The short film about the Stërpc Massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, by Croatian director Nebojsha Slijepcevic, has won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film is based on a war crime committed at the Sterpc railway station in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993.
The story follows a passenger train traveling from the Serbian capital Belgrade to Bar, a port city in Montenegro during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. Bosnian Serb forces detained him at a small station in Stërpci in Bosnia.
After receiving a tip that Bosnian Muslim passengers were on the train, they took 20 of them and later executed them. About 500 passengers witnessed this, but no one dared to confront them, except Tomo Buzov, a retired officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, who was traveling to visit his son.
The prisoners, apart from Buzov who was originally from Croatia, were mostly Bosniaks. They were sent from Stërpc station to a school in Prelovo, where they were first attacked. They were then taken to a burnt house in the village of Musici and executed.
Filmmaker Slijepcevic admitted to BIRN that he did not know about the heroic act that cost Buzov his life until five years ago, when he read an article by the famous Croatian journalist and writer Boris Dezulovic.
“Dezulović wrote an extraordinary text that deals with today’s appreciation of Buzov’s heroism and indeed with the thesis that he has been forgotten and that his sacrifice is not adequately commemorated, mainly because it does not belong to any nationalist narrative. Although he is Croatian, according to some Croatian nationalist standards he is ‘weak’ because he lived his life as a captain of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade,” Slijepcevic said.
“By the standards of Serbian nationalists, he is also undesirable because he was killed after confronting a Serbian paramilitary formation. And Bosniaks forgot Buzov when they commemorated the victims of this crime, because he is not a Muslim. Buzov somehow does not belong to any place because he is above all those narratives. It was the thesis of Dezoluvic’s article that inspired me and I immediately watched the film,” he added.
Train no. 671 in 1993 from Belgrade to Podgorica passed through a small part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but usually did not stop at Strpci. But this time, as Zeljko Radojicic, who was driving the train, told a court in Belgrade, it was stopped at the Bosnian station.
A group of armed men – mostly members of a Serbian paramilitary unit called the Avengers (Osvetnici) – led by Milan Lukic, boarded the train and began checking the passengers’ identities.
Neither the police on the train in Stërpci nor the other passengers reacted when the Avengers started picking up people because they thought they were looking for army deserters.
The only person who stood up against them was Buzov.
Thirty-one years later, the family still has not found his body. His son, Darko Buzov, told BIRN in 2022 that information about what happened on the train is incomplete, but according to what he was told, his father intervened to try to protect a young man from Montenegro who not to be taken by the warriors.
Darko Buzov said that many people have called his father’s actions heroic, but they were actually “the actions of a parent, nothing more; at that moment he reacted like a father of a son”.
Slijepcevic says the main goal of his film is to force viewers to think about how they would react to the situation Buzov found himself in. He says that in addition to Buzov’s heroic act, he was also interested in the attitude of all the other people on the train, with whom, he says, he somehow identified, reports Kallxo.com.
“I felt it was a metaphor for our collective experience. We were many passengers on a common train that met with disaster. The vast majority of us actually keep quiet about it all, keeping our heads down, but we all carry a burden of it. I was actually interested in that – I saw in it a situation that can be applied to a much wider experience than what happened on the train,” he explained to BIRN.
Therefore, he adds, he sees in the history of train no. 671 a connection with today’s times in many situations where the rights of minorities are threatened.
Since the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, many films have been made criticizing the bloody disintegration of the former united state, but nationalist forces remain strong in the nearly independent republics created as a result of those wars.
“The reconciliation process has not ended. Partly because it hasn’t been long since the war. The victims, criminals and witnesses of that time are still alive,” Slijepcevic said.
“On the other hand, there is a marked tendency to avoid catharsis. Right-wing nationalist forces in all countries of the region are working to prevent the healing of wounds, because polarization is their material,” he added.
Three suspected Serbian paramilitaries, Gojko Lukic, Dusko Vasiljevic and Dragana Djekic, are currently awaiting the start of a retrial in Belgrade for the Sterpc crime. It was scheduled to begin in January, but the hearing was postponed, as well as two more to follow, in April and May. The next session is scheduled for June.
Another defendant, Jovan Lipovač, died in February, while another, Ljubisa Vasiljevic, died in July 2021. In October 2023, the Belgrade Court of Appeal overturned the first-instance verdict and ordered a retrial in the case. In this decision, of February 2023, the High Court of Belgrade sentenced Lukic, Vasiljevic, Lipovac and Djekic to a total of 35 years in prison.
Ten other wartime Bosnian Serb soldiers have already been convicted of involvement in the Strpci crime in Bosnia and Montenegro.
The Bosnian state court sentenced the former commander of the Intervention Platoon of the Visegrad Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, Boban Indjic, to 15 years in prison in January of last year.
In October 2022, the Bosnian state court also found seven former soldiers from the Second Podrinje Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army guilty of involvement in kidnappings and murders. The judge in the trial said that Milan Lukic participated in the execution of 18 captured civilians.
Bosnia’s state court sentenced Mico Jovicic, a paramilitary volunteer from Serbia, to five years in prison after he took a plea deal in 2016.
A court in Montenegro sentenced another paramilitary volunteer, Nebojsa Ranisavljevic, to 15 years in prison for Stërpc’s crime.
The alleged mastermind of the crime, Milan Lukic, is currently in prison in Estonia after the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, sentenced him to life in prison for other crimes committed during the war in Bosnia, but not for the killings in Stërpci. .
