As a refugee, Irena Carlton was safe in England while the Bosnian War raged, but her family were not as fortunate. She tells Lindsay Jennings why her mission is now to help other asylum seekers.

IRENA Carlton is deep in conversation with a hopeful-looking Mongolian couple who are wanting to stay in Britain. The subject is a tribunal appeal report from the Home Office, which Irena and her colleagues at the Byker Sands Family Centre, near Newcastle, are having difficulty translating - from Home Office English into plain English.

"It looks good, " she tells the couple, scanning the report once more. "Give me a ring today as soon as you hear anything.

What you need is something to make it easier to read - do you have any alcohol?"

She bursts into laughter and the couple smile too, taking Irena's lead and relaxing their pale, tense faces, one suspects, for the first time in months. Irena understands their tension. She has been in their shoes.

Irena, 40, grew up in rural Brcko, in the northern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina with her younger sister and parents. Her father was a Muslim, and the company director of a meat producing factory, while her mother was a tourist rep and a Croat Catholic.

Irena loved poetry and the theatre and studied the history of Yugoslavian literature at university in Sarajevo before coming to England in September 1991 to improve her English. Little did she know that in less than seven months the beautiful lush country she left behind would have its heart ripped out. More than 100,000 people would eventually die in the Bosnian War.

Irena's parents were captured by Serb soldiers shortly after war broke out. Her mother was taken with other women in a convoy and dumped over the Bosnian border. She later found her way to Germany where she met up with Irena's sister, Sandra. But her father ended up in a concentration camp.

Irena says the war came suddenly: "Bosnia was very European, it borders Italy. We couldn't even understand what was happening and we loved our neighbours. But when you live in villages with not much education then you believe anything that's told to you, you just become part of it. The majority of Serbs were actually people living off the land who didn't have much chance of a great education. But these were people who (Yugoslavian President) Slobodan Milosevic targeted for their nationalism."

Irena was staying in London with two dozen other professionals - doctors, and architects mainly from Sarajevo, and a mixture of Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

"We were all friends, all desperate for information, " says Irena. "I didn't know anything about where my father was. I can remember seeing a picture in The Guardian when the Red Cross were over there and it was of a picture of a man being shot. It showed the bullet leaving the Serbian's gun and going towards this man and he was running and I was convinced it was my father. I couldn't see his face and it took about two weeks to find out my father was okay."

Irena's father was actually released from the concentration camp thanks to a Serbian friend, who was later shot for helping so many Croats to escape. Her father was held in a house prison for a year until a Serbian general, known for his killing sprees but who also happened to be friends with Irena's Muslim aunt, heard about her father's plight.

"This guy, who was basically a killer, saved my father, " recalls Irena. "He helped him with medicines, because mentally he was completely disorientated and was very thin, and he was then helped by another Serbian friend, who had also been completely involved in the massacres, to the border of Serbia.

"My father was presented as this man's Serbian friend and waved through every checkpoint but when they got to the border, his friend said he couldn't cross it and he said 'you will just have to fight'. My father was at the point where he just didn't care any more whether he was going to live or die.

"He had seen soldiers put people into the silos at his factory and mill them alive. He can still hear their screams today. He sunk to his knees and just started to cry and he said 'do whatever you want, kill me here rather than send me back.' This passport control man just looked at him and said 'go'."

Another Serbian friend was waiting on the other side in Croatia and her father was picked up and taken to Germany where he was reunited with his wife and younger daughter. It came as Irena had secured a place at Sunderland University to study cultural and textural studies.

She can clearly recall the first time she spoke to her father after he had reached Germany.

"It was very emotional. When I heard his voice he was speaking really, really quietly and I said 'why are you speaking quietly?' and he said 'I'm just frightened they will hear'. Being in a prison camp for two years, he'd just gone so far into himself that he couldn't believe he could have a normal life again.' Irena eventually secured refugee status and in 1996 married York archaeologist Richard Carlton, who had worked in Bosnia after the war helping to preserve some of the country's medieval artefacts.

Irena met him when she was working for the British Refugee Council in Newcastle and the couple have three children, Yasmina, ten, Sam Sebastian, eight, and Asya, six.

Irena returned to Bosnia in 1997 when Yasmina was a baby to see for herself the ghost towns which had been shelled beyond recognition.

"Seeing all those destroyed buildings, it was shocking at first, but then it just became part of the scenery, " she says. "You could see the beautiful mountains and lakes but you couldn't walk there because next to the roads there were signs saying 'danger, mines'. It was just utter devastation.

"There were so many graves everywhere, just simple with stones and markings. Four different Serbian families had moved into our house during the war and destroyed all our photographs, our mementos. We have a few photographs left but not much."

Her parents now live in Croatia while Irena works for an asylum seeking project run by the charity Barnardo's, helping people understand their application forms, access counselling, housing etc.

And she loves her work.

"Some of people's stories of survival are absolutely amazing, and so painful with what they have gone through, " she says. "We're really here to give them support because wherever they go they experience terrible difficulties in getting people to understand what they've been through. I get great satisfaction from knowing that I might have made a difference."

Her blue eyes burn passionately as she describes how her international cooking class allows people to recognise their cultures.

"They're all suffering the same but they're all very strong individuals with family values, " she says. "And they're all fighting prejudice. We all want the same things: to be safe with our children. We shouldn't be aliens to each other."

In the Byker Sands Family Centre foyer, discussions are still on-going about the Mongolian couple. It turns out the indecipherable Home Office form is actually saying that the Mongolian wife has secured refugee status, meaning her husband can stay too. Irena's face lights up.

"I'm going to go round and tell them. I want to see the look on their faces, " she says excitedly, grabbing her jacket.

"They're going to be so happy. You can put that in your article if you like."