Original subtitles

We're slap bang in the middle of the Danube river.

Over there is Croatia.

Over there, Serbia.

Here is the town of Vukovar, where 30 years ago,

as a young journalist, I came to witness the opening salvos

in what was a bitter and bloody battle,

the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Here is the Hotel Dunav, where I was based all those years ago

during the battle for Vukovar.

There was this constant bombardment from all sides.

From this side, we were taking rocket and shell fire.

There was sniper fire.

Here on the Danube itself, there were gunboats.

And in the air, there were also planes from the Yugoslav Air Force.

The siege of the Croatian city of Vukovar by the Serb-led

Yugoslav army was to last 87 days.

By its end, the city was in ruins.

Some of the Croatian defenders escaped.

Some were captured and sent to concentration camps.

Several hundred were killed in a massacre by Serb paramilitaries.

Both siege and massacre set a bloody template for the kind of violence

which was to afflict this region during the various wars of the 1990s.

It was also the first of my own trips here as a reporter.

I covered the conflict - beginning, middle and end.

I had a near-miss here, possibly the worst of my career.

I was convinced I was going to die here,

and to this day I don't know the reason why I didn't.

There have been more than 20 years of uneasy peace here

since the war in Kosovo ended in 1999.

But the land still has its ghosts.

And I've got mine.

The Balkans is a complicated place.

For most of the 20th century, most of the Balkans made up

a single country, called Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was made up of six republics -

Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia,

Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

People here tend to have a strong ethnic identity,

a sense of difference which is increased by religion.

Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins are mostly Orthodox Christian.

Slovenes and Croats are mostly Catholic.

Bosniaks and most Albanians are Muslim.

In 1941, the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia,

and set up the independent state of Croatia.

This genocidal regime took part, enthusiastically,

not only in the Holocaust against the Jews,

but also sought to eradicate Serbs and Roma.

The levels of brutality shocked even the German generals

who were nominally in charge.

Estimates as to the number of Serbian dead

starts at over 200,000 people.

After WWII, the place was unified by the former communist

partisan leader, Marshal Tito - for the most part,

a popular strongman who oversaw decades of peace.

When Tito died, in 1980, old enmities and ambitions

began to bubble up.

By 1991, the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic,

had embarked on a project to turn Yugoslavia into something

more like a greater Serbia.

The Serbs dominated the Yugoslav army and used it to try to take over

areas of Croatia and Bosnia which had ethnic Serb communities.

This was the beginning of a series of brutal ethnic wars,

which went on, in one form or another, for almost ten years.

And the first place the Serbs attacked was here in Vukovar.

My old friend, Alan Davis, and I were young reporters,

and we were determined to get into the surrounded city.

We talked to the Serb commanders, who agreed to let us through.

And they advised us not to do it. Yeah. I mean...

But, you know, that's... But we were young and handsome and bold,

and we did what we had to do.

And incredibly stupid, really, when looking back on it. Yeah.

It was over this way, wasn't it?

I mean, the tanks were positioned around here.

Well, we just walked up, and we kind of suddenly saw three tanks,

I think, behind that building.

But, obviously, this road was totally empty. Yeah.

And it was the sense of emptiness and quiet that was so...

A real sense of foreboding, you know. Yeah, so scary.

Because, obviously, with Vukovar just ahead, you know,

where there was ongoing fighting and shelling, and stuff, you know.

I think, turning the bend here...

I remember turning the bend, going down this this dip

into the wooded area, and those mines on the road.

For me, that was probably the most nerve-racking bit

of the entire war. Yeah.

There was a real sense of claustrophobia. Yeah, yeah.

That first day, having walked in, and you thought,

great, we've done a great thing.

Then the next thing is... How do we get out?

How are we going to get out? Going to have to do it again.

We moved away from the Yugoslav army lines, and into the trees,

where we were greeted by the Croatian defenders.

They accepted our credentials and welcomed us in.

As we moved into town, it became apparent that this was a conflict

which had escalated badly, and it was one where

the lightly armed defenders were seriously outgunned.

Vukovar was a lovely kind of middle class town in Croatian Yugoslavia,

and not overnight, but within the space of a few weeks, things changed.

This whole area was destroyed.

We were driven this last section into the square opposite

the Hotel Dunav.

Alan and I stayed at the Hotel Dunav on the banks of the river.

There were other journalists there

and we soon figured out that we'd entered

a really dangerous situation.

