Bosnian officials have inaugurated a memorial to ethnic Serbs killed during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Sarajevo Mayor Benjamina Karic, Bosnian Vice President Milan Dunovic, and Christian Schmidt, the chief UN envoy to Bosnia-Herzegovina, unveiled the stone monument on November 15 to people killed, most of them Serbs, on the slopes of Trebevic Mountain southeast of Sarajevo in 1992 and 1993.
Karic laid a wreath at the foot of the monument after she, Dunovic, and Schmidt pulled a black cloth off the stone in which the names of 17 Serbs are engraved and the sentence: "We will remember forever, with sadness and respect, our slain fellow citizens."
The officials did not issue a public statement during the ceremony, which took place on the mountainside and was attended by several people, who also laid flowers at the monument.
The monument pays tribute to the victims whose remains were discovered at the Kazani pit -- a mass grave where forces with a Bosnian Muslim paramilitary group dumped the bodies of ethnic Serbs killed in Sarajevo during the Bosnia War.
The monument has stirred controversy among Serb politicians and associations who have complained that the memorial fails to provide information about the victims' ethnicity or details about the perpetrators behind their deaths.
Bosnia's 1992-1995 war between its ethnic Croats, Muslims, and Serbs claimed some 100,000 lives.
