Tom Walker’s good humour rarely failed him on even his grimmest assignments in the Balkan troublespots where he made his name as a foreign correspondent for The Times and The Sunday Times in the 1990s. Despite the often forbidding context of his work, he invariably displayed resilient cheerfulness and rare generosity to friends and colleagues.

He was one of the first to report on the shooting of 45 Albanians in the Kosovo village of Racak in January 1999, a massacre that heralded widespread ethnic cleansing in the province and the intervention of Nato. In the ruined city of Pec a few months later, he wrote vividly about the death and destruction, describing charred skeletons of houses where many people were burnt alive, and a room where paramilitaries loyal to Slobodan Milosevic had written “Nato kills the flower of Serbia” in a victim’s blood on the wall.

Yet when the gruelling day’s work was done, he would relieve the tension by telling stories about a bar he had opened with journalist friends in Pristina, the provincial capital, the previous year. They named it Tricky Dick’s after Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy who had negotiated with Milosevic, and the Kosovo Liberation Army tried to burn it down.

With his unerring eye for a quirky angle, Walker reported during Nato’s bombardment of Belgrade that Serb peasants had jumped up and down on the wing of a downed stealth fighter, chanting: “Sorry, we didn’t know it was invisible.” He wrote that black humour was the lifeblood of Serbs and referred to a topless model in a daily newspaper who was said to be wearing a “stealth bra”.

The one occasion on which colleagues recall Walker displaying anger came when Alastair Campbell claimed that reporters in Belgrade had become lackeys of a “Serb lie machine”. He responded with a vigorous defence of the correspondents risking their lives under fire and attacked Nato “lies” about the numbers murdered and missing in Kosovo, which he believed had been exaggerated for propaganda.

Tom Walker was born in 1963 in Newport, Gwent, the only child of a histopathologist and a solicitor who instilled in him a lifelong love of hill walking and Bolton Wanderers. After Shrewsbury School and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, he worked for BBC radio stations in Gwent and Newcastle, and then for The Times in Brussels before the Rwandan genocide of 1994 persuaded him to become an aid worker.

For Médecins Sans Frontières, he organised the delivery of supplies to Rwandan refugees. He arrived in the Balkans as the European Commission’s spokesman in Sarajevo but soon decided to return to journalism.

It was while covering an antiMilosevic protest in Belgrade in 1997 that he met a young student leader named Milena. They were married within weeks and Milena, a cancer research scientist, accompanied him and his journalist friends on assignments.

After being expelled from Belgrade, Walker joined The Sunday Times as assistant foreign editor and broadened his range to encompass Zimbabwe, where he exposed Robert Mugabe’s policy of punishing political opponents by withholding food aid, and Afghanistan, where he lived in a tent during the Northern Alliance’s battles against the Taleban in 2001.

He returned periodically to his old Balkan haunts, dreaming of finding war crimes suspects such as Radovan Karadzic and claiming a $5 million bounty. He also contributed to The Times a number of authoritative obituary notices of leading Balkan figures.

Such was his dedication to Balkan coverage that when Zoran Djindjic, the Prime Minister of Serbia, was assassinated in 2003 on the day that Walker came out of hospital after an operation for thyroid cancer, he insisted on covering the story. He could barely speak but his writing was as fluent and strong as ever.

His wife survives him.

Tom Walker, journalist, was born on May 7, 1963. He died of cancer on July 12, 2007, aged 44