by Mark Colvin
I remembered Belsen, and Dachau, which I’d visited previously, the next May as I sat on a high-speed train heading south from Paris for the trial of the SS Hauptsturmführer and member of the Gestapo, Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyons’. In the seat opposite me sat a balding, grey-haired man who, like me, was reading through a large file of recent newspaper articles about Barbie. Thinking he might be another journalist, I asked if he was going to be attending the trial, and we got talking. He told me he made documentaries, though he did so in such a modest way that it didn’t at first register. It was only after about half an hour, when I asked his name and he said ‘Marcel Ophüls’, that I realised that I was travelling with the director of The Sorrow and the Pity. This classic, Oscar-nominated film had rocked France to its foundations in 1969 by forcing the country to look hard for the first time at the reality of wartime collaboration with the Germans, and in particular of French complicity in the forced transportation of the Jews.
Barbie had not only tortured French men and women in the Lyons Gestapo headquarters, he had sent many Jews and Resistance fighters to their certain deaths in concentration camps. He escaped to South America after the war but was finally extradited back to France in 1983. Now Klaus Barbie was to stand trial for crimes against humanity, central among which was the rounding up of forty-four children at a refuge in Izieu, and an order he personally signed for them to be transported, ultimately to the gas chambers. Not one of them survived.
It was Barbie’s lawyer, Jacques Verges, who turned the trial into a grotesque piece of theatre, with Barbie seeming to exert an almost hypnotic hold over the French media. A Maoist and lifelong friend of the genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Verges was determined to frame proceedings not around Klaus Barbie, but around the entire history of French imperialism. ‘French society is sick,’ he said. ‘It does not want to recognise the lies on which it constructed its existence.’ This appeared to chime with something in French intellectual life at the time. Verges’ entire strategy, it gradually emerged, consisted not of defending Barbie’s innocence as such, but of proving a parallel between the Nazis’ Final Solution and France’s actions in Indochina, Algeria and Central Africa. Whatever your views about those issues, for anyone brought up in the British, American or Australian court systems, this seemed like a derailing of the natural order of justice. It was Barbie himself who was accused of committing appalling crimes: even if Verges thought he could prove a moral equivalence between two political systems, how could that be a reason for letting this one war criminal go free?
Inside the courtroom, the first day of proceedings consisted entirely of a recitation of the many crimes alleged against Barbie—despite often monotonous reading by the lawyers, an accumulation of true horrors which couldn’t fail to have their impact as I scribbled away in my notebook. Barbie himself, white-haired, jut-jawed, stared impassively out at the public and the press. At one point, for some reason, he fixed his eyes on me for what seemed about five minutes. They were piercing and hard, and his expression was not merely stony but contemptuous. That stare is forever printed on my brain.
Fortunately, it was not Verges’ posturing but the testimony of victims that swayed the jury in the end. The ones who had suffered most, of course, could not be there: they had died in the gas chambers and their remains were burned to ash in the ovens. But even the survivors’ testimony was heart-rending, like the woman who remembered how, as a thirteen-year-old, she had suffered water torture at Barbie’s own hands: ‘“You’ll talk”, said Barbie. In the bath, when he pulled up my head, I was thinking, What would happen if I didn’t speak? … It was said that you must swallow right away in order to drown yourself. I couldn’t. I never recovered from the torture.’
On 3 July 1986, Barbie was sentenced to life in prison. He died there four years later. But the trial did more than bring one man to justice. For my train companion Marcel Ophüls, for instance, it provided vindication at last. The Sorrow and the Pity had been banned from French television until 1981. Now France could no longer look away from the consequences of its own people’s wartime collaboration with officers like Barbie and the genocidal ideology they represented.
* * *
In early 1985, just months after my visit to Moscow, rumours had begun circulating that the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko was not just severely ill, but dying. In mid-March, the Kremlin made it official: there was to be another state funeral, the third in two and a half years.
