Omarska Witness Speaks of "Heaps of Bodies"
She says victims mostly succumbed to injuries from torture and beatings with iron and wooden objects.
Omarska Witness Speaks of "Heaps of Bodies"
She says victims mostly succumbed to injuries from torture and beatings with iron and wooden objects.
A survivor of the Omarska detention camp in Bosnia testified in the trial of Radovan Karadzic this week that she began everyday by counting dead bodies that had been cast outside during the night.
“My day in Omarska started with the counting of dead people who were thrown out in front of the white house,” said the anonymous prosecution witness, who testified with digital face distortion. Her ethnicity was not disclosed in public session, described only as a non-Serb.
Because she testified in two previous trials already, those transcripts were entered into evidence and Karadzic’s cross- examination began almost immediately.
The Omarska camp, and the so-called white house, have been the subject of several other trials at the tribunal. Judges in one case determined that detainees were relentlessly beaten and “tortured in front of each other” inside the white house, and often killed there as well. The conditions in the camp were found in previous judgements to be “appalling” and detainees were given very little food and water.
Karadzic, who was president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb entity during the war, is challenging these previous findings. He repeatedly claimed this week that Omarska, located in the town of Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, was merely an “investigation centre” where people were brought for questioning after Bosnian Serb forces captured the area at the end of May 1992.
Prosecutors allege that Karadzic is responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer in various municipalities which "contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory".
He is also accused of planning and overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, as well as the massacre of some 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after 13 years on the run and represents himself in the courtroom.
Karadzic expressed doubt over almost every aspect of the witness’s testimony, and asked who could “confirm” her statement regarding the bodies outside the white house.
“The skeletons from mass graves can confirm that,” she responded. “Do you understand? Many mass graves were found with [people who had been detained in] Omarska.”
“Could you describe to us every killing you saw?” Karadzic asked.
“Well for the most part..”
“No, no, no,” Karadzic interjected. He then instructed her to describe each killing in detail “like a real witness”.
“Oh, like a real one, right?” she retorted. “Let me tell you, sometimes a bullet was a gift, a reward in Omarska. Before killing people, they beat [detainees] horribly with various objects.”
“Lady, I have no time,” Karadzic responded tersely. “If you had really lived through what you claim, I would feel great sympathy.”
He once again asked her to describe a murder she saw “with her own eyes”.
“In Omarska, people mostly succumbed to injuries [from] awful torture and beatings with iron and wooden objects of all sorts,” she said. “People were mostly killed by rifle or pistol bullets [but] people died for the most part because they couldn’t stand the torture.”
“So you didn’t see a single murder,” Karadzic put to her once again.
“I’ve seen many,” she maintained.
Karadzic also questioned the witness’s previous assertion that people were taken away and she never saw them again.
“This sentence is repeated in the case of many witnesses, yourself included,” Karadzic said. “Are you trying to suggest something by saying that or are you aware that people were being released even before August [1992, when the camp was shut down]? As soon as a person was proven innocent, this person was released.”
The witness responded that she only remembered one group of detainees being transferred to another nearby camp, Trnopolje. She added that during her time in Omarska, she had to work daily in the cafeteria handing out food to detainees.
“Very often I would notice that some people never came to get that single meal. When they would walk towards the restaurant, they would have to walk through a group of guards who would beat them using different objects so they avoided coming to cafeteria to avoid physical abuse,” she said.
Her “suspicion” for many of those who never came to get their meal was that they had been “killed during the night” and left in the “heaps of bodies on the lawn outside the white house”.
She added later that since people never changed their clothes after arriving at the camp, they were sometimes recognisable in the “heaps of bodies”.
“We are going to prove what you’re saying is not correct,” Karadzic responded. “Were there individual releases when the person was [found to be] innocent?”
“I’m not aware of such cases,” she said.
The witness said that when she was at Omarska, she never had any idea of what she was accused of, if anything.
Karadzic contended that she was “interrogated and then released”.
“I was kept in the concentration camp of Omarska for about two months and then another camp, Trnopolje,” the witness responded. “It’s not a prison, it’s a camp. I testified in previous trials what I lived through.”
“Leave that alone, we are looking at the legal side,” Karadzic said.
“It’s nothing to do with anything legal, it’s a camp, a concentration camp, all the rules are forgotten there – domestic legislation, international legislation – all that was forgotten,” the witness said.
The trial continues next week.
Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.
