FOR weeks now I’ve been trawling through my archive of war photographs. All were taken during what is now going on 40 years of working as a photojournalist on reporting assignments across the world.

The editing and selection is in preparation for a major retrospective exhibition in Glasgow in a few months’ time.

Not only has this been an arduous process, but also an emotional one. Time and again in my mind’s eye it has taken me back to many places and people that had become distant memories.

In the thousands of negatives, slides and more recent digital files, the faces of those caught up in turmoil sometimes eerily peer out.

Where now that little boy wracked by fever in South Sudan, that gunman in Afghanistan or young mother and baby trudging through the oven-like heat of the Iraqi desert fleeing for their lives?

Many of the images are from those wars in the former Yugoslavia back in the 1990s.

In one, an elderly Bosnian Muslim man wearing a black beret pauses at a crossing in the devastated city of Mostar, before running the gauntlet of snipers whose guns were trained on the streets ready to kill anyone who passed.

In another picture, two young Croatian militiamen carrying Kalashnikov’s and tattooed with Christian crosses sit embracing outside the besieged town of Vukovar. Both are almost certainly now dead given they were among those to make a final stand in the city against the paramilitary unit known as “Arkan’s Tigers”.

Commanded by Captain Zeljko Raznatovic aka Arkan, the Tigers were the most feared, brutal unit in the Serbian murder machine.

In effect they were the arrowhead of “ethnic cleansing”, the systematic killing that began first with Croatians and then moved on to Bosnia’s Muslims.

Today it’s almost impossible to imagine that such atrocities could take place barely a few decades ago right here on our European doorstep.

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The sieges of Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar and the massacre of more than 8000 Bosniaks, mainly men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica (pictured) in 1995, are hardly something from a bygone age.

All stand as stark testimony as to why division in modern day Europe can be a costly business.

Just a few years ago while in Sarajevo I listened as the leader of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Muslim community the Grand Mufti warned of the dangers lurking within Europe’s reluctance to welcome his country into its fold.

Outside on Sarajevo’s streets as the Mufti spoke, young people frustrated by staggering levels of unemployment were engaged in angry protests.

Many felt their plight was largely a symptom of Europe and their own leaders’ failure to deliver on promises made in the wake of the wars that ravaged the former Yugoslavia.

The Mufti was at pains also to point out that the ethnic wounds of those wars were still very raw and could so easily open up again given such disgruntlement.

It was Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century German chancellor at the time of the Congress of Berlin back in 1878, who infamously dismissed the Balkans as “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier”.

I couldn’t help being reminded of Bismarck’s dismissive remark again earlier this month when Montenegro’s president Milo Djukanovic warned in a speech that the EU needs to integrate the western Balkans quickly to safeguard its own future as well as protect the buffer region from Russian and Chinese influence.

So often in the past European leaders have dismissed or ignored the Balkans at their peril. And never was that European disdain more devastatingly exposed than during the atrocities that raged across the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Djukanovic is right, too, in flagging up the need for the western Balkans to be “the zone of the EU’s responsibility and its strategic interest”.

The alternatives are obvious in that Moscow, through mischief-making politics, and Beijing via loans, are pulling out all the stops to prevent this from happening.

That there are problems within some Balkan countries of their own making goes without saying. Organised crime, corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy in many instances prevail while the political elite is often deeply divided between pro-EU and pro-Russia camps.

Right now, though, to underestimate the volatility that continues to exist in many parts of the region would be a big mistake. It would show, too, that the EU has learned little from both the distant and more recent past.

Ever since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1992, conflicts over borders and unsettled political disputes have framed the Balkans' present-day situation.

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As Djukanovic (above) – who himself is pro EU – pointed out in his recent speech, “divided societies are the remnants of the wars of the 1990s”.

Today the kind of corrosive nationalism that helped fuel the wars back then has, by and large, been defeated across the wider Balkans region. But there are still those who regard such ideologies as far from buried and remain intent on exploiting them for their own nefarious ends. Preventing the revival of this must be of key concern to the EU and a crucial factor in its policy towards the region.

Add to this the fact that external players such as Russia, China and Turkey are looking for a foothold in the region, and the sense of urgency needed to address the economic and political problems of the Balkans becomes pressingly apparent.

Anyone doubting just how much of a tinderbox the region remains need look no further than the dispute this month that pitted Serbia and Russia against Kosovo over a series of raids by Kosovar police in the country’s Serb-dominated north.

That tension prompted EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to warn: “I see the risk of the dark forces of the past coming back, in terms of confrontation, even of conflict.”

Given our own woes over the Brexit fiasco, the Balkans might seem far removed from these crisis-ridden shores. But the region is once again at risk of becoming a strategic flashpoint and one in which all the world’s great powers are competing for influence.

Undeniably the region remains a tinderbox. I, for one, only hope that the scenes and suffering depicted in my photographs taken during its last traumatic and bloody upheaval will never again be repeated.

Now is the time to make sure those dark days remain in the past by welcoming the Balkans into Europe’s embrace.