The player who really knows war

Bunjevcevic and his family have lived through 10 years of conflict – reason enough for him to fear more

"War is always madness. Trust me." The words of Goran Bunjevcevic are spoken passionately, forcefully and from personal experience.

Madness has again returned to the streets of Belgrade, with the assassination of the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic, and Bunjevcevic, the only Serbian footballer in England, has been on the telephone every hour, on the hour, to try and gather information.

"There are no football games, no movies, nothing going on in the country. Everybody is waiting to see what will happen in two or three days," the Tottenham Hotspur player says. "It has to affect you."

Signed two years ago for £1.4 million from Red Star Belgrade, where he was captain, Bunjevcevic, 30, is as bewildered as he is concerned. "Everybody is waiting now, every hour we wait for decisions. What is going to happen? What is the solution for us? It is hard when you are over here and you do not know what is happening there."

His family, in Belgrade, are safe, but he adds: "It is not about family, it is more about the people around the government and connected with these things."

He struggles to make any sense of the killing that has led to a state of emergency being declared and a shutdown of services amid three days of national mourning. Fears are growing that a coup will be attempted.

"You think about football but you think about what is going to happen to my country," Bunjevcevic says, slowly shaking his head. "We have just started to build, people from England, France, Italy had just started to invest some money and build some nice buildings and shops, and everything was starting to go the right way for us. Not just in Serbia; I see that there are adverts on CNN and Eurosport inviting people to come to the beautiful coast of Croatia. It is really very beautiful.

"And now those people who are investing the money, they see the prime minister get shot. In the street. In front of the government building. A sniper. It is just incredible. What will these people think?"

Although he is a Serb, Bunjevcevic was born in Split, Croatia. His family are all Red Star Belgrade supporters and he eventually fulfilled his dream of signing for them in 1997. The club were founded after the Second World War, a team purportedly for the people and set up ostensibly to compete with the army club Partizan Belgrade, named after Tito's guerrilla forces.

In the fiercely complicated world of Balkan politics, while Partizan fans are staunchly federalist, Red Star followers – known as the Delije ("Strong Boys") – back Serb nationalism. It was rioting by the Delije, including the warlord Arkan, which apparently played a role in starting the Balkans conflict in 1991, and it was the Delije again who attacked the Belgrade state television station, an event which precipitated the fall of Slobodan Milosevic.

"For 10 years there was war and lots of killing, guns, everything. I could speak about this for hours. Then in 2000 you think war is over, everything is perfect and then the bombing came. They started to bomb," Bunjevcevic says.

They, of course, were Nato. Bunjevcevic was in Belgrade and explains what it was like. "Serbians are strange people," he says. "I tell you now everybody was sitting in restaurants and cafes drinking coffee, waving and smiling and watching the planes go by, saying, 'I will show you round when you come down'. That's the Serb mentality. Planes are going round but you always think, 'Oh, they are going to hit a military target', even if they do not. I can tell you now, more women got pregnant during the war than before." He and his family survived, although his uncle – "and several close friends" – had earlier been killed in the civil war.

"It [war] may feel like nothing until you lose somebody, it is very nasty and you think about the other side and it is very bad. More and more and more like a balloon until it goes boom! It is madness," he explains. "It [the civil war] was an incredible war. Imagine someone coming to London and saying, 'You are out, you don't belong' and so on."

And now he fears for the conflict with Iraq. "You always think about the war. Imagine if England starts the war with Iraq and Iraq starts to strike back. What do you do, normal people? You do nothing, you just go to the shelter and see what happens. What can you personally do? It has to bother you. We have been in war for 10 years and at the end we said, 'Why did they do it? What was the point?' ''

It may sound trite, but football has provided a "release". "The gaffer and coaches help me try to forget the things which happen at home," Bunjevcevic says. "Particularly when I am training and on the pitch. When you are in front of 36,000 people and they are screaming, you just say, 'Come on' and you run." But, he adds: "Then you come home and think about what is happening. If I was not playing football it would affect me more."

Not that he feels any football will be played in his homeland for some time. And that includes the European qualifier scheduled for Serbia-Montenegro, as his country is now known, against Wales at the beginning of April. "I think it would be stupid to play," he says, before, with emphasis, adding: "I am just a football player. It is for bigger people to decide."