Is Anything Happening? Read online

  ‘Here. I know you will not accept it for yourself, but give it to your men. They will thank you.’ I calculate that he will, of course, keep the cash for himself, but by suggesting that it is for his men, I avoid the danger (I hope) that he will accuse me of impugning his honour.

  ‘All right. You can go. All of you. Now.’

  And so the roleplay ends. Would it have worked for real? Probably not, and thank goodness I never got the chance to find out. But that night, in the bar, I am crowned King of the Checkpoints. And all the ex-soldiers have a good laugh.

  The next day, we are out again. This time, we are ambushed by gunmen who shove black sacks over our heads so that we can see nothing. We are marched round in circles, frequently doubling back on ourselves, until we have totally lost any sense of where we are.

  ‘Who are you? What is your name?’ The questions come thick and fast.

  ‘How old are you?’

  I tell him, and there is a pause.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit old for this?

  I tell him that I probably am.

  For me, the most valuable part of these training courses was what we learned about First Aid, because what used to keep me awake at night in places where men with guns were on every street corner was the prospect of a colleague being hurt and me not knowing how to help. (Say the words ‘sucking chest wound’ to anyone who has been on a hostile environment course and see what reaction you get.)

  Feeling for a pulse should be pretty basic stuff and, as everyone knows, or should know, you can feel for a pulse in various places on a person’s body: the inside of their wrist, at the side of their neck where the carotid artery runs just beneath the surface of the skin, or by finding the femoral artery in their groin.

  You get to know your colleagues pretty well on these courses, but sometimes a line has to be drawn. The only woman on our team was Shelagh Fogarty, then one of the biggest stars on BBC Radio 5 Live and now with LBC; and when it came to the feeling-for-the-pulse lesson, she made it absolutely clear where she drew the line. There was an unmistakable growl: ‘Don’t any of you even think of going for my groin.’

  I am ushered into a totally dark room. A colleague comes with me. The noise is deafening: gunfire, explosions, the shouts of injured people. We can see absolutely nothing and have no torches, but we have been told that there are two bodies with serious injuries somewhere in the room: one is a volunteer, the other is a medical dummy.

  My colleague and I have to find and identify the bodies, work out which is the volunteer and which is the dummy, find and identify their injuries, and then treat them.

  We end up groping and touching not only the supposedly injured bodies but also each other in a manner that would have resulted in instant dismissal back at the office. Thank goodness for the unspoken rule: what happens on a hostile environment course stays on a hostile environment course.

  But of course, working in a genuinely hostile environment is no joke, and there is a very good reason why correspondents are sent on these courses. I have lost too many friends and colleagues to take any of this lightly. When I was Middle East correspondent for The Observer in the 1980s, my rival on the Sunday Times was David Blundy, who was exactly the kind of man you do not want as your rival. He was much taller than I was, much better-looking, a much better reporter and a much better writer. Fortunately, he was also very charming and a great companion. If you walked into any hotel bar in the Middle East in the 1980s and saw Blundy there, you would know that you were in for an enjoyable evening.

  He was shot dead by a sniper in El Salvador in 1989 at the age of forty-four. Blundy was not a cowboy, but he was certainly brave. His friend and colleague Anthony Holden put it well:

  Any journalist drawn, like him, to scenes of conflict, to the chronicling of violent death, lives with the permanent knowledge that he could be next. The job, as he would have been the first to agree, does not include some macho brand of courage – in Beirut as in Belfast, he confessed to being ‘shit-scared’ – so much as a willingness to sublimate fear in pursuit of adventure or a good story, preferably both.5

  Farzad Bazoft had also been in pursuit of adventure and a good story when he was arrested by Saddam Hussein’s security police in Baghdad on 15 September 1989. Farzad, who looked a bit like a young Omar Sharif, had been born in Iran and came to Britain at the age of sixteen. I got to know him when he started freelancing for The Observer; always keen, always ambitious, and always in a hurry to make his mark.

  During the long Iran–Iraq war, access to the front lines was difficult and dangerous. More than once, Farzad was invited by the Iraqis to participate in closely controlled press trips to the front, presumably because they calculated that to have an Iranian reporting from their side would somehow be to their advantage. On what was to be his last trip, Farzad was more than usually excited, because the Iraqis had promised him an interview with Saddam himself. We warned him of the dangers, and urged him not to go. But he was determined.

  On the day he left London, a huge explosion was reported at a military complex outside Baghdad. Once in Iraq, Farzad managed to break free from his official minders and got to the site of the blast, where he took dozens of photographs and collected soil samples that he hoped to have analysed back in London. He also, fatefully, started asking people in his Baghdad hotel if anyone there knew what had happened. The hotel security staff were alerted, tipped off the police, and he was arrested at the airport as he was waiting for his flight back to the UK.

  Farzad was accused of being a spy, and was later forced to make a televised ‘confession’. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 15 March 1990. His body was returned to the UK, and he was buried in Highgate cemetery in north London.

