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John Owen: Good evening everyone my name is John Owen and on behalf of the City University Department of Journalism and director Rod Allen welcome to this official launch of the Crimes of War European project. We are delighted to have here tonight some frontline journalists who have distinguished themselves around the world and who have proven that knowledge of the Geneva Conventions and what constitutes a war crime can inform one’s reporting. Tonight we are going to talk about the application of the knowledge of the crimes of war to frontline journalism. To remind us that there are also photojournalists who use what they have learned from the Crimes of War book and other knowledge we are going to look at the photographs of the British photojournalist Gary Knight a member of Seven. This will be a presentation from his new book Evidence. We are going to look at Gary’s presentation and reflect on the role of photojournalism and see what in the past has, in one of the many sad conflicts, constituted a crime of war. (Audience views Gary Knight’s presentation.) John Owen: No journalist has done more to help increase knowledge about crimes of war and the Geneva Conventions than Roy Gutman. Roy Gutman is an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Bosnia. It was Roy Gutman whose reporting drove reluctant US foreign policy to do something about Bosnia. In David Halberstam’s book War in a Time of Peace, Halberstam singles out Roy Gutman for making the State Department pay attention to what was going on in Bosnia at a time when there was no specific policy for that region. Roy Gutman has continued his reporting not only in Bosnia but more recently with Newsweek in Afghanistan. In 1999 he decided to form the Crimes of War Project. He has built it from a small and somewhat unknown organization that lobbied on behalf of war reporting to an international organisation with its center piece being this excellent book Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. This book is on sale here at the bookshop in City University and is now available in six languages. Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know has become a walking companion to reporters around the world helping them interpret the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law. Roy Gutman is now a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and he continues to devote a huge amount of his time to the Crimes of War Project. It is with real pleasure that I present to you Roy Gutman Roy Gutman: Thank you John for organising this tonight along with Duncan and Adriane and other friends of this project. I am glad to have it described as an international organisation, as we are pretty small in terms of the number of individuals who are making this happen. But what really makes this project possible is the power of the idea at the centre of it. The simple idea that drives our organization is that war is a terrible thing but there is one thing worse: the crimes that are carried out under the cover of war. We have the notion that it is the job of journalists to remove that cover and to expose these events in war that are themselves worse than war. It is not just journalists that we direct this to because it is possible in a conflict situation that missionaries will spot these violations, human rights observers, aid workers, teachers, and other civilians. The law that we thought needed to be brought to the public is something that has been around for a very long time. In some forms it has been around for more that a century and half, certainly since the US Civil War when the Lieber Code was drafted at the direction of Abraham Lincoln to try to ensure that the Northern troops did not commit such atrocities against the South that it would be impossible to have a union again after the war was over. And in fact that is in part the motivating factor behind what is called Humanitarian Law and the Laws of Armed Conflict. After a war ends, if one seeks to allow society to knit itself together again, then the crimes that were committed under the cover of war need to be addressed. If they are not actually addressed in real time during the conflict or in the immediate aftermath, they will fester, sour, grow, and become a cancer in the society, and then very often there is a further war that follows. It’s a very practical notion. Journalists do not have the objective, certainly speaking from myself, of having a specific criminal behind bars, even though one would like to. In the case of Slobodan Milosevic, Gary Knight’s superb documentary shows why he is on trial and what the case is on him. Gary Knight is illustrating the role of a photographer in a war, which it is in reporting the events and documenting them. What is done by governments afterwards is not always something we can effect and control; it is their job. The only thing we can hope for in our project is that we can do our job as journalists. I will tell you John Owen has shown some of his classes this morning a film produced by the Crimes of War Project. It sates that one of the most important aspects for anyone who tries to cover this field is to recognise that we are fallible. I can think of an example in my own case in the early set of Balkan wars in Croatia where I missed a story because I did not know the rules. I did not realise that hospitals must not be attacked and that the moment you see a hospital destroyed is the moment that you as a journalist have got to start asking questions about what happened. I have no excuse in that frankly my colleagues also missed the story but that does not give any of us an excuse. Instead we can try to learn from our own failings and previous coverage. The laws