[4] While nominally an "investigation center" or "assembly point" for members of the Bosniak and Croatian population,[5] Human Rights Watch classified Omarska as a concentration camp.

[6][7] The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, found several individuals guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated at Omarska.

[8] The camp in the village existed from about 25 May to about 21 August 1992, when the Army of Republika Srpska and police unlawfully segregated, detained and confined some of more than 7,000 Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats captured in Prijedor.

[11] The U.S. State Department and other governments believe that, at a minimum, hundreds of detainees, some of whose identities are unknown, did not survive; many others were killed during the evacuation of the camps in the Prijedor area.

Serb employees of the public security station and reserve police gathered in Cirkin Polje, part of the town of Prijedor.

[9] The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the takeover by the Serb politicians was an illegal coup d'état, which was planned and coordinated long in advance with the ultimate aim of creating a pure Serbian municipality.

As the Army of Republika Srpska rounded up Bosniak and Croat combatants, they forced them to march in columns bound for one or another of the prison camps that the Serb authorities had established in the municipality.

During the next several weeks, the Serbs continued to round up Bosniaks and Croats from Kozarac near Prijedor, and other places in the municipality and send them to the camps.

While virtually all of the prisoners were male, there were also 37 women detained in the camp, who served food and cleaned the walls of the torture rooms, and were repeatedly raped in the canteen; bodies of five of them have been exhumed.

[14][15] In addition, the Omarska and Keraterm camps also operated in a manner designed to discriminate and subjugate the non-Serbs by inhumane acts and cruel treatment.

There was a deliberate policy of overcrowding and lack of basic necessities of life, including inadequate food, polluted water, insufficient or non-existent medical care and unhygienic and cramped conditions.

Newsweek reporter Roy Gutman claimed that US State Department officials, along with representatives of other Western governments, told him that 4,000–5,000 people, the vast majority of them non-Serbs, perished at Omarska.

[17] A member of the United Nations (UN) Commission of Experts testified during the trial of Duško Tadić at the ICTY that their number was in the thousands, but she could not be precise, despite the fact that Serbian officials confirmed there were no large scale releases of prisoners sent there.

A member of the Crisis Committee, Simo Drljača, who served as chief of police for Prijedor, has stated that there were 6,000 "informative conversations" (meaning interrogations) in Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje, and that 1,503 non-Serbs were transferred from those three camps to Manjača, leaving 4,497 unaccounted for according to Human Rights Watch.

Between 1997 and 2000, there was academic and media controversy regarding the events that took place in Omarska and Trnopolje in 1992, due to claims of false reporting and "lies".

The Court stated in its judgment:Having carefully examined the evidence presented before it, and taken note of that presented to the ICTY, the Court considers that it has been established by fully conclusive evidence that members of the protected group were systematically victims of massive mistreatment, beatings, rape and torture causing serious bodily and mental harm during the conflict and, in particular, in the detention camps.

[27] "There is no doubt whatsoever that there are hundreds of bodies as yet unfound within the mine of Omarska and its vicinity" said Amor Mašović, president of the Bosnian government's Commission for Tracing Missing Persons.

[28][29] The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has been active in advocating the exhumation and identification of their bodies from mass graves around the area; with their help, a number of victims have been identified through DNA testing.

[30] Mittal Steel Company purchased the Omarska mining complex and planned to resume extraction of iron ore from the site.

[31] Mittal Steel announced in Banja Luka on 1 December 2005 that the company would build and finance a memorial in the "White House" but the project was later abandoned.

The Republika Srpska authorities considered that allowing camp survivors free access to the site and the construction of a memorial as originally agreed by ArcelorMittal would undermine reconciliation.

The survivors allege that the Orbit is "tragically intertwined with the history of war crimes in Bosnia, as the bones of victims are mixed in with the iron ore".

Campaigners urged ArcelorMittal as the world's largest steel producer to use its considerable influence to oppose the local politics of denial and play an active role in healing fractured communities that have made the company's success possible.