A commemoration marking the 30th anniversary of the death of the 12-year-old Aleksandra Zec and her parents - Marija and Mihajlo - was held on Tuesday on Mount Sljeme by the Antifascist League of Croatia, the Serb National Council (SNV), and the Documenta NGO.

The central commemoration is held every year at the site where Aleksandra and Marija were killed in the night between 7 and 8 December 1991. Members of a special police unit under Tomislav Mercep came to the home of the Zec family in Zagreb’s Tresnjevka district shortly after 11 pm on 7 December 1991 and shot dead 38-year-old Mihajlo Zec as he tried to escape. Marija and Aleksandra, who witnessed the murder, were then taken in a van to the Adolfovac mountain lodge on Mount Sljeme where they were killed.

Addressing the commemoration, Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomasević said that everyone knew what happened at that site and who the perpetrators were and what had made them do that.

We also know that nobody has been held to account for that crime. It is tragic that in the last 30 years, not one mayor of Zagreb has commemorated this crime, Tomasevic said.

According to a press release issued by the organizers of the commemorative event, Tomasevic said that he had come to the commemoration as he thought that such crimes should not sink into oblivion, so that they would not happen ever again.

He was quoted as saying that he would like to live in a city where everybody could feel comfortably and in a city free of discrimination along any line, and where every crime was punished.

Tomasevic promised that he would continue attending this annual commemoration “in a humble but defiant manner.”

The SNV leader Milorad Pupovac was quoted as saying that the Zec family and many other families had remained in this country, confident that this was their home and that their cities could provide safety and security, and that their decision to remain living with other people in war circumstances could guarantee them safety and security.

“This is a strong message: the belief that people could live together in war,” he said.

Civil society activist Tatjana Dragicevic said that the war violence ended the life of the girl Aleksandra and made her a symbol of children killed in the war.

In this context, Dragicevic mentioned some other child victims of the war: two brothers, Slobodan aged 11, and Goran aged 4, who together with their parents — 39-year-old Drago and 32-year-old Nevenka — were killed in the Croatian town of Ervenik by Serb paramilitaries in early 1992; two-year-old boy Tomislav Juric and Dario Juric (4), who were killed in Kostrici when Serb paramilitaries overran that village near Sunja in November 1991, and 14-year girl Danijela Roknic, who was killed together with her father in a Karlovac suburb by an ex-Croatian policeman in October 1991.