Keraterm, Omarska, Trnopolje: triangle of Bosnia's war horrors

03 Nov, 2004

Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje would still be obscure corners of Bosnia, were it not for the daily confirmation of terrifying crimes committed there by Serbs during a 1992-95 war here.
In Kevljani, a remote village in the middle of the triangle of horrors in north-western Bosnia, forensic experts have since late August been exhuming remains of Muslim civilians from a mass grave. During the war the victims were inmates of detention camps in those locations, killed by Bosnian Serbs.
"So far we have exhumed 415 bodies," Esad Bajramovic of the Muslim-led Commission for Missing People told AFP.
"The youngest was only 15 years old," said the man, dressed completely in black.
Since the end of Bosnia's war, some 18,000 bodies, mostly Muslims, have been exhumed from over 300 mass graves throughout the Balkan country.
Some 16,000 people, including 3,200 from the Prijedor area, where Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje are located, are still listed as missing.
Bosnia's war claimed more than 200,000 lives and left 2.2 million refugees, more than half the country's population.
To get to Kevljani one has to leave the main road linking Banja Luka, administrative center of Bosnia's Serb-run half, and Prijedor, and take a narrow, bumpy road.
Surrounded by scrub and overgrown with weeds, with houses destroyed during the conflict, the road crosses a zone of extreme poverty that is home to several Muslim families who have returned to their pre-war houses.
Yet the mosque has been rebuilt. The green Muslim flag with white crescent and star flies on a recently built minaret. The old minaret on the ground in front of the mosque, probably destroyed during the war, is testimony to merciless inter-ethnic hatred.
In Kevljani, near the 17-meter-long (56-feet-long) and six-meter-wide (20-feet-wide) grave, regional prosecutor Indira Cuk monitors the work of exhumation.
"It is a so-called secondary grave, meaning that it would be difficult to identify the remains," she said.
This means the bodies were initially buried somewhere else, then moved to the Kevljani mass grave to cover up the crime.
The exhumation is to continue for at least two more weeks, with dozens more bodies expected to be found.

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