Thirty-three years have passed since the crimes committed in Grabovica (Kotor Varoš). The families of tortured, missing and killed persons are still facing an institutional barrier: they are prohibited from visiting the site of killing and last whereabouts of their family members.  

The decision taken at the end of October by the Police Station Kotor Varoš details the reasons for prohibiting a public gathering on the territory of the Grabovica community and school yard.  

In the opinion of the police, prohibiting memorialisation is a way to prevent negative reactions of the local inhabitants and different citizen’s associations.  

According to Detektor, while the police station assumes that the gathering would endanger the safety of persons and assets, and lead to violence and social unrests, the mayor of the municipality claims that the gathering would lead to tensions, and the president of the local veterans’ organisation calls it a provocation.

It concerns the memorialisation of a group of crimes for which Momčilo Krajišnik, Radoslav Brđanin, Ratko Mladić, Ljubiša Vranjeć, Mladen Milić, Bosiljko and Ostoja Marković, Duško Vujičić and Duško Maksimović have been convicted so far. Boško Peulić, Slobodan Župljanin, Manojlo Tepić, Janko Trivić, Nedeljko Đekanović, Zdravko Samardžija and Danko Kajkuta have also been indicted for crimes in Grabovica.

This case shows that establishing individual liability for human rights violations and war crimes, achieving judicial justice and establishing forensic truth is not a guarantee that the subsequent steps suggested by transitional justice mechanisms will succeed in bringing a post-conflict society to a state of sustainable peace.

When truth-telling, memorialisation practices, freedom of expression, opinion and assembly are made impossible, it does not constitute only an attack against the process of learning, supporting awareness raising and solidarity, but also against the process of establishing the rule of law and restoring trust in institutions.

This does not constitute a failure of post-conflict transformation of the state and society, institutions and communities. The failure of post-conflict transformation would imply that there was at least an attempt to carry out the transformation, but for some reason, it was not as successful as it should have been. However, this is a case of an active refusal of transformation, not its passive failure. It is also a testament to the deliberate undermining of the integrity of institutions that, truth be told, have not even attempted to address the serious issues of the administration, bureaucracy and security forces once they became well-established in terms of their integrity.

The practice of memorialisation, the culture of remembrance and memory, is being presented as a provocation by numerous groups that might be offended by the commemoration of the anniversary of the torture, imprisonment, murder and disappearance of civilians. When such nonsense becomes the official justification, the only question to be asked is why in Bosnia and Herzegovina they have not even begun to check the competences and integrity of current and future employees of the competent labour and employment institutions.

Proof that government institutions in this country are still directly involved in human rights and civil liberties violations and actively refusing to establish the rule of law and attain institutional integrity is accompanied by only one riddle: Who could be offended by the need of families and society to face the past and attain justice for the victims? It could only be understood by asking the question as to whose side these individuals are on, if memories of war crimes, memorialisation and facing the past would provoke them so much as to cause social unrests that the security system could neither prevent nor avert.

After this police reaction, it is questionable what the security system is prepared for, if it cannot even ensure a dignified memorialisation. It is a fact that such a system, unwilling and refusing to engage in ensuring the rule of law, human rights and civil liberties, has not even been criticised by high ranking political actors. Questioning the adequacy of how persons are performing their functions says a lot about achieving sustainable peace and institutional reforms that aim at this. The lack of reaction of international actors, human rights and civil liberties defenders, and human rights organisations is not only a testament to the inability to work diligently towards establishing civilian control over security actors, but also to the absence of basic will and desire to initiate the necessary reforms.