MOST people would not recognize him now — he has a full and manly frame, and a puckish smile; he has even had his teeth fixed. But I would know it anywhere, from the mixture of mischief, a deep inward stare and that mop of hair.
Sixteen summers ago this week, Fikret Alic was probably the most familiar figure in the world. His skeletal, emaciated torso and xylophone rib cage, behind the barbed wire at Trnopolje concentration camp, embodied the violence unleashed on Bosnia’s Muslim civilians at the orders of Radovan Karadzic, the man due to be taken to The Hague to answer charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
As Karadzic awaits his fate, Fikret is back in Bosnia. Although currently living in Sonderberg, Denmark, he has bought a flat in a block still under construction in Kozarac town center, and is here to save money to rebuild the nearby family home out of which he was chased in 1992, having completed the foundations. The arrest of the man who organized his torments has left a bittersweet taste.
“I am happy and I am angry,” he says. “For 13 years, he was living protected as a free man. And for the three years before that, all the world knew what he was doing, from my camp to Srebrenica, but did nothing to stop him. So now the truth will be told, but what has happened to us all this time? Now at last I am happy just because I am alive and here, with my wife and children, and not dead like so many others. But while he was free, I was broken, too.”
I came across Fikret in 1992 at the Trnopolje concentration camp, where I had gone at Karadzic’s invitation, while trying to inspect the gulag of concentration camps he had set up across northwestern Bosnia — places of reputed mass murder, torture, mutilation and rape — all of which Karadzic denied, insisting: “See for yourself.” We took up his suggestion and were directed down a seamless chain of command, first from Karadzic’s doorstep to the gates of a place of horror called Omarska, then, after being bundled out before seeing too much, Trnopolje, where Fikret and others languished behind the wire. They had arrived that morning, he said then, from yet another camp, Keraterm, where during a single night 130 men had been massacred in a hangar. Fikret said he had been ordered to help load the bodies on to bulldozers, but, weeping, had his place taken by an older man.
Now Fikret and I meet again, this time to celebrate the arrest of the man who orchestrated the most terrible days of his life. After the embrace, there’s a hollow laugh and a pledge that next time we really must get together for another reason. We are talking in Fikret’s native town of Kozarac, a place that the Bosnian Serb leader hoped to wipe from the map. As Karadzic languishes in Belgrade, Friday night is getting into gear, the fairground is grinding into action, children are whooping despite the rain; music is throbbing out of bars and cars on to the warm, wet streets and girls on heels like stilts strut into town. The boys’ haircuts are stiff with gel and families of three generations are out for a stroll.
Kozarac now calls itself “the biggest small town in the world.” Yet 16 summers ago this week, when I came through here on Karadzic’s authority, escorted by his guards, it had been burned to the ground and the stench of charred masonry was still heavy in the air. Its inhabitants — apart from a few Serbs tending their animals as though nothing had happened — were either dead, driven out, or taken to one of the gulag of concentration camps. There was no war here in the Prijedor region of Bosnia, just a sudden, vicious and brazen attempt to eradicate an entire population by killing, incarceration, rape and enforced deportation. According to the master plan of which Karadzic is accused, all the people on these streets this Friday night, and in these rebuilt houses, were intended to be dead, gone or never born.
But Kozarac has been rebuilt by the hard work and defiance of a diaspora, some of whom come back for the summer and others who have come back to live — albeit in the Serbian half of Bosnia, the so-called Republika Srpska. The mosques are rebuilt, too.
Every year now, there is a commemoration service at Omarska, making this the gathering of a unique tribe in Europe, Clan Omarska. This year’s remembrance takes place this week. A local group called Izvor, formed by camp survivor Edin Ramulic, calculates that for all the thousands of bodies already uncovered 3,205 people are still unaccounted for.
AS THE night unfolds around us, Fikret tells about the hunt in Trnopolje, after our visit, for anyone who talked to the press that day in 1992. He talks about how seven people had been killed for doing so, and how he had to hide for 10 days after our meeting on Aug. 5, at which point he joined a convoy of deportees on a terrifying mountain exodus at gunpoint across no-man’s land and into Muslim-held territory. Disguised as a woman he was saved from being taken into a group to be raped because he smelt so badly.
Later in the conflict he had tried to fight in the remarkable 17 Krajiske Brigade, based in Travnik, made up of ethnically cleansed men and women from around Prijedor determined to go home. But he kept coughing up blood and was discharged.
After living in Slovenia and Croatia he had a breakdown. “I was talking to a tree about my time in the camps. I might as well have been in a straitjacket.” Then came a chance to go to Denmark, a meeting with a Bosnian woman from Sanski Most, near Kozarac, in 1999, “and when I woke up, I was married,” he laughs.
Of his persecutors he now says: “No one has ever said sorry for what they did. I don’t know what it is about these people — I can show you five killers any time we go to Prijedor. Either they are proud of what they did, or pretend it did not happen. I am waiting for someone to admit what they did, or apologize, but they do not, they never will. They have built a monument outside the camp where I was, but it is to Serbs who died, not us. I don’t know of any Serbs who died there.”
The long road to Fikret, Trnopolje and Omarska — and to being back in Kozarac last week — began in London at the end of July 1992, when my colleague Maggie O’Kane and the American Roy Gutman published reports from fugitive deportees from Bosnia telling of beatings, torture and murder in the camps, among them Omarska — the place that would emerge as the second most deadly killing field in Bosnia’s war, after Srebrenica.
When he invited us to visit the camps, Karadzic greeted us with that professorial, wayward air and faux academic veneer that belied his deranged vision, but left no doubts about his authority over Omarska, promising that we would enter the camp on his word. He sent us down the chain of command to Omarska, first to Deputy President Nikola Koljevic, who would be our supervisor, then the crisis staff of the nearest town and administrative center for Omarska, Prijedor. On the way there we passed the incinerated ruins of Kozarac — “They are the people who fled because they would not accept the peace,” said our escort, Col. Milan Milutinovic of the Bosnian Serb Army.
After hours of obfuscation and failed attempts by the committee to take us to other camps that had already been inspected by the Red Cross, we set out for Omarska, eventually passing through the back gates of the camp and into another world.
A column of 30 men emerged blinking into the sunlight from the depths of a hangar. They were in various states of decay, some skeletal, with shaven heads. They drilled across a tarmac piste under the watchful eye of a machine-gunner and into a “canteen,” where they gulped down watery bean soup like famished dogs, keeping their bread roll for later. They were told they were allowed to speak freely, but they clearly dared not, the guards swinging their guns; there are few things like the burning eyes of a prisoner who dare not speak what he yearns to say. One man, Dzemal Partusic, said only: “I do not want to tell any lies, but I cannot tell the truth.” Another, Serif Velic, replied when I asked him about a wound to his head, that he had fallen — it had happened naturally.
When we tried to get to the hangar in which the prisoners were held, we were stopped by the commandant and Prijedor’s chief of police, Simo Drjlaca, cocking their guns. Time, and subsequent trials at The Hague, would tell what Karadzic wanted to hide — a nightmare of killing, torture, mutilation, starvation, drunken sadism and rape.
