Is Anything Happening? Page 3

  Second, TV cameras love crowds, again for a very simple reason: you can see them and film them, and they look suitably dramatic. What the cameras don’t see, and therefore don’t show, is all the people who have stayed at home and gone about their everyday business dry-eyed. It is the same with mass demonstrations: no matter how big the crowd – for example, the estimated 750,000 to a million people who protested against the imminent invasion of Iraq in February 2003 – there will always be many more people who did not bother to leave home. But you will not see them on the TV news.

  So yes, I do think we got it wrong at the time of Diana’s death, but I do not think it was a deliberate conspiracy. I know there were anxious debates, especially at the BBC World Service, about how much time to devote to the story. I argued, and I still think I was right, that there was immense international interest both in her and in the British royal family and it would have been crazy not to have reflected that. The same applied when Michael Jackson died in 2009 – some public figures really do have a global reach, even if they are not world leaders or Nobel Prize-winners.

  I finally realised that we had probably overdone the Diana story on the first anniversary of her death. It passed virtually unnoticed. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  I would never describe myself as a royalist, or as a traditionalist – I am, after all, a child of the ’60s – but I do have a soft spot for a nice bit of pageantry. Military bands, colourful costumes and meticulously choreographed ceremonial can always be guaranteed to bring a tear to my eye. To me, it is like theatre, and I felt much the same when I attended Midnight Mass one Christmas Eve in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome – I do not have a religious bone in my body, but I did love the sheer theatricality of it all.

  In November 1999, I was asked to be Radio 4’s commentator on Remembrance Sunday. I knew I had been called up from the subs’ bench: the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were both away at a Commonwealth conference in South Africa, and the BBC’s royal correspondent, Nick Witchell, who is as much part of the traditional Remembrance Sunday proceedings as the two-minute silence, had gone with them, leaving Radio 4 scrabbling around to find someone to fill the gap.

  I felt the full weight of the responsibility upon my shoulders. This was not like presenting any old news programme; this was being the voice of BBC radio on the most solemn day of the ceremonial calendar. So I read all the briefing notes and tried to memorise the wealth of information on the file cards. They looked as if they had been passed down by successive generations of commentators over the decades, and I was surprised to discover that they had not been written on vellum and kept tightly rolled in an airtight box.

  As it was the last Remembrance Sunday of the century, I decided to add a fin de siècle flourish to my script. ‘This twentieth century has been a century of war,’ I intoned. ‘And as we look back and remember, perhaps also, at the century’s end, we look forward too, and hope for a more peaceful century to come.’ What a forlorn hope that turned out to be.

  There is one moment above all on Remembrance Sunday when you do not want to make a mistake. As Big Ben strikes 11 a.m., the moment the First World War armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, silence descends on Whitehall – and the commentator must not, repeat not, break that silence. I had decided, stupidly, that just before Big Ben’s bongs, I would recite a few lines from the Ode of Remembrance by Laurence Binyon, and I worked out the timings to the last second, so that I would get to the end of the last line just as the clock whirred into action.

  I was one second out. The military bands fell silent, and in my best Richard Dimbleby commentator voice, I read the poem’s best-known lines: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning…’ Which is when, to my horror, Big Ben started chiming. The final four words – ‘We will remember them’ – were drowned out.

  I was never asked to do the Remembrance Sunday commentary again.

  Fortunately, BBC bosses can be a forgiving lot when they are so minded and, as time passed, my faux pas, which contrary to my fears did not result in a major constitutional crisis, was forgotten. Even so, I was quietly relieved to be called back into action for the funeral of the Queen Mother, whose death in 2002, at the remarkable age of 101, put an end to one of the longest waits in British journalism. It is well known by now, so I am not giving away any state secrets, that the BBC, like other major broadcasters, holds regular rehearsals for what are known diplomatically as ‘Category A’ deaths, and generations of BBC journalists had got into the habit of praying every night that the death of the Queen Mother would not be announced on their watch.

  I got away somehow with attending only one of these death rehearsals; it was so long ago that we were still using spools of magnetic tape, and the one – admittedly rather important – lesson that was learned was that no one could remember where the tape of the national anthem was kept. Fortunately, it all became a lot less fraught after the dawning of the digital revolution, when all the senior editors who needed to know what to do could access special computer files with everything already prepared and ready for broadcast.

  For the Queen Mother’s funeral, I was again allocated a commentary position in Whitehall, and, as for the funeral of Princess Diana, the BBC’s royal funeral machine functioned flawlessly. It helped, of course, that the BBC has an extensive network of underground cables permanently in place in some of the key locations – in front of Buckingham Palace and in and around Westminster Abbey, for example, so that when the need arises, they simply have to plug in the cameras and microphones and they are ready to roll. (Some of the network is shared with other broadcasters like ITN and Sky.)

