Konjević Polje ( sr-cyrl, Коњевић Поље) is a village in the municipality of
Bratunac, in the
Drina Valley of northeastern
Bosnia and Herzegovina. It practically merged with neighboring village ''Konjevići''.
Bosnian War
During the
Bosnian Serb Army's
campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1992, Konjević Polje became cut off from the main area of Bosnian government-held territory and was part of the enclave of
Srebrenica. The expulsion of the Bosniaks from the area along the
Drina River
The Drina ( sr-Cyrl, Дрина, ) is a long Balkans river, which forms a large portion of the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. It is the longest tributary of the Sava River and the longest karst river in the Dinaric Alps whic ...
had been the publicly-proclaimed goal of the
Republika Srpska from the start of the war. Two of the “strategic objectives or priorities of the Serb people in Bosnia and Herzegovina" were to "Establish State borders separating the Serb people from the other two ethnic communities" and "Establish a corridor in the Drina River valley, that is, eliminate the Drina as a border separating Serb States."
In his 25 November 2003 statement to the Office of the Prosecutor at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal ...
, the Bosnian Serb war criminal
Miroslav Deronjić
Miroslav Deronjić ( sr-cyr, Мирослав Дероњић; 6 June 1954 – 19 May 2007) was a Bosnian Serb who was charged with persecution, a crime against humanity, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for hi ...
affirmed that goal and referred to it as "liberation." He described the "liberation" of the area of eastern Bosnia along the Drina corridor as involving a two-part plan devised in 1991 and 1992, involving the Bosnian Serbs first taking power in the municipalities in the Podrinje and then expelling the Bosniak population by force, specifically by forcibly transferring the women and the children and often by detaining and killing the men. In the so-called "Deronjić Statement", he specifically referred to the "liberation of Konjević Polje" (paras. 154, 156).
During the Bosnian Serb Army offensive of early 1993, the villages of Konjević Polje and
Cerska were captured. Their Bosniak residents fled to Srebrenica and added to the town's already-swollen refugee population. Refugees from Konjević Polje and Cerska were sheltering in the Srebrenica elementary school when it was
shelled on 12 April 1993.
After the fall of Srebrebnica, the road between
Bratunac and Konjević Polje was a key place in which the Bosnian Serb Army forces attacked and broke the column of refugees fleeing towards government territory. Many of the refugees were killed and captured in localities in the vicinity. The school at Konjević Polje was used to hold detainees before their execution.
See also
*
Fata Orlović
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Konjevic Polje
Villages in Republika Srpska