The following appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The story with photos
can be seen at
http://enquirer.com/editions/2002/02/12/tem_poem_foretold.html
Poem foretold reporter’s death in Croatia
———————————————
‘And your name, too, will be killed tomorrow’
‘To the reporter’
Take as many notes and shots as you can,
my friend.
But do not report to the world that only
a number was killed.
In the golden fields of Slavonia.
As no number has any given name or
any taken future.
Do report to the world that
it was Johann and William
and Victor and Francesco
That was killed
in the heart of Slavonia
And that Gabriel and Gyorgy
and your name, too
Will be killed tomorrow
Take as many notes and shots as you can,
my friend.
But do not report to the world that only
a number was killed.
In the bleeding fields of Slavonia.
— Anonymous
By Rosemary Goudreau
The Cincinnati Enquirer
His picture hangs by my desk, the portrait of a 40-something newspaperman
with graying hair and wire-rim glasses, smiling as I remember him a decade ago.
Egon Scotland.
So, too, is a copy of the poem found in his pocket a year later,
after he was ambushed and killed by Serbian guerrillas in the early days of
the conflict in Croatia.
The poem was written in English on an old manual typewriter that
needed a new ribbon. Titled To the Reporter, the poem called on my friend to
tell the world that it wasn’t just a number killed in the bleeding fields of
Slavonia.
Report to the world that
it was Johann and William,
and Victor and Francesco,
That was killed
in the heart of Slavonia.
“And that Gabriel and Gyorgy,
and your name, too,
will be killed tomorrow.
My friend Egon Scotland, a reporter for the Munich-based newspaper
Suddeutsche Zeitung, died doing what reporters do – telling the world what’s
going on so that people can make informed decisions about their governments
and their lives.
Egon (pronounced A-gon) died nine months after I last saw him in
Washington, D.C. He and his wife Christiane had just driven in from
California, where we’d spent a year together in a journalism fellowship
program at Stanford University.
Egon had driven the back roads across the country, following parts
of Route 66. Unlike most times we saw one another, he had no car stories to
tell, probably because he’d rented a car. The year of our fellowship, Egon
bought a beast of a Buick for $600 and it seemed he spent as much time
alongside the road, as on the road.
We were among 18 journalists in the John S. Knight fellowship class
of 1989-90. Twelve of us came from the United States, eight from other
countries.
From the day we met, it was clear my foreign colleagues lived a much
different life. Sitting in a circle that first day, we took turns
introducing ourselves.
There was Joanna Szczesna from Poland, who spoke a broken English
she’d learned in prison. Joanna was jailed by Polish authorities for writing
articles about Lech Walesa’s upstart Solidarity Movement. Police repeatedly
raided her apartment, but Joanna was clever. She hid her notes in the wall
or sometimes in her baby’s diaper.
There was Rafael Santos, the managing editor of El Tiempo in Bogota,
Colombia. Raphael told us he had three bodyguards just in case one was
bought off. He carried a gun and took a different route to work each day.
Raphael couldn’t find someone willing to sell him life insurance. The year
of our fellowship, his brother Francisco was kidnapped by Pablo Escobar’s
Medellin Cartel. Unlike so many other influential people kidnapped in
Colombia, Francisco survived. Noted author Gabriel Garcia Marquez later
wrote a book aboutFrancisco’s captivity.
And there was Sun Yi, an economics reporter from China. Sun Yi lived
around the corner from Tiananmen Square, where the pro-democracy student
movement had been beaten down only four months earlier. Sun Yi didn’t want
to talk about what happened and never did. She spoke little English, but was
quite comfortable with the word “no.” She used it frequently. “Want to drive
to the coast, Sun Yi?” “No.” I’m not sure she always understood the
question, but she knew her stock answer would keep her from trouble.
The lives of my foreign colleagues looked nothing like mine, a fact
I’m reminded of as we await news of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl, kidnapped while reporting a story in Pakistan.
At the time of the fellowship, I was the medical writer for The
Miami Herald and the worst threats I’d ever faced were a screaming doctor, a
woman who spit on me and a few people who promised lawsuits but never filed
them.
Egon was a serious student the year we called – and feared would
remain – the best of our lives.
