Listening to reports from other towns in Bosnia, he hoped the war would stop soon. However, in the conflict that soon spread to Prijedor, Hukanovic and his son were arrested and taken from their home to the infamous Bosnian Serb-run Omarska detention camp on May 30, 1992.

He has never figured out why his young son was also arrested.

He recalls “horrible images” in the camp, including, “watching a child dying in his father’s arms. As I always say, my child luckily survived, but some children did not, some parents did not,” he recalls.

Hukanovic never forgot the sight of his neighbours returning from beatings with broken limbs.

His most painful memory is of a professor from Kozarac, who spent a night on a wooden stool because he could not lie down because of his injuries.

“The examination rooms were on the floor above. Beatings took place on the floor above. Then he said: ‘That is my son.’ He’d recognized his voice. He saw his body next to the house the following day,” Hukanovic says.

He remembers the time in the camp up to August 1992, before his transfer from Omarska, when he witnessed torture and stared death in the face.

He says he could not think about anything else but the smell of blood and cries of pain caused by the horrible mistreatment taking place in the interrogation rooms.

“What was in the heart of those men, the amount of hate that made them torture people in that way, kill them, take them out every evening, break their arms and legs during a 15-day period, making them die in agony?” he wonders.

But he also remembers heroes like a doctor at Omarska, Eso Sadikovic, who provided help to injured detainees, sometimes even stitching their wounds with threads made from his own hair.

“They [detainees] gave their dirty shirts soaked in water to make compresses, because the blows were inflicted with various objects, liker cords, sticks, wooden batons, cables, and the skin ruptured, so Eso would sew them [the wounds] with hair. Those were horrible images that can never be forgotten,” he recalls.

Food not suitable even for animals

Facilities of Omarska concentration camp. Photo: BIRN

In the last third of July 1992, he recalls, the largest number of buses arrived in Omarska, bringing more detainees, although the camp was already full by then. He says those detainees were simply killed after getting off the buses.

The surviving detainees in Omarska got one meal per day, but he says the so-called food was not even suitable for animals.

“We ate something that looked like cooked beans made a few days before; there were several beans in it, plus one or two cabbage leaves, and someone would ask how many more people they had to feed. They would say ‘200’, so that man would add a bucket of cold water into the pot to increase the quantity,” he says.

On August 5, 1992, around 120 men were taken from Omarska and killed, according to the verdict issued against Milomir Stakic, former president of the municipal crisis committee and head of the Municipal National Defence Council in Prijedor, who in 2006 received a 40-year prison sentence for extermination, murder and persecutions.

Hukanovic was transferred to Manjaca detention camp on August 6, alongside most of the other detainees. The conditions there were better, but it was much colder than in Omarska.

“It was in the mountains, a horror, the wind raging through our bodies,” he says, recalling his stay in Manjaca.

The last detainees were transferred from Omarska on August 21.

Through the International Red Cross, the detainees received blankets to protect themselves from the cold, but due to the climate and the poor conditions inside the wooden barns, Hukanovic says not even those blankets helped much. So, they used nylon to cover the holes between the wooden boards to stop the wind.

‘I won my battle by returning to this town’

Facilities of Manjaca concentration camp. Photo: BIRN

Hukanovic spent a total of six months in Bosnian Serb camps. Having been mistreated and kept in horrible conditions, he sometimes meets some of the people who did that to him.

“I have one characteristic which I consider a virtue. I don’t know what hate is. I simply don’t know that state of mind,” he says.

“I don’t even hate those who beat me. I simply want them to face justice,” he adds, adding that he believes there are enough likeminded people who don’t want to see the evil of war happen again in Bosnia.

“Nobody can force me into that. I am not a man of war. I am not a man of battles. I have won my battles by returning to this town. I think I have won by doing that and have fulfilled my lifetime’s desire,” he says.

People should stop condemning the town because the crimes were committed by people, by individuals, he says.

“The town is not to blame, but people are. Some say that Prijedor is not like it used to be. No it isn’t, it is more beautiful than before, the people are different,” he says.

He says he prefers talking about the people who confronted the atrocities than talking about the atrocities he witnessed or experienced. “I meet some of those people, I gladly have a cup of coffee with them,” he says.

He later spent part of his life after his detention as a refugee in Norway but could not spend his whole life outside the town he loves, so he came back. He has since devoted his life to writing and keeping alive memories of the truth and of the people who survived the crimes together with him.

“I always say proudly that I have never seen tears. I have travelled a lot, I have met people who were there with me, who survived the Omarska hell and, believe me, they are the true heroes to me,” he says, with pride.

The Hague Tribunal, ICTY, has sentenced a total of 18 people to 276 years in prison for crimes committed in Prijedor. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country’s top court, has also sentenced 21 people to the total of 368 years in prison for crimes in Prijedor.

The search for around 588 victims of Prijedor crimes is still ongoing. So far around 2,500 victims from the Prijedor area have been found and identified. But of 102 children killed in the town, the remains of 40 have never been found. The youngest exhumed victim, Velid Softic, was two months old.