The Council for Citizen Control of Police Work has invited the President of the Municipal Assembly (SO) of Herceg Novi, Ivan Otović, to personally advocate that the erection of a monument to the victims of the deportation of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 be included in the Program for Erecting Memorials.
The formal initiative on this, they remind, was repeated in 2018 by the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Action for Human Rights, Center for Civic Education and Anima, which traditionally, every year, organize memorial stops in front of the building of the Security Department of Herceg Novi, "nurturing the memory of our society on innocent victims".
The council notes that there are no legal or other impediments to erecting the monument and that it expects the competent state authority to give the necessary consent, without a doubt.
"For two years now, Otović has not responded to the written appeals of the civil supervision of the police, whether SO Herceg Novi has declared about it either through its working bodies or at the plenum and what is the outcome of those actions," announced the president of the Council, lawyer Zoran Čelebić.
He reminds that the Council has previously expressed interest in participating in the work of the Committee for the Erecting of Monuments, expressing the belief that the donor and diplomatic community, international and domestic non-governmental organizations, numerous citizens, as well as the Government, will fully finance the planning and erection of the monument.
The Council, on the initiative of Aleksandar Saša Zeković, at one time its member, for years recommended and advised the Police Directorate to issue an apology for the illegal arrest and deportation of refugees, recalls Čelebić.
"What they did not do for decades, they did not have the political and human courage and determination, the cadres of the Democratic Party of Socialists, on May 25, 2022, the then director Zoran Brđanin did: On behalf of the Police Administration, he apologized for the deportation of refugees in 1992. At the same time, on that occasion, the then Minister of the Interior, Filip Adžić, also supported the erection of the monument," the announcement concludes.
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