Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 14 Sep 1992 11:46:05 CDT
From: <U15231@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: "Cleansed" wound

From BOSNET:


	The following article is from the latest "Time Magazine."  According
  to the news I received from northwest Bosnia, this story must be true.  I
  wish to thank Ms. Nelle Cotten for her patience in retyping this article
  for BOSNET.
	Read it! It is worth reading!
	Naim Saiti


		"CLEANSED" WOUND

		By Lara Marlowe, Time Magazine, Sept. 14, 1992

    Six Serb Militiamen from Bosnia lounged on deck chairs and sofas on
  the unkempt lawn of what was a Muslim home in Kozarac.  The former owners
  had been swept out at the end of May.  Now, rifles at their feet, the
  fighters smoked cigarettes as they leafed through comics and pornographic
  magazines.  Dragan Zamaklaar, 22, in jeans and cowboy boots, dragged heavily
  on a Marlboro.  Then he began to cry.
	"I feel nothing for the Muslims who lived in the house we have taken,"
  he said, weeping for his own family.  "Muslims moved into our old home in
  Kladusa.  They killed my uncle last spring.  How would you feel if yoiu saw
  Muslims slit your uncle's throat, if you saw them throw Serb women and old
  people out of windows?"
	This kind of talk is commonplace in the wide swath of land Serb gunmen
  have seized in Bosnia by dispossessing local Muslims and Croats.  Far from
  hiding the results of largl-scale "ethnic cleansing," the Serbs seem to feel
  fully justified in taking over what is left behind.  Like so many former
  Yogoslavs, Zamaklaar learned hatred-not compasion-from the past.  Yet his
  flight from his family hom in northwestern Bosnia, where Muslims have so far
  managed to hold a small pocket of teritory, to the "cleansed" town of Kozarac
  has brought him no happiness.
	"The house we built in Kladusa had 10 rooms and a basement," he said.
  "But now six of us live in a Muslim's house with only four rooms.  How would
  I know what happened to the Muslims who lived in it?  There name was Fazlic.
  That's all I know.  They left some furniture, and we foudn a few of their
  family snapshots.  I didn't even boyther to look at them."
	In the northwest Bosneian village of Kozarac, 50 milts from their
  hometown, life is hard for Zamaklaar's mother, father, grandmother, sister
  and brother.  They have no income, and local Serbian dinar notes, one of
  three currencies circulating in Bosnia, are all but worthless.  "They don't
  know anybody here.  They just sit in the house all day and think about what
  happened to them," said Zamaklaar.
	The "purification" of Muslims from these towns and villages in
  northwestern Bosnia has proved a hollow vicotry for the Serbs, destroying
  prosperity as well as security.  All supplies must be trucked in from
  Belgrade, along a corridor often under fire from Croatian artillery.
  Residents complain of food shortages.  There is no gasolin; most travel by
  bicycle and horse-drawn cart.  People do not know how they will heat their
  homes as winter approaches.
	Before the Bosnian war, Prijedor, a town of 30,000 six miles from
  Kozarac, was a busy industrial center.  Now its rail yards are silent.  The
  lumber mills, food-processing platns and iron mines have shut down.  Schools
  will not open this fall.  The Serbian militia provides almost the only
  employment.
	When darkenss falls, the remaining residents, mosytly SErbs, retreat
  into their homes, respecting the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.  Distant artillery
  fire rumbles through the night.  And the militiamen drink.  Humanitarian
  groups receive frequent reports of inebriated Serbs searching out and
  murdering any remaining Muslims they can find.
	The Serbs around Kozarac express little remorse for the countless
  Muslim homes they have destroyed and tens of thousands of lives they have
  shattered in "cleansing" northwestern Bosnia.  Their main interest now is
  in improving their own living conditions in teh territory they have taken.
  Serbian officials told a visiting Western delegation last week that if the
  Muslim government in Sarajevo wanted peace, ti would first have to reopen
  the roads, railroads and air space and restore the telephone and electricity
  lines it has cut off.  "If we don't have electricity, if we don't have
  fuel," said Milan Covacevic, a social-planning official in Prijedor, "not
  only will we continue fighting, but we will all become cannibals."
	In the green meadows and pine forests around Kozarac and Prijedor,
  stands fo poplars, apple and plum orchards, haystacks and fields of
  unharvested corn and sunflowers evoke a peaceful pastoral dream.  But along
  the road to Prijedor, a burned-out house suddently appears around a bend.
  Then more follow, and more, maybe a thousand in all, relics of two-story,
  white-washed villas with broken red tile roofs.  Windows are smashedg, walls
  blackened by smoke.  There are no shrapnel and bullet holes recording some
  battle here; this is what "ethnic cleansing" looks like a day or even an
  hour later.  Laundry still hanges on clotheslines, a sign of how quickly
  disaster fell upon the inhabitants.  Only one house remains intact, the home
  of a Serb couple who sit drinking their morning coffee on the balcony, their
  mattresses airing in the sunshine.
	"Cleansing" was even more thorought in Kozarac, once a prosperous
  Muslim community of 22,000.  In Bosnia The Serbs farmedthe countryside and
  the Muslims earned higher wages working in the town factories.  Many of the
  Muslims of Kozarac had gone as guest workers to Germany and come home years
  later to build well-furnished villas that provoked the envy of their Serb
  neighbors.  Muslim survivors tell how the Serbian militia came with trucks
  to round up women and children last May; their location is still unknown.
  The next day the Serbs returned to loot the Muslims' tractors, cows, cars
  and furniture.  Survivors say more than 5,000 men were beaten to death or
  shot when they tried to defend their homes.  The Serbs dynamited the houses,
  so no Muslims could ever return.  They even ordered the Muslims to fly white
  flags from their windows, so militiamen would know which houses to destroy.
	Some of the Muslim men trucked out of Kozarac still live in famished
  misery less than amile away in makeshift tents at the Trnopolje camp,
  supposedly under the "protection" of Serbian regulars.  They can see the
  minaret of the Kozarac mosque down the road and are sometimes allowed to
  pick friut from teh gardents of their destroyed homes.  When they venture
  out, they see Serb newcomers from Muslim-held areas watching them from the
  windows and doorways of the few Muslim dwellings still standing.
	"Kozarac is not a safe place yet," admitted Milomir Stakic, the new
  Serbian mayor of Prijedor.  He took the place of his democratically electred
  Muslim proedecessor when Serbian forces began brutally "cleansing" the area
  last spring.  His statements were the first confirmation that Muslim
  guerrillas are operating in the area.  "Last night two Serbs were killed
  and their bodies were burned in Kozarac," he acknowledge.  "Groups of Muslim
  extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains.  They could hide there
  for another six months, even a year."
	During World War II, 100,000 German troops were unable to dislodge
  Serb figherrs from the local mountains.  Yet Stakic, like other Serbian
  officials, failed to see the irony of this role reversal, or of the Serbs'
  use of Nazi term ethnic cleansing.  He insisted theSerbs were only uprooting
  Muslim "extremists" when they ravaged Kozarac.  Look at Cela, he said, a
  nearby village of 1,200 Muslims and 500 Serbs where both are living in model
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