Photo Diary: Don't Forget the Bosnian Genocide

Bosnian Genocide, Four-year-old Jasmin Hreljic is being treated at Sarajevo's children's hospital for burns suffered to his face during the Serbian attack on the besieged Sarajevo.

Bosnian Genocide, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in the Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor in 1992. They were badly beaten and deliberately starved to die.

Bosnian Genocide, A young Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) child lies in bed and plays with toys while recovering from face wounds received during the siege of Sarajevo, 2 February 1993.

Bosnian Genocide, Amputee Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) children, wounded by Serbs during the siege of Sarajevo, photographed in a Sarajevo hospital, February 1992.

Bosnian Genocide, A man in Sarajevo washes blood off of stretchers used to carry the dead and wounded citizens of the besieged capital, terrorized and killed by Serbs on a daily basis.

Bosnian Genocide, The body of a civilian victim killed by Serb snipers during the siege of Sarajevo. Dead civilian lies on a sidewalk, surrounded by broken glass.

Bosnian Genocide, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians inside the notorious Manjaca concentration camp near prijedor in 1993.

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians inside the notorious Manjaca concentration camp near prijedor in 1993.

Bosnian Genocide, A woman stands near the area of Sarajevo that was used for the 1984 Winter Olympic Games which now holds the graves of thousands of casualties of the international armed conflict between Bosnia and Serbia.

Bosnian Genocide, Bodies of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians killed by Croats in Vitez, 25-30 April 1993.

Concentration Camp Survivors in Bosnia Detail Executions

Model of Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia used in the court proceedings by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Reading Eagle, page A16.
5 August 1992.

By Ron Gutman

ZAGREB, Croatia – Serbian guards at the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia daily executed Bosniak and Croat prisoners from the thousands being held in at least three locations in the sprawling former mining complex, according to an interview conducted by Newsday Tuesday.

Guards selected seven or eight victims at random each night using a flashlight in a darkened warehouse where 600 to 700 prisoners were packed together, according to a 53-year-old Muslim camp survivor, who asked to be identified only as “Hujca.”

Aftermath of the Bosnian Genocide: In the Land of War Criminals

Photo Credits: 21-year-old Edna Dautovic was one of many Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women who were tortured, brutally raped, and then killed by the Serbs in the Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor. Pre-war photo of Edna Dautovic courtesy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

“The men pointed at a passing dog and ordered Ranko to shoot it, which he did. As the dog lay dying, they screamed at Ranko, asking him if he was a good Serb and telling him that if he could shoot a dog, then he could shoot a Muslim. Yes, yes, he was a good Serb. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.”

Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) Civilians in Omarska Concentration Camp 1992 (A). Photo courtesy: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

By Gordon Weiss
Jan 6, 1997.
Journalist’s account

PRIJEDOR, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA — ”They eat pig or they get the f— out,” Ranko, 20, says of his former Muslim [Bosniak] neighbors and friends in this northern Bosnian town.

Ranko is a nice guy. Good-looking, with a raffish sense of humor and a fluent rap-like English lapped up from the cinema and the meager offerings of Republika Srpska television, he translates for me the lyrics of a Croatian rock band, Atomic Shelter, blaring from the loudspeakers.

Nix, 21, is quieter. “The Thinker,” his friends call him. He’s a writer, a poet, and as militantly Serbian as Ranko, though late at night and drunk, he whisperingly confesses: “My legs carry my dead soul, man; I am empty; I feel nothing. Do you understand me?”

Over beer and marijuana at the Ars Media bar in town, Ranko, Nix and other demobbed soldiers from the Bosnian Serbian army — they call themselves “The Street Dogs” — espouse in no particular order Stalinism, anarchism, nihilism, punk, metal, genocide, fascism, freedom of the press, love for mother Serbia and undying devotion for Ratko Mladic, the notorious Bosnian Serbian military leader and indicted war criminal. “Mladic, he’s our man, our main man; he’s a f—— hero and we would all die for him,” says Ranko.

And they never forget Prijedor’s “Silent Night.”

