Word: kozarac
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Enes Hadzic, a 36-year-old Muslim truck driver, was held for two months at the Omarska detention camp in the summer of 1992. He says Tadic, who came from his home village of Kozarac, six miles east of Prijedor, was a guard nicknamed the Butcher for the beatings and torture sessions he conducted. "One night six men were called out and killed within an hour," says Hadzic, held in a room nearby. "I could hear the voices saying, 'Please, Dule, don't kill me.' " One of Tadic's victims was Jasmin Hrnic, also from Kozarac. "I personally saw Dule...
Tesma Elezovic, 45, was on her way home in Braunschweig, Germany, in January 1993, when she came face to face with a man who had forced her and fellow Muslims to flee the town of Kozarac in May 1992. "I was in shock," she says. "This man had his gun on my son's neck the whole way through the journey...
...encounter brought back terrifying memories of the ethnic cleansing of Kozarac, where Muslims and Croats were rounded up and sent to a soccer stadium in Prijedor. "The next morning we were marched to a highway intersection for selection," recalls Elezovic. "The men, women and children, and old people were separated. A man pushing a stroller with his one-year-old son in it was pulled to the side. They put a vicious dog up to his throat. We could see his insides spilling out. Then he was taken to a garage and shot...
...troops were unable to dislodge Serb fighters from the local mountains. Yet Stakic, like other Serbian officials, failed to see the irony of this role reversal, or of the Serbs' use of the Nazi term ethnic cleansing. He insisted the Serbs were only uprooting Muslim "extremists" when they ravaged Kozarac. Look at Cela, he said, a nearby village of 1,200 Muslims and 500 Serbs where both are living in model harmony...
Back in the garden at Kozarac, the fighters with Dragan Zamaklaar shrugged off the plunder and dispossession. "Of course there are robberies -- this is war," explained one. The Serbs may chafe at the isolation brought on by a war of their own making, but they are not about to reverse the evil of "ethnic cleansing." There is little chance that the Muslims of Kozarac or Prijedor or two-thirds of Bosnia will ever go home, and the consequences of their dispossession will haunt Europe for years to come...