2 Tuesday April 5 2022 | the timestimes2
Robert Crampton
The treatment of women in
Ukraine brings back what
I witnessed in Bosnia
The Brit who
tried to make
Arnie the US
ambassador
to Moscow
How did a working-class girl from
Co Durham become the White House’s
top adviser on Russia? David Charter,
the Times US editor, meets Fiona Hill
I
t says a lot about Fiona Hill’s
down-to-earth grasp of Vladimir
Putin’s Russia that she lobbied
for Arnold Schwarzenegger to
be made US ambassador to
Moscow. Like many of her
warnings about Putin’s
murderous intentions, her push
behind the scenes for the Terminator
to be sent to try to dial down the
Russian president’s paranoid fear of
the West was ahead of the game.
Eight years after Schwarzenegger
was passed over by President Obama
(and still one of just 22 individuals or
entities followed by Putin on Twitter),
he released a heartfelt video message
appealing to the Russian people to see
the war in Ukraine for what it is: their
leader’s despicable folly.
Just as the former governor of
California invoked his Austrian father’s
lifelong remorse over the Second
World War, Hill’s razor-sharp insights
are firmly rooted in her experience of
growing up poor in Bishop Auckland,
and her broad Co Durham accent is
similarly untrammelled by the decades
she has lived in the US.
An American by choice after earning
her master’s in Soviet studies and a
doctorate in history from Harvard
University, 56-year-old Hill became a
celebrity overnight in 2019 when she
testified on Capitol Hill at Donald
Trump’s first impeachment inquiry. As
the former top White House expert on
Russia, she calmly set out the very real
threat faced by American democracy
from Putin and rebutted supporters of
the president who suggested it was
Ukraine that interfered in the 2016
US election. Her directness is “a trait
of the region where she grew up”, The
New Yorker informed its readers.
“It was in late 2013... and I’d been
[trying to think of] somebody who the
Russians or Putin himself could engage
with, because Putin and those aroundhim are very much into celebrities,”
Hill tells me in Washington during a
break in preparations for a visit to the
UK this week.
“Steven Seagal; Leonardo DiCaprio;
I once saw Mickey Rourke in the
street in Moscow with a whole
entourage around him. Putin also
has an obsession with weightlifting:
remember those bizarre episodes with
him and [the former Russian prime
minister] Dmitry Medvedev working
out with each other in the gym?” She
reels off a list of Schwarzenegger’s
other qualifications, among them
Putin’s fixation on the Second World
War and Schwarzenegger being “an
open book — I mean, every scandal
is already known about him.
“He’s married into the Kennedy
family, he’s roughly the same height
as Putin and they weren’t going to
intimidate him in the same way they
tried with other ambassadors. He’s
popular in Russia and knows how to
handle himself,” she says.
Could Arnie have made a difference?
That’s one of many unknowns in the
Putin story, but Hill is firm in her view
that it was not just President Biden’s
supposed weakness that convinced the
Russian leader that he could act with
such cruel abandon in Ukraine, as
many Republicans allege. “It’s the US
weakness overall — the whole Trump
presidency was evidence of the United
States’ weakness — a loss of cohesion,
political polarisation, partisan
infighting.” It goes back further, to
the Bush and Obama administrations,
she believes. “People can point to
individual [western] leaders but that’s
meaningless. Putin sees everything as
a sign of the end of the West.
“It began with the financial crisis
of 2008-09, when he realised that, in
his view, we had no idea about how to
run the economy. The Russians had
thought we knew what we were doing.ALEXANDEE EEMOCHENKO/EEUTEESA
s Russian forces
withdraw from
towns near
Kyiv, reports
are emerging of
mass rape
committed by
Putin’s troops
during their short occupation.
These will multiply in the coming
days. We will see more evidence
of women raped and murdered,
like those photographed lying on
the road out of Bucha. We’ll hear
evidence of women kidnapped
and sexually enslaved by the
retreating Russians. In eastern
Ukraine, we’ll hear reports of girls
and women raped not only by
soldiers but by their compatriots,
pro-Putin Ukrainians once liked
and trusted by their victims.
I know I’m not scaremongering
because I’ve seen it happen
before, 28 years ago, as a young
reporter in Zenica, Bosnia. There,
in a dreary office block converted
into a refuge, surrounded by
rubble, I interviewed many
women not long released from
Serb-controlled prisons, so-called
rape camps in barracks and gyms,
schools and private houses. They
had been raped repeatedly by
many different men, many times
each day. Some of the men were
their erstwhile neighbours,
teachers and classmates.
