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0:44

When news came on the television, the

0:47

Chalsheskus had been captured and in fact killed.

0:50

They showed pictures of Nikolai and Yevgena,

0:53

Chalsheskou, lying in the snow, dead.

0:55

And the medical staff and the

0:58

patients all erupted in ecstasy. They

1:01

cheered to the echo as though they were

1:03

watching some football match and their team had

1:05

scored. It was a very striking moment and

1:07

you got a real sense of how hated

1:09

these two had been. This

1:13

is Cold War Conversations and if you're

1:15

new here you've come to the right

1:17

place to listen to first-hand accounts of

1:19

the Cold War. Do make

1:22

sure you follow us in your podcast app

1:24

so you don't miss out on future episodes.

1:27

Alan Little recounts his journey from his

1:29

student days in Edinburgh to working as

1:31

a journalist on the front lines of

1:33

Cold War history in Eastern Europe and

1:35

beyond. In

1:38

1989 he found himself on the night shift at

1:40

the BBC in London when the Berlin Wall fell.

1:43

Witnessing the world change in real

1:45

time, Alan's desire to be part of

1:47

these monumental events grew stronger. He

1:50

shares his experience as a journalist

1:52

during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

1:55

Alan describes the electrifying atmosphere of

1:57

Wenceslas Square and the fear of

1:59

a violent... crackdown. Alan

2:01

also takes us to Romania during

2:03

the fall of Nikolai Ceausescu's brutal

2:05

regime. He recounts in detail

2:08

the chaos, the gunfire and the

2:10

bloody reality of the revolution's human

2:12

cost. The episode

2:14

also delves into his time during the

2:16

1991 Gulf War in Baghdad. He describes

2:18

the eerie experience of watching the city

2:21

being bombed from his hotel room and

2:23

the resilience of the people around him.

2:25

As the episode draws to a close,

2:27

Alan reminds us that while we may

2:29

know what a society is

2:32

transitioning from, we should be cautious

2:34

in predicting what it's transitioning to.

2:36

I'm delighted to welcome Alan Little

2:38

to our Cold War conversation. I

2:42

was a student in Edinburgh in the early 80s and

2:44

I was writing an

2:46

essay in my room and my flatmate knocked

2:50

on the door, put his head around the

2:52

door and said, there's been a military coup

2:54

in Poland. And I

2:56

was instantly on sort of red alert. I thought,

2:58

my goodness, a military coup in Europe in this

3:00

day and age. We had a little black and

3:02

white TV at the time and

3:04

I used to watch this guy

3:06

every evening on the Tea Time News. He'd

3:09

been a stringer in Warsaw, a BBC

3:11

stringer, completely unknown until this moment, but

3:13

because the Poles, the

3:15

Jaruzelski regime sealed

3:18

the borders, nobody could get in. This

3:20

guy called Tim Sebastian, BBC

3:22

Stringer resident in Warsaw, and he was there and it

3:24

kind of made his name, because it was on every

3:26

night suddenly. And I remember thinking,

3:28

what must it be like to be him? Imagine

3:30

having that front row seat witnessing

3:34

the theater of history unfold.

3:37

Imagine being in Poland when there's a military clampdown.

3:39

And I remember being very

3:42

excited about the prospect of being

3:44

present as history is made

3:46

and that sort of galvanized me into trying

3:48

to get into journalism. Will Barron What was

3:51

that path for you into journalism? I can't

3:53

imagine you see many adverts of foreign correspondent

3:55

knocking around. John Walling No, I was told

3:57

young journalists at the heart, as part of

4:00

their career is going to be the start.

4:02

Getting in is so competitive. I got a

4:04

lucky break. I got offered a three-month contract

4:06

at BBC Scotland straight out of university just

4:08

to bash the

4:11

phones. So I spent six months in

4:13

the BBC Scotland newsroom. Then

4:15

I got on a training course in

4:18

London to train to be a radio

4:20

reporter. I spent a couple of years

4:22

in local radio in England in Southampton.

4:25

Then I got an attachment to the Today programme.

4:27

It gained a three-month attachment to Today and

4:29

then they extended it for three months and then

4:32

they made it permanent, or as

4:34

permanent as jobs were back then, a year's

4:36

contract. It was during my time

4:38

at the Today programme. About nine

4:40

months after I joined on attachment,

4:43

things started to move in Eastern Europe.

4:46

The 1989 revolution started to take off.

4:49

I was desperate to get in on the act. I

4:51

was too junior and they wouldn't send to me. Then

4:54

the Berlin Wall fell. I was on a night

4:56

shift the night the Berlin Wall came down. I'd

4:58

been to Prague. To believe it or not, I'd

5:01

actually been to Prague the

5:03

previous year to watch

5:05

a football match. Hearts

5:07

were playing in the UEFA Cup and I'd

5:10

spent about five or six days there. Pretending

5:13

to be a heart supporter got me a visa and

5:15

I was able to go and spend

5:17

some time in a country that was really

5:19

hard to spend any time in as a

5:21

tourist. I knew

5:24

a few people in Prague and I started badgering

5:26

my editor to let me go to Prague. Then

5:30

finally, there was a student demonstration on the

5:32

17th of November, which

5:35

ended up with the police clamping down and

5:37

rumours of people being killed, which proved to

5:39

be not true. Then that started the demonstrations

5:41

in Czechoslovakia. My editor then rang me and

5:44

said, get yourself a visa and get on

5:46

a plane. I got to Prague

5:48

sometime in the week

5:51

beginning, the 20th of

5:53

November, I think it was, and

5:55

attended those massive demonstrations on Wenceslas Square

5:57

and started talking to people who were

6:00

demonstrating to try and bring down the communist

6:03

regime. But the communist regime in Czechoslovakia was

6:05

considered one of the more hard-line

6:07

ones in Eastern Europe at that time, and

6:09

people were still talking about a kind of

6:11

Tiananmen Square-type resolution to this

6:14

in Prague. People were genuinely frightened that

6:16

there would be a very violent crackdown

6:18

by the communist regime. Indeed,

6:22

a similar story from me. I saw

6:24

Rangers against Dukkla Prague in 1981 in

6:26

Prague. Not being

6:30

a Rangers fan, I happened to be there

6:32

on holiday, and the tour guide said I

6:34

can get you a ticket for this game.

6:37

That was quite interesting as Dukkla was a military

6:39

club. That's right. It was Dukkla Prague that Hartz

6:41

were playing in the second round of the UEFA

6:43

Cup, and I

6:46

went with a couple of friends who were

6:48

genuine Hartz fans, and we drove from London

6:51

across Europe and across the border in

6:53

West Germany, and drove up to

6:55

Prague that way. I remember being very excited to

6:57

be on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

7:00

Mason Wow, that must have been

7:02

some journey. What preparation did the

7:04

BBC give you for being

7:07

a foreign correspondent, if any?

