Hotel Vilina Vlas, Visegrad, in 2007. Photo: Wikipedia Commons/Aleksandar Bogicevic.
Montenegro’s Pension and Disability Insurance Fund announbced on Friday that it has terminated its contract with the Vilina Vlas spa hotel near Visegrad in Bosnia’s Serb-led Republika Srpska entity after rights groups criticised its inclusion in a subsidised holiday and rehabilitation programme for pensioners.
The move comes after the Association for Social Research and Communication, UDIK, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Centre for Civic Education, CGO, from Montenegro on March 18 urged the fund to cut ties to the spa because of its association with crimes committed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
“Such a choice shows, at the very least, a serious lack of sensitivity toward those facts, or even, which would be even more worrying, a willingness to relativize them,” CGO Director Daliborka Uljarevic told BIRN earlier this week.
A 1994 UN report on rape and abuse of women in the former Yugoslavia said that around 200 women were raped at the Bosnian Serb-run site in 1992, with some victims killed and others driven to suicide.
The site was also linked to the abuse and torture of Bosniak civilians from Sjeverin near Priboj, who were abducted in October 1992 by members of the Avengers (Osvetnici) Serb paramilitary group, led by the notorious war criminal Milan Lukic.
A ruling by Bosnia’s top court, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, described the spa as a rehabilitation centre that was turned into a camp for women and girls who were systematically abused.
In 2009, Zeljko Lelek was sentenced to 16 years in prison for crimes against humanity, including sexual violence committed at Vilina Vlas.
Montenegro’s Ministry of Social Welfare, Family Care and Demography said the fund on March 16 had “unilaterally terminated its cooperation agreement with the Vilina Vlas rehabilitation centre in Visegrad”. The ministry said it had not been involved in signing the original contract in 2016 and had not previously been aware of the historical context.
“Once informed of its existence, procedures were launched to review and terminate it,” the ministry said, welcoming the PIO Fund board’s decision to end the cooperation.
PIO Fund director Vladimir Drobnjak told Montenegro’s ETV the current management of the Fund “had no information” about the war crimes before now.
“It was a very disturbing revelation for us. Now that we have become aware of it, we cannot change history, but what we can do is act urgently, and that is to terminate the contract. That is what we announced in a phone conversation with the management of the spa three days ago,” Drobnjak said on Wednesday.