Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Louise Adalgo and today I'm taking you back 25 years to the summer of 1991 and the

first chapter in the wars in the former Yugoslavia when tanks belonging to the federal

Yugoslav army rolled into Slovenia to try to force the republic to reverse its decision to break

away. I've been talking to Dimitri Rupel who was a Slovenian

foreign minister at the time about his country's fight for independence. It's early

July 1991 and reports are coming in that a huge convoy of the Yugoslav army has left the

Serbian capital Belgrade and is heading towards Slovenia, which along with Croatia has become the first of the republics

to announce they're leaving the former Yugoslavia.

All lies and television cameras are on that convoy as it moves towards the supposedly independent

republics. No federal troops are out in the city and road to the television station are blocked

by buses sloon across them.

I personally was not scared.

I was so busy doing whatever was my job or my mission

that I didn't think much.

And we lived myself and my colleagues of that group that was

managing the operation were living like in a trance.

Slovenia and Croatia had both declared their independence on the 25th of June.

The next day the Federal Yugoslav army left their barracks and moved to take over Slovenia's borders.

We tried to contact as many people as possible and to persuade them that Yugoslavia had two problems.

First, the problem of democracy and second, Milosevich wanted to make Yugoslavia a Serbo-Slavia and this was something

that we are very much afraid of.

...