7:09

Dukkla I suppose almost none,

7:11

but I was already an

7:13

experienced radio reporter, so I

7:15

knew how to tell

7:18

a story on the radio. But no, they

7:20

didn't groom me in any traditional sense to

7:22

be a foreign correspondent. They just sent me

7:24

on this assignment, which I mean,

7:27

nobody expected this to happen in Eastern Europe,

7:29

and it all started to take off if

7:31

you remember that summer. Remember, this is a

7:33

pre-digital age. There's no internet to look up,

7:35

no mobile phones or anything like that. And

7:37

there was a department called News Information in

7:40

the old broadcasting house, and you went to

7:42

News Information and said, give me everything you've

7:44

got on Czechoslovakia. They had

7:46

a very small file, newspaper clippings,

7:50

because almost nobody had done any

7:52

reporting from Czechoslovakia for years. They

7:54

photocopied about, I don't know, a

7:56

couple of dozen newspaper

7:58

cuttings. a lovely feature

8:00

by Joan Bakewell. She'd been allowed to get

8:03

into Prague about 10

8:05

years previously and she'd written a piece

8:07

about Bohemia. So you literally, you landed

8:09

at the airport with your visa and

8:11

got on a taxi and said, take

8:13

me to the revolution. The taxi driver

8:16

would say, oh, there are some students making

8:19

placards in Charles University, I'll

8:21

drop you there. So that's, it

8:23

was seat of the pad stuff. Wow.

8:25

And did you have any challenges

8:27

with the language? Were you finding English speakers who

8:30

could tell you what was going on? This

8:33

was my first real foreign assignment.

8:35

I'd been given day trips to

8:37

Berlin and Spain before, but

8:39

this is my first foreign

8:41

assignment in which there was a moving news story.

8:44

I was learning how to operate on the job.

8:46

So I was concentrating on finding people who

8:48

could speak English. And then after a few days,

8:50

I met this young medical student. He

8:53

was in the third year of his medical degree

8:55

at Charles University and he spoke pretty good English

8:57

and he agreed to come and work with me

8:59

as a translator. So I was then able to

9:02

speak to people who didn't speak any English and

9:04

that opened a lot of doors for me. And I'm still

9:07

in touch with him. He became a friend. We spent weeks

9:09

together and we've stayed in touch all

9:11

these years. Wow. Wow.

9:14

And what sort of feeling

9:16

were you getting from people? Stressful.

9:21

Some people were quite reluctant to speak. They

9:23

were still scared. They were still trying to

9:25

work out what was happening. The

9:28

medical student I hooked up with, he

9:30

said to me, when

9:33

I sit my final exams at the end of

9:35

fifth year, I'll have to pass five exams. They

9:39

are medicine, hygiene, obstetrics

9:41

and gynecology, surgery,

9:44

and Marxism-Leninism. So

9:46

I said, wait a minute, 20% of your

9:48

intellectual effort has got to be devoted to

9:50

this sort of 19th century

9:53

philosophical cul-de-sac in the European tradition. And he

9:55

said, yep, we've got to do that. So

9:57

I said, is there a professor of Marx's?

10:00

Leninism in

10:02

a medical faculty, he said, yes, there is. Do you want to

10:04

go and meet her? So we went to

10:06

this woman's office. She taught

10:09

Marxism-Leninism to medical students.

10:12

And we sat in her office, and we

10:14

could hear the sounds of the revolution coming

10:16

up from the street below through the open

10:18

window. And I remember saying to her, so

10:21

you're a high priestess of this religion that's

10:23

being torn down as we speak. Do

10:26

you even believe in its credo?

10:30

And she said to me, look, and she was

10:32

a woman in her, I'd say late fifties. She

10:34

said, look, those of us who lived through 1938, 1948, 1968, we know better than to

10:36

ask that

10:40

question. We do our jobs. We

10:43

keep our heads down. We go to

10:45

her at the weekend with our family, and we

10:47

have a good private life. And it was my

10:50

first encounter with what I understood came to be

10:52

known as internal exile, where the sort of educated

10:54

urban middle classes in Eastern

10:56

Europe simply retreated from the public square,

10:58

retreated from any kind of participation

11:01

in public discourse, and just opted to have

11:03

as happy a life as they could in

11:06

the restricted atmosphere, because to do anything else

11:08

was too dangerous. You ended up in jail

11:10

like Harville, I suppose, and other dissidents, or

11:12

you ended up not being

11:14

allowed to work at your chosen profession, the

11:16

profession for which you were qualified. I mean, all those

11:19

educated people who ended up as window cleaners

11:21

and construction workers because they had spoken out

11:23

against the regime in 1968, including

11:26

Marta Kubisheva, the so-called Czech nightingale, the folk

11:28

singer who came to prominence in 1968. She

11:30

disappeared after 1968, after the Soviet invasion,

11:36

and was never heard of again until one

11:40

afternoon at four o'clock in Wenceslas Square,

11:42

she appeared on the balcony with

11:44

Vaclav Havel and sang the

11:46

Czechoslovak National Anthem. And

11:49

people all around me, I was standing maybe 30 meters

11:53

away in a crowd of 400,000, and

11:55

everybody knew exactly who she was, even though

11:57

her name had not appeared in any public

12:00

location, on the radio, on

12:02

television, anywhere for 21

12:05

years. People still knew exactly who she

12:07

was and what she symbolized, what she

12:09

represented. Mason- I think

12:11

she had a famous song. I seem to

12:13

remember seeing footage of her singing. Al-

12:16

I first heard of her when I met a young

12:18

woman called Blanca, and she

12:20

also worked for me as a translator.

12:22

She took me home to her parents

12:24

flat, where she and her brother lived

12:26

with their parents in a little flat. Her father

12:28

told me- and this was when it was safe

12:30

to speak, this was after the regime, the

12:33

Politburo announced it was resigning, and that everybody knew

12:36

that it was a matter of time before Havel

12:38

was sworn in as president. And

12:41

her father told me that he'd listened to the Czech

12:44

service of the BBC World Service,

12:46

and they used to do a program

12:49

every evening for 15 minutes.

