Martin Bell, Journalist - a Witness of Hatred.

On one occasion I did a report from the open-air black market in Berlin's Alexanderplatz, which was dominated by swarthy Romanian traders. East Germans around them were puzzled and angry, and already nostalgic for the old order, where these things were not allowed. One of them spoke bitterly about "Jews and Gypsies who have no intention of working here". The report duly ran on the Six O'Clock News; it was one in a series on the new Germany, and they were more or less committed to it. But the remark about Jews and Gypsies was taken out.

The feeling seemed to be that the Germans of today should not be thinking like that - and if they were, we had no business showing it. It was a slight but, I thought, dangerous act of timidity, and it was picked on by Peter McKay in his newspaper column. "There are bound to be difficult moments in Germany's unification", he wrote. "Some very ugly people will emerge from the old communist cocoon in the East. However much we approve of unification, we should take care to report accurately - regardless of taste - what is being said and done there. We don't want any more surprises from Germany."

It was a small enough incident, but I think it illustrates a general truth, that political correctness conflicts with good reporting. Personally, I have nothing against political correctness, and will stand shoulder to shoulder with the chattering classes on a reasonable part of its agenda. But the trouble with it is that it masks the truth - truth that may later do us damage because we chose to ignore it. In television news we are already denied the use of the full range of images available to us to depict the world as we find it. We deny ourselves these images for the most compelling reasons of taste, that we ourselves can hardly bear to look at them, and it serves no purpose to try and inflict them on others. But when we start excluding words, on the grounds of supposed political correctness, we are in deeper trouble than we need to be.

On this I offer a Bosnian example from the war between Muslims and Croats. At a time when it was raging most fiercely in September 1993, the front line shifted to the grounds of a mental hospital in the old spa town of Fojnica in central Bosnia. The Bosnian army held one side and the HVO, the Bosnian Croat Defence Force, the other. The hospital itself was in no man's land, its staff had fled, and its demented patients were wandering about in both sides of the line of fire as helpless as children, and yet it was notable that there was no operation "Irma", no international campaign on their behalf. I had wished to end my report with the thought that this was what the conflict had come to, and there could hardly be a crueller image of it than a madhouse in a war zone. I was told that the use of the word "madhouse" was no longer admissible: there were people who might be offended by it. I tried to make the case but in vain. The issue was a small one, but it seemed to me to be symbolically quite important. If the strengths and cadences of plain English were denied us - the English of Cobbett and Dickens and Orwell - then our focus on the world around us would blur still further. It was Orwell himself in his classic essay "Politics and the English Language" who spotted the link between the corruption of language and the corruption of thought. There wasn't political correctness in his day, but there was what he called "orthodoxy". "Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style... If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy". And there wasn't ethnic cleansing, but there was something presciently like it: "Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification."

By the time of the Fojnica incident my working life was spent almost entirely in the war zones. I did little else for nearly four years, and might as well have restyled the job description as new world disorder correspodent. I had never expected to be living quite so much on my nerves, and really didn't know whether the nerves were up to it, or had too much mileage on them already. The dangers were routine and usually manageable. The disturbing part of it was the constant exposure to the suffering of others, with a measure of guilt thrown in. On a front line in central Bosnia, cameraman Sebastian Rich and I were reporting on a sudden flight of Croatian refugees. An overburdened old lady and her granddaughter were setting out with faltering steps along a cart track through a no man's land that was known to be mined. Seb said, "You know, there are times when I hate this fucking job". I agreed. We shouldn't have been filming those two, we should have been helping them. Yet had we done so we would have missed our feed, and if we had survived we would certainly have been arrested by the Serbs on the other side. It seemed a lame excuse then. It still does now.

Because of these pressures and a certain coded way in which my employers started talking to me about this time, in the autumn of 1993 I became aware that they might be beginning to wonder whether I was not myself a candidate for admission to some kind of a British Fojnica. And I was not the only one. There is an established medical condition of battlefield stress, which might as easily affect a journalist as a soldier. On returning from Bosnia, I found myself summoned for consultations with the BBC's chief medical officer, a kindly and expert Irishman, for what I supposed was a post-operative session on the war wound. But that was just for the record and the opening civilities. The questioning then turned to the main event, which was my state of mind - in fact, my sanity.I was further quizzed on this in public by Dr Anthony Clare, another penetrating Irishman, in one of his mind-related radio programmes; and he had a specialist in battlefield stress beside him. I could have talked myself out of a job right there and then. They were indeed hard questions to answer, for to be unaffected by what one had lived through might itself be taken as evidence of some kind of lapse from a medical state of grace. And although I claimed to be more or less sound in mind as well as limb, might not battlefield stress be rather like alcoholism, and denial one of its symptoms?

I did admit to certain changes that I had noticed in myself. One was that when I returned from Bosnia to my cottage in a leafy corner of north London, I couldn't sleep, at least for the first several nights. The quietness was unnatural, with nothing to be heard but the wind in the oak tree and occasionally a night owl lodging there. I actually missed the crackle of small arms and thump of mortar fire which were my lullaby in Sarajevo. I could sense the wise Irishman nothing this, as evidence against.

