ONE PEACEFUL SUMMER’S day in July 1997, two years after the end of the Bosnian war, a policeman called Simo Drljaca went fishing by a lake near Prijedor with his fourteen-year-old son. Suddenly he heard a rustling in the bushes, and saw a group of soldiers running towards him, brandishing their weapons. He instinctively reached for his gun and fired off a shot, grazing one soldier’s thigh; in an instant, a sniper took aim and killed him. Two helicopters arrived at the scene, and the bereaved adolescent boy was bundled in next to his dead father’s body.

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