On the occasion of the anniversary of the massacre in Bar, the lawyer Kolja Camaj and civic activist Aleksandar Saša Zeković They submitted an initiative to the leaders of the Bar Municipality to name one of the streets in the city "Street of the Victims of the Bar Massacre".
They submitted the same initiative to the Council for proposing names for settlements, streets, and squares.
"It has been 80 years since the massacre in Bar, when, according to official military data, at least 452 people were extrajudicially executed, killed, all men, mostly young, originally from Kosovo, predominantly of Albanian nationality, who were forcibly recruited into the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOVJ) for the purposes of continuing the liberation of the then common state and the conquest of Trieste (Italy). At least 104 people were wounded on the same occasion. On this occasion, we have sent an initiative, enclosed, to the competent working body of the Bar Municipal Assembly, to name one of the streets in the territory of the Bar municipality 'Street of the Victims of the Bar Massacre'", it is written in the letter, which "Vijesti" had access to.
Camaj and Zeković pointed out that dealing with the past based on facts, to which the Municipality of Bar should and must inevitably contribute, represents opposition to historical revisionism and the relativization of indisputable historical facts due to (individual crimes, such as the one in Bar) that occurred.
"For us, as the initiators, the rehabilitation of traitorous movements, the rendering meaningless anti-fascism and the libertarian and yet progressive, emancipatory character and nature of the partisan movement and the then Communist Party of Yugoslavia, is unacceptable in any way. By accepting the indisputable suffering of innocent civilians or unlawful killings and liquidations and paying tribute and respect to them, the functionalization of victims, historical revisionism and the imposition of some other, substitute narrative are resolutely prevented," the letter reads.
The initiators of the initiative recalled that certain, albeit modest, professional, civic (activist) and political efforts have been undertaken to shed light on the events in the municipality of Bar in March and April 1945, and that the investigation of this crime was advocated by Mehmet Bardhi, using the institute of parliamentary questions, but also that criminal charges were filed with the Special State Prosecutor's Office in February against members and officers of the Tenth (X) Montenegrin Shock Brigade:
"Due to reasonable suspicion that they committed a crime against humanity, a war crime, a war crime against prisoners of war or any other criminal act against humanity and other goods protected by international law by extrajudicially killing and wounding several hundred persons with firearms on 1 April 1945 in the territory of the municipality of Bar"...
According to available official military data, part of the members of the second group sent from Prizren to Bar on March 25, 1945 with 2.382 recruits were extrajudicially shot in Bar.
"Certain authors indicate that according to official, military, historical data, members of the 10th Montenegrin Brigade killed more innocent victims in just a few hours in Bar (and Cetinje) than members of the German occupation army during the entire duration and operation of this formation," the initiative states.
Reporting the data that is known so far, they wrote that the unarmed recruits, predominantly Albanians, "were not exclusively killed and massacred by members of the 10th Montenegrin Shock Brigade, but, unfortunately, also by civilians, ordinary citizens, whose anti-Albanian sentiment was probably strengthened due to the fact that a significant number of Montenegrin and Serbian colonists expelled from Kosovo were residing in Bar."
"The superiors ordered the brigade members to carry out the issued illegal order (indiscriminate shooting), thereby acting together in violation of the regulations of international war law and the principles of international law," the initiative states.
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