12:52

It was the Czechoslovak service. And

12:54

he would listen very quietly with the shortwave

12:56

radio up against his ears, just in case

12:59

if he listened at a normal volume, he

13:01

was afraid his neighbors might hear and report

13:03

him. And the BBC

13:05

and the census and

13:08

the country used to play cat and

13:10

mouse with each other, because the Czech

13:12

regime would jam the signal, and

13:14

the BBC would change the frequency. And

13:17

then after a few days, the Czechs would catch

13:19

up with that and jam that signal, and then

13:21

they would move this frequency again. So he described

13:23

how he'd have to move around the dial till

13:25

he found the program. And

13:27

he took me to a cupboard under the

13:29

stairs and a walk-in cupboard in

13:31

which there was this amazing archive from

13:34

1968. It was a kind of alternative

13:36

history of the country. So there were

13:38

magazines and books and newspaper cuttings and

13:41

photographs and records,

13:43

songs, including songs by the Czech writing

13:45

and Martin Kubishva. And it was a

13:47

kind of alternative history of the country,

13:49

an archive documenting his

13:51

version of the history of the country. And he would say, he said to

13:54

his kids at school, study the

13:56

official history, pass the exams, because you'll need all that,

13:58

but it's all lies. And

14:00

here's the real history of our country, which

14:02

I'm keeping privately and secretly. You must never

14:04

tell anybody that we've got

14:07

this because it's dangerous and seditious. But

14:09

it was safe now for him to show me that. And

14:11

it was an amazing example of how

14:14

ordinary people kept alive a history

14:17

that contradicted the platitudes

14:19

and truisms of the communist regime. Yeah,

14:22

because after 1968 Czechoslovakia went

14:24

under that period

14:26

of so-called normalization. And

14:30

all those memories had to

14:32

be suppressed until 1989. And

14:36

as you've outlined, I mean, the bravery

14:38

of people like Harville to actually stick

14:40

their heads above the parapet and,

14:43

you know, all the signatories of Charter 77

14:45

is incredible. Because,

14:48

you know, if you were living in

14:50

Czechoslovakia at that time, as you've illustrated,

14:54

you don't know that this regime is going to

14:56

disappear in 1989. So

14:58

therefore, what do you do? Do you keep your head down

15:01

like some people did? And as you've

15:04

described, or do you actually stick your

15:07

head above the parapet and protest and

15:09

take the consequences? Yeah,

15:11

there was, I mean, I met a man called Bat-Slob

15:13

Marley, who was a priest, and

15:15

he had spent years in jail. And he was very

15:19

quiet and very

15:21

reserved, but absolutely stealing his

15:23

determination to, as Harville put it, live in

15:25

truth. And he was

15:27

another one who had spent time. And Harville

15:29

himself had been in jail as recently as

15:31

April. And by December, he was president in

15:34

Kraczynie Castle. And there was

15:36

something apt about, in

15:39

Bohemia, in Czechoslovakia, about

15:41

a revolution led by a theater

15:43

director and a playwright. There was something

15:45

highly theatrical about the, something quite performative

15:47

about the way in which the Czechoslovak

15:49

regime collapsed and was brought down.

15:52

And I remember Harville gave daily press

15:54

conferences in a theater called the Magic

15:56

Lantern. And, you know,

15:59

you could tell, there was something quite artistic

16:03

about the aspiration, and it embraced

16:07

the working class as well. I remember

16:10

the regime denounced the

16:13

revolution led by a theatre director and

16:15

supported by a student as bourgeois counter-revolutionaries

16:18

and called on the working class

16:20

to come out in support of

16:22

socialism. Havel called on the working

16:25

class to down tools one day and said,

16:27

let's have a symbolic strike of two hours,

16:29

12 noon till 2pm,

16:31

I think the following Monday. I

16:34

and the medical student, Voyend,

16:36

I was working with. We drove

16:38

out to a town called Cladno, north

16:40

of Prague. It was then

16:42

a huge steel town, one of the biggest steel

16:45

plants in Europe. It

16:47

had been in the late 40s

16:49

and 50s a sort of bedrock

16:52

of heartland of communism and communist

16:54

activism. It was written up

16:56

as a sort of hero city in the official history

16:58

of the country. The regime

17:00

talked about the red glow of Cladno because

17:02

of course the steel plant would cast a

17:06

red light in the night sky.

17:08

This was symbolic of its socialist solidarity.

17:10

So we went out to Cladno and

17:12

we went to the gates of the

17:16

steel plant and waited and went

17:18

bang on the

17:20

stroke of noon. The doors opened and

17:22

the workers all marched out in

17:25

file, thousands and thousands of them carrying

17:28

banners in support of the revolution. I

17:30

remember one of them said, plurality

17:33

not brutality, which also rhymes in

17:35

Czech. And another banner

17:38

that said, the bourgeois

17:40

reactionary students are our children.

17:42

It was profoundly moving. You

17:44

sort of knew at that

17:46

moment that it was over for the

17:48

communist regime, which had become obviously corrupt

17:51

and detested and hated by

17:53

almost everybody. You mentioned

17:56

Marta Kibishva before, but there was

17:58

another face from 9. 1968

18:01

who appeared next to Harville in Wenceslas

18:03

Square? That's right. It was

18:05

the same day as Morteka Bishop was there.

18:07

We came out of the tube station

18:09

and there were 400,000 people

18:12

in the square, the organizers reckoned,

18:14

and the balcony was on,

18:16

I think, the second floor of

18:19

a building that housed a newspaper

18:21

called Sforbodneslovo, which means free words.

18:23

And this was a newspaper that

18:26

was published by the small socialist

18:29

party. I think it was the Socialist Party, and

18:31

it was one of the parties that was a

18:33

kind of front

18:36

party. It was controlled by the

18:38

Communist Party, obviously, but to

18:40

show that the Communist Party were in

18:42

coalition with other parties. Sforbodneslovo

18:45

had broken ranks with the

18:47

Communists early on and were

18:49

publishing anti-communist editorials and stories

18:51

in the newspaper. And I

18:53

remember going there at midnight

18:55

each night and the crowds

18:57

would gather and they would

18:59

throw copies of tomorrow morning's paper from the balconies

19:02

onto the streets and people would eagerly

19:04

scoop these up to read the

19:06

latest anti-communist

19:10

stories. And so they allowed

19:12

Harville to speak from the balcony

19:14

each afternoon at four o'clock. Blanca

19:17

and I emerged from the metro station,

19:19

again, about 20 meters from the balcony,

19:21

and absolutely crowded with people. We couldn't

19:23

move. People were standing shoulder to shoulder.

