NEW YORK Seven NBA players, including Serbia's Vlade Divac and Croatian Toni Kukoc, and 50 youngsters from the war-torn region once united as Yugoslavia have been living a lesson in tolerance in a basketball camp in Italy.

They can only hope that the world, too, can learn from their "basketball without borders" weekend.

"It's great. The kids are so excited, and so are we," Divac, the veteran center for the Sacramento Kings, said in a telephone interview after the first day.

The team which Divac coached, the Kings, had beaten a Bulls squad coached by Kukoc, who came into the NBA labeled the "Croatian Sensation".

But the outcome of the game was hardly important, and the ethnic make-up of all the sides was pointedly mixed.

The children, aged between 12 and 14, were divided equally among four teams and they came from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia.

"They have to work together, play together, have fun together, everything in the past just erased, because it just doesn't make sense at all," Reuters quoted Divac as saying.

A quarter of a million people died in a decade of ethnic strife in the region and the children became the innocent but suffering victims. Could the NBA players learn anything from these youngsters?

"I hope so," said Divac. "When you look at those kids, you can see a clarity in their eyes and their hearts about everything. Basically, we are the adults who make all the trouble and we have to keep them out of that, and make them send us a message through all the countries.