Survivors of Bosnian Serb Camp Mark Omarska’s Closure

Former detainees and family members of people killed in the Omarska detention camp near Prijedor in north-west Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark the 27th anniversary of the date considered as marking the beginning of the closure of the facility on August 6.

Surviving detainees, who described the detention camp to BIRN BiH as "a torture and slaughter chamber", will this year again bring a memorial plaque to the Bijela Kuca [white house] in Omarska, whose placement has never been approved by authorities in Bosnia's Serb-led entity, Republika Srpska.

Mirsad Duratovic, president of the Regional Union of Detainees of Banja Luka, said that despite failing to obtain official permission to erect the plaque, they will put it up themselves.

"We will bring it and put it there. We will turn the former Omarska detention camp into Omarska memorial centre for one day," said Duratovic, who was held at the detention camp as a teenager in 1992.

He recalled that, on August 6, 1992, most of the detainees were transferred from Omarska to the Manjaca and Trnopolje detention camps. The last detainees left Omarska on August 21, 1992.

Camp survivor Nusreta Sivac, who was held at Omarska for around two months, said that, like the other women detainees at the Bosnian Serb-run camp, she began her "working days" there by counting the number of dead bodies "thrown" overnight onto the lawn in front of the Bijela Kuca.

"Sometimes I would count as many as 25, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on whether our torturers had been in the mood for killing and mutilating people that night," she said. "I remember many images. It is hard to single out some of them as everything was horrible," she added.

"It was a torture chamber, a slaughter house, so even...