A German native, he was a spiritual soul who liked the woods. He
designed and sewed the vest he so often wore. He studied Balkan history and
the Serbo-Croatian language, knowing he wanted to go to the region when the
year ended. I remember watching television with him when the Berlin Wall
fell. It was tough for this seasoned political journalist, so well known by
members of the Bavarian parliament, to be away from home at such a momentous
time.
When he returned to Germany, Egon wrote us that “the safety of
seclusion has gone on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A major part of the
political discourse now is discoveries – who, in the past, was whose spy,
agent or secret ally.”
Shortly after that, with Communism crumbling in Eastern Europe, Egon
was sent to Croatia, which was one of the first Yugoslav republics to break
from the Serbian-dominated central government in Belgrade. The ethnic
conflict later spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
“His reports showed an understanding of the region and its history
that few other correspondents could match,” wrote classmate Kathryn Tolbert,
a Washington Post reporter who visited Christiane in the weeks after Egon’s
death.
“He was in Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan and in the Kurdish refugee
camps in Iraq, an experience that aged him, Christiane said. But he had
become a star at the newspaper.”
Egon hadn’t wanted to go to Yugoslavia. He was tired and had been
traveling constantly. “But he would not turn down a request from his
newspaper. The paper asked several other reporters and then came back to
Egon. So he went,” Kathy wrote us.
The night before he died, Egon called Christiane around midnight, as
always. They didn’t talk long because he was due home two days later. Egon
was tired, having spent a month in the region. He would have been home
already, but his newspaper asked him to stay just a couple of days longer.
The next day, Friday, July 26, 1991, terror broke out.
The New York Times reported that Serbian nationalists, who
outnumbered the Croats with whom they’d lived peacefully during the Cold
War, began rounding up their neighbors to use as human shields for a
methodical march of death. Times reporter Stephen Engelberg filed his report
from Sisak, in the region of Slavonia, about 15 miles from where Egon died.
The report said that Serbs pulled people from their homes that
weekend and used them to create “a human wall” as they marched forward,
steadily firing a heavy machine gun mounted atop a truck. The assault was
part of a broad offensive to push Croats from their villages and create a
pure-blood Serbian state.
“Police defenders were reportedly paralyzed by the sight of their
families held hostage and did not return fire,” Stephen reported. “The
Serbian advance was finally halted when a Croatian policeman jumped atop the
truck and detonated grenades he was carrying in what was apparently a
suicide mission.”
At the end of the uprising’s first day, Egon was safe in a camp near
Glina. But a friend of his – Susanne Kupke, a young correspondent for the
German Press Agency wire service – had not yet returned.
And so, with a radio reporter colleague behind the wheel, Egon got
in a car clearly marked PRESS and went looking for her.
On a deserted road, they came upon some stranded cars, doors flung
open. Egon’s friend brought the car to a stop about the same time both
journalists realized they were facing an ambush. Serb gunmen emerged with a
hail of gunfire. They shot through the headlights, the surest way into a
car’s interior. Egon was shot in the abdomen. The radio reporter, unharmed,
threw the car into reverse and managed an escape. He drove to the hospital
in Sisak, where Egon was pronounced dead. He had bled to death.
Egon never knew that the young reporter he sought was safe, taken in
by a peasant family. For more than a day, she remained huddled in the dark
of their home, windows shuttered, conversations in whispers. Outside, a
steady rain of grenades and gunfire was directed at the homes of Croats.
“Dear God, please help,” she heard one woman pray.
Susanne reported that the gunmen were deliberately firing at
journalists. The word among the Serbs, who dominated the Yugoslav Army, was
that reporters favored Croatia.
Egon is one of 58 journalists killed in the Balkans since 1989, the
victim of an ethnic conflict that left hundreds of thousands of people dead
or homeless.
Today, the man who stoked the nationalist fervor of the Serbs who
killed him, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, faces a war-crimes
trial at The Hague, Netherlands. He stands accused of crimes against
humanity – genocide and ethnic cleansing.
And so today, let me, too, tell the world:
It was Johann and William,
Victor and Francesco,
Gabriel and Gyorgy
– and Egon, too –
who were killed
in the bleeding fields of Slavonia.
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