Truemors
OBSERVER reporter Ed Vulliamy exposed the Bosnian concentration camps. In the wake of Radovan Karadzic's arrest this week, Muslim figurehead Fikret Alic, whose image was imprinted on the world's media is today revisted.
Most people would not recognise him now - he has a full and manly frame, and a puckish smile; he has even had his teeth fixed. But I would know it anywhere, from the mixture of mischief, a deep inward stare and that mop of hair. Sixteen summers ago next week, Fikret Alic was probably the most familiar figure in the world. His skeletal, emaciated torso and xylophone ribcage, behind the barbed wire at Trnopolje concentration camp, embodied the violence unleashed on Bosnia's Muslim civilians at the orders of Radovan Karadzic, the man due to be taken to The Hague this weekend to answer charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
As Karadzic awaits his fate, Fikret Alic is back in Bosnia. Although currently living in Sonderberg, Denmark, he has bought a flat in a block still under construction in Kozarac town centre, and is here to save money to rebuild the nearby family home out of which he was chased in 1992, having completed the foundations. The arrest of the man who organised his torments has left a bittersweet taste.
'I am happy and I am angry,' he says. 'For 13 years, he was living protected as a free man. And for the three years before that, all the world knew what he was doing, from my camp to Srebrenica, but did nothing to stop him. So now the truth will be told, but what has happened to us all this time? Now at last I am happy just because I am alive and here, with my wife and children, and not dead like so many others. But while he was free, I was broken, too.'
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