Prijedor death camps: The stories from Omarska скачать в хорошем качестве

Prijedor death camps: The stories from Omarska

Omarska Concentration Camp in Prijedor is notorious for being the site of the 1992 Prijedor Massacre during the Bosnian War; it featured prominently in several trials for the perpetration of international crimes undertaken by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia. This is excerpted from mARK Danner's long article, "America and the Bosnia Genocide," The New York Review of Books, 12/4/97. Danner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote. His nine-part series of articles on the wars in the former Yugoslavia (see links below) will be collected in a book in early 1999. To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully familiar.1 Sunken-cheeked, hollow-eyed, their skulls shaved, their bodies wasted and frail, they did not seem men at all but living archetypes, their faces stylized masks of tragedy. One had thought such faces consigned to the century's horde of images-the emaciated figures of the 1940s shuffling about in filthy striped uniforms, the bulldozers pushing into dark ditches great masses of lank white bodies. Yet here, a mere half century later, in 1992, came these gaunt beings, clinging to life in Omarska and Trnopolje and the other camps run by Serbs in northern Bosnia, and now displayed before the eyes of the world like fantastic, rediscovered beasts. The Germans, creators of millions of such living dead, had christened them Muselmanner-Musulmen, Muslims. At Auschwitz, wrote Primo Levi, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass...of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead in them.... One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.2 In Omarska as in Auschwitz the masters created these walking corpses from healthy men by employing simple methods: withhold all but the barest nourishment, forcing the prisoners' bodies to waste away; impose upon them a ceaseless terror by subjecting them to unremitting physical cruelty; immerse them in degradation and death and decay, destroying all hope and obliterating the will to live. "We won't waste our bullets on them," a guard at Omarska, which the Serbs set up in a former open-pit iron mine, told a United Nations representative in mid-1992. "They have no roof. There is sun and rain, cold nights, and beatings two times a day. We give them no food and no water. They will starve like animals."3