of armed conflict are a set of rules that until we did our book was very inaccessible to reporters and the general public. It was drafted for lawyers working for governments and working for military establishments, very well meaning solid in content but totally inaccessible to you or to us. So what we tried to do was to make this interesting and dramatic and again I come back to Gary Knight’s photos, some of which are in this book. Both what we do as print journalists and as photojournalists is to bring these violations alive, to document them to prove that they happened, and as I say that is when we have done our job. There are about 150 articles in the book and 90 authors including some of the world’s greatest. Following the publication of our book we started up a website to try to pick up where the book left off. Clearly there is great interest in wars and wars are not going out of style. There is a lot of worry around the world and in the US about the American government and its intentions both in Iraq and in Afghanistan and what we do as journalists covering the US government. Speaking as a DC based correspondent, I believe we should be holding their feet to the fire at all times on all issues. We do not have to do this out of any animosity for the US government or any distrust, but just the usual skepticism. The standards of rules of armed conflict actually give you such a good set of questions to ask and are really such a useful tool that I can only recommend. We did a story in Newsweek this year on Guantanamo and the detainees there and I think we pretty well demonstrated in that story that at least half a dozen out of the 600, a small number but a real number, there cannot be a case against them. We asked the question of the US government why are you detaining these people since there is no evidence that they are combatants or associates with Al-Qaeda? In fact, we can demonstrate that there is a group of six Kuwaitis that were captured in Pakistan sold for a bounty to the Pakistan army, turned over to the US government and each of whom has written letters in which it is pretty clear that they were maybe hapless individuals but not combatants, so why are you holding these people? I can tell you that I have put this question repeatedly to the government and I can tell you that I have had no response but this is a very typical experience in journalism that we will experience even in a great democracy like the US. At certain times the door closes and you are excluded from even basic information and governments try to avoid accountability. All we can do in that situation is ask questions and keep on asking questions, formulate the best possible questions and put them before the public because the public at the end of the day is going to bring the pressure; but it does not always happen right away and the story we wrote in June has had in fact probably minimal impact. A few months later we did a story in about the killings of prisoners who surrendered at the end of the conflict in Kunduz. A number of them, maybe several hundred maybe a larger number were killed, suffocated in containers by one of the Northern Alliance warlords on what should have been the way to prison. Again, all we can do as journalists in this particular case is find the crime, document it, present the information to the government and to those we think might be responsible, get their comment, and when there is no comment publish, and then keep on asking the question until you get an answer. Knowledge of the rules allows you to say: wait a minute you are a party to this convention, you signed it, you promised to abide by it, you promised to uphold it, you promised to see to it that others uphold it so could you please explain what your forces were doing in that situation. Were they upholding it or were they looking the other way? That question is still open. At the Crimes of War Project we have a good book in many different languages, we have a 1st class website, so now we want to try taking advantage of what I think is real genuine interest here in England but really throughout most of the rest of the world, to offer training possibilities so that journalists can acquire a kit of tools and make use of them. I would hope that you would not all wind up individually as journalists or as others having to cover conflicts, these are not things that you would wish on people. But war is part of the real world and we as journalists have the obligation to put the spotlight on violations in conflict and also in our daily lives, violations of law. If you do wind up covering conflict we hope that you do have this bag of tools with you. We would like to do training both here in England and in other countries to that purpose. In every conflict zone, we want to somehow encourage that local people be they Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), be they journalists, nurses, be they missionaries or local clergy they also see the laws of armed conflict and humanitarian law theirs and that they take ownership and see to it. Sometimes only governments can implement this law, but the only way governments ever work is if we remind them of their obligations to up hold the law. Tonight we’re really lucky to have one of the best British/US journalists, Janine di Giovanni, who has just come back from the Ivory Coast. Janine can tell you about so many conflicts, I lose count of the number she has covered. What I have to tell you is really important about Janine is that she really watches for the facts and reports them and it isn’t as if it always gets into print. I can tell you my own story, in the Balkan conflicts my editors in the year 1992 when I told them the worst things imaginable were happening in southern Europe