'Independent' journalist receives MBE

MARCUS TANNER, the Independent's correspondent in Belgrade throughout the wars in the former Yugoslavia, received the MBE yesterday for services to journalism.

Marcus, 32, is one of a handful of British correspondents to have reported every phase of the civil war, from the first scattered riots in Croatia to the siege of Sarajevo.

His reporting has been lucid, balanced and authoritative, whether from the paranoiac atmosphere of Belgrade - where he has been robbed twice and beaten - or from the besieged Moslem enclaves of Bosnia. He was the first British journalist to enter the encircled town of Gorazde earlier this year.

Marcus Tanner joined the Independent before its launch in 1986 as an assistant librarian. After a series of articles for the travel and foreign pages, and a book, Passport to Latvia, he broke into full- time journalism by setting up as the newspaper's stringer in Belgrade in 1988.

He rapidly made his mark by covering the terrifying early stages of the revolution in nearby Romania and the first rumblings of disintegration of Yugoslavia.

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