These were feverish, chaotic and terrifying times for the people of Kosovo, and it was not until ground troops invaded in early June that the flood of refugees abated. By then, more than a third of the region’s 1.6 million population had been driven from their homes.
I tried not to be partisan about all this, because being Serbian or Albanian or Muslim or Christian does not make people intrinsically right or wrong, whatever the interlocking creeds of religion and nationalism may declare. However it originates, violence begets violence. And whether inflicted by soldiers at the behest of emperors and ministers of state, or by robbers and rapists on their own account, it takes the very best of humanity to bring the cycle to an end.
For the purposes of the story, I have truncated the timeframe in which these events occurred; and most of the characters and events in Say a Little Prayer are fictional and not based on real people. The only exceptions are the Kosovar leaders Ibrahim Rugova, Rexhep Qosja and Hashim Thaçi, who appear briefly in the Rambouillet section, along with the British Foreign Secretary, who some may recognise as Robin Cook. Their words and actions are entirely fictitious, of course, and all my own invention.
Kosovars refer to their country as Kosova, not Kosovo, but for the sake of clarity I have stuck with Kosovo throughout.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to my wife Emma for her generous and thoughtful advice on an early draft of Say a Little Prayer, and to Wynn Wheldon, who gave me an invaluable commentary on the Rambouillet section.
I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of books and their authors. The Balkans by Mark Mazower is a dazzling overview of this complex region – a mere 176 pages, but rich in both broad insights and illuminating detail. Tim Judah is a journalist who covered the conflict from start to finish, and his book Kosovo: War and Revenge has the pace and power to shock of the best thrillers. Marc Weller’s Contested Statehood: Kosovo’s Struggle for Independence is a fascinating and judicious account of the formal negotiations over the future of Kosovo, by a man who acted as legal adviser at the Rambouillet Conference. Kathryn Bolkovac’s The Whistleblower tells the story of her brave campaign to expose the trafficking scandal among military contractors in Bosnia.
The book that affected me most deeply is On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, which explores the psychological cost of training soldiers to overcome their instinctive aversion to killing their fellow human beings. Some have criticised his research, but it doesn’t matter: Grossman has first-hand knowledge of his subject and his compassion and integrity shine from every page. Read it, and find out what we are really doing when we send young men and women to war.
About the Author
Photo © Francis Ware
Giles O’Bryen is married with three children and lives in London.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 37