Bosnia Marks 19 Years Of Omarska Camp Closure

The camp, which was run by the Bosnian Serb Army for several months at the beginning of 1992-95 Bosnian war, came to be known as one of the most notorious death camps in Western Bosnia.

Although nominally labelled as an “assembly point”, a report from US advocacy group Human Rights Watch later described it as a concentration camp and the Hague Tribunal established that prisoners had been murdered, raped, sexually assaulted and severely beaten there.

Prosecutors during at the Hague trial compared Omarska and several other camps around Prijedor to those run by Nazis during World War Two.

Most of the inmates were Bosniaks and Croats from the Prijedor region in Western Bosnia.

Today, surviving prisoners are fighting for the right to build a memorial on the grounds of the former camp, which was bought by steel-producing company AcelorMittal after the war.

“We are still trying to reach an agreement with ArcelorMittal and Prijedor officials, but the talks haven’t gone far,” Murat Tahirovic, chairman of Bosnia’s Association of Detainees, told Balkan Insight.

Omarska was shut soon after television images made by English journalists were broadcast around the world, showing a glimpse of the horrific conditions inside the camp. 

According to the ICTY, from about 25 May 1992 to 30 August 1992, Serb forces, which had seized power in the Prijedor district of Bosnia, collected and confined more than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from an area close to the village of Omarska.

The camp was established on 26 May 1992 at a meeting, which was chaired by a medical doctor Milomir Stakic, the vice-president of Prijedor Municipality. It is believed to have closed on or around 6 August 1992.

Stakic was later charged and sentenced to 40 years imprisonment for war crimes by the International Court for former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

The ICTY found that more than 3,000 inmates were held in the Omarska camp, while nearly a third of them were killed there.

However, incomplete data from the Bosnian Association of Detainees estimates that between 3,600 and 6,000 inmates may have passed through Omarska, with at least 800 inmates killed and buried in mass-graves around Prijedor.