by Gary Ramage
A few days later I was sent to Bougainville for six months, and was based at a place called Loloho Jetty. It was probably – technically – a time when I should have been recharging my batteries and not pushing the fatigue too hard, but I really enjoyed myself. We shared the space with the Kiwi air force and their Iroquois helicopters, and I made friends with those Kiwi fliers during the deployment. Once the warring parties in Bougainville – which was actually a region of Papua New Guinea but ethnically aligned with the Solomons – had agreed to independence talks in Christchurch, the drama all died down and there wasn’t much going on. So I sunbathed a lot and ventured out to take shots of visiting dignitaries, but most of the time I was doing what I loved: being out and about with soldiers, joining their patrols and taking lots of good shots and footage.
For the most part, I accompanied the Kiwi lads on their aerial reconnaissance routes or their foot patrols into certain areas where the independence movement had spawned militias that didn’t want to make a treaty in Christchurch. The agreement was that visiting soldiers could not carry firearms, so it wasn’t a dangerous environment in the strict sense of it, but there were remnants of violence around. My lasting memory of those months is flying low over the incredible scenery of Bougainville, listening to Cat Stevens on the headphones. We had a Kiwi pilot called Crazy, and one day we were flying recon and he pointed to a mountain in the distance and said, ‘There’s an old volcano.’ Next thing we know, we’re hovering over this volcano crater, way up in the highlands.
‘What’s that?’ says Crazy, and before anyone can answer he’s flying up to this massive cave in the side of the volcano, with waterfalls coming out of it.
‘Don’t film this,’ says Crazy, and suddenly everyone on that helicopter is yelling their Hail Marys because Crazy is flying into the cave. We went all the way in and I was shitting myself. I mean, really, really scared. These days I can’t hear ‘Where Do the Children Play?’ without shuddering at the memory of that cave. I didn’t film it, but the loadmaster did. When we got back to base – and I have no idea how we got out of that cave – he plugged his video camera into the TV and played it for all of the guys. The Kiwi commanding officer came over to see what the whooping and laughter was about, saw what we’d been up to, and sent Crazy and his crew back to New Zealand.
I wasn’t far behind. It was a very tough sell, getting Bougainville into Australian newspapers: the nature of the conflict was unclear and the stakes didn’t seem that high. Soon after the deployment finished, I was back in Canberra for Christmas and then off to Irian Jaya, where the Townsville-based 5th Aviation Regiment was delivering aid and supplies to the drought-stricken countryside.
By now I was getting tired again. When you’re a photographer on deployment or just on assignment, all you do is work. There might be a shoot at 6 am and one at midday and another shoot that evening, and you cover them all. And on the overseas deployments, I’d be travelling most of the day, looking for something worth photographing. I was head down, tail up for months, and at the end of 1998 I got a surprise. The brass agreed I should do an exchange with the British.
9
Germany and Kosovo
I’d had visions of what a British exchange would look like: nice English countryside with a cosy pub down the road. But it wasn’t going to be cosy. I was going to Herford in Germany, headquarters of the British Army’s 1st Armoured Division, and a serious combat-footing base that served as the British jump-off point for its NATO and Middle East commitments. I arrived in March 1999, and was struck by Herford. It was very big and very well appointed. Rather than the institutional military design we had in Australia, the base consisted of scaled-down suburbs and cottage-style housing with leafy streets and rose gardens and what have you. Of course, it had all the military buildings too, but there’d been a real effort to make it a little patch of England.
Herford also had a big operation for the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which had its own TV and radio studios and welcomed fellow media operators warmly. I befriended BFBS cameraman Nigel Beaumont and Alison England, a beautiful red-haired Scottish journalist from Glasgow. We all got on very well and a group of us would have drinks together during my time in Germany.
Prior to arriving in Herford, I was aware that the British were involved in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and the surrounding territories. The Bosnian War between the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) had ended in 1995 with a political settlement, but it required a military presence to uphold various agreements. The British had a big presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and I wrote letters to every operation they were involved in. Just before they deployed in May 1999 I got the okay to go. I joined the British Psy-Ops (Psychological Operations) unit, which contained a military PR cell. We were based in a compound in Banja Luka, a city in the north of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a lightly militarised city by the time I arrived and I instantly had the impression that the highly publicised Dayton Accords – sponsored by President Clinton – were really only held together by the presence of NATO’s armies. Communist Yugoslavia had fallen apart and now the various tribes of the Balkans were putting it back together, but on their own sometimes-ugly terms. Banja Luka was the centre of the new Republika Srpska, one of two legal and political entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a lot of mosques in the city had been demolished and Muslims persecuted.
Actually, my first impression of Banja Luka wasn’t military: it seemed to be teeming with hot Bosnian girls, trying to sell pirated CDs to foreign soldiers. And it was awash in alcohol; the British units all had their own bars so you could get drunk with the Commandos or the Gurkhas. Our compound was in an abandoned factory, probably selected because it was surrounded by a wall, and they planted the media unit people beside the Gurkhas’ base. They put us media types in these Corimex dorms that were essentially shipping containers with two beds in them. I got lucky and had one to myself.
