Facing Judgement Day

Witnesses accuse 150 Bosnian Serbs of killing and maltreating Muslims in the camps in northern Bosnia (Omarska, Trnopolje, Manjaca, Bresicani and the "Keraterm" factory), and in some fifteen villages in the north of Bosnia. Witnesses claim that the guards in those camps would select, as a routine, groups of five to fifteen Muslim prisoners, taking them out of overcrowded rooms and beating them - with rifle butts, iron bars and the like, sometimes even killing them. The richer, more educated or politically active Muslims had an especially hard time. Among others, witnesses accuse Miljenko and Veljko Zigic - of murder and arson, brother and sister Draza and Rosa Mitrovic - of terrorizing people and plundering in the village of Kamicani, and especially policeman Dusan Tadic for whom they claim that he had committed murder in two camps - he is accused of killing a man with a knife and at least another one with a fire arm in the Omarska camp. The commanders of the Omarska and Trnopolje camps, Zeljko Kocka and Slobodan Kuruzovic are accused of organizing the killing of prisoners, and one witness claims that Kocka even did the killing himself.

Apart from the mentioned witnesses there are also others from the camp in the vicinity of Prijedor who intend, when the time comes, to accuse the Serbian authorities there for war crimes and ethnic cleansing. The story of one them starts on May 25 1992 - it was then, he says, at the "Evropa" restaurant in Omarska, that there was a meeting of Mirza Mujadzic, leader of the local branch of the Party of the Democratic Action (SDA), Simo Miskovic, leader of the local branch of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), Radmilo Zeljaja, local commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Velibor Arsic, a colonel of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and Slobodan Kuruzovic, a reserve major and the director of the primary school in Prijedor. It was agreed that Prijedor be taken over by the Serbian army and that the Muslims and the Serbs do not touch each other. However, already on May 25, the army disarmed the police, and Mirza Mujadzic was arrested along with the vice-president of his party. This was followed by the arrest of 68 Muslim intellectuals on June 7 who were taken to Omarska. Among them was also the former municipality president. No one has seen them since, and when the camp in Omarska was closed down, they did not come out of it.

After one of the incidents in the Hambarine settlement (seven thousand inhabitants, mostly Muslims who were armed), on June 17, members of Serbian armed formations entered the settlement and, according to our witness, Hambarine was on fire for three days. Prior to this, he says, there was also unrest in Kozarac, on the outskirts of Prijedor (24 thousand inhabitants), when the armed Muslim population requested that two tanks of the Bosnian Serb Army be withdrawn from the town center. After talks the tanks were withdrawn eight kilometers away, and Radio Prijedor called on the Serbs and Muslims not to tread on each other's territories. Nevertheless, he considers that the incident only served as an excuse for a general attack on Kozarac on June 19. On that day Radio Prijedor reported that "Islamic fundamentalists have decide to take over the town with weapons." The big nerve-testing game lasted until June 25. Already a day later, the Bosnian Serb Army requested that all the armed Muslim villages surrender their weapons. Some 15 villages did surrender their arms and the military and civilian authorities promised peace and security to all citizens. Members of the Bosnian Serb Army patrolled Muslim villages. However, says our witness, at the place where the village of Biscani, Rakovcani and Rizvanovici meet, a terribly massacred body in the uniform of the Serbian units was found. He claims that there are witnesses and that he knows them well, who swear that the body was brought by a military van the previous evening, and he supports his statement by saying that Radio Prijedor never gave the name or the origin of the killed person. This was followed by an attack by four thousand members of Serbian military formations from Majdan (the municipality of Sanski Most) and Prijedor, enforced, he claims, by Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan's "Tigers" and "red berets" (paramilitary forces), on those villages and by the mass murder of civilians. During that time, he went on, transport helicopters of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and "Gazelles" kept bringing weapons and ammunition to Serbian forces, and the (JNA) distributed arms in villages with a Serbian majority like Maricka, Tomasic and Rakelic even before the war broke out.

Speaking about all the games with weapons, the witness gives the example of Srdja Srdjic, a B-H MP of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS). Srdjic, allegedly got 1900 automatic rifles and seven million bullets from the (JNA) and various people whom the authorities of Serbia put it charge of distributing weapons to Serbs outside Serbia. However, he sold those weapons to the Muslims (the price of a rifle with 500 bullets - 2000 DM), only to have all the buyers arrested when clashes broke out, according to lists made by Srdjic and his associates. The witness says that almost all Muslim villages were attacked by neighboring Serbian villages. He claims that around eight thousand people were kept at the Omarska camp for a longer or shorter period of time. According to him, the shortest stay was eight days, and the longest for ever. He thinks that the left opencut of the Omarska mine and the opencuts of Tomasica, Glinokop and Pasinc, are mass graves. Speaking about all this, the witness said that ethic cleansing was followed by mass plundering - around 4500 cows, 3000 sheep, 1700 - 2000 calves and an enormous amount of robbed movables were taken from the territory of the Prijedor municipality to Serbia. Trucks with Sabac (a town in Serbia) licence plates would come every day and, he says, take all that, and over 39 carloads of wheat were transported to Banja Luka.

