Back in July 1991, a reporter was shot in the groin with a dumdum bullet fired by a Serbian sniper in Croatia. He had been in his car, which was clearly marked Press, searching for a young and inexperienced colleague who was late returning from the field. The wounded reporter bled to death.

In his pocket was found a photocopy of a poem, written in English and signed by one Slavko Bronzic of the town of Osijek, of whom no more is known. It read:

To the Reporter
Write down as much as you can,
my friend,
but report to the world not only
the number of the people who got killed
on the golden fields of Slavonia.

Because a number has no name
and no stolen future.
Report to the world,
it was Johann and William,
and Victor and Francesco,
and Gabriel and Gyorgy,
who got killed,
and that maybe tomorrow
you will get killed, too.

Write down as much as you can,
my friend,
but report to the world not only the
number of all who got killed
on the bleeding fields of Slavonia.

Report to the world that the dead reporter in whose bloody pocket that poem was found was Egon Scotland. He had gray hair and a mustache, and was forty-two years old, a German who wrote for Suddeutsche Zeitung, in Munich.

He had spent part of 1989 and 1990 in the U.S., as a John S. Knight professional journalism fellow at Stanford University. There, he had studied Balkan history and the Serbo-Croatian language. His Stanford friends describe him as a man who tried his hand at everything, from metal sculpture to clothing design, someone who made and wore his own multipocketed vest. They describe him as a man of intense professional dedication and voracious intellectual curiosity, someone who could be aggravating, captivating, eccentric, endearing.

Some of those friends established a fund at Stanford, to which people can contribute money in Scotland's name. It will be used to permit other journalists to study the kinds of ethnic and national conflicts that he died trying to explain.

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