I would like to believe that
those men would not have been
morally capable, as civilians in
peace time, of committing sexual
violence. But that would be naive;
when the authorities greenlit
systematic rape as a weapon of
war, a significant number of men
turned out to have no moral
restraint at all.
I remember one woman,
Hasnija, a Bosnian Muslim who
was 19 when we met, 17 when she
was abducted by paramilitariesfrom her family home in Banja
Luka. She was imprisoned and
raped several times a day for
almost a year. Her attackers
included two boys with whom
weeks earlier she’d shared a
classroom. One was the school
bully. The other, she had thought,
was her friend. She said he was
not forced into abusing her, but
took his turns enthusiastically,
cruelly delighting in telling her
she would have a Serb baby,
which she duly did.
The women I met were in the
early stages of what may or may
not have proved to be their
recovery. I hope the wounds,
physical and mental, healed.
I hope that in the past three
decades they’ve lived contented,
fulfilling lives, able to put their
trauma behind them. They were
being well cared for, as much as
the war could allow. But this hope
is probably a false hope. Those
women, you did not need to be a
psychologist to see, were deeplytraumatised. Some, I would judge,
were broken beyond repair.
That experience in the Balkans
in late 1993 is partly why I
shudder whenever I read the
word rape, in any context, but
especially when I read about rape
in wartime. I shy away from the
word in news reports. I skip or
mute or turn off depictions of the
crime on screen. Rape is an ugly
word for a hideous crime. I feel
nauseous even typing the word
now. I don’t want to use the word
in the same sentence as my wife
and daughter, yet obviously I
relate the crime to my loved ones
in an instant.
I don’t think a man needs a wife
or daughter to abhor rape; I do
think protecting their female
relatives from sexual violence will
be a big motivation for why
Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
There have been a handful of
prosecutions for rapes committed
in Bosnia. Rape is now recognised
as a war crime. Angelina Jolie and
William Hague have done good
work highlighting its prevalence.
None of this has deterred some
of the invaders in Ukraine. The
scariest lesson I learnt in Bosnia
was the flimsy nature of the line
between civilisation and savagery.
It wasn’t just Serbs. I remember
an uncomfortable evening with
some Croatian militiamen, boys
really, home on leave in Split.
Drunk, rifles propped against the
wall, heavy metal and neo-Nazi
insignia on their T-shirts, keen
to show off their Rambo knives,
some of them spoke casually of
the sexual violence they had
taken part in on the front lines,
inviting me to join in their
laughter. When I refused to do
so, the atmosphere turned chilly
for a while. I hope they’ve had a
tormented time these past three
decades as well. But I doubt it.Fictional
food fight
three men are titled,
yet two of them carry
either the certainty or
the suggestion of being
an impostor. Two are
eccentric bullies. All
three are keen on
revenge. Mrs Danvers
too is hell-bent on
retribution. By her own
admission, Bennet can
be cold and disengaged.
This is the crew
Camilla would most
like to break bread
with. Go figure.
OK, it’s a tricky task.
My instinct was for an
all-female line-up,
because women tend to
be more fun. But then Irealised it would be a
chance to settle an
argument that fills a
large proportion of my
conversations with my
son: who’s the hardest
fictional tough guy?
So I’d invite Bernard
Cornwell’s twin heroes
Uhtred of Bebbanburg
and Richard Sharpe.
Then Robert Ludlum’s
Jason Bourne, Lee
Child’s Jack Reacher,
and James Bond, even
though he’s a bit of a
racist and a crashing
snob. Bourne seems
like the best bet for
a stimulating chat,
complex and torturedas he is, so I’d sit next
to him and watch the
others slug it out after
the cheese course.
Lots of smashed
crockery and broken
furniture await.
I envisage a decider
between Uhtred, born
and bred for recourse
to instant extreme
violence in a way the
others were not, and
gigantic Jack. Until
recently the smart
money would be on
Reacher, but then
again by common
consent he has gone
a bit wimpy recently.
It’s a hard one. Discuss.The Duchess of
Cornwall has drawn up
a dream literary guest
list for an imaginary
dinner party. She
plumps for the Count of
Monte Cristo, Mrs
Danvers from Rebecca,
Count Fosco from The
Woman in White,
Elizabeth Bennet from
Pride and Prejudice and
Uncle Matthew from
The Pursuit of Love.
It’s a revealing list. The