There were thirteen year old boys and men over the age of seventy among the camp inmates. In front of the other inmates, the children slowly changed and started looking like "classic" camp inmates, like the ones we remember from the documents about Dachau, Kolima or Omarska. After his release, Prof. Rizvanbegovic spent some time in Zagreb, and today he lives in Sarajevo where he is the Minister for Education in the government of the Bosnian Federation.
According to his estimate, during the summer months of 1993 there were about 20,000 Bosniaks in the "collection centers" all over Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna: in Gabela, Dretelj, Ljubusko, at Helidrom near Mostar, in Otoka near Vitina, Kocerin, Posusje, Duvno, Sujica, Bijelo Polje and Siroki Brijeg. In some of the camps prisoners were brutally tortured and murdered. It is known that tens of Bosniaks died from the consequences of torture. Until today, none of the criminals has been tried; the commanders of the camps were promoted to new duties, while the "collection centers" were disbanded and emptied or are still used for the same purpose.
It is necessary to remind that the infamous camps in Dretelj and Gabela are only half an hour drive from the Croatian border, right next to the highway, and that for months they hadn't been visited by a single Croatian official, nor a Croatian journalist, Catholic priest, Red Cross member.... In August 1993, Helsinki Watch members were denied access to the camp and then, as usually happens in such circumstances, the whole case reached foreign press. Then, the season of unpleasant questions for the Croatian public began, and the story started from its tail.
"Only a year ago, Croats and Muslims fought against the Yugoslav Army which had been controlled by Serbs. Today, they are stuck in the agony of a total civil war. Mostar is the main prize. Old city is the site of aimless destruction, which reminds one of Vukovar... Even Sarajevo appears untouched in comparison with eastern Mostar. Every day, at least two to three people die from hunger or sickness. Hundreds of artillery grenades, fired from the western side of the Neretva river, slam day and night into the mostly Muslim old city, killing every day 8 people and wounding another 30."
Gutman characterizes Croat-Muslim conflict as "a war within a war"; he finds the explanation for this conflict in the reasons given by the commander of the HVO units, general Slobodan Praljak, in his interview with Gutman. General Praljak openly defined the war with the German term Lebensraum (living space) which once upon a time had been used as the justification for the Nazi aggression against the European east.
"Croatian command (signed by the then Defense Minister, Bozo Rajic) on April 15 demanded to be given military control over three 'Croat' provinces from the Vance-Owen plan, including Mostar. Seeking an ethnically cleansed state under the name of Herceg Bosna, Croats started stopping convoys; the siege of Mostar begun on May 9," writes Gutman.
One of the responsible protagonists of Hercegovina struggle for Lebensraum, General Praljak, is probably the greatest rhetorician and adventurist of the failed war adventure with Muslims; in the same situation, as he repeats today, he would "repeat this war hundred times over," as if it were an unsuccessfully executed movie scene. From the point of view of what we usually call Christian morality, the totally warped criteria of this tireless veteran reminded the author of this article of the meeting with the then commander of Mostar HVO, Jadranko Topic.
The war in Mostar was still going on, which could have been concluded at the western entrance to the city: next to a steep trail one could see the barrels of large sniper rifles Beretta 12.5 poking from a freshly dug out trench; their owners, Irish professionals, were aiming at the distance with their fingers firmly pressed against the trigger; every morning they moved to another deadly location. In the city, detonations could have been head at the time when the former wing attacker from the soccer team "Velez" received us in his office at the "Velez" stadium. Office walls were decorated with Croatian symbols and the sign of the Croatian Soccer Club "Zrinski". After offering us coffee and cigarettes, Topic gave us his view of the whole problem:
Behind this "innocent" interpretation one could see a sarcastic stare of a peaceful and not terribly worried man. Several months earlier (at the beginning of May 1993) he had been walking around the Old city with a megaphone and calling on Bosniaks to surrender and hang white sheets on their houses. One of the bloodiest micro-wars in the Bosnian war started those days, with a cannonade of the HVO artillery; this war was probably the strongest argument for the thesis about a civil war in Bosnia.
Somewhat earlier, sudden raids and arrests of Muslims, HVO members, had begun in Stolac county. Commander of a HVO Bosniak unit "Bregava" was arrested and taken to the barracks near Capljina. Soon the members of the main SDA council for Stolac, humanitarian organization "Merhamet" and the most respected leaders of the Islamic community in Stolac were detained.
Thus begun the ethnic cleansing of Stolac which was completed during the first five days of August. Out of more than 8,000 Stolac Bosniaks (more than 80 percent of the town population), only a few families remained in the town, mostly thanks to mixed marriages, commercial contacts or the debts of other nature - for example the one that was repaid to a Muslim family by the Mostar bishop Peric . The old Bosniak family had done the same thing for Peric fifty years ago when they saved him from the persecution of Partisans.
In a pretty detailed and ambitious booklet, "Crimes in the Stolac county, 1992- 1994," which has recently been published by the eastern Mostar authorities (and was characterized by the western Mostar authorities as a "flagrant violation of the Dayton agreement"), one can find a detailed chronology of this local conflict.