I kind of freaked out a little bit when the receptionist, Mariani,

kind of said, you know, when you're walking around outside

of our hotel, be careful of snipers, and that kind of thing.

From across the river. Yeah.

Well, that kind of sobered me up somewhat.

He's the only receptionist I knew who had a... Pump-action shotgun.

Yeah... And a sniper rifle.

And a sniper rifle kept behind the desk.

Where was the...? Wasn't the cafe on the square?

Well, that was... The one we were in...

Was it definitely that one? That's where we saw them play chess.

The old man... The two old fellas playing chess.

One Serb, one Croat, and they said this is the real battle for Vukovar.

They joshed. Little did they know.

Was it third or fourth floor?

I think it was the fourth floor.

We didn't have the deluxe balcony.

We didn't have the room for view.

The cheap seats.

And, as you say, I think the sign was very much the same.

Yeah, the sign's the same.

The hotel is ruined now.

In reality, it was refurbished after the war

and has simply fallen into disrepair again,

but it reminds me of the way it looked in 1991.

What I remember about the basement, as you were saying,

is it was quite claustrophobic and small.

It was a sort of dilemma.

Stay upstairs, potentially, a round comes in.

Shrapnel and glass flying around everywhere.

Like you, I thought, well, if you're going to cop it,

I'd rather be outside than kind of buried alive.

Hello? So, there is a restaurant there.

Anybody home? My God, that's interesting.

There we have... There's the entrance there. Oh, yeah.

That's a lovely view, isn't it?

And that little door off to the right

is where Mariani dragged us in.

That was a hellish day's shelling.

We meet with one of the men who defended Vukovar back in 1991,

a former pilot called Ivan.

I asked him how things started to go so badly wrong.

Did you think at the time, maybe I should leave?

No.

Fighting wore on through October and into November.

Food and ammunition supplies dwindled.

The defenders were holding out for relief from the newly formed

Croatian army, but it never came.

Alan and I managed to get back out to safety before the end.

We were among the last Western journalists to leave.

What was the lowest point?

You said that you spent time in three detention camps, yeah?

I'm sure it's virtually impossible to forget,

given what Ivan's gone through, but...

..forgive?

DAVID: If I can just show Ivan a few photographs...

INTERPRETER TRANSLATES

This is not here. This is Bapska.

Erm, my friend, school...

A school friend? Yes, yes.

And he was how old?

Ovcara is the name of a farm outside Vukovar.

It was used as a detention camp during the siege.

When the battle ended, something far darker happened there.

After Croat defenders, such as Ivan, had laid down their weapons,

they were taken to detention camps.

They were the lucky ones.

Fighting alongside the Yugoslav army were two Serbian paramilitary units,

who were to become notorious over the following four years -

the White Eagles and Arkan's Tigers.

The paramilitaries had the job of doing what the regular army would not.

At the end of the siege, the Yugoslav army

took control of the city hospital.

Inside were around 300 wounded soldiers, mixed up with civilians.

The army separated out the men and boys,

and took them in buses to Ovcara.

There, they were beaten and handed over to the paramilitaries.

For 260 medical staff and patients from Vukovar hospital,

this spot was the end of the road after the fall of Vukovar.

They were bussed from a nearby pig farm to this position here,

and over a period of four hours were shot and killed.

It was the first atrocity in Europe, mass atrocity in Europe,

since the Second World War,

and a harbinger of things to come across the whole of Yugoslavia.

This is the water tower at Vukovar.

It became famous as a symbol of resistance.

It was blasted by shelling.

But each day the Croat defenders would hoist their flag on top

of the tower, at least one paying for it with his life.

Now it's a museum dedicated to the battle,

complete with original shell holes.

Yelena is a local writer who works here.

She lost her father in the massacre.

Yelena, you were ten years old during the siege of Vukovar.

What do you remember about that time?

I remember how it started, because we didn't ever believe

that, really, the war is coming.

We weren't even scared.

But it started to be worse and worse,

so we had to go out from our house.

I remember we were running on the street,

and behind of us were the tanks.

This is your family? Yes.

Me, my brother, and my mother and my grandmother. Right.

Because my father was working.

My father was working in the hospital,

so we stay in the hospital.

And September 18, Vukovar... whole of Vukovar fell down.

So, your father was working in the hospital,

and he was there in the hospital when the paramilitaries came

to the hospital to take staff and patients from the area?

Yes, all the patients.

They took all the men, the patients and the workers of the hospital.