  There was a postscript. After Saddam had been overthrown in 2003, the man who had ordered Farzad’s arrest and interrogated him claimed that he never believed that Farzad was a spy but that his execution was on the direct orders of Saddam himself. In an interview with the journalist Ed Vulliamy, Kadem Askar, a former colonel in the Iraqi intelligence service, said: ‘Bazoft was obviously innocent. I could tell that he was simply chasing a story. And I submitted my report saying that.’6

  Farzad was just thirty-one when he was executed; John Schofield was even younger, twenty-nine, when he was killed by a single bullet in Croatia in 1995. He had joined The World Tonight from Channel 4 News and, because radio people tend to have a chip on their shoulder about TV (is there any worse insult than ‘He’s got a face for radio’?), he was greeted with some initial suspicion.

  It did not last long. John was a first-rate reporter who wrote like a dream. He was reporting from the Krajina region when he was killed, and he had been doing everything right. He was wearing body armour and travelling with colleagues in an armoured vehicle. He died because a Croatian army unit, watching them from a couple of miles’ distance, mistook them for Serb forces. A high-velocity bullet hit him in the neck, just above his flak jacket.

  As always when a reporter dies on duty, his friends and colleagues agonised: why do we do this job? Is any story worth dying for? Should we stop kidding ourselves and find a more sensible way to earn a living? On my way back from John’s funeral, I shared a car with a BBC colleague. We asked ourselves the questions, and came up with an answer. John thought it was worth it, and so do we. What other answer is there?

  Marie Colvin said it like this:

  Someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people – be they government, military or the man on the street – will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.7

  Marie had taken over from David Blundy as Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times. I first met her when she was still with the American news agency UPI and starting to make
a name for herself by securing exclusive interviews with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. She became one of the best-known war correspondents of her generation, reporting with great courage from East Timor, Sri Lanka, where she lost an eye after being hit in the face by shrapnel from a grenade, Kosovo, Chechnya and Zimbabwe.

  She went to more dangerous places, and stayed there longer, than anyone else I knew. She lived as hard as she worked, and was married at various times to two friends of mine: my Observer colleague Patrick Bishop, and the Bolivian journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio, whom I got to know in Beirut and who committed suicide in 2002. The last time I saw Marie was at Heathrow airport, when I found myself, totally by chance, standing behind her in line at the security scanner. We both put our laptops through the machine, then she picked up mine by mistake. Only when she turned round did her instantly recognisable black eyepatch give her away. We laughed and hugged and went our separate ways.

  Marie was killed in the Syrian city of Homs on 22 February 2012. The previous night, I had left a note for the editor of the following day’s edition of The World Tonight: ‘If you want a voice out of Homs tomorrow, my old mate Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times is there.’

  In a tribute published on the day of her death, Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News wrote:

  Marie was glamorous. At parties, which she loved, she would wear a tight black cocktail dress and a special eye-patch studded with rhinestones. Parties at her house were full of actors, politicians, writers and journalists. She drank and smoked and had lovers. She liked to take time off in the summer to go sailing. But what absorbed her most was reporting.8

  Why do I dwell on the deaths of friends and colleagues? Because journalists do not often get a good press these days, so it is important to be reminded that some of them are very fine people who do very fine work. And that some of them pay a very high price.

  The first time I was dispatched to what might have become a war zone was in July 1974, after the Turkish army invaded Cyprus. Greek Cypriots who wanted to unite Cyprus with Greece had staged a coup d’état and deposed the venerable independence leader Archbishop Makarios. It was a dangerous time: both Greece and Turkey were members of NATO, and there was a real chance that the two countries could end up at war with each other.

  I was based in Rome, working for Reuters, and I was ordered to make my way as quickly as I could to the only stretch of land border between Greece and Turkey, east of the town of Alexandroupolis in the far north-eastern corner of Greece, where the river Ebros forms the international frontier. If Turkey was going to invade Greece, this was where the tanks would roll across – and Reuters wanted to make sure that they had a man on the spot.

  Alexandroupolis began life as a little Ottoman fishing village called Dedeağaç. It was captured by Russian forces during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, reverted to Ottoman rule in 1878, but was then seized by Bulgaria in 1912. The following year, it was taken by Greek forces, but handed back to Bulgaria under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest.

  The town reverted to Greek rule at the end of the First World War following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and was named Alexandroupolis in honour of King Alexander when he paid a visit in 1920. It was occupied again by Bulgarian forces between 1941 and 1944 after the invasion of Greece by Germany and Italy.

  And now, in 1974, it was again at risk of being overrun from the east. This was my first time in the Balkans and as I gave myself a crash course in the region’s history, I found myself sympathising with Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.’9 It was to become an all-too-familiar emotion twenty years later, when the Balkans again slid into war as Yugoslavia disintegrated and I tried to make sense of its swirling conflicts and get my head around its bewilderingly unpronounceable names.

  When I got to Alexandroupolis, I checked in to an undistinguished hotel on the edge of town and headed straight for the border. There was little sign of any heightened tension, and no sign of any other reporters, which I found worrying. If I was the only newsman there, there was a strong possibility that I was in the wrong place. Either that or I was about to get a world scoop.

