Bosnians Commemorate Victims of Notorious Omarska Camp

Former detainees and relatives of inmates of Omarska mourned the victims on Monday, releasing balloons into the air in a ceremony at the site of the former camp, where around 700 Bosniak and Croats were killed in 1992.

The commemoration also included the launch of a book by a former inmate, Mirsad Causevic, who wrote about the experiences that he went through while imprisoned at Omarska and other detention camps run by Bosnian Serb forces during wartime.

“They used to kill on average ten people in Omarska detention camp each day,” Causevic said.

“Those bodies would lie in the sun on a pile during the day. In the evening, tractors would come and drive them off in an unknown direction. It turned out later on that they drove them to Tomasica mass grave. Besides that grave, there are other mass graves on the territory of the Prijedor municipality,” he added.

Causevic said that a local mayor and professors and doctors were among those who died at the camp.

“I managed to survive, but I lost two brothers in the war. One of them is still considered missing. I wrote this book so my children would know what their father had gone through and appreciate their lives better,” he explained.

“I wrote it to become an inspiration to people who suffered some sort of torture in their life, to motivate them to write their own stories maybe. But most of all, I wrote it to enable this pain to come out in some way, to help myself,” he added.

Causevic said that 3,334 detainees were listed as being held at Omarska when the International Red Cross was first allowed to visit the camp in the summer of 1992.

“In the days preceding the visit, [Bosnian Serb President] Radovan Karadzic promised to journalists that they would be allowed to enter the detention camp and then ordered the local authorities to prepare the terrain so it would look ‘better’ than before. However, the images and recordings spoke for themselves,” he recalled.

At the beginning of August 1992, US and British journalists Roy Gutman, Penny Marshall, Ed Vulliamy and Ian Williams were the first to alert the world to the existence of the Prijedor detention camps through their reports for international media outlets.

The Hague Tribunal and the Bosnian state court have convicted several people of committing crimes at detention camps in the Prijedor area of north-west Bosnia, including Omarska. Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb wartime military commander Ratko Mladic are among those to have been accused of responsibility for crimes in Prijedor.

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

The Arcelor Mittal company has run an iron ore mine on the Omarska site since 2004. Victims’ associations have repeatedly complained that there is no permenent memorial where was located.