Mirsad Tokaca, Director of the war crimes research and documentation centre, today added his name to the growing list of people who believe that the commemoration of the Omarska camp is too important to be rushed through by a handful of people without consultation.

Mr. Tokaca was in Prijedor this week to present the interim results of his project "Losses in BiH 1992-1995" that has been collecting data on wartime deaths since 1993. He stated that the civilian losses in Prijedor were second only to Srebrenica as a proportion of population. However, as he told Emir Suljagic in an interview with Dani published in December 2005, "genocide is not a matter of numbers."

"These numbers only strengthen my belief that 1992 was the decisive year, that genocide took place then. Genocide is not a matter of numbers, especially following the conviction of Radislav Krstic. The Convention on Genocide likewise does not specify numbers, but speaks of the intention to destroy or kill a specific group, or indeed to expose it to conditions leading to its demise. Such demise, moreover, does not mean that the victims must be physically exterminated, but that they are forced to leave their habitat. In other words, that the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot live in their homeland, that inhabitants of Zvornik no longer live in their town, and so on. This indeed was the intention of the aggressor. The figures only encourage me in the conviction that genocide is not a question of numbers: it is a matter of the identity of the victims, the way in which they died, and when they died. Take, for example, the question of Zvornik. Our research shows that the crime occurred over the period of April to August 1992, that the killing reached its peak in May-June and the population's disappearance in June-July, and that the two phenomena wholly fit together. The same picture is repeated not just in Srebrenica, but also in Bratunac, Vlasenica, Sarajevo and Prijedor. I am speaking here about civilian casualties, which occur in inverse proportion to the rising resistance: as resistance grows, the number of casualties declines."

(Source: Bosnian Institute News)

This all supports the fact that the ethnic cleansing of the Prijedor region in 1992, and the network of camps established to support the process, was a key moment in the Bosnian genocide. If one place can symbolise what happened in 1992, so that we can all learn from one of the darkest episodes in Bosnia's past, then it is the camp at the Omarska/Ljubija mine.