Judge Almiro Rodrigues of Portugal passed sentences of up to 25 years and told the men that they had all known about or participated in rape, murder and persecution aimed at extinguishing the non-Serb population of northern Bosnia.
Dragoljub Prcac, Milojica Kos, Miroslav Kvocka and Mlado Radic were all camp commanders, and a local taxi driver, Zoran Zigic, was a regular visitor to Omarska and other camps, where he beat prisoners, often to death.
Kvocka, Prcac, Kos and Radic were sentenced to five, six, seven and 20 years respectively: Zigic was given the longest term, 25 years.
"You enjoyed using force, you enjoyed inflicting pain ... You also enjoyed humiliating detainees by forcing them to lap up water like dogs or to drink their own blood," the judge told Zigic.
Omarska was one of three camps set up in northern Bosnia to rid the country of non-Serbs. About 6,000 Muslims and Croats were held in appalling conditions at the camp, a former mining complex near Prijedor, for about five months in the spring and summer of 1992.
Hundreds died of starvation, punishment beatings and ill-treatment. The prosecutors compared the camps to those run by the Nazis.
The trial, which lasted 15 months, heard harrowing evidence from 140 witnesses. The prosecutors said new arrivals were beaten with batons and rifle butts and crammed into stiflingly hot metal cages without sanitation, exercise or adequate food.
The cages were apparently stacked four high and separated by grates. Since there were no toilets, inmates lived in their own filth, which dripped through the grates.
Although the prison was predominantly male, several dozen women were also held there and repeatedly raped by camp staff. Corpses piled up outside an interrogation centre known as the White House and were dumped in graves in a field beside a razed mosque.
The Omarska camp came to be seen as a symbol of ethnic hatred in Bosnia. The revelations of what went on behind its barbed wire in 1992 shocked the world and was one of the things which led to the creation of the UN war crimes tribunal the following year.
The then Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is himself wanted by the tribunal for genocide, angrily denied the existence of "concentration camps" at the time and claimed that Omarska and the two other camps were run-of-the-mill holding centres for prisoners of war.
But media visits to Omarska, notably by ITN and the Guardian, prompted the EU to condemn the camps as "repulsive and despicable".
Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian wrote at the time: "The men are at various stages of human decay and affliction; the bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced."
Of the 50,000 Muslims who lived in Prijedor before the Bosnian war, a mere 6,000 remained afterwards, and the prosecutors said the rest had either fled or been murdered.
All five men continue to protest their innocence and are likely to appeal against yesterday's verdict. Three other men were indicted by the tribunal in 1995 for crimes at Omarska, one for genocide, but all remain at large.