Where am I?
Omarska
| S.O. recounts his experience as a prisoner in the Omarska concentration camp. Length: 8:11 |
“The main objective of the concentration camps, especially Omarska but also Keraterm, seems to have been to eliminate the non-Serbian leadership. Political leaders, officials from the courts and administration, academics and other intellectuals, religious leaders, key business people and artists - the backbone of the Muslim and Croatian communities - were removed, apparently with the intention that the removal be permanent. . . . Its depletion rendered the group at large defenseless against abuses of any kind.” — from the U.N.’s Prijedor Report
Located about twenty kilometers southwest of Prijedor, Omarska is an iron mining and ore processing facility that in May of 1992 was transformed into one of the most brutal prison camps in Bosnia. An estimated 5000 Muslim and Catholic civilians, thirty-seven of them women, were illegally held as prisoners at Omarska.
Torture, starvation, and dehumanizing conditions were part of daily life. On any given day dozens of prisoners might be killed. Many of the atrocities occurred at the infamous White House, a first-aid station for miners that in the summer of 1992 became a torture and killing chamber.
The exact number of people killed at Omarska is not known. The camp was closed in late August of 1992 following exposure of the atrocities in news reports by Ed Vulliamy and Roy Gutman. "Omarska was a monstrosity,” wrote Vulliamy, “an inferno of murder, torture and rape. It was a stain upon our century."
| A.M. tells of the treatment of prisoners in the infamous White House at Omarska. Length: 4:36 |