Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, edited 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 TRAVELLED 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’.
