"Baptized" with water: the last photograph of Hajrush Ziberi in Bijeljina

Bijeljina, early April 1992

In early April 1992, the paramilitary unit Srpska dobrovoljačka garda, known as Arkan's Tigers, entered Bijeljina under the command of Željko Ražnatović "Arkan". Armed members of the unit shot at people in the streets, and they removed the green Islamic flag from the mosque and replaced it with a Serbian one. According to claims citing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Tigers and associated armed groups killed at least 48 people in Bijeljina within two days.

The American photojournalist Ron Haviv was in Bijeljina with Arkan's Tigers on 2 April 1992.

A prisoner in the Tigers' headquarters

Hajrush Ziberi was an Albanian from the village of Lakarci near Skopje in Macedonia, who had come to Bijeljina for work. According to the portal genocid.ba, he was not yet 24 years old and had married three months before his death. The same source states that he set out for work that morning but never arrived – the Tigers took him away from the mosque.

According to Ron Haviv's testimony, members of the Tigers showed him Ziberi's identity card and presented him as a Kosovo Albanian. They knocked him to the ground and laid out several pistols in front of him, claiming they were his. Ziberi was held in the Tigers' headquarters. He managed to get out through a window on the first floor, but the Tigers caught him, poured water over him, mocking that they had "baptized" him, and dragged him back into the building.

Haviv then took a photograph in which Ziberi, surrounded by armed Tigers, with a raised hand, looks straight into the lens and pleads for his life. Arkan demanded the film from the photographer. Haviv handed over the cameras, but hid part of the film and took it out of the country. The next day he inquired about the prisoner, but never saw him again. The specific perpetrator of Ziberi's murder is not known.

Death and the body in the Sava

Ziberi's body was found in the river Sava. There are differing accounts of the date: according to Al Jazeera, Ziberi died on 4 April 1992, while genocid.ba states that his body was found in the Sava on 4 May 1992. According to genocid.ba, his friends Abdurahman and Bejtullah were killed together with him. The same source states that Ziberi was buried as an unknown person (N.N.).

Identification and return home

Hajrush Ziberi was identified through DNA analysis twelve years after his death – according to genocid.ba, in Visoko. According to the same source, his remains were transported and on 19 September 2004 buried in his native village in Macedonia, where his wife also awaited him.

The identity of the young man in Haviv's photograph was for a long time unknown to the public. Only when the image was published on Facebook at the end of 2014 was it linked to the name of Hajrush Ziberi, and his family thanked Haviv.