| Bringing the Spotlight |
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| Written by Josh Nathan-Kazis | |||||
| Tuesday, 05 February 2008 | |||||
Roy Gutman on Journalists and War Criminals
The idea was, let’s look at war not in terms journalists ordinarily do, which is the political origins of the war, let’s look at the war in terms of how it’s being fought. And that goes to the [distinction between] jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Jus ad bellum [law that governs when a country can start a war] is what everybody debates all the time, but jus in bello [law that governs how a war can be fought] is this thing that only the military has any knowledge of, and the International Red Cross and journalists dabble in, but badly. And frankly, I had an example. In the war in Croatia, which preceded the war in Bosnia, I came upon a hospital which was totally destroyed. I never researched who did it or under what circumstances. I would have had a huge story if I had done that. I didn’t realize until years later. I came upon this hospital quite by accident. The whole place was reduced to a basement ward. Everything else aboveground had been destroyed You assumed that it was standard practice. I assumed that this was something terrible, but there you go. Let’s go out and interview individuals and get their stories, and I could mention the hospital in passing to set the context. But if you had framed it as a war crime… If I had done my homework, I would have asked the hospital people exactly when it happened, under what circumstances, was anyone inside the hospital firing out from there, using it as a military object, and then I would have gone to the other side and I could have carried it straight up to the Chief of Staff. I discovered afterwards that the same thing had happened to five hospitals within about two months. This was a pattern not just of breaking the law, but of testing the reaction. And I think it may happen in war routinely, but if we are not there really early on and watching for this, we’ll miss all the signs. Croatia was a test case for Bosnia. The Serbs saw they could get away with things like this in Bosnia. So the concept of the Crimes of War Project is that when journalists expose war crimes, they are creating boundaries that the international community sometimes will not enforce otherwise. You’re right. If you put the spotlight on something in a timely way, suddenly that puts it right on the tables of the foreign ministers of the world. And sometimes even the presidents. That story would have, had I written it. And yet, nobody wrote it! Nobody knew the rules, although the rules are quite accessible. Well, they are accessible in theory. They were drafted by lawyers and military lawyers for their own use and not for us. So [the notion of the Crimes of War Project] was to take this very obscure law and popularize it. Do Israeli and Palestinian journalists covering the conflict there have an understanding of the laws of war? We have an Arabic edition out, although not a Hebrew edition. I think that the Palestinians have used the laws of war where they could to defend themselves against a superior power, namely Israel. I think Israel’s attitude to the Geneva Conventions is a very interesting one. They say they are observers, but they have excluded the 1967 conquests as coming under the Fourth Convention. The explanation is that it was not anybody’s territory prior to then, so therefore they can’t say it was conquered. That’s a position that no other country accepts, and I think it’s caused great damage. What effects has the book had since its original publication in 1999? It’s always anecdotal, because nobody ever tells you what they do with the book, but in Chechnya there was a practice by the Russian army of shooting the wounded. This is a systematic war crime, and Maura Reynolds of the [Los Angeles Times] did a terrific piece about it [in September of 2000]. She found the practice, saw that it was occurring in a routine and systematic way, talked to the victims, and then went to the Russian army and asked the questions. The Russian army said, this is a violation and it’s going to stop. Did she quote the book? No. But I did have a feeling we were there. It seems clear that the United States has no immediate intention of joining the International Criminal Court. I wonder if that concerns you. It seems like the concept of your project doesn’t rely international institutions to deal with war crimes. And see, that’s what makes [Crimes of War 2.0] different than any book by any lawyer and most academic experts on the subject. As journalists, we are not wedded to one institution or another... The reason this law came about is that the opinions of mankind seem to be that some things should not be permitted. As to who is to prevent them from being permitted, public opinion can encourage governments to do things, sometimes international public opinion can do it, sometimes internal public opinion can do it. We were really careful not to endorse one method or another… The major thing about the laws of war is not that they’re out to punish the culprit. The major aim of the laws of war is prevent recurrence of the crime. For my money, the spotlight alone is just as good as any instance of law or any court. If the spotlight works and abuse ends, fine. That’s the object.
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On August 2nd, 1992, journalist Roy Gutman published a story in the pages of Long Island’s Newsday that described the murder of thousands of Bosnian prisoners at a Serb-run concentration camp in a town called Omarska. It was among the first accounts of the camps to hit the international press, and its impact was major. Within a few days of publication, camps were shut down and prisoners freed. “That’s as good as it gets in our business,” says Gutman, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting from Bosnia. And yet, he says, “The war went on for three years after that. Nobody should be patting themselves on the back.”