We remained there all of Friday and into the night, watching the shells get closer All the time we were expecting reinforcements. But we were manning the borders, and we were told our lines would hold. I was sent with a small group to an observation point on a hill above the barracks. Zagreb – Zvornik, a Serb volunteer, was standing guard at his barracks near Drnis on Friday 4 August when he heard the bombardment of Knin begin at 4.50am, writes Sarah Helm

“The aggression was expected. By the time the shelling started, all Serbs in the area feared that they would be held to account for these crimes “We all feared the revenge,” one young Serb student said.. For four years Krajina Serb leaders had been pumping the population with paranoid fears of the Croatian “Ustasha”, as they called Croats.The Serbs who captured Krajina in 1991 destroyed Croat property and forced Croats to flee.

Everyone was so scared,” said an elderly Serb who had stayed in his house.Perhaps the most important reason for the fear, however, was the dread that Croatia would wreak terrible revenge if it regained the land. However, even by the next day there was no sign of a general evacuation order.”Many of the Serb troops were themselves unaware of the order to retreat, and there were no instructions to civilians. First, shells were pulverising the area; more than 2,000 shells fell around Knin alone, in a blitz which UN military observers believe was designed to create maximum civilian terror. The Croatian advance was designed to drive the civilians ahead of it.Second, within 24 hours of the shelling, the Krajina Serb military leaders appear to have ordered at least some of their forces to withdraw and evacuate.

The civilian panic intensified when people realised their forces were not resisting and had even fled. The order for the Serb military in the UN Sector South to pull out appears to have been given in the early hours of 5 August.It is entirely possible that the Serb leaders knew very well that a military retreat would trigger a flight of civilians. The soldiers’ families were among the first to leave, and their departure must have fuelled panic among their neighbours. There were several reasons for such immediate, widespread flight. We knew we had a strong army,” said a Serb soldier who was on duty in the town of Drnis.Twenty-four hours later this soldier was fleeing in abject fear, along with 150,000 other Serbs. When the shelling spread to the north, people were eating or working – as could be seen from the scattered debris of the sudden flight, which belies claims by one senior Western diplomat that the people had been “practising evacuation”.Most significantly, perhaps, even regular soldiers in the Krajina Serb army were confident, until the offensive began, that Croatia would be repelled “We were led to believe that our defences would hold.

“This led people to think perhaps the attack would not happen,” said a UN official in Krajina.The people of Knin were in bed when the bombardment began early on 4 August. According to several of those questioned, the Krajina Serb leader, Milan Martic, announced that the defences would hold in a broadcast on the eve of the bombardment. The same day Peter Galbraith, the US ambassador to Croatia, announced the possibility of a last-ditch peace settlement. They just fled in fear, and gave everything up.”What emerges from the interviews is a story of a civilian population which was not driven out, but which was given no choice but to flee.The Krajina Serbs had been given to believe the land would be defended, and had received no instructions to take shelter or evacuate. They were interested in building their lives and were quite well off.”Mr Sare was separated from his family and sought refuge in the UN base in Knin “Now they are in Belgrade. Some of the refugees were born of mixed marriages, and there were even Croats among those who fled, usually married to Serbs.