Kurt Schork was born on 25 January 1947 in Washington, D.C.. He graduated from Jamestown College in 1969, and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar later that year — at the same time as the future United States President Bill Clinton. Schork worked as a property developer, a political adviser and then chief of staff for the New York City Transit Authority before becoming a journalist. Kurt Schork was lured to journalism late in his life, when at the age of 43 he realized his dream was to become a foreign correspondent. “He was at a stage when he decided he just had to do it,” says his brother, John Schork. “And if he was going to be a journalist, he wouldn’t do things by half-measure. He was into ice climbing and he was an avid and expert skier.”
For much of his career he chose to be a freelance journalist. He was passionate about his job, and early in his journalism career he wrote, “War reporting is a privilege. After three years, the grime and gore of combat, the dreadful logic of ethnic hatred are no longer abstractions for me. More important, every day I see the grace and dignity of ordinary people trying to survive under extraordinary circumstances.” Schork was the only correspondent to remain in Bosnia during almost four years of war and made Sarajevo his base until 1997. Kurt Schork covered numerous conflicts and wars, including The Balkans, Iraq, Chechnya, Iraqi Kurdistan, Sri Lanka and East Timor.
If it was extremity which drew Kurt to Kurdistan and Bosnia, it was the human and moral imperatives which made him stay. “He was not a religious person but for him honesty and morality were always absolutes, he had a sense of fairness,” says his brother. Kurt arrived in Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and stayed until 1997, the longest-serving foreign correspondent of the Bosnian war. He did not think it was right to take weekends off, or holidays, while the population had no way of leaving. He would wake up before dawn most days and run through the shell-scarred streets, and usually finish his morning round-up of the night’s developments by the time most of the press corps were getting up. In a book, The Washington Post’s veteran front man Jonathan C. Randal describes the time when he and Kurt were traveling in Kurdistan and came under sniper attack. Jumping from the car, they crawled to the side of the road to take cover as bullets whistled overhead. After a half-hour, Kurt lost patience. “Abruptly he jumped in the car, motioned for us to follow, and with the mastery of a Prohibition getaway-car wheelman, reversed at high speed until we were out of trouble.”
But the mark of his superiority as a journalist was the fact that the story never came before the people. Joel Brand, a US journalist also in Sarajevo for most of the war, recalled eating pizza with Kurt one day when shells began to fall on a neighborhood nearby. “My first reaction was to drive away from the shells, his first reaction was to drive towards the shells,” he says. They came across a pile of wounded and bleeding civilians and Kurt immediately jumped out and started loading them into the car. A group of French soldiers arrived in an armored vehicle, took one look and drove away, but Kurt – with no protection (he believed wearing a flak jacket was an insult to the Bosnians who had none) – insisted on getting everyone who could be helped to hospital.
“Above all else, he was a humanitarian. He knew better than most journalists how to walk the fine line between doing what he had to do to be a reporter and doing what he needed to do to help people,” says Joel Brand.
“Kurt stood for everything that I wanted to stand for.” Malcolm Brabant, the award-winning BBC correspondent who also covered the Bosnian war, says simply, “Nobody compared to him in the slightest.”
Kurt fell in love first with Sarajevo, then with a former Reuters colleague, a Sarajevan Sabina Ćosić, who became his life partner. Over five years of nearly nonstop coverage, his voice doggedly exposed the moral equivocation of the Western allies. In time, the U.N. daily press briefing became a jousting match between Kurt and the official spokesmen sent out to claim success even as the region descended into murderous chaos.
He left Sarajevo with Sabina in 1997 and settled in the US. They moved to his hometown of Washington DC, where he spent months lovingly renovating the property they had bought. His plan was to go to Sierra Leone in May of 2000, while waiting to cover the Summer Olympics in Australia. At the time, Kurt was still tinkering with a much-delayed book about Bosnia, which remains unpublished. It would have been far from the first work on the subject. Those who knew him and his work had no doubt that it would have been fair, accurate, and funny. He left DC on 9 May 2000. Two weeks later, he was killed in Sierra Leone on 24 May 2000.
In 2000, Schork went to cover the civil war in Sierra Leone, in western Africa. On 24 May, he and three other news personnel “set out in two vehicles with an army escort on a daily trip to pick up news from the war front.” Everything appeared safe, but then they heard gunfire up ahead. Suddenly, they were ambushed by rebels 50 miles from Freetown who may have thought the vehicles belonged to someone else. Kurt was shot in the head and died instantly. His colleague, Miguel Gil Moreno, an Associated Press cameraman and producer who was also among the finest in his field, was killed too. Yannis Behrakis, a Reuters photographer and Mark Chisholm, a Reuters cameraman, were both wounded. All four knew each other from the Bosnian war and during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s. They had become a ‘band of brothers’. Schork’s death was a great shock to all who knew him and to those who read his news stories.
