Elvedin Pasic recalled going to the mosque on on June 11, 1992, the first day of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim ‘Festival of Sacrifice’, which is known in the Balkans as Kurban Bajram. He was 14 years old.
“I was very excited because I was little and couldn’t wait for the holiday since I hoped I would get money from the elders, as was the tradition,” Pasic would later testify. “On the second day of the celebration, our neighbours attacked us.”
Pasic took cover in a basement as artillery rounds fell on the village of Hrvacani in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, before fleeing.
“At one point we were stranded in no-man’s land,” he told the trial of Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2012. “We just kept moving from village to village... We returned to Hrvacani several weeks later. The house had been burned down, nothing was left. The dog chained in the yard had been shot.”
Months later, Pasic survived a massacre by Bosnian Serb forces in the village of Grabovica but was captured and separated from his father, whom he never saw again.
Eid al-Adha recalls the prophet Ibrahim’s [Abraham’s] willingness to sacrifice his son when God ordered him to. It is one of the most important festivals in the Muslim calendar, but for many survivors of war crimes in Bosnia, the holiday is inseparable from memories of fear and loss during the 1992-95 war.
This story is the result of an analysis of trial documents from the ICTY and Bosnian courts, in which numerous witnesses testified to crimes committed during Eid al-Adha, which fell this year between May 26 and 29. In 1992, it began on June 11, the day Serbian police and soldiers attacked Kotor Varos just as its Bosniak residents were preparing to celebrate.
In the verdict in the trial of Bosnian Serb Radoslav Brdjanin, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison, judges at the ICTY wrote:
“Beginning on June 11, 1992, the first day of Eid and the day Bosnian Serbs took control of the municipality, Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilians were arrested by members of the Bosnian Serb army and police and detained in various facilities, including the school in Grabovica, the police station, the prison, and the sawmill in Kotor Varos, until November 1992.”
Munevera Avdic from Kotor Varos, whose husband was killed in 1992. Photo: N1.
Munevera Avdic lived in the Kukavice settlement of Kotor Varos. She recalled Serbian forces placing tank mines on the Vrbanja bridge during the night of June 10-11, 1992.
“My husband and the others were preparing to go celebrate Eid al-Adha, getting ready to go to the mosque to pray,” Avdic told BIRN. “A few minutes later he came back crying and said: ‘The war has started.’”
Prayers were never held, Avdic said, as panic spread. She fled into the woods with her three children and other families, returning only occasionally to get food. When they went back for good, tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled into the settlement.
“My husband and more than 20 others were captured on June 25,” Avdic recalled. “They were told they were going to some meeting. I stayed at home with the children when shooting started, and we hid under the stairs on the ground floor. My husband and the others were killed in front of the hospital.”
Several ICTY verdicts found that on June 25, 1992, members of a Serbian paramilitary unit took a group of Bosniaks from the Kotor settlement outside the town of Kotor Varos, beat them with rifle butts, insulted and robbed them, and then killed six of them. The judgments also concluded that at least 26 Bosniak men were killed on the road from the Kotor settlement towards the Kotor Varos health centre and in front of the health centre itself.
In 2024, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced Bosnian Serb former police officers Dusko Vujicic and Dusko Maksimovic to six years and one-and-a-half years in prison respectively for abusing detainees, although they were acquitted of the killings near the health centre.
The judges, who acquitted co-accused Savo Tepic and Ilija Kurusic, said it was undisputed that non-Serb civilians from Kotor Varos were arrested and detained beginning on June 11, 1992, as confirmed by numerous witnesses.
The Cultural Centre in Celopek, where Bosniak prisoners were abused in 1992. Photo: ICTY.
For Bosniak detainees in the Zvornik area of eastern Bosnia, particularly the Cultural Centre in Celopek, Eid al-Adha 1992 was a period of torture and sexual abuse.
The mistreatment began with the arrival of the Yellow Wasps paramilitary unit, led by two brothers known as ‘Repic’ and ‘Zuco’.