and they seemed to foretell even worse things happening, that their basic attitude was "we’re not interested, that story does not really get our attention, would you please go on and do other things". I think Janine can tell you similar stories and any journalist can, that’s the nature of covering international politics and of covering foreign conflicts. I can also tell you that any one of us who tries to reflect on the events of the last year since the attacks on the World Trade Center we have to ask ourselves "what led up to that, what came before it?" This is really the subject I am working on now in my sabbatical year because frankly conflicts, and I am speaking specifically of the Afghan civil war, lead to far worse things than they appear to contain at the moment you are looking at them. Some conflicts lead to intervention, like in Kosovo when all of NATO intervened, and there was no specific thing but there was a threat of an enormous refugee outflow of 2million people, it was a preventive intervention. In the case of Afghanistan we can see that a conflict that was going on for years and where the western countries paid no attention it was like a swamp, a monster grew in the swamp and this was Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda people and they really weren’t spotted during that conflict. Other conflicts lead to war crimes and crimes against humanity that are really systematic and widespread and even to genocide, we saw this in Rwanda and we saw this in Bosnia and other conflicts just lead to bigger conflicts. Nobody in his right mind will urge you to go out and seek your conflict, this is something you approach very cautiously. We need everyone to be trained to the maximum and aware to the maximum of the tools. But conflict is a part of the world we live in and we should stop taking the attitude that some conflicts do not matter because they are small and far away and they seem contained, there is no such thing as a conflict that can be contained, every conflict eventually spills over and has an impact that is far worse than we imagined at the time. So while our politicians may argue that, we as journalists and members of the public should not accept it and we should basically find some way to put the spotlight on conflict and the violations of the laws of armed conflict and there is a small chance in some cases that it might lead to some small improvement. I should say that Tony Borden is here from Institute of War and Peace Reporting who has done an amazing job of uncovering the smallest of conflicts and made them part of everyday coverage and that’s the kind of thing that’s made a big difference in the difference in the consciousness especially in Britain and Europe and I think frankly you are well ahead of us in the US in the consciousness of these conflicts. John Owen: Thanks Roy Gutman, I want to thank Janine for the effort she’s made to get here tonight, she went through an incredibly difficult time to get here. A couple of days ago she emailed me this: Greetings from the Ivory Coast, what a mess this place is. It reminds me all too much of Yugoslavia circa 1990 with all the nationalism and ethnic cleansing, how sad the world does not give a damn. Yesterday I saw government troops taking off prisoners somewhere and tried to find a representative from International Committee of the Red Cross to give them the prisoners names, there were the usual dead bodies by the side of the road terrified civilians, villages empty of all life the usual stuff. Unfortunately no one cares. All I could think was that something like that does not even warrant a paragraph in the Times cannot compete with the Washington sniper or Saddam. Janine di Giovanni Janine di Giovanni: Good evening, as John Owen said I just got back from the Ivory Coast. On September 19 rebel soldiers launched a coup which in my eyes is rapidly descending into a civil war. But you probably do not know about it, you probably have not read about it, and you certainly have not seen it on TV because it is Africa, and sadly unless an African story reaches Rwanda-like proportions they go unreported. But I am talking abut the Ivory Coast because when I was asked to join this panel I thought about how the consequences of 9/11 have affected me as a reporter and initially I thought they had not. I just thought I went to the field and did my job and it was the same as it has been for the last decade. But over the weekend I was in Dalawa, a town in the middle of the Ivory Coast. The country is now cut in half between the government and the rebels and this town is directly in the middle and as John Owen said I saw bodies, I saw terrified civilians, I saw the beginning of ethnic cleansing and I saw prisoners. These prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs with wire, they were shirtless in the burning sun, and they were terrified. They had been beaten, and they were being taken to the gendarmerie the paramilitary. Now having worked in Bosnia for so long with Roy I am very sensitive about what happens to prisoners so I wanted to get their names and ID numbers and surprisingly the government forces let me do it. And afterwards when I talked to them about it and said - "you must treat these men with dignity, you must not beat them, and you must not torture them." They said to me - " How can you say that you are an American, look at what the US is doing to the Taliban prisoners at Camp X-Ray." And it suddenly occurred to me America’s hypocrisy and how it is above the law and sadly how it is setting such a bad example. When I talked to a colleague of mine from the BBC he said that he’d had a similar experience in Liberia where a man had been arrested and was being held without any prospect of getting to