Word: prijedor
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Before the Bosnian war, Prijedor, a town of 30,000 six miles from Kozarac, was a busy industrial center. Now its rail yards are silent. The lumber mills, food-processing plants and iron mines have shut down. Schools will not open this fall. The Serbian militia provides almost the only employment...
...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, a social-planning official in Prijedor, "not only will we continue fighting, but we will all become cannibals...
...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...
Outside the police station in the northwest town of Prijedor, dozens of Muslims stood in line to apply for permission to leave. As in most Serb-held territory, the departing can get exit papers only in exchange for signing a document relinquishing all claim to their property and possessions. Serb police chief Simo Drljaca gloated that none of the 9,000 Muslims he says applied to leave wanted to remain in the mayhem that is Bosnia...
...version of reality to justify their aggression. "There is no ethnic cleansing," said Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, "but ethnic shifting. We are doing it to protect people." They have conjured up a phantom Islamic jihad from which they are saving Europe. ( "This is not a civil war," insists Prijedor police chief Drljaca. "It's a religious war." The operative lie is that Bosnia's Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, is bent on creating a Muslim fundamentalist state. Never mind that Bosnia's Muslims are not fundamentalist, indeed are among the more secular followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman...