Bosanski Petrovac: Serb Returnees Report New Provocations

On the night between September 15 and 16, ahead of the anniversary of the expulsion of the Serb population from Bosanski Petrovac, local residents of Serb nationality reported new provocations in the center of the municipality. The news matters for Serbia because it again touches on the safety and survival of the small community of Serb returnees in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a community that has spent three decades fighting to stay on its own land.

According to testimonies from residents who spoke to Radio Television of Republika Srpska (RTRS), the center of Bosanski Petrovac saw chanting, loud music, quad bikes being driven around and the display of wartime flags and symbols. Returnees say these scenes accompanied the marking of September 14, the day in 1995 when Serb civilians and soldiers were expelled from the municipality.

Some of those expelled were killed at the time, and the fate of many is still unknown. That is why returnees greet every anniversary with unease rather than relief at having managed to return to land they once had to flee.

Provocations recur every year

Serb returnees say this is not an isolated incident. According to them, similar scenes repeat every year around the same date, when the other community marks the liberation of the municipality during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“Every time they celebrate, they use the occasion to provoke and raise tensions,” one of the returnees in Bosanski Petrovac said, in a statement carried by Glas javnosti.

That sentence sums up what residents describe as a pattern: an event that one side sees as a celebration is, for the other, a reminder of expulsion and loss, and marking it with wartime symbols further squeezes the space for coexistence, which is, after all, one of the formal conditions for the survival of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Authorities, according to media reports, are not responding

According to Glas javnosti, the authorities did not respond adequately to this year’s provocations, just as they failed to do so after similar incidents in previous years. No official body of the municipality or the canton had issued a statement on the event by the time this article was published.

The absence of a response is not a new pattern in this part of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serb returnees in several small municipalities, from Drvar to Bosanski Petrovac, have warned for years that local authorities treat the marking of anniversaries as an internal matter for the majority community, regardless of how provocative it looks from the perspective of the minority that survived the war.

The region marks the same dates in different ways

Srpske novine recently reported on a wreath-laying ceremony in Drvar, marking the 31st anniversary of the expulsion of Serbs from that area. The two events, in Drvar and in Bosanski Petrovac, fall on the same timeline: mid-September, when memories of two communities in western Bosnia collide in entirely different ways.

While Serb returnees in Drvar mark their loss with silence and wreaths, in Bosanski Petrovac, according to residents’ testimonies, the same anniversary is marked loudly on the other side, with symbols that carry a direct reminder of expulsion for returnees.

That difference in tone, repeated year after year, shows how much coexistence in the small municipalities of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a formal category rather than a reality on the ground. For Belgrade and the Serbian public, this is not just a regional story about one municipality, but a sign that the question of returnees’ safety reopens every autumn, without a concrete institutional answer from either side of the border.

The next anniversary is twelve months away, and until then returnees in Bosanski Petrovac have no mechanism beyond their own testimony to point to a pattern that, in their words, has been repeating year after year.