19:25

It was cold. Everybody had big coats

19:28

on. And there was a gentle

19:30

fall of snow. And suddenly,

19:32

Harville appeared on the balcony with Martin

19:35

Kibishua and an old man, a white-haired

19:37

old man. Everybody kind

19:39

of gasped. I

19:41

know what it's like to hear 400,000 people gasp

19:44

in disbelief at the same time. I

19:46

said to Blanca, what is it? She said, oh

19:48

my God, I can't believe it. It's him. It's

19:50

Dukcek. It's Alexander Dukcek. And there he was, this

19:52

old man. And what I couldn't understand

19:55

was how Blanca, who was 21 years old,

19:58

how she recognized him because he had disappeared. appeared

20:00

from public view 21 years earlier, the year

20:02

she was born. Alexander Duchék

20:04

was the first Secretary of the Communist

20:06

Party in Czechoslovakia and effectively the leader

20:08

of Czechoslovakia from January 1968 to April

20:10

1969. He oversaw significant reforms

20:16

to the Communist system during a period

20:18

that became known as the Prague Spring,

20:20

but his reforms were reversed and he

20:22

was eventually sidelined following the Warsaw Pact

20:24

invasion in August 1968. For

20:27

more information, see Episodes 14 and 17. Mason

20:32

W For

20:35

more information, see Episodes 14 and

20:38

17. Alexander Duchék I wondered how many 21-year-olds in Britain

20:40

could identify Harold Wilson, who was Prime Minister of the

20:42

United States. His image hadn't been banned and it was

20:44

because of this archive under the stairs and her parents

20:47

hoped that she knew exactly who he was. He spoke

20:49

from 19th

21:21

century buildings on each side of

21:23

the square and echoed up and down.

21:25

It was absolutely breathtaking. It was like watching

21:29

a magician bestow liberation with the

21:31

uttering of a kind of magic

21:34

spell. You sort

21:36

of knew at that moment that

21:39

it was all over. Of course, Duchék himself

21:41

went on to become, I think, Speaker of

21:43

Parliament in the new dispensation.

21:46

At the time, I didn't think very much of

21:48

the fact that it was the name of the

21:50

nation that so electrified people, but Marta Kibishova, a

21:53

few minutes later, the song she

21:55

chose to sing was the national anthem. Not

21:58

a hymn of liberty or democracy. And

22:00

I came to understand much

22:02

later that at the time I thought of it

22:05

as a sort of anti-communist pro-democracy uprising,

22:07

but it was also a

22:09

moment of national liberation. And

22:12

I don't think I fully appreciated how much the

22:15

idea of national liberation from a

22:17

hated foreign occupation was a

22:19

powerful motivating factor. I think

22:22

I reported at the time as essentially a

22:24

pro-democracy uprising. But in fact, what we were

22:26

witnessing in real time was the much delayed

22:28

end of the Second World War and

22:31

the reunification of a

22:33

partitioned continent. And I

22:35

think I would come to understand the power

22:37

of that a few years later in former

22:39

Yugoslavia, where I would see the

22:42

call of the tribe, the call of the nation. In

22:45

hindsight, it taught me a lesson that quite

22:47

often as journalists watching events unfold in real

22:49

time, we know what a nation or a

22:52

society is in transition from, but we should

22:54

be very careful when making judgments about what

22:56

we think it's in transition to. So we

22:58

thought at the time that Eastern

23:01

Europe countries of the Warsaw Pact

23:03

were in transition from communism and

23:05

Soviet occupation and in transition to

23:07

Western European style liberal democracy. Well,

23:11

it turned out that the

23:13

situation was a bit more complicated than that.

23:15

And what we've seen in the last decade

23:18

or so is in

23:20

many of these former communist countries, the

23:22

rejection of Western European

23:24

ideals and models of

23:26

liberal democracy in favor

23:29

of what Orban, for example, calls illiberal

23:32

democracy. And so I think

23:35

in 1989, we might have been a little too

23:37

quick to make

23:39

our assessment what the countries were in

23:42

transition to. G.L.Y.K. You're a podcast listener,

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Just search for Cold War Conversations on

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Amazon and leave a review for the

24:16

podcast. Thank you. The

24:19

description you gave of Dubchek

24:22

appearing on the balcony and the

24:24

other descriptions there are so evocative.

24:27

And I think it can be

24:29

difficult to remember how earth shattering

24:32

these events were. You

24:35

know, I remember at the time thinking the Soviet

24:37

Union is going to be there forever and

24:40

that's just the way it's going to

24:42

be. And yet within the passage of

24:44

a few months and years, the whole

24:46

of that structure

24:48

had been swept away.

24:52

Yes, I remember thinking it that day

24:54

when Dubchek appeared, I remember thinking even

24:56

at the time that this is one

24:59

of those pivotal years in history. And

25:01

I thought to myself, how many years

25:04

has carried this significance

25:06

of historical change since

25:08

the French Revolution? And

25:10

I thought, okay, 1789, 1815, you can make a case for 1848, 1870, 1919, 1945, six. This

25:23

is the seventh and I'm watching it

25:26

in real time as a young reporter. Six

25:30

or seven dates in

25:33

the history of Europe since the French Revolution

25:35

have been as weighty and as important as

25:37

this. You can even narrow that down

25:39

to four or five. So

25:42

it was a huge privilege to be there.

25:44

And for me, it was my first big assignment

25:47

and it doesn't get

25:50

any better than that in terms

25:52

of the idea that

25:54

the privilege we have as journalists sometimes

25:57

of stumbling into a situation where we

25:59

are there. watching in real time as

26:02

history turns. Mason-Amazing times,

26:04

amazing times. Al-Khalili And

26:06

I went down to

26:08

Bratislava because they

26:10

announced that the border to Austria was

26:12

going to be opened for the first

26:14

time, I think, since 1948.

26:16

And what I hadn't understood was that when

26:21

the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course, Bratislava was only 25

26:23

miles from Vienna. And and at one

26:26

time, even had a German name. And

26:29

people had a living memory before

26:31

1948 of being able to take

26:34

a tram or a train into

26:36

Vienna from Bratislava to watch the opera and

26:39

go home in the same evening. And then

26:41

this curtain descended, and Bratislava

26:43

and Slovakia generally were cut off from

26:45

the imperial capital, which had been such

26:47

an important part of the identity and

26:49

civic life of Bratislava. And they

26:51

were going to open the border for the first

26:54

time at midnight. So I went down to watch

26:56

people gathering for the symbolic opening and crossing into

26:58

Austria for the first time, being allowed to cross

27:00

into Austria for the first time. It was kind

27:02

of a mini version of what had

27:05

happened at the Berlin Wall on November the 9th.

