Serbs Have Slain Over 1,000 in 2 Bosnia Camps, Ex-Prisoners Say

The Serb conquerers of northern Bosnia-Herzegovina have established two concentration camps in which more than 1,000 civilians have been executed or starved and thousands more are being held until they die, according to two recently released prisoners interviewed by Newsday.

The testimony of the two survivors appeared to be the first eyewitness accounts of what international human rights agencies fear may be systematic slaughter conducted on a huge scale. Newsday has not been able to visit the camps. Neither has the International Red Cross or any other international agency.

Yugoslavian Prime Minister Milan Panic sent word through a deputy that he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of death camps and that he favored the closing of all camps from all sides in the Bosnian war. The country Panic has taken over is a shadow of the former Yugoslavia and consists only of Serbia, which is accused of sponsoring the war in Bosnia, and tiny Montenegro.

In one concentration camp, a former iron-mining complex at Omarska in northwest Bosnia, more than 1,000 Muslim and Croat civilians were held in metal cages, without sanitation, adequate food, exercise or access to the outside world, according to a former prisoner who asked to be identified only as “Meho.” The prisoners at the camp, he said, include the entire political and cultural elite of the city of Prijedor. Armed Serbian guards executed prisoners in groups of 10 to 15 every few days, he said.

“They would take them to a nearby lake. You’d hear a volley of rifles. And they’d never come back,” said Meho.

“I think if these places are not death camps, we might have access to them,” said Pierre Andre Conod, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Zagreb, which oversees conditions in northern Bosnia. “They’d have reason to show them to us if the conditions are acceptable.” The Red Cross has gained access twice to what Bosnian Serbs call a prisoner-of-war camp in Manjaca.

Serbs, who claim the Bosnian region as their own, describe the policy of expelling Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats as “ethnic cleansing.” Reports by the survivors interviewed by Newsday suggest that this is a euphemism for a campaign of atrocity and brutal deportation at best.

In a second improvised camp, in a customs warehouse on the bank of the Sava River in the northeast Bosnian city of Brcko, 1,350 people were slaughtered between May 15 and mid-June, according to Alija Lujinovic, 53, a traffic engineer who was imprisoned at the camp. Guards at Brcko executed prisoners by slitting their throats or with firing squads, he said.

“Meho,” 63, a building contractor from the town of Kozarac, was coaxed out of hiding by a doctor from his hometown for a two-hour conversation with Newsday and Red Cross personnel Friday.