Page 253 - James Caan - The Real Deal

25 · Kosovo

Now known as Yusuf Islam, Cat is one of the most amazing
people I have ever met, and when he told me about his work I
knew I wanted to be involved. He doesn’t work as part of an
organisation; he just boards a plane, sees what needs to be done
and then gets on and does it. He’d been doing it for twenty years
or more by the time I met him and his results were impressive.
He had been spending a lot of time in Kosovo and Bosnia and
the things he told me about the civil war there were almost beyond
belief. Massacres of entire villages, rape used as a weapon of war:
Europe had let genocide happen on its doorstep and he was doing
everything he could to help these shattered states recover.
My life had been so consumed with business for the past decades
that all I knew of the situation in the Balkans was the headlines.
When he talked to me about the atrocities he had seen first-hand,
I was so moved that I readily agreed to help.
He called me up on a Thursday: ‘I’m going to Kosovo on
Saturday. Do you want to come?’
‘There’s still a war going on.’
‘That’s why I’m going. People are being killed. Children are
being orphaned.’
I thought about it for a moment. Wasn’t this the kind of
involvement I wanted? ‘How do we get there?’
On the one hand I didn’t want to go because I was scared, but
on the other here was a guy who was going to show me how I
could really make a difference. If I didn’t get on that plane with
him I would have felt guilty, fraudulent even, so on Saturday
morning I met Yusuf at Heathrow. It was just the two of us
making the trip: no press, no PAs, no entourage.
There were no direct flights to Kosovo, so we got a flight to
Vienna and from there we could get a plane to Montenegro, and
from there we could make our way overland into neighbouring
Kosovo and the war zone.
We were sitting in the executive lounge waiting for our flight,

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