27:07

So this was about three weeks later. And

27:09

that was an important symbolic

27:11

moment as well. And again, I saw

27:13

in it the reunification of

27:16

a continent that had been partitioned at the end of the Second World

27:18

War. Ubuntu 27 Amazing

27:21

times! Amazing times! Sir�Ind

27:24

I remember thinking on the border

27:26

there between Bratislava and between

27:28

Slovakia and Austria. I remember waking

27:31

up to what I sort of subconsciously

27:34

known about central Europe, which had been

27:37

for many generations a kind

27:39

of polyglot, polycultural melting

27:42

pot, and there was"... There

27:44

was a Prague in the 19th century, for

27:46

example, was a German-speaking city. Franz Kafka lived

27:48

in Prague. He was a German speaker. And

27:51

most people would have been at

27:53

least bilingual, if not trilingual. When

27:56

the emperor put out a proclamation, it had to put out in 14

27:58

or 15 languages. And

28:01

there was still just about a

28:03

folk memory of that tradition.

28:05

And there was a story

28:08

about census takers in Bohemia

28:10

asking people, are you German or Czech? And

28:13

the answer would be yes. I am

28:16

a German or Czech, depending on the content

28:18

in which I find myself. When I'm in

28:20

the countryside growing my cabbages, I'm Czech. When

28:22

I'm in the city selling them, I'm German.

28:24

So people were used to living in

28:27

a multicultural, multilingualistic world. There's

28:29

a very moving scene in Joseph

28:31

Roth's Radetsky March, the

28:33

novel where a young

28:35

soldier saves the life of the emperor almost

28:37

by accident. The emperor grants him

28:40

some land and he becomes a member of

28:42

the mine and ability. And

28:44

he's a Slovene. He goes home to visit his

28:47

father, who's a gardener, one of the emperor's estates.

28:49

The father is so overwhelmed by his son being

28:51

a member of the nobility, he feels he has

28:53

to speak German to him. And

28:55

there's a moment of great awkwardness and

28:58

estrangement between the two men as the

29:00

father speaks the language he thinks

29:02

his son has been elevated

29:04

into. And watching that

29:07

exchange across the border was a

29:09

reminder of that vanished world, that

29:11

central European melting pot. Do

29:13

you remember Otto von Bismarck? He was a member of

29:16

the European parliament and he was the heir to the

29:18

Bismarck dynasty. And

29:21

Austria was playing Hungary at football and

29:25

somebody said to him, are you going to watch

29:27

the Austria-Hungary game? And he said, who are we playing? As

29:32

a kind of joke. So the consciousness of

29:34

that world that had pretty much

29:36

disappeared between the wars came

29:39

back into the European story, came

29:41

back into popular consciousness. And I found that very

29:44

fascinating. Not long after

29:46

that stint in Czechoslovakia, I was

29:48

parachuted into Romania just before

29:50

Christmas as things started to take off there. So

29:54

Romania was the kind of hermit, well

29:56

Albania was the real hermit country, but Romania

29:58

was a very closed country. as well.

30:00

It was a very, very brutal regime and

30:02

known for that. And suddenly we heard rumors

30:04

of popular

30:07

demonstrations in

30:09

Timishwara in the west of the country.

30:12

Now, what I didn't really fully understand

30:14

at the time was that the ethnicity

30:16

was a big part of that part

30:18

of Romania's identity. And

30:20

the demonstrations were

30:24

being held in support of a Lutheran

30:27

pastor called Lazlut Turkish, and

30:29

his name is Hungarian, of course. And

30:31

it was a huge Hungarian minority in

30:34

western Romania, and

30:36

also quite a big

30:38

German-speaking population. And

30:41

again, this ethnic patchwork in Romania

30:43

was a reminder of how Europe

30:47

had been divided up after the first

30:49

world war, and Hungary had lost an awful

30:51

lot of territory because it

30:54

had fought on the wrong side of the war. It had

30:56

lost the war. And huge parts

30:58

of what many irredentists

31:01

in Hungary believed to be

31:03

naturally Hungarian territory were

31:05

carved off and given to some of the other

31:08

new states, including parts of Serbia and the north

31:10

and Romania and the west. And

31:12

so I was told to get on

31:14

a plane to Belgrade in what

31:19

was then Yugoslavia, get a car

31:21

and drive to the Romanian border and try to

31:23

get across. When I went to Czechoslovakia,

31:26

I had a visa and

31:28

everything. I was legitimate, but

31:30

there was no time to apply for a visa

31:32

for Romania. And a colleague

31:34

and I drove from Belgrade to

31:36

a town called Voskac in Serbia

31:40

on the border. And we checked into a hotel for

31:42

the night, and at dawn, we got up and tried,

31:44

and they led us across the border. But the border

31:46

guards were warning us to be careful. They

31:49

didn't share a language, but they managed to

31:51

indicate that there was gunfire, there was fighting

31:53

on the road and in the

31:56

town. And we got there and

31:58

there was turmoil. demonstrations,

32:00

the soldiers were everywhere, and

32:02

I remember spending the night at

32:05

the studios of Radio Timishwar,

32:08

which had been taken over by the

32:10

demonstrators, and the airwaves had been captured

32:12

by the anti-regime uprising, and the Ceauseskis

32:15

were still in power at this

32:17

point. We didn't know that they'd tried to get away,

32:21

and had in fact been captured. What

32:23

happened was, late at night, and

32:26

it was December, so it was very dark, I think

32:28

it was Christmas Eve, or the day before Christmas Eve,

32:31

suddenly the army burst into the radio station and

32:33

told us all to get into a room in

32:35

the middle of the building that had no exterior

32:37

walls or windows, and they'd switched all the lights

32:40

off and told us to lie on the floor.

32:42

Suddenly there was a gun battle outside. Securitati,

32:45

the army told us it was the

32:47

Securitati trying to storm the building. The

32:51

Securitati, the security police, had stayed

32:53

loyal to the Ceauseskis

32:55

regime, because of course if the Ceauseskis

32:57

fell, they would be in the

33:01

firing line for the brutality they'd meted

33:03

out in support of the Ceauseskis regime

33:05

over the years, and they would try to

33:07

storm the building. So it was a

33:09

very frightening few hours we spent there,

33:11

thinking that if the Securitati get in

33:13

here, they will come in with guns

33:15

firing, and we'll be in the way. So there

33:18

was a standoff, the army defended the building, and

33:20

I remember how exhausted they looked, how

33:22

absolutely shattered all the soldiers looked, and

33:25

we had to shelter there for the night until the battle

33:28

was over. Then something

33:31

very odd happened.