The Soviet system was genuinely sclerotic, partly because it had tested the theories of centralised economic control in a socialised economy far beyond their limits, but also partly because it had been led for two decades by sclerotic old men. Finally, after decades of promotion by pure seniority, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party saw the sense in appointing a younger, more energetic, more outward-looking leader. The man they chose was almost unknown outside his own country at the time but was soon to become world-famous, better known as a person and a politician than any Kremlin leader since the startlingly colourful Nikita Khrushchev twenty years before. The new man’s name, of course, was Mikhail Gorbachev, and Kremlinologists both inside and outside the Soviet Union immediately began the guessing game: who was he, and what would he do next?
News travelled more slowly in that era. It was about three weeks later that I got a call from a current affairs producer in Sydney: ‘I’ve been reading about this fellow Gorbachev. He sounds interesting. Could you get us an interview with him in the next couple of days?’ It wasn’t the only time I had to explain such things as the distance between Brussels and Moscow, the difficulty and delay in getting visas, or the fact that every resident Moscow correspondent was already begging vainly for even a few words with Gorbachev. After all, around the same time, ABC News briefly had a foreign editor whose proud boast before taking the position was that he had never left NSW, let alone Australia.
The BBC’s Moscow correspondent, my old schoolfriend Tim Sebastian, said on Gorbachev’s appointment that despite his lively and flexible manner, the new leader was ‘still a strict, orthodox Marxist: in no sense has he shown himself to be a liberal’. Even Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, nominating him for the leadership, said that behind Gorbachev’s disarming smile there were ‘teeth of steel’—a particularly Soviet metaphor, since many victims of Russian dentistry did actually have steel teeth. But Margaret Thatcher made a point of attending Chernenko’s funeral, and, having met the successor on a recent visit to London, Thatcher said, ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’ It was one of the most influential statements she ever made, because it began the process of persuading her friend and ally, US President Ronald Reagan, to take seriously the new man at the top in Moscow.
I’d already been reporting regularly on the increasing crisis over the nuclear arms build-up in Europe. That year I went to West Germany to film US Abrams tanks on exercises, interview arms experts and nuclear-free-zone proponents, and film a length of the sinister border with East Germany, where long lines of barbed wire interspersed with Warsaw Pact army watchtowers still marched through the dense forests that had haunted my dreams since reading the Brothers Grimm as a child. On another occasion, without a crew, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie, in the guise of a tourist, and spent the day exploring East Berlin, a city almost as grey, lacking in vim and plagued by scarcity as I’d found Moscow the year before. In strategic terms, both sides were deploying or threatening to deploy more intermediate-range nuclear missiles on European soil. There was even increasing talk of ‘battlefield nuclear weapons’. American officers appeared on TV telling of how they were trained to use ‘flash-to-bang time’ to calculate how far away a nuclear explosion had hit—the old thunder and lightning trick: see the flash, then the number of seconds till you hear the bang is the number of miles away it is. The nuclear annihilation of large swathes of Europe didn’t seem probable, but it certainly didn’t seem impossible. Now, we journalists quickly had to learn the meaning o
f words like ‘glasnost’ (‘openness’) and ‘perestroika’ (‘restructuring’), and, almost as quickly, to start analysing deeds as well as words.
A month after he became leader, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would not, after all, deploy intermediate-range nuclear SS-20 missiles into Eastern Europe. On the one hand, this was a major gesture of appeasement in the best sense. On the other hand, it could be viewed as a clever tactical move: it ratcheted up the pressure on Western leaders like Thatcher and Reagan to make their own gestures towards disarming Europe. In Britain and Germany, particularly, there were big and vocal unilateralist disarmament movements. Some—a tiny minority but a dangerous one—were bent not on pacifism but extreme violence.