He was the driver of the ambulance.

What do you know about what happened to your father then?

Actually, we...

In the morning, all hospital had to come out.

There was the Major Sljivancanin, he was outside,

and he says that all the women and children have to go to the right,

and all the men go to the left.

Separated? Yes.

All the men were put in other six buses

and driven to Ovcara. Yeah. When they...

And your father was among them?

My father was one of them.

Actually, they was torturing all of them all night,

and killed them the same day.

It was the day when my mother even had her birthday.

Her 30th birthday.

It was her 30th birthday on the day your father was killed?

And she's without the man of her life,

with two children, alone in the world.

So, you found out about your father the same day, or a few days later?

No. We were believing that he is in the prison of Serbia,

like so many people were.

We were expecting...

When was the changing of the prisoners, she was going to all.

And she came back so sad, and with the empty...

Empty arms.

So, they found Ovcara, which is 200 people was there,

my father was one of them. We...

..were on the identification.

So, with the blood and the tattoo which he had,

we could really believe that this was him.

But the six bus was never found.

Do you think the town has healed?

No, I think that it will be when all of us who was

the witness of that... The generation of that period.

When all our generation is gone, maybe then here will be

the more peace and the more...

But the most important thing is, not to forget.

Yes, we can't forget it. That's... it's our history.

We just have to remember, because...

Because, I believe, if we don't talk, it might be repeated.

The siege of Vukovar was lost in the noise of greater horrors to come.

The Ovcara massacre was covered up by its perpetrators.

The world's attention turned to the south, where the better known

city of Dubrovnik was attacked by the Serbs in similar fashion.

The victims of the Ovcara massacre were exhumed and examined

forensically in Croatia after the war.

Three Yugoslav army officers were tried at The Hague

by the UN Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Two were found guilty of charges relating to the massacre.

None of the Serb paramilitaries has been convicted.

In Bosnia, the war wore on for four brutal years,

defined by ethnic cleansing and mass murder.

Here, the task of sorting the dead fell to an organisation

called the International Commission on Missing Persons.

We're travelling south to Tuzla, where the ICMP has a base.

Here in this quiet building are stored the remains of thousands

of people - they are mainly victims of the Srebrenica genocide.

At Srebrenica, Bosnian-Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic,

systematically murdered over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

Two international courts have ruled that Srebrenica

was an act of genocide.

Many Bosnian-Serb political leaders reject that verdict even today.

Among many found guilty of complicity in genocide

and crimes against humanity, five Bosnian-Serb leaders

have received life sentences for their involvement.

Not all the victims have been found.

Those that have make their way here, where the quest for justice

goes on more than 20 years later.

Here, the storage room, it is very important place,

where we keep all remains and remains of clothing.

I suggest... Is this refrigerated? Yes, yes.

So, this is storage room.

Oh.

We keep all bodies here.

So, complete this side is full of skeletal remains.

And in the paper bags, remains of clothing, personal belongings.

We have here over 2,000 remains of skeletal remains

and 3,000 remains of clothing.

And you can see on every bag we have numbers,

that is original case numbers.

In the paper bags, we have remains of clothing which need to be

associated with bones after identification.

So, the bones and clothes are brought together? Yes.

You probably don't notice it, but I...

This musty smell in here. Yes... It's a very strange smell.

It is smell, probably, of the bones, of tissue, dirty...

Everything is mixed.

You've got used to it, I take it? Probably.

But just looking around here, what I see is there are some bags

that look, shall we say, fairly bulky,

as if they've got substantial remains in them.

And there are others that look as though you've got virtually nothing.

That is, unfortunately, the situation with Srebrenica.

Because those remains, most of those remains were removed

from primary locations to the secondary locations,

and very often we don't find complete bodies.

When you say they were moved, you mean they were moved deliberately

by the perpetrators of the killings? Of course.

From perpetrators, because they wanted to hide evidence.

So, those people died in July 1995,

but after two or three months, in September or October,

we have some evidence that they removed some of the bodies in 1996,

in January and February. Right. They wanted to hide evidence.

So, it was a cover-up, effectively? Yes.

And they would open again primary grave, and with big machines,

with trucks. They would remove those bodies to the other locations.

So, they created, basically, from several primary graves,

they created a lot of secondary locations.

And what is the issue?

The composition of bodies already started after three or four months

of death, so when they remove those bodies with big machines,

they destroy the integrity of the individual.

