I am something of a student of the Balkans, having visited the former Yugoslavia in 1993, 1999 and 2005.
As a journalist I have been fascinated by the infinitely complex social structures, the rich culture and history, and the tragic conflicts.
I continue to be haunted by my experiences there.
There is a town in eastern Bosnia known as Visegrad, a rather plain town on the Drina River, just a few miles from what is now the Serbian border.
It is most famous for its impressive, ancient Turkish bridge, famed in literature and draped in a rich, if often tragic history.
The town, until the early 1990s, served as the hub of several small villages in the mountainous region.
Those villages are now ruins -- burned out homes, bombed mosques, collapsed minarets.
Overlooking the town is a mountain range sometimes referred to as Draga's Wall, a 1,000-foot limestone escarpment. The karst formation is pockmarked with caves and seemingly bottomless pits. Local legend has it that it was built by an evil queen named Draga sometime in the distant, impenetrable past, using an army of slaves.
In Visegrad, I stayed at a small hotel, the only one in town, as far as I could determine. I noted the lock on my room had been broken.
I later learned that the hotel had been used as a "rape camp," during the 1992-95 war in the Balkans, when the Muslim population was largely expelled from eastern Bosnia, with several women being held as virtual slaves -- raped and tortured and killed.
Few in the town knew English, but I found a young man who owned a small cafe in town who did speak some English and asked what had happened to the Muslims in the area.
"They left," he said sheepishly.
I asked about what had happened in the summer of 1995 in a town about 20 miles north. A little town called Srebrenica, to which many of the local Muslims had fled to, it being a U.N.-declared "safe haven" for refugees.
He told me the massacre at Srebrenica, in which an estimated 7,000 Bosnian men were killed by Serb paramilitaries, had been exaggerated and that in fact Srebenica had been the staging ground for many attacks on neighboring Serb villages.
He then went into a rant about his former Muslim neighbors.
"They don't even use toilet paper," he said.
I was in Novi Sad, Serbia, in January 1999, only months after the NATO bombing during the conflict over Kosovo.
The damage was rather spectacular. A modern suspension bridge over the Danube in ruins, a TV station destroyed, its tower toppled.
I tried to take a picture of the TV station, but was stopped by security guards and told I would need to have permission from the Interior Ministry (this was when Milosevic was still in charge).
For those who question the attacking of a TV station, let me remind you of Rwanda, where radio stations directed the killing.
The media under Milosevic did largely the same.
There was an infamous broadcast during the war in Bosnia in which Serb state-controlled TV alleged that Muslims in Sarajevo were feeding Serb babies to animals in the zoo.
This at a time when all the animals in the zoo had long since died of starvation or been euthenized in the midst of the Serb siege.
Now, most educated Serbs understood this broadcast to be trash, but the tragic fact is that the Balkans is something of a European Appalachia. There are isolated villages ground down by poverty, ignorance and alcoholism. Many of these people, along with criminal elements took up arms and started going to Bosnia on weekends to kill Muslims and loot their homes, bringing back truckloads of furniture, TVs and refrigerators.
In Novi Sad, I met with a young man who worked at a small opposition radio station there. It was only licensed to broadcast over a few square miles of the city.
He explained it to me like this:
"Imagine if the KKK had taken control of your country and your media -- that is what we have here."
So Slobodan Milosevic is gone now. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who orchestrated the Srebrenica massacre is still at large, as is Radovan Kradzic, the former political leader of the ultra-nationalist Bosnian Serb breakaway government.
There are many shallow graves, and many bodies tossed deep into the bottomless pits in Draga's wall.
The war seems kind of distant now. But not distant enough.
I would like to think that what happened in Bosnia could not happen to our multi-cultural society in the United States, but one can never be too sure.
-- Criminals taking control of our government
-- A media in the hands of those who promote hate for their own short-term gain or neo-fascist agenda
-- Politicians stirring up fear for their own ends, while they let our nation go bankrupt in order to give tax cuts to their wealthy cronies.
Sad fact is, I never feel too far from that little town in Bosnia, and that haunting bridge over the Drina River.