BALKAN JOURNEY:It was the worst conflict on European soil since the end of the second World War with casualties estimated at up to 200,000. In Balkan Journey, Peter Murtaghexplores what happened when the former Yugoslavia fell apart in the early 1990s and the legacy it has left the people there and the international community. This report from Sarajevo is his first despatch.
IMAGES FROM the civil wars that scarred what was Yugoslavia as it disintegrated in the early 1990s remain in the mind.
There was lush green countryside - fields and rolling hills - which suggested initially something close to a pastoral paradise. The well-tended gardens had vegetable patches. There was the appearance of settled communities living simple lives above subsistence but by no means wealthy.
In the cities, everyone seemed to live in austere, ugly concrete apartment blocks. But in the countryside, every family seemed to have a two-storey home with a red-tiled roof and a neat garden.
Night after night on the TV news from 1992 to 1995, we saw black smoke and flames belching out of the windows of so many of those neat rural homes. Men in military garb darted in and out of hedgerows, leapt over garden walls and, in places in eastern Croatia like Vukovar and Osijek, street fighting took place in scenes reminiscent of the village-by-village battles that followed the D-Day landings in Normandy.
And accompanying each lull in the fighting, we had those shots of strutting military thugs herding people down muddy roads, out of their villages. Long queues of refugees, a rag-taggle line of grannies, mothers, fathers and children, snaking through the countryside, often with agricultural machinery reminiscent of earlier decades of the 20th century and other wars.
Sometimes, the men were eerily absent. In time, we found out why.
This was Europe, our continent, less than 20 years ago. And, while most of the fighting raged, Europe did little that was effective in stopping the carnage. It took American determination - in the face of the worst mass murder since the Holocaust - and Nato firepower, deployed for the first time in the alliance's history, to bring the combatants to heel.
By the time it all stopped, at least 100,000 people were dead, very many of them civilian, and tens of thousands more were wounded, physically and mentally.
The late 20th century wars in the Balkans didn't happen by accident. They were caused, made to happen, quite deliberately by men (although as we know from the war crimes cases, women also stoked the flames of hatred but men were by far in the majority).
The chief culprit was Slobodan Milosevic, an unreconstructed communist who saw his opportunity in the vacuum created by the death of Josip Broz Tito, the former partisan fighter who helped create Yugoslavia in March 1945 and held its disparate ethnic factions together - essentially by suppressing their nationalistic urges - until his death in 1980.
In the jockeying for position both within federal Yugoslav structures and separate ones in Serbia, the largest of the six republics that made up Yugoslavia, Milosevic emerged dominant by the end of the 1980s. And he saw that the way to achieve power was cynically to fan the flames of Serbian nationalism.
Just as cynical was Franjo Tudjman, the Croatian leader, though he was far less murderous.
And caught between the two were the Bosnians, led by an outplayed Alia Izetbegovic.
Allied to Milosevic and, to much lesser effect to Tudjman, were leaders of ethnic minorities in Croatia and Bosnia. The best known of these were two Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, whose patron was the Serbian leader, Milosevic.
Karadzic, a psychiatrist-turned-politician, was leader of the Bosnia-based Serbian Democratic Party and, in due course, was president of the self-styled Republika Serpska - a large enclave of Bosnia where most of the people were ethnically Serb.
Mladic was a general in the Yugoslav army and commander of the Knin Corps. Knin is a large town in southern Croatia. At the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, it was some 70 per cent ethnic Serb and about 30 per cent Croat.
Mladic became head of the Bosnian Serb army. He and Karadzic essentially ran the war in Bosnia, together devising the plan first to define the Serb-dominated areas, and then clear them of inhabitants of other ethnic groups. Ultimately, their aim was to unite these areas with Serbia, a goal in which they were encouraged and aided by Milosevic.
Both Mladic and Karadzic were indicted for war crimes by the International Tribunal in The Hague. Karadzic's arrest, announced early yesterday in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, is a significant milestone. Mladic, the man behind the murder of over 8,000 Muslim men and youths from Srebrenica, remains at large and is believed to be currently being protected inside Serbian areas of Bosnia.
My interest in all this stems from when I was deputy foreign editor of the Guardian newspaper in London. I have extremely vivid memories of liaising with two journalists we sent to Bosnia, Maggie O'Kane from Dublin and Ed Vulliamy. Both, in my view, turned into two of the finest war reporters of their generation.
O'Kane wrote vividly about the sieges of Sarajevo and Gorazde. Vulliamy, whose book Seasons in Hell, captures much of the horror of what went on, once became mixed up in a convoy of Muslim refugees being "ethnically cleansed" by Mladic's men. Later, in tandem with an ITN film crew, he found Bosnian Serb concentration camps where emaciated Muslims were being starved and brutalised.
As Karadzic's arrest shows, what happened back then hasn't gone away. The purpose of my Balkan Journey is to revisit some of the places and people associated with events back then and to report on what's happened since.
There is a notable Irish involvement in the Balkans. In Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, there are garda officers and Defence Force personnel helping advice the Bosnian authorities as they strive to bed down a stable democracy and, ultimately they hope, join the European Union.
In Kosovo, Irish troops form part of the Nato-led European force based there trying to ensure the safety of the Serb minority north of the capital Pristina and also the Albanian majority, who recently declared their independence from Serbia. For the past year, an Irishman, Brig-Gen Gerry Hegarty, has been commanding a 1,500 strong multi-national force comprising about 280 of his own troops plus Swedes, Finns, Latvians and Czechs. In a few days time, command will cease and he will hand over to a Finnish colleague.
• During his journey Peter Murtagh will be blogging on his experiences as he travels through the Balkans on a motorbike
• TOMORROW Peter Murtagh reports from the tiny village in Croatia where ethnic cleansing was first implemented by Ratko Mladic, leader of the Bosnian Serb Army