Raw Memory

A woman weeps at Hrastova Glavica, August 2008

Prijedor is “a laboratory of ethnic cleansing“. The population of the third largest city in the Republika Srpska was, before the war, approximately half Serb, half Bosniak. The VRS’s campaign of murder, expulsion, and detention in concentration camps reduced Prijedor’s Bosniak population by half. 14,000 people are estimated missing from the Prijedor Massacre, an act of genocide in the Bosnian War second only to Srebrenica. Today refugees and internally displaced persons are slowly returning to the region, making it an ethnically mixed community, unusual in post-war Bosnia, and making Prijedor, a city where war criminals and victims pass each other in the street each day, a laboratory of the living memory of the war in contemporary Bosnia.

I traveled to Prijedor with a colleague from BIRN to cover memorial events for victims of Omarska concentration camp and Hrastova Glavica, a mass grave where 130 Omarska inmates were shot and buried following the camp’s closing in August, 1992. Most of the people we spoke with were former detainees or relatives of detainees. Their stories were horrific: starvation, torture, beating and random executions, all at the hands of their Serb neighbors and friends who had joined the VRS at the outbreak of the conflict. Nermin, an employee of Izvor (an remembrance and reconciliation NGO in Prijedor) was in his uncle’s apartment in 1992 when 13 Serb policemen came to arrest his uncle. He knew several of them well: “we were in school together and would get a beer and hang out quite often. They did not look me the eyes that day, and would not answer me when I spoke to them”. His uncle and grandfather were detained and later shot.

The analyses of victims and returnees is also dismal. Most feel that there are two separate societies in Prijedor with two separate views of history and the war. “There is no life together”, Ms. Alibegović, whose husband was in Omarska, told us, “Everyone is nice, but when you say your last name, people change”. The divorce rate spiked following the war; marriages between Serbs and Bosniaks, once common in Prijedor, are unheard of today. Up the street from a mosque in central Prijedor a stand sells pictures of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić with “Serbian Heroes” printed above them. The owner of the stand became nervous when my colleague took a photo. “I don’t know if you’re one of us or one of them”, he said.

Inmates at Omarska Camp, 1992

Ms. Alibegović told me that the Dayton accords allowed the division in the community to solidify: “In war you have to have a winner. The UN did not make a winner. Now nobody is wrong. There are only victims. No one is guilty. We are fighting the same fight, only without guns”. Even individual memories of the war have become sensitized and polarized by the divisions held in place by antagonistic narratives and political rhetoric. “My next door neighbor arrested me and sent me here”, a man at Omarska told me, “Today he calls me and invites me over for coffee. I cannot go. I cannot face him after what he and others did to me and our neighbors”. For Eldin, an inmate who escaped to England from Trnoplje, Prijedor is no longer his town: “I walk down my street and there are houses that international community has rebuilt. The street looks like it did before the war. But it is not the same. I cannot return. I have another life in England now. England is not my home, and Prijedor is not the same”.

Eldin said many refugees from Prijedor feel this way. Like many towns in post-war Bosnia, a poor economy and high unemployment makes returning to Prijedor unrealistic, and a disputed memory makes reconciliation and community near impossible. But many return. “This is my home and there is something special about that,” a kid my age told me. He lost his father and uncle at Hrastova Glavica, “I believe things can change in Bosnia; they have to”.