court, and he said to the official who arrested him, what about habeas corpus, this man must go to court. And he said "what about the Americans? Are they exercising that right?" So like it or not America is a superpower. It sets examples and since September 11 the message is that anything done to combat terror is for the good of the US citizens or the world; that’s what they tell us. That includes violating civil liberties as in the case of Camp X-Ray. This example, what frightens me the most is that it gets passed on for example in Israel, under the mantle of waging their own war on terror the Israelis have also foregone human rights. One thousand eight hundred Palestinians, most of them non-combatants, have been killed since the second Intifada began in September 2000. Collective punishment which is a violation of international law is the norm. House demolition, restriction of movement, daily humiliation at checkpoints, expulsion of relatives, Israeli settlers taking the law into their own hands, I could go on and on. In April this year, under the eyes of the Israeli snipers and tanks, I got into the Jenin refugee camp, what I saw there in the immediate aftermath of the battle will stay with me until the end of my life, in the same way amputated children in Sierra Leone and civilians in Grozny, Chechnya after the fall will always stay with me. But Jenin was different, Israel is a so called democracy, while waging their war against terror they used civilian dwellings as snipers nests, they bulldozed homes until the area the size of a football pitch was cleared, they killed a man in a wheelchair waving a white flag trying to leave his home under fire, he was trying to surrender. They stopped the Red Cross from evacuating the wounded. But most of all they tried to stop the press from covering it. My British colleagues and I were outraged. When we finally got in under great risk we wrote what we saw and what we saw and what we felt and what the testimonies the witnesses gave us. Our US counterparts, I am ashamed to say, played down the story, many of them under orders from their editors. For what we did especially the reporter from the Independent, the Evening Standard and myself we were punished, the Jewish lobby and the Israeli Embassy sent emails attacking us personally, we were slandered: the wife of the owner of the Daily Telegraph an extremely powerful woman called us anti-Semites and brownshirts in print. I do not have to defend myself and say I am not but I am not. I see this as a 9/11 fallout, Israel is fighting "a war against terror" or so they say and we had dared to criticize them. By hoping to intimidate us, by trying to make us fearful because they are more powerful than us they hoped they’d shut us up. They’d hoped that we wouldn’t go back and that we’d stop reporting it. When a watered down United Nations report came out saying Jenin was not a massacre they gloated but it is not the point. Israel gets away with a violation of human rights every day because their ally and mentor the US allows them to, because their ally the US is also doing it, and because their ally the US is above the law. So how do we fight this as reporters? We keep telling the truth, we keep exposing hypocrisy, we keep going to places off the news agenda, places like the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, China, Chechnya, even the US where human rights are violated. We delve into unpopular stories that might get us into trouble like Roy’s when he wrote about Taliban prisoners killed by Northern Alliance troops and we try in some way to affect the policy makers, we’re not the policy makers but we can have some effect, we can have some influence and as reporters that’s all we can do. John Owen: Next we turn to the role of Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) and particularly NGOs like Human Rights Watch, who in tandem with journalists document what goes on in these places and sadly in many cases there is more journalism being done by Human Rights Watch than journalism itself because the disturbing trend of many news organisations failing to place journalists on the scene. Human Rights Watch has become an incredibly important witness to what’s going on, but it has a mandate well beyond simply reporting the facts. Jean Paul Marthoz is the press director for the European division of Human Rights Watch and he is someone who straddles the world between human rights and journalism. He is a long time journalist working in Belgium for newspapers such as Le Soir, he is a frequent contributor to magazines, he’s written four books on journalism and he is also someone who has taught on a number of occasions. It is a pleasure to welcome from Brussels Jean Paul Marthoz. Jean Paul Marthoz: The 1st reaction I had to the two presentations but especially to the Ivory Coast testimony is that for us a human rights organisation is it a failure again . The description I got just now was the reading that the French media had been much more active than the British media for obvious reasons. It reminds me that the situation we knew in 1993 in Rwanda we were shouting, trying to influence governments to do something about the impending genocide, we could see the machinery of genocide being set up by the government in Rwanda and nobody really listened to us. Ivory Coast seems to be following this slide into massive violence and two years ago we published a report about the elections and the massacres and it did not go very far. Because internally the situation has turned from bad to worse and internationally there was not that much attention that would have been needed to put enough pressure on to change this. Journalism
has some purpose of responsibility in that atmosphere of indifference.
