Focus: The girl who got away

Five years ago the ITN reporter Michael Nicholson brought home an orphan from Bosnia. Did he do the right thing?

NatashaNicholson lives the privileged life of a sporty teenager growing up in the Surrey stockbroker belt: a huge garden attached to an old family house, a swimming-pool, visits to tennis camp to indulge her passion. No doubt she has enjoyed half-term as much as any English girl her age - or perhaps more, for Natasha has more to celebrate than most in Haslemere, her new, genteel home town.

The humdrum pleasures of middle-class life are fruits to be treasured, for they did not come easily to Natasha. She was born Jelena Mihaljcic on 7 October 1982, the illegitimate daughter of a Bosnian woman, who left her, aged five months, at an orphanage in Sarajevo. As in Britain 20 or 30 years ago, an unmarried woman in pre-war Bosnia- Herzegovina was under great social and family pressure to give up her child rather than live openly with the stain of illegitimacy.

The little girl who grew up in the Austro-Hungarian building on a steep hill in Sarajevo changed her name to Natasha, an early attempt, presumably, to rewrite her own history, and a sign, perhaps, of the strength and spirit that was subsequently to attract her saviour. When a television crew, in town to cover the early days of the siege of Sarajevo arrived to shoot a story for ITN's news bulletin, the reporter was most taken with a pretty, feisty little girl at the orphanage.

"Why Natasha?" asked the director of the orphanage, when Michael Nicholson, the ITN journalist, announced his intention of taking a child back home to England. "She shines," he replied. "She doesn't seem to belong here." As the director pointed out, "None of them belong here." But Nicholson, a veteran of wars, tragedy and suffering across three decades and as many continents, had made his decision. Rather than use his journalistic credentials as a vehicle to improve the general situation, he would spirit one of Bosnia's victims to a glorious new life away from the conflict that had engulfed her country and her people.

He arranged a place for Natasha on an evacuation out of Sarajevo, then wrote her name into his passport and flew her to London - without asking his wife, Diana, what she thought of the idea. Once home in Surrey the story was broken by the Sun newspaper and followed up by most of its rivals. Nicholson, and Natasha, who spoke no English, posed for pictures and interviews together: it was a rare feel-good story, a tabloid angle on Bosnia.

THESE events have now found their way on to the cinema screen - and Welcome to Sarajevo, based on Nicholson's book Natasha's Story, is bound to highlight once more the issues surrounding the act of impulsiveness that had Nicholson making, not just reporting, news five years ago.

In the film, which opens in London on 21 November, the central figure of the TV reporter is played (by Stephen Dillane) as someone in his mid- thirties - ie 20 years younger than Nicholson was in real-life. Amid the random brutality of the Bosnian war we see the Nicholson character, moody and troubled, make an attempt to do more than merely report the horror of it all, alighting upon the girl in the orphanage. In the film her name has been changed to Emira, which gives it Muslim overtones. Natasha is more usually Serbian. The makers of Welcome to Sarajevo are anxious for the film to be seen as more than just the Michael Nicholson story, but that's essentially what it is.(He was paid pounds 100,000 for the rights).

Nicholson, the doyen of ITN correspondents, now has a comfortable niche and his pick of stories, colleagues say. The management views him as a star with a high recognition factor. The gossip in the newsroom has him as one of the highest-paid reporters on domestic television, earning about pounds 90,000 a year - or about pounds 5,000 per story, according to those disgruntled at his output. His last foreign assignments were the handover of Hong Kong and the 50th anniversary of Indian independence this summer. But after so long in the field, no doubt he has earned his place in semi- retirement.

One of his great hobbies is tending the 30-acre garden in Haslemere. "If you go away for a month to somewhere really grotty like Rwanda - or in the old days, Bosnia - it's just wonderful to come back to a well-manicured garden," he has said.

