THIRTY YEARS ON: BLOOD AND HATRED IN THE BALKANS

ONE NIGHT IN THE SUMMER OF 1991 I was standing at the Udvar border crossing in southern Hungary. The air was warm and still. Stars glittered against a black velvet sky. Behind us was a sleepy village of one-storey houses. In front, the flat, silent fields stretched into the distance. But the bucolic scene was deceptive. A short walk away, on the other side of the flimsy barrier, the fomer Yugoslav republic of Croatia had declared independence. The war had started.

We had spent the day at the nearby Hungarian town of Mohacs, interviewing Croatian refugees. It seemed incredible-democracy was taking root across the region, but in Yugoslavia, the most modern of the Communist states, families were fleeing with stories of death and terror.

We had come to this remote hamlet to see if we could get a sense of what was happening on the other side. The Hungarian border guards were nervous. They had no contact with their Yugoslav counterparts, no idea what was happening there, but they had seen the news reports about the fighting. I looked at my friend, the photographer Justin Leighton. He shrugged. Why not? We would go and take a look. We asked the Hungarians if they would let us back in. They laughed, of course they would.

The barrier slowly lifted and we stepped into the darkness of noman’s land. The very air seemed to change, loaded with menace as we walked across. This was quite a stupid idea, I thought, but