Published: 2009-03-22
Taylor gives a view from the trenches
By JOSEPH HOWSE
Most war memoirs offer a perspective from a single side of the firing lines.
However, Unembedded: Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting gives the
observations of a journalist who has crossed camps many times to cover
soldiers’ and civilians’ stories in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and
other conflict areas.
The author, Scott Taylor, is editor and publisher of the military magazine
Esprit de Corps, and a columnist for The Chronicle Herald. After serving a
stint in the Canadian infantry, Taylor cofounded the magazine with his wife
Katherine in 1988. Unembedded includes a detailed history of Esprit de Corps,
its role in exposing leadership failures such as the ones behind the Somalia
Affair, and its weathering of criticism and a financial crisis.
Taylor’s experience in frontline war journalism began in 1992 in Croatia.
Partly from his firsthand experience there and in his subsequent tours of
Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, he argues that Western governments and media have
downplayed the atrocities committed by Croatian, Bosnian Muslim and Albanian
Kosovar forces.
>From the aftermath of the Kosovo War, Taylor reports on the plight of Serb
>refugees, whom he saw being jeered by NATO forces, and pelted with stones by
>roadside mobs. Taylor notes that the chief of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Agim
>Çeku, previously commanded the Croatian artillery forces that targeted
>civilians in the Medak Pocket.
Taylor also argues that there has been an overstatement of the war crimes
perpetrated by Yugoslav and Serbian forces. Here, however, parts of his
interpretation are dubious.
"Racak was a hoax," Taylor claims in reference to an incident in the Kosovar
village of Raèak in January 1999. Following operations there by Yugoslav
police, 40 mutilated bodies were found by international observers and
journalists.
Testifying to Human Rights Watch and the British Serb journalist Gordana Igric
(among many others), Raèak villagers said a massacre had taken place.
Meanwhile, Yugoslav officials contended that the dead were rebel soldiers,
posthumously disguised as civilians in order to create a hoax.
Forensic investigation of the bodies was undertaken by three teams. Teams in
Yugoslavia and Belarus (a Yugoslav ally) supported the official Yugoslav
account, whereas a Finnish team (representing the EU) found no merit in the
idea that the bodies were disguised or transported after death.
Taylor makes no mention of the eyewitness reports. He refers to the separate
and disagreeing forensic teams only as a single "UN forensic team (which)
concluded that ‘no massacre’ had taken place in Racak."
Taylor also implies that the Hague Tribunal held proceedings on the Raèak
incident "without corroborating forensic evidence." To the contrary, the head
of the Finnish team, Dr. Helena Ranta, testified before the tribunal.
After covering the Balkan conflicts, Unembedded proceeds with two chapters on
Taylor’s tours of Iraq. These sections include very moving testimony to the
state of Iraqi hospitals during the UN embargo. Other parts of Taylor’s
observations and interviews reflect the mood during Saddam Hussein’s last
election campaign, on the eve of the Iraq War.
Also delving into Iraq’s lesser-known internal issues, Taylor documents the
situation of the Iraqi Turkmen population, sandwiched geographically and
politically between the country’s Sunni Arab and Kurdish blocs.
During 2004, Taylor and a Turkish colleague were captured, held prisoner and
brutally beaten by insurgents in northern Iraq. Taylor’s account of this ordeal
in Unembedded provides rare insights into the chaotic power struggles within a
terrorist cell. His captors variously promised to release him, prepared to kill
him, or handed him off to other groups, until his release after five days.
At the time, Taylor considered this the end of his career in war journalism. He
writes, "The fact that it had been the U.S.-organized Iraqi police that had
handed Zeynep Tugrul and me over to the Ansar al-Islam mujahedeen illustrated
the rapidly blurring lines . . . . When you realize you can no longer identify
the players, it is time to get off the field."
Subsequently, Taylor has returned to war journalism, this time in Afghanistan.
From his tours there, Unembedded contains talks with aid workers, Canadian and
Afghan national army soldiers, and eccentric, ruthless
warlords-turned-governors.
One of Taylor’s interviewees, an aid worker, describes the conflict from the
perspective of locals in Kandahar: "For the most part, they don’t know who is
doing the bombing — either the Taliban or the Afghan government troops. They
don’t even comprehend the role of the coalition forces for the simple reason
that they never see them."
The strength of Unembedded is in its firsthand reporting, as Taylor captures
the voices of soldiers, survivors and antagonists who would otherwise go
unheard. On the other hand, the passage on Raèak suggests problems with
Taylor’s secondhand research. Readers should cross check his most strident
claims with other sources.
Joseph Howse is a freelance writer who lives in Halifax.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Books/1112623.html
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