OMARSKA CONCENTRATION CAMP AND THE PURGE OF PRIJEDOR’S NON-SERB INTELLECTUAL ELITE
OMARSKA CONCENTRATION CAMP AND THE PURGE OF PRIJEDOR’S NON-SERB INTELLECTUAL ELITE

Summary/Abstract: In the spring of 1992, after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the municipality of Prijedor and its surrounding villages fell under the control of the Bosnian Serb forces. Bosniak and Croat inhabitants were compelled to mark their houses, wear armbands, and eventually donate all their possessions to the Bosnian Serb authorities, before being expelled or deported. Some fled, but thousands were arrested and detained in concentration camps.The present study focuses on the Omarska concentration camp, where among others, doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, police officers, and other representatives of the non-Serb intelligentsia, endured unimaginable brutality. Deprived of food and water, some were forced to drink engine oil, others were burned alive, raped, or sexually mutilated. In Omarska, the members of the intellectual non-Serb elite of Prijedor were not only eliminated, but deliberately dehumanized, as part of a systematic plan meant to obliterate the cultural and moral backbone of an entire community.Survivors’ testimonies highlight the camp’s daily reality: raped women, people tortured and executed, corpses dragged onto trucks, and fellow prisoners compelled to erase every trace of the crimes, by cleaning up the blood, teeth, and flesh of their neighbors, friends, colleagues, or even relatives.By correlating the survivors` accounts with the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia („ICTY”) and archive documents, this paper seeks to shed light on one of the darkest, yet least least-discussed chapters of the Bosnian war: the systematic purge of Prijedor’s non-Serb intellectual elite in the Omarska concentration camp.

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