Getting back, everything does seem a bit odd.”One’s perspective of relative values also changes. I just laughed.”Harry Arnold, a Fleet Street veteran, said: “I covered Aberfan, I covered Bloody Sunday, but Kosovo was certainly the most traumatic – the terrible suffering of refugees in the camps first of all, and then Kosovo itself. “Mind you, back in London not many things seem important either. I am a freelance cameraman, and one of the American companies asked me to go to Dublin to cover that Beckham and Posh Spice wedding. To him, Kosovo “is a blighted land of blighted people,” and he was glad to be back home.But returning from Kosovo to “normality” has been a strange experience for many of the journalists. A few who immediately went off on holiday found it almost impossible to relax or enjoy themselves.
Danny Richards came back after four days of a week’s break in Corfu. “It sounds absolutely crazy, but I began to resent the place, the holidaymakers, the hotels, the whole tourist thing,” he said. The KLA pointed out all the unexploded devices he had somehow managed to miss.For Bishop, who had been covered wars since the Falklands, it was the “promiscuity of violence” in Kosovo which made it different from other conflicts. Patrick Bishop, of The Telegraph, went to cover a story in Vrbica with his translator, to be told that he had just driven over a road full of mines. Then came the news that two friends from the Daily Record, Simon Huston and Chris Watt, had been grazed by bullets when their car was ambushed It was hard to keep track of which roads were safe.
An old man showed me the stretch beside a stream where he thought she and a few others were buried. Returning to Stenkovec 1 – the “celebrity camp” where Blair and Clinton, Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave were much photographed – I found the Berishas had gone, and felt relief at not having to give them the bad news, and also the failure, on my part, to give them some hope.Signs of one’s own vulnerability were never far away. Hearing that two German reporters had been executed after being stopped by paramilitaries was worrying. I went to their home town to be told she had been taken away by paramilitaries. I was asked by Fadil and Almi Berisha at a Macedonian refugee camp to try to find their 19-year-old daughter, Samira, separated on a day of violence and confusion near Batlava. Tim Butcher, The Daily Telegraph’s young defence correspondent, painstakingly tracked down friends he had made before in Kosovo He wanted to make sure they were alright. Harry Arnold of The Mirror managed to reunite five-year-old Jehona with her family in Prizren.
She had been found wandering around a refugee camp in Macedonia, lost and frightened.Not all such quests were successful. Danny Richards, a cameraman, is still making endless phone calls to refugee agencies to find the whereabouts of a young brother and sister at Pec, whose parents had disappeared. Some examples of organised cruelty were particularly difficult to cope with: few could forget the quarters of the MUP, the Serb special police, in Pristina, with its torturers’ paraphernalia.It also became quite personal for many. One saw the misery of the refugees in Macedonia and Albania, heard tales of what had happened to their villages and towns in Kosovo, and saw the charred shells of their homes, and the graves of children, parents and friends of those you had met.