The booklet mentions the names of the individuals responsible for the events in Stolac and gives a longish list of local politicians, starting with Mate Boban, Pero Markovic, Ivan Bender, Jadranko Prlic; it continues with the HVO officers, above all the HVO Chief of Staff, Slobodan Praljak, and then also the local leaders: Police commanders in Stolac Valentin Coric and Pero Raguz, president of the local HDZ, Andelko Markovic and the command of the town HVO led by Bozo Pavlovic and Veselko Raguz.
It seems that the Bosniak authors were not absolutely objective in their assessment of the general situation in Stolac (for example, it doesn't make sense to accuse Croatian Army units of "the occupation of the town" when the town had been under the Serb control immediately before that action). But that sort of exaggeration cannot discredit other facts stated in the book, let alone be used for constructions about Muslim "Serbofilia", greeting of the YPA tanks with flowers etc.
A while ago, when I asked the local Croats whether Muslims had greeted the YPA tanks with flowers they replied that the Serb tanks had been greeted with flowers by only one person. By a mentally unstable Bosniak woman whose husband had died as an officer of the Yugoslav Army in Croatia.
It is clear why the commentators from Herceg Bosna skirted around the interesting evidence presented in the aforementioned booklet. Most of the evidence deals with the experiences of the Bosniak camp inmates. Namely, a good number of arrested Bosniak inhabitants of Stolac was taken on July 13 1993 to the HVO camps in Dretelj and Gabela; at the same time, their property was systematically looted and set on fire.
All the recognizably Islamic buildings in Stolac (which make up a large proportion of the town) had been burned and then razed to the ground. First under attack were four Stolac mosques, the oldest one of which, Careva Mosque, was built in 1519. The old Stolac square, Tepa, was burned and razed to the ground; today is has been cleared of ruins and is ready for the building of the Square of Ante Starcevic [19 century Croatian politician, "father of the nation"]; Stolac authorities have even prepared plans for the square within a new development plan for the town and are seeking projects for the future square. Muslim cemetery, located behind Tepa, was the only object to survive untouched during the first days of the HVO rule; however, after the Dayton Agreement, it has been demolished, together with a score of remaining Bosniak objects, and prepared for the Croatian re-design.
We find the similar situation with those who were responsible for the "collection centers" (as the camps were euphemistically called by Nedeljko Mihanovic), although, in this case, it is harder to document the involvement of the higher officials, since they tried not to leave written documentation. According to the book "Crimes in Stolac County," 1559 Bosniak men and 49 women and elderly from Stolac were detained in the HVO camps. 19 of them died in the camps.
They stayed in the camps between April 1993 and April 1994 when the last group of inmates was released. However, after the release, the former inmates, mostly from the counties of Mostar, Jablanica and Stolac, were not allowed to return to their homes. Some of them were sent to Croatia, to a collective center on the island of Korcula; from there, they were later sent abroad. 1916 inhabitants of Stolac county had been expelled from Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Camp Dretelj consisted from 6-7 hangars, 2 concrete tunnels and two cells for solitary confinement which had been used for punishment. 450-700 people were squeezed on 200 square meters of one hangar. During the summer months, the temperature in hangars would reach 50 C. The situation in the tunnels , whose entrances were blocked by metal doors which had always been kept shut, was the same.
Camp in Gabela used the buildings of an old YPA ammunition depot. It consisted of 4 hangars and 3 cells for solitary confinement. Camp commander, Boko Presic had been famous as a madman, and later (after the end of his "tenure") was allegedly confirmed to be clinically insane. At the beginning of October 1993, Previsic murdered Mustafa Obradovic in front of a large number of witnesses, because the victim had tried to smuggle food leftovers into one of the hangars.
This journalists has obtained a confession of one of the guards from the Gabela camp; this man was a local from the neighboring village, was educated and had been forcibly mobilized into HVO; he requested to stay anonymous. His statement confirms numerous cases of torture and executions of the prisoners by the HVO members.
"During the night we were often visited by the soldiers from the elite HVO units from western Hercegovina; those units were reportedly under direct control of Mate Boban or Tuta Naletic," claimed this witness.
"They would make me open the hangar door and then they would pour water on the prisoners inside from a fire hose. Then they would take some of the prisoners outside and beat them. Sometimes they would shoot at them, without aiming, which would result in deaths," he admitted. "Every day, we forced Muslims to sing Croatian patriotic songs, Ustashe songs, or lecture them about the dangers of 'Alija's fundamentalism'".
Prisoners had to urinate and defecate inside hangars and a lot of them ended up drinking their own urine because of terrible thirst. It seems almost unbelievable that for the existence of such torture camps the majority of Croatian politicians found out from the foreign press.
Even if president Tudman made a slip of tongue, he didn't lie, that's for sure. According to usual humanistic standards, and the Geneva convention, Hercegovina camps were definitively concentration camp; until today no one has been indicted for the crimes committed in these camps (not even by the Hague tribunal which seems strange).
A small, and for Croatian politicians irritating, booklet about the crimes in Stolac is an ambitious step in that direction. It does not spare any one of the Croatian leaders. To what degree that step is based in the political reality, and to what degree it was based on the impulses of humiliated Bosniaks, is a question to which the only answer can be given by philosophers like Slobodan Praljak.
Lecturing the world powers about the war morality (Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam) as if someone had given him a mandate to repeat catastrophic historical examples, this supporter of the theory of Hercegovina Lebensraum would probably gladly push the pendulum of responsibility towards the international community which hadn't done its job. Why would he be guilty, when he was only doing his job, using all the opportunities that the job offered?