Crimes of War

A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Panel Two: War Crimes: The Elusive Story/How do You Use the Law?

Moderator/Discussant: Eugene Roberts, University of Maryland, School of Journalism

a)The Major Story that Usually Gets Away
Roy Gutman, International Security Reporter, Newsday, President, Crimes of War Project

EUGENE ROBERTS: As you know, the topic is the elusive story of war crimes. A secondary or an important part of this is how do we use international humanitarian law to cover our obligations to the public better.

Roy Gutman literally wrote the book on much of this, and we'll turn now to Roy.

ROY GUTMAN: Thanks, Gene. Well, you see the book, in a way distills what I and colleagues with the help of some great legal minds have distilled. It is interesting in the laws of war for the sake of journalists and everybody else.

I wanted just to say a little bit about how it came about because these projects like doing a book, as my wife can testify and she's somewhere out here, just is over a period of time and all of a sudden you decide you really have to do it.

In my case, it was 1995, so just five years ago, I had run into a man named Ed Joseph, who some people in the audience will know was a civil affairs officer for the United Nations during the conflict in Bosnia. I'm sorry to bring up another Bosnia example, but it was rather formative. And Ed was in the town of Bihac, which was one of the so-called safe areas, during 1994, a very tense period. And the civil affairs advisor advises the military commander on legal matters, civilian matters and so on. And in this case they were faced with an imminent attack by the Bosnia Serbs on the town. And an attack there would have caused an immense slaughter I think at the end of the day. There would have been real fierce battles in the streets. But a lot of civilians would have been killed.

And Ed somehow convinced the commander who was a Canadian, and he got other people in the UN apparatus to support him, that one building in that town was going to be the first one attacked and that was going to be the hospital. And he somehow convinced the military commander that the UN had to block that attack. All they had was Bangladesh forces in light armored vehicles. They really were in no position to stop an attack. And the UN really didn't stop an attack really anywhere during the whole conflict.

But somehow Ed convinced him. The commander had said to them, "Look, why should we? This is really not our job. Our job is to deter attack but not prevent an attack and not to counter one." And Ed said, "Well, they're going to come in the following way. They're going to come in through the east end of town where there's a major hospital. They will probably destroy the hospital en route and hundreds of patients within the hospital. And the fact is that the hospital is the most protected" -- and the commander said, "Well, that's just another building."

And Ed replied, "The hospital is the most protected building under international law. It is given all sorts of immunity. It cannot be attacked. And you can't simply have your forces here watching as it comes under attack." And he got the agreement within the UN apparatus. And the Bangladeshies blocked the attack.

And actually, the hospital, by strategic luck or coincidence, was the entrance to the town. And by the way, it's in the book in a different form. I didn't give his name under the article. The article is called "The U.N. and the Geneva Conventions." But Ed’s action that day basically saved the hospital and saved the town and saved the people.

Now, under the motto that "no good deed goes unpunished" Ed later went to the UN and informed them what he had done. And the legal office came back and said, "You must never cite the Geneva Conventions in describing and trying to get peacekeepers to take action."

And the reason given by the UN legal office is that the United Nations is not a party to the Geneva Conventions. And UN peacekeepers do not come under the Geneva Conventions. Therefore, they have no obligation to observe them or see to it that they are observed.

And this sounded like the most selfish kind of argument that one could ever make. And I started going to the UN. I talked to Kofi Annan and I talked to the International Committee of the Red Cross and I discovered that it's really an amazing anomaly. The Geneva Conventions and all of international humanitarian law in general was not taken by the United Nations as applying to it or to its peacekeepers. And that the only times that they did apply humanitarian law to their own forces was when they reached an agreement, usually some kind of a written report with the International Red Cross prior to sending in blue helmets.

But what Ed's story made me think of was my own experience in covering hospitals and other aspects of war earlier on in the Balkan conflict.

I thought back to 1991 before the Bosnian war began in the run-up to the Bosnian war, for one, the war in Croatia. And I had been to a place called Vinkovci in eastern Slavonia near Vukovar, visited a hospital which was completely demolished. Every window was broken. Every piece of equipment was destroyed. Every ambulance had been targeted. Every Red Cross had basically been turned into a target.

