← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Sarajevo
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Presenter Kate Adie's in Sarajevo along with Allan Little and Jeremy Bowen.
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Hello.
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This download from the BBC is the latest edition of the Radio 4 programme from our own correspondent. It's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Good morning to you from Sarajevo, where the surrounding hills are just turning the light green of spring. Hills which 20 years ago reverberated with gunfire as the war started in Bosnia. I'm with a group of journalists from around the world who've come to mark that anniversary, remembering a conflict where everyone was a target. The city was besieged for 44 months and Bosnian Serb troops rained down shells on schools, libraries and hospitals. Snipers shot pedestrians at random. People were killed as they queued for water or bread. No electricity, little food, constant explosions. Correspondents, camera crews and photographers took their chances alongside the citizens. In this programme, we'll be hearing from two of my BBC colleagues who, like me, were reporting from here over three years. First, Jeremy Bowen.
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The first time I landed at Sarajevo airport, I was taking over as correspondent from my BBC colleague, Martin Bell. It was a hot morning in the early summer of 1992. The war was in its first few months and I'd been told Martin would give me a good briefing. I walked down the tail ramp of the Saudi Arabian Air Force transport plane, the that had brought a cargo of medical supplies and a few reporters into the besieged city, dodging the crew who were frantically throwing boxes of dressings and IV fluid out onto the tarmac. The engines were still running. They kept them going because the pilot planned only to stay as long as it took to unload. Martin was short and to the point. You'll enjoy it if you live, he told me, not breaking step as he strode up the ramp into the belly of the plane. And I suppose he was right. In the next three years, there were some terrible moments. But the war opened up its bitter heart and drew me right in. I hated the killing and the way the people who weren't killed suffered. But I enjoyed living on the edge, in a place with no rules. I never much liked leaving Sarajevo or Mostar, even to decompress in the pearly and deserted Venetian beauty of the Croatian coast. And. And I'd count the days until I could go back. I didn't die, though. Many, many people did. I enjoyed surviving the day, being young and indestructible. The best part was trying to shine a light into some of the world's darkest corners, to make a record of the terrible things that people were doing to each other. It gave my life a serious purpose. At night, the sound of shelling and gunfire, if it wasn't too close, would would lull me to sleep. I didn't exactly need the danger, but I was happy to be the one who'd be telling the world about the bad things that were going to happen tomorrow. It was my war in my continent at a time when I was growing up as a foreign correspondent. It made me angry that some people in Britain easily ignored the slaughter that was happening in our backyard until almost the very end. The international response to the war was a deadly failure, underscored by thousands of lines of Graves. In 1992, the world was learning to live outside the constraints of the Cold War. Local conflicts in sensitive parts of the globe could no longer escalate into a hot war between the superpowers, which was a huge relief to all of us who grew up with the insane prospect of mutually assured destruction. But it also meant there was no need for a superpower hotline when local conflicts went critical so the world's most powerful countries could afford to stay spectating. When war became genocide in the Balkans and then In Rwanda in 1994, the shame and the impotence of those years left a mark. One is a strengthened aspiration that it is wrong and even politically costly for a powerful state with a belief in the rights of humankind to watch killing when it could be stopped. The desire to avoid another Bosnia was, or Rwanda was a powerful motivator in London and Paris when the decision was being made to intervene in Libya last year. And it's still one reason why Britain and others want to do something within the severe constraints of what they believe is possible to stop the killing in Syria. Of course, intervention is deeply controversial, contaminated by the catastrophic consequences of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and seen as a cynical and hypocritical return to imperialism by many people around the world. But getting involved with soft power or economic sanctions or old fashioned diplomacy at the right place and the right time, respecting international law can still be a good idea. After Bosnia, Western countries no longer want to stand and stare. Another consequence of the war is the idea that leaders can be punished for what they've done. I've testified three times at the former Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal in the Hague, twice against Bosnian Croat warlords, and then last year in the week that the Tunisian president was deposed against the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadi. Did Bosnia's legacy contribute to the indictments within months of Messrs. Gaddafi, Mubarak and Sons? Yes, I think it did. I caught glimpses of the Tunisian revolution on TV as I was escorted back and forth to the witness box. In court, the Arab tumult faded away, obscured by my first journalistic love, Sarajevo and its ghosts. The city of bullets and shells, of the indomitable, the villainous and the dead.
