Politics
How to survive yuletide in Grozny
Published 20 December 1999
New Statesman Christmas - Christmas past has found John Simpsonin Ceausescu's palace during the Romanian revolution, and under a sniper's bullets in Sarajevo under siege. Here he recalls his most memorable encounters
It has a definite Stephen Potterish, How-To-Be-One-Up-At-Christmas ring to it: "I'll be in Grozny," you say with a self-deprecating grin; "someone's got to draw the short straw." This always has a suitably plonking effect. The others shuffle their feet and talk about the need to spend Christmas with the family, but they can't match that hint of self-sacrifice, of being on some mission of international importance when everyone else is sunk in hedonism.
Something in each of us longs to cut free from the whole intolerable business of conspicuous overspending and overeating, and those family rows that result in more depression, divorce and suicide than at any other time of the year. To plunge instead into the camaraderie of an expedition to whatever place is currently the world's nastiest has a certain attraction, therefore. There will be no bitchy relatives in Grozny this Christmas, no whining children, no unmendable electronic toys. No one will argue there about what to watch on television, or complain of heartburn: the digestive variety, anyway.
Over the past decade I have spent a majority of my Christmases in difficult and violent places, from Romania in 1989, when the revolutionaries executed Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, to Baghdad just before the Gulf war broke out, Moscow during the collapse of Marxism-Leninism, twice in Sarajevo during the siege by the Bosnian Serbs and once, as it happens, in Bethlehem at the height of Palestinian-Israeli tension. Each of these trips gave me the best possible excuse for failing to send Christmas cards, and left the people I had neglected feeling obscurely guilty as they watched my reports. It then allowed me to spend January somewhere hot and pleasant, since the BBC, also feeling uncharacteristically guilty, thought I deserved a break.
On 25 December 1989 the studio of Romanian Television was decorated for the first time in half a century with holly and tinsel. It was very hard to get in. Members of Ceausescu's Securitate were still thought to be firing at it; and even if they weren't, there was plenty of wild gunfire from troops who had gone over to the revolutionary cause. The 60-yard walk down a dark street to the television station entrance, with hundreds of trigger-happy soldiers around, was trying. Ugly things happened there: on Christmas Eve someone had cut the throats of several soldiers as they slept in the corridors.
Christmas Day itself was cold and frightening. My cameraman and I stood for five hours in the snow outside the headquarters of the Communist Party's central committee in one of the city's grandest squares, arguing with an armed and semi-hysterical revolutionary that we should be allowed to get inside and film the place where the revolution had happened.
Eventually we prevailed. Inside the gloomy building the marble of the grand entrance hall was gored by bullets and splashed with blood, and soldiers had taken up positions behind sandbags at the foot of the superb staircase. It was like penetrating the Winter Palace in Petrograd in October 1917. An extraordinary collection of maniacs and misfits had taken over the place. A circus strongman briefly became the revolutionaries' leader, and a deranged sculptor strode up and down Ceausescu's private office, threatening to shoot everyone. Not, however, the cameraman and me. The sculptor might be clinically insane, but he knew a good PR opportunity when he saw it.
Eventually I had to go to fetch some equipment for the cameraman. As I edged discreetly out of the room, the sculptor was standing with his foot on the neck of a prone and almost naked man whom he suspected of treason. I was gone for half an hour. When I managed to get past the hysterical revolutionary on the door, climbed the staircase past the nervous soldiers and got back into Ceausescu's office, I found the previously naked man dressed and in charge. Now the sculptor was lying on the floor in his underpants, and he was later taken down to the cellars and shot.
As we left the central committee building, Ceausescu's old housekeeper, who had taken an inexplicable liking to me, handed me the great man's Mont Blanc fountain pen as a keepsake. A label beside it announced that it was a Christmas gift from the British Labour Party.
That night I sat in the television station, writing my script for the BBC's main Christmas evening news. The time for our satellite broadcast to London was coming closer. Suddenly the local television announcer appeared on screen, reading a statement that said that Ceausescu and his Lady Macbeth had been executed that afternoon. The television staff danced and sang for joy.
I had 12 minutes to turn my report into an obituary for the dead dictator. Writing faster, I think, than I had ever done in my life, I finished with about 15 seconds to spare. I flung my pen down - and then noticed it properly for the first time. I had written Ceausescu's obituary with his own Mont Blanc.
The siege of Sarajevo was an evil, dehumanising business. I arrived there on Christmas Eve 1992, when it was blanketed by snow. The water froze in the standpipes, and the elderly died of hypothermia in their beds. A university professor I visited in his draughty, top-floor flat, marked by many bullets, kept alive by burning his books in the grate, weeping as he did so. Inside my room at the Holiday Inn the temperature was minus 19 degrees Celsius. I slept fully dressed under the bedclothes, inside my sleeping bag - and still shivered.
Under such conditions, comradeship is everything. My BBC colleagues made light of the discomfort, even though we had all contracted the most abominable cold sores. We spent Christmas morning at an old people's home on the front line, filming an ancient man as he chopped wood for the single stove that kept the elderly patients alive. Two nurses had remained after the rest of the staff, doctors and all, had vanished. The next day the old man was shot through the forehead at a range of 30 yards by a Bosnian government sniper.
In the restaurant of the Holiday Inn, Christmas dinner was served by waiters wearing the ghosts of old dinner jackets. The meal consisted of watery soup, a thin slice of some nameless meat and a root vegetable. A small oblong of coconut cake rounded the meal off.
As the sniperfire and artillery continued outside we drank our bottle of Laphroaig, trying not to split our lip sores, and felt surprisingly good. I've had less enjoyable times in the bosom of my family.
I won't in fact be in Grozny this Christmas. Instead, I shall be on board a tramp-steamer in the South Pacific, en route to Millennium (formerly Caroline) Island in the Kiribati group, along the international date line. The purpose of going to this uninhabited atoll is to catch the earliest rays of dawn on 1 January 2000 for the BBC's millennium programme. It's the kind of thing journalists do. It still beats trying to buy indigestion tablets on Christmas afternoon, or mending the lights on the tree after the baby has chewed through the flex.
Next year, I tell myself, I'll spend Christmas somewhere really good. Possibly Kabul.
John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs editor
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