The annual summit of the G7, the world’s richest industrialised nations, was held in May 1985 in Bonn, then the West German capital. Filming anti-nuclear demonstrations, Les Seymour and I suddenly found ourselves in the midst of mayhem: black-clad anarchists in masks and balaclavas rampaging though the streets smashing windows and using catapults to fire ball bearings. Sheltering in a doorway, we looked at each other. We’d both been in dangerous situations in Africa and the Middle East, he more often than I, but there was something completely visceral and unpredictable about this. These people might have seen governments as their enemy, but they were quite indiscriminate about the damage to anyone or anything that got in their way. And that included news crews. Flying glass from shop windows was the biggest danger, but I escaped with no more than a scratched hand. Bonn—Beethoven’s birthplace, immortalised by John le Carré as A Small Town in Germany—seemed the most unlikely venue for such mayhem.
That sort of encounter was unusual in the Brussels job, though. When I think of those years, I think of the title of Mark Lawson’s amusing travel book The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to All the Safe Places. At that same G7 summit, the press room was on a high floor of a tower block beside the Rhine. The German hosts had laid on unlimited supplies of food and Henkell Trocken sparkling wine. My old Double J friend and colleague Jim Middleton was now Washington correspondent, travelling with the US president’s press pack. He and I drank a glass or two while looking out of a window down to the street below, laughing as we watched a hilarious stand-off between the motorcades of the US and French presidents Ronald Reagan and François Mitterand. Our bird’s-eye view gave us the perfect vantage point from which to see secret service officers threatening to duke it out in the building’s driveway. It took about half an hour before they reached some sort of compromise.
It made you wonder: if allies found it that hard to give any ground on such a tiny matter, what about enemies, when the issue at hand was nuclear war?
Not all of the ‘battle for room service’ was played out in the theatre of Cold War summits. In Vienna, for example, there was also the hotel where the oil cartel OPEC held its meetings: meetings on whose results, announced by the camera-hungry Sheikh Yamani, the world’s markets regularly swung. I was discreetly shown around the basement garage, where Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Bentleys and various high-end sports cars sat, permanently garaged under dust cloths. Some of them were owned by oil barons and sheikhs who drove, or were driven in them, once or twice a year. Others were thick with dust: clearly left there indefinitely, just in case, by people who probably had dozens of similar vehicles in similar garages all over the world.
As a reporter at OPEC, instead of hanging around waiting all day, you could often find out when the announcement was coming, giving you time to spend in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, looking at Raphaels or the world’s largest collection of Brueghels. There were also, at the Belvedere Museum, more modern works. One day a British colleague thought he was absolutely hilarious when he replied ‘Typical Aussie’ on hearing that I was ‘going to the Belvedere to look at the Schieles’.
I also spent a lot of time in hotel rooms in Paris, sometimes getting there at extremely high speed down the road from Brussels after another in the wave of terrorist bomb attacks, now almost forgotten, which hit the French capital and other cities like Frankfurt in the 1980s. Many were blamed on Libya, others on Syria, others on various Palestinian liberation organisations. In a pattern that’s become all too familiar more recently, there was little discrimination when it came to the victims. Among the wounded at the Tati department store in Montparnasse, particularly, I remember women in hijabs and small children among the mainly Muslim immigrants killed or wounded.
There were also days in Paris, in mid-1985, spent trying to uncover the truth of the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. It was difficult. President Mitterand’s defence minister, Charles Hernu, and the minister for overseas territories, Georges Lemoine, ran what was essentially a brick wall defence. As it turned out, Hernu himself had ordered the mission, but nobody at that time would say so. I made contacts, especially through the assistance of Le Monde investigative journalist Edwy Plenel, and passed them to my colleague Chris Masters, who made better use of them than I could, with my daily deadlines fairly soon dragging me back to Brussels to cover the rest of Europe. Chris dug deep, and found intelligence sources to give him the real evidence, which he and producer Bruce Belsham put to air in what remains one of the great Four Corners investigations.
