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In the spring of 1992, Serb army forces took control of Prijedor. They ordered Muhamed to go on the radio and tell the people of the city to surrender their weapons to the Serbs. Instead, Muhamed told the citizens to remain calm and to use peaceful means to resist the illegal Serb government that the army had formed. Prison Camp Muhamed was removed from his job as mayor, and later arrest- ed by Serb police. He was sent to a prison camp in a nearby city called Omarska. Prisoners at Omarska slept on the floor, and were fed one meal a day—a slice of bread and a bowl of thin soup. Conditions were filthy, and lice infested the prisoners’ hair and beards. They were regularly tortured and beaten, and many did not survive. Muhamed was held at Omarska for five weeks. Then, one night toward the end of July, 1992, he and six others—all high- ranking men from Prijedor—were led away by guards. They were never seen again. Muhamed was killed for no other rea- son than because he was a Muslim, and a leader of his commu- nity. Sadly, his story is not unusual. The Western powers tried through diplomatic means to bring the fighting to an end. Safe havens were established by the UN, but these were ignored by the Serbs. In one safe haven, at Srebrenica, a Serbian force rounded up 7,500 Muslim men and boys between the ages of 12 and 60, and slaughtered them in July 1995. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an inter- national organization established in 1949 by the United States

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What Is Genocide?