New York Times reporter dies covering the Cold War and Kosovo

His wife, Helga, said that the cause of death was a kidney disease.

Hard-working and ruthless journalist Bender covered the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its collapse in 1989 wrote several hundred reports of East-West tensions and life under communist regimes in East Germany, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, reports the New York Times”.

In the early 1990s, after Germany was reunited and peace returned to most of Europe, Bender returned to the Balkans to cover the wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia in massacres, rapes and genocide, killing 100,000 people and driving millions of others from their homes. He interviewed civilian victims, fighters and their leaders, including indicted Serb war criminals like Slobodan Milosevic and General Ratko Mladic, broadcast Koha.net.

Binder's passport was over 8m long on pages sealed with visas from troubled regions, and reports of 2,600 articles and comments in his 43-year career for The Times offered details for dictators and their policies, as well as details for the daily routines of citizens facing food shortages.

Bender covered Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia from 1963 to 1966. He focused on President Josip Broz Tito's popular government of Yugoslavia.

Bender was transferred to the Bureau of “The Times” in Washington as diplomatic correspondent and European Affairs in 1973. He often returned to Europe in the 1980s to report on developments in the Soviet bloc's nations, and in the years of Germany's reunification; the fall of communist regimes in Albania, Romania and Bulgaria; and civil wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

While Yugoslavia was disintegrating in 1991, it was blocked with Croatian forces in a five-day siege of grants and sniper shootings in the port of Dubrovnik.

Ralph Blumenthal, his former colleague at “, recalled that Binder had “great love for the Balkans” stressing that he had absorbed the region's history and culture for decades and was deeply affected by the disasters of wars there. His last book, “Farewell, Ilir” (2014), was a memor for Balkan politicians, poets, artists, fishermen, farmers and friends.

David Bender was born in London on February 22, 1931, one of four children of American parents, Abner Carroll and Dorothy Walton Binder. His father was foreign news editor and correspondent for the “The Chicago Daily News”. He graduated from Harvard in 1953.