Posted on 01/29/2005 8:47:53 AM PST by mark502inf
There were countless horrors in the wars which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A Serbian army general has now surrendered to the authorities and will go to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague to answer war crimes charges dating back to 1999. But what happens once camp guards have served their sentences?
Dragan Kolundzija, Kole to his friends, is sitting at the bar of the Hotel Prijedor when we enter.
He smiles awkwardly and gets down off the stool to shake hands.
He looks younger than his 46 years.
If you saw him in the street, you could mistake him for a football coach.
Not a reserve policeman.
Not a concentration camp guard.
He has not agreed to an interview yet. He has turned down the approaches of other journalists.
It takes Lola 10 minutes to persuade him to speak.
Lola, my fixer, who fought for a while in the same Bosnian Serb army as Kole and tells dirty jokes all day long, has a heart of gold and is not afraid of anything.
Meanwhile, I watch the women cleaning the glass panels which dot the lobby of this hotel.
Then we go upstairs to a big empty room with a gas heater.
The hotel staff seem afraid of us, or of Kole, I cannot decide which.
'Tortured to death'
Kole was a guard at Keraterm in 1992, one of three concentration camps in north-west Bosnia, where nearly 1,700 Bosnian Muslims were tortured to death in three months in the summer of 1992.
Thousands of others still bear the scars.
He pleaded guilty to one count of persecution as a crime against humanity. And got three years in jail from the Hague War Crimes Tribunal.
And was one of the first to be released.
Five of his fellow guards are still serving sentences.
"There were 30 in total", he says.
Sitting with him, it is easy to remember that the Serbs too are victims of the Bosnian war.
That the jailers too, suffer.
His hands shake badly. And his lips.
He tries to hold his hands still on the pure white tablecloth.
We make small talk for a while, but I cannot pretend we have come to talk about the river, which flows lazily by, beneath the windows.
I try to be gentle.
I am a storyteller, not a prosecutor.
What ways were open to you to show kindness to the prisoners?
He breaks down immediately.
Unusual friendship
After a while, he says he has a friend.
A Muslim, who was an inmate at the camp, when he was a guard.
We guards were much closer to robots than to human beings Kole
Would we like to meet him?
Ten minutes later, Suad, known as Duda is there.
He too is trembling.
The Serb and the Muslim, the guard and his prisoner are sitting side-by-side, broken faced, broken eyed, drinking stupid soft drinks as though there was no war, no cruelty, no injustice in this world.
"We guards were much closer to robots than to human beings... we were all doing things which were not connected to our true selves... " says Kole.
"There was chaos in the compound, and chaos outside in the town. And men with guns."
They explain to me, in fits and starts, what a concentration camp means.
What the concentration of men means.
It is where men are concentrated to death.
Four rooms with 400-500 men in each, 120 metres square.
In the summer heat. With no space to lie down.
Civilians, from 15 to 90-years-old.
Rounded up at the start of the war on the orders of the high command, zealously carried out by local henchmen.
Muslims had been officially declared vermin.
So they had to be concentrated.
Every night Serb soldiers, back from the front, came to the camp.
They wanted revenge for lost comrades.
They asked the guards for the keys to the rooms.
And committed acts of unspeakable barbarity. Of sexual humiliation and horror.
Of all the guards, only Kole refused to hand over the key, says Duda.
That was the only shift when there were no beatings or killings.
Except for just one night.
'Dark black night'
"It was dark, the soldiers somehow got into the room and Kole was shouting, stop shooting, stop shooting!" Duda says. "By morning there were 200 bodies."
Kole is hunched up at the table, staring at the back of his hands, as though he does not know what they are.
After a while he says, "that was a dark black night".
At the Hague, Duda testified in his defence.
Partly thanks to that, Kole is out already.
The judges believed he did what he could, to alleviate the suffering.
Now the two men are friends again. Like they were at primary school.
After the interview, I try to find the toilet but my brain is fogged up.
I walk headfirst into a plate glass door. The women cleaned it too well. It quivers but does not break.
I walk with my hands in front of me now, like a blind man.
But there are those who still believe in a final solution to the 'Muslim problem'
This hotel, this country is a labyrinth of invisible glass.
On the way out of Prijedor, we pass Keraterm, the ex-camp. Once a factory for bathroom tiles.
It is a low, meaningless building beside another factory, which boasts a chimney at least, for making bricks.
25,000 Muslims are back in Prijedor. Out of the 45,000 who once lived here.
Some stare at Kole in the street. Some shake his hand.
Nearly everyone was changed by the war.
But there are those who still believe in a final solution to the "Muslim problem".
That one race, or ethnic group, is better than another.
But if Kole and Duda can live together anyone can.
What is the status of the Milosevic trial, does anyone know?
The prosecution has rested its case and its been in the defense phase since November. There are 66 charges & Milosevic's health is not good & that has caused numerous delays in the past, so it probably still has a ways to go.
Thanks
The following is fiction, from Chapter 23 of "A Grave Breach" (May 2005) which has elements of the Bosnian war as a background and at one point, there's this about people such as the man in this article.
"In many other cases, the victimizers who were not caught in a web of reprisal moved on, back to their homes, perhaps, where their own families may or may not have been waiting; where they looked at their wives and their sons and their daughters and saw the faces of their own victims and wondered how in God’s name they had become, even for a time, what they had become. And done what they had done. Back in their places of personal refuge, they learned to their horror that, for them, the veneer of civilization was an internal construct, not an external restraint. And they came face to face with the realization that, while there would never be forgiveness from their victims, their true punishment was that they could never forgive themselves."
WOW 1700 rags killed during the course of a WAR!!!!!!! Cry me a river! Sheesh 3000+ were killed at 911. You totally support the raghead Chechen/KLA/Wahhabi killers. Curious lack of ragheads at this trial wouldn't you say? ( I know you think the rags did no wrong here so I won't wait for the answer. Just go back to the appeasement of the rags that Bill and Maddie started.)
Pretty powerful writing, Jim. You have to ponder not just how people who do these kinds of things live with themselves afterward, but how they manage to justify it in their own minds at the point when they actually walk into a room filled with prisoners, point their weapon at an unarmed and helpless human being and pull the trigger. I'll be looking for the book.
Well, Nov3, sometimes breaking things down to their component parts helps understanding. Let's do that with your reply to this article about warcrimes in Bosnia:
ragheads: wrong continent, wrong people, wrong culture.
Chechen: wrong country.
Wahhabi: wrong religion.
KLA: wrong war.
See how easy that is? It really does help in understanding themes in writing, such as your theme of not having any idea of what you are talking about.
A quadruple ignorance hit for you, Nov3. First one is for the "rags" racism. The second one is for applying the term "rags" to Bosnians--akin to calling Eskimos "ni**ers". The third one is 1700 killed during the course of the war--over 100,000 were killed in Bosnia, about 70% of whom were Bosniak Muslims. Your fourth hit is to say they were killed as part of war. War is between armed combatants. The 1700 were unarmed and helpless prisoners slaughtered while in concentration camps. That's murder, not war.
The Bosnian Muslims had the largest infantry within Bosnia. In fact it was discovered that the Muslims often had people on civilian lists who were members of the Bosnian Muslim army.
As do the Serbs, Joan.
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