I am reminded of their stories and the Balkan wars as I watch the bloody unravelling of another country: Syria. The Balkans and the Levant are thousands of miles apart and have little in common, yet something eerily similar lingers on from my memories of watching Sarajevo die live onscreen, in the daily dispatches of the Syrian inferno.

For starters, there is the televised butchery. 

Even though the conflict in Yugoslavia happened before the onset of the digital world — the internet was still in its infancy and media was still very much printed or televised — the rape of Sarajevo occurred in the age of CNN. There was no YouTube, but the heartbreaking images of death and destruction populated the living rooms of every European household at lunch and dinner. Sasha and his brother sat in my parents' television room and pointed at the screen as buildings came down — they spoke to one another sombrely, naming the landmarks they recognised as man's fury turned them into rubble.

Then there was the indifference. 

It was summer, and desperate civilians seeking to escape were pressing at the borders of Europe. In Italy, we watched. We watched and opined, much like everyone else across the continent, and wondered whether we should lift a finger. US President George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker III, had famously said that America did not "have a dog in this fight". Britain's Conservative prime minister, John Major, thought much the same way. Nato, fresh from winning the Cold War, had no plan to intervene in a fratricidal war that no one seemed to understand. The logic for non-intervention was compelling — realism told us we had no strategic interests at stake. The Soviets were gone. Communism was gone. Balkan ethnic hatred was too complicated to disentangle. So were the populations. We watched. They died.

And finally there were the belated pangs of an international guilty conscience.

It took three years and a new American administration to change all that. President Clinton embarrassed Europe into intervention. Europe realised, much too late once again, that it could not preside over another genocide on its soil — history's lessons had to be enforced. Eventually, the guns fell silent. Yugoslavia's dismemberment was brought under an orderly transition. But by then the ethnic mosaic that entangled Bosnians, Croats and Serbs in the central areas of the former Yugoslavia had been shattered by the gruesome logic of ethnic cleansing. Stability and good neighbourly relations eventually returned — but only because the mosaic had been broken. Despite agreements and solemn promises, by and large Muslims did not return to Serbian or Croatian territory and vice versa.