Martin Bell, The Argus (Brighton)

An Audience With Martin Bell OBE, Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham, June 11

10:00am Friday 10th June 2011

During his two-year National Service in 1957, Martin Bell served out his time as an acting corporal in the Suffolk Regiment in Cyprus.

He was in the ranks, not an officer, but the BBC’s former chief war correspondent says having served at all gave him an edge over his fellow journalists when he was reporting from the field.

“It stopped you asking damn foolish questions,” he says from his London home, where he is presumably dressed in that same white suit he made his trademark over 40 years of journalistic service.

“It enabled you to empathise with the troops and they’d tell you more.”

Far from toughening him up for a job which saw him cover 11 conflicts and report from 90 countries, he admits by the time he swapped journalism for politics in 1997 he was a “battle softened veteran”.

He never became desensitised and, luckily, the nightmares which haunt many reporters (and soldiers) after first-hand experience of the frontline never materialised.

“I have nightmares about losing suitcases, not about being shot at.”

He joined the BBC as a reporter in Norwich after graduating from Cambridge with a degree in English in 1962. Three years later he moved to London, before being packed off to Ghana for his first foreign assignment.

As he remembers his forays abroad, the old BBC tone comes out. It’s grand, old and upper-crust; unflinching and authoritative.

He makes battle-scarred landscapes sound glamorous.

Covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, he was stationed in Bosnia, holed up in the famous Sarajevo Holiday Inn (originally built for the 1984 Winter Olympics) with 50 other foreign journalists.

As he speaks, what may be one of the ugliest buildings in the Balkans (bright yellow, seemingly built from Lego) becomes a magical place.

“In any war zone there is always one press hotel, not necessarily the best, but one where we always hung out. I just loved it. It is still one of my favourite hotels in the whole world.

“I didn’t enjoy being shot at but I did enjoy the camaraderie of being with your mates.”

He even talked Shakespeare with Radovan Karadÿic’s (currently facing war crime charges in The Hague) deputy – an experienced scholar who eventually shot himself at the end of the war.

“I actually liked Karadÿic’s deputy.

“We were in the middle of this bloody war and we would have discussions about which play it most resembled.

“He would say Cymbeline, which is full of bloodshed. And it was always done over a bottle of Ballentine’s or something.

“We had some very late night sessions.”

That there was something heroic about the whole thing is a misnomer.

Bell is resolutely pro-soldier, vehemently anti-war.

“The more I saw of the war, the more I thought it almost never delivers the outcomes the politicians think it will.

“The last one that did in our case was probably the Falklands and that was a close-run thing.”

The tales from Bosnia show how war reporting has changed.

In the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, which, bizarrely, has become something of a tourist site, there was a very small press core. It meant reporters got to know the main players – Karadÿic, the various military and UN commanders – and dealt with primary sources rather than spokesmen or spin doctors, which is always good for journalism.

But flip the coin and proximity also meant danger. Although Bell covered Vietnam, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Nigeria and Angola, he felt most scared in Bosnia. He was even injured by flying shrapnel in the groin. “I remember I was terrified to put my hand down my trousers,” he recalls.

“Bosnia was frightening because we were in the middle of the war and to some extent sharing the plight of the citizens of Sarajevo.”

Nowadays, foreign correspondents covering wars tend to be “embedded”. They travel to wars with a military unit, says Bell, but it is fragmentary and unsatisfactory.

The other option for journalists is to remain in safe-zones, in fortified compounds, on rooftops, which removes the sense of being in the thick of things.

Bell says the changes in reporting are the fallout from 9/11. The bombings in New York meant journalists were singled out, targeted for attacks, taken as hostages. One only needs to read of the BBC’s Frank Gardner who was shot in Saudi Arabia by al-Qaeda sympathisers. Despite not having been in a war zone, he will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

“It meant we couldn’t just wander around finding things out as we used to,” says Bell.

Bell was awarded an OBE for his services to journalism in 1992. The year before, he had the honour of being the first embedded journalist on tour when he went to Iraq with the British Tank Regiment, the Irish Hussars.

The feat has been remembered at the Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, in its recent exhibition War Correspondents Under Fire Since 1914.

The display includes one of Bell’s white suits, some dogtags, his epaulettes and his accreditation card – 001 – authority to accompany an operational force.

“I’ve just become a museum piece, which is rather sad,” he jokes.

He’ll achieve another first in Shoreham tomorrow as he debuts poetry from a new collection, to be released in November.

One is about the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic (another military man recently extradited to The Hague for war crimes, among them the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica).

“It is about him and the crimes and the way the victims of Srebrenica had no due process. All they got was a shot in the back.”

Such is Bell’s reputation he was asked to give evidence at Radovan Karadÿic’s trial last December. The former president of the breakaway Serb Republic then asked to see him.

“I spent three hours in his guarded cell. He wrote a tract called My Defence when he was on the run and he singled out three reporters as media monstrosities. I was one of them.

“But in court he was conducting his own defence and he called me a ‘precious witness’.

I’ve never been called precious by anybody else except an indited war criminal.”

Bell turned to politics in 1997 to stand as an independent candidate in Cheshire’s Tatton constituency against Neil Hamilton.

He overturned a 22,000 majority and became the first independent MP since 1951.

He declined to stand in 2001 and George Osborne, now Chancellor, took the seat.

He found politcs often more disturbing than war journalism.

“The House of Commons was really scary because I wasn’t ready for it. I had some good friends though, one of your local MPs in fact, Sir Peter Bottomley.”

The Worthing West MP was one who called for reform in the wake of the expenses scandal and Bell wrote a book on the matter, entitled A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal And How To Save Our Democracy.

He agrees the expenses scandal only compounded the public’s cynicism about politics, fuelled, among other things, by career politicians who too often come from the same two universities and who, if they are lucky, clever and well-connected, can land a safe seat while they are still in their 20s.

What we need, he says, are more politicians with some grasp of the real world.

“The case I cite is how did we stay out of the Vietnan War?

“Lyndon Johnson, then US president, wanted us in and we normally do what the Americans want, but the defence secretary at the time was Denis Healey, who had been a beachmaster in 1944 so he understood you don’t go into wars lightly.

“On the other hand, in the government which took us to Iraq in 2003, there was nobody with any military experience.”

Regarding Afghanistan, North Africa and the Middle East, he suggests the only lesson of history is that we don’t learn the lessons of history.

“This is our fourth Afghan war. Guess who won the other three?”

*Starts 7.30pm, £15, call 01273 464440

An Audience With Martin Bell OBE, Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham, June 11