Zenaida, aged 16, is typical of thousands. She arrived in Split on April 24, from her home town of Donji Vakuf in Bosnia-Hercegovina after a hair-raising 24-hour journey in which buses ahead of hers were shot up by Serbian snipers and machine-guns. In Split she was immediately sent, with her mother, brother, sister and grandmother to one of the two large city sports stadiums where she has lived for four weeks with dozens of other families in a squash court.

The food is monotonous but adequate. The lavatories and washing facilities are quite inadequate for the unexpected thousands who sleep cheek-by-jowl amid screaming babies and quietly weeping grandmothers. Her father, an illegal worker in Germany, cannot come to the aid of his family without being called up to fight – which would help no-one, she says. No-one from the aid agencies has visited them in four weeks or asked them what they need or told them when or where they will go next.

At the plush Hotel Split, a semi-permanent home to more than 1,000 refugees, two little girls arrived at reception. Hana Kafedzic, 12, and her sister Nadja, 16, said they had no money, no food, no water and knew no-one. They had arrived the night before on a Children's Embassy bus from Sarajevo, evacuated by their father, a mathematics professor, who stayed behind. Their mother was trapped abroad and they had walked four miles to the hotel.

The hotel at first refused them baths, food or any assistance because 'they haven't got the proper documentation', until furious foreign journalists shamed the manager [Tonci Pejkovic] into action, demanding to know how a 12 year-old was supposed to know how to jump the hoops of bureaucracy after two sleepless nights, a machine-gun attack on their convoy and no idea whether their father and the rest of their family was alive or dead. 'Did he have children of his own?' the journalists asked. 'How would he react if a hotel in London or Paris had turned them out onto the streets at night, homeless, unfed and unprotected?' Clearly shocked, the manager instructed staff that these girls at least be taken in while the journalists themselves adopted them, making arrangements to escort them to safety.

Pictured left: is the author and Hana Kafedzic on a ferry heading north from Split to Rijeka in May 1992. Much of the Dalmatian coast surrounding the port of Zadar was then in the hands of JNA/Serb forces which put ferries at risk and required shipping to make wide detours to avoid coastal batteries and possible air attacks. Hana and Nadija are now safely in the hands of friends in Rijeka. But they are among the lucky few...