The trouble is that when you deal with Africa you still have the
old colonial patterns of coverage. In the French media there was
a lot of attention to Ivory Coast in the last years and many articles
in Le Monde and Liberation and specialised magazines, you could
criticise those articles but the attention given to the issues was
not the same in the Anglo-Saxon media. On the other hand you could
say that attention given in the French media to Sierra Leone was
10% of what the British media did. It has consequences for our own
work because yes it is true that as a human rights organisation
we are working a lot on information gathering and sometimes we have
more time and more resources than some news organizations to carry
out our investigation. We can spend sometimes months or even years
to carry out our investigations, e.g. the story of the book we had
out on Rwanda we spent four years, 12 full time researchers trying
to analyse the origins of the genocide. In this case if you want
to influence government it is where we part ways with journalism.
Journalists can see themselves as an actor too and try to stop genocide and crimes against humanity but this is not the first function of journalism. And in this case how can you create a critical mass when you have this fragmented coverage of those conflicts. French media yes, British media less and the US media I do not think they covered it at all until a few days ago. How can you as an organization that believes that the power of words force governments to do something, how can you create this critical mass so that governments are forced to listen, forced to take decisions. So journalism is not only about reporting and filing copy, it is also about giving priorities to stories and it is certainly true that if the New York Times puts a story on the front page or on page eight it makes a lot of difference because the front page will be seen, even will be read by the president of the US, at least the former president and it will be given more attention than a CIA briefing note on the same country. So there is the clear responsibility of the journalist in this. There is another issue that I would like to raise, which is the case of urgency as we mentioned in the Jenin case. We investigated Jenin and the incursions of the Israeli army and it is the same thing as Ivory Coast. I just talked to our researchers in Ivory Coast and we have not been able to document according to our own criteria. Cases, for example, of summary execution: we have heard a lot of rumours. But the dilemma is how can you just wait, knowing that if you do not react, do not shout loudly it will continue and you will be a part of the drift into more violence. It’s like Jenin, we had to wait days to be able to produce a report that we believed adhered to the highest principles of our own methodology and accuracy and at the same time we were concerned that because we had to stick to this fact checking we were not really helping the situation to calm down and that we were to an extent partly to blame that civilians were still being targeted. It is a major dilemma: the speed you need to create an alarm and to make sure that governments will not be allowed to continue what they are doing. This is something that journalists who report live on a story can’t do with the risks involved of being inaccurate or being attacked. And for our case too human rights organizations are being tempted to do that too. Working as live reporters, in some cases it was easier to do than in others. At the same time I love journalists I still feel my heart as a journalist even though I work for an NGO. I would say we are allowed less mistakes than journalists are, journalists can correct themselves quite quickly, we cannot. Our credibility is much more fragile than journalists. If we make one factual mistake we are dead; we are losing our credibility. If journalists make a mistake there is a tolerance in the journalistic field that you can correct yourself; basically you are less vulnerable. That dilemma I talked about between looking for accuracy at the same time as a sense of urgency, is based on the fact that we believe strongly at Human Rights Watch our credibility depends on the fact that we are not seen as taking risks with facts. John Owen: Finally we want hear from the person who takes the information the journalist provides and moves it to the Crimes of War Project website www.crimesofwar.org Anthony Dworkin is the editor. Anthony Dworkin: Very briefly what we try to do with the website is take the ideas and the principles that are in the book and keep them moving forward because sadly there are lots and lots of situations around the world which keep coming up year by year where the laws of war are being abused; at the same time the law is developing so we try and cover both those things. We look at conflicts through the lens of the law and we try to look at things going on that are a crime not just an act of war not just an atrocity, not just someone shooting someone else but really a crime the whole world should be paying attention to. And at the same time we try and take the law which has been a fairly obtuse, dry and arcane field and make it accessible and make it come alive so that people who aren’t lawyers should know about it. There is an old saying that war is too important to be left to the generals and our view is that the laws of war are too important to be left to the lawyers. If any of you haven’t seen the site then very briefly we have big articles on the points that Janine raised on what’s happened in international law in the US since 9/11. One example of a conflict that does not get reported much is the civil