03/07/2008

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More Thrills than Skills: A Half-life in Journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

I used to congratulate myself that I wasn't naive enough to expect war to be like a John Wayne movie. In reality, I discovered it was.

At least in the beginning it was. For a few brief days in September 1991, I found myself in a supporting role, if not exactly a major player, in a bizarre black farce enacted in eastern Croatia in those early days of the Yugoslav wars.

That same sort of mixture of tragedy and humour must have been in mind for Mark Twain when he observed, “The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow.”

The Press Centre for the war in Croatia in those days was in the plush and rather incongruous surroundings of the capital Zagreb's modern, four-star Intercontinental Hotel. On a good day, it was but a short drive from the front. At the end of September '91, you could drive to the frontline near the village of Pokupsko in less than thirty minutes, do your story and be back for a beer in the bar by lunchtime.

Of a morning, journalists milled about questioning the bright and earnest young men and women; most were émigré Croatians who had come back from places like Australia, Canada and America and were making their English language skills and enthusiastic commitment available to their nascent independent homeland.

Croatia, a land of some three and a half million now warring souls, had, of course, been lumped into the Yugoslav federation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Kosovars and Macedonians all found themselves thrown into the same melting pot; a pot which would turn into a cauldron in the early 1990s.

One man had held it all together since the end of the Second World War – Marshall Tito: a man of perception, commitment and utter ruthlessness. He succeeded in imposing his will on his fractious peoples, recognising their propensity to divisiveness. Within ten years of his death, though, the whole fragile body politic would fall apart.

In June 1991, the Slovenes in the very north of Yugoslavia waved goodbye to the federation. After a brief ten-day war, the EU brokered a peace and by implication recognised the secession.

The writing was on the wall for the rest of the federation. Within fifteen years there would be an agglomeration of pocket states where Belgrade once ruled supreme: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia.

Unlike Slovenia, Croatia was cursed with two warring ethnic groups: Christian Orthodox Serbs, who looked to Belgrade for inspiration and leadership, and the larger Catholic Croat population, which relished the prospect of independence.

In the spring of 1991, ominous unpleasantness had started in areas where there were significant Serb minorities: particularly in the area known as Krajina, to the south of Zagreb, and in the east of the country along the border with Serbia. This ‘unpleasantness’ would, in short order, lead to what would become known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ as Serbs and Croats staked their claims to areas in which they were in the ethnic majority.

All war is unpleasant, of course, but one in which neighbour turns on neighbour, overnight, exhibits a particularly uncompromising and vicious mentality.





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