by Paul Henry
I found a one-armed local taxi driver with a beaten-up old Mercedes who was prepared to do anything for money. I went to see the liaison woman at the New Zealand Army.
‘I’ve decided to make my own way,’ I said.
‘Well, we’ve got a huge armed convoy that’s going through in a couple of days. Why don’t you wait for that?’
‘No, no, no. I’ve organised a driver.’
‘Well, we can’t have any responsibility for anything that happens to you.’
That was fine and in fact I learnt more in those few days than I could have in months with the army. In particular, I learnt how close you can get to the heart of a situation, and how much of a feeling you can get for how things really are for people living through something like this.
I felt huge relief when I prised myself away from the New Zealand Army, even as I climbed into this wreck of a Mercedes with my driver and his bad fibreglass arm. Its hand was clenched like it had a bad case of fibreglass arthritis, and it wouldn’t move. It was more like an imitation of an arm. He was both embarrassed and proud of it. He had to use his real arm to move his fake one to any position it needed to be in. For instance, if he wanted to drape it casually over the back of a chair he had to heave it into place. The only thing worse than his arm was his English.
The real downside of having a driver with a dodgy false arm was that the car was manual and a lot of the driving was through areas that had been rendered suitable only for four-wheel drives. He had to position his fibreglass arm on the steering wheel to free up his good hand to change gear. If we hit a pot hole there was only his fake hand on the steering wheel to keep the car on the road. And he was very nervous. Anytime we heard any sort of noise he would start to sweat.
I had been told by the army that this was a dangerous trip. Ultimately I planned to go through the heart of Bosnia to Croatia and eventually to Split, but we were first going to the coast towards Dubrovnik. At that time there were shells reaching Dubrovnik, and there were hot pockets everywhere. And because it was guerrilla warfare you never knew where the front line was going to be, hence the British Army’s high estimate of death. It was unlikely we would pass many other taxis.
Previously I had souvenired a few items: some bayonets, some poorly exploded hand grenades. They were entirely safe but they were ordinance. I had also secured a small firearm for my own protection. All these things were secreted in the boot of the car.
‘I will tell you if we need these items,’ I told the driver. ‘If we need the gun I will tell you.’ So we set off through the war zone, driving through beautiful little villages that had been obliterated.
Travelling this way I experienced the raw emotions that you don’t get when you’re cosseted by the army. The primary reaction to us was mistrust. Why was this person travelling through this godforsaken zone? We saw kids playing football in minefields, surrounded by the bombed-out shells of houses. Serbs and Muslims were playing together, in the middle of a war between Serbs and Muslims. I stopped in little cafes where half of the cafe was gone and they were still serving that thick coffee you suck through sugar cubes. I wonder if there has ever been another conflict as bizarre.
The funny thing is I wasn’t scared at all. I would have numerous similar experiences in the future and I can’t remember ever being scared, no matter how dangerous the situation. I can remember times sitting in hotels afterwards, looking back and thinking, ‘That was ludicrous. That was such a stupid thing to do.’ It’s the adrenalin and the excitement that get you through. Also, if there’s nothing you can do — which there usually wasn’t — there’s no point being scared.
One of our destinations was Mostar, site of a famous bridge that had been destroyed, and an important symbol of the whole conflict, representing as it did people coming together. As we approached Mostar there was a lot of heavy fighting going on around us. There were lots of roadblocks. In cases where these were manned by locals, when they saw it was just some fool in an old Mercedes with a one-armed driver, they let us straight through. UN roadblocks had a traffic-light system that told you either you are entering a safe area; there’s some dodgy stuff going on; or don’t move because it’s happening now.
Near Mostar we were in a red area so it was active, which just meant that the UN had been involved in some skirmish within the last few hours.
We were approaching a bridge that spanned a gully, with steep granite mountains on the side. The terrain could not have been harsher. Two angry-looking men had been manning a pillbox and blocking the bridge, but when they saw us coming they came over to block the road. We were told to get out of the car at gunpoint.
‘Just do whatever they say, follow my lead,’ I told the driver. I got out and looked around. I realised there was nowhere to run, let alone anywhere to hide, which severely limited our options.
I couldn’t tell from their uniforms how legitimate these guys were. They were pretty rough. They could have been the real thing or they could have been a couple of opportunists who saw a way to make a bit of money. They clearly weren’t the sort of people who would have to fill in forms for their superiors if they killed you. For people like them, the easiest thing was to kill you and throw you over the bank. That’s much less trouble than trying to work out what you are saying and help you along in your journey.
But the person I really couldn’t figure out was the driver. It’s a bad sign when the local is worried, and he was sweating profusely. Suddenly there was gunfire in the background which seemed to spark the guys with guns into action.
‘What are you doing?’ one asked my driver in broken English, assuming he was a foreigner.
‘He’s my taxi driver,’ I said, for which I got pushed against the car with the bayonet end of the gun.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked the driver again. The driver answered him in his own language. I had no idea what he was saying but was pretty sure it was along the lines of ‘This lunatic has kidnapped me. Please kill him and let me return to my family.’
‘Where is your equipment?’ the gunman asked me.