Bosnian Genocide (1992) - Bosnian Muslim Civilians in Omarska Concentration Camp 1992. Photo courtesy: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Prijedor is a town of about 100,000 people in the center of a mining, forestry and agricultural district, nominally in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but to the Serbian residents, a proud component of the self-proclaimed statelet Republika Srpska. “Cleansed” of its Muslim population, Prijedor is also home to an estimated one-third of those indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” committed in Bosnia’s civil war.

Many of those crimes were committed in these parts, beginning on a spring night in 1992.

The way Ranko and the others tell it, there was a list circulating through town, ominously entitled “The Silent Night.” It supposedly listed the names of Serbian intellectuals, political leaders and community figures targeted by militant Muslim outsiders who had come to Prijedor to raise the town’s 70 percent Muslim majority against its Serbian minority. The threatened Serbs, goes the story, struck first.

Documents issued by The Hague tribunal give a succinct and somewhat less mythological account of what happened next:

Bosnian Genocide (1992), Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) prisoner in Omarska concentration camp near Prijedor.

“About 23 May 1992, approximately three weeks after Serbs forcibly took control of government authority in Opstina [district] Prijedor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, intensive shelling by Serb forces of Bosnian Muslim and Croat areas in Prijedor caused Muslim and Croat residents to flee their homes. The majority of them were seized by the Serb forces … [who] shot or beat them on the spot … the Serb forces began taking prisoners to the Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje camps.”

In the camps inmates were gang raped; they were stabbed and mutilated; they were starved; they were sexually assaulted in front of their families and forced to perform fellatio on one another; some were shot. But mostly they were slowly, mercilessly beaten to death with boots, fists, shovels, baseball bats or any instrument that came to hand. Some of those indicted were listed as “visitors” to the camps.

Bosnian Genocide (1992) - Bosnian Muslim Civilians in Omarska Concentration Camp 1992 during a staged lunch. Photo courtesy: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Armed with an official “Wanted” poster, I drove the 300 kilometers from Sarajevo to Prijedor. It was early winter, and smoke was drawing from the chimneys in the Serbian villages I passed. Nothing was alive in what were once Muslim villages, only the skulls of torched homes, their roofs, windows and door frames burned out completely.

Bosnian Genocide (1992), Penny Marshall, ITN, 6 August 1992 shakes hand with Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) prisoner Fikret Alic, Trnopolje concentration camp.

Finding the former camps is not difficult. There are signposts and billboards all along the 50-kilometer drive between the Bosnian provincial capital of Banja Luka and Prijedor. One of the camps, Keraterm, on the edge of Prijedor, is operating again, as a tile factory. Trnopolje, a village lying halfway between Prijedor and the Omarska concentration camp — labeled a “death camp” by the Hague tribunal — advertises guest houses.

Bosnian Genocide (1992), Armed guards oversee staged lunch at Omarska concentration camp. Ian Williams, ITN, 6 August 1992

The camps, linked to nearby residential areas by narrow-gauge railway lines, are remarkable only for their offensive blandness. The older villagers are gruff. To a visitor they claim to know nothing, except for the sowing of fields and the cutting of timber. In Prijedor, there is a mixture of fear, conspiracy and defiant pride. “What you have to understand is that these so-called war criminals are heroes up here,” says an ex-opera singer from Sarajevo, playing “Killing Me Softly” on a Hammond organ at the AeroClub in Prijedor. “If you are going to indict one person, you have to indict everybody, because everybody participated.”

Bosnian Genocide (1992), Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) prisoner Fikret Alic in Trnopolje concentration camp

The Aeroclub is owned by Simo Drljaca, the former police chief of Prijedor, described by a spokesman for The Hague tribunal as a man “accused by every major human rights organization of massive human rights violations,” from the beginning of the ethnic cleansing in May 1992 until September 1996, when he was forced to resign at the insistence of IFOR, the Nato-led ground forces. Drljaca once famously remarked to a British journalist during a tour of the Omarska concentration camp in August 1992 that “Muslims are usually very skinny because they don’t eat pork — have you read the Koran?”

