Dretelj camp
prison camp during the Bosnian War
The Dretelj concentration camp or Dretelj prison was a prison camp run by the Croatian Defence Forces (HOS) and later by the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) during the Bosnian War.
The camp
The camp was located near Čapljina and Medjugorje in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Originally a Yugoslav People's Army barracks, the camp was primarily concrete with six warehouses, along with two concrete tunnels that were dug into the hillsides. Each warehouse was roughly 200 square meters, of which the Bosnian Croats could fit anywhere between 400 and 700 prisoners.
During 1992 the HOS detained mostly Serb civilians, who were held in inhumane conditions, while female detainees were raped.
The HVO detained Bosniak men at the Dretelj camp primarily from April to September 1993, with some Bosniaks detained there until approximately April 1994. The prison population at Dretelj Prison peaked on 11 July 1993, when the HVO detained approximately 2,270 Bosniak men at the prison. After that, the detainee population averaged about 1,700 Bosniak men.
During the time from 30 June until mid-July 1993, the Herceg-Bosna/HVO authorities conducted mass arrests of Bosniak men, including Bosniak members of the HVO, and detained many of them at Dretelj Prison. The Herceg-Bosna/HVO authorities held and continued to detain Bosniak men at the Dretelj camp irrespective of their civilian or military status, including a number of boys younger than sixteen and men older than sixty.
“Dretelj camp” enters the record as prison camp during the Bosnian War. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dretelj, camp and prison can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Dretelj camp” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Dretelj, camp and prison provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q843093. Authority coordinates are 43.126, 17.707. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1993 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dretelj camp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.