29/08/2008

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.

In a war zone like Bosnia, there were generally three types of expatriates on the ground, so to speak. There were the military men, the aid workers and the journalists. The fact is that as the dangers increase so people move, let's say, closer together.

One of the well-publicised relationships was that of Lt Col Bob Stewart, commanding officer of the Cheshire Regiment. The tabloid press unkindly dubbed him ‘Bonking Bob’ after the news broke of his relationship in Bosnia with a representative of the Red Cross and the failure of his own marriage. The winter of 1992-3 was particularly hellish in central Bosnia and Bob was, effectively, the captain alone on the bridge as violence erupted all around his isolated peacekeeping mission.

At the time, journalists working regularly around the base in Vitez knew full well what was going on and all were agreed this was not a fit matter for the public print. Besides, many of them were themselves married men trying to bury the trauma caused by what they were seeing and experiencing every day by way of intense, short-lived  affairs with their own local interpreters or ‘fixers’. Or, indeed, with their own colleagues.

It was only when a tabloid hack parachuted in on an ‘in and out’ operation that the story broke. The ‘leak’ was a woman called Anna Pukas writing for The Mail on Sunday who got the drift of Bob’s relationship and splashed it all over the tabloid.

After that, of course, it was open season and poor Bob was comprehensively pilloried. Although he inevitably left Bosnia under a bit of a cloud, he is still well remembered there and the success of his mission notably ensured the survival of his regiment at a time of swingeing military cuts in the UK.

I am glad to be able to place it on the record that, after Bosnia, Bob and Clare married and they now are contently ensconced with a large and very happy family.

Indeed, quite often the affairs forged in war stood the test of time rather well. A Dutch photographer I knew went along to cover one of those events in besieged Sarajevo which the Bosnians mounted from time to time as a two-fingered salute to the Serbs on the hills above raining down fire on them. This particular act of defiance was the Miss Sarajevo contest. A couple of dozen girls, involuntarily slimmed down on European Union hard rations, paraded in the Holiday Inn Hotel.

The winner got . . . the photographer from Holland where they were last heard of happily married.

In Vitez, all the hacks hung out at P/INFO: the army press centre in central Bosnia, irreverently known as The Schoolhouse, located in what used to be a private house near to the entrance of the British army camp. The British army rented it at a phenomenal rate from an absentee landlord. Bosnians were very happy with that sort of situation. A 100 metres down the road, a whole family of five locals were living in the hen hutch at the bottom of the garden to facilitate the accommodation of Tony Birtley and the American film crew for ABC Television – at two thousand Deutschmarks a month.

During the spring and summer of 1994, the warcos milled about under the supervision of the 'Housemaster', Major James Myles, who was in charge of P/Info. We were a truly shambolic lot and he did his best to exercise some sort of discipline over the motley international collection of writers, photographers TV and radio people.

Twice a day we gathered for briefings, seated obediently on school benches. The British Army computer at Split Airport recorded that they had issued 14,000 press accreditations since the previous October. Fortunately for the Major, we didn't all turn up on his patch at the same time and they'd started to weed out an awful lot of impostors in the Harry Lime mould: black marketeers, drug pushers, arms dealers and the like.

A crowd of Italians with press accreditation turned up on a flight into Sarajevo, blithely asked the way into town and strolled off down deadly Snipers' Alley. When the French UN commander sent out an APC to retrieve them, it turned out they were tourists on a ‘war holiday’.

The warcos divided into three main species. There were 'The Regulars' who were dug in for the duration: the BBC (known irreverently as The Broken Biscuit Company), ITN, Sky, Reuters and a sprinkling of chaps from Very Important Organs like The Times and Daily Telegraph. They were terribly well equipped with satellite dishes, computers and assorted technological wizardry. The BBC even had a complete range of Marks & Spencer pre-packed meals. We much envied them for that although John Simpson was kind enough to share one with me on Christmas Day in 1992.

The Regulars were awfully matey with the army and a mite snobbish. At barbecues held in the whoosh and glow of the free nightly fireworks displays of tracers and rockets, they jawed on all the time about their televisual derring-do in Beirut and the Gulf.

Then there were ‘The Freelances’. They were really a bit of a nuisance. As we were independent, both by nature and the requirement to make a living, we didn't stick around long enough to develop the same cosy relationships. The army tended to think of us as jolly unreliable; we didn't realise everything that was said was “strictly off the record”. Sometimes we didn't join the pool (that is to say we didn't share their stories with the other warcos) and actually went off on our own rather than on the cosy army-escorted field trips.

In May 1994, the Reuters man, who ran the pool in Vitez, asked me if I would sign up for the pool. Winding him up, I asked, “What does that mean, John?”

“It means you only go out one day a week. You share your copy with everybody else and you can relax the rest of the time.”

Winding him up somewhat further, I explained: “But I’m a freelance and I’m here to get exclusive stories for my papers.”

“Well, fuck off, then,” quoth the man from mighty Reuters.

Of course, the pool was a system devised by the army in a bid to keep journalists in line. If you could make sure only one was out and about, then you could control the story much more easily. For its part, the army would argue that it could only adequately protect one journalist, one photographer and, maybe, one TV crew at a time. It could not protect a rabble.

And then there were ‘The Spooks’. These are, typically, journos who are somewhat vague about their employers. They tend to claim they work for Machine Guns and Howitzers Monthly or some obscure and quite untraceable evening paper in the US Midwest.  They ask all sorts of tedious questions about the impact resistance of Chobham armour. More often than not, they are reporting back directly, or indirectly, to the CIA/MI6/GS9, or combination of them all.

There was a young guy from Finland who was always hanging around the Holiday Inn Hotel in Sarajevo. We called him Finnbar. We knew he represented some unpronounceable organ of the Finnish press. He was clearly on a tight budget because he slept in the laundry cupboard. It ultimately turned out, to everyone’s embarrassment, not least the UN’s, that he was an enterprising 16 year-old schoolboy who had submitted a letter for UN accreditation on the notepaper of the school magazine.

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