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Jeremy Bowen, who's here this weekend in Sarajevo. As you heard, wars throw up all sorts of unfinished business. Often thousands of displaced men, women and children are on the move. New borders may be in place. There's grieving and there are scores to be settled. It can take years, generations even, for the dust to settle. Simon Worrell's family was left wondering what exactly had happened during a wartime battle in France. It would prove to be the final chapter in a love story which had begun seven decades earlier.
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Flanders fields are shrouded in fog as we approach the town of Hasebrouck, near the Franco Belgian border. It drifts like smoke through the streets. Muffling sounds as though nature has conspired to throw a veil over the distant events I've come to uncover. While sorting through my mother's possessions after her death, I found a battered cardboard chocolate box. Inside were bundles of letters tied with red ribbon from her fiance. They met in Oxford in 1937 and fell madly in love. My mother was a schoolgirl. Martin Preston, nephew of the poet Robert Graves, was a student at St. Edmunds College. When war came, Martin enlisted with the Ox and Bucks Light infantry as a second lieutenant. In January 1940, he embarked for northern France as part of the ill fated British Expeditionary Force, or bef. All I worry about is yourself, he wrote home. Your health and your joy and our love. And then I don't worry because I'm sure it can't all be there for Nothing, can it? Six months later, the broken remains of the BEF were would be evacuated from Dunkirk. Martin's unit, the 1st Buck's Battalion, was diverted to Hausebrouck to hold up two German Panzer divisions bearing down on the retreating British army. He was killed in action on May 28, age 22. My mother never found out the exact circumstances of his death, so I have come to Hauserbrouck the to find out for her. Today, the Fondation Varennes is a low concrete building housing troubled teenagers. In 1940, a historic orphanage stood on this site and it was here that the Bucks battalion made its last stand. On one side were two crack Panzer divisions. On the other was a territorial regiment made up of print workers, railwaymen or farmers, sons. Some were armed only with axes. The German attack began at 6am on May 27. Martin was in the orphanage, which served as Battalion HQ. Pockets of men had been positioned on the southwest flank of the town and at the railway station. But by nightfall, most of these forward positions had been overrun. German tanks occupied the Grand Place, Hasrbrouck's main square. The orphanage was the last redoubt. The keep orders were fight to the last man. Shortly before midnight, Martin was sent out on patrol. He took two men with him and set off up the Rue de l' Orfelina orphanage Street. And 72 years later, I retrace his footsteps. Like most streets in Hasrbrouck, Orphanage street is lined with brick terraces that once housed textile workers. It's about 200 yards long. For the first part of his journey, Martin was protected by the Vickers machine guns mounted on the roof of the orphanage. But everything beyond the T junction at the top of the street was in German hands. I reached the T junction and pressed myself against the wall in the same spot where Martin must have waited before turning right towards the Grand Place. Every step now took him into extreme danger. Flames poured from burning buildings. Corpses littered the ground. He sent back his two men and went on alone. It's not clear what happened next. Reports that filtered back to my mother suggest that as he turned this corner, he walked slap into a German patrol. He spoke the language. Did he try and parley with them? A note scribbled by my mother on the back of one of his letters mentions a Bren gun. In my mind's eye, I see Martin charging towards the enemy, spraying bullets from that Bren gun before he drops to the ground. Did he even have a chance? His body would have lain there all the next day as the Germans obliterated the orphanage with tanks and field guns and Stuka dive bombers. The Buck's Battalion, outgunned, outnumbered, fought on valiantly. But by late afternoon, the commanding officer was dead, the orphanage in flames. At 6 in the evening, the surviving 114 men surrendered. Their heroic action at Hasebrouck allowed thousands of their comrades to reach England. Vardenkirk. My mother went on to marry a highly decorated member of SOE Special Operations Executive. Another hero who survived that man would become my father. But until her death at the age of 89, she kept under the glass of her dressing table a photo of a young man in a cricket blazer who looks back at her with eyes lit from within by love.
