To understand the war, I had to return to the iron-ore mine that housed the accursed concentration camp. In 1992 it took five putrid summer days to argue our way into the camp. But now the road is empty at the turnoff for Omarska. Flakes of snow, which mute all sound and drape the mine in virgin white, have overlaid what happened here. It is seven below zero, but our shivers are not from the cold.
Children play with sleds in the yard behind the gate.
A couple of stray mongrels now frolic in and out of the jaws of a hydraulic door. In 1992 this tarmac was a killing yard, the bodies loaded onto trucks by bulldozer. Omarska was a place where cruelty and mass murder had become a form of recreation. The guards were often drunk and singing while they tortured. A prisoner called Fikret Harambasic was castrated by one of his fellow inmates before being beaten to death.