Former concentration camp inmates marked the 26th anniversary of the closing of the Bosnian Serb ‘Omarska’ concentration camp near the northwestern town of Prijedor.

The event was organised by the Prijedor 92 and Kozarac associations of camp inmates and the Regional Association of Banja Luka Camp Inmates.

After footage of the conditions in Omarska were published in foreign media on this day 26 years ago, Bosnian Serb forces moved nearly all inmates to two other concentration camps, Manjaca and Trnopolje, the head of Prijedor 92, Mirsad Duratovic, told the Fena news agency.

“Only a small group of inmates was left, and they were there to serve as a shield, a mask, a facade, so that some future news agencies that would come in would show that it was actually not as it was shown in the reports of August 5 and 6,” Duratovic said.

Located in a mining complex, the Omarska camp, where inmates were kept from May to August 1992, was one of the most notorious camps in Bosnia.

More than 6,000 civilians were kept there, 800 of whom were killed in brutal ways.

Next to the mine, within the concentration camp complex, there are two houses – the ‘red house’ and the ‘white house’.

According to testimonies from survivors, the walls in the ‘white house’ were soaked in blood, as this is where inmates were interrogated and tortured and women were raped.

Nobody knows what went on in the ‘red house’, as none of those taken there ever came out alive, witnesses said.

Witnesses described a specific way in which inmates would be killed in Omarska, which entails wrapping truck tires around a living inmate and setting them ablaze. Apart from this, inmates experienced beatings and would be left without food and water for long periods of time.

Many of the survivors are afraid to testify as they live in the same area where they were tortured and abused.

Some of the victims from Omarska were killed in the 1992 Koricani Cliffs and the Hrastova Glavica massacres, while many others died as a from the wounds they endured while being tortured.

In August 1992, renown US and UK journalists, Roy Gutman, Penny Marshall, Ed Vulliamy and Ian Williams revealed to the world what was happening in Prijedor and those who survived the concentration camps most likely did thanks to the reporters.