We spent a full day driving around the Republika Srpska, primarily looking for the sites of the former concentration camps: Omarska, the Kereterm camp in Prijedor, and Trnopolje - as well as the World War II camp at Donja Gradina.

This was the one part of the trip where we were "on our own," and so we had to rely on our reading of the accounts of the camps in order to figure out what we were looking for. Omarska, however, was easily identified. The plant is now owned by the steel company, Mittal. We were easily able to identify the red and white houses which were used as both detention and torture centers during the war. (See Gutman's Witness to Genocide for more details).

Amazingly, there are no memorials here. It was ironic that in order to photograph the site, we stood in an Orthodox cemetery which was filled with freshly cut flowers in remembrance of the local dead- but nothing for the victims of the camp. The Human Rights Watch report on the area can be read here.

Thousands of people went through the camps at Omarska and nearby Kereterm, Manjaca and Trnopolje, but conditions in Omarska were worst of all. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed and many more suffered torture in what was the best documented act of genocide in recent times - see for example the summary indictments against several local Serbs relating to Omarska and Keraterm.

The camp existed during the summer of 1992, until international attention made it impossible to maintain. The remaining detainees were then hastily transferred to Trnopolje and Manjaca, killed or eventually evacuated by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Journalists such as Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy revealed the existence of the camps, but the true horror emerged in the form of survivors' testimonies.

The Republika Srpska was a study in historiography. Though there were no memorials to the Muslim victims, nor to the thirteen mosques destroyed in Banja Luka, we found memorials to the Serb war-dead. Though we decided not to go to Trnopolje because nothing remains of the camp, Judi later read that there was a memorial there to Serb victims.  

Heading to Prijedor, we passed through the village of Kozarac, where unlike Banja Luka, mosques and minarets still grace the horizon.   Kozarac was one of the most infamous sites of ethnic cleansing in the Krajina area of the country; the Serbs rounded up all the men and boys and brought them to the local camps while the women and children fled; many were raped.  See Silber and Little’s book The Death of Yugoslavia.  Judi later learned that several of the survivors from this village have testified at the various trials and some are today living side by side with the perpetrators.