In Prijedor, the 32nd anniversary of the crime in the Keraterm camp was marked, where more than 200 inmates, mostly of Bosniak nationality, were killed in one night. More than 3,000 people were detained in this camp from May to August 1992 – 371 of them did not survive. On the day of dissolution, there were about 960 people in the camp.
Mirsada Džolić’s husband and more than 20 family members were killed in Keraterm. She also went through the horrors of another camp in Prijedor, Trnopolje. Today, in front of the building of the former ceramics factory, where the Keraterm camp was, she came with her daughters to see the place of her father’s death: “I lost 28 family members. I found my husband in 2006. I survived, you know how that happens. I brought my daughters for the first time”.
Fikret Alić, the man who appeared on the cover of Time magazine, also survived the horrors of Keraterm, as well as other Prijedor camps. He stayed in Keraterm, as he says, for only 52 days: “We are gathering at the place of suffering where the innocent civilian population who had the wrong name was killed. Croats and Muslims were killed here – and even Serbs who were not loyal”.
On the night of July 23-24, 1992, the administration and camp guards released exhaust gases into the sleeping quarters, and when the camp inmates went out the door to escape the smoke, more than 190 of them were mowed down by machine gun fire. The surviving camp inmates still remember those events today.
“All those bodies that were lying here, that were chopped up by the power of the 84, all those murders and all those tortures – that lives in a person and it takes a person a few days to stabilize psychologically,” says Jusuf Arifagić, president of the Kozarac camp inmates’ association.
Seid Omerović, president of the Union of Prisoners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, reminds that in the area of Prijedor, more than 32,000 people have passed through camps and places of detention – for Keraterm, it is known by shooting.
The bodies of those killed in Keraterm were found in mass graves in the vicinity of Prijedor. Because of this crime, a verdict was passed against 9 people, seven in the Hague Tribunal, and two before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this crime was also part of the indictment against Biljana Plavšić, Momčilo Krajišnik, Radoslav Brđanin, and two high-ranking officials of the Ministry of Interior of the Republika Srpska.