Drljaca remains free, though he is expected to be included in the next list of indictments to be issued this month. Meanwhile, he works for the Republika Srpska Ministry of the Interior and owns and runs a successful transportation business in Prijedor. The locals call him “Mr. Ten Percent.” I find his office easily enough but a bodyguard acidly declines my request for an interview and advises me not to come again.

Bosnian Genocide (1992) - Bosnian Muslim Civilians in Omarska Concentration Camp 1992 during a staged lunch. Photo courtesy: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

On May 11, 1992, the roundup began. Ranko passed through the streets of Prijedor as Muslims and Croats were dragged from their houses and shot, or beaten, and loaded into yellow and blue vans for transportation to the camps. Only 16 years old, he had already volunteered for the militia. A couple of men he knew were dragging an old Muslim man from his house. They grabbed Ranko and thrust a pistol into his hand, telling him to shoot the old man.

“My hands were shaking, I looked at him and pointed the gun but I couldn’t shoot. He reminded me of my father. He was saying, ‘Don’t do it, son, don’t do it.’ He was kneeling in the gutter outside his house. Then his wife came down the stairs screaming and crying, and they shot her in the eye. She fell back inside her home. The old man stopped pleading, and began crying, just crying then.”

The men pointed at a passing dog and ordered Ranko to shoot it, which he did. As the dog lay dying, they screamed at Ranko, asking him if he was a good Serb and telling him that if he could shoot a dog, then he could shoot a Muslim. Yes, yes, he was a good Serb. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Ranko’s customary bravado evaporates as he recounts the one second it took him to kill his first man. He saw at least 50 murdered bodies in the streets that day.

Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia, 1992

The Sensei Bar in Kozarac, a small, devastated village a couple of kilometers from Prijedor, is owned by Dusan Tadic, who has the dubious honor to be the first man tried by the war crimes tribunal.

Tadic was a guard at the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps, where, according to the war crimes indictment, he raped women, beat and shot some prisoners to death and forced others to drink from puddles and crawl over broken glass, while jumping on them until they could not move. Then he emptied a fire extinguisher into their mouths as they lay prone. To his kid brother, Mladen, who now runs the Sensei Bar, “Dusan is a great guy … he actually saved a lot of Muslims … wouldn’t hurt a fly… it’s a case of mistaken identity … he didn’t even know how to use a gun.” Goran Borovnica, also from Kozarac, is on the wanted list, but has disappeared. Friends think he died fighting on the central Bosnia front during the war. He is accused of hauling out Muslim prisoners as they were being marched to the camps and shooting them on the spot. Goran was also “a great guy,” says Mladen, “but very, very violent when drunk.”

Goran’s two sisters and mother live in a pitifully small house that used to belong to Muslims. Lubica, his mother, alternately weeps and screams obscenities about her former Muslim neighbors. “He was a lovely man, and wouldn’t hurt a mouse,” she says. “If there were more people like my brother and Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, this war would never have happened,” says Goran’s sister, Branka, 38, pulling on a Vek cigarette. She kisses the images of Mladic and Karadzic on the wanted posters. “It was a normal war here — and the Muslims shot at their own houses.”

Bosnian Genocide (1992), Omarska concentration camp prisoners at staged lunch. Penny Marshall, ITN, 6 August 1992.

If that’s true, the Muslims did a brutally efficient job. Kozarac is a ghost village, leveled, burned and empty. Scattered teapots and pans, lumps of melted glass, torn clothing, a dog carcass and charred bits of washing machines and stoves litter the streets and muddy lanes where 6,000 houses once stood.

IFOR wanted posters are sometimes quaintly accurate. One simply goes to 31 Cirkin Polje Street, Prijedor, as noted in one of the posters, and there you find Predrag Banovic — and if you’re very lucky his twin brother, Nendad. Both of them are accused of torturing and beating to death civilian prisoners. The Banovics still work for the reserve police, a couple of local policemen tell me. They share a red motorbike and can often be seen riding through town, a couple of kilometers from the Keraterm concentration camp, where among other things, Predrag forced one man to bite off another’s testicles.