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Simon Worrell. In northern France, the government in Iraq says it's about to close down a camp which has been home to thousands of exiles. Part of a group known as the People's Mujahideen of Iran. Many of them, it's thought, will eventually be deported. The organization dates back to the 1970s, when it opposed the Shah of Iran and his allies. The US says its members killed Americans at this time. The pmi, or mek, as it's also known, eventually ended up working with Saddam Hussein, fighting Iran's clerical regime. Owen Bennett Jones has been finding out that now it maintains it stands for secular democracy and it's a group which stirs strong passions.
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It would challenge even the most talented PR executive. How do you get a group described by the US government as a culture and an officially designated foreign terrorist organization to be viewed by many congressmen and parliamentarians as champions of human rights and secular democracy? The starkly differing perceptions of the mek, or People's Mujahideen of Iran, could be a case study in the power of image management of what can be achieved not with guns, but by the way information is disseminated. The organization has a history of ideological and tactical flexibility. Since the 1970s, its rhetoric has changed from Islamist to secular socialist to capitalist. Pro Iranian revolution, anti Iranian revolution, pro Saddam, pro America. Violent, peaceful. And another dichotomy, it has admiring supporters and ardent critics. Take, for example, the US military officers who had to deal with the MEK after they invaded Iraq in 2003. Not only was the MEK heavily armed and designated as terroristic by the US government, it also had some very striking internal social policies. For example, it required its members in Iraq to divorce. Why? Because love was distracting them from their struggle against the mullahs in Iran. And the trouble is, people love their children too. So the MEK leadership asked its members to send their children away to foster families in Europe. Europe would be safer, the group explained. Some parents haven't seen their children for 20 years and more. And just to add to the mix, former members consistently describe participating in regular public confessions of their sexual fantasies. Now, you might think all this would set alarm bells ringing, and for some US officers, it did. One colonel I spoke to who had daily contact with the mek leadership for six months in 2004, said the organisation was a cult and that some of the members who wanted to get out had to run away. And yet another officer, who was there at precisely the same time and who's now a retired general, has become an active lobbyist on the MEK's behalf. And with his open smile and earnest, friendly manner, he's a good advocate. Cult. How about admirably focused group, he says. And he also says, I never heard of anyone being held against their will. We later emailed him about a former member who claimed to have told the general to his face that actually people were held against their will. He's lying, the general replied. You just have to decide which side to believe. Ex MEK member Eduard Tomado is now living in Germany. His face is scarred to the point of being misshapen. His complexion is grey, his skin blotched and waxy. His forehead constantly covered in dribbling beads of sweat. But then he spent nine years as a prisoner of war in Iraq. He then joined the mek, hoping to help Iranian democracy. He didn't like what he saw and says after three years he asked to leave but was told he couldn't. He stayed for 12. He now says joining the MEK was the biggest mistake of his life and he's expressed that feeling in a most unusual way. He's married and produced three children. My family, he said, is my protest against the mek. There are many other stories. Children who never forgave their parents for abandoning them. Children who did forgive and are now joyously reunited. Divorcees who got out of the organisation saying they still love their former spouses who are still in. In over 25 years of reporting, I have been lied to often enough. But as successive former MEK members told me what they'd been through, their tears seemed real enough to me. And yet a significant number of politicians in the US and the UK would say I was tricked. Because the former MEK members who spread these kind of stories are in fact Iranian agents. Again, who to believe? In the United States in particular, an impressive array of public figures regularly speak in defence of the MEK. There are over 30 big names. People like Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, Howard Dean, one time Democratic presidential hopeful and a retired governor and a former head of the FBI, and so on. After a month talking to people on both sides of the argument, I am left thinking some supporters are paid, others see the MEK through the prism of Iran. That does support anything that offers the hope of change. There is. Many are well motivated. But some are naive and the former members. Some are embittered, others just seem broken. Which is when it occurred to me the perception people have of the MEK may say more about them than the organisation itself. It's so difficult to pin down. You can see your own reflection in it.
