KUKES, Albania.
RON HAVIV has been shooting on the Balkan front lines for nearly 10 years – with a camera.
When the fighting breaks out again, this prize-winning photojournalist from New York doesn’t run for cover. He runs to uncover the truth, documenting today’s events for tomorrow’s schoolbooks.
“You see great acts of heroism and great acts of cowardice,” the 33-year-old freelancer said. “This is history that is happening.”
Haviv was one of several photojournalists recently robbed at gunpoint by masked men while traveling to and from a Kosovo Liberation Army training base and burial ground.
It was just his latest brush with death.
His group hired armed guards – off-duty Albanian special police – to escort them to the KLA camp three hours outside Kukes.
After shooting the KLA for three days, the group headed back in a Land Rover and Nissan Patrol from Bajram Curri at 5:30 a.m. Friday.
Two kilometers into the trip, they spotted a Mercedes-Benz parked across the road. Haviv immediately thought it was an ambush.
He was right. One masked man stepped from the car and two from the bushes. They fired their AK-47s in the air and methodically robbed the group.
They got away with Haviv’s three cameras and four lenses, worth $8,000 to $10,000, as well as both vehicles, his custom-made flak jacket, first-aid kit and even his good-luck charm, a cotton brown scarf he got covering the Kurdish refugee crisis.
Haviv suspects the guards set him up.
“Only three people knew we were leaving at that time,” he said.
In this land of lawlessness, if someone robs you one day, he can walk into a cafe the next day and say, “Hi.”
You can’t do anything about it.
But Haviv brought home the goods – his film.
“I hid it in a bag of cookies and put the cookies in my pocket,” he said.
Haviv, a 1987 graduate of NYU, is on assignment for Newsweek. He’s covered the world of war – the Persian Gulf in 1991, Haiti in 1994, Panama in 1989, Croatia in 1991.
His most harrowing experience came in 1994, when he and a French photojournalist were invited into Serb-held Croatia.
“It turns out we drove past some secret missile base that we didn’t even know existed,” he recalled.
They were taken by Serbian special forces to their hotel and told to pack. He left a note for colleagues saying he was being deported, and left with the officers.
But suddenly, a soldier started screaming, separated the two photographers and demanded he admit he was spying.
“They said, ‘You have four hours to confess or we’ll kill you and your friend,'” Haviv said.
But he remained confident, if only because “most journalists are killed by snipers,” he said.
They told him they’d killed the French photographer, but he didn’t believe them. Then they put a hood over his head, peppered him with questions and punched him in the head each time he denied being a spy.
When he didn’t show up after 10 hours, his friends realized something had gone wrong. They contacted Newsweek, which got Washington involved. After three days of negotiations, Haviv was released.
Haviv was also captured at the end of the Gulf War when he tried to cover the uprising of the Shiites in southern Iraq, but ran into Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard instead.
“I don’t know who was more surprised, us or them,” he recalled.
This time, he was held for six days in an Iraqi jail until being packed off with three GIs and 30 journalists and sent to the Red Cross in Baghdad.
As they left Basra, their helicopters came under Shiite fire.
Was he scared?
“There’s nothing I could do,” Haviv shrugged. “I was just hoping we don’t get killed by the people we went to photograph. It would be kind of ironic.”
Haviv knows he could earn much more taking pictures of Madonna – but hopes to put together a book documenting the horror of the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
“I’ve taken these same pictures for 10 years,” he said. “I’ve seen Serbs killing people in Croatia. I’ve seen Serbs killing people in Bosnia. They’re doing the same thing with the same tactics – and what has been done? Nothing.”
Yesterday he was trying to get into Kosovo to document the fighting.
“I’m not saying I’m not going to be afraid. Of course, it’s terrifying and I don’t want to die,” he said.
“But I also want to be able to work.”