13/08/2008

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.

Hermann Goering had a special convertible model built to take him to war. The Skodas which took me me around the battlefields of Bosnia were two production line, three-year-old Rapid Coupes: they ran there for more than four years, suffered the most appalling abuse and covered almost 100,000 kilometres - much of it over unsurfaced roads - throughout Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia and Macedonia.

In the early days of the wars in former Yugoslavia, most journalists simply pitched up at the car rental desks at the airport and disappeared into the distance in a freshly valeted saloon. A considerable number of these hire cars, hardly surprisingly, never returned to base. 

In Slovenia's brief, ten-day war, the combined hire car fleets of the newly independent state were decimated by an estimated 50 per cent, largely thanks to the efforts of journalists. At best, cars were returned in a rather different condition from that they went out in.

During the Croatian war of 1991, local fighters around Pakrac were most insistent on the necessity of spraying my gleaming white Hertz car with camouflage paint. Hardly surprisingly, the hire companies started inserting war zone exclusion clauses in their contracts. This had appalling implications - especially for freelance journalists like myself.

A TV cameraman of my acquaintance overturned his rented Lada Niva in central Bosnia, cheerfully reported the loss and was considerably put out to find a $15,000 debit on his company American Express card the following month. The company accountants were even more upset.

The Independent’s defence correspondent, Chris Bellamy, was following me along the rather difficult Route Triangle in central Bosnia when I saw, behind me, his rented car running inexplicably off the road. It was not a goot time for him to be searching under the dashboard for his notebook. However, a nice man from the SAS helped recover his car which was, alas, a non-runner by that time.

As rental ceased to be realistic - and the risks increased - the larger newspapers and broadcasters moved into customised and armoured vehicles. At anything up to £150,000 a time, this was hardly an option for yours truly, but with three cars sitting outside my house in Scotland I decided to export one to the frontline. The Rover seemed too good to condemn to what seemed like almost certain death in Bosnia, and my 1948 Sunbeam Talbot 80 would have been a mite tricky on spares. So it was call-up time for the three year-old Skoda Rapid coupe.

I'd been attracted to it by the Autocar review in 1988 which surprisingly compared the handling to the Porsche 911: "..handles like a Porsche . . . more fun than a GTI.” 

It was, indeed, an extraordinarily nippy, little fun car and if it hadn't been for the social disapprobrium I would have been a truly enthusiastic owner. And it had been decisively refused an MOT by a local grarage, which then offered me a derisory hundred quid for it, saying: “Really we shouldn't let you even drive it home.”

I was offered £600 as a trade-in. About the same as a two week car rental, in fact. So it was Bosnia for what was regarded as a write-off in the UK.

Effective 'write-off' value was an important consideration. It was, of course, quite impossible to insure a car at all in Bosnia during the war and there was only a limited form of third party border insurance available for Croatia and Serbia. But the good news was that no MOT was required and so it was possible to simply drive a car into the ground. Most journalists have tales of their cars being stolen in the war zone but here the Skoda scored: nobody wanted to steal a highly conspicuous right hand drive vehicle - and a Skoda at that. The car soon became well known to the police and military on all sides, all over Bosnia.

Skodas, generally, are also well-known to mechanics throughout the Balkans, although my model proved a little advanced for some in terms of its electronics. The car's performance over the unsurfaced, dirt track and mountain roads of Bosnia was quite extraordinary. The combination of rear-engine and rear wheel drive with semi-trailing arm rear suspension - designed by Skoda in co-operation with Porsche - gave excellent traction. As a precaution against both bad roads and mines, I had steel plates welded underneath the car to protect the brake and fluid lines and to afford some minimal protection against mine damage, in case the worst should happen.

It was virtually impossible to push the 1289c.c. engine too far but, together with the petrol injection, there always seemed to be enough power. In Christmas 1994, after four feet of snow had fallen on the mountain passes, an officer in the Royal Highland Fusiliers told me there was absolutely no way I could get out of central Bosnia without a four-wheel drive. And I hadn't dared to admit that my snow chains had disappeared. In the event, the tiny Skoda sailed past heavier four-wheel drives and army trucks hopelessly bogged down in the fresh snow.


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