“For me, it’s very difficult finding the right words to describe the legendary Kurt Schork. However, what I can say is that Kurt was undoubtedly the finest war correspondent of our generation. He risked all by reporting from war-torn counties that very few dared to go. He died doing so. In fact, he died in May twenty-two years ago. I remember that day well — I was sitting right beside him.” says Mark Chisholm.
I still have vivid and painful memories of what happened on 24 May 2000.
I remember going down a road to investigate reports that the Sierra Leone Army was pushing back rebels near Rogberri Junction. I remember peering anxiously out the passenger window and I remember noticing that things were eerily quiet. There were no villagers, animals or soldiers walking along the roadside. It was completely dead. It just didn’t feel right. I remember looking at Kurt. And then glancing at Yannis. “Do they feel uneasy too? Or am I just being paranoid?”
I remember thinking that, from experience, I knew that Kurt and Yannis would speak their minds if they felt something was amiss. However, such unease was rare. And on this occasion, I remember wondering if I was merely being paranoid about the whole situation.
“Should I speak my mind?!?” I remember wondering. I looked at Kurt and then at Yannis once more. They both seemed fine. Kurt must have been driving between 20-30 kilometers per hour as he eased our Mercedes into a gentle left-hand bend along the main road. I remember feeling unnerved and thinking, “Something is not right. Something is just not right.” And then it happened! There was a sudden explosion of gunfire on the left-hand side of the car.
“Ambush!” I screamed. As I did so, bullets ripped through the car, smashing windows and sending glass splinters into the car’s interior. There were bullets and shrapnel. There was flying debris as bullets tore through the vehicle’s bodywork. I remember my first reaction was to crouch down as several bullets whizzed past my head. Terrified – I yelled, “GO-GO-GO, Kurt! GO!” I screamed as loud as I could to make myself heard above the terrifying din of gunfire, exploding shrapnel and tearing metal. “Kurt! GO-GO-GO!” I screamed again as I noticed the car starting to slow rather than speed up. My life flashed before my eyes as our attackers sprayed our car with automatic rifle fire. The rebels were just meters from me.
And then I saw Kurt. His head was leaning over in the direction of the driver’s window at an awkward tilt. Kurt’s eyes were wide open, and his hands clenched the steering wheel. Kurt appeared lifeless! He was dead! Dead!“
“At first, I couldn’t comprehend this fact. I refused to believe it. It just couldn’t be! My shouts and screams had fallen upon deaf ears. Kurt was already gone. Such was the ferocity and intensity of the attack that Kurt hadn’t even had a split-second to react. I thought then – as I think now – that one of the first bullets fired at us had struck Kurt in the head. He died instantly. That is what I remember of that day near Rogberri Junction and Kurt’s death. I also remember hiding in the African bush and then bringing Kurt and Miguel’s bodies back to Freetown – with Yannis Behrakis alongside me. I also remember my thoughts when I first saw Kurt’s lifeless corpse. “Kurt, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I let this happen to you,” I remember whispering to myself. “No one deserves such a senseless and undignified ending to their life!”
I remember that, as I stared at Kurt’s body, it was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that my long-time friend, the legendary Kurt Schork, now lay dead before me. It is still hard for me to come to terms with today – twenty-two years on. Not only was Kurt a colleague, but I also loved and admired the man! We had been through so much together in so many conflicts. I found it impossible to grasp that this was how it ended – on a pot-holed, broken, tarmac road in war-torn Africa.
RIP Kurt – and Miguel – never forgotten!”
Mark Chisholm
“When I first came to Sarajevo in 1994 there was one name that was on everybody’s lips – Kurt Schork. He worked for Reuters, as did I. However, he was on the text side, and I was with Reuters TV and our offices were on different sides of the city. As such, I only really saw him at the UN briefings – and there he was a formidable force – as he was in the whole of his reporting.” says Glen Felgate, Kurt’s colleague. “For me, it was in Kosovo that I really got to know him. I remember one day our Ukrainian camera colleague Taras had been attacked by Serbs in Pristina. I arrived just as the attackers broke his camera and were kicking him to the ground. I managed to pull him away – but the camera was broken in two. It was an unnerving experience and when we all went to dinner that night with Kurt there were carloads of Kosovo Serbs parading around town waving Serbian flags and chanting Serb slogans. Kurt could tell I was nervous. “Hey, don’t get spooked… you’re the anchor,” Kurt said quietly as he sidled up to me. The words were innocuous enough, but to me, they meant everything. In one sentence, Kurt had replaced my fear with assurance. For some strange reason, I felt that was the moment that this bastion of no-nonsense journalism accepted me.”
