My heart goes out to Serb civilian casualties. After all, we know what it is like when powerful weaponry pounds your city, your people, family and friends. We have been there. For 30 months, the capital of Bosnia-Hercegovina, Sarajevo, was under incessant bombardment. Thirty months meant 1,000 days. It also meant 12,500 killed, including 1,600 children. Up to 4,000 children in Sarajevo were wounded in 1,000 days and nights. No water, no food, no medicine, no place to hide . . . from what? From guns perched at the mountain above, a favourite weekend outing spot in more peaceful times.

For three long years, a European city was under siege by mighty Bosnian Serb forces, supervised and aided by the J(N)A or Yugoslav (People's) Army. The political and the military supreme commanders respectively were Milosevic's men on the ground: Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the former originally from a mountain village in Montenegro, the latter from a mountain village near the Bosnian-Serb border.

Both had an overwhelming hatred for the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural existence that Sarajevo stood for. With troubled family histories themselves they were perfect candidates for Milosevic's plans to "cleanse" anything and everything non-Serb. Mladic's infamous order to his soldiers manning the heavy artillery pointed at the city below - "pound them until you blow their mind" - stands out as one of the most horrific legacies of this century. Among others, the main maternity hospital with its delivery rooms and new-born babies was deliberately shelled by Serbian forces, and is still out of action today, three years after the peace accord. The main post office was one of the first buildings to be shelled and burnt down to cut off the city from the world. Children playing were taken out by snipers like pigeons. Women and men, young and old, buying food at the city market were blown to pieces on clear, sunny days. From the hillside, targets were being picked out through binoculars with surgical precision. The going rate or reward for shooting a Sarajevan dead on his balcony or in the street, was 100 Deutschmarks. Imagine your life worth £40. But then, sinister cynicism is Milosevic's speciality.

And those were the lucky ones. In Bosnian villages and small towns, Karadzic's Serbs followed a chilling routine: first they would disarm local Muslims or Croats of the few weapons they had, round them up, divide men from women and put them in deserted hangars. Then came the torture and killing, intimidation and rape. Mercy was not on the agenda.

Horror stories we thought were firmly locked in the past resurfaced again, for the first time since the second World War. And so did concentration camps. Serb guards paraded their deadly guns and threatening looks among emaciated and tortured, humiliated victims. Still, this was labelled a `civil war' with a keep-off warning. The then British Foreign Minister, Douglas Hurd, was especially keen on the word. The third strongest army in Europe, the J(N)A, waging a war against an unarmed population, and they called it `civil'?

Then Srebrenica happened, and Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic had gone one step too far. In summer 1995, 7-10,000 men from the supposedly safe area were brought to execution sites, shot dead and bulldozed over. Some bodies are being exhumed, more are rotting in the ground of Republika Srpska. Many may never be found, their remains decomposed and scattered, their families in a limbo. I have seen the fields of eastern Bosnia where a skull or an odd human bone was dug up and thrown aside for a Serb farmer to sow his crops. And this was barely three years after the men of Srebrenica were shot like sheep - no resistance, no screams, just deadly silence . . .

Radovan Karadzic and his general have been in hiding since they were indicted for war crimes by the Hague Tribunal. Their mastermind, president of Yugoslavia and now of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, continued his crusade against the non-Serbs and the disobedient.

He started his campaign on Kosovo 10 years ago, harnessing Serbian national pride and turning it into rampant nationalistic extremism, without compromise, without mercy. His army first attacked Slovenia in the north, gave up and moved down to Croatia causing havoc and destruction, from the beautiful old town of Vukovar to the gem of Adriatic, Dubrovnik.

A year later, Milosevic took his army to the most vulnerable, central republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina. It was believed Bosnia would fall within weeks - God knows how it survived three war years. In 1995, after 250,000 had died, a peace deal was declared and the West wanted Milosevic to be its guarantor, the "man to do business with". He tricked them into believing they could not do without him.

Regrettably, the man's business is not peace but war. Kosovo is just the latest "pearl" in his necklace, but would not have been the last. There is the tiny but proud Montenegro, whose pride Milosevic would like to squash; then there is a Sandzak triangle between Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro with a Muslim majority, which he would like to cleanse; lastly, there is Vojvodina in the north, whose autonomy he stripped away at the same time as Kosovo's. Meanwhile, in Kosovo, the same old story: streams of refugees, torture, rape, mass killings, destruction of homes, looting . . . and endless lies to his own people and to the outside world. In eight years, Milosevic's policy has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people of the former Yugoslavia being made homeless and dispossessed. But the Serbs stand firmly behind their leader.

There are now voices opposed to NATO strikes, and advocating negotiations and a political solution instead. I would challenge them that they have not done their homework: the majority ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo has pursued and exhausted all avenues of peaceful struggle in the last 10 years. Living in a European state without freedom of expression, denied the right to teach and learn in their own language, dismissed from positions of any importance and denied all political and human rights, they became increasingly desperate. The prisons of Kosovo were built for ethnic Albanians. Inside, they were denied justice and left at the mercy of those who imprisoned them. Mercy was not on the agenda. Though less than 10 per cent of the population, the Serbs of Kosovo have been running the show, and loving every moment.

People usually do not rebel if given their rights and freedom, even under minority rule. Kosovan Albanians never stood a chance with their Serb masters. When they did finally rise against them, it was out of despair. Life is not worth living, we'd rather die than go on like this, they said. NATO bombardment will cost the Kosovan Albanian population an enormous price, both in lives and livelihood. But it is the price they consider worth paying for their dignity and for their future. And so should we. For, if you do not halt evil when it is unleashed far away, it may soon come closer to home.

Vesna Ruzicka-Sehovic is London Correspondent for the main independent Bosnian daily, Oslobodjenje.