Camps As Stakes

Dull eyes of living skeletons staring at us from TV screens and hypocritical statements by ``defenders of their centuries old hearths'' have already been seen and heard. Only the roles have been changed. Croats seem to have decided to catch up with and surpass Serbs on the charts of war criminals, while victims remained more or less the same. Muslims also are not missing the opportunity to give their contribution to operations of ethnic cleansing, in proportion determined by the so-called balance of power in the field.

According to the recent report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the situation in Herzegovina and Central Bosnia is ``chaotic and is getting worse.'' All three sides are accused of having detention camps. Croats maintain the lead with 2,133 registered captives compared with 1,256 detained by Muslims. Serbs now seem most benevolent as they practically finished their job--675 people altogether are currently held captive in 16 camps throughout the Serb Republic in Bosnia.

However, these figures represent only a tip of the iceberg, as places and people which no humanitarian organization managed to gain access to until recently have not been taken into account. Dretelj,the former ammunition depot close to Mostar, is one of them. In the meantime, representatives of UNHCR visited Dretelj and found almost 3,000 detainees in hangars and underground tunnels. They succeeded in arranging release of about 400 elderly and seriously ill people. There are testimonies that the members of HVO (the Croatian Defense Council) had hidden a number of detainees who were in bad condition and tried to make others look decent (gave them a shave, a hair-cut, etc.) before the visit took place. International pressure on the leadership of Herzeg-Bosnia and their sponsors in Zagreb was stepped up due to the stories from Dretelj and nearby Gabela. Not even the letter which Croatian President Franjo Tudjman sent to Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban last week did anything to ease this pressure. It was demanded in the letter that the rules of the Geneva Convention are strictly obeyed and that passage be allowed to humanitarian convoys headed for the Muslim enclaves. Last Friday, only a day after the letter was published, UNHCR representatives lodged a severe complaint against crimes committed in Croat-run camps and the State Department announced that `Croat officials will be held responsible for immediately putting an end to these atrocities.'

What is striking in this sad media story about the camps is the moment of their `discovery.' One should recall the London Conference (August 1992) when almost entire international public focused its attention on the camps run by Bosnian Serbs in Northern Bosnia. The goal was to point to the methods that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his followers were using in creating their state. The intention was to 'soften' the Serbian delegation and force it to accept Bosnia-Herzegovina as one state. A year later, it is clear that Bosnian Serbs have persevered on the road to the better ethnic future, so that nothing else was left to be done but accept those solutions which have been imposed by biggest cannon caliber along with successful liberation of large `Serb' territories from the Muslim population, as in Foca and Prijedor. It was this context in which the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina was legalized at the Geneva Conference. However, things got complicated when it came to creating an illusion that Muslims have gained something as well. Bosnian Croats rejected two key demands made by Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic--the access to the Adriatic and the E.C. protectorate over Mostar. The Geneva negotiations thus failed, while the only thing the international community, impotent in its efforts to end the Bosnian war, could do was to `discover' ethnic cleansing directed by Bosnian Croats and threaten the Republic of Croatia with the same fate which met the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Namely, the camps with several thousand men, women and even children did not crop up overnight, either in Northern Bosnia or in Herzegovina. The information of their existence and of atrocities committed there had been kept as valuable stakes in the negotiating poker game, only to be used in the situation when it seemed that the war in B-H could be put ad acta.

That is the reason why it seemed that the story about Dretelj and Gabela would most likely have the same ending as that about Manjaca and Omarska a while ago. Tudjman and Boban will heavy-heartedly become cooperative and ask representatives of UNHCR and the Red Cross to help them get rid of unwelcome guests as soon as possible. Humanitarian organizations and governments financing them will once again find themselves in the situation to rack their brains figuring out what to do with yet another contingent of several thousand starved and exhausted Muslims who should be fed and accommodated. Ill tongues will afterwards say that such humanitarian effort is nothing else but accepting of ethnic cleansing.

Camps are set up in order to convey very important messages. Firstly, they warn of a merciless war without reconciliation: if detained, not one Serb, Croat or Muslim who is familiar with what went on in Omarska, Dretelj or Celebici cannot expect to be treated in a different way from the way his compatriots treated captives of other nationality in these camps. Therefore, on their own initiative and without coercion, people are leaving their homes and going where they think it's safer--which is named as humane exchange of population. According to numerous testimonies, in camps run by all three sides those who tried to protect `people of nationality' other than `their own' were extremely roughly treated.

But the worst thing for the people who happened to find themselves outside the borders of newly carved ethnic states when the war broke out is the fact that there is no end in sight to this story about camps. According to UNHCR experts, even if the agreement on ``the Union of Republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina'' had been accepted by all three sides about one million people would still have to change their place of residence permanently in order to ensure that newly-formed members of the so-called Union are ethnically clean. No one in the world has figured out how to move hundreds of thousands of people from one place to another without causing much violence and suffering. Some kind of 'detentions centers' would have to be set up in order to carry out such an undertaking successfully. Even though those places would not necessarily have to resemble Omarska or Dretelj, it is clear that they would not resemble holiday resorts either.