So, very often, we find remains of one person in more

different locations, sometimes in more different mass graves.

So, it's like a composite.

Presumably, you're putting together almost... I know it's an odd

comparison, but it's kind of a jigsaw puzzle, really...

Of course, like puzzle. ..of pieces from different locations.

Yes. I always give example of one person

which we found in four different mass graves

and 15 different locations.

So, in Srebrenica cases, approximately,

to identify one person, we have to take seven DNA samples.

Do most families, in the main, wish to know what happened, do you think?

For most families, it is very important that we find at least

one bone, because they want to closure their story. Closure, yeah.

They want to bury remains. They need that monument.

They need place where they can go.

I think that is very important to them to move forward.

Are there any particular cases in that duration of 15 years

that kind of stand out in your mind, for any particular reason?

I remember several cases, but only for scientific reasons.

I try not to think a lot about that impact.

Ah. So, this is the examination...?

Yeah, this is the examination room, the room where I do

all the examination of the skeletal remains.

This is new case. Right.

Which I received last week, and I did...

This is complete body, but a lot of bones missing.

Just to be clear, these are the bones... From one person.

From one person.

What's this at the top? We have soft tissue.

Little bit of hair and skull fragments.

It's missing lots of elements.

It's missing torso, ribs.

Arms not complete, feet not present.

It's after 20 years of that.

I suppose the first reaction that I have when I came in here

is how little there is to work with.

What a complicated, complex, kind of, piecing together.

It is very complicated,

but we are lucky because we found a way to identify individuals.

Without DNA testing, really, it wouldn't be possible to identify

such a high number without making mistakes.

We're on our way to Sarajevo.

It's the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina,

and it is now what it once was -

a thriving, multicultural European capital.

During the war, it was subject to a bloody siege,

as the Bosnian-Serb army attempted to strangle

their Muslim brethren into submission.

I was here during and after the siege.

The only way in by land was via a winding supply route

through the mountains, twisting around behind Serb lines.

The siege was to last almost four years,

from May 1992 to February 1996.

Life for the people of Sarajevo was shattered.

Even simple tasks, such as getting water or food,

became life or death moments.

The Serbs rained down artillery, mortar and sniper fire on the city.

But they could not break the will of the Sarajevan people.

This was a restaurant before the war,

built for the Olympic Games. Obviously, totally derelict now.

And it was used as a Serb shelling position during the war,

and you can see why - it's an incredible view

and a very, very important strategic point.

Now we can look straight down.

I can see the city hall building, the hospital - which was shelled

during the war - and, indeed, Sarajevo stadium, football stadium

over there, which is obviously a key landmark, as well.

So, it's very easy to pick out individual positions within the city.

Every conceivable type of heavy weaponry used on

the city itself from here - tank shells, mortars, rockets.

After years of inertia from the international community,

NATO began limited air strikes on the Serb forces

surrounding the city.

The siege was finally lifted in February 1996.

In the peace which followed, Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided

into two political entities under the supervision

of a UN-appointed High Representative -

one a federation of Bosniaks and Croats,

the other the Serb pseudo state of Republika Srpska.

This is the uneasy settlement which persists to this day.

Several Serb commanders were found guilty of war crimes

for their role in the siege -

General Dragomir Milosevic,

the Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic,

and his chief commander, General Ratko Mladic.

When the war ended in 1996, I came back to Sarajevo

and lived here for a while.

I worked for an NGO which supported journalists.

This is the banks of the river right in the heart

of Sarajevo, the very centre.

This street, in particular, is very exposed.

You can see the high hills on the other side from which Serb fire,

both shell fire, tank fire, rocket fire and, indeed,

snipers shooting down at civilians here in the streets.

In this direction is the airport a good few miles out,

with the famous airport run - Sniper's Alley, as it was known -

which you used to come in in high speed in cars.

Really, it was very dangerous, just speeding along that street.

This was the entrance to the flat that I had on this block,

just after the war.

It's actually owned by a woman called Safeta Kovasevic.

She rented it out, and I stayed here when I came here after the war

to take up a job.

She was an incredible old lady, actually.

She'd lost family members during the war.

She was very ill, she had Parkinson's disease.

It was a kind of tough time, and she kind of became

a kind of grandmother figure to me in a lot of ways, you know.

Terrific woman, actually.

But many a night I'd wander down from the pub.

As you can see, it's only about 50 yards away there.

Stagger home.

