AMERICAN PROSECUTORS ARRIVE IN BOSNIA: Investigating War Crimes Against Serbs, With This Camp Under Special Focus!

A group of American prosecutors is expected to arrive in Derventa this month to take statements, together with officers from the Bosnia and Herzegovina State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), from eight former detainees about the horrors they endured at the notorious Rabić camp for Serbs, located at a military warehouse in the area of the town during the spring of 1992.

During the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the Army of Republika Srpska had not yet been formally established, Croatian and Bosniak forces attacked the local Serbian population in Derventa. At the same time, camps for Serbs were established in the town, the most notorious of which were located at the Army Hall and at the Rabić site.

The Rabić camp, established in April 1992, held 120 Serbs, while several hundred Serbian civilians passed through detention camps in the Derventa area.

Trials have already been conducted over the killings and abuse of detainees, with several individuals sentenced to prison terms of one year or longer. American prosecutors are expected to be briefed on these cases later this month.

This was confirmed to the Banja Luka-based Glas Srpske newspaper by the president of the Derventa Association of Former Camp Detainees, Drago Knežević, who himself endured abuse in the camps in the early 1990s.

“Four or five prosecutors from the United States, as part of previous cooperation with the local prosecutor’s office, are expected to come and interview former detainees regarding the Rabić camp. This should take place starting on July 20 and continue over the following several days,” said Knežević, who, along with two other former detainees, is scheduled to be interviewed on the first day of the visit.

At this point, he says, he does not know what will happen next.

“The assumption is that they are seeking information about certain individuals who were at Rabić and are now living in the United States, so that they can take further measures there, such as deportation or extradition to our judiciary,” Knežević believes.

In 2024, Haris Skerlić was sentenced to one year in prison for the abuse of civilians. The indictment stated that the defendant’s twin brother, Muris, also took part in the crimes, but at the time of the verdict he was unavailable to the judiciary in Doboj.

“We’ll see who exactly the Americans will be asking about. It mainly concerns the twin brother, or both of them, because they were or still are in the United States. Whether the American prosecution will take any further action against him, I don’t know, but I do know that I was one of their victims. One of them took me outside, ordered me to kneel, and handed me a pistol, telling me to kill myself. I put it to my temple and pulled the trigger, but it misfired. He cursed my ‘Chetnik mother’… While I was kneeling, he beat me with his military boots across my chest and face,” Knežević recounted, adding that afterward he remained for some time in the underground hangar at Rabić.

The person most notorious for the brutality of crimes committed against civilians in Derventa was Azra Bašić, who was finally sentenced in 2018 to 14 years in prison.

The horrors of the camps in Derventa were also described by Ilija Ćuk, whose testimony was recorded in the Atlas of Crimes Against Serbs During the Defensive-Patriotic War of 1992, published by the Republika Srpska Center for Research of War, War Crimes and the Search for Missing Persons.

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