33:34

The army started giving press conferences saying

33:36

that 70,000 people had been killed by

33:41

the Securitati during the uprising in

33:44

Romania and 5,000 in Timishwara. And

33:48

there was a young Polish journalist

33:50

there who was a stringer for

33:53

the Sunday Telegraph, and his name

33:55

was Radek Sikorski. And

33:57

he was very strikingly articulate and

33:59

very strikingly clever. He

34:02

turned up to have been a schoolboy

34:04

in Britain at the time of

34:06

the 1981

34:09

clampdown in Poland and therefore couldn't go

34:11

back. He spent the years

34:13

of his teens and early 20s in Britain

34:15

as a refugee. He had got this job

34:18

as a stringer for the Sunday Telegraph and

34:20

he was highly skeptical. He

34:22

roused the skepticism of the oppressed people and he

34:24

would say to the army spokesmen, if

34:26

there are 5,000 dead in this city, can we see

34:28

the bodies please? Where are the bodies?

34:31

He was invested in the anti-communist

34:33

story and if any of

34:35

us was going to believe the stories of

34:38

all these dead, Radek Sikorski had

34:40

the motivation to believe it, but he was the one

34:42

who led the challenge. It was very striking, very impressive

34:44

and we asked to see the bodies and eventually they

34:46

showed us a few bodies in the morgue and

34:48

most of them had had surgery. These were people

34:51

who had died in hospital from natural causes or

34:53

from disease and they couldn't show us any –

34:55

there were some dead. I saw some myself, but

34:57

not 5,000 and I remember thinking Tim

34:59

Ishwar is about the size of Edinburgh, which is where

35:01

I'd gone to university and

35:04

I thought, if there were 5,000 people dead in Edinburgh in a

35:06

city of 500,000, I would know some of them

35:09

personally or I would know people who knew some of them.

35:11

So we started to challenge the official narrative

35:13

of the army spokespeople, but the headlines all

35:15

said 70,000 people dead at

35:18

the hands of the church, yes, it simply wasn't true. What

35:20

had happened in Romania, in

35:23

contrast to Czechoslovakia,

35:25

was a military coup. It wasn't

35:27

really a popular revolution, although it

35:29

was supported – the coup was

35:31

supported by the people,

35:34

but it was really a military coup that

35:37

had some popular legitimacy, but it was quite

35:39

hard to understand exactly what was going on.

35:41

But I remember being in a hospital talking

35:44

to people about what was going on when news

35:47

came on the television that the Ceauseskis had been

35:49

captured and in fact killed. They

35:51

showed pictures of the dead. They didn't show the

35:54

moment of the killing, they showed pictures of Nikolai

35:56

and Yevina Ceauseskis lying in

35:58

the snow dead. And

36:00

the medical staff and the patients

36:02

all erupted in ecstasy. They

36:05

cheered to the echo as though they were

36:07

watching some football match and their team had

36:09

scored. It was a very striking moment and

36:11

you got a real sense of how hated

36:13

these two had been. I mean,

36:16

that must have been a terrifying

36:19

time for you because this is

36:21

your first time sort of where

36:23

your life is really in danger

36:25

in Timishwara. Yeah,

36:27

it was the first time I'd ever heard guns fired

36:29

in anger. And I remember going into a school room,

36:33

which had been turned into a kind of field hospital. And

36:36

I was completely blindsided by

36:38

it. In retrospect now, I don't think I

36:40

really knew how to operate in that situation.

36:42

And there was a very exhausted doctor. He

36:44

was quite an old man. He must have

36:46

been well into his sixties. And

36:49

he was trying to handle this himself. And

36:51

he turned the school room into field hospital.

36:53

And there was an Italian journalist there who'd

36:55

been shot. And I was

36:59

really shocked by that because

37:01

I thought I'm here to witness not to suffer.

37:05

And it makes you recalibrate. And

37:08

there was a young man on a mattress. And

37:11

he was about my age, late twenties, he would lie

37:13

on a mattress and it was a sort of waterproof

37:16

tarpaulin on the mattress. He

37:19

had a big, a thick chew in

37:22

his mouth down into his lungs. And

37:25

he was, he was naked

37:27

from the waist up and

37:29

he was covered from the waist down. He was covered in a

37:31

sheet and he

37:34

had clearly bled out. But

37:37

the respirator was still going. And

37:40

as his chest rose and fell to the

37:42

rhythm of the respirator, I could see

37:44

his elbow dip in and out of

37:47

the blood that had pooled, his own

37:49

blood that pooled in the indentation made

37:51

by the weight of his body in the

37:53

mattress. And I remember even at the

37:55

time thinking, he's dead. He's

37:57

dead. And then the staff haven't had

38:00

time to do anything about it. And

38:03

he's in a bloodbath. I

38:05

thought, gosh, this is a bloodbath.

38:07

This is a literal bloodbath. We

38:09

normally use that phrase metaphorically. And

38:12

I've never, as far as I know, as far

38:14

as I can remember, I've never used the phrase

38:16

in any of my reporting since. Because

38:20

early in my career, I saw a real

38:22

one, a literal one, and it made a

38:24

very profound impact on

38:26

me. ALICE V. O'BRIEN-DINGHALA Difficult to

38:29

imagine that experience, but thank you

38:31

for giving me that

38:34

description. How long were you

38:36

in Romania for? Were

38:38

you just there for a few days, or did you

38:40

see, or did you get to

38:42

Bucharest? ALICE V. O'BRIEN-DINGHALA I didn't get to

38:44

Bucharest. The BBC was well represented in Bucharest

38:46

by much, much more senior people than me.

38:48

I was there still

38:50

working exclusively for the Today program, turning around

38:55

colorful radio packages with lots of people's

38:57

voices in them. So we stayed in,

38:59

and also it was very hard to

39:01

file from Romania, because the

39:03

phones weren't working very

39:06

well or very reliably. So two

39:08

or three times, I drove from

39:10

Timishwara back across the border to

39:12

Vršas, where my producer had

39:14

booked a hotel. And we

39:17

were filing our stories from Serbia, and

39:19

then driving back in. And I

39:22

remember this was really the one, I was only there

39:24

a few days, maybe a week, and

39:27

because the BBC by then had more senior people

39:29

than me there. And

39:32

I remember when we came out for the last

39:34

time, we drove not back

39:36

to Serbia, but to Hungary,

39:38

to Budapest, which by now

39:40

had had its own anti-communist revolution,

39:42

was at peace. And we checked into a

39:44

five-star hotel on the banks of the Danube.