It was a difficult period for me, it was a really difficult period.

You know, difficult to focus on work, unsure about what was lying

in the future for me in terms of career and whatever.

I just... One of those moments where a person kind of loses their way,

and it all really kind of came to a head right here.

This crossing over the Miljacka river is new.

It was built to connect the art school area to the north bank.

It's a playful design that reflects the spirit

of the city and its recovery.

But it was looking down into the water of this river

that I experienced one of the darker moments of my life.

It was 23 years ago to the day.

It's my birthday today, I'm 63 years old today.

And it was my 40th birthday.

I hadn't even made it back to the apartment from the pub,

which is just across the road,

and things were not good.

I was in a very dark place at that time.

It was very, very difficult.

I'd been involved in decades of covering conflict.

Things were not good at home in terms of relationships.

You know, I was probably drinking too much.

And I had a bottle with me, I was still drinking,

and looking down into the water.

I mean, it's about three inches deep now.

You couldn't exactly do yourself any harm there right now.

But the river was very high at that time.

I had all kinds of weird thoughts running through my head.

It was as if everything just closed in on me.

And I was shuffling about... I had a backpack with me that day, as well,

and I was shuffling about the backpack and the bottle...

Took the bottle and...

And I came across a birthday card which Safeta had left outside

my door, and I thought, what am I doing?

This woman has been through unbelievable stuff,

and here I am feeling sorry for myself.

She'd undergone so much during the siege here,

her and her family, the suffering, the loss, that it kind of helped

put everything in perspective for me and provided

the kind of glue which, frankly, I think held me together at that time.

It's a kind of strange moment.

And I still reflect on it to this day.

I tried to find Safeta, but we could find no trace of her.

I would love to have been able to thank her once more for her kindness.

There's a photographer based in Sarajevo called Damir Sagolj.

He served in the Bosnian army during the war and, afterwards, began

to make a career as a photographer specialising in war

and humanitarian catastrophe.

It's always good to meet a fellow traveller, especially

in his favourite bar.

I come from Bosnia.

Right, 1995, end of the war in Bosnia,

I was totally broken - just like every single one of us.

Had... You know, penniless, no money, no future, nothing.

So it's not that I had a number of options that I could choose from

and then I picked up conflict photography.

All conflicts are brutal, but there seems to be

or was something about the conflict here that was really exceptional.

Is that an exaggeration or am I imagining that? No.

Or is it different? No. And if it is different,

what makes it different here?

What I believe that made a big difference between Sarajevo

and similar places is that...

First of all, it lasted very long.

It was a very intense four years.

But also, once you are in Sarajevo -

I'm talking about Sarajevo in particular -

you are part of it.

You know, you and I have witnessed criminal activity in war zones

across the world. But would it be fair to say

that it was something particularly brutal?

I can't get my head around this.

You know, turning on your neighbour, the person you went to school with,

you know. Where do you think that comes from? I don't think that's unique for Bosnia.

You had neighbours turning onto neighbours in...

..in many places around the world.

That's the war.

Very often, the front lines go through the living rooms.

What was happening here -

I think that the perception of people like you who came here -

this was the place where you come

and you go to a place that was bombed, let's say an apartment.

And you go and you look at the collection of the LPs

and the books in that apartment, and you go, like,

"This could have been my apartment."

So, all of a sudden, it's not... It's not the third world.

It's not alien. It's not a faraway place.

All of a sudden, this is happening to a man that

is practically the same as you, right?

Photography, especially war photography, is like a drug,

you know. Like fucking heroin.

You know, a lot of people say that. It is addictive, yeah?

Of course. Would you say you'd been addicted?

Of course. What about when the fix wears off?

I've found that more problematic.

When you enter the war zone,

when you go into that zone,

you basically go against everybody else.

Everybody else is running away. Trying to get out.

Hmm. So by the fact that you are going against everybody, it tells

you that you're doing something irrational.

So you are trying to be rational within irrational. Sure.

So you have to be rational more than when you are outside.

We should have a shrink sitting here right now.

So you're flying 10,000...

10,000 metres altitude, 1,000 kilometres an hour for ten years.

And you want to land?

No, it's not going to... Do you have a crash landing?

Tell me somebody that didn't.

If people tell you that they didn't, they're lying

or they're Superman.

I've had a few really bad crash landings over the years,

I have to say. It would be stupid to think that otherwise is possible.

I think the sad thing, too, is that those crash landings bring

with them collateral damage - relationships, friendships,

you know. Everything.

