Zaklopaca

Zaklopaca is a small village in the Milici municipality in north-eastern Bosnia, close to the city of Vlasenica. The Bosnian Missing Persons Institute discovered two gravesites in the village in close proximity to each other. The first exhumation was conducted in 1998, when the remains of eight people were found. It was also concluded that the site had been tampered with and bodies had been transferred to another location.

A second exhumation in 2004 resulted in the discovery of a second grave 500 metres away from the first one. It contained 54 war victims’ remains, including 11 children aged from four to 12 years. The youngest victim was four-year old Naida Hodzic and the oldest was 62-year old Fatima Berbic.

The gravesites remain unmarked, located between a lime pit called Zlatanova Krecana and the Studeni Jadar river. 

On May 16, 1992, Bosnian Serb Army troops and police officers killed 56 Bosniak civilians, including women, children and elderly people. Twelve people who survived the massacre and fled to the city of Vlasenica were tracked down and killed in the days that followed. After the massacre, an earth mover from the Boksit mining company was used to dig the pits in the village of Zaklopaca where the bodies were dumped. 

Amor Masovic, chairperson of the Bosnian Federal Commission for Missing Persons, said that among the victims in the grave were 29 people from the Hodzic family.

In March 2022, the Bosnian state court handed down a first-instance verdict acquitting two former policemen and three Bosnian Serb Army ex-soldiers of involvement in the murders of Bosniak civilians in Zaklopaca. The court concluded that it had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt that Radomir Pantic, Nenad Vukotic, Branko Jolovic, Milomir Milosevic and Nikola Losic committed the murders in 1992.

According to the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute, 955 Bosniaks went missing in the Vlasenica and Milici municipalities between 1992 and 1995.

The largest mass grave found in the Vlasenica area was the Ogradice mass grave, from which the remains of 232 victims were exhumed in 2003. The Zaklopaca mass grave was the largest found in the Milici municipality. Thirty-seven victims were also exhumed from the Susica mass grave.

Kurtalici

The village of Kurtalici is located on the banks of the River Drina, eight kilometres from the city of Visegrad in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. A primary mass grave was found in Kurtalici in 2000 after the water level in the River Drina, close to the Bosnian-Serbian border, had fallen by several metres and receded by 20 metres along both banks. The remains of 62 Bosniak civilians were discovered. 

According to forensic experts, the identification process was difficult because the bodies were piled up on each other, remains were intertwined and it was impossible to recognise which part of the skeleton belonged to which victim. Around the gravesite, a large number of empty ammunition shells were found, indicating that the victims were killed at the site.

The site, which lies on the right bank of the River Drina and Lake Perucac, remains unmarked. 

Since the end of the war, a commemoration for war victims from Visegrad has been held on the last Saturday in May at the Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge in the city. Roses are thrown into the Drina River in remembrance of the victims. 

Visegrad was attacked and occupied in April 1992 by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which installed a Serb-controlled administration. After the JNA left, the Bosnian Serb Army and the Serb-controlled police initiated a systematic and widespread campaign against Bosniaks, involving arrests, detentions in camps, torture, rape and killings, as well as the destruction of homes and religious buildings.

According to documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), around 1,600 people were killed in and around Visegrad, among them 600 women and 119 children, in what the court said was one of the most extensive and ruthless ethnic cleansing campaigns during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.