Word: serb
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...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 hangs on clotheslines, a sign of how quickly disaster fell upon the inhabitants. Only one house remains intact, the home of a Serb couple who sit drinking their morning coffee on the balcony, their mattresses airing in the sunshine...
...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...
...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...
During World War II, 100,000 German 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...
...Muslim villagers in Cela tell a different story, not of harmony but of terror. First a lamb was stolen during weapons searches. Then 15 men were taken away for "interrogation"; only 14 returned. Another man was sent to the Serb-run mountain prison camp at Manjaca. Drunken militiamen set fire to the mosque, killed an old Muslim man and dumped his body down a well...