Amer Dulic spent 233 days in 4 Bosnian-Croat concentration camps. In 1993, he was only 17 years old when he & his cousins were taken from their homes to Kostana Bolnica (Bone Hospital). They were locked in a small room in the basement with about 20 other kids.
They heard screams & crying. It was clear that people were being beaten & tortured. First night there, he was forced to bury 2 cousins. For the first time in his life, he saw beaten and bloodied men, and listened to their final breaths. 
"It was the first time I experienced someone with their eyes open trying to tell us something but they couldn’t. We saw ourselves in that position, we knew that soon that could be us".
His name was eventually called; he couldn’t feel his legs from the fear.
His name was eventually called; he couldn’t feel his legs from the fear.
As he walked into one of the rooms, he saw 6 of his neighbours. He was happy, he thought they had come to help him, to rescue him. Sadly, they turned out to be the worst.
“After 15, 20 minutes of being beaten I fell and I thought they would stop. But they didn’t. On the ground, they kicked me with boots. It was the first time I felt the pain of a boot. They asked me to stand up and put my hands on the wall."
"One of them kicked me between the legs, each time I would fall. If I didn’t get up they would hold a knife to my throat". If I fainted they threw water over me to bring me round. I was forced to clean up my blood with a T-shirt."
The war was personal & intimate. Men looked into the eyes of men they had grown up with as they were tortured. Women were raped by men they had played with as children. War crimes were perpetrated in small rooms by men who knew names, histories & the families of their victims.
There are no plaques at the bone hospital, no sombre displays of artefacts, no glossy brochures to catalogue explaining what had happened there. The building, a slowly disintegrating shell, is a haunted embodiment of the tenth and final stage of genocide: denial.
“You can’t say a whole group is responsible, it is individuals who committed these crimes. I wrote a book about my experience, it was the first 1 to use the full names of perpetrators to focus on individuals. I returned to Stolac in 1998, those people are still my neighbours.”
