17/08/2008

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.

My questioners have a basic problem. As they do not speak English - and I am not prepared to admit to any knowledge of  Serbian - they are obliged to use Igor for translation. The interview, accordingly, is leisurely in its progress and working out acceptable answers is not that difficult.

Igor: “These chaps say your passport is forged. That's not true, is it?”

“Now they say you're a spy. That's nonsense, isn't it ?”

Establishment of my own identity beyond the shadow of a doubt is not too difficult either: press cards from the UN, Republic of Krajina and Tanjug in Belgrade; letters from the editor of Scotland on Sunday and the BBC; driving licence, credit cards, National Library of Scotland reading room ticket and Amnesty International membership card - this last, curiously, impressing them the most. I shower them with pieces of paper, all of which are religiously photocopied. 

My questioner is fast building up a thick file. This is clearly Very Important. I am asked how many times I have visited the war zones of Yugoslavia. When I reply, “28”, my questioner looks mildly shellshocked. I bombard him with quite useless and irrelevant bits of information: a description of the long journey by car from Scotland, my work and holidays in Yugoslavia before the war, and so on, and so on.

Eventually, he barks out a command to a colleague outside the door. Nothing as final or quite as exciting as instructions to form up a firing squad. The door opens and a tray laden with glasses, coffee and real Napoleon brandy appear, as if by magic (apparently stolen from an impounded lorry parked outside which is being industriously emptied onto the pavement).

Now, the business apparently over, all is, quite suddenly, smiles and bonhommie. We are obliged to remain another hour to drain the bottle with our erstwhile captors after which, amidst much back slapping and handshaking, we are waved merrily on our way. Control over drinking and driving is clearly not a priority around here.

On another notable peregrination, I treated the reporter for the US military paper, Stars & Stripes, to a Skoda-ride through the war zones. Bill Sammon was an affable type, if something of a greenhorn. I met him at a press conference given by the French military and he revealed that just six weeks previously he had been working as a reporter on The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. Not an ideal training for Bosnia but I offered to take him  under my wing.

We drove up to Tuzla in a three car convoy accompanied by Jon Swain, of The Sunday Times, and Erich Rathfelder of Tageszeitung. It was just as the news of the fall of Srebrenica broke.

The drive was marked by the usual litany of front line experiences. At one point, Bill disappeared off to relieve himself. He must have been well hidden because we all resumed our journey, believing him to be in one of the other cars. Fortunately, we were halted at a Bosnian checkpoint just a mile or so ahead when an out of breath Sammon caught up with us. At another stop, he left his notebook on the roof of the car. He remembered it a few minutes later and I reluctantly turned back.

We espied two local youths dragging the day’s trophy along the road, an old tin bath. As we passed, Bill let out an anguished yell. His notebook was lying, safely retrieved, in the bath. He had to part with a few Deutschmarks, but at least he got his notebook back.

My driving seemed to impress him. He wrote about it in Stars & Stripes. "Harris plows [sic.] forward like a man on a mission. Skidding near the edges of sheer cliffs without guardrails, veering past pedestrians at the last possible moment, nudging the bumper against the rumps of stubborn sheep – these are simply the things one does if one wants to make Tuzla on time, Harris seems to believe."

The drive to Tuzla was, though, well worthwhile. Not only did we witness the arrival of thousands of very young, aged and female refugees with their harrowing tales of the mass murder of their menfolk, in the worst single instance of genocide in Europe since 1945, but Bill discovered a US Ranger called Guy Sands (Major) in charge of Tuzla airport.

Sands opened up to Bill, due to his being from an official US War Department publication. It was a great story, finding US Special Forces, operating in darkest Bosnia and we both did well out of it.

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