Word: kozarac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Serbs around Kozarac express little remorse for the countless Muslim homes they have destroyed and tens of thousands of lives they have shattered in "cleansing" northwestern Bosnia. Their main interest now is in improving their own living conditions in the territory they have taken. Serbian officials told a visiting Western delegation last week that if the Muslim government in Sarajevo wanted peace, it would first have to reopen the roads, railroads and air space and restore the telephone and electricity lines it has cut off. "If we don't have electricity, if we don't have fuel," said Milan Covacevic...
...green meadows and pine forests around Kozarac and Prijedor, stands of poplars, apple and plum orchards, haystacks and fields of unharvested corn and sunflowers evoke a peaceful pastoral dream. But along the road to Prijedor, a burned-out house suddenly appears around a bend. Then more follow, and more, maybe a thousand in all, relics of two-story, white-washed villas with broken red tile roofs. Windows are smashed, walls blackened by smoke. There are no shrapnel and bullet holes recording some battle here; this is what "ethnic cleansing" looks like a day or even an hour later. Laundry still...
...Cleansing" was even more thorough in Kozarac, once a prosperous Muslim community of 22,000. In Bosnia the Serbs farmed the countryside and the Muslims earned higher wages working in the town factories. Many of the Muslims of Kozarac had gone as guest workers to Germany and come home years later to build well-furnished villas that provoked the envy of their Serb neighbors. Muslim survivors tell how the Serbian militia came with trucks to round up women and children last May; their location is still unknown. The next day the Serbs returned to loot the Muslims' tractors, cows, cars...
...Some of the Muslim men trucked out of Kozarac still live in famished misery less than a mile away in makeshift tents at the Trnopolje camp, supposedly under the "protection" of Serbian irregulars. They can see the minaret of the Kozarac mosque down the road and are sometimes allowed to pick fruit from the gardens of their destroyed homes. When they venture out, they see Serb newcomers from Muslim-held areas watching them from the windows and doorways of the few Muslim dwellings still standing...
...Kozarac is not a safe place yet," admitted Milomir Stakic, the new Serbian mayor of Prijedor. He took the place of his democratically elected Muslim predecessor when Serbian forces began brutally "cleansing" the area last spring. His statements were the first confirmation that Muslim guerrillas are operating in the area. "Last night two Serbs were killed and their bodies were burned in Kozarac," he acknowledged. "Groups of Muslim extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains. They could hide there for another six months, even a year...