Fikret Alic, the living skeleton from the “Serb concentration camp Trnopolje” near Prijedor, became one of the symbols of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In 1992, the world was shocked by the cover of the United States (U.S.) magazine Time, which featured a photo of the exhausted and starved Alic behind the barbed wire of the Trnopolje camp. Alic, disguised as a woman, managed to escape from the camp, while many Croats and Bosniaks from the Prijedor area disappeared forever. According to him, the horrors of Prijedor were only the introduction to the genocide in Srebrenica, whose 30th anniversary will be marked in July this year.
May 31st, 1992, was a Sunday that generations of Bosniaks from Prijedor will remember. The war in BiH had already started in full, and the summer of 1992 in Prijedor and the surrounding area brought images that foretold great horrors. That day, the authorities of the Republika Srpska (RS), led by Radovan Karadzic, issued an order: “Serbs to join the army and police, and Croats and Muslims to mark their houses with white flags or sheets and to wear white armbands.” Otherwise, they faced severe consequences.
“Mark and kill”
That is how historian and researcher Mujo Begic describes this decision. According to him, the tragic story of Prijedor began already in January 1992, when the Serb Democratic Party illegally declared Prijedor a municipality of the RS. What followed was the violent takeover of power and the expulsion of Bosniak and Croat municipal officials. Before the order about white armbands, military forces had already established the camps Trnopolje, Omarska, and Keraterm.
“Prijedor is Srebrenica at the beginning of the war,” says Begic.
“That was the prelude to mass expulsions, killings, torture, deportations – all forms of crimes against humanity. It was part of the Greater Serbia project that led to genocide,” emphasizes Begic, who often describes the events in Prijedor with the phrase: “Prijedor is Srebrenica at the beginning of the war.”
Due to its strategic position, Prijedor was under special attention. The city connected Belgrade and Knin, and Bosniaks and Croats were considered a threat.
“That’s why they had to be removed. In Prijedor, all elements of genocide under international law were committed. I personally helped with the exhumation and identification of hundreds of human remains,” explains Begic.
Not all victims have been found
In the camps around Prijedor, at least 3.716 people were killed, among them 102 children. More than 2.100 victims have been identified, and the rest are still being searched for. Over a hundred mass graves have been discovered, the largest in Tomasica –discovered only in 2013 – with the remains of at least 360 people, although it is estimated that more than 850 are buried there.
Before the war, about 52.000 Bosniaks and Croats lived in the Prijedor area. More than 30.000 were imprisoned in camps.
Fikret Alic – the face of Prijedor’s horrors
Fikret Alic became the face of Prijedor’s horrors back in 1992. When foreign journalists visited the Trnopolje camp, a Newsweek photojournalist took a picture of Alic behind the wire, and Time published that photo on August 17th with the caption: “Must it go on?”
“They arrested me on June 14th during the so-called village cleansing. I was first in Keraterm until August 5th, and then transferred to Trnopolje, where the photo was taken,” Alic recalled 33 years later.
He didn’t know that the image would circle the globe and provide the first insight into the crimes in BiH.
“The Time cover should have been an alarm for world leaders, but they didn’t react,” he says.
The genocide in Srebrenica was the tragic outcome.
When asked if he realized at the time that he was part of ethnic cleansing, he said: “No. But they separated us and took the educated to unknown locations. We never saw them again. Then I realized that I might not survive.”
After the photo was published, the guards wanted to kill those who spoke to the journalists, including him. He escaped from the camp disguised as a woman, with a convoy evacuating women. In October 1992, he arrived in Ljubljana. He was 20 years old.
“I learned what love and sorrow mean”
Mujo Begic, who has been researching crimes in BiH for 30 years, says:
“I’ve spoken to thousands of victims, including raped women and camp survivors. I met mothers who lost sons, husbands, fathers…Sometimes we were able to identify someone with a single small bone. These mothers would kiss that bone, cry… It was their only solace.”
Identification of human remains is carried out at the Sejkovaca center near Sanski Most.
“That is the saddest place in BiH. There, a number becomes a name, memories live there. In Tomasica, entire families were found. It is a family grave and proof that genocide was committed there,” says Begic.
Solace through truth
After Slovenia, Alic lived in Denmark and then returned to BiH. He followed trials in The Hague and testified. He especially remembers the trial of Dusko Tadic, local SDS leader in Kozarac, sentenced to 20 years in prison for crimes in the camps.
“I felt that justice might still be achieved. I followed the proceedings until the court closed in 2017. I’m satisfied because Karadzic and Mladic were convicted,” he said.
A story the world should have taken seriously
One of the first foreign journalists to report on the crimes was Roy Gutman, Pulitzer Prize winner, who, thanks to the help of journalist Nada Kronja Stanic, visited BiH and confirmed his suspicions. He was the first to use the term “genocide” for the crimes in Prijedor.
“Roy was Jewish and knew the Holocaust. He was convinced that something very similar was happening in BiH,” said Kronja Stanic.
Still, although the Time cover sparked global sympathy, world leaders did not act in time.
“For years we repeated what was happening. Only in 1995 did they react – too late,” she concluded.
Gutman published numerous reports and interviews with survivors. Although he did not visit the camps himself – that was done by journalists Penny Marshall, Ian Williams, and Ed Vulliamy – his reports were key in giving the global public an insight into the bloody and brutal wartime reality in BiH.
Nada Kronja Stanic is convinced that world leaders could have intervened and stopped the war as early as 1992. Although the world, after the publication of the famous Time cover with the emaciated Fikret Alic, expressed sympathy and sorrow, nothing changed.
“We didn’t know how to convince world leaders to act. Only after years of repeating what was happening in BiH did they start to react – but too late. That was only in 1995,” added Kronja Stanic.
Gutman later received the Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting from BiH, in which he exposed abuse, torture, and massacres committed by Bosnian Serbs.