39:46

And it was the first time that I

39:48

experienced that sense of elation, of

39:51

having seen something profound and very

39:53

dangerous and frightening, and of having survived

39:55

and got out to safety. And it

39:57

was a sensation I'd become. familiar

40:00

with in the years that lay ahead, but

40:02

I remember the high of it, the

40:05

elation and the relief

40:10

and the sense

40:13

of having accomplished something and done

40:16

well professionally, of

40:19

being alive and of feeling alive,

40:21

feeling graphically and colourfully alive. It

40:24

was a sensation I'd become

40:26

familiar with in the years that lay ahead, especially as

40:29

the violence unfolded

40:32

in former Yugoslavia.

40:34

This makes you want to carry on and

40:37

do more of this coverage. Oh,

40:42

definitely. I knew that I wanted my

40:44

future to be in what we then

40:46

called foreign news. I knew I wanted

40:48

to try and get a posting and

40:50

to live somewhere broad. I've always been

40:52

fascinated by the story of Europe anyway. I

40:54

wanted to work in Europe and

40:58

I knew that I wanted to specialize

41:00

in foreign news. The

41:02

following year, in August,

41:07

Iraq invaded Kuwait and

41:09

a few weeks went past.

41:11

Again, you have to remember that I was quite

41:13

junior in the pecking order. I applied

41:16

for a foreign job and didn't get it, but

41:18

on the basis of the interview I'd done, the head

41:20

of radio news told

41:22

the foreign editor to try me out. He rang me

41:24

one day. I'd never met him. He rang me and

41:28

said, come and see me.

41:30

He said, I want you to go to Baghdad

41:36

to be the radio news guy on the ground in

41:38

Baghdad. He said, I'm not going to say this could

41:40

be a dangerous assignment

41:42

because, frankly speaking, it is a dangerous assignment.

41:44

Think about it. For a few hours

41:46

I want to know by three o'clock. You're

41:49

up for it. And of course I

41:51

was up for it, but it was frightening. I remember getting

41:53

my visa and going to see the head of the Arabic

41:55

service, the world service, to

41:57

talk. I didn't know anything about it. Iraq.

42:00

I had to mug up as best I could about

42:02

the nature of the regime, the nature of the invasion

42:05

of Kuwait and the consequences of it and

42:08

the Western response to that. There's

42:10

a great line in an autobiography by

42:13

the great foreign correspondent James

42:15

Cameron when he was in

42:17

the Korean War and he was in a

42:19

little press boat during a seaborne invasion. And

42:23

he said something like, we

42:25

were all performatively determined to get

42:27

ashore in wave one while secretly

42:29

trying, in our privacy of our own heads, trying

42:31

to contrive some not disreputable way of being in

42:34

wave 50. And I

42:36

completely get that, that you put on

42:38

a brave face and you talk about

42:40

the story, but then quietly you say, what

42:42

do you think might happen if the war

42:45

starts when I'm there? And the

42:48

head of Arabic at the World Service said, oh,

42:50

you're in a shipmate. So,

42:54

no illusions about the

42:56

nature of the assignment, but I wanted to go

42:59

and, you know, it was frightening but exhilarating. And

43:01

so off I went into Baghdad in

43:04

the company of the great John Simpson, who was already

43:07

a household name in foreign news

43:09

at the time. He was the sort of grandfather

43:11

of the broadcast

43:13

foreign news and I went in his

43:16

coattails and that was another really

43:19

turning point for me in terms of career. And

43:23

what was that experience like in Baghdad? Were

43:25

you there before the bombing started? I

43:28

was there before the bombing in October for about

43:30

three or four weeks and it was

43:33

an interesting time

43:35

to be there because the Soviets and the French were

43:37

trying to find a solution that

43:40

wouldn't involve war. And

43:43

Yevgeny Primakov was a Soviet foreign minister, he

43:45

came a couple of times and

43:48

what the Iraqis were trying to do was divide

43:51

Moscow and Paris off from London

43:53

and Washington and split the international

43:56

community in the end unsuccessfully. But

43:58

they were trying to do that and I remember

44:01

Ed Sheeran. Edward Heath came. Edward Heath announced at

44:03

the Conservative Party conference that he was going to

44:05

fly to Baghdad. Margaret Thatcher was absolutely livid, reportedly,

44:07

to go fly to Baghdad to try

44:10

to negotiate the release of some

44:12

of the British hostages, because if you remember,

44:14

there were lots of Westerners living in Iraq,

44:16

mostly because of the oil industry at the

44:18

time of the invasion of Kuwait, and they

44:20

weren't allowed to leave. They were being held,

44:22

and it was my first encounter with the

44:24

term human shield, who were being held in

44:26

the end as human shield, and Edward Heath

44:28

managed to get some of them released,

44:32

but only a few dozen, and there

44:34

were several hundred there. So

44:37

that was happening at the time. But

44:39

then I left after three or four weeks, and

44:41

in the new year, we were waiting for the

44:43

war to start. I was sent

44:45

to Jordan, to Amman, to wait

44:47

there, and two of my colleagues from

44:49

the BBC were in Baghdad when the bombing started, but

44:51

they got kicked out on a second day, and

44:54

went back to London. So I was

44:56

in Jordan, so I was well-placed to get a visa to go

44:58

in when the Iraqis opened up again. So

45:00

I went with Jeremy Bowen, a cameraman

45:03

called Rory Peck, who was two years later

45:05

killed in Moscow, and the three

45:08

of us drove into Baghdad

45:11

from Jordan, up what was called Ska

45:13

Dali, because once we were

45:15

over the border in Iraq, we passed

45:17

countless vehicles that had been bombed from

45:20

the air in the previous couple of

45:22

weeks. And we had to contend

45:24

with the possibility that our convoy would also get bombed

45:26

from the air, but we'd made it into Baghdad, and

45:28

we were there to witness the

45:31

nightly air raids, the nightly bombing, and

45:33

the people's reaction to it. Hi,

45:36

I'm Andrew, and I'm very proud to

45:38

support Cold War Conversations with a small

45:40

donation each month, because Ian's put together

45:43

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46:22

go to coldwacomversations.com slash

46:25

donate to find out more. The

46:29

hotel was a really interesting place. It was

46:31

called the Hotel al Rashid and it had

46:33

been built during the Iran-Iraq War and it

46:35

was a fortified building. It was designed to

46:38

withstand heavy bombardment.

46:41

It was bulletproof glass in

46:43

all the windows. So we

46:45

didn't go to the bomb shelter. We stayed in our

46:47

rooms. We were given rooms on the fifth or sixth

46:49

floor and we could watch from the fifth or sixth

46:51

floor, the city gradually

46:53

being unpicked each night by these

46:56

air raids. It was early in the year,

46:58

so it was dark early.

