Tomo Buzov (February 20, 1940 – February 27, 1993) was a retired officer of Yugoslav People's Army who was murdered for trying to prevent the Štrpci massacre.
Buzov was an ethnic Croat, born in Kaštel Novi near Split in 1940. As a professional soldier in the Yugoslav People's Army, he had moved to Belgrade and spent most of his life there as a navy officer and signalman. He went into early retirement some time before the war in the early 1990s.[1][2]
On 27 February 1993 Buzov was traveling by train from Belgrade to Bar to visit his son Darko, who was doing his regular military service stationed in Montenegro. As the train was passing through eastern Bosnia, where war was raging, armed members of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) stopped the train at a railway station in the small village of Štrpci near Priboj.
The soldiers inspected the train and singled out 20 ethnic Bosniak civilians among the passengers. One of those civilians, a 17-year-old boy, was sitting in the compartment with Buzov. Buzov asked the soldiers what they were doing and what army they belonged to, and told them that he was a retired officer. They said it was none of his business, and started to escort the civilians out of the train. Buzov told the boy to remain seated and went out instead of him.
The 20 civilians, including Buzov, were then taken to the local VRS command post, beaten and handcuffed with wire, and then taken to a place near Višegrad where they were shot, with their bodies thrown into the river Drina. The massacre is believed to have been committed by a Serb paramilitary unit led by commander Milan Lukić.[2]
Aftermath
In 2009, Lukić was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Court in the Hague for other crimes.[3] A Bosnian court accused him in 2020 for the massacre in Štrpci, but Lukić, imprisoned in Estonia, refused to acknowledge it.[2] In 2023, a court in Sarajevo sentenced seven Bosnian Serbs to 91 years in prison for murdering 20 non-Serbian civilians from the train.[1]
The Bosniak youth saved by Buzov survived the war and has three children.[2]
Legacy
The municipality of Novi Beograd placed a memorial plaque on the building where Buzov lived. The inscription reads: "Tomo Buzov. JNA Captain First Class. In memory of the humanity and courage of the man who lived at this address. April 2023."[4]
There is a memorial plaque and a dock named after him in his hometown of Kaštel Novi.[5]