And then talking about that from the perspective of somebody

who worked for BBC, or a big corporation from a civilised,

well-organised country - it's one thing.

Talking about somebody who is coming from the country

that's... Yeah. That's a different ball game,

trust me. If you have a problem,

you go home to BBC, or to Scotland

and you say, "I have a problem."

What happens? Hmm. They help you.

You're not going to get support and understanding from the society,

because society is fucked up.

You're not going to get it -

all those safety nets that you're talking about, the way

the white, privileged man from the West gets

when he gets in trouble. Mm.

If you're a photographer from India or from Pakistan or from Bosnia

or from Palestine, from Africa, from Myanmar,

and something happens to you...

No-one one's picking up the pieces.

I've never felt comfortable with that, you know.

So what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Yeah.

That's how it is, it's a...

I mean, you've spent decades, as I have, in this line of work.

Do you regret it? Every single day of my life.

DAVID LAUGHS

There are two most stupid things that I did in my life.

I lived abroad before the war and I came back just before the war

because the war was about to start.

And the other thing also very stupid is that I did what I did

after the war with another 25 years of conflict.

But both of those things, stupid things,

I am extremely proud of and I would do them again. Again?

I questioned myself about it so many times and wondered, you know,

should I be doing something else? What now? Tomorrow morning,

would you be back in a conflict zone?

Would you be off to another?

I just think that I had enough, you know.

It's like if you take this spoon, you know.

So here we are bending a spoon.

If I do one more time, it's going to snap. Snap.

Right? So if I can just leave it...

A little bit bent. Just a little bit bent.

OK, from time to time, you know, you do a little bit of this, so maybe

it works again.

And then see in 20 years, you know. OK.

I don't know. Who knows? Who knows?

Maybe we'll have this conversation in the future.

There you are. Hopefully, we haven't snapped by then.

Yes. THEY LAUGH

Good. All the best. All the best.

That. No.

I mean, I could spend my entire life taking pictures of them.

Doorways.

Matisse had his door, er, windows,

the wee man has his, um, doorways.

Though I spent time in Sarajevo,

my experience of the Yugoslav wars always seemed

to have a Croatian accent.

I began my travels in Vukovar

and saw the heroism of the defenders.

I also spent a lot of time in the south,

where some of the worst and most tragic fighting of the wars took place.

Mostar, the largest city in Herzegovina.

At the beginning, the Croats and Muslims

of Bosnia and Herzegovina

were united against the Bosnian Serb aggression.

But in Mostar, that unity slipped.

The Croat militia, the HVO, tried to take over the city in the name

of their imagined Bosnian-Croat state

and with the backing of Croatia itself.

The Bosnian army resisted

and the city was torn in two.

Thousands of Bosnian Muslims were ethnically cleansed

from the western part of Mostar and its surrounding villages.

Rape was used, as it was elsewhere, as a weapon of war.

Civilians were shelled indiscriminately.

Mosques were deliberately destroyed.

The symbol of Mostar - the ancient bridge, known as Stari Most -

was broken by Croat shelling.

By the end of the war, the population of Mostar,

which had previously been mixed, had been completely polarised.

Bosniaks lived in the east,

Croats in the west.

It remains so, largely, to this day.

While some Bosnian army soldiers were convicted of crimes

against Croat prisoners,

the burden of guilt fell clearly on the Bosnian-Croat leadership.

Six senior leaders were convicted of war crimes

and crimes against humanity in The Hague.

Two local HVO commanders were singled out for their brutality.

Mladen Naletilic and Vinko Martinovic,

known as Tuta and Stela.

This place is called the Heliodrom.

It was formerly a military barracks, but, during the war, it was used

as a concentration camp,

and something like 20,000 people were processed here.

By processed, I mean, they were detained, tortured, beaten

by the HVO who ran this camp here.

The building in which most people were actually detained

is at the far end here. There is no access to this.

But the main building where they were held - most people were held -

is on the other side of the grounds here.

There's no signage. There's nothing here at all to suggest

what it was during the war. There's no plaque.

There's no signage at all.

There were people convicted at the War Crimes Tribunal

who ran this camp.

But, again, the denial continues today.

This is the town of Citluk, not far from Mostar.

The militias here, the HVO militias here, had an infamous

reputation for their brutality and their atrocities.

Looking round Citluk now,

you know, it's such a kind of peaceful,

benign kind of backwater, you know.

