ON a sunny little hillside in central Bosnia five years ago I met Lieutenant Colonel Bozidar Popovic. He was a middleaged Serb with a Partisan hat, a cane stick and a big moustache who yelled at me: "Have you ever heard of Jihad?" Yes, I thought, I had heard of the Arabic word for "holy war". But Colonel Popovic was the commander of Manjaca concentration camp and not a man who expected replies.
Now inevitably on a list of UN sought war criminals and, equally inevitably, still on the run - the good colonel was keen to show me how well he treated the 900 Muslim wretches under his control, the doctors, intellectuals, policemen and businessmen who had been "ethnically cleansed" from their homes in Prijedor. At one point, Colonel Popovic - claiming all the while that his prisoners loved him - insisted that I and my colleagues drink slivovic with him. And when I put down the glass of plum brandy and glanced out of his window, I saw lines of those poor defeated souls, tramping greyfaced through the rain back to their cattle stalls.
Colonel Popovic appears suddenly towards the end of Rezak Hukanovic's terrifying account of life and death in the Serb camps, still betraying the chilling camaraderie of the monster. "I hope we meet again, but over coffee or a drink," he tells the survivors of Omarska and Manjaca as they are at last bussed off to freedom in Croatia. "War is worthless, but it can't last forever. I wish you all the best." As Hukanovic says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And hell, of a kind, is what this book is all about. Readers who are of what the BBC used to call "a nervous disposition" should read no further. For this is a book about mind numbing brutality and absolute evil:
"Never in all his life was Djemo to see a more horrifying sight. The poor man stood up a little his cries were those of someone driven to insanity by pain. And then Djemo, and everyone else, saw clearly what had happened:
the guards had cut off the man's sexual organ and half his behind."
"One rainy night the name of Mehmedalija Sarajlic was called out. A distinguished, grey haired man about 60 years old, he was taken outside and forced to strip naked; then the guards brought him, still naked, back into the room with Hajra, a girl who couldn't have been older than 22 or 23. She, too, was forced to strip, and they were ordered to make love in front of all the others." "He'd come up to a prisoner, getting right in his face, and ask: "Which of your eyes do you like better?" With others, he'd look down. "Which ball... ?" He hammered another [nail] ... into a young prisoner's heel and threatened to kill him if he tried to pull it out."
There is a limit to how much of this a reader - or at least, a reader without a heart of stone can take. The account is taut, bleak, the phrases pared back, almost adjective less, fury in every paragraph. Djemo is the author, who oddly casts himself in the third person throughout his narrative. Sarajlic refuses to make love to the already raped girl, is savagely beaten and left lying in the rain to perish. The boy with the nail in his foot dies in excruciating pain. Prisoners are forced to bite off each other's genitals, they have their eyes gouged out by guards, pull worms out of their own head wounds - "the kind that normally appear on corpses when they start to rot" or collapse with dysentery, their excrement running down their legs on to their own sick colleagues.
"It was a time of crying without tears, without noise," Hukanovic writes of the Omarska camp. "Even prayers couldn't be heard. It was as if the prisoners had been both tried and sentenced to endure the evil of the camp. Every thing around them turned to sadness." There are a few heroes; a Serb soldier who refuses to let his pathological comrade murder an old Muslim friend, camp guards who try to give food to the starving, thirst crazed prisoners; and the Muslims themselves, fighting to stay alive in their circles of hell. As "Djemo" himself says with that special imaginative power which the Slav languages seem to nurture, "the days fell away like beads of a broken string of prayer beads in the hands of a nonbeliever."
NOT unnaturally, most of the Serbs in this book are "beasts" or "animals"; and sometimes the invective becomes so ferocious that the words lose their power to shock. In his foreword, the brave and eloquent Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel describes meeting the same Colonel Popovic when he visited Manjaca. "I tried to bear witness for its victims," he writes.
Yet I could do without Wiesel telling me how moving this book is because 15 years ago I witnessed another act of human savagery which Wiesel failed to condemn. After the Sabra and Chatila massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinians were sexually assaulted, disemboweled and knifed to death by Israel's militia allies, Wiesel could only find it within himself to express "sadness", adding that this was sadness "with Israel, not against Israel" and noting that "after all, the Israeli soldiers did not kill".
I suppose it all comes down to whose side the bad guys are on. Or how bravely you will follow up words with action. All this Bosnian terror - "a kind of madness", as a Serb policeman once described it to me - was supposed to have been ended by the Dayton agreement.
And the war has indeed been put on hold. But the monsters, most of them, are still roaming the lands courtesy of the sublime - nay, obscene policies of the Nato led forces who don't want to arrest the guilty men. Hukanovic's tormentors are thus still sloshing back the slivovic in their mountain forests. As for Colonel Popovic, a Serb friend told me the other day that he's enjoying a quiet retirement under a different name in Switzerland.