I remember the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of May 1992 with great clarity and affection. Sunny afternoons in the garden and walks along The Backs in Cambridge. An outing to the cinema. The excitement of making a home with my partner, recently arrived from Canada. Europe at the end of the twentieth century - with all its material comforts and cultured rituals. At the same time, just two hours by plane from that placid scene, a young man (no less European) was witnessing the destruction of a centuries’ old way of life as his former schoolmates and drinking buddies turned on their neighbours with an inexplicable savagery - swiftly putting paid to all those confident high school history lessons that had taught us ‘Never Again in Europe!’

Kemal Pervanic is a thirty-one-year-old Bosnian refugee who arrived in the United Kingdom at the beginning of 1993. He had survived almost seven months of brutality, terror and hunger in Omarska and Manjaca - two of the prison camps which the then-triumphant Bosnian Serb political and military leadership had established in Northern Bosnia. The existence of these squalid, deadly places in Europe’s heartland had shocked the Continent for a brief media moment toward the end of that hot summer of 1992. But it is doubtful that many of us have as yet taken the full measure of the damage which these accursed camps and their catalogue of horrors have done to the integrity of our European human rights and humanitarian law traditions. Something crucial to modern European self-perception died at places like Omarska and Srebrenica. As historian Michael Ignatieff has written of the Bosnian conflict, ‘no one who was there will ever believe in Europe again...’

Kemal Pervanic’s memoir of his time as an inmate of Omarska and Manjaca is a vital and compelling act of resistance. Resistance against forgetting; resistance against the reduction of any human being to the status of a disposable object; resistance against those who insisted on seeing the war in Bosnia as the inevitable explosion of deeply-rooted and implacable ethnic hatreds which could only find resolution in partition and segregation. On one level, what is extraordinary about this book is its very ordinariness. For this is the story of a young man from a village indistinguishable from scores of others which suffered the same lightning-quick dissolution of common life during the first months of the war in 1992. It is written - with remarkable poise and control - by a young man who had never thought of himself as an author or a historian, and who was indeed to become first person from his village to receive a university degree after his release, resettlement and rehabilitation in Britain.

We have had accounts of various aspects of the Bosnian conflict from foreign journalists, academics, or standard-bearers for the benighted ‘international community’ - frequently with greater or lesser helpings of ego attached. From Bosnia itself, we have had a number of moving and incisive meditations on the war from intellectuals, poets, and home correspondents. Many of these books and articles have been peppered with testimony from the grassroots and from individual victims of appalling human right violations. But ‘The Killing Days’ is surely one of the few first-hand, comprehensive records yet produced by an ordinary Bosnian citizen who endured a particularly bleak chapter of his country’s tragic dismemberment.

With commendable economy and understatement, Kemal Pervanic recalls how thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and a few dissenting Serbs were beaten, tortured, starved and murdered at the hands of their captors during those first bloody months of the conflict. Although it is a primarily a story of the wholesale destruction of the Bosnian Muslim society of the Prijedor-Kozarac region, Kemal’s book is a lament for the violent disappearance of a way of life which transcended what he personally regards as the artificial boundaries of religious or national identity.

First and foremost, Kemal’s memoir is a narrative of grief at the loss of fundamental humanity which these camps represented. It is a narrative which does not concern itself with the priorities of nationalists or ethnic purists of any stripe - apart from his evident disgust at their stupidities. Like the poet and journalist Rezak Hukanovic’s otherwise very different book about the Omarska nightmare, ‘The Killing Days’ makes plain that while the camps were an integral part of the Bosnian Serb national project - those who carried out its ugly demands with the greatest conviction should be viewed more precisely as individual thugs or gangsters rather than embodiments of collective identity.

Shakespeare wrote that ‘the private wound is the deepest’ - a judgement that applies to the fate of the Prijedor-Kozarac region during the summer of 1992 with astonishing accuracy. For in this corner of the country, the ferocity of the maiming and killing which took place in the name of the Republika Srpska was often directly related to the intimacy of the tormentor and the tormented. Nothing shocks and chastens more in this book than Kemal’s roll call of those with whom he had once attended primary school, drank in some village pub, or chatted in a local barber shop - but who then in an instant were transformed into camp guards or agents of terror. The avenging of imagined slights or wrongs among former neighbours and the settling of old scores between families lent the cruelties of Omarska an especially chilling dimension which ‘The Killing Days’ captures in all its painful detail.

But at the core of this chronicle of seemingly limitless inhumanity, there is also resilience and a streak of very dark comedy. The tenderness and generosity between Kemal and his brother, and their fears for their mother’s safety; the quiet dignity of broken men who could not be certain they would live to see another day; the frantic compilation of improvised recipe collections among inmates struggling to keep some memory of home and family alive; the surreal image of the inmates’ half-shaven heads after a power cut brings their mass hair clipping session to a sudden halt - these are as much at the heart of this book as the random acts of violence and the body counts which punctuated each and every day at Omarska.

Kemal even manages to have even tremendous fun at the expense of his pompous captors - sending up the absurd paranoia of local chieftains possessed by visions of grand Islamic conspiracies; the comic book patriotism of the shabby impresario who leads the inmates in enforced choral singing in the camp; and the officer who dreams of a boat built by Muslim slave labour, but whose statelet inconveniently lacks a seacoast. But it is the unforgettable moments of compassion and even creativity in the midst of despair that most distinguish this book - the ingenuity of the artist/craftsmen of Manjaca as they fashion beautiful objects out of bits of wood; the gentle tending of the wounded and the sick in the stinking, overcrowded rooms of Omarska; and most especially, Kemal and his brother parting with their last, carefully hidden Deutschmarks in a futile attempt to ransom a condemned man from hideous, certain death.

Editing this book with Kemal over a three-month period at the end of 1998 has taught me much about the reach of the human spirit. The absence of hatred for his captors or a desire for revenge against those who took everything from him - which is so apparent throughout this book - has been confirmed many times over in our conversations. Kemal’s aspirations in writing this book - in a language he scarcely knew six years ago - were never self-consciously literary, but moral. Like Primo Levi, he emerged from his imprisonment determined to tell the truth about what he had known in the grim, unsparing universe of the camps.

One day as we worked together on the book, I asked Kemal what he would say today to some of those former schoolmates who had stood guard over him at Omarska were he to meet them face to face. With startling frankness, he told me that in his darkest moments - when he thinks of those who destroyed his home and his world and the lives of so many relatives and friends - he sometimes imagines what it would be like to murder them in turn. He told me ‘I can actually see myself killing them - I watch myself doing it - and I feel nothing as I prepare to do it, or while I am doing it, or after the killing is done. But then ... I realise that I do not need to do this - that I do not want to do this - that in doing this, I would lose myself completely - lose everything that I am ... And then, I just feel privileged.’

Words such as these are unflinching in their acknowledgement of the scale of the crime committed and the depth of the sorrow and anger of those who survived. And yet, at the same time, they speak to a readiness to break the cycle of violence, to a capacity to allow ourselves, in Seamus Heaney’s words, to ‘... hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge.’ Kemal’s brave words - his desire for justice rather than vengeance - and the book he has written have certainly left me with at least a fragile hope that Europe might just one day learn something from the legacy of this terrible century. In giving us his story in these pages, it is we who become the privileged ones.

Dr Brian Phillips

Amnesty International

‘The Killing Days’

by Kemal Pervanic