The Association of Camp Detainees in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) yesterday marked the 33rd anniversary of the crime in the “Keraterm” camp near Prijedor, where 371 detainees were killed.
“The 33rd anniversary of the crime in the Keraterm camp was marked. It is our obligation to commemorate Keraterm and other camps, to remember, but also not to forget. This is one of 55 commemorations held annually throughout BiH, organized by the Association of Camp Detainees in BiH either through its member organizations or with our partners, institutions, and other victim organizations of torture,” said the president of the Association of Camp Detainees in BiH, Seid Omerovic.
He added that this is not only remembrance but also an act of memory and drawing conclusions from what happened.
“And those conclusions should result in an adequate law that will address this category of people, meaning that the status of camp detainees is adequately and systematically resolved, and that is through the adoption of an appropriate Law on Victims of War Torture and an appropriate social status for these deserving people,” said Omerovic.
He emphasized that the Association of Camp Detainees in BiH will not give up on insisting on the adoption of this law.
“Camp detainees are a population that remains very active and of high quality to this day, having made a tremendous sacrifice, right after the defenders during the aggression on BiH, and what political representatives have still not delivered is the rights and status of camp detainees through an adequate law. These are things the Association will not give up on. The law would primarily regulate an institutional and planned concept of the existence of camps and the fact that there were 200.000 camp detainees after the war, a very large number of whom were precisely here in the Prijedor area, as well as the existence of approximately 650-700 camps and detention sites,” said Omerovic.
The Regional Association of Camp Detainees of the Banja Luka Region, the Association of Camp Detainees “Prijedor ’92,” and the Association of Camp Detainees Kozarac remind that the “Keraterm” camp was established in the pre-war ceramic factory in May 1992 by organs set up by the SDS, who violently took power and control over all of Prijedor at the start of the aggression on BiH.
Four factory rooms – halls that had previously been used as storage for finished products – became spaces for terror and executions of around 3.000 detainees of Bosniak and Croat nationality from those areas.
Their bodies were found in mass graves in Tomasica, Stari Kevljani, and Jakarina Kosa.
Horrific scenes of terror in the camp, when 190 detainees were executed in a single night, were testified to in court by surviving detainees: Fikret Alic, Jusuf Arifagic, Teofik Kulasic…
That monstrous act and other proven crimes in Keraterm were listed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague in the indictment against the then-president of Serbia, and more than 30 responsible individuals from the then civil and military authorities of the Republika Srpska (RS) and Prijedor, as well as paramilitary units, camp management and guards of that and other Prijedor camps, were proven guilty and sentenced to long prison terms.
“The existing legal ‘solutions’ ‘protect’ surviving camp detainees in such a way that they are still being issued penalties in the form of ‘RS attorney fees’ amounting to thousands of BAM, and even today, about 100.000 living witnesses have no access to health rehabilitation, no employment priority, no real protection or concrete rights even after three decades,” said the Association of Camp Detainees in BiH.
The Association of Camp Detainees in BiH states that it will continue to lead the side of proven and documented truth and justice, and continue spreading the truth to the world for generations to come.
