We were both part of the UN’s peacekeeping force, Henrietta as a producer for UNPROFOR’s TV unit and I as spokesperson. We were there in the mid-1990s, when the warring parties, particularly the Bosnian Serbs, were engaged in a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, using rape and starvation as weapons of war, establishing concentration camps, and waging a genocidal campaign of violence that culminated in the Srebrenica Massacre in July 1995.
Against this backdrop of Europe’s most vicious conflict since World War Two, Henrietta negotiated at checkpoints, crossed confrontation lines, navigated active war zones and risked her life to gather human stories from the region’s warring communities. And she never bought into the UN’s smug consensus that came from the Secretary General down, and which sought to downplay the atrocities committed against the population we were mandated to protect.
Henrietta spoke truth to those within the force, particularly the military, never missing a chance to point out to them the sick irony that the word “protection” was in the very title of the force they served. “The UN Protection Force?”, she would ask, “So why have hundreds of thousands of people died in our mission area?”
On one occasion, Henrietta was with me when an instruction came from Secretary General Boutros Ghali’s office to write a speech for his visit to Sarajevo, the only guidance being that I couldn’t mention the word “siege”. Sarajevo at the time was being starved into submission by the Bosnian Serbs.
Henrietta threatened to end our working relationship if I complied. Of course, I did not, but I had no doubt that Henrietta would have followed through on her threat had I done so.
***
Years later, in London, Henrietta, the BBC correspondent Caroline Wyatt and I arranged to meet for what turned out to be a character-revealing dinner near Bush House.
As we walked up Drury Lane, we saw three besuited thugs from the city beating up two waiters in the doorway of an Indian restaurant. We observed the fracas, and once we’d got the facts from the waiters, we followed their attackers at a distance, saw them take up positions in a restaurant, reported them to the police, and had them apprehended.
How well I remember Henrietta’s sense of natural justice and determination, as she put it, “to have these ghastly thugs banged up”. Caroline later commented, “That was an extremely memorable evening – and an enduring reminder of Henrietta’s moral fibre. I was quite ready to go home and give up – but Henrietta prevailed, and got the bastards arrested!”
***
Finally, the following anecdote from Madeleine Holt, former BBC Newsnight Arts Correspondent:
My main memory of Henrietta is how much she wanted everyone around her to be happy. A perfect example is when we both went to Paris to interview the art critic Catherine Millet about her explosive diary of sexual adventuring. Henrietta, with her perfect French, had effortlessly pulled off this exclusive for Newsnight.
A day after the filming, I got an early Eurostar back to London, and, just as I got into the carriage, I realised I had left my two treasured rings in my hotel room. I called Henrietta and, without hesitation, she changed her plans so as to go back to the hotel and – thanks to her natural authority – she wangled her way into my room and retrieved the rings in the nick of time.
I think of her often as I put these rings on every morning.
Photograph courtesy of Jeroen Akkermans. Published under a Creative Commons license.
