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Revision as of 20:28, 30 March 2006 by 70.162.140.144 (talk) (→Demographics)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Prijedor (Cyrilic: Приједор) is a city and municipality in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, located on the Sana river, between Novi Grad and Banja Luka. It is administratively part of the Republika Srpska entity.
Demographics
According to date from the 1991 census, the municipality of Prijedor had 112,470 inhabitants: 49,454 Muslims (44%), 47,745 Serbs (42.4%), 6,371 Yugoslavs (5.66%), 6,300 Croats (5.64%) and 2,600 others (2.3%).In 1992 the city of Prijedor had 45,000 residents.
Geography
Prijedor is located in north-western Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina. It is located between towns of Sanski Most to the south, the Novi Grad (to the west) and Bosanska Dubica (to the north), and the regional capital of Banja Luka to the east. Except for the area of Sanski Most, the other neighbouring districts had Serbian majority populations prior to the Bosnian war.
Two smaller towns Ljubija and Kozarac still belong to the municipality of Prijedor, as well as numerous villages and hamlets. The Sana river flows through the municipality (which has a shape that resembles an irregular vertical rectangle) from the west towards the centre, and then bending to the south. The town of Prijedor is located in the valley of the river, where the Sana river bends to the south. There is a large artificial lake for fishfarming to the south-east of Prijedor town. The district is mountainous especially in the northern and western areas, with forested Kozara mountain in the north and parts of the Majdanska mountain in the south-west.
History
As part of northern border zone of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Prijedor was part of a corridor that Serbs wanted to establish between Serbia and the Serb-controlled Republic of Serbian Krajina. One obstacle to such a corridor is that when crossing the Drina River (the frontier between Serbia proper and BiH) and moving westward through BiH towards the Krajina region, the pre-war population was multi- ethnic and the Serbs were not a majority in many of these areas. Any Serbian demands for territory for a corridor were thus unlikely to gain political support in BiH. In 1993, Serbian military leaders in Banja Luka acknowledged the need for the conquest of a corridor as mentioned. It was a prerequisite for the "bringing in of humanitarian assistance". The town of Omarska near Prijedor housed the infamous Omarska camp during the most recent Balkan War.
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