I drove to their house on a narrow fruit tree-lined lane at the edge of Prijedor. Some lights were on, and through the latticed window I recognized Predrag, his black hair in a pony tail, kneeling on the bare wooden floor, counting freshly harvested apples. His father, Svetko Banovic, was entering the figures in a book. I pushed the door open and stepped into the room. “IFOR!” Predrag whispered, thinking I was a military investigator who would arrest him. He hid his face with his hands and ran from the room as his father confronted me and forced me out. Mr. Banovic said that the man was a worker and that he hadn’t seen his son for three years.

Bosnian Genocide, 1992 -- Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians in Omarska concentration camp (1992) near Prijedor

Suzana, Ranko’s girlfriend, is angry and sick of the questions. It’s late at night and we are at an impromptu birthday party for their friend, Momo. Momo and others are imbibing marijuana and rejki (the local turpentine). There’s singing, laughter and a vague sensation that something could always turn nasty. Ranko tells us about a very funny night when they all got so drunk that “we beat the shit out of one another.” “Why don’t you write about what the Muslims did to us?” demands Suzana. “Show what they did here.” What did they do? I ask. “They did nothing, because we got in first,” says Ranko. “But they wanted to. We were smarter and faster.”

They tell me again about “The Silent Night.”

“No, I never saw the list, but I know that it existed because my uncle’s name was on it,” says Ranko. “Hey,” says Nix, whispering to me out of earshot. “This was their city, the Muslims.” His eyes are wide. “No one will tell you what happened, because they’re too f—— scared.” The worst “atrocity” they can offer me is a cemetery for the Serbian war dead. “You will see it full of mothers crying for their sons and it will break your heart,” Ranko assures me.

The dull red buildings of the former Omarska concentration camp are perched on the edge of the village of Omarska, seven kilometers from Prijedor. People could wash their dishes and watch the beatings and shootings from their kitchen window. A small red brick building in the center of the compound, now covered with a snowy fringe, was known as “The Red Building.” Prisoners were taken there for “special treatment,” which they almost never survived.

I’m looking for Zeljko Meakic, the former camp commander at Omarska, where up to 3,000 inmates were incarcerated, tortured or killed. Despite assurances from the Republika Srbska Minister of the Interior that Meakic has since been removed as deputy chief of the Omarska police, local villagers tell me that, yes, every morning “the commander,” as they call him, still leaves for work at the Omarska police station.

It is freezing and snowing as night falls. I have been searching for Meakic’s house for nearly two hours, getting conflicting directions. I stop in a tiny, isolated bar and ask the barmaid if she knows where Meakic lives. She says she’s never heard of him, but a few minutes later, as I’m drinking coffee, I hear her describing my car over the telephone.

In late August 1992, Ranko had a friend over for a few drinks. His friend belonged to a military demolition team that had received orders that night to blow up a mosque in central Prijedor. Ranko’s friend invited him to go with the team, about a dozen boys. At around midnight they set off for the Muslim temple, which Ranko tells me, “was about 200 years old. I don’t know, they all look the same — cheap.” They battered the door down and began smashing up the mosque, downing more rejki as they looted and destroyed. One of the boys started playing Iron Maiden and Nirvana over the loudspeakers that had once broadcast the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Then they lit a bonfire of carpets and tables in the middle of the mosque and bored holes in the walls by the light of the fire. They wired up the charges, dismantled and took the sound system and gathered outside to watch the walls crumble in a single cloudy explosion, singing and laughing. I asked Ranko if he felt ashamed. “Why? I did two djamijas [mosques] the same way. If you destroy their djamijas, they never come back.” I’m curious, then, as to why the mosques I pass are all destroyed, while the Muslim graveyards abutting them are left conspicuously untouched. One man I ask, a farmer in a field, replies, “not enough bulldozers,” but Suzana’s answer is different. “Disrupting the dead. It brings bad luck.”

One night, drunk and stoned, and by way of explanation for all the questions that I have asked, Nix replies in song: I used to love her
But I have to kill her
She feels so much
She drove me nuts
She’s buried right in my backyard
I know I miss her
So I have to kill her
She’s buried six feet under
And I can still hear her complain

“Guns ‘n’ Roses,” he says, as if that says it all.

