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West Bank in City Center

Despite the promise of the government of the Una-Sana Canton, they still live in tents; humanitarian organizations are also promising construction of houses, but they have no time for waiting. In the very center of Prijedor, about fifty Bosniak returnees live in tents. Their courage can only be compared with the volume and intensity of crimes that Serbs have committed against them. However, if by the autumn they do not receive something more than UNHCR's boxes with food, army issue blankets and worn tents, all their courage and sacrifice will be in vain

by Emir SULJAGIC

Dani, Sarajevo, Federation Bosnia-Hercegovina, B-H, July 21, 2000

"Wait a minute, the supervisor is coming," Dina said with a smile and disappeared inside a wooden shack. In front of the shack, in spite of drizzle, a group of men is talking about something. Then, a man with gray hair shows up saying: "Please, I am not a supervisor, I am simply on duty today. Come in, it's cold!" The walls of the shack are covered inside with gray army issue blankets. There is a stove in a corner, and a large but shallow puddle spreads over the concrete floor in the middle of the shack. The cramped feeling is amplified by a blinking, weak lightbulb, hanging on a piece of cord from the roof, which is leaking. Several persons are sitting around a school bench, on which one can still read Vidosav [a Serb name] engraved with a compass, while it is slowly turning dark outside. Behind the shack, there are about ten tents set up on the concrete foundations of once upon a time started house. The tents are surrounded by shrubs and weeds.

Guard Turned Trader

Nothing indicates that these tents are at the spot where in the past there was a town, actually its center, the oldest part of Prijedor. That part of the town was during the war so thoroughly destroyed that today, among the weeds, it is almost impossible to recognize the foundations of the destroyed buildings. When they returned to the town two weeks ago, its inhabitants found only several graveyards stones from the mosque cemetery. Berek, as the returnees call the old part of the town, was built according to the available data in the seventeenth century, after the defeat of the Ottomans in front of Vienna and the loss of their possessions on the other side of the Sava River. The military and civilians withdrew to Bosnia, and some of them found shelter in Krajina. A military fort was built on the bank of the Sana River, and a canal was dug out around its ramparts. Apparently, that made the fort impenetrable. That is why all the inhabitants of the Old Town will tell you that Berek is a Turkish word and means a canal or something else... However, the word is of the Hungarian origin and means a grove or a meadow, or otherwise barren or swampy soil, a swamp or a pond, which this part of the town could have been before it was built up, and its name probably came from the Hungarian settlers. But the relevant sources claim that that Hungarian word had been recorded much earlier and it is not known how and from where it arrived to Bosnia.

"I was crucified in Manjaca, they tied me around the neck and started to beat me. They would have killed me if it wasn't for him. He saved me."

"He saved you and killed many more."

"Well, I am telling you that he saved me that night, but the following day someone else beat me with an electric cord."

The darkness has already fallen and the three of them are engaged in a quiet conversation, standing on the road that once upon a time passed through the Old Town. It looks as if they were standing in front of their old houses and waiting to be called to dinner. However, behind and around them, there is only darkness and further away, there are city lights. Across the river, the town lives just like in the past. There is music, noise, it seems no one notices tents in the town center. Couples, holding hands, are walking along the river bank, but it is as if they do not notice the people who have summoned enough courage to come back. Bajro is among the oldest people in the group. He is in his sixties, but he makes lively gestures while speaking, as if he would like to accentuate his words.

"I passed through Manjaca, Omarska, Batkovica, and Trnopolje. A few days ago I went to buy cement and passed by a store, and saw the guard from the camp who had beaten me up," he says and continues without pausing to catch breath. "I figure, if I had only five minutes, I would cut him to pieces." He, by the way, is not from the Old Town, but sleeps in the big tent, waiting to get back the keys for his house, which is currently used by a family from Grahovo. "I wouldn't throw them out, I would give them a room, even a whole floor. However, when we were in the city hall, he (the present tenant in his house, auth. rem.) said to the clerk: 'I do not want to live with a Muslim in the same house!'"

Eery Peace of Tents

All that Sefik Suhonjic has got left of his home is a photograph that he always carries with himself. The photo, in a small shiny frame, depicts a large, white house with several floors, built in the Bosnian style, just like all the other houses in the Old Town. He says that he could get a building permit only if he agreed to build the house in that style. That was one of the first houses built there after WWII. For years after WWII the inhabitants were leaving that part of the town, because the Communist authorities, apparently, wanted to get rid of "remnants of the feudal past", by not allowing the construction of waterworks, sewage or electrification. Neglected Berek was left mostly with poor people who had nowhere to go and a few who stayed out of spite. The development plan for the Old Town was finally finished in 1983 and those who were still living there at the time could finally relax, convinced that their sacrifices finally paid off.