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That was Owen Bennett Jones. A verdict is due soon in the trial of the former Icelandic Prime Minister, who is facing charges arising from the 2008 financial crisis. Ger Horder lost his job when Iceland's three biggest banks collapsed and the country's economy went into meltdown. He denies charges of gross negligence. Pascal Harter has just been to Iceland and says that while many there have been hit hard by the crisis, they are resilient people, used to surviving in the toughest conditions.
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I'm in a helicopter with the Coast Guard looking for polar bears that have floated to Iceland on pack ice. At first I assume the idea is to rescue them. I'm soon corrected. Polar bears are dangerous. I am told they are shot on sight. After 40 minutes flying over this icy, barren landscape, I'm left wondering why anyone ever chose to settle here. Why didn't the earliest settlers from what is now Norway simply turn their boats around in the 10th century and say, no one can live here, it's just too hard? It isn't just that Iceland has lots of wind, grey and snow. It's that the place hasn't got soil. It's mostly volcanic. What pass for trees are waist high shrubs, usually leafless. Icelanders like to tell this. What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? Stand up. No trees, of course, means no wood to make houses. Ikea were actually late on the case. Iceland's been importing whole homes flat packed in kit form since the 1800s. And commodities, which in other countries are viewed as plentiful, are luxury imported goods. Here you can get vegetables in restaurants, but your broccoli is likely to be like bonsai, a tiny sprig atop of your pile of smoked fish. We are flying past giant black wind smooth cliffs that fall straight into the sea. Back in the Cold War days, the Americans had a surveillance base here. I'm told that when the officers couldn't stand the isolation, they threw themselves off the cliffs. We never do see a polar bear, but we do fly over a man walking his dog in the middle of nowhere. I become almost hysterical. What is he doing so far from warmth, so far from safety? But it turns out there's a town just around the next mountain. And there we land. It's called Isa Fyodor and the young man refuelling the helicopter tells me it has a hospital, a theatre and three bars, and that he prefers it to the capital, Reykjavik. The mountains used to get me down when I was a child, he admits. I didn't appreciate them then, but when I went away, I missed them. This is a town that remains in shade from October to February. The sun is too low in the sky to creep over the immense mountains to give even a moment of pale yellow light. Instead, Isa Fyodor is a grainy blue white for five whole months, except during the height of winter, when it's pitch dark for 21 hours a day. The helicopter crew are now speaking of the residents of Isa Fyodor with admiration. They are good people, tough people, says the pilot, who shivers as he recalls how he himself was based there for two years. This is real Iceland, he tells me. He suggests that they might need an English teacher there. Perhaps they can leave me behind. I can get by, he laughs, by downloading a picture of the sun as my screensaver. It doesn't just have a hospital, a theatre, three places to drink, a choral society and a drama group. Isofyodor, of course, has Wi fi. Did you think this was some backwater? This is Iceland, where people not only survive in harsh conditions, they prosper. Yet Icelanders are finding they need all possible survival skills to get through their financial crisis. Many families who weren't extravagant in any way, have been crippled by an unjust fluke of the Icelandic mortgage market. It means that even after years of paying off the mortgage, they now find that they owe more than ever. I talked to one woman who fears she will lose her home altogether. And she's not alone. There are at least 200 families like hers. That's a lot in a country so small that you start to recognise strangers on your third day in the capital. There is a lot of shoulder shrugging in Iceland with a phrase thetaredast, which means not. It will be alright, but you can make it alright. You will be able to handle it. And when you ask Icelanders if they're angry about what the financial crisis has done, they just shrug and say, we've been through worse. Like Isa Fyodor. When it comes to sunlight, Icelanders don't expect much from the trial of their former prime minister. They are much more concerned with making do and getting on with it. Like that man walking his dog in the icy wilderness.
