War Prisoners Open Memorial at Brcko Camp

Wartime detainees in Bosnia’s Brcko District have opened a memorial room containing over 1,000 photographs and documents showing crimes against civilians committed in 1992.

The Association of Former Detainees of the Brcko District in northern Bosnia opened the memorial on Tuesday in a hangar at the wartime Luka jail camp, as a reminder of the torture that prisoners suffered there at the beginning of the 1992-95 war.

“This will be a room of truth about over 3,500 detainees who passed through this camp at the start of the war and which will be available to the public and younger generations, because we will try to organise school field trips to this room throughout the whole year,” the association’s president, Fadil Redzic, said at the opening ceremony which was also attended by Bosnian officials.

He added that in the next several months, 500 new photographs would be exhibited which will depict the murders of Brcko citizens.

Verdicts handed down by the Hague Tribunal have established that Bosnian Serb forces opened the Luka camp in early May 1992 and that several thousand Bosniak and Croat prisoners passed through its hangars within around two months, some of whom were killed.

Former Luka camp detainee Dzafer Deronjic welcomed the establishment of the permanent memorial.

“We want everyone who witnessed horrific torture at the camp to come forward and testify so that those responsible for the crimes can be prosecuted and not walk around the town freely,” said Deronjic.

Jasmin Meskovic, a representative of the Association of Former Detainees of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the memorial was not intended to place blame on any ethnic group.

“By opening this room and others like it, we do not wish to create hate amongst peoples. All we wish is to remember the evil which happened in Bosnia, so that it might never happen again,” said Meskovic.