Zijo Ribić: the eight-year-old boy who was the only one of his family to leave the pit near Skočić alive

A village near Zvornik

Skočić is a Roma village about 15 kilometers from Zvornik. From April 1992, a volunteer paramilitary unit from Serbia, known as "Simini četnici", which was founded by Sima Bogdanović, operated in the territory of the Zvornik municipality. The unit came from Ruma and Šabac.

According to the testimony of Zijo Ribić, a group of Roma from the village was hiding in the house of Hamdija Ribić in Skočić. Zijo was eight years old at the time.

12 July 1992

Members of the unit "Simini četnici" raided Skočić. The date of 12 July 1992 was established by the first-instance verdict of the Higher Court in Belgrade. The attackers blew up the village mosque. According to testimony, they robbed the Roma and took their gold, money, watches and jewelry. The men, among them Zijo's father, were separated and taken away by truck.

Arifa Nuhanović, aged 58, was killed at the very first location in Skočić. The women were subjected to rape. Three young women, two of whom were minors at the time of the crime, survived and later testified as protected witnesses.

At the pit

The attackers took the captured women and children to a pit, where they killed them and threw the bodies into the pit, which they then blew up. The location of the pit is given differently in the sources: according to one source it is a pit near Hamzići not far from Šetići, according to another a large pit in Šetići, and according to a third a pit near Malešići.

In Skočić, 27 Roma civilians were killed. According to the indictment, the victims included a pregnant woman killed with a child in her arms and seven children aged from two to 13.

According to Zijo Ribić's testimony, his mother was in the ninth month of pregnancy, and his brother Sabrija, about two years old, was shot by the attackers at the pit before her eyes. As Zijo testified, in the attack his father, mother, six sisters and a brother were killed.

The survivor

Zijo Ribić was the only member of his family who got out of the pit alive. According to his testimony, he was stabbed in the neck and wounded by firearm, and survived beneath the bodies of other murdered people. According to another source, the attackers beat him, believed him dead and threw him into the pit, from which he pulled himself out when he regained consciousness.

The boy fled and took shelter in an abandoned house. There he was found by two JNA soldiers, who took him to the clinic in Kozluk and then to the hospital in Zvornik. He remained in the Zvornik hospital until December 1994.

Growing up

In December 1994, a Norwegian organization sent him to an institution for traumatized children in Igalo in Montenegro, where he spent about a year and a half. After that, until 2001, he lived in the children's home "Mladost" in Bijela. In 2001 he moved to a children's home in Tuzla, where he finished school and trained as a cook. He later attended a cooking school in Italy and works as a cook in Tuzla.