Is it fair to call the Serb-run detention centers “death camps”? NEWSWEEK last week found a disquieting resemblance to concentration camps in the facilities designed to confine political dissidents and minority ethnic groups. Reporter Joel Brand got into the Manjaca center and talked to inmates; correspondents Karen Breslau and Rod Nordland interviewed recently released prisoners in Croatia and Bosnia. Though it may be in the Muslims’ interest to exaggerate atrocities, the refugees’ tales are powerfully consistent. Civilians are dying by the hundreds, if not thousands, at the camps-some the result of beatings and torture, but the majority from neglect, starvation, disease and dehydration in the scorching Balkan heat. The refugees’ reports do not conjure up the precision death factories of the Nazis. “No one is that organized around here,” says Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ special envoy in Zagreb. Still, “the civilian population is not an indirect target,” he says. “They are the targets of direct military aggression in the name of ethnic cleansing.”

The drive for national “purity” has torn apart former friends who once lived side by side-and reunited them under the most appalling circumstances. When Nikola Misic, an ethnic Croat from northern Bosnia, was shipped off to the Vijaka camp, one of his interrogators turned out to be a Serbian neighbor from his native town of Derventa. Nearly 2 million Bosnian civilians, mostly Muslims and Croats, have been driven from their homes, often by local Serb irregulars, in order to redraw the map of former Yugoslavia. The lucky ones have swapped houses with Serbians who used to live in Muslim areas or in Croatia. But thousands have been shipped to one of as many as 94 detention camps.

One of them was “Lipa,” a gaunt survivor of Omarska, who declines to give his real name for fear of endangering his relatives still at the camp. He dates his troubles to May 30. On that day the 59-year-old Muslim, his wife and their 16-year-old son were rounded up at gunpoint by police and the Chetniks, Serbian irregulars who dress in black and wear long, square beards emulating the World War II guerrilla partisans. The city’s Muslims were forced to march, hands clasped behind their bowed heads, through the streets of Prijedor, 21 miles northwest of Omarska, singing Chetnik fighting songs. Along the way, Serbian residents turned out to jeer and laugh. Then began an orgy of looting and house burning. Tanks driven by Serbian soldiers fired shells into the windows of particular homes. “They knew exactly who owned what house and which ones to destroy,” says Lipa. “That’s how I know they were our neighbors.” Soldiers separated women from men, who were ordered onto buses that took them to Omarska. There, the Chetniks grabbed about 20 prisoners at random, says Lipa, and shot them. The others were interrogated to determine whether they were “terrorists” who would pay dearly for their resistance to Serb irregulars or “innocent” civilians who might be exchanged for Serbian prisoners held in detention camps run by Croats and Muslims.

Life at Omarska was a wretched mixture of deprivation, terror and boredom. Packed together so tightly, the men had room only to crouch. At night they slept on the ceramic-tile floor, using their shoes or shirts as pillows. During the day, in stifling 100-degree heat, the men were forbidden to talk or to wash. The only toilet soon became clogged, forcing inmates to relieve themselves on the floor. As hygiene deteriorated, “almost everyone had diarrhea and began to vomit,” says Lipa. Like other prisoners, he suffered from lice and skin ailments. Water was a major problem. After inmates passed blood in their urine, Lipa suspected that a rusty tap, the only source of drinking water, was contaminated with lead.

Beatings were a daily ritual. Intellectuals, says Lipa, were prime targets. “The guards had lists of everybody’s name, address and profession,” he says. “Doctors, engineers, lawyers and writers were beaten especially badly.” In the group of Demal Ceric, a 30-year-old Muslim at a camp in Prijedor, prisoners were taken out 50 at a time. “The guards would make us kneel as though we were praying to Allah and then beat us with their gun barrels and lead pipes.” Greater punishments were aimed at those who came from towns that had resisted the Serbs. Some were made to swallow bullets. Ceric says he saw four inmates die from beatings. “We had given up any hope of survival,” he says. “We thought we would be killed at any time.”

Much the same was true at other camps. At the Vijaka center, 25 miles northeast of Banja Luka, a 60-year-old Muslim farmer, known only by his family name of Bundavica, became a marked man, says Nikola Misic. Serbian guards, aware that two of Bundavica’s sons belonged to the Croatian defense forces, beat him regularly. One night, after an evening of drinking, several guards fell upon Bundavica with their clubs. After 15 minutes they propped him against a wall and warned other inmates to stay clear of him. Next morning, Bundavica, bleeding profusely, was still alive. “Were you drinking too much again last night?” the guards taunted him before kicking him in the stomach and head. After the man died, one guard turned to the other and said, “We didn’t kill him-he just had a heart attack.” They laughed.

Croats were treated no better than the Muslims. Mijat Sirovina, 30, an ethnic Croat from northern Bosnia, spent 105 days in two detention centers. At the first camp, Stara Gradiska, now abandoned by the Serbs, Sirovina experienced one creative torture device. Guards would force men into a chest-deep tank, big as a swimming pool, then tighten a net over the top and feed electrodes into the water–just enough voltage to deliver agonizing, but not fatal, shocks. Transferred to the Manjaca camp, 13 miles south of Banja Luka, Sirovina met Milan Vukovic, whom he calls 250 pounds of sadism. The prisoners rechristened the guard “Vukovac” (“Wolfman”). “He laughed when he beat people, like he was drugged and enjoying himself,” says Sirovina. Thirty people died from beatings and starvation, he reports, during the 40 days he spent at Manjaca. Victims were buried curled up, to avoid digging big holes. “I wouldn’t waste the dirt under my fingernails for one of you,” Wolfman told him.

At the end of last week, international outrage obliged Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnia Serbs, to consider turning over the camps to the International Red Cross, or else dismantling them. But ethnic cleansing may have already achieved its goal-a “purified” corridor through Bosnia-and done irreversible damage. Sirovina, who was released June 30 in a prisoner exchange and now lives in Slavonski Brod, Croatia, bears more than the scars of a broken jaw and missing teeth. He wants nothing whatever to do with Serbs. “They’re the ones who started the war,” he says. “We could never live with them again.”