  There were a couple of Greek soldiers at the Greek end of the road bridge across the river and, as far as I could see, just a couple of Turkish soldiers at the other end. But the river banks were thickly wooded and I suspected there might well be more military activity out of sight in the undergrowth.

  Halfway across the bridge, a line was painted across the road. The border. On one side was a Greek soldier and, less than a yard away, just the other side of the line, standing almost shoulder to shoulder, was a Turkish soldier. I spent several hours observing them, but they showed not the slightest interest in me.

  Waiting for war is a very tedious business and tends not to produce dramatic copy for impatient editors back at head office. It is the polar opposite of newsworthy. Understandably enough, Reuters were extremely keen for me to file a story, having gone to the trouble of sending me there, but my difficulty was not only that I did not have a story, but also that I saw little prospect of having one. There was no traffic on the highway, and no one wanted to talk to me. So on Day Three – it might have been Day Four – inspiration struck.

  I would try to cross the border myself. On foot. With great care.

  ‘Good morning.’ I smile at the Greek soldiers. ‘Can I cross?’ They speak no English and I speak no Greek, so I make a walking sign with my fingers. They shrug. I cannot be sure whether the shrug indicates total incomprehension or total indifference, but I calculate that if they do not want me to cross, they will soon make it clear enough.

  I start walking and hear no shouts of anger from behind me. So I continue, walking as nonchalantly as I can manage towards the two armed men standing on each side of the line in the road, halfway across the bridge. It is 800 yards from one side to the other, so it takes me nearly five minutes to get to the middle.

  Again, I smile and greet the soldiers warmly. ‘Good morning.’ There is no reaction from either of them. I keep walking. I cross the line into Turkey. There is still no reaction. So I keep going until I reach the other side and the Turkish sentry box.

  ‘Good morning.’ I smile again. They smile. ‘How are you?’ Perhaps one of them speaks English. They do not. I wander about for a few minutes but notice nothing of any interest. There is only one thing to do: I walk back across the bridge. Nothing happens. No story.

  One of my favourite apocryphal stories from the annals of journalistic myth concerns a telegram allegedly sent by the monstrous American media tycoon William Randolph Hearst to an artist whom he had sent to Cuba in 1897 to cover what he believed was an impending war with Spain. After a few days there, the artist, Frederic Remington, said there was unlikely to be a war and requested permission to return home. The supposed answer from Hearst, which is now a much-loved journalistic legend but almost certainly devoid of historical accuracy, was: ‘Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.’

  In 1974, Reuters failed to furnish a Turkish invasion of Greece, and I was not sorry to leave Alexandroupolis. The story that I filed was not going to win any journalism prizes.

  On the Greek–Turkish border, 15 Aug 1974, Reuter – The frontier between Greece and Turkey was quiet and open to normal traffic today.

  I walked across a bridge into Turkey over the river Ebros which forms the border near Ebros town without any difficulty…

  My first experience of war reporting had been a big disappointment.

  My second experience was not much better. In January 1980, by which time I had started working for The Observer, I was taken deep into the Western Sahara by fighters belonging to the Polisario Liberation Front. They were fighting for independence from Morocco, which had seized control of the former Spanish colony in 1976 and was determined not to give up.

  We spent several days driving through the desert in a convoy of open-topped jeeps, seeing nothing but sand, sand and more sand, an
d discovering that if you sleep out in the open in January, even in the Sahara, temperatures can fall to below freezing and ice will form on your blanket. My dispatch was somewhat lacking in what war reporters call bang-bang:

  On a journey covering several hundred miles with Polisario guerrillas last week, I saw no evidence of a Moroccan military presence other than the burnt-out remains of tanks, munition trucks and other vehicles. Even when we entered Morocco itself, we encountered no opposition … We travelled without compass, maps or radio. At night we slept beneath the stars as temperatures fell to below zero. The guerrillas took it for granted that we would not be disturbed by the Moroccans…10

  It was one of those trips when I could not help but wonder if I was the victim of a gigantic hoax. Did we really cross into Morocco itself? Were we really in disputed territory? Perhaps we had done no more than drive round and round in circles for a week, never leaving Algeria, which is where I had met up with the Polisario fighters. After all, one Saharan sand dune looks very much like another. These days, with global positioning technology available on every mobile phone, it would be much easier to work out exactly where I was – but in 1980, I found myself with no option but to believe what I was told.

  I have often had cause to remember a line from Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Scoop, which offers a glorious satirical depiction of the life of a war correspondent. At one point in the tale, the hapless William Boot, a country life writer mistakenly sent to cover a war in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia, sends a cable to his editor:

  THEY HAVE GIVEN US PERMISSION TO GO TO LAKU AND EVERYONE IS GOING BUT THERE IS NO SUCH PLACE AM I TO GO TOO SORRY TO BE A BORE.11

  Going to a place that does not exist, and then being expected to provide dramatic news stories from there, is only marginally dafter than going to places that do exist but where nothing at all of any interest is happening. Editors sometimes like to challenge keen young reporters by offering them assignments that look exciting on paper but can turn out to be a lot less thrilling on the ground. ‘See what you can find, old boy. There’s bound to be something going on.’