After all, I had never really worked as closely with Kurt in Sarajevo as some others had. Although Kurt might have said that I was the anchor – I wasn’t. I was merely the coordinator. It was from Kurt that we took our editorial lead and moral guidance. It was a mantle he wore so well in Bosnia amongst the text journalists and one that we were happy to let him don in Kosovo too. After all, he was the most experienced and astute of us all. I will never forget those words and that reassurance. So much so, that I have entitled a chapter in my memoir (which is an unofficial tribute to Kurt and our dear friend Miguel Gil Moreno – who also sadly died in Sierra Leone on 24 May 2000) – “Don’t get spooked… you’re the anchor.” I felt I was just getting to know Kurt when he died in Sierra Leone in a rebel ambush. I arrived in Freetown just 24 hours before the attack and identified Kurt and Miguel’s bodies with a few other comrades. It is a tragedy that lives with me to this day – twenty-two years on. The world is a much lesser place without both Kurt and Miguel. RIP my dear friends.”
Glen Felgate
Bosnia’s Independent Union of Journalists initiated the action in honor of Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork and Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of the AP. In June 2000, Sarajevo government officials awarded them Bosnian passports posthumously. Their passports were given to Reuters and AP representatives by officials of the Sarajevo cantonal interior ministry. Schork, a U.S. citizen, and Gil Moreno de Mora, a Spaniard, were widely recognized for their reporting on Bosnia’s bloody war. The journalist union’s chief, Mehmed Husić, said the two men were true friends of Bosnia. He added: “They were really the people who have said the truth about Bosnia in the times when it was the most difficult and most important thing.” Kurt’s partner Sabina had obtained a Bosnian driver’s license for him during the war, as his US license had expired. Kurt was incredibly proud of the license and showed it to everyone in the US and used it to rent cars when traveling in Europe. Sabina discussed with local officials the possibility of Kurt applying for a Bosnian passport for him, but was rejected.
Part of the road from Sarajevo airport into the city was renamed in memory of Kurt Schork. His Street connects the airport to the boulevard nicknamed “Sniper Alley” by foreign reporters during the 1992-95 war, when Serb sharpshooters made Sarajevans run a perilous daily gauntlet. “During 1,425 days of the siege, he showed the whole world the truth about the war, the heroism and the scale of the suffering of the citizens of Sarajevo,” a plaque reads. Among those at the renaming ceremony was the mother of Admira Ismić, a girl killed with her sweetheart Boško Brkić while the 25-year-olds were trying to escape the city. Their bodies lay for days in no man’s land. Schork’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ account of their tragic story was among his most moving reports from Sarajevo. You can read Kurt Schork’s signature dispatch from siege of Sarajevo here.
The Kurt Schork Memorial Award was established ‘to recognize freelance journalists who make a critical contribution to international understanding, but whose work is often overlooked.’ Also, the newsroom at Schork’s alma mater, Jamestown College, was named in his honor. Many great people have reflected on his life and achievements, one of them Martin Bell, himself a veteran reporter, said of Kurt: ‘He did more than file dispatches, which he did faster and better than anyone, he helped the helpless, he rescued the wounded and became the conscience in residence of the Sarajevo press corps.” A webpage dedicated to the memory of Kurt and articles written in the aftermath of his death can be found here: www.ksmemorial.com
“Does it make any difference what kind of war you get killed covering?” asked The Washington Post’s veteran front man Jonathan C. Randal. “Probably not. It’s a high–war correspondence. I keep fighting the cliche that Kurt died doing what he liked to do.”
“He was dedicated and brave and brilliant, and he had a deep strain of wisdom and conscience,” recalled CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“I can’t remember a time when I was not in awe of him,” said Julian Borger of Britain’s Guardian newspaper, who, like many, met Kurt in Sarajevo, where he was a mentor to young journalists.
“He came to war reporting late, at 43, an age when many of us are thinking of giving it up, and became known as a reporter who wrote precisely what he saw with a rare combination of physical and moral courage. He did not believe in crusades and regarded his job as a privilege. For Schork the job of war reporting was a craft, in which the greatest skill was to bear witness and come back alive. But war is no respecter of professionalism. In this bloody numbers game the more firefights you see, the more likely it is that eventually you will be killed, wounded or damaged psychologically.”
Anthony Loyd in his book ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’, a memoir of war and a dead friend.
KURT SCHORK was born on 25 January 1947 in Washington, D.C., USA.
He was killed in an ambush on 24 May 2000 in Sierra Leaone.
Special thanks to Sabina Ćosić, Mark Chisholm & Glen Felgate
www.ksmemorial.com & www.ksmfund.org & Julian Borger
Sources: www.theguardian.com www.reuters.com www.apnews.com www.washingtonpost.com
Cover photo by Thomas James Hurst
Music used: ‘Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
© 2022 Sniper Alley. All Rights Reserved.
