EvanL
02-19-2004, 11:55 PM
The graveyard is big. It stands on a slope beside the repaired mosque in the town of Kozarac. On the other side of the road, a few kilometres away, is Omarska. In the past year the number of graves in the cemetery has doubled. In ordered ranks the Muslim headstones have been planted. On each, a name, a year of birth, the year of death. There are several hundred of these new white headstones. On all the year of death is the same: 1992.
These are the dead of Omarska, a factory converted by Bosnian Serbs into a concentration camp, and of other camps in the region of Prijedor. The bodies were dumped into mass graves or down mine shafts. The killers wanted to hide the evidence of their crimes.
But there were witnesses and they led international investigators to the graves. It was another story to identify the bodies found there. This, in many cases, took years and sophisticated DNA testing. It wasn't until early in this century, 10 years after the massacres, that this process was largely completed.
And it wasn't until last year that the Prijedor council reluctantly agreed to fund the burial of the hundreds of identified victims in the cemetery at Kozarac.
Yet Prijedor, in post-war Bosnia, is counted as a success story. Before the war, 49,000 Muslims lived in the area; they slightly outnumbered the Serbs. Almost all were driven out and their houses and villages destroyed. In the eight years since the end of the war, about 22,000 have been classified as "returnees," that is, people who have come back to their original homes or who have retaken possession of their properties.
That any came back at all is due to the presence and the pressure of outsiders. Eight years after the war ended, there are still 12,000 SFOR troops patrolling the country. Almost 1,200 of them are Canadian and the commander of the western sector of the country is Canadian General Stuart Beare. His civilian counterpart as the head of the regional Office of the High Representative in Banja Luka, the capital of the Bosnian Serb province of Republika Srpska, is another Canadian, Graham Day.
And in Prijedor, the local head of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) is a young Canadian called Jeff Ford. This is his second tour in Bosnia. At meetings with local officials, up to and including the mayor, he and other "internationals" prod them to tiptoe, however unwillingly, towards justice for the dispossessed and driven out.
Ford said he is, in part, driven by his reading of what happened during the war. "When you look at the war and what happened at Omarska, then you definitely feel endowed with a certain obligation in this work and a certain responsibility. A lot of people in the international community have that same motivation."
Prijedor itself is a bleak provincial city. In the drab streets there is little work. For a Muslim, the decision to come back to a Serb stronghold is daunting. Six years ago 28-year-old Anel Alisic decided to return from exile in the U.S. His parents and brother refused.
In what is a common story, it took Anel two years of legal battles to evict the people who had taken his family apartment.. When he finally got inside, it was to discover his work had only begun. "The only thing that was here was an ornamental plate on the wall. Everything else was gone, the lightbulbs, the sockets, even the parquet floor was ripped up. We had to start from the beginning. Psychologically, it was very tough to come back. I knew there were still war criminals walking around."
Anel was driven by the example of his uncle, Muharem Murselovic. A dozen years ago in May he had been arrested by Serb militiamen and taken to Omarska, along with 3,000 other Muslims and some Croats. It was an introduction to hell and it left hellish memories.
"It was the darkest point of the history of Prijedor, and my own as well," he says. "The conditions were inhuman. We were exhausted. Many of my friends were executed. But I always vowed I'd return. It was such a large injustice, such a huge evil. It couldn't be left like that. My belief in justice drove me to come back."
He did return and recently succeeded in reclaiming a small café-bar he had owned before the war. He is now about to reopen it. "Some of the people who survived carry the biggest scars because we have to accept that life goes on, even though we are living today with those who were our murderers yesterday. We have to find a way to go forward.
"Imagine you have been kicked out of your house and your street. You come back and find it has been renamed the street of Serb Warriers. We now live in a different country, and yet what the Serbs did to us has not been dealt with."
Living with former oppressors and with those who looked on and did nothing is not made easier by their belief that they are the victims. That belief found artistic expression in a monumental cross erected to Serb martyrs and victims of wars recent and distant. It was commissioned in the late 1990s and now stands on the square facing city hall. The city council still hasn't found money to rebuild the city's 300-year-old main mosque.
Unlike Anel and his uncle, most Muslim families who have returned prefer to live in the villages just outside Prijedor. As a result of the war the ethnic groups no longer live together but rather side by side, and sullenly.
One thing many on both sides of the ethnic divide share is a bleak view of the future, as Jeff Ford can testify. "There is a sense of hopelessness. People express the notion that they're used to living in the environment. They can make a living for themselves but don't see much opportunity for their children. They're actually seeking some way to get them to a third country."
