Warrant Officer Pavel Pandolarovský

"We used to get into a situation, in the army it's called contact, where the other side, some combatant, we can't identify him, is firing at you to kill you or to make your activities impossible. That was common. The most risky was the constant base attack with rockets. The base where we lived was attacked from time to time with rockets. They were 107 millimeter rockets of Chinese origin, which had a simple mechanism. And these people were sending them at us from the opposite hills. This rocket would come four, five kilometers towards us. The people who didn't want us to be there would greet us from time to time with those rockets."

"On the administrative border we had to meet the regular Serbian army at various checkpoints. Our good knowledge of the Serbian language proved useful. We were able to make contact with them. But these were people who were dripping with hatred towards Albanians. They explained to us that they felt wronged, that the land was theirs. Some of the soldiers were very harsh. They said they would go back to Kosovo and stab all the Albanians. They said they would go back there anyway once we left. They said they didn't understand why we were guarding them when they were Muslim pigs who should be burned. That's how some Serbian soldiers spoke."

"Once, it was just outside Prijedor, I was on patrol in a Land Rover. I was the leader, there were six of us. And we were being fired on from a house, probably with the aim of getting us to move elsewhere. It was the local mafia gangs who were bothered by our activities. They were running out of money because they couldn't run their business, prostitution, arms sales. We were also fired upon twice when we were guarding the biggest hotel in Prijedor. We received anonymous calls that we were all going to explode there. We were guarding that hotel because prostitutes from different countries were staying there while they were getting their papers done, before the convoy was assembled to take them to Sarajevo. From Sarajevo they were taken to their countries. I didn't go in that convoy to Sarajevo anymore. We guarded the hotel for about a week while all the paperwork was done, before the international organisations got there to find out how the girls had got there, whether they had got there voluntarily, forcibly, under the influence of drugs and the like. These women and children, because they were between the ages of 14 and 40, were staying in that hotel."

"I couldn't tell the difference between a Bosnian, a Serb, an ethnic Croat. There were enclaves where there were more of these or those. We protected whole sections so that these people would not pick up a grenade, a stone, an axe, any weapon and attack the others again. Unfortunately, that happened in 1998 or 1999 as well, but not on a broad front with thousands of dead. There were assassinations, explosions on certain members of political factions and movements. There were attacks in the villages by neighbours on neighbours over petty disputes which had the subtext that he was a Croat, he was a Serb and so on. There were devaluations of monuments, mosques, churches."