It was also in Paris, in October 1985, that I saw Gorbachev for the first time in person. He had just sacked Andrei Gromyko as foreign minister, an extraordinary moment as ‘Old Grom’ (‘grom’ is the Russian word for ‘thunder’) had held the post for an astonishing twenty-eight years. It was the clearest indication yet that Gorbachev had ambitions beyond domestic glasnost and perestroika. He wanted to take command—with the Foreign Ministry’s Eduard Shevardnadze at his side—of international policy. Security in Paris was so tight that at one point we sat in a traffic jam for two hours on the Left Bank as the military blocked off streets and roads for the Gorbachev motorcade. But once indoors with the press pack, security was almost non-existent. As Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev walked through the rococo drawing room of the prime ministerial headquarters known as Le Matignon, I was in the front row among scores of journalists, with nothing but a velvet rope and less than a metre of space between me and the leader of one of the world’s two superpowers.
It was a stark contrast to a news conference in Bonn in May, where our tripods had been corralled at least 20 metres away from President Reagan, as we tried to peer over the shoulders of a line of tall Secret Servicemen with dark glasses and earpieces. A French photographer tried to nudge one of them into moving. ‘Don’t touch my body,’ he said though gritted teeth. She tried again, and he turned round, leaned down right into her face and said, ‘Read. My. Lips. Don’t Touch. My. Body.’ Mind you, to be fair, in 1981 Reagan had taken a bullet to the chest from the mentally disturbed John Hinckley Jr in Washington, so his protective detail had plenty of reasons to be careful.
Also on the list of ‘the safe places’ to and from which I commuted often during that time was Geneva, site of many UN agencies, including the Disarmament Commission. Gorbachev’s Paris visit turned out to be a curtain-raiser for his Geneva Summit with Reagan a month later, where he started to build a real relationship with the US president. This meeting was frustrating for anyone who hoped to be able to report on concrete results, real advances towards peace. But we know now, and even at the time there were indications, that it laid the foundations for what would eventually become the first de-escalation of the postwar nuclear arms race. It was there behind the scenes that Reagan and Gorbachev forged a personal relationship which would ultimately lead to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Geneva also led me, unwillingly I must emphasise, to mislead the ABC audience as to my own linguistic abilities, basically because the press centre where the summit was being held was wired in a very peculiar Swiss system. The time zone was perfect for the ABC’s new TV news and current affairs program The National to carry live coverage of the summit’s close, when Reagan and Gorbachev would emerge from their private talks t
o give formal speeches. There was no problem feeding out the video and audio of Reagan, but with Gorbachev there was a snag: the simultaneous translation was being distributed around the building by a curious low-voltage electronic system which had one massive limitation. If you plugged your transmitting equipment into it, even putting alligator clips on and feeding it through a Nagra as an amplifier, you would drain it in some mysterious way, to such an extent that the whole system would blow. It wasn’t a myth: other broadcasters had done it earlier in the day, with disastrous results. The only way to get sound was to listen through the system’s wired-in headphones. My job was to talk The National’s presenter, Geraldine Doogue, through the preamble to Reagan, throw to him, then come back to her for the transition to Gorbachev. The only way for the audience to hear what the Soviet leader was saying in English, therefore, was for me to listen to the translation and simultaneously parrot every word I heard into a microphone back down to Sydney. One result is that I still, very occasionally, meet people who were watching that night and who are under the entirely erroneous impression that I speak fluent Russian.
In my view, the first real test of Gorbachev’s grip on power, and his genuine intention to bring about transparency, or glasnost, came about five months after the Geneva Summit, with the Chernobyl disaster. It happened on 26 April 1986, but the first reaction was the traditional Soviet one: cover it up. The Moscow authorities said absolutely nothing about it for two days, and even then their reaction was only triggered by the Swedes, who had detected unusual levels of radioactivity at one of their power plants more than a thousand kilometres away. Nuclear scientists around Europe started seeing similar results, and the Soviets were forced into a brief admission: ‘There has been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the nuclear reactors was damaged. The effects of the accident are being remedied. Assistance has been provided for any affected people. An investigative commission has been set up.’ Moscow correspondents reported that even this terse press release was the result of a debate inside the Central Committee—a debate which Gorbachev had had to fight hard to win.