And I went into this place. And it is so disorienting for a reporter to arrive in a place like this and you just try to figure out what is the story I can tell out of this? And I told a perfectly legitimate story out of this of what was going on because the hospital was still operating in the basement.

And I did a nice story about the members of a tank crew, a multi-ethnic tank crew, and they were all lying in adjacent beds and how they were being cared for and cared for properly. But I didn't actually write about the hospital itself except in passing. I just said it's part of the tragedy of the war that this hospital had been targeted. Well, it is part of the tragedy of the war but it was also a war crime.

And after talking to Ed Joseph I decided to go back and look over that story again and also sort of re-research the situation of the hospital. It turns out, and I talked to people in the International Red Cross, it turns out that five hospitals had been targeted at that very time. And it was almost like a systematic assault on hospitals.

Had I -- and I can fault myself on missing a story, but so did everybody else -- had any of us done the most basic investigative journalism which is to say you go from side to side. You find out what the story is on the people who are receiving the attack and then you go to the people who are attacking. And we could do that at that stage. I mean, it was a bit of a 100 or 200 mile drive sometimes. But you could go back and forth.

I could have done the story not just about Vinkovci Hospital but about the fact that there was a pattern of attacks on hospitals. And it just struck me that this was the kind of knowledge -- and it's kind of the intellectual category that I was not doing in doing my coverage. And I thought that in general reporters haven't been doing this very much because we haven't been covering wars where violations are almost like the essence of the conflict.

And the interesting thing is that this was like an advanced warning of much worse things to come. And the fact that we did not put the spotlight on in a very good way or really substantially at all, it seems to me that it sent a whole variety of signals.

First of all, we missed a story. Secondly, those who were doing the destruction were doing so assured in full knowledge of what they were doing and of the violations that they were committing. And clearly they took a signal from this namely that the coast was clear and they could carry on and, in fact, that they could expand.

Now, I think times have changed. And this last previous panel made clear just how far the law has come, how far the knowledge of the law has come and also I think among the media how much better we are informed today.

I'll just give you an example. Steve Coll, who will be speaking at lunch today, has done an article in the [Washington] Post Magazine about Sierra Leone. An absolutely definitive piece which we have put on the tables downstairs. In last week's Washington Post there was a very interesting article by Dan Williams out of Chechnya in which he described what the rebel forces were doing there, the Chechans, in killing Russian soldiers after they were captured, actually massacring them, slaughtering them, executing them was a war crime. And he mentioned that actually both sides have thrown out the laws of war in Chechnya.

So in other words, the media is much more sensitized now than it was eight or ten years ago. And very interestingly, also the institutions have changed. The UN, for example, last August made a permanent agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross on the applicability of humanitarian law to UN peacekeepers.

In fact, now the UN has gone from a position where humanitarian law does not apply to us to the point that the secretary general of the UN last September after Kosovo started almost annunciating a kind of a principle that you can have humanitarian interventions that may even seem to be counter to the UN charter based on violations of humanitarian law.

So things have come a long way. But it seems to me that in some ways we can still miss the big story or we can miss a very interesting story if we don't inform ourselves better about the rules. And I'm not saying that it's the job of journalists with all respect to olara Otunnu, who I think is doing the Lord's work in terms of trying to get implementation. I don't think it's our job to implement anything. I don't think it's our job even to advocate new rules or to take sides.

But what we can do as reporters is to use the standards that are out there including the norms that Olara was mentioning last night and this morning and use these as a kind of a tool to go to the authorities, the military authorities, the political authorities and say, "This is your standard. And this is what I've observed. Can you please explain how there can be a total discrepancy and put our facts together?" And I think that that can be the basis of better war reporting in the future.

Thank you.

Roy Gutman, Bio.
International Security Reporter, Newsday, President, Crimes of War Project

Eugene Roberts, Bio.
University of Maryland School of Communication