Bosniaks Commemorate Omarska Prison Camp Victims

The commemoration at the former camp. Photo: BIRN.

Bosniaks gathered on Thursday at the iron ore mining complex in Omarska to mark the anniversary of the day in August 1992 when the notorious detention camp was closed down.

Around 6,000 Bosniak and Croat men and women were detained at Omarska and some 700 of them were killed in the three months during which the camp operated at the beginning of the Bosnian war.

One of the organisers, Jasmin Meskovic from the Association of Detainees of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that more than 20 years after the closure of camps like Omarska, there are still disputes about the number of detainees, and how many died, were wounded or disappeared during the war.

He said that a law on torture victims was needed so politicians could not question the atrocities that were committed during the war.

“We don’t need the law for Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats. We need law for victims of torture,” Meskovic said.

“Only with such a law we can finally get the exact data. Without the law, everyone can play politics with the number of camps and the number of detainees,” he added.

Bosnian Army troops at the commemoration. Photo: BIRN.

Omarska was one of the several camps which Bosnian Serb forces opened at the beginning of the war to detain the non-Serb population during the ethnic cleansing of the Prijedor area in north-west Bosnia.

Human Rights Watch classified Omarska as a concentration camp, while the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted several people of crimes against humanity perpetrated at Omarska, including murder, torture and rape.

One of those who came to commemorate its closure, Sead Jakupovic, spent several months in the Omarska and Manjaca camps in 1992, where he lost 23 kilogrammes of his body weight. After the war he returned to Prijedor, where is now the speaker of the city assembly.

“I am here as a citizen, not as the speaker of the city council. Politics must not have an influence here. The organisers must not allow politics to get involved,” Jakupovic told BIRN.

He complained that the local Prijedor authorities and the Arcelor Mittal company, which has run an iron ore mine on the Omarska site since 2004, have failed to live up to promises to provide funds for the construction of a permanent memorial to the victims and their families.