This extract from The Pavelić Trap follows an episode in which the central character, British journalist Mick Morrison, and his more experienced colleague and mentor, Saša, have just escaped unscathed from an ethnic cleansing trauma in which a Bosnian Muslim community had been chased from its villages by Bosnian Serbs but hoped to be heading to safe territory. The word ‘balija’ was a term of abuse used by Bosnian Serbs towards Bosnian Muslims and, roughly translated, it meant ‘dirty Turkish gypsies’.