Picture from Trnopolje camp

A witness who was a prisoner in the Trnopolje prison camp testified today under the pseudonym ST-249 at the trial of Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin, former Bosnian Serb police chiefs. Stanisic and Zupljanin are charged with crimes of the Bosnian Serb police against Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992.

As the witness recounted, the Trnopolje camp near Prijedor was used to detain mostly Muslims from Kozarac. They were not allowed to leave the camp. The defense contends that the camp in Trnopolje was ‘an open collection center’. According to the witness, the real reason why the prison camp was established was to expel the people from their homes and then from the Serb territory ‘based on an elaborate plan, not randomly’.

Under pressure from the Western media and the International Red Cross, the Serb authorities allowed some individuals to leave the prison camp ‘under certain conditions’, the former prisoner explained. One of the conditions was to have a medical certificate showing that the prisoner in question had to go to Prijedor because of ill health. Also, the prisoners had to find a Serb fighter willing to vouch for them.

During his stay in the Trnopolje prison camp the witness could hear prison camp commander, Major Slobodan Kuruzovic talk to the people from the local civil authorities. They said that the non-Serbs whose houses had been destroyed would be made to leave the municipality and that only 10 percent of the Muslims would be allowed to remain in the municipality. The witness claims that he heard from a Serb soldier who used to work in the state security service before the war that ‘the local political structures’ – the SDS and its crisis staff – insisted that only 2 percent of the Muslims would be allowed to stay in Prijedor.

‘The SDS policy was clear and the Serb politicians clearly stated that they didn’t want to live with the Muslims, only with other Serbs’, the witness said. The Muslim villages were attacked and their inhabitants were detained in prison camps, killed, terrorized, raped, starved and deported Muslims from the Serb territories in Prijedor to implement ‘total ethnic cleansing’ of the area.

The defense lawyer representing Stojan Zupljanin, who was the police chief in the Banja Luka area, put it to the witness that the Serb forces’ attack on Kozarac was not unmotivated: it was a response to the killing of Serb soldiers near Kozarac. The witness said ‘with absolute certainty’ that it was a ‘lie’, adding he was unaware of any incidents near Kozarac before the Serb forces started shelling the village.

The defense lawyer then showed him a document from June 1992 in which a group of Muslims asked for permission to return to Kozarac. The witness explained those were the people who were expelled to the village of Cele when the conflict broke out. They didn’t know that their property had been totally destroyed and that it was impossible to live in Kozarac anymore.

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