Houses can be rebuilt; memories cannot. The past sits like a stone in the minds of many here. Yet, in this region, the victims of war can finally be buried properly. And the living can return to take up the threads of shattered lives. That, in this corner of Bosnia, is success.
These are the dead of Omarska, a factory converted by Bosnian Serbs into a concentration camp, and of other camps in the region of Prijedor. The bodies were dumped into mass graves or down mine shafts. The killers wanted to hide the evidence of their crimes.
But there were witnesses and they led international investigators to the graves. It was another story to identify the bodies found there. This, in many cases, took years and sophisticated DNA testing. It wasn't until early in this century, 10 years after the massacres, that this process was largely completed.
And it wasn't until last year that the Prijedor council reluctantly agreed to fund the burial of the hundreds of identified victims in the cemetery at Kozarac.
Yet Prijedor, in post-war Bosnia, is counted as a success story. Before the war, 49,000 Muslims lived in the area; they slightly outnumbered the Serbs. Almost all were driven out and their houses and villages destroyed. In the eight years since the end of the war, about 22,000 have been classified as "returnees," that is, people who have come back to their original homes or who have retaken possession of their properties.
That any came back at all is due to the presence and the pressure of outsiders. Eight years after the war ended, there are still 12,000 SFOR troops patrolling the country. Almost 1,200 of them are Canadian and the commander of the western sector of the country is Canadian General Stuart Beare. His civilian counterpart as the head of the regional Office of the High Representative in Banja Luka, the capital of the Bosnian Serb province of Republika Srpska, is another Canadian, Graham Day.
And in Prijedor, the local head of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) is a young Canadian called Jeff Ford. This is his second tour in Bosnia. At meetings with local officials, up to and including the mayor, he and other "internationals" prod them to tiptoe, however unwillingly, towards justice for the dispossessed and driven out.
Ford said he is, in part, driven by his reading of what happened during the war. "When you look at the war and what happened at Omarska, then you definitely feel endowed with a certain obligation in this work and a certain responsibility. A lot of people in the international community have that same motivation."
Prijedor itself is a bleak provincial city. In the drab streets there is little work. For a Muslim, the decision to come back to a Serb stronghold is daunting. Six years ago 28-year-old Anel Alisic decided to return from exile in the U.S. His parents and brother refused.
In what is a common story, it took Anel two years of legal battles to evict the people who had taken his family apartment.. When he finally got inside, it was to discover his work had only begun. "The only thing that was here was an ornamental plate on the wall. Everything else was gone, the lightbulbs, the sockets, even the parquet floor was ripped up. We had to start from the beginning. Psychologically, it was very tough to come back. I knew there were still war criminals walking around."
Anel was driven by the example of his uncle, Muharem Murselovic. A dozen years ago in May he had been arrested by Serb militiamen and taken to Omarska, along with 3,000 other Muslims and some Croats. It was an introduction to hell and it left hellish memories.
"It was the darkest point of the history of Prijedor, and my own as well," he says. "The conditions were inhuman. We were exhausted. Many of my friends were executed. But I always vowed I'd return. It was such a large injustice, such a huge evil. It couldn't be left like that. My belief in justice drove me to come back."
He did return and recently succeeded in reclaiming a small café-bar he had owned before the war. He is now about to reopen it. "Some of the people who survived carry the biggest scars because we have to accept that life goes on, even though we are living today with those who were our murderers yesterday. We have to find a way to go forward.
"Imagine you have been kicked out of your house and your street. You come back and find it has been renamed the street of Serb Warriers. We now live in a different country, and yet what the Serbs did to us has not been dealt with."
Living with former oppressors and with those who looked on and did nothing is not made easier by their belief that they are the victims. That belief found artistic expression in a monumental cross erected to Serb martyrs and victims of wars recent and distant. It was commissioned in the late 1990s and now stands on the square facing city hall. The city council still hasn't found money to rebuild the city's 300-year-old main mosque.
Unlike Anel and his uncle, most Muslim families who have returned prefer to live in the villages just outside Prijedor. As a result of the war the ethnic groups no longer live together but rather side by side, and sullenly.
One thing many on both sides of the ethnic divide share is a bleak view of the future, as Jeff Ford can testify. "There is a sense of hopelessness. People express the notion that they're used to living in the environment. They can make a living for themselves but don't see much opportunity for their children. They're actually seeking some way to get them to a third country."
Houses can be rebuilt; memories cannot. The past sits like a stone in the minds of many here. Yet, in this region, the victims of war can finally be buried properly. And the living can return to take up the threads of shattered lives. That, in this corner of Bosnia, is success.