The head spins with the myths and imperatives that pervade all Balkan conversations, the memories of past wrongs crying to be righted. “The Silent Night,” Muslims who “breed like rabbits,” the dispossessed Serbs who had “once owned all the land,” the mythical caches of arms in every Muslim household, the frontier between Turkey and Europe, manned by the innocent, vigilant Serbs, the plans by Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic to create a fundamentalist Islamic state where every Serbian maiden would be forced to wear the chador. Beyond Prijedor, the process muddles on. While The Hague tribunal calls repeatedly for the arrest of the indicted, IFOR officials argue that they have no mandate to arrest. The government of the Republika Srpska maintains that there are no war criminals on its territory (it refuses to recognize the legality of the indictments), therefore it has no obligation under international law to arrest anyone.

In Prijedor, the Street Dogs yell “sex and violence” like baying wolves, screaming at the empty streets and darkened roofs, sending a chill across the town’s already frigid air. They have rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and plastic explosives in their bedrooms. Ranko’s cupboard has an arsenal where other kids might store their tennis rackets. Still, for all their bravado and defiance, psychic hounds are snapping at their own heels.

“You see,” says Nix, with a slow, sweet smile revealing tombstone teeth that belie his tender years, “you despise us. But you cannot despise us more than we despise ourselves.”

The 1992 Hambarine Massacre near Prijedor, Bosnia

The attacks on the Bosnian Muslim village of Hambarine in May of 1992, coupled with the arrests, detention, rapes, and ethnic cleansing and massacres of civilians in the Prijedor, resulted in virtually a complete elimination of Bosnian Muslims from the municipality of Prijedor.

In Tadic Judgement, paragraph 466, we find that Serbs practiced Nazi-style techniques of terror over Bosniak and Croat population in the municipality of Prijedor:

“Those who remained were required to wear white armbands to distinguish themselves and were continuously subject to harassment, beatings and worse, with terror tactics being common. Non-Serbs in the municipality Prijedor were subjected to gross abuses….”

Serbs Kill 200 Bosniak Prisoners, Heave Bodies Down the Slope

Eugene Register-Guard
9 August 1992.

ZAGREB, Croatia — A Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] says a split-second decision to leap into a ravine saved his life while Serbs killed about 200 fellow prisoners and heaved their bodies down the slope.

“One of the bodies fell about five meters from me, so that the man’s brains were all over my chest,” said Semir, 24, who said he knew of just one other man who survived the massacre last month.

Semir asked The Associated Press not to photograph him or use his family name on the chance one of his brothers might also have survived the killing, which he said occurred Aug. 21 [1992].

In Sarajevo, Bosnia’s Investigative Commission for War Crimes said it had “all the details” about the alleged massacre, including the names of the victims and those who killed them.

The Bush administration said Tuesday it also was investigating reports of the massacre.

Semir said Serbs caught him in mid-July near Prijedor in northern Bosnia and held him in a detention camp at the nearby Keraterm ceramics factory. He was later moved to a camp at Trnopolje. On Aug. 21, he said five buses came to the camp. Women and children were put in on one bus; men and teenage boys in the others.

Kozarac massacre, Serbs Systematically Kill Thousands of Bosniak Civilians

The Deadly `Ethnic Cleansing’ Of A Bosnian Muslim City

By Mary Battiata
2 November 1992.

KOZARAC, Bosnia – At a bend in the road just past the Kozarac town sawmill, a young Serb named Goran Borovice stood on a second-story balcony, watching as columns of bloodied and dazed Muslim refugees streamed by below.

It was May 26, the third and final day of the “ethnic cleansing” of Kozarac, a previously prosperous Slavic Muslim enclave of 25,000 whose misfortune it was to lie inside a newly declared “ethnically pure” Bosnian Serb state. That morning, victorious Serb fighters had moved tanks and loudspeakers to the woods on the edge of town:

“Muslims get out! Muslims get out!” the Serb command blared over and over, according to witnesses. ”