‘I don’t really have any equipment,’ I said. And I showed him my pad and camera and the little mini-disc player I used.
‘No, where is your equipment?’
I wasn’t quick enough to answer before he pushed the taxi driver to the back of the car.
‘Open the boot,’ he ordered.
And now we were in some degree of trouble. Whoever they were, my cache of weaponry was going to look bad to them. Then my driver managed to take the situation and make it worse.
‘Gun?’ he asked me.
‘You stupid man,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’ve never shot a gun in my life. I don’t even know if it’s loaded. We’re going to take these guys on, are we? You’ve got one arm.’
So we were at odds. I thought we were in serious shit and he thought we could shoot our way out.
‘I need a cigarette,’ I said to the guy with the gun, in order to buy a little time. ‘Would you like a cigarette?’
He wasn’t interested. He forced me against the side of the car.
‘Open it,’ he said to the driver. As clearly as anything I can still hear the little click of the catch in the boot as it was opened. And I knew it was going to be the last sound that I would hear. I estimated we had 10 seconds tops before they saw our weapons. By now the bayonet in my side was hurting. It was a very blunt bayonet so he had to push very hard.
Suddenly there was a long whistling noise not far away. ‘That’s nice,’ I thought, ‘Jesus has decided to save me’ and there was a phenomenal explosion. I couldn’t tell how far away it was but it was close enough to be a concern. We were all hit by shrapnel — not by bits of bomb but by bits of road. There was tarseal going everywhere. The windscreen of the car was smashed. One of the guys with guns was knocked over and then they both started screaming and ran back to their pillbox.
‘Get in the car,’ I yelled, ‘get in the car.’
My driver was distraught
and moaning about his windscreen. In fact the car was completely rooted, but we were still able to drive out and made it safely to Mostar where there was more of a UN presence.
That incident had a huge impact on me. For better or worse, it was the start of me believing I was bulletproof. If I can get out of that, I reasoned, I can get out of anything.
I left my driver at the border and made my way to a nearby town where I found a hotel to stay in. It was a people’s palace — a communist hotel, built according to communist ideas. It was on the fringes of the conflict, out of range of 99.9 per cent of missiles so you felt relatively safe.
I went to check in. I wasn’t expected. I walked through a huge lobby with what seemed like acres of marble flooring. It was completely empty except for two chairs set against one wall. It was probably a 15-minute walk to the next pair of chairs. There was a marble concierge desk about 20 feet long, with no one attending it. I had yet to lay eyes on another human being. Then, about the length of a rugby field away, I noticed a woman standing to attention in a pristine uniform.
I told her I wanted to check in. It soon became clear there was one way of doing everything and that was how we would be doing it. This huge hotel was clearly entirely empty but she made a show of seeing whether they would be able to find a room for me without a reservation. There was no question of a discount because it was off-season.
I was booked in and established there was a restaurant on the basement floor. I had a view of the Mediterranean from my room, which was small and, like everything else about the hotel, especially the staff, quite stark. After taking a moment to settle in, I went looking for the dining room. I appeared to be the hotel’s only guest. Occasionally I encountered someone in a uniform, standing stoically in a marble corner holding a mop or a duster.
I eventually made my way through a labyrinth of grand hallways and reached two enormous doors, with a little sign that said dining room. As I approached, the doors opened before me, not automatically but thanks to two people on the other side who had somehow discerned that I was coming.
I was in yet another aeroplane hangar. I was seated at the table furthest from the door. Immediately in front of me, but more than 50 feet away, in the middle of the room was a rostrum with a Hammond organ. That wasn’t a good sign.
I was trying to make conversation and be jovial with the staff but they seemed reluctant to acknowledge I was there. Service was very formal. The menu had just three items and the only thing I recognised was bangers and mash, which is what I ordered. It came with a large bowl of what appeared to be pickled cabbage and a huge plate with one circular spiral sausage and a plop of mash in the middle.
I had just started to cut into my sausage when the doors opened. ‘Fantastic,’ I thought, ‘some more guests.’ Instead, a very tall, very large woman wrapped in a black cape came in, carrying a satchel, and sat down at the Hammond organ. She shuffled her papers for some time, while I worked my way around my spiral sausage. Then she started to sing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. She was singing more or less in English, and it was surprisingly loud given that she was so far away, had no amplification and the acoustics were appalling.
I checked out the next day and went to start the long series of hops on planes that would take me home.
Getting through Customs at Zagreb was not easy. This was the location of the UN’s major headquarters for their Bosnian activity, where they brought on new staff and briefed people before they went into Sarajevo. The place was effectively in lockdown and security was very tight.
‘Do you have anything to declare?’ I was asked on leaving the country. What else could I do? I opened my suitcase and showed them the bullets I’d picked up, the hand grenades and the bayonet.
‘Souvenirs,’ I said. ‘Horrible, grotesque and macabre souvenirs.’
The Customs officer looked at me, acknowledged that they were horrible, grotesque and macabre, put them back in my pack and let me on the plane. Those were the days when you could carry bayonets on planes.