war in Sudan. A lot of people think a genocide is taking place. We also looked at when it was legal to start a war a slightly different branch of law but one we thought was relevant in light of what President Bush is threatening to do in Iraq. Some of the things coming up are that we have got a big piece on another war that’s not being covered and that’s the one in Chechnya which is going from bad to worse and where civilians are increasingly made victims. We’re looking at the Milosevic trial and how that’s playing out and we’re looking at Indonesia and the various things that are going on there, so those are the types of things that we cover. One of the things that we do on the website that’s a really important aspect of international humanitarian law is to try to be as international as possible because in the human rights field sometimes you get accused of getting a western agenda but the laws of war really are universal, the Geneva Convention has been signed by every country except one that’s in the United Nations. So these are as near to anything you can get that have been agreed to around the world the problem is they are not always observed. The question that we tend to get a lot is: "OK, you can write about these things, these crimes that are taking place and you can point out that they are taking place but is anything going to happen?" I think that one of the things that is particularly interesting at the moment is that we are at a crucial moment because we’re seeing a lot of developments both positive and negative regarding the way that the laws of war are applied. Particularly we have seen in the last few years the tribunal in the Hague for former Yugoslavia, there is the tribunal in Arusha for Rwanda, tribunals have been set up in Sierra Leone and East Timor and now there is the first permanent body the International Criminal Court which is really going to institutionalize in a free standing way a body which can prosecute and investigate these crimes. Now it is a fledgling organisation and most of the world’s most powerful countries including the US are not on board at this time. Nevertheless I think the fact that this is all going on means that there is a real sense that the laws of war are there, they are getting developed they matter and that’s a reason to push them up the agenda. On the other hand we see the US which is not only ducking away from the International Criminal Court but in what it is doing in its campaign against terrorism is stretching the law, which is probably the most diplomatic way of looking at it. You can look at the history of the laws of war as a battle between making them more precise, more defined and making them more vague. There is an old saying that if international law is at the vanishing point of law then the laws of war are at the vanishing point of international law. They are as vague as you can get but they are getting more defined. But the US and other countries are taking them in the opposite direction trying to change the notion of what counts as a war, what counts as a combatant, when does a war end, and what counts as a battlefield. These terms are becoming more muddied but they are not being completely neglected. The US is trying to keep itself from being judged, it is trying to get away with everything it can, it is trying to create as many loopholes as it can, it is trying to create as many areas as Guantanamo which are out of the reach of any law. But they won’t come right out and admit we’re breaking the law, in a way this is the tribute that imperialism pays to legitimacy. They try and make it as muddy as they can but the won’t come out and say we’re breaking the law. That is another way I think it is important for journalists to be aware of the law, of holding people to account. We’re not recommending for people that write for us or for you to be judges but we are saying be aware of these terms, be aware of what the history is and be aware of what the meaning is. It counts. John Owen: I just want to put one question to the panel, it is an issue that’s been lively all day and an issue that many journalists are divided on, certainly the trans-Atlantic division is quite obvious, and that’s the issue of whether journalists should testify before war crimes tribunals. We’re aware here that journalists such as Robert Fisk are tremendously opposed, journalists such as Jeremy Bowen, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, Jacky Rowland of the BBC, Martin Bell formerly of the BBC have all testified or volunteered to testify. So the question is should journalists testify and if so under what conditions and if never why not? Janine di Giovanni: I am slightly divided on it. On one hand I do think that as journalists we do have an obligation, on two occasions I have liberated documents that were vital to tribunals; once was Sierra Leone right after Sanko escaped and I went into his house on my own with a Sierra Leonian guy and I found notebooks, I can’t believe that he was so stupid that he left them behind. Handwritten notebooks documenting how the RUF traded diamonds after the Lome peace accord and it had everything, the weight of the diamonds and who they were trading with. The next day the Minister of Justice, who was terrified because he might have been in the book, called a press conference saying that he needed these documents and I photocopied them and gave them to the United Nations. I did the same thing in East Timor with a list of militias that I found. I think especially with Sierra Leone I would testify but I understand John Randal’s (former Washington Post reporter, who has refused to testify at the Hague and is being represented by Geoffrey