These are the words of Kemal Pervanic, the author of this chilling and powerful book.

We should be thankful that his prediction from his time in Omarska camp during the Bosnian War came true.

The Killing Days is a moving book recalling a terrible and shameful period in Europe’s history. All the more so because its simple language recalls the experiences not of a politician, or a general, or a journalist, or an analyst of war, but one of many hundreds of thousands of anonymous victims of the grand designs of Balkan leaders.

What happened to Kemal Pervanic happened to countless others whose stories may never be told. And to countless more in Kosovo, whose fate is now slowly being disintered with their remains from the Balkans’ latest killing fields.

I was the first person to get into Manjaca camp during the Bosnian War, having been threatened by Serb generals who tried to stop me that if I went there I would be shot. I saw the prisoners who had previously been in Omarska. Maybe Kemal was among them, though we never met. Certainly the terrible experiences of the prisoners there, of which Kemal writes so movingly, was etched into every one of the emaciated faces I saw — and they haunt me still.

It is a sad irony that within a few years of the end of the Bosnian conflict the Balkans are again in turmoil. I only hope that at last we will learn, and that the experiences of Kemal — and again of thousands like him in Kosovo — will never be repeated in the name of political or ethnic advantage.

To read this book is to understand, painfully, the human consequences of our failures in the Balkans and the historical necessity of ensuring we never repeat them.