Instead of houses, the meadow is today lined by tents. Several private tents and two big ones. One of the big tents is used as a dormitory and a TV hall, while the other one serves as a mosque. Last Friday they celebrated the first dzuma [Islamic service] since the return and 1992. Next to the big tents, there are about ten smaller, private tents that house whole families. The inhabitants of the tent-city spend most of the time clearing locations previously occupied by their houses. After dark they turn in to the tents. Above the tents, a few lights are on. The electricity was connected last week and the TV set does not stay turned on too late into the night. Whether because the night was cold so that the usual bustle was missing as everyone had turned in, or because it is always like that, the tent-city seemed eerily quiet. In one moment the men started to whisper among themselves - one of them walked between the tents, making brief stops. It was time for sleep and they had to choose four volunteers to keep watch that night, armed by flashlights and hope that nothing bad would happen. Even if something bad were to happen, their presence would not help at all, but the others probably sleep better knowing that someone watches over them. Someone besides the Serb police.

From time to time, one can hear steps through the thin walls of the tent. One of the guards is walking among the tents, but very cautiously and quietly, as if every noise could draw the unnecessary attention of the Serbs on the other side of the bridge. Over there, in the town, the life follows some routine, probably established in 1992. The techno beat wafts from somewhere, there is the sound of cars, but the canal which separates the Old Town form the rest of Prijedor has the appearance of an iron curtain. Here, on this side, some other world. But not a new world, an old one, which has returned to get what belongs to it. They say that silence is good for sleep, but not this sort of silence. This kind jiggles ones nerves until someone starts snoring, which is not taken by the rest as bothersome, but as a signal that it is safe to go to sleep.

"SSJ: We keep our word"

If they do not wake up earlier, or if nothing else wakes them up, they will be stirred by the commotion and noise coming from the flea market built in the meantime in a part of the flattened Old Town. All that is left is an apple tree from someone's courtyard, on the other side of the fence, but it also lives in a different era. "It's like a finger pushed in the eye, an insult for the Old Town. I told them (local Serb officials, auth. rem.) that that's the same as if they built a flea market in Belgrade in the Kalemegdan fort, or in Banja Luka in Gospodinska St.," says Muharem Murselovic, the president of the Municipal Council in Prijedor. But that is not the only insult inflicted on the inhabitants of Prijedor, claims Murselovic, widely known in the town as Mursela. Last year, the town authorities almost adopted the plan for the building of a ring road toward Bosanski Novi on top of the Old Town! Murselovic has been living for more than a year in Prijedor in the main street, across the street from his store, which is now rented by a Serb from Prijedor. As one of the first returnees in Prijedor, at the time "when my former acquaintances turned their heads away from me if they saw me in the street", Murselovic garnered support of his fellow citizens. More precisely, Bosniaks living in the Prijedor region, of whom more than a thousand have already returned home. The tent city in the Old Town is not the only one in the region. There are another three in Cejreci, Brezicani and Cela.

The town itself appears to be frozen in time. The street names have been changed, but the store signs in the Latin script haven't been taken off. The best example of that strange, not only lexical but also ideological transition that has been stopped is the monument to Dr. Mladen Stojanovic in front of the city hall in formerly Ivo Lola Ribar St., today Nikola Pasic St. The monument still stands untouched although all institutions, organizations, and associations that previously were named by Dr. Stojanovic have been renamed in the meantime. "Look, I've been getting birth certificates for our folks and waiting for the office to close," says Asim Dzamastagic the head of the office before the war. Today he is retired, and he and his wife live in a stable, actually its remains, in Rakovcani, at the entrance to the town. He is aged 63 and very lively, but his hands shake as he pulls out from his pocket and old leather wallet showing the photo of his 20-year-old son who disappeared in the May of 1992. It's good here. However, you need to be careful who you talk to and avoid discussing politics at all cost," he says, somehow timidly. The same road along which eight years ago thousands of people were deported from the town leads to Asim's home. "There was a pile of corpses there, another one over here," he points along the way.

Although people freely walk through the town, Bosniaks and Serbs do not communicate. Only rare individuals greet you, or say "hello" or "how are you" and then as soon as possible go back to "their own kind". Ethnic divisions, established as if based on some mutual and tacit agreement, seem like the only possible and natural state of things in the town in which the blood from the walls of Keraterm and Omarska has only recently been washed. But, that is deeply unnatural. The town in which even street sellers sell biography of Radovan Karadzic, and at whose exit you are seen off by the electoral slogan which freezes the blood in your veins - "The Party of Serb Unity (SSJ): we keep our promises", and in which camp guards sell building material, cannot be the same town to which their surviving victims are returning.

Translated on September 11, 2000