MORE THRILLS THAN SKILLS – A HALF-LIFE IN JOURNALISM, PART 84

Allmediascotland
24/10/2008
UK

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each
weekday, 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 traveled several times to Kosovo during 1993 and 1994 predicting,
as most journalists did, that the repressed province of Serbia would,
in the end, explode with dire consequences.

After I had written this a couple of times, editors asked me to give
Kosovo a miss until Armageddon might eventually arrive. It wasn’t
until 1999 that Kosovo ultimately imploded and that year I had other
commitments.

I crossed the Pacific at the beginning of the year and returned to the
UK to go to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, a tiny Christian enclave
in the Caucuses, together with a team from Christian Solidarity,
led by the leader of The House of Lords, Baroness Cox. She is a
remarkable lady who spends what free time she has with threatened
Christian communities wherever they might be in the world.

I first met her in Lokichokkio, in northern Kenya, as she came
out of Sudan where she had uncovered evidence of the massacres of
Christians. She told me of her experiences and I wrote them up for
The Scotsman which made the story their front page ‘splash’.

During 1988, I had done a lot of work in Africa. The World Food
Programme had ferried me around southern Sudan, where hundreds of
thousands of people were starving largely as a result of the food
insecurity caused by civil war, and Somalia, where the picture was
much the same: famine had come with war and flooding had compounded
the problems.

War with Ethiopia took me to Eritrea. Quite apart from the border
conflicts which mar life there, Eritrea is one of the most charming,
and safe, countries in the whole of Africa. A former Italian colony,
it boasts a pleasant capital in the city of Asmara replete with
coffee shops and ice cream parlors. Amnesty International will tell
you of the country’s poor human rights record. But it is, at least,
completely safe to walk the streets at night. I enjoyed my time there.

I had gone to Uganda to visit Acholiland, in the very north of the
country, which was being ravaged by a particularly unpleasant character
called Joseph Kony who headed something up called The Lord’s Resistance
Army. He saw himself as a religious prophet. Quite how, beats me.

His specialty was kidnapping and brutalizing children: the boys were
turned into fighters and the girls into sex slaves. One night he took
more than 100 girls from St Mary’s School, a Roman Catholic boarding
school in Aboke. I went to the school and interviewed the sisters and
three girls who had managed to escape the clutches of Kony. Theirs
was a remarkable tale of survival.

These competing ‘attractions’ meant that my attention had shifted away
from the Balkans, where I had served my apprenticeship. I didn’t ‘do’
the war in Kosovo, although, in advance of NATO involvement, I received
an invitation to address some unspecified ‘key’ people and brief them
on Kosovo and journalistic techniques of intelligence gathering.

Prior to the West’s involvement in Kosovo, the buzzword, in
intelligence circles, was ‘HUMINT’: human intelligence. Previously,
far too much emphasis had been placed on satellite-provided information
and electronic interception. As a result of the development of ‘hot’
conflict in places like Bosnia and Somalia, where western interests
were directly threatened, it was realised that on-the-ground knowledge
and ability to gather information was of inestimable value.

Of course, the people who are best at that are . . . journalists.