Bosnians Tell of Brutality at Serb-Run Camps

Refugees from northern and eastern Bosnia, routed from their homes by Serbian “ethnic cleansing” operations, gave stark accounts this week of conditions inside Serb-run prison camps, where they said civilian prisoners were routinely beaten, shot and held in near starvation in packed warehouses and garages.

They also gave horrific accounts of attacks by Serb militiamen in their towns and villages, describing how the gunmen cut the throats of young men in front of lined-up prisoners and ordered villagers to throw the bodies of their slaughtered neighbors off bridges and to set their own houses on fire.

The refugees, housed in school buildings in Zenica and in Travnik, another town in central Bosnia, are predominantly Muslim women, children and elderly men, who say their husbands and sons are either dead or are still being held in Serb prison camps in northern Bosnia. They say they were separated from their young, able-bodied male relatives shortly after their villages came under attack in May and June.

Worn out by their ordeals and facing uncertain futures, most of the refugees have only small bundles of clothing and a few meager possessions, and they sleep on mats and tables at the schools. Some of the elderly seem confused and disoriented.

The interviews, with the assistance of an interpreter, were conducted in school classrooms by four reporters who reached the town over dirt mountain roads from western Bosnia, virtually the only route into the area.

Most of the older men who have made it here to Zenica say they were held for some time in a prison camp at a former iron-mining complex at Omarska, near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia.

The reports of conditions in the Serb-run prison camps have launched a worldwide storm of protest. At the United Nations, Bosnia’s ambassador made available a document charging that the United Nations had reports at least as early as July 3 of the existence of four Serbian-run “concentration camps” housing Muslim prisoners.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has so far been allowed access to only three of the Serbian-run prison camps, which now number more than 100, according to the Bosnian government. Omarska was not among them.

According to the accounts here, most of the male refugees who were held in Omarska were sent afterward to a camp at Trnopolje, also near Prijedor, joining women and children at a school where 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners at a time are kept, in conditions they described as squalid, before being released and sent southward in trains or buses to Zenica and other central Bosnian towns.

One refugee here, Atif Ahmedzehajic, 50, a stonemason, said he was taken to Omarska on May 28, two days after Serbian militiamen rousted his family from their home in Kevljani.

“As we got off the bus at the Omarska mine,” he said, “they made us walk in a line, with our hands behind our heads and our elbows forward so we could not look to either side. And right there, before my own eyes, they shot three men, shot them dead, because they claimed they tried to escape. For the first of these three men, they must have fired about 300 bullets into him.

“Then they took us to the mine’s bathing facility. They kept us there for two days. There were about 2,000 people in the room. We spent most of the time standing up, because it was too crowded to sit down. With me were my two sons, my two brothers and two cousins. (The Serbs) would come and take some of the people and take them out, and these people would never come back. They took everyone for interrogation at least once. They asked ‘Who was preparing you to fight against us?’ I was taken once. They slapped me and beat me across the back with a stick.”

Neither he nor other refugees interviewed at Zenica and Travnik had evidence of mass executions. Ahmedzehajic and others, however, noted that the Omarska mine complex contains at least four separate camps for prisoners and that those people held in the mine’s shower-room area had no contact with prisoners in other areas.

Dzevad Hadzic, 16, also from the village of Kevljani, was taken to Omarska about May 26, confined in an equipment garage that he estimated was packed with 3,000 to 4,000 men and was held there until July 15. The prisoners, all civilian, were fed once a day. “We got one-eighth of a loaf of bread and some thin soup,” he said.

But the prisoners, he said, were routinely beaten as they ran a gantlet of club-wielding Serbs on their way to the room where they were fed.

“When we ran in,” he said, “there would be four or five of them with sticks. They would try to hit the older ones so they would fall down, and then the younger ones would slow down, and they would get a better chance to hit them.”

Other former prisoners, eight of whom were interviewed individually and in detail, provided similar accounts. Hadzic said he lost 20 to 25 pounds during his stay at Omarska.

He said that virtually every day, on his sprint from the garage to the feeding room, he saw bodies, “four or five, piled in a meadow. Sometimes they looked like they had been shot, sometimes beaten.”

Most of the prisoners said they recognized some of their neighbors among their captors.

Hakia Jakupovic, 66, lived in the largely Serbian village of Babici, near Kozarac, where, he said, “there were only three Muslim houses, and we had always lived together in good relations” with the Serbs.

In May, however, some of his neighbors came for his family--Jakupovic, his two sons, his 22-year-old grandson and two cousins--and hauled them to Omarska in a tractor-drawn wagon. He spent 41 days there, in a garage where, he said, it was so crowded that “we had to sleep in shifts.”

Except in the dash for the daily ration of bread and soup, Jakupovic said he was not beaten, but he saw many who were. “They would call people out in the middle of the night,” he said, “and they would beat them up and make the prisoners drag them back in.” Some men, he said, died from the clubbing. “They were beaten in the kidneys,” he said.

