The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Author:Tim Butcher [Butcher, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Non Fiction, War
ISBN: 9780802123893
Amazon: 0802123899
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2015-06-08T12:00:00+00:00

I too had been young, aged twenty-seven, and anxious when I crossed Mount Igman after nightfall during the war, an episode so vivid it still comes to me in acute detail. It was June 1995 and the situation inside Sarajevo had worsened dramatically, with the Bosnian Serbs restarting their artillery assault on the city. The fighting had got so bad that for many weeks even the Mount Igman road was closed, adding to the sense of claustrophobia and desperation within the city. I had been ordered to pull out by my editor, but had not been able to leave, part of a growing group of journalists and foreign aid workers going increasingly stir-crazy. At one point I went to investigate reports of a hospital being shelled, arriving in a ward to find the body of a headless male patient who had been lying there. The man had been decapitated by a Bosnian Serb shell smashing through the wall. By this stage my emotional frame was askew, and I remember responding with manic giggles when I saw the victim. He was headless, but completely covered in what looked like pink talcum powder. The explosion had atomized the brick wall, creating a rouge dust that coated absolutely everything in the room: beds, medical equipment, furniture, floor, corpse. My coping mechanism was to find this comic.

One Friday afternoon word went round that the Mount Igman road would be opened for a few hours that evening. Desperate not to miss the chance to get out, I skittered around gathering my gear, begging fuel and loading my Land Rover. Other journalists needed a ride, so just before twilight we set off, with me at the wheel next to two colleagues, a man and a woman, squished into a driving compartment designed for two, creeping across the runway of Sarajevo airport and along the potholed, cratered lanes that led to the mountain trail snaking to safety over Mount Igman. We knew that the Bosnian Serbs could shoot at vehicles on the road – we all remembered the British soldier killed there a year or so earlier at the wheel of a supply truck – but if we timed it right there would be enough light to make it safely across. We were out of luck.

By the time we got to the bottom of the trail, all up-traffic had been stopped. We were told the road was too narrow and too hazardous to allow two-way traffic, so a cyclical one-way system had been imposed: for an hour only upward vehicles were allowed, after which the flow was switched to downward. We had just missed the upward flow, so would have to wait an hour for our turn to go. This meant it would be completely dark by the time we set off – a worry, given that we were not allowed to use lights. To turn on a headlight was to give the Bosnian Serb gunners a target, so all lights had to be disconnected. I had

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