Cleansing the past in Omarska

It is an unexceptional and most ordinary place.

There used to be a ceramics factory nearby, and not far from the factory was a shuttered iron ore mine called Omarska, once the biggest producer in all of Europe.

Back in the 1980s, Omarska churned out three million tons of iron a year and its large complex of buildings laid out amidst the ramshackle beauty of this westernmost part of Bosnia was the largest on the continent.

So we already have the ceramics factory and the ore mine. Now let us add to that the school in a neighbouring village, where the workers from the factory and the mine once sent their children. This completes the cluster of buildings that became, in the early days of the Bosnian War, the site of some of the most heinous war crimes to be carried out in the recorded history of Europe.

It is stunning then to note that three years ago, this mine was purchased by steel giant ArcelorMittal. The world's largest steel company bought a former concentration camp and – despite repeated promises – has quietly resumed iron ore mining without erecting a memorial to the lives lost, or bodies and minds tortured.

The concentration camps opened in May 1992 and were shut in August of the same year, when two British reporters - one toting a TV camera - happened upon the living skeletons held captive there. Those that had not yet died by that time were transferred to a prison camp at another location until December of the same year.

Survivors groups gathered in late summer to honour their own on the 15th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. While there, they held funerals for 140 more bodies that have been recently found and identified.

Of the three sites, the Omarska camp was the most monstrous, having been upended by a volcanic wickedness that transformed it from the most prolific iron mine to the most horrific torture facility. And it happened so swiftly that only the darkest of nights and darkest of souls could conspire together to make it happen.

And now Omarska has become a money-making venture between the Republic of Srpska - the Serb-controlled entity within Bosnia - and ArcelorMittal. In fact, it is the largest act of privatization since the war.

In 2006, the Financial Times named Mittal its Man of the Year. And in May of this year, Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People. Mittal is Britain's richest man - net worth $25 billion in 2005 - and has a 51 percent controlling interest in the mine, leaving 49 percent to the Republic of Srpska. Newspaper reports go easy on Mittal, stating it was unclear if he knew he was buying a former concentration camp when he bought the Omarska mine.

Yet, to date, and despite efforts by survivor groups, there is not a single plaque or sign in Omarska to note the horrors that happened during those early days of the war, and a head-strong congress of deniers will say the torture didn't happen. There were no concentration camps here, my friend. There were no radical Serb nationalists who detained, viciously tortured, and killed their ethnically Muslim and Croat neighbors.

Stay on the bus, don't get off here, there is nothing to see.

They would be right, in one sense: there is nothing to see. The rapes, the starvation, the beatings, and the sadistic sexual mutilations that resulted in mass death have been buried by a collective will; buried and ignored like the some 1,700 bodies in the mass grave that is believed by many to lie beneath Omarska. In fact, there is a strong chance the machines from the mine were used to put them there.

It is an Olympian leap to imagine Mittal was unaware of the atrocities when he bought the mine, given the international coverage of the camps. But he knows now. He has met with survivor groups - such as the Dutch-based Optimisti organization - agreeing to keep at least one area of the mine, known as the "White House," as a museum. Yet his promises during the last three years have been so far postponed and frozen, and as yet unfulfilled. In October, ArcelorMittal made yet another promise to the survivors to finally proceed.

No one in the steel company's London office, or its offices in The Netherlands and Luxembourg, returned phone calls or answered emails regarding ArcelorMittal's unfulfilled agreements with survivor groups.

Some of the 60 or so guards at the concentration camp had worked at Omarska when it was in operation as a mine before the war. Having signed an agreement with the Republika Srpska to give priority employment to Serbs, what is the possibility that at least some of his current workers on the payroll put those bodies there?

The Serbs have put up some memorial plaques - honouring Serbs who died elsewhere in Bosnia during the war. There is not a single commemoration or acknowledgment of the thousands of Muslims and Croat Bosnians that were victimized and murdered by those they used to call their neighbors and their friends.

The school is in use again, too, and the end of the academic year has been moved up by city officials - from late June to May 24 - the same date in 1992 the school building was opened as a concentration camp for Muslims and Croats. Even the region's town fair, which was traditionally held in the middle of May, was moved to April 30, the date the Serbs "liberated" the town.

Because of the barbarity of the acts that now define Omarska, a separate war crimes trial was held at the Hague, in which four men were convicted. One ringleader, Milan Kovacevic had, after the war, already confessed during a brandy-filled afternoon with the British reporter who discovered the camp, making comparisons of his misdeeds to Auschwitz. Kovacevic died unexpectedly in prison before the trial started.

When the trial was over, the judges reported this: "Extreme brutality was systematic ... dead bodies were left to fester for days at a time and a terrible stench and fear pervaded the camp....a regular stream of murders, torture and other forms of physical and mental violence ... unbearable conditions appear to have driven the detainees insane ... the corpses were so numerous, they covered some 50 or 70 metres."

The survivor groups are not asking that the mine close, despite the nature of who is profiting from this tainted land; they are requesting that their suffering be acknowledged. It really is that simple.

Man of the year, world's most influential: Please step up.