A large number of surviving inmates and families of those killed today marked the 31st anniversary of the beginning of the closure of the monstrous Manjača camp near Banja Luka.
Torture in the Manjača camp, surrounded by barbed wire and minefields, in the immediate vicinity of which mass graves were also found, was endured by more than 5,000 camp inmates of mostly Bosniak and Croat, and partly Serb, nationality.
The recognizable Cyrillic name “Logor” above the entrance clearly pointed to the fact that the positive hopes of those who entered were reduced to a minimum.
Formed on the military training ground above Banja Luka to detain prisoners of war in the neighboring Republic of Croatia already in 1991, it was subsequently used to close the Ključ, Sanski Most, Prijedor, Kotor Varoš, Doboj, Mrkonjić Grad, Šip, Banja Luka concentration camps.
The then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of France, Bernard Kouchner, visits this camp in August 1992 and informs the world about torture in the Manjača camp, and he is one of the most responsible for the first closure of this camp.
Unfortunately, shortly after that first dissolution, the camp was reopened, but this time for inmates from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The President of the Union of Prisoners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Seid Omerović, told Fena news agency that a special problem for the camp population today is the absence of a law on the protection of victims of war torture in FBiH, although some progress has been made this year.
Omerović pointed out that in the last few years there has been a lack of institutional support and expressed the hope that it will soon become more concrete.
After marking the anniversary in Manjaca, members of the Union of Prisoners visited the mass graves in Ključ, the Bunareva pit, where in August 2000, according to the report of Borka Ožegović, a resident of that area, who was later killed, the remains of 23 murdered prisoners were found and executed from the area of the village of Humići near Ključ.
A later investigation by Jasmin Odobašić, a member of the Institute for the Search for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, confirmed that the number of victims is not final and that it is necessary to carry out a better exhumation of the victims of Bunarev, which was prevented by his death in March 2023.
For proven war crimes in the Manjača camp, only some of the main criminals were sentenced to 130 years in prison, while the crime over the Bunarevi cave, as well as the murder of the witness Borka Ožegović, remain unsolved to this day.
Omerović said that because of these reasons, as well as all other reasons, and because of the struggle to build a quality society and strong state institutions, the Union of Prisoners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with its members, will remember and remind the sacrifice of prison inmates throughout the country, and continuously contribute to the struggle for that truth and justice and finally for adequate treatment.
