Omarska camp

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Image from Penny Marshall crew video footage
Image from Penny Marshall crew video footage

Omarska camp was a notorious war prison (also referred to as concentration camp) in Omarska, a mining town near Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Functioning in the first months of the Bosnian War in 1992, it was one of 677 detention centers and camps throughout Bosnia during the war.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, has found several individuals guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated at Omarska, including murder and torture.[1]

Contents

[edit] Overview

The camp existed from about May 25 to about August 21, 1992, where Bosnian Serb paramilitaries unlawfully segregated, detained and confined some of more than 7,000 Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats captured in the ethnic cleansing of the municipality of Prijedor. It was officially termed an investigation centre and the detainees were accused by the Serbs for alleged "paramilitary activities."

By the end of 1992, the war would result in the death or forced departure of most of the Bosniak and Croatian population of Prijedor municipality; about 7,000 people were missing from a population of 25,000, and there are 145 mass graves and hundreds of individual graves in the extended region. There is, however, conflicting information about how many people were killed at this camp. According to the survivors, usually about 30, and sometimes as many as 150 men were singled-out and killed in the camp every night. The U.S. State Department and other governments believe that, at a minimum, hundreds of detainees, whose identities are known and unknown, did not survive; many others were killed during the evacuation of the camps in the area.

[edit] The camp

In May 1992, intensive shelling and infantry attacks of Bosniak areas in the municipality caused the Bosniak survivors to flee their homes. The majority of them surrendered or were captured by RS forces. As the RS forces rounded up the Bosniak and Bosnian Croat residents, they forced them to march in columns bound for one or another of the prison camps that the RS had established in the municipality.

On about May 25, 1992, about three weeks after RS took control of government authority in the municipality, and two days after the start of large scale military attacks on Bosniak population centers, the RS forces began taking prisoners to the Omarska camp. During the next several weeks, the RS forces continued to round up Bosniaks and Croats from Kozarac area near Prijedor, and other places in the municipality and interned them in the camps. Many of Prijedor's Bosniaks and Croat intellectuals, professionals and political leaders were sent to Omarska. While most of the prisoners were male, there were 37 women detained in the camp, who served food and cleaned the walls of the torture rooms, and were being serially raped in the canteen; bodies of five of them had been exhumed.

Interrogations, frequently accompanied by severe beatings, were conducted on a daily basis at the Omarska. Mutilation, murder as well as other forms of physical and psychological abuse, including ritual humiliation and sexual assault, were commonplace at the Omarska. The camp guards and frequent visitors who came to the camps used all types of weapons and instruments to beat and otherwise physically abuse the detainees. In particular, Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat political and civic leaders, intellectuals, the wealthy, and non-Serbs who were considered as "extremists" or to have resisted the Bosnian Serbs were especially subjected to beatings and mistreatment which often resulted in death.

Inmates being run to the camp canteen - image from Penny Marshall crew video footage
Inmates being run to the camp canteen - image from Penny Marshall crew video footage

In addition, Omarska and Keraterm camps also operated in a manner designed to discriminate and subjugate the non-Serbs by inhumane acts and cruel treatment. These acts included the brutal living conditions imposed on the prisoners. There was a deliberate policy of overcrowding and lack of basic necessities of life, including inadequate food, polluted water, insufficient or non-existent medical care and unhygienic and cramped conditions. The prisoners all suffered serious psychological and physical deterioration and were in a state of constant fear.

Within the area of the Omarska mining complex that was used for the camp, the camp authorities generally confined the prisoners in three different buildings: the administration building, where interrogations and killings took place; the crammed hangar building; the "white house," where the inmated were tortured; and on a cement courtyard area between the buildings known as the "pista", an L-shaped strip of concrete land in between, also a scene of torture and mass killings. There was another small building, known as the "red house", where prisoners were sometimes taken in order to be summarily executed.

Killings were usually by shooting, beating or cutting of throats, although on one night of frenzied killing, prisoners were incinerated on a pyre of burning tyres. The dead would be loaded onto trucks by their friends or with bulldozers. Sometimes prisoners were taken to dig the graves; they did not return.

[edit] Death toll

As part of the ethnic cleansing operations, these four camps helped the Crisis Committee of the Serbian District of Prijedor to reduce the non-Serb population of Prijedor from more than 50,000 in 1992 to little more than 3,000 in 1995, and even fewer subsequently. While precise calculations about the number who actually died in these camps are difficult to make, US State Department officials, along with representatives of other Western governments, have estimated that between 4,000 and 5,000 people perished at Omarska.

A member of the United Nations (UN) Commission of Experts testified during the Duško Tadić trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that there number was in the thousands, but she could not be precise, despite the fact that Serbian officials confirmed there were no large scale releases of prisoners sent there. A member of the Crisis Committee, Simo Drljaca, who served as chief of police for Prijedor, has stated that there were 6,000 "informative conversations" (meaning interrogations) in Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje, and that 1,503 non-Serbs were transferred from those three camps to Manjača camp, leaving 4,497 unaccounted for. [2]

[edit] International reaction

In early August 1992, reporters Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian) and Roy Gutman (Newsday) gained access to Omarska camp. Their reporting served as one of the catalysts of a UN effort to investigate war crimes committed in the conflict.[3] The camp was closed less than a month after its exposure caused international uproar.

[edit] 1997-2000 controversy

There was academic and media controversy regarding the events that took place in Omarska and Trnopolje in 1992, due to claims of false reporting and "lies". These allegations, promoted by the state-controlled Radio Television of Serbia and the British Living Marxism (LM) paper, prompted the Independent Television News (ITN) network to accuse the LM of libel; the ITN won the case in 2000, effectively forcing the paper to close down.[4]

[edit] Recent developments

[edit] Trials

Some of the RS officials responsible for running the camp have since been indicted for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Some have been convicted at the ICTY in 2001, while others await trials in Bosnia. Many Bosniaks feel the sentences handed down are inadequate. Serbs seem to have more conflicted feelings: some say the trials are important for justice and reconciliation while others believe many of those on trial are innocent or even war heroes.

[edit] Exhumations

In 2004 work has concluded at one mass grave only two miles from the Omarska site, from which the remains of 456 persons probably murdered in the camp were retrieved. "There is no doubt whatsoever that there are hundreds of bodies as yet unfound within the mine of Omarska and its vicinity," said president of the Bosnian government's Commission for Tracing Missing Persons. The International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) has been active in advocating the exhumation and identification of their bodies from mass graves around the area; with their help, a number of victims have been identified through DNA testing.[5]

[edit] Memorial controvery

More recently Mittal Steel company has purchased the Omarska mining complex and is planning to resume extraction of iron ore from the site, and the project of Omarska war memorial was halted by extremists from both sides. Mittal Steel announced in Banja Luka on December 1, 2005 that the company will build and finance a memorial in the 'White House'. Many Bosnian Serbs believe there should not even be a memorial, while many Bosniaks believe it should not be built until all the victims have been located and only then if the whole mine - which is currently working again - is used for the memorial site.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links and references