A/HRC/37/55/Add.1 victims: Jews and Roma, imprisoned Partisans and Serbs from the Independent State of Croatia, as well as prisoners of war detained in the camp, many of whom also died. While the municipality of Belgrade established a commission for Sajmište in 2011, the Special Rapporteur is seriously concerned that to date, no decision has been taken to memorialize the site in an adequate manner. She was also alarmed by reports received during the mission that the German Pavilion was under threat of destruction by the municipality for the construction of a road, and that the Topovske šupe camp used for men was planned for destruction in 2017 to build a shopping mall. She shares the fear of the Center for Holocaust Research and Education that any such destructions could also be “precedentsetting”,20 thereby increasing the risk to other sites. Moreover, she also finds particularly offensive that at the site of mass executions of men in Jabuka, Pančevo, the memorial built in 1981 is in bad condition and used by a local hunting association for target practice and wildlife hunting. 77. The Special Rapporteur has learned that there have been no new developments regarding these sites, and no final decisions taken since the time of her mission. She renews her strong recommendation to the Government of Serbia and the municipality of Belgrade to ensure the adequate memorialization of these sites, in close consultation with the concerned groups. Such memorialization is an essential part of what has been called the “battle against forgetting”,21 and critical to ensuring human rights, including cultural rights, without discrimination, in today’s Serbia. 78. The Special Rapporteur was pleased to visit the statue honouring the Romani singer Saban Bajramovic in Niš, which has been erected as a result of a civil society initiative. However, she was sorry to learn that this statue was vandalized in the past, including with swastikas and ethnic slurs, though measures have been taken to try to ensure that it is not attacked again. Further steps should be taken to create more monuments commemorating the heritage of the Roma and other marginalized people; to consult the people concerned when doing so; and to make sure that such sites are treated with respect and used to promote tolerance and inclusion, rather than as what one civil society voice called “an alibi”. 79. Beyond the borders of Serbia itself, it is critical for Serbia to come to terms with the recent history of its authorities’ role ⸻ whether through participation, collusion or acquiescence, depending on the context ⸻ in the vast destruction of cultural heritage in other parts of the former Yugoslavia during the conflicts of the 1990s, including in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, a pattern of cultural destruction about which experts have determined that, when taken together, there “can be no doubt as to the systematic tactics being employed”.22 C. Cultural heritage in Kosovo 80. The massive destruction of cultural heritage in Kosovo during the 1998/99 conflict and its aftermath, crimes aimed at “cultural cleansing”, still cast a long shadow. 23 According to the research of international experts reporting to the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the damage included 225 of 607 religious facilities registered by the local Islamic community that were completely or partially destroyed during the conflict, 20 21 22 23 14 Center for Holocaust Research and Education, Report on the State of Holocaust and Poraimos Sites in Belgrade, Serbia, 2016, p. 4. Pisarri, p. 2. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, 2016, p. 60. “Ethnic cleansing was accompanied by a policy of cultural cleansing to render it permanent and irreversible.” As the cultural rights mandate has documented, there are always political agendas on the battlefield of memorialization. This produces conflicting, divergent narratives about such events, including about relevant statistics. See, for example, Folić, Crucified Kosovo, and Islame, Serbian Barbarities Against Islamic Monuments in Kosova.