The other change was that nothing else, outside certain personal relationships, seemed to matter very much. This was not a work obsession, for I had worked just as hard in other countries, and then stowed away those memories with the Globetrotters. It was a Bosnia obsession. I would return from a six-week stint in the burning Balkans, and from a war which threatened the security of Europe even in periods of relative lull and ceasefire, and be asked to take part in one of those talk shows with which Radio Five likes to fill its evening hours. Bosnia was an afterthought, if that. My fellow panellists, the great and the good of British journalism, were principally concerned with some business about the position of Eurosceptics in the Cabinet, and the overwhelming moral issue of the day, which was whether the winner of the National Lottery was entitled to anonymity. I remember not contributing much, but asking myself, is this my country? Is it even my planet?

The fault was clearly mine: some lack of proportion which is best identified as "Bosnia withdrawal syndrome". I have seen it in others, especially journalists, but soldiers and aid workers too. The Prince of Wales's Own, one of the finest battalions we ever dealt with in Vitez, found on their return from Bosnia that even their best men were scoring unexpectedly low marks on routine proficiency tests. Somehow ordinary soldiering didn't seem to matter so much. The same thing happened rather more publicly to General Lewis MacKenzie. After his recall from Sarajevo he assumed the command of a Canadian Army Division. There are not many of these, and at any other time it would have been the fulfilment of a lifetime's ambition, but after his experiences in Bosnia he found it curiously unsatisfying - frustrating too, because he could speak his mind freely in Sarajevo, but not in Toronto or Ottawa. He left the service a year early, and incorporated himself as General MacKenzie Communications Inc., beginning a new career as adviser to other nations' armies and commentator on UN peacekeeping. (He also held on to his sanity: the evidence of that is that he turned down repeated invitations to enter politics.)

I have written of the need for some kind of professional commitment and a journalism that cares as well as knows. But clearly there has to be some balance as well, or one is at risk of becoming a crusader in lost causes and a foaming-at-the-mouth zealot, and the less effective for that. I had sensed it in myself on the occasion of the Radio Five talk show. Their politics and perceptions meant nothing to me. I was in danger of ranting on like the Ancient Mariner who "stoppeth one in three". It would be useful to call a halt, to stay away for a while and somehow see the thing from a longer perspective.

Again I was lucky: it must have been those suitcases. Providence - also known as my benign and efficient foreign editor Vin Ray - intervened. He needed someone with old-soldierly credentials, and who knew the difference between a remembrance a celebration (it was surprising how many did not), to cover various fiftieth anniversary commemorations of events towards the end of the Second World War. I assured him that, contrary perhaps to appearance, I was not old enough to have been among those present at the Normandy landings. But I was certainly there for the anniversary, as the veterans paraded at low tide on the sands of Arromanches in front of the Queen, and marched off proudly with a spring in their step, singing the songs of two world wars and as far away from Tipperary as ever. (Unfortunately the live coverage of it all was diminished by a commentator who insisted on talking over every frame of it, though it needed no words at all. The hardest skill in television is the art of writing silence.)

Naturally I sought out my old friends from Suffolk, who had landed in Normandy with the British Third Division. There are few greater privileges than to listen to old soldiers who have come through such times: it is like the study of history without historians. They were also parading through Colville- Montgomery, which they had liberated. Their senior survivor, Lieutenant- Colonel Eric Lummis, wounded in Normandy as a young subaltern, formed up the sixty old soldiers behind him in column of march. I made sure that his word of command, "One Suffolk quick march..." found its place on that night's Nine O'Clock News. The youngest of them was sixty-eight, and this would not happen again.

The following day they invited me to join them in a memorial service at the Château de la Lande, once a German panzer stronghold, where many of their comrades had fallen. The band of the Suffolks' successor regiment, the Royal Anglians, marched down the château's broad driveway playing the regimental march, Speed the Plough; Eric Lummis thanked his hosts feelingly in home-made French, and undraped a simple plaque at the side of the road; the Last Post was sounded, and old soldiers' eyes misted up. It was certainly no celebration. Of the 925 men in the battalion, 103 were killed in Normandy and 389 were wounded - and the Suffolks were luckier than some.

I remembered these figures because not many days later, in my other life, I was present at another such ceremony - the same words, the same salutes from the living to the dead, almost the same regiment, and a strikingly similar plaque. But this was from the new world order, not the old. The plaque was in memory of Steven Wormald, a twenty-two-year-old captain with the Royal Anglian Regiment who had been killed by a mine within a week of arriving in Bosnia. It had happened during a time of supposed ceasefire, in one of the broken villages near Gornji Vakuf, on the old front line between Muslims and Croats. The inscription recorded that he had died in the service of peace. There seemed a grim symmetry about it.

After a fifty-year break, the British army was back again and involved in a land war in Europe. It was not a combatant, but its soldiers were sometimes as much at risk as if it had been. And not all the deaths, like Steven Wormald's, were accidental. Lance-Corporal Wayne Edwards, the first to die, was deliberately shot in the driver's hatch of his Warrior APC. A soldier could become a target in peacekeeping just as much as in war-fighting.