Robertson and joined in the case by journalistic rights groups) reservation, I do think it puts journalists in a very awkward and possibly dangerous position but on the other hand I do think that that’s part of our job and if we go there and we are finding information that is crucial we have to give testimony. Roy Gutman: My motto as a print journalist and this is slightly different from a radio or TV journalist is that you want to find the story and let it tell itself and get out of the way of the story and not to become the story. The worry I have about testifying is that it is a circumstance you as a journalist then enter the story and become an active participant in it. The editors of US publications in distinction to British and European publications have a great wariness, I have had two editors who have said well yes if I insisted on testifying I could but I would be taken off the story, and I feel that as a journalist the best contribution I can make is by staying on the story. Another reservation is that I am not sure that the tribunal in The Hague and the International Criminal Court has thought about journalists testifying and the protection they deserve for being asked to testify. There are in the Hague tribunal rules and in the statutes of the International Criminal Court all sorts of protections for humanitarian aid workers who also may well have seen serious human rights violations but they are not required to testify and are given every available out and people from the International Committee of the Red Cross are given a total excuse. I do not know that journalists deserve that kind of protection. The value of the work we do, should be such to these tribunals that they should think long and hard about what provisions should be used to protect us; now there is no protection whatsoever. So in the Randall case I sent a letter to The Hague saying that I valued the tribunal but I am baffled as to why they would want a reporter to testify about some quotes from a story that he wrote 9 years ago. That was not the thrust of my point, it was that the tribunal must consider what had happened to journalists that had testified in the past. In some cases, for example ITN, they took rushes of the film and distributed to the defence and the defence had distributed it to people that called themselves journalists who had written about it in a disparaging way and accused ITN of falsifying an event, I am talking about their visits to the camps. And in another case the tribunal allowed a defence attorney to cross-examine Ed Vulliamy for several days and even to turn over his notes which contained all sorts of telephone numbers and clues, which I thought was outrageous. So my point to the tribunal was please write rules that will protect journalists, give us rules that we can work within and do not compel journalists to testify if its against their wishes or the wishes of their publication. John Owen: So you are not saying that you’d never testify but it would have to be a specific instance where there was no other access to information? Roy Gutman: I think if one’s testimony would make the difference between conviction and release of somebody who is a clear criminal then I suppose out of conscience one has to be prepared to testify but I think that is a pretty unusual case. And every time I have been to the tribunal and I have been asked several times and said this to them they have failed to respond and so I have assumed that my testimony was not that vital. John Owen: Any other journalists in the room who may have an opinion on this before we move on? Unknown BBCWS: What about the case of Murray Sale who was the Sunday Times reporter sent to cover Bloody Sunday; now there is an investigation 20-25 years on and he is a crucial witness. Now in that case Roy would you testify? He had notes, he wrote an original story which was spiked, he and the photographer drew maps, interviewed lots of witnesses, surely it is his duty to history to testify? Roy Gutman: As I say it is a matter of conscience, if it makes any difference between the truth coming out and the conviction of a criminal or the righting of a wrong, if it is something that can’t be dealt with. But in this situation after 25 years don’t you think they’d be able to figure it out without requiring him to testify. But sometimes a journalist is the only person who can put it together, so I have to say that I think there are exceptions but in general I am very cautious of a journalist taking part in court proceedings. John Owen: Anybody else? Prathar Bugani Channel 4 Documentaries: I have a question about reporters on the frontline and how they are perceived by the people they report on. I was in Sierra Leone during the civil war much of the time with D Brigade of the Parachute Regiment and it did seem to me that some people would view you as potentially passing on information which could compromise your access to what was happening which was already compromised in the bigger picture. And I wondered where you draw the line? Janine di Giovanni: Personally I haven’t had that experience, what I have found more especially in places where there aren’t a lot of journalists - like in Chechnya when Grozny fell and there was three of us in all Chechnya reporting it - I felt that people see a journalist someone who could bear witness, they wanted to talk to us they wanted to give us testimonies. I think the difficult thing then is that you have to take these testimonies very carefully and really try to read through propaganda and find the truth. But I haven’t ever encountered hostility, with militias that’s different but with civilians most of the time they want tell their