The Albanian Boy
After more than 20 years away I return to Kosovo with my filmmaker daughter Emma to meet Besnik, a boy who survived a terrible massacre.
In the early stages of the Kosovo war in 1998 Serb paramilitaries stormed into a camp of Albanian women and children and murdered more than 20 of them. The oldest survivor was a little boy called Besnik. Over several months I became close to Besnik. Twenty years after we had last been in contact he requested a reunion. Later today, travelling with my filmmaker daughter Emma and my translator Leman, I will meet Besnik again.
As the first rays of dawn began to filter over the rolling hills of central Kosovo on 26th September 1998, they brought with them the promise of a beautiful day.
Unusually for the region the dry, sunny weather had held out late into the year.
The cooler mornings gave just a taste of the harsh Balkan winter to come but were a refreshing change from the pounding dusty heat of the summer.
For the women and children of the Deliu family, packed into a small shelter made of branches and string and covered with plastic sheeting, the good weather was a blessing of sorts.
The incessant sounds of shooting and mortar rounds had made the children nervous and the women were happy to get them out into the open air while they cleaned camp.
Five-year-old Besnik went to play on the edge of the camp with his two little sisters and a cousin.
Little did any of them know that a mixed Serb unit of paramilitaries and police had quietly crept up on them from the north while the scant village defence was watching the roads from the south.
When the ensuing orgy of violence was over more than 20 members of the extended Deliu family, some tiny children, lay shot and stabbed to death on the scrabbly hillside.
The first time I met Besnik, the oldest survivor, was a week after the massacre.
He was nervous, shy and scared of strangers and was wearing a scruffy sweat-shirt with the words Harley Davidson emblazoned on it.
The killing had generated international media coverage but Ymer, Besnik's uncle, had asked journalists not to question the surviving children.
Besnik was in any case in no fit state to talk. Despite an evident attempt to be brave, his lip quivered sometimes as if he was about to cry and he avoided eye contact.
I went on to visit Ymer, Besnik and the family many times over a period of months with Leman, my translator.
We took food, and sometimes a little money, or gifts for the children, and slowly they began to treat us like part of the family.
In the end my time with Besnik and Uncle Ymer became more about our personal relationship and less about journalism.
Nevertheless Besnik's story was probably the most meaningful, and traumatising, I covered in 15 years as a war correspondent. It even eclipsed the killing of 170 children I witnessed during the Beslan school siege in southern Russia in 2004.
This afternoon, for the first time in more than 20 years, I am due to meet Besnik again. He is now a tall 28-year-old man and has two small children of his own.
We will meet in his small house in Abri, rebuilt after it was burned down by the Serbs.
And my own daughter Emma, who is two years older than Besnik and a Berlin-based filmmaker, will be with us, as well as two Hungarians: a sound person and a cameraman.
Today's meeting has been nearly three years in the planning.
I was at home in Canada, where I had been running Wild Bear Lodge, a wilderness retreat, with my wife Kristin for more than a decade.
It was where I had gone to recover from my time on the frontline and start a new life.
One afternoon a Facebook message blipped up on my computer screen.
"Përshëndetje," it read. "Hello."
Then another line: "If you come to Kosovo I would like to meet."
It was from Besnik.
I caught my breath.
"Will you meet him?" Kristin asked.
"Of course," I replied.
For a while, as is its wont, life got in the way.
Early the following year Kristin, my wife whom I adored, died in my arms after a short fight with cancer.
Covid closed Europe's borders.
And then one day, several months later, as I was talking to Emma about Besnik, she turned to me and said that she would like to make a documentary about the reunion.
As we weighed the possibility we both knew that our working together on such a sensitive subject would bring our own relationship, and our past, into sharp relief.
Though I have been in contact with Emma my whole life and we had always been close, we never lived together and she grew up with her mother and another man.
We finally arrived in Kosovo late last Friday night after a long drive from Budapest, 500 miles to the north, through Easter traffic.
Yesterday I met my old translator, Leman, who now has three children. Her lips quivered as we sat in a park and began to speak about Besnik and the past.
Today, when I have finished writing this, Leman and I will - just as we did so many times all those years ago - climb into a car and make the journey an hour west and north into Drenica, the Kosovo Albanian heartlands.
Emma and one of Leman's daughters will be with us.
It is Ramadan and we have been invited to break the Muslim fast with his family at sunset.
Emma, Leman and I aim to spend much of the next week with Besnik and his family - talking about what happened back then, what has happened since and, perhaps, the future.
I have always been mesmerised by trauma, memory and historical narrative and the way it has shaped my own life and the lives of others.
Inevitably there will be things that come up that are unexpected. We are mining a deep, rich but unstable seam.
My relationship with Besnik, Leman and my own traumatic past will all be under the microscope.
But Emma and I will also be probing our own relationship and past. Dangerous territory, perhaps, but also steeped in meaning for both of us.
There are many parts to this story and we will bring it altogether as a documentary. That will take months but, in the meantime, I will be sharing its evolution in several pieces for this newsletter.
"I didn't go back to that part of Kosovo for years after the war," Leman said to me yesterday as she fought back tears in a cafe. "Besnik's story was my trauma. But now it is time."
I feel the same.
The night before as we drove south and night began to fall I had told Emma some of the missing story of my relationship with her mother, and explained why I had not been there as a father for her.
When I finished she was quiet for a few seconds.
"I didn't know that," she said finally.
The next day when we returned to the subject - cameras rolling - I noticed tears in her eyes. I too was fighting to hold myself together, a lump in my throat.
It promises to be an intense week.
Please send suggested corrections and comments.
UPCOMING
+ My daughter Emma and I will be continuing to work this coming week in Kosovo and I will update with more episodes about the documentary we are filming in due course. This may be the first of several projects Emma and I do together.
+ I am also working on one or two written pieces about my time on operation with Russian Spetsnaz in Chechnya in the 2000s. They cast interesting light on current Russian military operations in Ukraine. These will now come out after the Kosovo project is finished.
+ I have now received my press accreditation for a planned trip to Ukraine in early May. I am still working out the logistics for a 10-day trip.