He continues to update newspaper audiences on Natasha's progress, quoting from her school report in the summer of 1995: "Natasha is a pleasure to teach ... She is a natural leader and has the respect of all her classmates. She will never be an 'also-ran'." A pupil at her local comprehensive in Haslemere, she is a keen sportswoman and competitor, swimming and playing tennis, basketball and cricket. "She is deliriously happy and so are we," Nicholson says. "Her ambition is to be a tennis coach." She has already won junior titles locally, and has attended courses at Bisham Abbey, the training centre on the banks of the Thames in Buckinghamshire which coaches the cream of the country's young sporting talent. Her future appears to be in England. Only a trace of an accent remains, and she has never been back to Sarajevo. Nicholson remains protective of her: she is not doing any press interviews for the release of Welcome to Sarajevo.

Despite the apparently happy result of Nicholson's intervention, most of his colleagues, especially those who worked in Bosnia, reacted with disapproval to what he had done. Cynics - who none the less cared deeply about the city and its people, and who spent weeks, months, years, living in Sarajevo - were critical of Nicholson for taking a Bosnian child out of her environment, albeit one that was difficult and dangerous.

"Everyone was so cynical. It was just, he's doing that for a book and a film. I don't think that was the motivation, but that's how it was perceived," said one photographer in the city at the time. "He could have just done it and not said a word." Another television colleague argued: "He went for the sentimental 'look at the baby' story." But, said the reporter, there were plenty of people well able to care for children within Sarajevo. What the Bosnians needed, above all, was international intervention to stop the siege.

Some criticism can be attributed to the fact that Nicholson is widely disliked by his colleagues. "Horrible" and "deeply, deeply unpleasant" are a few of the epithets used to describe him. Nicholson himself recognizes that he is not everyone's idea of a good colleague. Of Stephen Dillane's performance in the film, he says: "He's played me to perfection. Bad-tempered and uncooperative."

But there were other reasons for questioning what might seem to be an obvious good deed. Martin Bell MP, Nicholson's great television rival, said last week that he tried to steer clear of "sentimental" reporting partly, he said, because of its selectivity. "Why orphans? Why not the mentally handicapped?"

What about the evacuation of children from a city at war, though? "I felt very ambivalent about it," Bell said. "You were taking them out of their home city. There was a case for evacuating and then returning them when the war was over."

Certainly the aid agencies were deadagainst adoptions during wartime - they are illegal in the former Yugoslavian republics, all of which saw families reunited years after the Second World War had torn them apart. And for the Bosnian government, fighting an enemy whose avowed intent was to wipe its people out, the adoption of children by foreigners was especially sensitive: some saw it as ethnic cleansing by the well- meaning.

In his book Nicholson repeats, contemptuously, the advice of the British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering, an umbrella group: "A war zone is not the right place to think about fostering or adoption. It encourages people to think of children as commodities ... It is best for all children to live with their own families, in their own culture and community." This is bureaucratic nonsense to Nicholson, who writes: "But there is no culture in death."

But perhaps the professionals have a point: their aim was not merely to thwart decent Britons who wanted to help suffering children, but to help the children to grow up knowing their roots. "For some children, the only chance of survival is inter-country adoption," says Leigh Chambers of the BAAF. In such cases, "one of the things we recommend is that you immerse yourself in the culture of that child's country ... so the child grows up British but aware they are Bosnian also. There's no reason why they should not be proud of that."

BUT Natasha has transformed herself into an English teenager, according to Nicholson. "She has successfully blocked out Sarajevo. She no longer asks for old friends, she has deliberately mislaid her own language; she has forgotten her past, she has decided it was not a life worth remembering. Only one incident, as I remember, caused a little sadness and a few tears. Natasha's class had been given a project, the subject of which was 'Heredity'. Every boy and girl were told to bring in family photographs to form a family tree and to write a history of their family. Natasha was excused because she had none."

But indeed she does have relatives living in Bosnia and Croatia. Perhaps Welcome to Sarajevo will help in the future should Natasha decide, like so many adopted children, to explore her heritage.