Who started the war? It's a well-known sentence from the Oscar winner Danis Tanović's film No Man's Land. Historians will surely answer that question one day and give the final context of the genesis of the Bosniak-Croat conflict. Without going into an attempt to solve this difficult question from the end of the 20^th century in this short presentation, we will focus only on the events in the municipality of Konjic, for which the village of Orlište is a kind of indicator...

From individual crimes...

In order to talk about Orlište, it is necessary to state first the broader context at the level of the entire location of the river Neretvica. The facts tell us that the suffering of the Croats of this region began on March 23^rd, 1993, when the HVO ambulance driver Dragan (Bosiljko) Vujičević (1963) was killed in Klis (the collective name of several settlements). On the same day, a captured member of the HVO, Mate (Stipo) Stjepanović, was killed in Jasenik.

Fear crept in among the Croats much earlier when news came from the area where the HVO and the BiH Army were "touching". However, everything culminated on March 20^th, when, directed by Ismet Gabela and Sakib Boloban, a bomb was thrown from a moving vehicle among three girls in Kostajnica, and Katica Šagolj was seriously wounded.

...to ethnic cleansing

What started with individual murders and harassments turned into mass crimes in a few days. The result of this is that about 50 villages where the majority of the Croatian population lived were, more or less, burned and looted, and mass crimes were committed in eight of them.

Those places are: Gostovići, where there were four victims; Buščak with three; Trusina with 22; Vrci with seven; Radešine with five; Dubravica also with five; Podhum/Žitače with 26; Zaslivlja with three; Orahovica with four and finally Orlište with also four Croatian victims.

Also, almost 10 000 Croats were forced out from the municipality of Konjic, 160 of them died, and among them were 80 adult civilians, seven children and 39 HVO soldiers.

Kostići are remembered...

Although collectively it is not the biggest crime in the area of the municipality of Konjic, Orlište is special since it was the first village that was attacked and completely burned and destroyed, and the people - that is, several dozen Croats - were forced out of their homes (the data are different and say from 33 to 64 inhabitants).

Unfortunately, four people with the same surname were killed and massacred - Kostić: Branko (Tade) Kostić (1937), father of two children Mija and Valerija, was found with a massacred head, with a spilled eye and a split skull that was held only by the skin; Ivan (Rade) Kostić (1907), killed in his house on his bed; Janja Kostić, born Miškić (1913), killed with three shots in front of her house where her husband Ivan was also killed, and Anđa (Pere) Kostić, widow of Ilija (1924) - this is a woman who had been immobile for eight years and was wounded by a firearm, and passed away a few days later.

Who first started in Orlišta?

Although we stated at the beginning that history, globally, will give an answer to the question of who first started the tragic conflict between Croats and Bosniaks, in Orlište it was clear from the first day: Bosniak soldiers invaded a weakly defended village, killed, looted and carried away what can be taken away.

This is supported by numerous reports from survivors, and in this text we will use part of the testimony of Ivka Kostić (1948), which can also be found on the Vrci-Klis/Konjic Facebook page.

"A few days before the crime, Muslim soldiers came to the village and challenged us by cursing the Croatian mother. They were Muslims from the neighbouring villages of Gobelovina and Raotić. Verbal provocations caused fear in us (...) we anxiously awaited what would happen because we were unable to oppose them, since almost all of us were bare-handed, old and sick. The Muslim army was led by Mirsad Bajraktarević from the neighboring village of Lokve. In Orlište, which dawned in the fog on the Annunciation and the Muslim first day of Eid, Muslim soldiers invaded in the morning from all sides. The village was guarded by 15 HVO soldiers. It was not enough for the flood of Muslim soldiers that came from all sides like wasps. My Branko, Ivan, Anđa and Janja did not manage to escape (...) They were cruelly killed. Houses and stables were set on fire, cattle were driven away (...) Everything in the village was looted and burned. They killed my husband Branko, set fire to the house and barn, and drove away 57 sheep, eight cows and horses. We suspect that it was looted by Muslims from Raotić (...) I went out together with several other Croats over the Bokševica mountain", she said, among other things, in her statement. Today, Ivka lives in Mostar, and spends her days as an elderly and sick person because she has high blood pressure and diabetes. She constantly remembers because the lives of the living are "stuck" in 1993. Unfortunately, some traumas never go away...

What do the survivors say?

The survivors of the massacre in Orlište have been waiting for justice for 30 years. One of them is Mijo Kostić, the son of the murdered Branko, who also lives in Mostar today. Just like in the case when we reflected on the topic of the 25th anniversary of this crime, Mijo is visibly disappointed in justice and the judiciary. Unfortunately, his mother's testimony is not relevant to the prosecution. Even when the case is kept in a drawer for several years, according to Mijo, it comes into the hands of prosecutors who bought law degrees during the war or after the war and got into the prosecutor's office through connections, and they cannot "take the case to the end".

Following this, he sent countless letters, requests and inquiries regarding the crime in Orlište. He received answers and promises, but to this day no one has been prosecuted.

In the last notification he received from the county prosecutor's office of Herzegovina-Neretva County from the end of 2021, he was told that the investigation against Mirsad Bajrektarević (in Ivka Kostić's testimony: "Bajraktarević") was suspended due to lack of evidence, while in the case of Mustafa Buturović it was suspended due to death. It is similar with other commanders or possibly those guilty of command responsibility. The central reason for rejecting the indictment is the impossibility of determining, from witness statements, which unit of the ABiH attacked Orlište.

It is clear that in this case too, law and justice are two separate things. Expecting people who saved their bare lives to be able to recognize the subtle signs of even the smallest units of an army trying to kill them shows that physical evidence is much more important than live testimony. Perhaps more capable prosecutors would be able to prove something, but according to Mijo Kostić's statement, this is not the case in the HNK prosecutor's office.

Although the popular proverb says that it is never too late, the fact is that justice and law lose their meaning if the perpetrators are convicted after so much time has passed. There remains faith in heavenly justice and the memory of a once prosperous village and regret for the lost media war because, let's be realistic, only a few enthusiasts know about Orlište today...

What is left of the parish?

In order to get an impression of the parish of St. Anthony of Padua once and today, we also spoke with the parish priest OFM Ivica Karatović, who has been in this religious community for three years. He told us that there is no planned commemoration of the crime in Orlište, but that on Little Easter there will be a joint show of respect for all the victims in Trusina. After the prayer and funeral service at the monument, those present will go to the parish church together for Holy Mass. With a heavy sigh, the parish priest had no comment on everything, he only briefly added (about Orlište) "there is no one there anymore", and the parish has a total of 58 believers.

As a comparison, we will cite the fact that in 1991 it had 2 360 Catholics, two regional churches, as many as 34 cemeteries, many of which had their own chapels. The area was steeped in Catholicism, and the villages were full of adults and children. All this stopped in 1993, when the parish church was badly damaged, and the branch church, cemeteries and chapels did not fare better, as well as the people who were forced out of their homes.