From: victor@jezebel.wustl.edu (Victor Wickerhauser)
Subject: Re: Panic on Serbian concentration camps
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis Mo.
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 13:57:33 GMT

In article <1992Jul30.085843.17265@watson.ibm.com> jec@pilatus.zurich.ibm.com (Jean Cherbonnier) writes:
>What do they call concentration camps ? 
>Are they just camps for refugees or displaced people ?
>Or are they camps where serbian put the people they don't like,
>to eliminate them ?
>
>J.Ch.


Perhaps this will answer your question about what goes on in these camps:

[ without permission for "fair use" only; thanks to J.L. ]

The Washington Post
Thursday, July 30, 1992, front page

"Beaten, Robbed, Jailed Because He's a Croat"
---------------------------------------------
Refugee From Bosnian Warfare Recounts Confinement by Serbs
By Blaine Harden


ZAGREB, Croatia, July 29---When a gang of armed Serbs burst into his 
apartment, stole his wife's wedding ring and broke his nose with the butt of a 
machine gun, Ivica Matkovic joined the swelling horde of destitute Bosnians 
that the rest of Europe has yet to figure out how to help.

As European diplomats squabbled in Geneva today over how best to dam the flood 
of more than 2 million Balkan refugees, Matkovic and his pregnant wife, Vesna, 
told a story of starvation and degradation, of brutal imprisonment, beatings 
and murder.  It explains why so many of Bosnia's Slavic Muslims and Croats 
have been on the run at the rate of 10,000 a day since full-scale factional 
warfare broke out there four months ago.

"They said they were looking for weapons," said Matkovic, 39, a member of 
Bosnia's Croat community who owned a store in the city of Doboj.  "But they 
took all our jewelry, rings and money.  They kicked a hole in the Sony 
television set and broke the crib that we had bought for our new baby.  They 
handcuffed me and broke my nose."

That was the beginning of a 2+1/2-month ordeal that has left Matkovic looking 
like a sub-Saharan famine victim, with stick-like arms and protruding 
cheekbones.  He says he lost 50 pounds while being held by Serb militiamen; he 
has also contracted tuberculosis, doctors say, and he takes tranquilizers to 
steady his nerves.

Unfortunately for the Matkovices, their hometown lay within what Ser militia 
forces consider a strategic corridor stretching from territory held by Serb 
insurgents in neighboring Croatia eastward to the border of Serbia, which has 
long supported Serb combatants in both Bosnia and Croatia.  Doboj's population 
was about 41 percent Muslim, 37 percent Serb and 12 percent Croat, roughly 
mirroring Bosnia's prewar makeup.

The city was overrun by heavily armed Serb forces on May 4.  There was no 
resistance; it fell that morning.  Then began the "ethnic cleansing"---a 
notorious Serb militia practice of driving non-Serbs from territory they 
control with threats, terror and brute force.  It is estimated that only about 
12,000 of Doboj's prewar population of 35,000 still live there; the 23,000 
"cleansed" residents were all Muslims or Croats.

Matkovic said he was driven from his home in a blue Volkswagen to the Doboj 
city prison, where his captors ordered him "to write down the names of people 
from Croat and Muslim political parties who were buying weapons.  When I said 
I didn't know, they kicked me and hit me with guns.  They broke two ribs, and 
I was all bloody."

He said he was then confined for 30 days in a 9-by-15-foot prison cell with 30 
other inmates.  They were fed only once every five days, he said, and each day 
were allowed to share about a quart and a half of water.  "While I was in that 
cell, I saw 10 people die.  Some died from beatings, some from lack of water."  
He said the only explanation he was given for his confinement was that he was 
a Croat.  "One of my jailers told me that when all 800,000 of the Croats in 
Bosnia are dead, then there will be peace," Matkovic said.

While he was imprisoned, his wife stayed in their looted apartment for seven 
weeks.  "We were only allowed to go out between 8 and 11 in the morning," said 
Vesna Matkovic, now eight months pregnant.  "If you were out after that, there 
were buses that went around arresting you; you had to pay bribes to get 
released."

"In my apartment, I couldn't go out on the balcony because they shot at people 
who stood on balconies.  Every day in May and June, the Serbs were burning 
about 20 houses of Croats and Muslims in Doboj.  One of the first things they 
did was take our car, a four-year-old Alfa Romeo."

Her husband said he was transferred from the jail cell on June 6 to a guarded 
truck garage at a nearby militia base that held 560 other Croat and Muslim 
men.  He spent 15 days in the garage, he said, during which he was fed only 
once---"bread with marmalade."

"There were shelves in the garage [for truck parts], and we slept on them," he 
said.  "The second night I was in the garage, some Serbs who were drunk came 
inside and shot their machine guns at people sleeping on the shelves.  I saw 
nine dead and 30 wounded.  They came back on other nights five or six more 
times and shot five or six people each time."

Small groups of prisoners were sometimes allowed outside the garage to relieve 
themselves in a grassy field, Matkovic said.  "They were so hungry that some 
of them ate the grass they peed on," he said.

Matkovic said he spent the last 13 days of his confinement in the basement of 
a Doboj discotheque, where about 350 men were held in a 30-by-36-foot basement 
room with no toilet facilities.  Prisoners had to sleep where they urinated, 
he said, adding that while he was there he was given only one meal, some 
bread.

His suffering ended on July 3 when he was exchanged for a captive Serb 
militiaman, a swap supervised by U.N. peacekeeping forces based in Croatia.  
When he arrived in the Croatian town of Nova Gradiska, he discovered that his 
wife has also been exchanged for a Serb combatant, and along with other 
refugees they caught a bus for Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

The detailed story of the Matkovices told here today---though impossible to 
verify independently---echoes accounts that U.N. refugee officials and 
European Community monitors say they have heard from countless refugees 
fleeing other Bosnian towns and cities that have been "cleansed" by Serb 
forces.

The couple was interviewed at the Zagreb Trade Fair, part of which has been 
turned over to local volunteer groups that are helping Bosnian refugees find 
food, clothes and accommodations.  The group helping the Matkovices, called 
City Club Doboj, is operated and paid for by about 2,000 Zagreb residents who 
were either born in Doboj or had relatives there.  It has managed to find 
shelter here for about 600 refugees.

Similar city clubs have been set up to help refugees from scores of other 
towns in Bosnia, but---as European diplomats were told today in Geneva---
Croatia is fast running out of resources to care for the 300,000 displaced 
Bosnians it already has, let alone the hundreds of thousands more U.N. 
officials expect.

Still, as the Matkovices made clear today, the strain on Croatia is not likely 
to be relieved anytime soon.  "Even if we could go back, we will not," said 
Matkovic.  "I would only like to go there and fight.  But as you can see, I am 
not strong now."

[Picture with caption:]
Vesna and Ivica Matkovic are reunited in Zagreb after being driven from their 
home in Bosnia.

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Prof. M. Victor Wickerhauser (314)935-6771  <victor@jezebel.wustl.edu>
Dept. of Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO  63130  USA