  I had learned by now, having already been the BBC World Service commentator for the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan in 1999, that when commentating at funerals, the usual rules of broadcasting do not always apply. ‘Dead air’, for example, that awful, embarrassing silence when something technical has gone wrong or a broadcaster’s brain has frozen, is not a problem at a funeral: after all, silence equals respect, as do long pauses. And if you really do not have anything to say, you simply describe what you can see in front of your eyes, very … very … slowly.

  Perhaps I sound as if I am mocking when I refer to the ‘BBC’s royal funeral machine’. Nothing could be further from the truth, because when I was first introduced to its inner workings, I was awestruck by the precision of its engineering and the care with which it is built and maintained. To be a BBC royal event commentator is to be a tiny cog in an immensely complex piece of machinery; all that is required is that you mesh perfectly with the other cogs.

  Fortunately, not every major royal event is a funeral, so the mood was very different on 29 April 2011, when Prince William, second in line to the throne, married Kate Middleton, a – shock! – commoner, who seemed to have a much better idea of what she was getting into than poor Princess Di had done thirty years earlier. The BBC’s briefing notes for the occasion ran to more than 100 pages, and they were worth reading with care. This time, I had been allocated a position actually on Horse Guards Parade, rather than outside it, and I had been provided with plenty of facts and figures about all the historic buildings that flank the parade ground.

  To the north, the Old Admiralty building, completed in 1726 and described, somewhat unflatteringly, as Britain’s first purpose-built office block. To the south, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, designed in the Italianate style by George Gilbert Scott and completed in 1868. To the west, the green open spaces of St James’s Park, and to the east, the archway leading into Whitehall, through which the royal couple would ride on their way to Westminster Abbey. I even managed to squeeze in a disrespectful fact of my own: that beach volleyball would be played on the parade ground when the Olympic Games came to town the following year.

  About two-thirds of the way through the royal wedding briefing pack was a section entitled ‘The bride’s hair’, which contained invalu
able information about her favourite stylists and the advance speculation about how she would wear her hair on the big day. The next section was entitled ‘The groom’s hair’ and was much shorter, as indeed was his hair. It consisted of a single sentence and I remember the words exactly: ‘Don’t be silly.’

  I was, therefore, perfectly prepared when the happy couple’s open carriage passed in front of my commentary box and I was able to announce to a waiting world, with all the authority of which I was capable: ‘I can confirm that the bride is wearing her hair down.’ I acknowledge that it was perhaps not a scoop that added greatly to the sum of human knowledge. Even so, I have never fully understood why some of my more serious-minded colleagues at The World Tonight claimed to be shocked and horrified that I would stoop so low as to comment on royal hairstyles.

  * Alex later left the BBC and founded the highly successful Hawkshead microbrewery in the Lake District. I have sampled his produce – and very good it is too.

  † Diana’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only person in the car who survived the crash, was the only one who had been wearing a seatbelt.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE GOOD, THE BAD…

  No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

  NIGHT AND DAY, TOM STOPPARD

  THERE ARE BROADLY THREE types of people that a journalist encounters professionally: they can be categorised as players, pundits or ‘real people’. Players are the people who have the power to change things or who are themselves in the news: political leaders, businesspeople, sportsmen and women. Pundits are the ones who have specialist knowledge and who are able to explain the significance of a newsworthy development: academics, commentators or other journalists. Real people? The rest of the world.

  Some of them are interesting, some are boring; some stay in the memory for ever. Like Pepile, who was seven years old when I met her in her bare, stone-built home at the end of a dusty hillside track in the rolling countryside of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. She was desperately ill with Aids, having been infected by a neighbour who had raped her in the belief that having sex with a virgin would cure him of the disease. She sang for us and showed off the few words of English she had learned before becoming too ill to go to school. She was one of the saddest, and sweetest, children I had ever met, and when I got back to London a few days later, I emailed the health workers who were caring for her and asked if there was anything I could do to help.

  Their reply broke my heart. ‘You’re too late. She died.’

  It was more than fifteen years ago and I remember her to this day.

  At the other extreme was Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs known as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, who was indicted for war crimes in 1995 and eventually captured in 2008. I met him when he came to London in 1992 for so-called peace talks, at a time when his forces were laying siege to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and firing mortar and artillery shells into the city at a huge cost to human life.

  I told my colleagues that I did not relish the prospect of interviewing a man whom I regarded even then as a war criminal. But they were insistent, so we reached a deal that would enable me to live with my conscience while still doing the job for which I was being paid.

  ‘Show him into the studio and then call me,’ I said. ‘I won’t shake his hand, and I won’t make small talk. I’ll go into the studio, I’ll do the interview and then I’ll say, “Thank you” and walk out.’

  That is what we did. I challenged him as hard as I could when he denied that his forces were firing indiscriminately into a heavily populated city and I hoped that listeners would understand that he was lying. I was persuaded, reluctantly, that they deserved a chance to be able to make up their own minds, but I hated doing it.

