(24 Dec 2013) Bosnian Serb authorities postponed plans on Tuesday to demolish a house where Serb soldiers burned 53 Bosniak civilians alive at the start of Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
Workers sent by the municipality turned around and left on Tuesday when they saw that victims' families had gathered outside and set up tape around the house in the eastern town of Visegrad.
Bosniaks claim that the plan developed by Serb authorities to destroy the house in order to make space for the widening of a nearby road was just an excuse to destroy a crime scene and erase a memory of it.
"This house is obviously not in the way of the road that is planned to be built here. They are systematically trying to destroy the site of the crime, the final resting place of civilians who were burned alive here," said protester and victim of the Serb assault on Visegrad, Bakira Hasecic on Tuesday.
Families of the burned victims have reconstructed the house in Pionirska Street and visit it often to lay flowers and remember those who died.
The crime in Visegrad was among the first carried out by Serb forces on the local Muslim Bosniak population during the war.
A group of Serb soldiers barricaded the victims, including a two day-old baby, in the cellar of the house and set it on fire.
They then fired automatic weapons at those who tried to escape through the windows.
A few days later they repeated the crime in another house, killing nearly 70 people.
By the end of the war, after 3,000 were killed and others expelled, no residents of Visegrad were Muslim Bosniaks.
Before, they accounted for two-thirds of the 25,000 population.
A small number have since returned to the town which is now in territory administered by Bosnian Serb authorities.
Following the war, the country was divided into a Bosnian Serb republic and a Bosniak-Croat federation.
The United Nations war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, sentenced several Bosnian Serbs to decades in prison for the Visegrad killing spree.
International officials in Bosnia had issued a statement urging the Visegrad mayor's office to abandon plans to destroy the house.
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