Palich, Avdo

Avdo Palic was born in the village of Krivacha (Khan Piesak) in northeast Bosnia and Herzegovina into a Bosnian family. Palich was a graduate of the Yugoslav military academy and before the war he served as an artillery officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army . While studying in Sarajevo, met his future wife Esma from Zepa . Before the war, Palic lived in the town of Vlasenitsa , where he worked as a teacher in a local school.

On March 29, 1992, Avdo and Esma Palich arrived in Zepa to visit relatives. In early April (after the outbreak of hostilities) he led the territorial defense of Zepa, and later the 285th light mountain brigade, which was part of the 28th division of Nasser Oric . Under the command of Palic, the Zepsky enclave was a bridgehead used by Muslims for sorties and attacks on the Serbs. And although the UN proclaimed Zhepa as a “security zone” on May 6, 1993, in reality Zhepa did not demilitarize . The Ukrainian peacekeepers located in Zepa at the cost of their lives guarded the Muslim population of the enclave and refugees from Central Bosnia and Srebrenica, and monitor compliance with the ceasefire, which were provocatively violated by both the BiH army and the Serbian armed forces. The Serbs were constantly forced to divert part of their forces to the blockade of Zepa. According to the order of the headquarters of the army of BiH, the armed groups of BiH in the enclave had to forcibly take away the weapons of the Ukrainian peacekeepers and use them as a human shield in case Zepa was captured by units of the Bosnian-Serbian army. After the fall of Srebrenica, Muslim peacekeepers in Zepa were taken hostage by Muslim and Serbian forces. However, the command of the Ukrainian contingent, unlike the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica, managed to avoid the deaths of peacekeepers and civilians in Zepa and ensured the operation to evacuate more than 9,000 people to Central Bosnia. The key role in the bloodless salvation of Zepa’s population was played by Colonel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Nikolai Verkhoglyad ^[1] .

In December 2006, the activities of the commission investigating the enforced disappearance of Avdo Palic resumed, however, attempts to find the remains and find out the circumstances of his enforced disappearance have not yielded results.

Avdo Palich was married to Esme Palich, the couple had two daughters: both were born during the war. His wife and daughters currently reside in Sarajevo.

At the international documentary film festival in Kiev, titled “Holiday of Disobedience: Women's Fates on the Screen,” a 26-minute film by Bosnian director Alain Drevlic “Esma” was shown. The plot of the film is as follows: “The heroine of the film Esma has been looking for her husband, Colonel Avdo Palich, for several years. He was abducted from the UN camp in Bosnia, where official negotiations took place between representatives of the Serbian-Bosnian conflict. In the morning, Esma collects her daughters at school, works during the day. Almost every day she was informed by telephone about the next grave she had found. She rushes to exhumation, but even in this grave the remains of not her husband. ” ^[2]