  Karadžić had an extravagant head of flowing silver hair, of which he seemed inordinately proud. He also had what I can only describe as ‘dead eyes’, and not an ounce of charm. He had studied psychiatry, including for a time at Columbia University in New York, and spoke reasonable, if heavily accented, English. In the 1980s, he had been convicted of embezzlement and fraud in connection with a property deal; there were also reports that he had been suspected of signing fake medical certificates while he was employed at a hospital in Sarajevo.

  Four years after I interviewed him in London, following the signing of the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War, I travelled to Sarajevo to report on the aftermath of what had been the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the end of the Second World War. An estimated 100,000 people had been killed during five years of conflict. Karadžić was now in hiding, having been indicted by a specially constituted war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But I soon discovered that just about everyone in Sarajevo seemed to know where he was, so I got someone to draw me a map, showing exactly where he was believed to be living.

  Together with World Tonight producer Craig Swan, with whom I was to make many more overseas trips over the next few years, I set out to find him. Along the way, on the road to Pale, in the mountains outside Sarajevo, we encountered a UN checkpoint, manned by Ghanaian soldiers.

  ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for Dr Karadžić’s house. We’ve been told he lives along this road and wondered if you had seen him.’

  They laughed heartily. In theory, they should have been keeping a careful lookout for him, but they could not have been less interested in our information as to his likely whereabouts.

  ‘Who is this guy?’ one of them asked with a grin. ‘We’ve never seen him.’

  ‘But this is the right road?’

  ‘Yes. This is the road. You can drive maybe two kilometres and then you will see the house on the right-hand side.’

  They were right. At the end of the driveway were two Serb police officers. I told them we hoped to be able to interview Dr Karadžić and asked them to convey a message to him that we were waiting outside. There was something utterly surreal about standing outside the home of an indicted, supposedly fugitive, war criminal, while armed police passed on a request for an interview.

  The answer, when it came, was no. ‘Dr Karadžić is not at home, so now we would like you to leave.’ We saw little point in arguing.

  Perhaps I should have been disappointed, but I was not. We had surreptitiously recorded all our conversations along the way, so we had a wonderfully dramatic piece of radio, proving that the alleged war criminal’s whereabouts were perfectly well known, even to the UN, and that he was being deliberately allowed to evade capture.

  He was finally arrested twelve years later, after apparently having lived under an assumed identity in Belgrade since 1999. He had grown a huge white beard, had a long mane of white hair and wore a giant pair of glasses. He called himself Dr Dragan Dabić and had set himself up as a practitioner of alternative medicine. In March 2016, the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague found him guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and he was sentenced to forty years in jail.

  I have not deliberately gone out of my way to cross paths with people accused of war crimes, but Karadžić is not the only one I have encountered. During my time based in Jerusalem as the Middle East correspondent for The Observer, I reported on the trial of a man known as Ivan the Terrible, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American who was alleged to have been a brutally sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943.

  He had been deported from the US to stand trial in Israel, and his family had come with him. One weekend, when we were relaxing at the American Colony Hotel, the favoured hang-out for all correspondents in Jerusalem, I noticed that my then five-year-old son was in the hotel garden, playing with Demjanjuk’s grandchildren. My immediate instinct was to snatch him away, but then I paused. Even if Demjanjuk was guilty of the appalling crimes that he was alleged to have committed, his grandchildren were guilty of nothing at all. So why should I mind if my son played with them? The truth is that I
did mind, but I did not stop him.

  Demjanjuk was found guilty in 1988 and sentenced to death. But the conviction was overturned on appeal after serious doubts emerged that he had ever been at Treblinka. He returned to the US but was then deported again, many years later, to face trial in Germany, where he was accused of having been a guard at a different Nazi camp, Sobibór. Again, there were serious doubts about his true identity, but again he was convicted, this time of being an accessory to the murder of some 28,000 Jews. He died at the age of ninety-one before his appeal against the German conviction could be heard, and the conviction was therefore invalidated.

  Was Demjanjuk a war criminal? Because the trials took place so long after the events in which he was alleged to have participated – and because the identity documents on which the prosecutors relied could so easily have been forged – my own conclusion is that his guilt was never satisfactorily proved. But even if it had been, I think I would still have been right to allow my son to play with his grandchildren.

  The first time I interviewed Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was in 1993 for a BBC television film about the role of NATO following the end of the Cold War. We flew to New York, set up the cameras and lights in a book-lined room in his suite of offices – and waited.

  When the great man entered, he took one look at the lighting rig, which had been set up so that some of the light would bounce off the bookcases and cast him partly in shadow, and growled. ‘Huh,’ he said in that unmistakable, heavy German accent. ‘You vant to make me look like a var criminal.’ He then sat down without further comment and indicated that he was ready to begin the interview.