Former prisoners at the wartime Keraterm detention camp and families of inmates who died gathered in Prijedor to mark the anniversary of the killings of around 200 inmates by Bosnian Serb forces in 1992.
Thirty-one years after a wartime campaign of persecution against non-Serbs began in Bosnia’s Prijedor area, survivors and their families commemorated the victims and urged the authorities to finally allow a memorial to be built.
Bosnia’s state court confirmed the indictment of five former guards at the Trnopolje, Keraterm and Omarska wartime detention camps on charges that include torture, murder and allowing the rape of inmates.
At the start of his trial in Belgrade for the killing of 51 non-Serbs in 1992, former reservist policeman Milorad Kotur explained how prisoners were taken from the Omarska detention camp and then shot dead.
The Bosnian state court upheld the verdict convicting former reservist policeman Dusan Culibrk of involvement in the wartime killings of more than 50 Bosniaks and Croats in the Bosanska Krupa area in 1992.
Six former guards were charged with committing a crime against humanity against illegally-detained prisoners at the Trnopolje, Keraterm and Omarska camps in the Prijedor area during wartime.
Former Bosnian Serb Army soldiers Bratislav Bilbija and Djuro Adamovic were found not guilty of beating up civilians in the Prijedor area during the war in 1992.
The system of detention camps set up by Bosnian Serb forces during the war in 1992 was intended to torment and humiliate entire communities, genocide scholar Hikmet Karcic argues in a new book.
Two small but vocal groups of right-wing Bosnian Serb nationalists exerted pressure that is believed to have caused the authorities in the city of Prijedor to ban this year’s White Armband Day march to commemorate war victims.
A ban on a march commemorating victims of wartime persecution by Bosnian Serb forces in the city of Prijedor, which police say was imposed for security reasons, has been criticised as a violation of civil rights.