[Reader-list] Omarska: The afterlife of a death camp

[ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com]

In early December 2004, it came to the attention of the public that the steel magnate Laxmi Mittal, Britain's 
wealthiest resident, had a controlling share in a former iron ore mine owned by a public sector company of 
the Republika Srpska. The site of this mine is Omarska, that was revealed, back in August 1992, to be a 
detention center operated by Serbian forces to incarcerate, torture, rape and kill Bosnian Muslims and Croats 
during the war that tore Yugoslavia apart. Many have used the term "concentration camp" to describe 
Omarska during the period when it functioned as a key locus of ethnic cleansing activities carried out by 
Serbs against their then-countrymen. 

Bosnian survivors' groups as well as government agencies appealed to Mr. Mittal, who has bought and 
converted industrial facilities all over eastern Europe and countries that were once a part of the Soviet Union, 
to make a memorial at Omarska. This put Mr. Mittal in the awkward position of antagonizing Bosnian Serb 
authorities, who have every interest in the economic regeneration of their ravaged region, but no stake 
whatsoever in memorializing the terrible violence against other communities committed on their territory. 
Moreover, mass graves have already been discovered in the neighborhood of Omarska, and there is a 
genuine possibility of yet more evidence of large-scale murder turning up in the area before it can become 
functional once again as a mine. Not even the world's single largest steel manufacturer can afford to build 
his next mining complex over dead bodies.

Claude Lanzmann's excruciating 9-1/2-hour documentary, "Shoah" (1985), is shot for the most part in 
Treblinka, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, and other such places in Poland where the Nazis once ran 
their concentration camps, killing millions of Jews during the Second World War. However, Lanzmann does 
not use archival footage, nor does he attempt a reconstruction of the camps, either at their original 
locations, or in specially created film-sets. Instead, he returns to these sites as they are -- their ovens, 
changing rooms, gas chambers, quarters and crematoria mostly over-run with vegetation, mute, snow-
covered in the winter and green in the summer, uninhabited and apparently untended, marked by atrocity in 
a way that simply cannot be undone. 

"Shoah" took over 10 years to make. Again and again, at different times of the year, in the heat and in the 
cold, the film-maker went back to the same meadows, fields, streams, railway-stations, forests and 
graveyards, the leafy country-roads, the paths in the mud going nowhere. In this misleading serenity, 
unused and undisturbed since the 1940s stand the barracks, gateways, fences and buildings whose purpose 
defies comprehension. Victims, bystanders and perpetrators, interviewed by Lanzmann over 350 hours, all 
use words like "unthinkable", "unbelievable", "impossible" and "incomprehensible" to recount what they 
experienced. We understand that no gloss is possible for what happened to Europe's Jews in the Nazi camps, 
nor can these physical spaces ever be restored to any kind of normalcy. Too many suffered, too many died, 
the pain has spilt out of the realm of human relations into nature: the very landscape is utterly tainted. 
Bodies under the earth. Blood in the soil. Ashes in the air. Gates to a living hell, execution walls, chimneys 
coated with burnt flesh. Train-tracks that transported thousands of cattle-cars of the unsuspecting living to 
their unimaginably gruesome death. The testimony of survivors from the towns and villages all around, as 
they remember huge fires, horrible stench, unbearable screams, a calamitous violence whose physicality 
once witnessed can never be forgotten. The heart shudders for modern-day Poles, left with a country scarred 
by these material remainders of irredeemable evil.

Can there be an architecture sadder than that of Auschwitz? What can anyone do with such a place? It cannot 
be covered over and it cannot be recovered. Perhaps Mr. Mittal should watch Lanzmann's film before he 
hastens to erase Omarska's recent past with his latest venture. Alas for Bosnia, which experienced its own 
Holocaust not so long ago. If going to Omarksa as it is today fails to move him, Mr. Mittal ought to watch the 
British TV channel ITN's 1992 footage of the camp while it was still operational, with human beings forcibly 
kept inside it. He must see those scenes of silence, fear, lying, cruelty, deprivation, impending doom -- all 
plainly visible through television cameras without a single word spoken. He should look carefully at the blue 
uniforms of the inmates, the rows of shoes in the sheds, the scarce food in the mess, the barbed wire 
outside, the eyes of men whose world has been irrevocably violated. If he cannot use his billions to finance a 
museum or a memorial of some other kind -- an installation, a sculpture, a structure -- on site, then at the 
very least he ought to leave what used to be the camp alone, let is speak for itself, be its own testimonial 
against genocide. There are mines enough in the world, and plenty of other ways for a devastated region to 
rebuild its economy than the inauspicious, unseemly and ultimately immoral attempt to salvage a death 
camp for industrial activity.       

(For a detailed report on Mr. Mittal's investment in Omarska, see the Guardian story at, among many other 
sites: http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=1976).
         
Ananya Vajpeyi, Ph.D. 
Center for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University
JNU New Campus
New Delhi 1l0067 INDIA. 
E: ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com