Veteran Times correspondent in Eastern Europe who cast a shrewd eye over the workings of totalitarianism — often at a cost to herself
For more than 40 years Dessa Trevisan was the Times correspondent in Eastern Europe. From her base in Belgrade from 1953 to 1960 and then in Vienna until 1971 and finally back in Belgrade, she covered the big events of the Cold War, from the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to the collapse of communism in Romania and the decline and fall of Yugoslavia.
While covering the disintegration in the 1990s of Yugoslavia, the land of her birth, she was threatened, shot, jailed and expelled from the country. She remained nonetheless a passionate, if frustrated, patriot, combining this with pride in being British.
Throughout these upheavals she provided an insight into the methods of communist rule and a robust analysis of its oppressive excesses, and she was long regarded as the most knowledgeable reporter covering Eastern Europe.
Trevisan’s schooling in politics, begun in Second World War Yugoslavia and continued under Tito’s rule, gave her a pragmatic understanding of Central and East European affairs. She was always aware of the force of nationalism behind all the political ideology in the region.
She was one of the first to detect the split between Moscow and Bucharest when Romania’s President Ceausescu refused to toe the Soviet line in foreign and economic policies and would not allow Romanian troops to join the other Warsaw Pact armies when they invaded Czechoslovakia. She was also quick to recognise the threat to Yugoslavia’s unity posed by Slobodan Milosevic’s rise to power.
Few correspondents had better contacts in the ruling communist parties of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. This was never more apparent than in Prague during the chaotic weeks immediately after the Russian invasion in August 1968 which ended Alexander Dubcek’s efforts to introduce a reformist political programme of “socialism with a human face”.
With tanks on every corner of the capital and bursts of gunfire at dusk to signal a curfew, the Alcron Hotel, just off Wenceslas Square, became Prague’s unofficial press centre for the scores of foreign journalists who had slipped into the country. Such was her determination not to miss the story that Trevisan even left the Prague hospital where she was having treatment for cancer.
After scouring the city to observe the occupation and the brave efforts of Czechs and Slovaks to mount some resistance, the journalists would gather in the Alcron lounge to swap information, speculation and rumour. The diminutive figure of Trevisan would attract a huddle of colleagues keen to hear her analysis of the opaque political manoeuvrings. Thanks to years of assiduously cultivating her contacts she was one of the few able to discover what was going on as anti-reformists and reformers jostled for the upper hand. And she played a similar role in 1980 Warsaw and Gdansk, as journalist colleagues applied to her for the inside story of the collapse of communist authority in Poland.
On Yugoslavia Trevisan’s analysis was particularly acute. Her insights into behind-the-scenes developments during Tito’s rule and his edgy relationship with Moscow were much valued by diplomats and reporters.
In the late 1980s she was one of the first to warn of Milosevic’s attempts to reassert Serbian authority over the other republics, and to anticipate the eventual breakup of the country. She chronicled the political background of the departure from the federation of, first, Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and then Bosnia a year later.
Unlike most foreign correspondents in Belgrade, Trevisan spoke Serbian and understood Serb culture — accomplishments that Serbs frequently complained were lacking in reporters new to the tangled threads of Balkan politics — but her trenchant reporting made dangerous enemies. Her reports of the imprisonment of dissidents, the suppression of free speech, the economic failings of communist rule, and the ethnic passions inflamed by Milosevic, earned her the enmity of many of the party faithful.
After the UN imposed sanctions on Federal Yugoslavia (then Serbia and Montenegro) over Bosnia in 1992, Trevisan received repeated telephone death threats. She was also accosted outside Belgrade’s International Press Centre and told: “We know where you live. We will break down your door and come to finish you.”
She complained to the Serb authorities about this harassment and intimidation, and a week later, in broad daylight, she was shot in her right hand by a pellet from an air rifle as she left her home.
Hours later, a man telephoned her to say: “We promised you a bullet and now you have had it. The bullet was infected with Aids.”
These ordeals did not diminish Trevisan’s commitment to full reporting from Yugoslavia, but a year later her press accreditation was withdrawn and she had to leave the country. The pro-government newspaper, Politika, accused her of “political tendentiousness” and of reporting events in a manner which ensured that Serbia had a bad image.
There was no basis for those charges. Trevisan was even-handed in her acerbic assessments of the negative characteristics of role players in the Balkan dramas, whatever their ethnic origin. Indeed, she came to believe that evils were committed on all sides and that the West was too quick to demonise the Serbs and gloss over atrocities committed by Croats, Muslims and ethnic Albanians. Despite her own experience of the Belgrade authorities, she was sharply critical of the operation of the international court at The Hague, including the conduct of the trial of Milosevic.
She was outraged by the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999, and by Western recognition of an independent Kosovo nine years later. Kosovo, with its great Orthodox churches, was, for her, the cradle of Serb culture and she could not forgive the way it was detached. But she did not share the Serb contempt for Albanians, who make up the overwhelming majority of the province.
While on a private visit to Belgrade at the age of 74, she was sentenced to ten days in prison and ordered, officially, to leave Yugoslavia.
Born Dessa Pavlovic, she was the daughter of a Serb father and a Croat mother. Born in Zagreb, she was imprisoned during the German wartime occupation of Yugoslavia. Her francophile father was wealthy and she went to a finishing school in Switzerland, after which she studied history at Belgrade University. She began her journalistic career with Reuters before joining The Times in 1953.
As well as speaking English and French she was fluent in German and Italian and had a knowledge of Romanian and several Slavonic tongues to add to her native Serbo-Croat. She would sometimes switch languages in mid-sentence.
No more than five feet tall, she had a formidable presence, a husky voice and a fiery temper when roused. Always stylishly dressed, she could switch from coquettish impishness to the hauteur of a Central European grande dame, entrancing lugubrious party hacks and world-weary journalists alike.
Her social network included scholars, writers, actors, musicians and personalities ranging from the American art patron Peggy Guggenheim to Milovan Djilas, Yugoslavia’s renowned dissident during the Communist years, and the Hungarian-born author Arthur Koestler.
She was enthusiastic about jazz and football, and she was knowledgeable about contemporary painting — on one occasion Picasso sketched cats for her on a napkin and inscribed them “Pour Dessa”.
Her parents’ properties were confiscated by the communists, and she cared for her mother in their Belgrade apartment as Yugoslavia fell apart. After her expulsion from Belgrade she moved to London, and the supper parties she gave in her Albany apartment were always stimulating affairs.
After her retirement from active journalism her passionate observation of political developments continued. With peace restored to what had been Yugoslavia, she lived in retirement in Montenegro — which became an independent state in 2006 — but retained an avid interest in world events and continued to brief other journalists about the Balkans. Her mind remained fresh and inquisitive.
Dessa Trevisan was married in 1950 to the British journalist Eric Bourne and in 1964 to the Italian art collector Guido Trevisan, who died last month.
She was appointed OBE in 1994.
Dessa Trevisan, OBE, journalist, was born on November 9, 1924. She died on February 19, 2013, aged 88
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
