Lessons from history

This story is part of Correspondent broadcast on 7 October at 1850 BST on BBC2

The war in Bosnia was one of the most traumatic - and dramatic - assignments of my career. For myself and all my colleagues who stuck it out, long term, those wasted cities - Sarajevo, Mostar, Maglay, Travnik, Vitez, Jajce-places that are now off the map, forgotten - are indelibly burned in my mind. They are no longer big stories. But I can't forget them, and I doubt I ever will.

Even then, during the war, they were, to some extent, forgotten. The world got bored with Bosnia and bored with our reporting. Yet, we still felt compelled to return, again and again, and try to make sense of what was happening in the country once known as Yugoslavia.

Most of us were driven to report by moral outrage. But there was also a fascination element with the place that drew me in unlike any other conflict I have ever covered. Perhaps it was the fatalism of the people, the sense of history that kept repeating itself, that drew them in like a spider's web, from which they seemed unable to escape. Why was this region so prone to violence on such a dramatic and heart-breaking scale? Perhaps that is why my colleagues and I kept returning, over and over again, trying to make sense of the place.

I was not the first journalist to become obsessed with the country.

One of the first female correspondents

Sixty years before me, there was Rebecca West, the essayist, author, feminist; a controversial character who traipsed across Yugoslavia in a grand hired car with her beloved interpreter - Constantine - her husband, a silent banker, and several other characters.

On the back of her travels, she wrote a book that became my bible: "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon", an enormous treatise on the people and the place. I carried it with me everywhere, underlining passages, sometimes leaving old copies in hotel rooms or giving them to Yugoslavian friends and then buying new ones when I returned to London.

Last year, while covering the war in Kosovo, I wrote a 7,000-word piece for the American Magazine Vanity Fair, called "Madness Visible" . Basically, it was a diary of the eight years leading up to the NATO bombing - of the chaos, the death, the life, the tragedy that had engulfed the region.

Remembering loved ones

On the back of that, Bloomsbury and Knopf commissioned me to write a book, travelling through the region, trying to find characters and people who would tell me their story and let me try to make some sense of the years I had spent looking for answers.

I needed, however, a map. And that map turned out to be West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon". What I would do, I decided, was turn to her book as a sort of war Baedeker, returning to the places that she had gone to, and going back to some of my own places that I could not forget. I wanted to see what had changed in the 60 years since West had journeyed to Sarajevo, Mostar, Jajce and what could I gather from the lessons of the past?

The commission to write the book led to this film. When I began the first leg of my journey - Bosnia - I was accompanied by a BBC crew. We could not go to all the places that West had journeyed to, and sometimes, we added our own, such as Sanski Most, Kozarac and Omarska, that West did not go near. But we felt they were essential to telling the story of the breakdown of Bosnia.

The film then became a journey with two intentions. One, to make

This is a sad film, I think. Because what you see at the end is what I saw - that unless these people learn from the past, they will continue, over and over, to live in a web of violence, terror and destruction.

Janine Di Giovanni

a quasi-pilgramage to West, and two, to re-trace my own footsteps five years after the Dayton Peace Accord was signed in 1995, halting the bitter and brutal war. Sometimes I saw old friends, and wanted to see how the years after the war had aged them, made them reflective, or not. Sometimes I met new people and heard their stories.

The final meeting was with President Aliya Izetbegovic, Bosnia's leader, who is retiring in October. Walking through the empty, dusty halls of the Austro-Hungarian styled Presidential Palace, I had sharp pangs of deja vu: how many times during the war had I run from the Holiday Inn to the presidency, demanding some kind of explanation from Izetbegovic, or Dr.Ganic, his then vice-president. Now, the hallways are painted and there is electricity and water. But the answers I got from Izetbegovic were not much different from the ones I got eight years ago, when Sarajevo was being pummelled by shells.

I learned a lot from this journey, but I still don't have an answer. By the end of the three weeks filming in Bosnia's heat, moving from town to town and village to village, I came away with no more conclusions than I had during my years travelling in and out of Bosnia. What happened here? Why did things go so brutally wrong? And how, if possible, could the blood letting be halted?

A Bosnian friend once laughed at me when I put these questions to him. "This is the Balkans, and this is Bosnia," he said. "If I had a crystal ball, I could give you the answers." Like him, I still don't know, but I have my theories, and while they may not be the most original or the most startling in the world, they are what I believe: these are a tragic, epic people caught in the tangles of the past.

Mostar, one of the most beautiful towns in Bosnia

Past hatreds, past wars, past friendships, past desires, past grievances, petty and grand. One thing that stunned me into silence was talking to one of the concentration camp survivors, Zlatko, who appears in the film, and asking him why they took him away, tortured him, beat him, made his life into a living hell. "The policeman who came to get me that night didn't like me," he said. Something about something he had once said to the brother of the policeman's wife and that was basically it. The same with Adil Draganovic, the war crimes prosecutor in Sanski Most who was also taken away. The men that bore him off were angry because he had once given them parking tickets back in the time when he was a judge.

This is a sad film, I think. Because what you see at the end is what I saw - that unless these people learn from the past, they will continue, over and over, to live in a web of violence, terror and destruction.

Reporter: Janine Di Giovanni

Director: Peter Lydon

Producer: John Thynne

Editor: Fiona Murch

This story is part of Correspondent broadcast on 7 October at 1850 BST on BBC2