Belgrade is cheap, pleasant and easy to visit. My advice is come and see its weirdly interesting sights before the hordes catch on.

No one could call this place particularly beautiful. It has many fine buildings, plenty of wonderful cafés and some quite unforgettable restaurants. The Sava and Danube rivers, which flow through it, are magnificent. But Belgrade still has a case of post-Marxist-Leninist city planning, and you wouldn’t wish that on anywhere you liked.

Still, it’s great to be back. Time is, as ever, short, but I insist on taking a quick drive round the city to see the sights. Not the tourist sights, you understand, but the ones that are special to me. The hospital where I had an emergency knee operation during the Nato bombing campaign of 1999, for instance. The operation was successful, thanks to an excellent young surgeon who became a personal friend, and no thanks at all to his professor, who walked in on the operation and ordered the surgeon to stop at once because he was helping the enemies of Serbia. Admittedly, the Americans had managed to bomb the hospital the previous night.

Then there was the hotel where the warlord Arkan was blown away by hired assassins. When I visited the hotel afterwards, the porter proudly showed me the bullet holes behind the reception desk, and then, nudging and winking, led me over to the place where they had parked the sofa that Arkan had been sitting on.

I saw the places where I had been tear-gassed, chased, threatened and arrested. I looked at them all with a pleasant nostalgic glow. Those days are past now, and won’t come back. Serbia isn’t an easy country, and it has all sorts of hang-ups. Yet at some stage it will surely become a member of the European Union.

That night we stayed up late to do our stuff live for the 10 O’Clock News in Britain, and weren’t free for a bite to eat until midnight, Belgrade time. Everything seemed shut by then, even the room service at our hugely expensive hotel. Someone there suggested a late-night place nearby where we were given burek, a meaty, cheesy, pizza-ish kind of thing running with oil, and violent little cups of coffee that kept me awake, heart thumping, for the rest of the night. It was still better than going to bed hungry.

The following morning we went for a stroll. I had once walked down this street when the mobs were attacking the office of the British Council. I was under the strictest of instructions from my Serbian producer, who walked beside me, not to make eye contact with anyone; being attacked didn’t, he explained, bring out the best in Serbs. I agreed. Nowadays, though, no one is bombing them. The crowds are relaxed and well-dressed, and the biggest problem is to find a seat in one of the open-air cafés. For old times’ sake, when we sat down, I ordered a glass of viljamovka, the ferocious local firewater made from pears.

And then, as we ambled on, I spotted a newsstand. It was nothing out of the ordinary, covered with all manner of magazines and newspapers in Cyrillic as well as Latin script, the fiery, excitable periodicals, which keep the temperature up in the former Yugoslavia. It looked no different from any other of its kind, yet what happened in front of it one afternoon in April 1999 led to noisy scenes in the House of Commons, headlines in the British press, a threat from me to sue the prime minister for defamation, and – most surprising of all – an apology from Downing Street itself.

With Nato bombs falling every day, my camera crew and I came nervously to this newsstand, in order to record what the BBC calls vox pops: interviews with people in the street. There were no government minders with us; we just did our thing. Directly the camera was switched on, people surrounded us angrily, shouting their defiance of Nato, ourselves, Winston Churchill and anyone else they could think of. It was no great surprise: bombarding civilians always makes them defiant.

But this wasn’t what the British government wanted to hear, and rumours and whispers began that I’d been taken to the centre of Belgrade by Serbian government minders, and only allowed to speak to a few unrepresentative loyalists, while pretending that they were ordinary men and women in the street. The Downing Street spokesman, Alastair Campbell, who seemed to be running the British government in those days, quoted Tony Blair in his famous diaries as calling me ‘that sanctimonious w****r’. Oh well – one of Blair’s predecessors as prime minister had punched me in the stomach when I asked him an unwelcome question, so I suppose this was a bit of an improvement. To be honest, though, I hadn’t realised that today’s prime ministers used that kind of language.

It was all sorted out in the end, and none of it mattered much any way. Campbell even wrote and sort of apologised. Government loyalists in Serbia, who had habitually accused the BBC of being the mouthpiece of the British government, were puzzled for a moment, but one particularly rabid figure (sentenced to 20 years at the Hague) explained that the official attack on me was just a stunt to fool everyone. Nine years later, no one in either Britain or Serbia remembers anything about it. I had largely forgotten it myself, until I spotted the newsstand.

Things have moved on and today no one is unpleasant to Westerners here. Belgrade is cheap and pleasant and easy to visit. My advice is come and see its weirdly interesting sights, before the hordes catch on. But remember not to leave it too late to have dinner.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.