7 October 2008 | Several countries in the Western Balkans, including Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, are banking on their recent conflict-torn past and offering foreign visitors the chance to retrace the steps of war criminals and see the traces left by the wars that shook the region in the 1990s.

Most organised tours of Serbia’s capital, the Earth Times online newspaper reported, have included since 2000 a visit to a downtown army headquarters bombed by NATO in 1999.

This summer, just days after Radovan Karadžić, the war-crimes-indicted Bosnian Serbs’ leader, was caught after 13 years on the run, a tour agency in Belgrade began offering tours that traced Karadžić’s footsteps around the city. As BalkanTravellers.com reported in July, the tour included his favourite haunts while he was posing as a white-bearded alternative healer, as well as his place of capture.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capital, it is possible to visit the 800-metre tunnel that linked the besieged Sarajevo Muslims with the outside world through which around one million people duck-walked, although – according to the Earth Times publication, no regular tourist agencies offer such services.

Interested people can also find “men with a business spirit” to take them to the nearby town of Srebrenica, where in 1995 around 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić.

According to the report, in addition to foreign tourists, people who often visit these places include Serbs who want to see where their relatives or friends were killed.

In Croatia, tourists interested in seeing traces of the war usually head to the city of Vukovar, on the Danube River, which was shelled for almost three months and ruined completely before it eventually fell in late 1991. Vukovar was also the site of one of the worst atrocities of the Croatian War – the execution of 264 Croatian prisoners by Serb militias, aided by the Yugoslav People's Army, at the Ovčara site near the town, where a memorial now stands (in the picture above).

The Danubiumtours agency offers the Footsteps of Vukovar defenders six-hour guided bicycle tour of Vukovar, which takes tourists from the city’s centre to the hospital along the so-called “tank road” to a prison camp and Ovčara.

In the former hospital, according to the publication, wax figures of wounded and dying Croatian soldiers are strewn around.

The Earth Times also reported that while around 20,000 visitors come to the ruined city every year, it is hard for them to find a place to eat or accommodation after doing the war tour.

“Vukovar could become a place where a common tourist can learn a lot, but at the moment it has nothing but the war to offer,” Zrinka Sesto, director of Danubiumtours, told the publication.

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