More thrills than skills – A half-life in journalism, part 94

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, edited 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 HAD long been intrigued by the civil war in Sri Lanka: a ferocious internecine conflict which had broken out at the beginning of the 1980s.

It was, apparently, a breakaway war in which minority Tamils in the north and east were seeking self-government from a predominantly Sinhala government in Colombo.

I would soon learn that it was rather more complicated than that.