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Sat 02 Feb 2004Revisiting the dogs of war
Memoir: Lt Col Bozidar Popovic was proud of his prison camp. The Serb officer displayed his 3,640 Muslim prisoners like trophies when I visited Manjaca, in the mountains of Bosnia, with a delegation from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe late in the summer of 1992.
The Muslims sat lined up with their bedding, on the ground in the cattle-sheds where they were held. The former dairy farm was surrounded by barbed wire, Alsatian guard dogs, watchtowers and minefields. As Popovic led us between rows of prisoners, the emaciated men stared up with a look of unspeakable suffering. Col Popovic boasted, blatantly falsely, that he respected every article of the Geneva Convention.
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