At dawn, or in the early evening, he said, some prisoners--who dared to look out the windows--could see bodies being loaded on trucks. He did not see this himself, he said, because he was afraid of being spotted by the Serbian guards and killed.

The refugees also gave graphic accounts of their ordeals as Serbian militia forces took over their towns in the “ethnic cleansing” operations launched against the Muslims in early May.

Although the events they described are now weeks old, similar operations are believed to be in progress or imminent in other predominantly Muslim towns in northern Bosnia. Because communications are cut and travel is extremely dangerous, the day-to-day situation in the area is virtually unknown. The city of Bihac, in the Bosanska Krajina region of northwestern Bosnia, for example, is being shelled daily. A Bosnian outpost in the hills just to the east of Zenica was under aerial bombardment Tuesday afternoon. The city of Gorazde, in eastern Bosnia, has been under siege for weeks, with virtually no information available about conditions there.

The experiences of the refugees in Zenica suggest what the residents of these areas have in store should the Serbian guerrillas continue their push without interference.

Samira Majdanic, 21, was called out of her house in a neighborhood in Kozarac one morning in mid-May. Her father and brother, seeing the Serbian advance, had fled into nearby woods.

“They shot out all the windows in the house,” she said, “and ordered us to come out. But it was only me. There were about 50 of them. Some of them were neighbors, and some of them were strangers. One of them took out his knife and threatened to cut my throat.” After forcing her to search in the woods for her father and brother, they took her back to her house.

“They made me set fire to it,” she said. “They handed me a box of matches, and when I said, ‘What do I do?’ they said, ‘Start with the curtains.’ ” They made her burn down three more houses and seven weekend cabins.

One of the refugees in Travnik, 42-year-old Muharama Menkovic, who is from Kamicani, another settlement near Kozarac, said that on June 15, a Serbian guerrilla force appeared in her village, marching a group of people in front of a tank, mostly women and children.

The one young man in the group, she said, was singled out in front of her house. His name, she said, was Mustafa Kalic. He was 22.

“They made him take off his shoes,” she said. “Then they made him get down on the ground. They stomped on his fingers. Then they tied his hands behind his back. Then they cut his throat with a huge knife.” She and another woman from the village were forced to bury him, she said.

She was then sent to the camp at Trnopolje. Six men in her family--her husband, brothers and cousins--were sent to Omarska. She has no idea, she said, whether they are dead or alive.

“I must ask you,” she said, through tears, at one point in the interview, “where is the rest of world? We have been nearly starved. We have been forced to sleep in fields.”

As with virtually all the refugees, her possessions have been reduced to donated clothes and a few items stuffed in a bag.

Delic Suljo, 65, a retired munitions factory worker from Gorazde, was at his son’s home in Visegrad on May 10 when Serbian guerrillas took over the city. He said they circulated through the streets broadcasting on loudspeakers: “Loyal citizens of Visegrad, go to your jobs, do your work and no harm will come to you.”

But they also worked through the town, he said, street by street, with lists of residents “and collected people from the streets and houses” in a column of two vans, two small trucks and a refrigerator truck from a meat-packing plant.

From a vantage point on an upper floor of his son’s house, Suljo said, he could see the Serbs executing people, mostly young men, on the two bridges over the Drina River at either end of town.

“There was a real massacre on May 12,” he said. “They took the people out of their trucks, made them bend over the rail of the bridge. Some they stabbed in the back of the neck. Some they shot. Some had their throats cut in the middle of the bridge, and then their bodies would be thrown off into the river. . . . It went on every day from May 12 to June 17.”

One day, Suljo said, he counted 27 such executions.

“I started to write a diary,” he said, “but I left it when I left the city. The first day I saw it, I could not believe it. I had a pain in my chest, a sickness in my stomach.”

On June 13, he said, they came to the street where he was staying. (His son had already fled the city, or been captured, and he has no idea of his whereabouts.) The Serbs called everyone onto the street, but in a moment of confusion, he and another elderly man ran away. A short time later, the two were accosted by another Serbian militiaman, who ordered them to come with him to the old bridge over the Drina.

There they were ordered to drag two bodies onto the bridge and throw them off. One had been killed with a shot to the head, the other had a slit throat.

“We could hardly do it,” Suljo said. By that time, he had been hit in the nose and was bleeding and had been kicked so hard in the chest that four ribs were broken. He and the other man, soaked in blood, managed to heave the bodies over the bridge railing.

Suljo was not harmed further. The next day, he said, he went to the Visegrad Red Cross office, where local Serbs helped get him out to a refugee transit camp, from which he was sent to Zenica.

When interviewed in the classroom, Suljo had with him a folded piece of paper with a list of names.

“It is a list of people from Visegrad,” he said, “who helped to kill their neighbors.”