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The international press fraternity can be a fickle tribe.

Deep bonds are forged amid wars, revolutions and natural calamities.

But the journalists who cover these stories can sometimes behave like social climbers at a cocktail party, with one eye constantly scanning the room on the look out for someone more interesting to talk to, for the next assignment - the trip that will make or burnish a reputation.

It's easy to remain committed to a story while it's on the front pages. It's harder when that story starts sliding down the news agenda, when the attention of output editors back in London begins to wander elsewhere.

This week, though, scores of journalists from around the world who came together twenty years ago to cover the war in Bosnia are returning to Sarajevo, the city that spent 44 months under siege.

Residents of Sarajevo during siege (Mike Persson/AFP/Getty Images).

They'll gather once more at Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, which became home to many of them between 1992 and 1995.

Allan Little first travelled to the Balkans in 1991, in the lull following the Gulf War, as an ambitious young reporter for BBC Radio News.

BBC correspondent Allan Little in Sarajevo.

He was sent to cover the escalating ethnic violence between Croats and Serbs that broke out following Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia that June.

"I went for two weeks initially and I stayed for four years," he told me.

By the time the fighting spread from Croatia to Bosnia in the spring of 1992 and Serb forces lay siege to Sarajevo, Allan Little and other journalists like him were already deeply immersed in the labyrinthine complexities of Balkan politics.

It was the career break many had been waiting for.

"The Gulf War focused everyone's attention on the Middle East and the more senior correspondents tended to stay involved with that story because it was seen as the big geo-strategic battleground," Little recalls.

"The people who got on top of the Yugoslavia story early on and became the experts in it, with a few exceptions like Martin Bell, were relatively young and inexperienced - people like me.

Martin Bell with armoured car in Bosnia (James Mason).

"We tended to be in our late 20s and early 30s. We were all hungry and prepared to devote our lives to it completely.

"We took ownership of the story and it was the making of a generation of us."

Digital newsgathering was in its infancy during the Bosnian War. The first generation satellite phones and laptops - primitive and cumbersome by modern standards - began to be used during the conflict. Even so, the press corps in Sarajevo still relied mainly on a "bush telegraph" of local contacts for reliable intelligence.

"Typically there'd be a UN briefing at 9am and that was a good way to start the day," Little says.

"You'd get in the car and drive through the backstreets to avoid Sniper Alley up to the where the UN was based.

"You'd meet Bosnian journalists there who were coming from their neighbourhoods and would be in touch with local politicians. Some would have news from besieged enclaves like Srebrenica and Goražde.

"Then you'd try to go off to where the war was." 

Another development that came of age during the conflict was the introduction of safety equipment to protect journalists.

"We didn't do hostile environment courses in those days," Little says.

"We were literally running around the front lines with a tape recorder and a notebook.

"In Bosnia news organisations started to think about safety for the first time.

"We got our first armoured cars in Sarajevo towards the end of 1992 because it was so dangerous. BBC Television News bought a decommissioned RUC vehicle from Northern Ireland and the radio correspondents quickly got one as well."   

For the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, Sarajevo was a "news asylum" - a nightmare that felt like it would never end.

Cameraman Robbie Wright set some of the most searing images of the period to music, choosing Seal's "Crazy" as the soundtrack for the madness and mayhem that engulfed the city - a pop video filmed in Hell.  

Some journalists have chosen to stay away from this week's 20th anniversary gathering.

"I was there, but I am not going," says Tim Judah from the Economist.

"What I fear is that readers or viewers of the material that emerges from the event will be treated to the same rehashed stories and old footage of Bosnia from nostalgic correspondents who have no idea what the place is like now."

Allan Little admits he too had misgivings about joining the Class of '92 reunion.

"At first I didn't want to be involved in what appeared to be a celebration of war - I thought it was mawkish and inappropriate" he admits.

In the end, though, the same people who kept pulling him back obsessively to the Balkans two decades ago managed to change his mind.

"A couple of Bosnian friends rang me and said 'What's this? We hear you're not coming'," Little says.

"They said 'You were with us all that time - you must come. Have you forgotten us? We need to have you here.'

"It's like falling in love for the first time - it's something you can't do a second time in quite the same way.

"I think there's one big story in every journalist's life which changes you - and that's what Bosnia did to me." 

Stuart Hughes is a BBC World Affairs producer