Supplemental report on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia - Transcript

US Department of State Dispatch, Nov 2, 1992

The witness said that prisoners at Omarska had to pass a field as they were herded to the eating area. He stated that there were ten to fifteen new corpses laid out in the field every morning. As prisoners fled into the eating area past a line of guards, the guards would trip the men and beat them on the back, limbs, and joints with police batons and heavy cable. Every two days the prisoners re ceived about one hundred grams of bread and a small cup of soup with a bit of rice or potato. The witness went from 86 kilograms to 52 during his 77-day confinement.

The witness described the preparations made in the camp before the first journalists arrived. About two hundred men in one sleeping room were moved to another room already at overcapacity. They were told to keep their heads down below window level and to keep quiet. There was only enough room for the men to sit with their knees against their chests. The other room was cleaned and thirty new prisoners from Keraterm were put there and shown to reporters.

He identified six guards at the Omarska camp by first name only: Neso (used to work at the Sretno cafe in the Suhi Brod quarter of Kozarac), Ritan, Uros, Daja, Gruban, Zeljko (probably among the camp commanders; drove a green Mercedes). (Department of State)

Late May: A Muslim refugee, a butcher by trade and probably in his early forties, spent 27 days at Luka camp outside Brcko during which time he saw about 20 soldiers rape a woman in the presence of her child and other camp inmates. During a September interview with a US Foreign Service officer in Vienna, he claimed that it was general knowledge that young girls were being picked up almost daily and brought to the canteen where they were raped. The girls subsequently "disappeared." (Department of State)

12 April-28 April: A 33-year-old Bosnian Muslim refugee--a machine technician by profession--from Sarajevo and her two children were interned in Manjaca camp near Banja Luka for 16 days. During a September 25 interview with a US Foreign Service officer in Zagreb, she described her first interrogation: two Serbian camp guards, who called each other Todor and Srbo, beat her and burned her right upper thigh twice with a cattle prod. They raped her in front of her children, a 12-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son. Afterward she bled badly. Her daughter was raped twice. (Department of State)

Wanton Devastation and Destruction of Property

29 May: A May 29 Serb attack on Prijedor destroyed the centuries-old Prohaska mosque and St. Joseph's Roman Catholic church. (New York Newsday)

April-July: All 14 mosques in and around Foca, among them the Aladza--the colored mosque--built in 1550, were destroyed, as was the Ustikolina mosque near Foca, built in 1448. Thirteen mosques in Mostar, all built between 1528 and 1631, were destroyed.

According to the head of the Islamic community in Zagreb, 200 mosques were destroyed and another 300 damaged between April and late July. The Bosnian Institute in Zurich estimated that, in areas of Serb occupation, 90 percent of the mosques have been destroyed. (New York Newsday)