It's hard to imagine that, all those years ago, you know,

these individuals and these groups were operating here, you know,

with such barbarity.

I mean, really extraordinary barbarism.

As you would expect in an area like this, a town like Citluk,

they're paying homage to Vukovar, where Croats made

the stand, of course, against the Yugoslav National Army

and Serb paramilitaries.

Going through this underpass and, you know, like many places

it has graffiti. There's a lot

of Nazi, neo-Nazi, kind of imagery here -

swastikas and references to militias

and right-wing militias.

Quaint little place.

Isn't it strange, though, how these places can just feel so normal, you know.

Does it just dissolve with time, all that shit?

Or does it just always lurk around a place, you know?

Fixated, you know, completely and utterly fixated.

They were right. That was it.

They've still got the badges of these war crimes units!

On the town's walls!

This was a notorious area, and it was here

I was brought by some militia,

HVO militia, from Mostar back in '93, '94 -

just the tail end of '94.

And...

..the people who brought me here,

to all intents and purposes, were friendly.

We were drinking with them. Promises of being able to accompany them

as a journalist, tell the story with their units.

But it all turned very sour, very nasty.

And they ended up effectively kidnapping me here.

And it's so bizarre, standing in the middle of this town,

around this hotel area, where I was initially brought, um,

and it all turned very sour here.

And, eventually, I was taken out of town to an outhouse

in the countryside and held there for some time.

I was beaten over the course of a few days very, very badly

and, ultimately, taken out by three guys who were very drunk,

after a few days.

Taken to a spot - I don't know where, outside of town.

And we passed a few places on the way in, possibly where I was taken.

And, there, I was tied,

made to kneel down and, um,

a gun was put to my head.

And there was a lot of argument between the guys who were drunk.

I suspect one wanted to kill me,

one didn't. The other one was too drunk to bother.

And the gun was put to my head, cocked and the trigger was pulled.

Um...

And the gun didn't go off,

or it was a mock execution, I'm not sure.

They hit me on the head and I ended up unconscious

and came to sometime later.

I almost never returned to journalism after this place.

Six months at home, I pretty much went off the rails,

and, you know, it took a long time to get...to get steadied up.

They held me at this outhouse for two, three days.

You know, I'm not really quite sure, actually,

because I was constantly being beaten.

I had umpteen broken bones,

a broken collarbone, broken ribs.

I was physically pretty mashed up.

This is... Definitely, this area is where I came around here

when I came back out onto the main road.

I'm just going to go along at the end of the track here, OK?

No question about it, because the wall here, I remember.

But there was also a fence running down,

because I managed to cut myself free on the fence.

I remember being really, really thirsty.

I remember the dyke. It was a different...

This gate wasn't here.

There was a different old fence that I used to cut the ties

on my wrists.

And it took me for ever to get from there to the road.

It was like an eternity coming up this road.

Got to the road. I was there, I don't know,

maybe 20 minutes or so, half an hour.

And I realised I had to flag down the first vehicle, you know,

not knowing whether, you know,

it would be more militia, or bad guys, whatever.

And, fortunately, they weren't, they were really kind.

They were clearly smoking weed at the time and asked me if...

And I did. I took a, I took a large draw on the, on the joint.

And it just lifted the pain, you know, because my ribs,

especially, my shoulder, were really, really painful

at that point in time. So it just lifted the pain that little bit.

It was fantastic! A wonderful feeling, actually.

I was convinced I was going to die here.

Convinced.

Um... And, to this day, I don't know the reason why I didn't, frankly.

HE SNIFFS

QUIETLY: Oh, man.

HE EXHALES SHARPLY

HE COUGHS AND SNIFFS

Ironic! Do you see what the inscription says?

Just down there, effectively, was the spot where

a war crime was committed against myself.

And yet, right here, there's a monument

that actually commemorates

those victims that stood trial for war crimes at The Hague.

I mean, you couldn't make that up.

They're clearly in denial.

Well, that was very unpleasant, I have to say.

This is Dubrovnik, our final stop.

It's good to see the sea.

This place, too, was besieged and shelled

by the Serb-led Yugoslav army,

right back at the beginning of the war.

The same tactic, the same devastating results.

It was taken back by the Croatian army a year later,

but not before the old town - a Unesco World Heritage site -

had been partially destroyed.

You wouldn't know to look at it now.

It just goes to show that the wounds of war can heal -

the outward ones, at least.