Bosnian Ex-Prisoners Commemorate Wartime Omarska Jail Camp

Flowers outside the ‘White House’, a building at the camp where prisoners were killed. Photo: BIRN.

A commemoration was held on Thursday to mark the closure of the former Omarska detention camp near Prijedor, where non-Serbs were imprisoned in dismal conditions in 1992, with attendance restricted to a symbolic few because of measures to curb the coronavirus pandemic.

War victims’ representatives laid flowers in front of the camp’s notorious White House building, where some inmates were killed.

Mirsad Duratovic, president of the Regional Union of Associations of Detainees from the Banja Luka Region, who was held at the Omarska, Manjaca and Trnopolje detention camps when he was a minor, told BIRN ahead of the commemoration that it is intended as a reminder to “the direct perpetrators, organisers or those who issued orders” that former prisoners will not give up their attempts to seek justice.

Duratovic said that up to 6,000 detainees were held at the Omarska detention camp at some stage when it was open in the early months of the war in 1992. He said that 700 detainees died, although not all of them were killed at the camp itself.

Serif Velic, who spent 185 days in the Omarska and Manjaca detention camps, which were both run by Bosnian Serb forces, said it was important to commemorate the prisoners’ suffering, particularly as a mark of tribute to those who died.

“We who stayed alive must try, year after year, to remind ourselves about it for their sake and for our own sake too,” Velic told BIRN.

A group of American and British journalists visited the Omarska camp at the beginning of August 1992, and after they reported on the poor conditions there, the last detainees were moved out on August 21.

The camp has generated headlines again recently after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced last week that he will appoint to the House of Lords the former co-publisher of a magazine that claimed that conditions at the Omarska and Trnopolje camps were not as bad as they were reported by the American and British journalists.

Bosnian war survivors expressed anger about Johnson’s decision to ennoble Claire Fox, the former co-publisher of Living Marxism magazine, which lost a libel case in a London court after it claimed that British television company ITN faked evidence in a report in 1992 about the Omarska and Trnopolje detention camps.

The Hague Tribunal has convicted 11 people of committing crimes at detention camps in the Prijedor area, and the Bosnian state court has convicted four more.