Personal testimony · Trnopolje · August 1992
Two Versions of One Death: A Detainee from Ljubija in the Trnopolje Camp in August 1992
Anto Tomić, a Bosnian Croat from Ljubija, passed through the Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje camps in the Prijedor area in the summer of 1992. In Trnopolje he heard two contradictory versions of the death of Milan Ćurguz "Krivi", a man who brought food and messages to the detainees from Ljubija, and he later repeated both before the Hague Tribunal.
Arrest and Keraterm
In 1992, Anto Tomić was 34 years old. He was a Bosnian Croat who lived in Ljubija in Prijedor municipality and worked in the mines in Omarska. Between 13 and 14 June 1992, two Serb soldiers, who were his neighbors, arrested him in his apartment. Together with about ten other Bosniak and Croat men, he was taken to the Keraterm camp.
In Keraterm he spent almost three weeks in Room 2, which held about 400 people. During that entire time he was never interrogated, and no one told him why he was detained.
Omarska
On 4 July 1992, Tomić and the other detainees from Ljubija were transferred from Keraterm to the Omarska camp. There, Tomić was once beaten so severely that he lay unconscious for four days.
Trnopolje
On 6 August 1992, Tomić, exhausted and beaten, was transferred with other men from Ljubija to the Trnopolje camp. The camp commander was Major Slobodan Kuruzović of the Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS). Tens of thousands of detainees passed through Trnopolje, mostly elderly people, women and children.
According to Tomić's account, many detainees suffered from dysentery, and there was one toilet for about thirty men. In the camp, Pero Ćurguz, a teacher from Ljubija, worked for the Red Cross. According to Tomić's testimony, he treated the detainees from his town correctly: he brought them food and arranged accommodation for them. Before the Tribunal, Tomić said of him: "As far as we from Ljubija were concerned, he was very correct."
Milan Ćurguz "Krivi"
Pero's brother Milan Ćurguz, known as "Krivi", was the local Serb representative in Ljubija. Every day he brought the detainees from Ljubija food, clothing and messages from their relatives. According to the testimony of Anto Tomić, Milan told him that this help to the detainees would cost him his life. Milan Ćurguz was killed in the summer of 1992, but when and how exactly he died has not been established.
Two Versions in One Day
According to the testimony of Anto Tomić, on the day of their arrival in Trnopolje, Pero Ćurguz told the detainees that Milan had been shot in the back by Serbs from his own unit. About half an hour later, a television crew from Banja Luka arrived at the camp. In front of the camera, Pero then stated that his brother had been killed by Bosniaks. According to Tomić's written account, in this second version Pero also said that Milan had fallen in combat with a superior group of "green berets", and that the detainees served, as Tomić puts it, as a backdrop during the filming.
Thus, on the same day, two mutually exclusive stories about the same death were told: one in front of the detainees, the other in front of the camera.
Testimony in The Hague
Under the name Ante Tomić, he testified on 5 and 6 April 2001 before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the case against the Keraterm commanders Duško Sikirica, Damir Došen and Dragan Kolundžija, and on that occasion he repeated both versions of Milan's death. Sikirica, Došen and Kolundžija pleaded guilty to persecution, and the ICTY sentenced them to 15, 5 and 3 years in prison.