Of course the cases were different. The UN force was a small one from a volunteer army. It could be pulled out quite rapidly, though with some difficulty, or be transformed into something else. National security was not obviously involved. National survival was not involved at all. The conflict in Bosnia, however terrible, caused great upheaval but did not spread significantly beyond its borders. But there were still some disturbing continuities. The war was territorial, and began essentially with the aggression of the strong against the weak. Force prevailed. National security could have been involved: after 1914, we should need no history lessons on the repercussive effect of a first shot fired in anger in Sarajevo. The best analogy perhaps was that of a fire, which had broken out in the southern wing of our common European home. We had the choice of forming ourselves into a fire brigade and fighting it, or of retreating into our separate apartments and hoping that it would burn itself out. UNPROFOR was our fire brigade, however ill-equipped and ill-prepared, and would be arsonists elsewhere in the world were watching to see how it did. It did not do well, until handing over the fire-fighting function to a much more businesslike outfit.

There was also surely the moral dimension of whether the victims' plight moved us to help them beyond any calculation of national interest. Ethnic cleansing, which in its most lethal form is updated genocide, resembles genocide exactly in that it is not an unaccompanied crime. It needs accomplices - not only the hatred that makes it happen, but the indifference that lets it happen.

Again, the fifty-year perspective is a useful one. My next anniversary assignment was a grim one indeed: the liberation of Auschwitz. I had not been in a place, not even Berlin, so haunted by the ghosts of the past. The new inscription on the memorial at Birkenau, the purpose-built death camp in which more than a million Jews perished, describes it as a warning to humanity. Survivors of the Holocaust, impelled to return for the anniversary, were not the only ones to see the continuity between "final solutions" then and now, and to conclude that the warning to humanity had not been heeded. René Guttman, Chief Rabbi of Strasbourg in France, was leading 200 of his people in prayer at one of only two synagogues still functioning in Cracow, the city nearest to Auschwitz (and incidentally the city of Schindler's List). In his opening remarks he welcomed them by mistake to Sarajevo. It was more like a slip of the heart than a slip of the tongue. "We understand," he said, "that what happens in Sarajevo nowadays happened because we are in front of the same intolerance and hatred of people that was here fifty years ago. The instinct of holocaust is unfortunately in the hearts of some people."

The same connection was made by Elie Wiesel, who has surely earned the right to be heeded as much as any man alive. He did it implicitly in his speech at Auschwitz, of which he was one of the few survivors, and addressed it to the next generation: "I do not want my past to become their future." And he did it explicitly and outspokenly to an audience which included President Clinton, at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington: "What have we learned? We have learned some lessons, minor lessons perhaps, that we are all responsible, and indifference is a sin and a punishment. And we have learned that when people suffer we cannot remain indifferent. And Mr President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything, must be done. This is a lesson. There are many other lessons. You will come, you will learn. We shall learn together."

We are still learning. The case against indifference, as Elie Wiesel made it, is quite unanswerable. And because it was he with his credentials who made it, we mere war zone reporters don't have to, but just go about our everyday business of assembling the evidence that makes his warning relevant and urgent and necessary. It is and should be a long way from polemical journalism, for we should find what we find and not what we are looking for, but if we are lucky we can open people's eyes to these old and dangerous currents swirling around us. If we are not, they will continue to worry more about the National Lottery.

In the case of our present experience, unlike the earlier and arithmetically yet more terrible genocide, the facts were well enough known and documented from the start. There were eyewitness reports and photographs. There was television. We do not have the alibi of ignorance. But the difficulty is the same. It is a difficulty of communication - Cassandra's predicament - speaking the unspeakable to an audience that doesn't want to hear. It was Elie Wiesel as usual who found the right words for it: "My good friends, it is not because I cannot explain that you won't understand, it is because you won't understand that I cannot explain."

In my temporary function as new world order correspondent, I have witnessed the first two tests and challenges of that order. One was in Kuwait, where a larger country invaded and annexed a smaller one. The Western alliance promised that the aggression would not stand, and it did not. (But Kuwait had oil.) The other was in Bosnia, where a stronger people attacked a weaker people and expelled those whom they didn't kill from land they had shared for centuries. (But Bosnia had no oil: and the American army does deserts, it doesn't do mountains - at least it didn't until its orders changed dramatically late in 1995. Even then it played for safety, performing limited functions with minimum risks behind a ring of steel, with every intention of leaving the field and declaring a victory exactly one year later. The Americans' aim in Bosnia was a take-away triumph.)

At the time of writing, diplomacy is once more engaged on the issue; there is a peace treaty in place and a force to implement it, at least in the short term. I have believed from the start that this is a crisis which will end in one of two ways: either the stability of the rest of Europe will spread to the Balkans, or the instability of the Balkans will spread to the rest of Europe. It can still go either way. If the nightmare scenario returns, and the implementing powers are unwilling to stay the course, then the security of Europe will be threatened, and we shall remember the principal lesson of the war that the Bosnians have learned for themselves.

It is a brutal one: arm your children.

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