600 Wartime Detention Sites Identified in Bosnia

Elameri Skrgic Mikulic, Sarajevo BIRN December 13, 2016

Newly-published research has identified 600 sites at which around 160,000 prisoners were detained during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

New research launched on December 13th in Sarajevo by the Coalition for RECOM, which advocates setting up a regional truth-seeking commission, documents 600 wartime places of detention in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Coalition for RECOM said that about 160,000 people had been detained at these sites.

The detainees included 88,000 Bosniaks, 12,000 Serbs and 4,500 Croats, said Dzenana Karup-Drusko of the Transitional Justice, Responsibility and Remembrance in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is part of the coalition.

“What is characteristic of many detention camps is the fact that people were transferred from them to other locations. I believe we shall prove it was done for the purpose of ethnic cleansing,” Karup-Drusko said.

The coalition also determined that at least 130,000 people were killed or went missing in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s wars.

Speaking about the results of the research conducted in Kosovo, Bekim Blakaj of the Humanitarian Law Centre said the NATO bombing caused the biggest number of victims.

Blakaj said that a total of 13,173 people lost their lives in Kosovo and there was not a single municipality in which no human loss was recorded.

Natasa Kandic, the coordinator of the Coalition for RECOM, said that documenting the victims of war and detention facilities was intended to contribute to the establishment of an official regional commission for establishing facts about war crimes.

Kandic expressed hope that a summit to be held in Rome next year would result in the adoption of a declaration on the establishment of RECOM.

(Published on BalkanInsight 13. 12. 2016.)