I was quite impressed with the beauty of Eastern Europe; even a place like Banja Luka, which had seen some fighting and had a few machine-gunned facades, had a really nice proportion to its buildings and streets. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was business as usual, Banja Luka was basically operating as a city again, albeit one filled with soldiers and military vehicles. I threw myself into work for a month – taking any and all photographic assignments.
After four weeks I was rotated back to Germany and in Herford I hit a couple of interesting crossroads. First, the Kodak company had released a bunch of cameras for trial in the British Army. They were called the Kodak DCS620 and they didn’t use film – apparently the images were all digital and were saved to a storage disc inside the camera that you later plugged into a computer and ‘downloaded’. Because of the size difference between 35mm film and the charge- coupled device (the CCD, one of the main components of the digital camera), you had to multiply the focal length of a lens by a focal length multiplier, in the case of the 620 this was 1.6. So they were a bit fiddly and the cameras were slightly awkward compared to our SLR Nikons.
‘Never work,’ we agreed, having had a play with them.
I needed rest after Banja Luka – I’d worked too hard, trying to impress. I probably needed a week off. But the British media ops unit was very busy, and it was going into a charming part of the world called Pristina. We were going to trial our digital cameras in a genocidal shithole called Kosovo.
***
Our convoy of forty British Army Land Rovers and trucks set off from the base in Sarajevo at around 6 am, and crossed the border into Kosovo just as the sun came up. We were bound for Pristina, the main city in Kosovo and a site of ethnic cleansing. It was summer in Europe, so the grass was long in the roadside ditches, with wildflowers springing out of the greenery. I was in a Land Rover with three other media unit people, feeling safe because we were travelling with the Paras (the British Army’s Parachute Regiment) when suddenly the bullets started coming in. There was yelling up and down the column, a cra
ckle of radio traffic, and the vehicles slid to a halt as gunfire sounded and bullets pinged into metal and whacked off the asphalt. High on a hillside above, snipers were shooting at us from a complex of townhouses, so we were all out of the Land Rovers, throwing ourselves into those pretty roadside ditches.
Welcome to Kosovo.
I ducked into the clay bank, bullets flying over my head, thinking that both the camera in my hand and the British Army pistol on my hip were totally useless: the pistol is like a pea-shooter against the sniper rifles, and the digital camera? I still wasn’t convinced.
The Para soldiers formed up very quickly and promptly got rid of the snipers, but I was ducking along that ditch, looking for pictures and wondering what kind of mad shooters would open up on a convoy of British Paras. The Parachute Regiment is not known for being namby-pamby when fired upon.
We were on our way again about half an hour later, once the soldiers had secured the area, but it put me on my guard and set the scene for a lot of paranoia in that unfortunate place.
I worked in the G3 Media Operations Pristina, tasked with covering 1 and 3 Para Regiment, who were in Kosovo as a part of NATO’s Kosovo Force. I was partnered with a British Army photographer, Shaun Lewis, who was shooting video footage for G3. Shaun was a great bloke and became a good mate. And aside from the top work he produced, he was also a total ladies’ man. Of average height with dark hair, Shaun had a soldier’s build and two heavily tattooed forearms. He also had a pierced tongue, which he assured me gave him an edge with the ladies. He hardly needed an edge – in our visits to some of the wonderful military watering holes around Pristina, I was reduced to the role of bystander while Shaun gave a master class in how to get the ladies laughing.
Along with writers and other photographers, we moved around Pristina and rural Kosovo in a Land Rover, news- gathering both for specific assignments and on general tip-offs that something was going down – for instance, the mass graves. Kosovo’s civil war between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbs) and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had only been going for three months when we arrived in June 1999. Wherever you looked that summer there were buildings with massive holes, burnt-out tanks on the side of the road, army trucks burned to the axles and the obligatory spray of machine gun bullets through everything from a school’s wall to a statue in the town square. And all amid the idyllic rolling meadows, babbling brooks and medieval villages this part of the world is known for. The people may have been crazy but the Balkans in summer is beautiful.
Nevertheless, Kosovo had about it the same unpredictability I’d seen in Somalia. It was prettier and greener, sure, but it had that same aura of lawlessness: random acts of massive violence, calculated cruelty, school teachers turning into psychopaths, entire towns herded onto trains and transported to the border – that sort of thing. Somali warlords used food to control people, while the Serb forces used artillery. But both used pickup trucks filled with murderous militias, inciting terror on a random basis.
