'When my father was taken captive in Sarajevo'

It was on 2 May 1992 that the heavy bombardment of Sarajevo began, less than a month after it came under siege from the Bosnian Serbs. On the same day Alija Izetbegovic, the president of the newly independent and embattled nation of Bosnia, was seized as he returned to Sarajevo from Portugal.

With the president, throughout this night and day of drama, was his daughter Sabina. She remembers that her father had not wanted to leave Sarajevo in the first place.

Mediators from what was then the European Community (EC) had arranged for him to fly temporarily to Lisbon, and had promised that his safe return to Sarajevo would be guaranteed.

But that's not how it worked out, remembers Sabina.

"We were on the plane to Sarajevo, but the pilot couldn't make contact with Sarajevo Airport. He said he could land anyway, so my father told him to go ahead and try."

The plane landed in the middle of a Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) takeover of the airport.

"As we were landing, I could see tanks, all aiming at the runway. We got out - as soon as we got out the plane immediately took off - and a group of army officers came towards us."

The non-appearance of the promised EC protection goes down in the history books as just one more symbol of the feebleness and confusion of the international response at the start of the war in Bosnia.

Sabina and her father were taken to an office inside the airport building. The senior JNA officer told them to sit down. Then he called in four young soldiers "very, very young, with machine guns - they sat in each corner of the room, aiming at us".

The president asked to use the telephone to contact his government in the city. The officer refused, saying all the lines had been cut. Then he left.

"At that very moment, the telephone on the table rang. I grabbed it - I was afraid the soldiers would shoot my father if he touched it. On the line was a woman asking if there were any planes leaving the city!

"My father took the receiver and said: 'Dear lady, this is President Izetbegovic, please call the Presidency, call the TV station and tell them we are being held against our will!'"

The JNA soldiers then took the president and his daughter to a nearby military base, where they were harangued by the base commander. He told them that the city defence force, loyal to President Izetbegovic, had surrounded a JNA unit inside Sarajevo. A senior Serb officer, General Kukanjac, was being held hostage. It looked like the army wanted a deal, says Sabina.

Inside the military camp, Sabina realised she was witnessing first-hand the rapid transformation of the multi-national Yugoslav Army, which had been built by former President Marshal Tito to weld together - and control - the different nations and ethnicities of Yugoslavia.

"I could see there were those who still had some ideals of the Army as the 'army of all the peoples'. And then there were those who were becoming Serb Army. Some still wore the Yugoslav red star on their caps. And some had already taken it off."

Sabina heard the constant firing of heavy artillery. Inside the city, as the shells rained down, there was panic - Vice-President Ejup Ganic went on Bosnian TV to appeal for international help.

In the end, it was President Izetbegovic himself who negotiated his own release. He persuaded the base commander to put him in touch directly with Gen Kukanjac, trapped inside Sarajevo with a company of his soldiers.

The president and the general worked out a precise deal. A convoy of UN armoured vehicles would take Sabina and her father into town. They would go to the surrounded military post inside Sarajevo. The convoy would then be joined by an agreed number of Yugoslav Army vehicles, which would then start the journey back out of town. On the way, Mr Izetbegovic and his daughter would turn over a bridge, Skenderija, in the centre of town, towards the Presidency building. The convoy would proceed to safety.

The journey into town went to plan. But then things began to unravel.

"You could feel the tension in the air… The day before there was a lot of fighting… through the window of the armoured car I saw the bodies of some soldiers who had got killed the day before. I was praying to God that we would reach Skenderija Bridge!"

But halfway there, she says, the convoy stopped.

"General Kukanjac, the Serb general, was sitting with us in the armoured car. The door suddenly opened. There was a Bosnian soldier, who happened to be a Serb, and that guy, a young, very strong big guy, was standing at the door, threatening to kill General Kukanjac. So a Serb threatening to kill a Serb general! He was cursing, he took off his shirt to show his wounds; it was a scene. My father said 'calm down!' And then, I heard some shooting!"

That young Serb man screaming his grievances in the face of Serb General Kukanjac was not the only Serb supporting Alija Izetbegovic's government. Many Orthodox Serbs stayed in the city and lived through the siege with their Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat neighbours.

The incident Sabina refers to is still hotly disputed. What is certain is that some part of the convoy did come under attack. But who fired first may never be known.

Sabina remembers a senior Bosnian army commander, Gen Jovan Divjak, using a loudhailer to try to halt the shooting. "My father was shouting too: 'Stop firing, stop firing!'"

After about ten minutes, says Sabina, the guns fell silent. The convoy got moving again. Sabina and her father made it to the relative safety of the Presidency.

"I remember that most people were euphoric when they saw us. But I remember that somebody said 'Oh, good to see you. But maybe the international community would have done something for us if you had been killed'," she says.

"That night I couldn't sleep… I felt the fear that I hadn't felt while I was in the middle of it all."

What followed was more than three years during which Bosnian Serb guns fired down from the hills onto the city's population, killing many civilians as well as the fighters defending the Bosnian capital.

The lines of white gravestones in many of Sarajevo's open spaces tell that story today.

<italic>Sabina Berberovic spoke to Dan Damon for the </italic> <link> <caption>BBC World Service </caption> <url href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/" platform="highweb"/> </link> <italic>programme history programme Witness. </italic> <link> <caption>Download the podcast</caption> <url href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/witness" platform="highweb"/> </link> <italic> or </italic> <link> <caption>browse the archive</caption> <url href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t1hd" platform="highweb"/> </link> <italic>.</italic>