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Pascal Harta in Iceland, two decades after the start of the Bosnian war, new buildings have appeared all over Sarajevo, but countless others are still speckled with bullet holes and scarred with shell marks. Not far from where I'm speaking to you, there's a fruit and vegetable market. In February 1994, a shell exploded here. Today, the names of the 67 people who were killed are listed on a blood red wall. Some people still avoid the place. Another of our correspondents back in the Bosnian capital this weekend is Alan Little.
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There was an old Yugoslav army barracks at Sarajevo on the Serbian side, and in that first hot summer of war, it swarmed with the aggressive swagger of Serb militiamen, the foot soldiers of what came to be known as ethnic cleansing. They wore bandanas and bullet belts, a menacing caricature of the rebel cowboy, off the leash and unchecked. They had raided the weapons stores and I found myself in an arms bazaar. You could buy a hand grenade for a dollar, the same price, it turned out, as it would cost you to buy a fresh egg. Inside the besieged city, we lived at that time in an abandoned government guest house in Sarajevo. The handful of Western reporters who'd managed to smuggle themselves through the siege lines there was briefly one night, a rocket launcher in the garden, and the sound of the outgoing rounds woke us from a fitful sleep. Inevitably, it invited return fire. A mortar round from Serb positions in the hills above thudded into a tree outside our window, exploded and split the trunk neatly in two. A French newspaper man who lived in the house with us got shot in the leg on the airport road, the road we called Sniper Alley. I went to see him in hospital. Please, Alan, he said, they want to cut off my leg. There was a British army doctor serving with a small UN force in the city. A brave and vivacious young woman with a throaty chain smoker's laugh called Vanessa Lloyd Davis. I called her. She came to see Jean, touched his foot and grimaced. Get him into my vehicle, she said. He cried out in pain as we carried his stretcher out onto the rubble strewn streets. And Vanessa drove him to the airport and put him into the back of a French aid plane that was returning empty to Paris. There they took off, his leg below the knee. We chronicled a war that cost a hundred thousand lives. Think of it. 100 people a day on average, every single day for three and a half years, dead. 2.7 million forced from their homes. The world watched in anguished indecision, determined to treat all sides as though they were equally guilty. The UN responded with humanitarian aid. Norwegian troops ran aid flights into Sarajevo. They stamped our passports with the words Norwegian Movement Control, maybe Airlines. Maybe you get there, they joked, maybe you don't. I went to what had been the city's most luxurious hotel, the Hotel Europe. It had burned to a blackened shell in the early days of the war, but even so, dozens of refugees were living in it. On the second floor, I found an elderly couple in the corner of what had been a large function room. They had swept the soot from the floor and walls and found a mattress to sleep on. The hardest thing the man told me was that they had no contact with their grown up daughters who lived in Croatia. They don't even know whether we're still alive, he said. Write their phone numbers down, I said, and I'll call them when I'm in Croatia in a couple of weeks. I gave him a pen and he wrote in my notebook, darling Vesna, mom and I are doing fine. We are safe, he lied, and I know that we'll all be together soon. Love, Daddy. A blameless old man and a simple act of fatherly generosity broke my heart. My throat tightened and I couldn't speak. I waited until I'd cleared the building, but in the street outside, the tears came freely and for a moment, uncontrollably. It wears you out. Sometimes you are swept up in the enormous injustices and unfairnesses. You come home after weeks in the war zone and you are amazed by the indifference of others. People ask about the war and you begin to answer, and you see their eyes glaze over, and after a while you give up. You seek out the company of others who've been there, and you can't wait to go back. The other day I emailed the French reporter who lost his leg on Sniper Alley for the first time since I put him in Vanessa's ambulance 20 years ago. Do you remember me? I asked. From the summer of 1992. Within minutes he replied, remember you? Of course. How could I forget? How indeed can any of us forget that summer?
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Alan Little, who, along with me, Jeremy Bowen, and many other correspondents from around the world, is here in Sarajevo remembering. And that's it. Back next Saturday. Do join us. Goodbye.