Kojic and Vulic Report Mustafa Ceric to BiH Prosecutors

Milorad Kojic and Sanja Vulic, lawmakers in the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, today filed a criminal complaint with the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Mustafa Ceric, the former head of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, over posts on his Facebook profile that they say deny Serb civilian victims and incite national, racial and religious hatred. For Belgrade this is not a distant Bosnian episode: it touches on how Serb war victims are discussed in a neighboring country, at a time when Republika Srpska is running its own campaign to commemorate the dead.

What the complaint says

According to the complaint, Ceric posted content that, the lawmakers say, unambiguously denies the existence of Serb victims, and downplays or attempts to justify crimes established by final verdicts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and courts in Republika Srpska and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The complaint quotes one of Ceric’s posts:

“Look at our victims so you don’t see our crimes.”

In the same text, according to Kojic and Vulic, Ceric wrote that “linking present-day Italy to fascism should not be stated as a claim without proof,” which the complainants read as an allusion branding the “Get to Know the Serb Victims” campaign, run by the Memorial Center of Republika Srpska, as fascist. Ceric, according to the complaint, calls the same campaign a “war on truth,” which Kojic and Vulic say amounts to denying the authenticity of photographs of Serb civilian victims from the 1990s, despite court rulings that establish those victims existed.

The complainants also single out the headline of one of Ceric’s texts, “Appeal of the day: let’s not wait for others to count our dead again,” which they say carries a hidden call for renewed armed conflict between the three peoples and two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They add that in the text Ceric urges members of his own nation to stay on alert, claiming there is an atmosphere in society similar to the one before the war, even though, in the complainants’ assessment, no such situation actually exists in the country.

The most contentious passage

Kojic and Vulic cite the following passage as the most dangerous part of the text:

“From Sarajevo to Novi Pazar, from Prizren to Zagreb, from Mostar and Tuzla to the European and American seats of our diaspora, a serious, responsible and lasting framework for consultation needs to be established. Not another photo-op gathering, not a new podium for party score-settling and not an assembly of groupthink, but a shared table of national responsibility. At that table a strategy of democratic, political, legal, diplomatic, economic and security protection of Bosniaks and Bosnia and Herzegovina must be shaped.”

The complainants read this passage as a nationwide call for Bosniaks to mobilize against what they describe as a fictitious Serb enemy, and as a denial of positions on the territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia. The complaint notes that Ceric describes such a gathering as a fight “against the possibility of crimes being repeated.”

Based on all of this, Kojic and Vulic asked the BiH Prosecutor’s Office to urgently examine whether there are grounds to suspect the criminal offense of inciting national, racial and religious hatred, discord and intolerance, and to open an investigation against Ceric, warning that if such writing turns into public speech it could lead to more serious criminal offenses. As of publication, Mustafa Ceric had not commented on the complaint or responded to the claims made by the complainants.

Why this matters for the region

Ceric, one of the most influential voices in Bosniak politics over the past three decades, has been at the center of disputes over how the Bosnian war and its death toll are interpreted before. The complaint comes as the Memorial Center of Republika Srpska steps up its “Get to Know the Serb Victims” campaign ahead of upcoming anniversaries of the killings, so each new accusation of this kind further strains relations between Banja Luka and Sarajevo. Belgrade is following the case as part of the broader question of recognizing Serb victims across the region, not least because the complaint leans on verdicts from the Hague tribunal and domestic courts as proof that those victims existed.

It is not yet known when the BiH Prosecutor’s Office will decide whether there are grounds to open an investigation, and no deadline for its response has been given in any statement so far.