The mentioned witness says that he holds the following people especially responsible: a former taxi driver from Cirkin Polje who, he says, robbed houses and killed, a pre-war hoodlum from Prijedor whom he accuses of having committed murder in Celi and Muslimanska Gonjenica in his capacity as commander of the unit called "Eagles" and a Chetnik duke; he knows that his nickname is "Bobin," but that he is from Prijedor, he thinks he is 19 years old and he has heard that he had committed a large number of murders. The witness considers Slobodan Kuruzovic, the director of the primary school in Prijedor and the commander of the Trnopolje camp, responsible for the murder of an undetermined number of prisoners at Trnopolje.

The witness further says that clashes broke out in Prijedor at the end of June. The local radio said that the Muslims had attacked the town, and when the shooting started, that 16 Serbs and 120 Muslims were killed. Two Serbs were killed in front of his building. Serbian soldiers accused a neighbor from the forth floor, a Muslim, of killing them with his pistol from his window and they executed him. Speaking to other people in the building, he came to the conclusion that it was a staged murder: it is very difficult to hit a man from the forth floor, and apart from that, at the place which was said to be the scene of the murder, there was not a drop of blood. He considers that the attack on Prijedor was staged in order to find an excuse for ethnic cleansing and he adds that the radio never gave names of the killed Serbs as it usually did. He says that he himself was imprisoned in the "Keraterm" camp for more than a month and a half. His Serbian friends got him out. While he was there, he found out that they had killed in Omarska Nedzad Saric, the president of the court in Prijedor, Senadin Ramadanovic and Asif Kiki, the two richest private entrepreneurs in Prijedor. He went on to say that in that same camp prisoners were beaten with sand bags, metal bars and wooden rods cut in two at the top so as to tear of a piece of flesh with every blow. According to him, the price for being released from the camp was 10 000 DM, and the only one who could pay this was a certain Cuko, the owner of a popular pizzeria in Prijedor, married to a Serbian woman.

The witness points out that the old Serbian inhabitants of Prijedor call it a town of criminals. He says that the local Red Cross organizes convoys for leaving the region charging this 70 DM for adults and 40 DM for children. He adds that humanitarian aid is distributed only to Serbs and that, on the door of the "Zitopromet" milling firm it says: "No flour for Muslims!."

Is this story true? Should VREME witness be trusted? In order to find out the truth, everyone should be heard, regardless of how painful that may be. This especially refers to the Serbs when they try to prove to the world that it is not only them who are committing war crimes. Filip Svarm

The Death Map

The situation in Prijedor, shown on the map, was drawn by a witness who was lucky enough to get out of the "Serbian purgatory" alive. Who knows what kind of "historical" cynicism is responsible for the fact that this witness is a Serb adopted by Muslims when he was a child; the tragedy to see his parents (foster parents) killed was caused by - his compatriots, Serbs. Later on, some other Serbs saved his life; however, in the whole story of last year's destruction of Prijedor, that is a small comfort. If it is any comfort at all. In mid June 1992 practically the entire Old town (1) and the Gypsy quarter (2) were destroyed: the people who did not flee in the wake of weapons, dredgers and machines for digging trenches either "disappeared" immediately or, if they were lucky, a few months later when the existence of Serbian camps was "discovered," they were released from the Omarska camp. Part of the male Muslim inhabitants of the town quarter of Skela (3) were killed immediately, on the spot, part of them ended up in the camp into which the former "Keraterm" tile factory was turned. The part along the bank of the Sana river (4) and the settlements of the Cepici and Husici families (5) was cleansed to such an extent that certain families (Alisic, Aliskovic, Mujadzic, Mujkanovic, Resic, Trto...) are totally exterminated. In the night between June 21 and 22, in the main street, three (out of four) houses were set on fire: a Muslim grill restaurant and two Albanian stores were gone in the fire which the firemen carefully controlled: so that the fire wouldn't spread to the forth house, a Serbian cafe. The next day, a dredging machine levelled the three sites of fire, trucks brought white road gravel from below mount Kozara and already that same evening, on the sites of the fire, the owner of the cafe - celebrated the opening of his new summer garden.

The main headquarters of the Serbian "liberators" of Prijedor (the inverted commas are necessary because Prijedor was not attacked) was in the building of the municipality and the secretariat of internal affairs. In front of them stood tanks which fired at the Old town and Skela. According to this testimony, the biggest crimes in Prijedor were committed by Serbs from neighboring villages, and not the town Serbs. The mosque, the Muslim priest's house (6) and the Catholic church (7) were raised to the ground with no less than 300kg of dynamite per edifice. The ground was levelled afterwards and grass was planted there.

In the municipality of Prijedor there used to be 28 mosques (most of which, 11, were in the regions of Kozarac and Kozarusa): today there is no trace of any of them. The Muslim villages of Biscani, Rakovcani, Rizvanovici, Hambarine, Carakovo, Zecovi, Islamska Ljubija and the Croatian villages of Donja and Gornja Rovska, Zune and Stara Rijeka no longer exist today; only Gornja Ljubija has been spared, but - there are no people in it.