31/07/2008

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.

After lunch, some guys from Associated Press were pulling out of town and I decided I definitely wanted the first ride back to Tirana. Unfortunately, the bridge at the unofficial border at Novosele turned out to be controlled by . . . guess who? This was just not my day.

This was no normal border crossing. At the bridge, on the pot-holed main road, such as it was, between the port of Vlore and the Albanian capital, Tirana, travellers were being pulled from their cars by our familiar band of desperadoes posing as the forces of law and order.

A duo of policemen in uniform looked on powerlessly at this motley crew - there were maybe ten or a dozen of them - variously dressed in black and white winter camouflage trousers, green fatigues, balaclavas and baseball caps; some, including their aggressive six foot, four-inch leader, the aforementioned 'Partizan' Caushi wore bullet-proof flak jackets padded with ceramic plates over their 'battledress'. 

They all carried the ubiquitous AK-47 machine gun with their wicked curved magazines bound together by brown parcel packing tape: the practice adopted by hooligan paramilitaries the world over.

A young boy of maybe eighteen years was pulled from the wheel of a black Mercedes at the point where traffic was funnelled into single file by a barricade of broken concrete and burned out cars. The thugs beat him with the butts of their weapons, one fired his weapon into the air and Caushi took a bayonet from his belt and gleefully and randomly punctured the youth's body.

Our car approached the barrier and we were signalled to pull over to one side by an unshaven lout.

The driver tried to explain that we were journalists. A vicious snarl creased the gunman's face. “Italian! Italian!” he shouted excitedly, raised his AK-47 and fired in our direction. He fired six, maybe eight rounds. They passed harmlessly over the roof of the car. 

The driver, Dieter, a German news agency reporter, kept his head, thank God.

“No, not Italian, German,” he explained calmly in a sort of Eurolingo. You could almost see the idiot gunman's brainbox slowly clicking into gear. It was evident he was either drunk or high on drugs - probably both. He quite suddenly altered his view of the situation and clapped the driver playfully on the shoulder. “Germany, OK. Germany, OK.”

Other gunmen pressed in on the other side and we desperately sought their approval.

Everything seemed to be playing in slow motion. We were now the centre of their undivided attention: the young boy lay whimpering in the gutter at the side of the road. I tried to follow the track of all of these waving, menacing guns wondering what the hell to do if one started up on us: little chance, the thin metal of the Mitsubishi would be no barrier to them. Contrary to popular myth, fostered by Hollywood gangster movies, cars do not stop bullets.

After a few minutes which seemed like an eternity, the Chief Hooligan signalled his approval and we were allowed through to the other side of the river.

In truth, never, even in four years in Bosnia, had I been so frightened as I was that day in Vlore. 

In Bosnia, as journalists, we cursed the continual checkpoints, the demands for papers and the restrictions on movement, but these in themselves ensured some degree of control in the midst of a vicious war.

Here, in southern Albania, there were simply no rules. Just irrational, unpredictable and implacable thugs. The prisons were empty and the lowest criminals had been given access to unlimited weaponry and ammunition and some hotchpotch uniforms, and were now suddenly free to carve out their own piece of territory in which they could rule supreme, unchallenged, robbing, beating and, if the whim took them, shooting the less powerful.

I had planned to spend three days in Vlore, the centre of resistance to the government in Tirana, but I returned, terrified, after just eight hours.

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