Don's Diary

MONDAY. If you are going to have to spend four hours sitting around an airport there are worse places to do it than Zagreb. There's parkland, a bar with an outside terrace and, because of the collapse of the tourist trade, only the very occasional sound of a jet taking-off or landing. There are four of us, two from Britain, two from Sweden, emissaries en route to Bosnia. Our mission - almost impossible - is to run a series of training workshops on political communication for a coalition of parties who are fighting this month's Bosnian elections on a non-nationalist platform.

Eventually our driver and interpreter arrive to transport us from Zagreb to Bihac in northern Bosnia.

I learn a lot about house construction travelling through the former Yugoslavia. Driving through the Krajina area on the border of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia I stare out of the window, transfixed by the houses we passed - all in various states of destruction. The most striking thing is not the destruction itself but how methodical it has all been. Every single house occupied by a Croat (or further south a Muslim) family has been destroyed; yet every so often one comes to a village which is neat and intact and soon I stop asking "Serb?" because the answer was always "Of course". And yet there are people, everywhere I looked - moving around, re-building homes, working the fields or just sitting.

TUESDAY. Midway through my first session in Bihac and I am getting vague indications that the theory and practice of political communication, which are now so much a part of daily life in Westminster and Washington, might be just a bit irrelevant to the group of farm labourers and factoryhands who are listening to Indira doing her best to render into Bosnian "spin doctors" and "sound bites".

Bihac, now part of the Moslem-Croat Federation of Bosnia, was besieged by the Serbs for four years. Now its people are making up for lost time. Saturday night, and Bihac girls, and boys for that matter, are out in force, sitting in bars, strolling around town and listening to the multitude of bands playing in the open air. At two in the morning we finally retreat.

WEDNESDAY. The journey to Sarajevo is much like the journey through the Krajina - every house along the road has been destroyed, some hit by artillery, some flattened by mines (although with their roofs intact) but most just stand there like forlorn skeletons. "How do they do that?" I ask, sounding dreadfully like a plug for a BBC TV series. "Simple" says our driver Figret, four-times wounded in the Bosnian army and a real war hero, "Kick out the occupants, light a candle in the back of the house, turn on the gas and wait for the explosion". So neat, so clean, just like Auschwitz.

We cross into the Serbian entity, Republica Srbska, from territory controlled by the Moslem-Croat Federation; no checkpoints just an unmanned Iprofor barrier to be negotiated. We drive off in the direction of the border.

No television pictures quite prepare you for the devastation in Sarajevo. The approach from Bihac takes you along the airport road where barely a building is left standing, twisted wrecks of houses, offices and factories stand guard at the entrance to the city.

THURSDAY. The participants in our Sarajevan seminar are more sophisticated than their Bihac counterparts. I learn about the coalition - it is very broad and includes former communists, social democrats, a peasants party and the Republicans, who have links with their American namesakes. But perhaps the strangest component in this secular coalition is the Bosnian Moslem Party. It does not seem to make a great deal of sense but by now I am beginning to learn that it is easier to accept things as they were rather than try and apply British pre-conceptions to the very complicated situation which now exists in Bosnia.

FRIDAY. Last stop Tuzla - an affluent-looking industrial city midway between Belgrade and Zagreb. It is the one major centre where the coalition has real hopes of doing well. The mayor is a social democrat and heads the coalition's national list. We have an interesting training session where, among the issues raised is, how should they deal with accusations of "Yugo-nostalgia"? Having seen the devastation created since the collapse of the former state I think that maybe the old Yugoslavia was not such a bad thing after all.

The mayor is an impressive man who, apart from trying to win a seat in the national parliament is also trying to manage a town whose population has been swollen by a quarter of a million refugees.

Tuzla's our last stop and the most hopeful. Bosnia is riven by its three-way ethnic divide, the chances of a non-sectarian coalition making any significant national impact in the elections is remote. But there will be pockets of success, perhaps like Tuzla, where there is a chance the people will be able to establish some sort of bridgehead to demonstrate that the future for Bosnia might one day lie in the hands of those who see themselves as Bosnian's first and only secondly, if at all, as Moslems, Croats or Serbs. There is no doubt there is some way to go before that will be achieved but if and when it is perhaps, in a very tiny way, our little foray into Bosnia might have made a small contribution.

Ivor Gaber is professor of broadcast journalism at Goldsmith's College, University of London.