Kevin Myers remembers his time as a war correspondent in the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia and wonders if the story of criminals selling “war vacations” to rich clients in the Balkans to shoot unarmed civilians could be true.
To any war correspondent in the field, there is no greater source of evil than his or her news desk at home. The intrepid gallants that occupy that heroic table will fearlessly send their colleagues to the most distant and bloody of battles to check reports that unicorns are being used as cavalry by North Korean stormtrooper-cannibals.
“Could you get to Uzbequistanopolis ASAP and file 800 words by 7 pm our time. No later, please. Last night you filed at 8 pm, very inconvenient for the news desk.”
“Uzbequistanopolis is five hundred miles away, over two contested borders, and the largest tank battle since Kursk is raging there as we speak.”
“We’re aware of that. This is the news desk, remember. We can read a map. By 7 pm, 7.30 the latest.”
“Five hundred miles.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s why we’re giving you the extra half-hour. And while you’re there, give us a colour story on the new rendition of Becket’s Juno and the Paycock in the Uzbequistanopolis National Theatre.”
“It’s Beckett, two t’s, and the production is Waiting for Godot. Juno is by Shaw. ”
“There you go again, splitting hairs. Just file, on time this time, for a change, OK? No later than ten for the play. Deadlines – you ever hear of them? Gotta dash. Bye.”
So when a CBS journalist slumped in and joined us in the “dining room” at the Holiday Inn Sarajevo over 30 years ago, looking grey around the gills and with a haunted look in his eyes like Macbeth at the banquet, we feared the worst. We said nothing, our raised eyebrows asking all the questions.
“Yep,” he said, “you got it one. News desk trouble. Double A Plus”
We still said nothing. Didn’t need to. In Sarajevo, where none of us had eaten a proper meal in ten days, a Double A Plus crisis was the journalistic equivalent of tertiary syphilis.
In broken tones he told us what the news desk had demanded of him. It had received reports that Italian millionaires were paying good money to come and shoot Bosnians. Was this true? He had to file a full story, complete with pics, and interviews with the loved ones of the victims of the Italian snipers, for the morning TV bulletin.
We shook our heads not in pity at his plight, but in terror at our own. News desks have secret drums with which to pass on meaningless rumours to one another, which would then to serve as the basis for them sending us all on a wild goose chase to break what they clearly thought were the expenses-filled life of ease for their parasitic war-correspondents, with our margueritas and our hammocks shared with exotic sloe-eyed dusky beauties. So, all of would us soon be getting the same calls.
An Italian journalist had arrived in the Holiday Inn the day before, and had received orders to file immediately. “How can I?” he asked me piteously. “I don’t know nothing. Did you file this evening?”
“Sure. I’ll fetch my copy.”
I did so. He scanned it. “Can I use this?”
“Of course. See you later.”
He eventually joined us in the “restaurant”, where four of us had just finished sharing a tin of corned beef left over from Marshall Aid. He waved away the offer to let him lick the empty tin, and showed me his copy in Italian, which I don’t speak, but I know what “Io” means. I hadn’t used the first person singular once in my piece. I pointed this out to him.
“I know,” he confessed. “But I had to make it more personal.”
“You were under a hell of a lot of fire, it seems.”
“I owe you big time, Kevin.”
I called in the favour the next day. “Could this be true about the Italian sniper paying good money to shoot people?”
“The problem with Italy is that there’s always some bastard to make up a a good story, and there’s always another fucking bastard who will confirm it.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s true?”
“Bastards,” he explained.
The next day I visited a Serb position overlooking Sarajevo, travelling in a CBS armoured car. The Serb gunners were firing sporadically into the city, with the colonel in charge trying to hit the post-office building which was run by his sister, who remained loyal to Bosnia, as some Sarajevo Serbs did. Yes, he was trying to kill her.
I asked him about the Italian story: Could it be true?
He was incredulous. “You think I would risk my men’s lives so some mad fucking Italian millionaire could kill a fellow Yugoslav?”
“Hmm. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“Ah, but that’s different.”
During my last visit to the camp, I had noticed a terrible smell, and some fat flies emerging from cracks in the ground.
“What are they?” I had asked, pointing.
He sniffed. “The Bosnians we killed last week. We should have buried them deeper. Those fucking gravedigger flies can smell them and burrow down to lay their eggs.”
I thought for a moment or two.
“So, are these the mothers or their offspring?”
He laughed approvingly. “You journalists! Such questions!”
Now he remembered the gravedigger flies.
“I told you the truth about them flies and my treacherous sister. We Serbs never lie. You think I risk my men’s lives for such scum?”
Back in the Holiday Inn that night I shared my Serbian colonel’s opinion of the story about Italians paying money to kill Bosnian children. We all agreed that it was typical news desk scuttlebutt, and likewise, that we would not file any stories that in any way confirmed it, regardless of the news desk’s possible threats to post us permanently to Pyongyang or South Georgia.
“That sort of settles it for today,” said Tim, a cameraman who had served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry and who was as fearless as he was tall, and easily the best man under fire that I’ve ever seen. “But these stories never go away. They’re like Halley’s Comet. They’ll be back and back, and they’ll outlast us all, I promise you.”
Quite so. This week Brussels Signal heard that Italian news desks were buzzing with stories about Italian millionaires going on human safari in Bosnia in the 1990s. My news desk asked: As a veteran of that war, what did I think of it?
The above is what I think of it. Doesn’t mean it’s untrue. After all Halley’s Comet keeps going around the solar system, and there’s hardly anything to it, just water and carbon dioxide, rather like Bosnia’s Italian snipers.
But I could be wrong……
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