Abida Omerović: the night Glogova burned and the buses to Kladanj

Forty years in Glogova

According to her own account, Abida Omerović was born in 1930 in Pirići, and in 1952 she married and moved to Glogova, a village in the Bratunac municipality. She spent forty years there.

Warning signs

In the spring of 1992, as Abida Omerović recounts, she saw tanks lined up on Avdina njiva. A neighbour, Hamed, warned that the Serbs would kill everyone and urged the men to leave Glogova. Her husband, according to her testimony, refused to leave with the other men and later hid in the forests. According to the same testimony, shortly before the attack Avdo, who had gone off with horses, was killed.

On the day before the attack, 8 May 1992, the Bratunac Crisis Staff, headed by Miroslav Deronjić, decided that Glogova would be attacked and set on fire and that its Muslim inhabitants would be forcibly expelled. Before the attack, the Territorial Defence and the police, with Deronjić's consent, disarmed the inhabitants of Glogova, so that the village was left without any defence.

In the night before 9 May, as Abida Omerović recounts, she saw an armed man kneeling under the pear tree next to the house. She then said to her family: "Now we will all be killed."

The attack of 9 May 1992

The attack on Glogova was carried out on 9 May 1992 by JNA units, the Territorial Defence Bratunac, the Bratunac police and paramilitary units. According to the testimony of Abida Omerović, in the morning shooting began from the forest and houses started to burn; the first to be set on fire were two hunters' lookout huts.

The attackers systematically burned houses, other buildings, fields and haystacks, and destroyed the mosque. A large part of Glogova was razed to the ground. 64 unarmed Bosniaks from Glogova were killed.

Abida's family, according to her account, spent the night in the house of a neighbour, Miralem. Before the barn burned down, her daughter-in-law managed to let a cow with its calf out of it.

Surrender and expulsion

The next day, according to the testimony of Abida Omerović, the inhabitants went towards the asphalt road to surrender and waited all day under guard on Avdina njiva. Among the guards, as she states, was a man named Rašo. The buses, according to her account, arrived in the evening. At a café on the road, soldiers attacked the driver and said that the people should be driven into the stream and killed.

The surviving women and children were forced onto the buses and expelled from the Bratunac municipality; the Crisis Staff's plan named Kladanj as the destination. In Kladanj, according to the testimony of Abida Omerović, the deportees were accommodated first in a newer building, then in a kindergarten and in several houses.

After the attack, not a single Bosniak remained in Glogova.

The judgment

On 30 March 2004, the Hague Tribunal (ICTY), on the basis of a guilty plea, sentenced Miroslav Deronjić, president of the Bratunac Crisis Staff, to ten years' imprisonment for persecution as a crime against humanity. The judgment relates specifically to the attack on Glogova. The ICTY Appeals Chamber delivered its judgment in the Deronjić case on 20 July 2005, and in November 2005 Deronjić was transferred to Sweden to serve his sentence.