, deaths from crossfire cannot be considered as genocide.

The authorities of Republika Srpska marked the site with a monument listing 47 casualties. Among those publicly implicated by the Serbian side are the 108th brigade of Croatian National Guard (by then renamed into the Croatian Army), the Intervention Squad of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian Defence Forces.

In 2002, during the ICTY Prijedor massacre Trial against Milomir Stakić, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs in Prijedor, the Defence called a survivor of the alleged massacre in Sijekovac to support a claim that the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina was caused not by the Serbs, but by incursions into Bosnian territory by the Croatian army north of Bosanski Šamac.

In 2004, Federal Commission for Tracing Missing persons started exhumations near Bosanski Brod, due to a suspicion that a number of Bosniak victims were buried in the location which is actually a Bosniak graveyard.

The judge of the Zenica-Doboj Court from Zenica, Enisa Adrović, noted the exhumations had taken 14 days, and that the victims were, for the most part, Serb civilians. The exhumation recovered 59 corpses and was done under the supervision of Federation Commission for Missing Persons. The first 8 bodies found had personal objects (cloths, T-shirt, a belt, buttons, spectacles), yet the remaining 49 [sic] bodies had no objects that could help in their identification. Among them there were 18 bodies of children. RS monitors mentioned the possibility of an illegal trade in human organs, as the victims were mostly part naked.

Several exhumation officials initially suspected that most victims were civilians from Vukovar, including Goran Krcmar, a member of the Republika Srpska Office for Missing Persons and the District Prosecutor of Doboj, Slavko Krulj, who referenced the Veritas Information Center. These assumptions were subsequently refuted. No representatives from the Republic of Croatia's Office for Missing Persons were present at the exhumation. Savo Štrbac, Director of the Veritas Information Center, noted that the number of children found seemed to vastly exceed the number of children actually reported as missing from Sijekovac.

Tomo Aračić, president of Udruženje '92, the organization that initiated the exhumation in the first place, said that they had no actual information about any Vukovar children at Sijekovac. The presiding officer of the Federal Commission for Missing Persons Marko Jurišić stated unequivocally that the identities of the majority of the bodies were unknown and that only analysis by forensic experts could determine such details.

In May 2010, the leaders of Republika Srpska (Rajko Kuzmanović and Milorad Dodik), the Croatian president (Ivo Josipović) and a prominent Bosniak leader (Sulejman Tihić) all visited the site to pay respect to around fifty civilian victims of the March 1992 events, at the local Orthodox Church of Saint Marina the Martyr. The site and the visit provoked some controversy in Croatia, with allegations of impropriety levelled against President Josipović and the authorities of Republika Srpska for misattributing some of the casualties.