“RUNNING NATIONAL RADIO TURNED OUT TO BE MUCH HARDER THAN I EXPECTED … I BUMPED INTO SHARON CROSBIE, WHO I HAD WORKED WITH IN MY VERY EARLY DAYS AND WHO WAS THEN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF RADIO NEW ZEALAND. I HAD A REASONABLY SIZED CRUSH ON SHARON, DATING BACK TO WHEN I WORKED WITH HER ON AS IT HAPPENS DURING MY FIRST PERIOD AT NATIONAL RADIO.”
* * *
RUNNING NATIONAL RADIO TURNED out to be much harder than I expected. I had gone back to various bits and pieces at Pacific after the Bosnia trip. At the Radio Awards at the Sheraton Hotel in Auckland I bumped into Sharon Crosbie, who I had worked with in my very early days and who was then chief executive of Radio New Zealand. I had a reasonably sized crush on Sharon, dating back to when I worked with her on As It Happens during my first period at National Radio.
She was a huge star and we got on famously. Not everyone got on with Sharon. She could throw spectacularly theatrical tantrums, often involving the flinging of objects, which is generally regarded as un-Kiwi and something many people dislike. However, I was used to them from the BBC, where they were part of the culture. I found them quite stimulating.
‘You should really come back,’ Sharon said to me after whatever award I was nominated for was won by Paul Holmes. ‘You could have the job managing National Radio. Would you be interested?’
‘Yes,’ I said. It was perfect timing. There was no prospect of anything substantial at Pacific, so it was a good time to move on and an interesting project to move on to.
My agreement, you may have noticed, was given without any thought at all. I had no long-term goal — it would be a challenge to get the job and that was as far ahead as I had thought. The job was part of a changeover process in which National Radio was going from being essentially a government department to a more commercial footing. It was being managed by KPMG in Wellington. They were making the appointments but obviously Sharon had a say and the board had a say. After a few weeks I was approached by KPMG, sent an application form and was interviewed and eventually got the job.
When I announced I was leaving, Derek Lowe took it as a personal slight. As a pioneer of private radio in New Zealand, he reacted to public radio like bulls react to red rags. He was very pissed off that public radio was taking one of his breakfast hosts — even though he had taken me out of that role. In his view I was going to ‘a death camp for broadcasters’.
He could have taken some pride in the fact that I was going there to a senior management position thanks to knowledge I had gained from him about how to run a radio business. If he did, he didn’t show it.
The new structure was cumbersome. There was a board, Sharon as chief executive and all the senior managers: the head of news and current affairs, the head of finance, the head of commercial activities — essentially the person who sold cassettes, the presentation manager for Concert, the presentation manager for National, and the person in charge of programme acquisitions. My role was officially presentation manager of National Radio, though I always called myself the manager. It was equivalent to being the manager. I didn’t have complete control over programme acquisitions and finance and news and current affairs, but I had control over the way news and current affairs was presented and how long a news bulletin was. I didn’t have control of the journalists, thank God.
I had not considered when I got the new job that the organisation was being torn apart from every angle, and that the objectives which had to be achieved were not the objectives of 99.9 per cent of the people who worked there.
So I arrived on day one wondering how to furnish my office.
On my first day, I went to see one of the senior management team. He was the manager of transition, employed and paid for by KPMG. His job was to get this ramshackle group of broadcasters, who thought they were managers, to move Radio New Zealand out of the past and at least into the present. Possibly into the future. For the 99.9 per cent, he was the enemy.
‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. He didn’t yet know that I was m
ore likely to side with him than anyone else, but he may have had an inkling because of my commercial background and some things I’d said to KPMG in the process of getting the job.
He almost cried during that first meeting.
‘My hair is matted with blood from banging my head against the wall,’ he said.
‘That’s entertaining,’ I thought.
For the rest of the day I had no idea what I was going to do apart from furnish my office. Working in the room outside my office were all the people who had wanted my job and felt they should have got it. I could read their minds. ‘Who the fuck is this little shit coming from Radio Pacific? What does he know that we don’t already know?’ The answer was nothing. I didn’t know anything that they didn’t already know about what they were doing, but I knew all the things that I needed to know about what they were going to do or what I thought they should do.
I went into my office and sat down. I had no radio. I couldn’t even listen to my own network. I had a chair and a desk and some empty filing drawers and cupboards. I positioned my jotter pad and checked that the stationery was all in order in the top drawer, which it wasn’t, so I went out and bought some stationery.
I went to see Sharon, who described the situation in slightly different terms than those used by the manager of transition.
The reality was that the staff hated the management team, hated what they were doing, did not believe they could do it but did believe they were destroying public radio. The worst part was that deep down most of the management team agreed with them.
To sum up: the staff hated the management team for what they were supposed to do; and the management team hated what they were supposed to do so much that they were trying not to do it — delaying making decisions and then making bad ones.
There were absurdities wherever you looked. Elizabeth Alley was a wonderful person and a talented broadcaster. She was in charge of purchasing programmes, and she knew a lot about programmes, but she didn’t have the budgets to actually purchase them. She had endless meetings about what programmes would be bought if and when the money became available.
