At Site of Brutal Camp, Serbs See No Evil, Hear No Evil

In the new-fallen snow, there are no traces of the barbed-wire fences. The thousands of Muslims once held in the notorious concentration camp here have been exiled--or killed.

And no one in the Serb-held village of Trnopolje seems to remember that Muslim women and girls were carted off from the camp in the night to be raped by Serbian soldiers.

“They had a garden and picked vegetables from the fields and were able to cook,” recalled Ivan Olenjuk, a 71-year-old Serb who lives a block from what was once the Trnopolje concentration camp. “It was not so bad for them.”

As NATO-led peacekeepers arrive for the first time in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina--the heartland of Bosnian Serb “ethnic cleansing” during 3 1/2 years of war in the country--many Serbian civilians seem to be in a state of denial.

Although killings, torture, beatings and rapes in concentration camps operated by the rebel Serbs are well-documented by the United Nations, Serbs who lived here throughout the war say they know nothing of concentration camps or atrocities against Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

“I’m sure the concentration camps did not exist,” said a well-dressed 39-year-old Serbian woman in the nearby city of Prijedor who gave her name only as Slavica. “People are nice here. They don’t make trouble for other people.

“Nobody wanted this war,” she said. “It just happened.”

Until now, the area around Prijedor has been largely off-limits to the foreign media; the handful of reporters allowed into the region during the war were accompanied by Serbs. With the advance of British soldiers into northern Bosnia, reporters are now able for the first time to talk freely with people on the streets of Serb-held cities and villages.

“Yes, many people died and were tortured,” confided Natalija, a 27-year-old Serb in Prijedor who knew one Muslim killed at the Omarska concentration camp. “But people are scared to say anything. They can’t talk. His [Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s] people are everywhere.”

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Even if most Serbs won’t discuss it, the evidence of ethnic cleansing is unmistakable.

On the outskirts of Prijedor, where the predominantly Muslim village of Kozarac once thrived, the gutted shells of 2,600 houses stand as a monument to intolerance. Still visible on many of the ruins is a carefully circled X, the sign used to mark the buildings for destruction as the homes of Muslims.

Untouched among the ruins are the 33 houses in the village that belonged to Serbs.

Although the terms of the peace agreement reached last month in Dayton, Ohio, allow members of all Bosnia’s ethnic groups to return to their homes, the Serbs made sure the Muslims in this area would have nothing to come home to.

“We were here first, so this is our land,” said Gordana Bosancic, 45, a Serbian social worker in Prijedor. “To have good neighbors, it’s better if you’re in different areas. Living together in one area, we’ll kill each other.”

Prijedor--far from Sarajevo, the widely watched capital in southeastern Bosnia--was the region where ethnic cleansing began in the early days of the war. After rebel Serbs took control of the area in 1992, they began rounding up Muslims and putting them in camps, systematically killing the leaders and repeatedly raping the women.

Men of fighting age were segregated and sent to separate camps. Thousands of Muslim families say they have not heard since from fathers, husbands or sons who were taken away by the Serbs.

A 1994 report by the United Nations found that the Serbs operated 962 prison camps where 500,000 people were imprisoned. The U.N. documented 50,000 cases of torture and 3,000 cases of rape. At the time of the report, 187 mass graves had been found, containing from three to 5,000 bodies each.

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Some of the most notorious camps were located near Prijedor, including Trnopolje, Keraterm, Manjaca and Omarska--the primary death camp, where thousands of Muslims are believed to have been murdered.

Before the war, Prijedor was a multiethnic city with a population of 112,000, including 49,000 Muslims. Today, fewer than 900 Muslims remain. Their place in the city has largely been taken by Serbian refugees.

After the existence of the concentration camps was revealed by reporters in 1992, the better-known camps were closed down and many of the prisoners sent to other countries as refugees. But the Serbs have reportedly continued operating smaller camps elsewhere.

Under the Dayton agreement, the three formerly warring factions must produce a list by Thursday of all prisoners who are still being held; all prisoners must be released by Jan. 19. But with many Muslim men still missing, some expect more mass graves to be found in Serbian territory as North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces are more widely deployed.

British troops moved into Prijedor on Thursday, setting up an outpost in a vacant school as part of the effort to enforce the peace accord. Earlier in the week, the British established a base in Banja Luka, a key northern Bosnian city proposed as the capital of the new Serb Republic.

At the Trnopolje concentration camp--built around a converted schoolhouse--most of the prisoners were women, children and elderly men. Some former prisoners say they were raped and beaten at the camp. Others say they were taken by guards to houses or barracks where they were held captive and raped repeatedly until they became pregnant.

Dusan Tadic, a former Serbian police officer who is the only one of 43 indicted war criminals to be in custody, is charged with raping and killing prisoners from Trnopolje and other camps. He is scheduled to go on trial in May.

At one point, Trnopolje was used as a way station by international relief officials to register Muslim refugees before helping them leave the country. But before the Muslims could go, the Serbs required them to sign a statement saying they were leaving of their own free will and were giving all their property to the Serb Republic.

These days, the camp at Trnopolje has become the home of Serbian refugees who have fled here from regions held by the Bosnian government. Muslim houses in the village that were not destroyed also have been taken over by the refugees.

“During the war, the school was used as a camp for Muslims. Now it is our camp,” said Draga Sireta, a 66-year-old Serbian refugee from the area around Sanski Most, 15 miles south of Prijedor. “I feel bad, but this is the camp for us now.”

Olenjuk, the father of a police officer and one of the few Serbs who lived in the village of Trnopolje before the war, said he gets along well with his new non-Muslim neighbors.

“Here there used to be a majority of Muslim people,” he said. “All the Muslims . . . left of their own free will, and I don’t miss them.”