I’d now been in four conflict zones in six years: Somalia, Bougainville, Bosnia and Kosovo. Each was dangerous in its own way, and all the more so for an outsider who enters for a limited amount of time and has to learn the ropes from the ground up, very quickly. While Somalia had felt hopeless, Kosovo had a manic energy about it. For a start, their cities looked like ours; you wouldn’t drive into Pristina and immediately decide this was failed state. It was a pretty city of around 150,000, with a mix of old and new buildings. When we were there it had seen some violence and gunfire, but now the civil war was being fought predominantly in other towns. So Pristina was still basically operating, under a cloud of paranoia and confusion, and most of the bars and restaurants were open for business. It was only in patches that you could see the savagery of the fight: apartment buildings in ruins, a cemetery blown up, bridges taken out and freeways with massive craters in them. Interestingly, the locals claimed the biggest destruction came from NATO bombing, not Serbian artillery. These were the days when generals were talking about ‘smart bombs’ and ‘clinical strikes’ with straight faces.
The situation in Kosovo all came down to brute power and ethnic politics. The Serbs (who, under Slobodan Milǒsevic´, controlled Kosovo as a part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) were trying to drive the Albanians out of Kosovo. The Albanians, in turn, had formed the Kosovo Liberation Army and fought back. The ethnic part of it was quite serious: at one point the Serbs had forced the inhabitants of a whole Albanian village from their homes, pushed them into trains and taken them to the Macedonian border.
The uprising by the ethnic Albanians was being waged outside the main city but the battle for Pristina airport a few weeks earlier, on the outskirts of the city, was deemed crucial. The airport was being held by the Serbs – or their paramilitaries – while the SAS and the Norwegian commandos had been in a race against the Russians to take it. A part of that airport was a massive complex under a mountain that used to contain Soviet-era fighter planes. The NATO planes had bombed the complex, leaving this big hole in the side of a mountain – the kind of lair Dr Evil would favour.
The Russians’ reputation for ‘misunderstandings’ in Kosovo was still fresh after the airport incident. In one episode, within my first three days of being in Kosovo, I was out and about with the Paras and we suddenly found ourselves on a secondary road clogged with Russian tanks as far as you could see. They’d been moving into a town to take up peacekeeping duties – but they’d neglected to inform the locals. Now they were in a tank traffic jam as the brass tried to sort it out.
Somehow, as we navigated around Pristina and into the surrounding countryside, we managed to stay safe while gathering the pictures required. There were some photographers in Kosovo shooting for newspaper groups and Reuters and AP, but not many: Kosovo, like Somalia, was not a big attraction for the freelance crowd. It was quite unstable and even the American posturing and NATO bombing didn’t seem to deter the combatants. Bosnia and Herzegovina had gone through its meltdown phase and come to a more or less stable conclusion – at least, that’s how it was in 1999. You could see the remnants of war, but civil society was making a comeback. Kosovo, on the other hand, was ‘live’ and unresolved.
The British PR units gave me a real insight into how to control information, not holding it back – as was the culture in the ADF – but moulding the way the media reported the sensitive stuff. The British media officers didn’t try to cover up a mass grave of Muslims. We would gather the news and the pics, and their crack media teams would trim it the way they wanted it to play, and send these very professional packages off to newspapers in the UK every day, timed to hit the deadlines. Regional and smaller metro papers in the UK would run the stories and the photographs straight into their news sections. It was an eye-opener: not military PR like an advertising brochure, but PR as an extension of military intelligence, where you alter the perception rather than hide the reality.
The Brits were smart and confident with this stuff and they needed a constant stream of images and stories to make it work. They needed to be at least on the same page as the mainstream media. So I was busy, with my days starting at 5.30 am and going into the night. I was lucky to be in bed before midnight during my Kosovo deployment, but it was worth it, because the work I was doing was good-quality news-gathering that ended up in British papers. It was exhilarating. And because Shaun and I were both sergeants, we were left to our own devices so long as we were filing material for the army PR machine. We made our camp in the Pristina compound with the Paras, which gave us good access to information.
But it didn’t pay to get too confident. Businesses may have been open but nerves were frayed. One morning we were following a story and tracking the Paras in the city outskirts. I realised I’d dropped a lens cap and I told Shaun I was going back to where I thought I’d dropped it. I walked back up an alley and saw the cap on the cobblestones. As I bent to pick it up, I heard the unmistakable sound of a machine gun being cocked. It was o
nly a young Para, and it was all over in a few seconds once he realised I was an Aussie and not a Serb, but my heart was thumping like a hammer. As I say to people before they go into these environments, it’s the silly moments when you lose concentration and drop your guard – that’s when the shit happens.
I felt stupid about this incident. My spatial awareness is always very good in the combat environment. But that’s how you end up dead – wandering up an alley, so focused on a five- dollar lens cap that you don’t see the shooters. It turned out that my Aussie Army cam fatigues were the same camouflage pattern as that being worn by the Serbs.
A similar thing happened with a bunch of angry Albanians who surrounded me in the city one afternoon. They thought they’d found a murdering Serbian soldier. Luckily, Shaun leaped into the fray and rescued me before anything bad happened.
Due to this major safety concern I was given a set of British fatigues; they were second hand and sporting a few rips. I spent an evening stitching up the holes and changing over all my Aussie insignia to the British shirt … with sewing skills they taught me at Kapooka.