47:00

I remember these huge

47:02

orange and black fireballs in the

47:05

night sky as these very, very

47:07

heavy bombs propelled by Tomahawk

47:09

and other kinds of missiles slammed

47:12

into the buildings around the hotel. There was

47:14

like a six-lane highway outside the hotel and

47:16

on the other side of the six-lane highway

47:18

there was some kind of conference center. But

47:22

the rumor was it was somehow connected to the

47:24

Ministry of Defense and we were in the dining

47:26

room of the hotel one night and it took

47:28

a direct hit and our whole building shook. I

47:31

remember sitting, it was a

47:33

surreal experience because I remember sitting

47:35

in the dining

47:38

room being served dinner and there was

47:42

no electricity in the hotel. So

47:44

the light, the principal light source, was

47:46

the fire from the building across the

47:50

six-lane highway, which is now in

47:52

flames. The whole of the dining room was

47:54

bathed in this kind of flickering

47:57

dappled orange light with

47:59

a shadow. widows, and the waiters

48:01

continued to serve dinner, and there was a

48:04

row at the next table because some French

48:06

journalists had brought their own wine. The

48:09

waiter wanted to charge corkage. And

48:11

I thought, well, this is surreal.

48:14

I didn't expect this. And

48:18

that's how it was. It was a strange mixture of

48:20

the very dramatic and

48:23

the banal. What else

48:25

did you see while you were in Iraq? I

48:28

came back from Baghdad, and

48:30

then Kuwait

48:32

was liberated, and I went to Kuwait for a few

48:34

weeks, and we went up into the deserts

48:37

of southern Iraq and the mudflats of the Euphrates

48:39

Valley, the part of the country that was occupied

48:41

by the American-led forces. We

48:43

reported on the uprising among the

48:45

Shia population of southern Iraq

48:47

and the reaction by the Saddam Hussein

48:50

regime, which had been left in power,

48:52

and he got his Republican Guard forces,

48:54

the elite forces, together again and sent

48:57

them down to the south to put

49:00

down the rebellion very, very brutally, and thousands

49:02

died in it. And we

49:04

reported that, and then I went home and had a long rest.

49:07

And then we started hearing news of unrest

49:10

in what had been the most western

49:13

of the communist countries, Yugoslavia. Nobody

49:15

expected Yugoslavia to—well, some people knew

49:17

it, thought it was doomed, but

49:20

the rest of us didn't think so.

49:22

And there was violence in Slovenia and

49:24

the Republic at the north of the

49:26

country in Slovenia. And I was asked

49:28

to go to Croatia for two weeks, and

49:32

I drove down from Vienna, crossed

49:35

the border into Slovenia and into

49:37

Croatia, and got to Zagreb.

49:39

And I stayed for four

49:41

years, more or less. Not

49:44

continually, I went in and out. But

49:46

the next day I went to

49:48

the front line, just south of

49:50

Zagreb, where some forces were pushing

49:52

forward. And it was a

49:54

very steep learning curve, learning to understand the

49:57

ethnic composition of this post-war,

50:00

World War I state called Yugoslavia.

50:02

There was

50:06

a lot of reading, a lot of talking, a

50:08

lot of listening, and I

50:10

got to know extremely well. I spent

50:12

quite a lot of time in Croatia in 1991,

50:14

and then

50:17

of course Bosnia in 1992 when

50:19

the war kicked off there. I remember in

50:21

Croatia people saying, this

50:24

is bad enough, but if it takes off

50:26

in Bosnia, that's going to be truly horrendous.

50:29

And it was really. There were

50:31

two areas of operation principally. One

50:34

was Sarajevo and Asijj, and the

50:36

other one was central Bosnia, where there was

50:38

eventually after a few months there was a

50:40

war between two foot

50:42

groups that had been until that

50:44

point allies, the predominantly Muslim army

50:46

of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Croatian Defense

50:48

Forces, and they fell out and

50:51

attacked each other. So

50:53

it became a three-way war with

50:56

the Bosnian government trying to hold

50:58

the line for the principle

51:00

of a secular,

51:03

non-ethnic republic in

51:06

the mainstream European tradition. And the

51:08

two other forces served nationalist and

51:10

Croatian nationalist forces fighting for a

51:13

very different vision, a much more

51:15

ethnosuppremist vision. Many

51:17

states in Bosnia carved out to

51:20

be ethnically pure by the means that came

51:22

to be known as ethnic cleansing. So

51:25

we would report the siege

51:27

of Sarajevo when we were there, the bombing,

51:29

the sniping, the killing, the

51:31

efforts to feed

51:33

the city, the privations that

51:35

the people were living through, and

51:37

the attempts by the Bosnian government

51:39

to seek international help. And outside

51:41

Sarajevo we'd go to the front

51:43

lines and follow the

51:45

progress of the forces behind the ethnic

51:48

cleansing and the wholesale dispossession. And

51:50

what was happening in the rest of Bosnia was it

51:52

wasn't so much a civil war, it was an act

51:55

of state-sponsored dispossession.

51:57

It was a state-sponsored criminal

51:59

enterprise. Prize. The

52:02

details of that are now well known because of

52:04

the international tribunal that was set up after

52:06

the war. It

52:11

was hard navigating that, coming to

52:13

understand all its nuances and understanding

52:15

that people of Croatia don't believe that they're

52:17

not part of the Balkans, they're part of

52:19

Central Europe. The Sava River and

52:22

the Danube River separates them from the

52:24

Balkans. One young man said

52:26

we were standing on the banks of the

52:28

river and he said we're looking across the

52:30

river at Bosnia or Serbia. He said where

52:32

we are now on this bank, we're Central

52:34

Europe, we're part of the same civilization

52:37

and culture as Mozart and

52:39

the great German novelist

52:42

Thomas Mann. On

52:44

the other side of the river, that's where

52:46

all that Eastern way of thinking, that Asiatic

52:49

way of thinking that leads all the way

52:51

to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, that starts over

52:53

there. And that was very much the way

52:56

many Croatian nationalists saw themselves, the

52:59

frontline of the fight for European

53:02

civilization against Eastern barbarism. Of course,

53:05

it wasn't like that at all when you got to Bosnia.

53:08

It was not the way

53:10

Croatian nationalism depicted it,

53:12

but it was important to understand those

53:14

mindsets that were fueling so much of

53:17

the violence. Don't

53:19

miss the episode extras such as

53:21

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53:26

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53:28

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53:38

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53:46

very much for listening and see you next

53:48

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