Alan Fisher

Best of 2008

It would be easy to pick the election of Barack Obama as the highlight of the year but there was a degree of inevitability about it. Given how badly George Bush has done in his time in charge, it was almost inevitable that any Democrat selected to run would win. The fact that it was such an historic selection is to be applauded. We won't really find out if it was the best event of 2008 until half way through 2009 and he gets the chance to govern. So for me, the best event would have to be the arrest of Radovan Karadzic. As someone who covered the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, I watched as this arrogant doctor conducted the worst atrocities on mainland Europe since the Second World War. The Serbs called it ethnic cleansing, a cleansing in itself of the horrible truth that this was genocide. Discovered living in Belgrade as an alternative therapy guru, when he appeared in the dock in the Hague it was clear that Dragan Dabic was just one haircut and a sharp suit away from being the figure we all recognised and many across the Balkans loathed and feared. A little older, a little greyer but still the same man accused of a litany of war crimes. His trial in the Hague gets underway next year. It'll be down to a Scottish judge if it ends the same year.
 
Worst of 2008
 
In a terrible year financially, it would be easy to pick the human tragedy that follows the disaster in the financial markets as the worst event of the year. But for me that would be the outbreak of another war in Europe. August 2008 saw Russia and Georgia clash over the breakaway Republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The town of Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, became the front line. People, fearing from their lives, cowered in their homes as the bombs dropped. Buildings and lives were destroyed. The fear on the faces of women as they ran from the Russian advance haunts me still as for a moment I shared the chill in the pit of my stomach. And there were the stories of atrocities, of men being murdered, of women being raped, of children being traumatised. In the early days of the 21st-century, it should be hoped that Europe need not see things like this. Perhaps it is too much to ask.
 
 
Book of 2008
 
My favourite book of the year is Watching the Door by Kevin Myers. The memoir of a journalist who finds himself in Belfast almost by accident, it perfectly captures the frightening reality and the black humour of the early years of the troubles. He'd like to paint the place as a hellhole, where murders are routinely carried out on street corners in the name of one cause or another but he makes a lively and engaging story out of the sense of evil he feels lies across the city. His Belfast is not the one I recognise from my time in the city but in saying 'The absence of sense is what makes wars possible' he captures much of what was wrong in Northern Ireland for 30 years.

Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent

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