Word: prijedor
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Dates: during 1992-1992
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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...
...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 "Groups of Muslim extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains.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...
...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...