story. Roy have you found that? Roy Gutman: Yes and often enough. This might sound odd, but one has to try when you are covering violations under the international set of laws, that just like with any other story you’ve got to go to the authorities yourself and you’ve got to question them on it. I have found on the whole that witnesses are quite eager to tell you what they know and sometimes the authorities are quite eager to tell you their version or to even signal you sometimes that you can take your pick as to which version is truthful. If you can go in there with your facts together you can sort it out, you have to have your facts together and keep your cool. In your face journalism is not advisable. Jean Paul Marthoz: My experience working as a former journalist especially in Latin America, the people I wanted interview were too scared of being seen in my presence, somebody who looked like a journalist or an investigator. In Colombia it is certainly the case that when you go into zones that are run by the guerillas or the para-military organizations the first reaction of many people is to shut up or try not to be seen with you because they know that if something gets out of the country even if they did not give you the information they would be suspected of having been part of the conspiracy. When we were working in El Salvador we were trying to get mixed teams. If you went to the guerilla camps and you were only with American journalists there was always a suspicion that you were working too closely with the US so we tried to have mixed teams I was working for a French newspaper and that was ok but you have to prevent people from believing that what they say will not be directly reported to the newsroom or to others that might be members of the government. I felt a lot of suspicion in those cases. In Kosovo the refugees were rushing to our tents to testify because they believed we were the last recourse for them to tell the rest of the world what was happening inside Kosovo. Different conflicts, different situations and different relationships between civilians and other kinds of witnesses. Prathar Bugani: Would you accept that using the information more directly also has the danger of making some journalists more clearly a target. I am thinking of John Schofield who I think was the 72nd journalist to be killed in Bosnia in 1995. Roy Gutman: One of the things that has happened as a result of the coverage of the Balkan conflict where we were allowed a lot of latitude in going to the authorities and being in certain areas, for example is that they think that at the end of the day that got a rather bad press but they still got some openness. In the meantime what has happened is that other governments including the Russian government, especially in the 2nd Chechen war, and Timor and other places have learned a lesson which is keep the press out; or in some cases to target the press which has happened certainly in Timor. So governments, especially tyrannical governments or ones that are committing crimes, also have a learning curve and watch each other and what journalism is doing. So our job is to find ways around those closed doors when they close. John Owen: I would just say that I do not think the circumstances you cited contributed to the death of John Schofield I think there were other factors. Jonathan Steele: I’d like to add something about testifying because I think that Janine di Giovanni used a phrase which goes to the heart when you are writing a human rights story - bearing witness. It seems to me that there is a bit of a paradox if you are bearing witness in the public prints and on TV or radio for your evidence to be judged by the court of your readership or viewers or humanity or whatever you want to call it. And then say that when I am faced with the invitation to a court of law I won’t turn and bear witness in the same way as I did in the prints. Janine di Giovanni: No I said… Jonathan Steele: No, I wasn’t criticising you I was just giving my view on it. And I think that is the rule that one starts off with and then one makes the exceptions that Roy very carefully made and then they demand things that aren’t part of your testimony like what are the telephone numbers in your book, it is not relevant. I am not saying that you give a blanket statement that you will always give evidence on every possible occasion. I think that the general rule should be: if I have given evidence in a public media then why not in a court. The International Committee of the Red Cross is quite different because their whole philosophy is discretion, they only get access to prisons etc if they do not bear witness, and they only give very general statements about conditions. So if the International Committee of the Red Cross has immunity from appearing at The Hague then I think that’s quite legitimate but I think journalists since we are about openness, transparency and accountability. And sometimes I wonder whether some people that hesitate, hesitate because they are not sure they can stand up to cross-examination. David Loyne: I think there is one particular problem and that is that governments only respond if they really want to. In 4/3/94 there were huge numbers of journalists in Bosnia at one point all reporting quite a lot of horrible things that were happening. And as we know the British government led some people into a peace keeping role but it was very mealy mouthed. John Major didn’t want to get involved, he was persuaded to get involved by the reporting of some of the people here and Christianne Amanport and a number of people at the BBC but it was a very pusillanimous response and the troops weren’t properly mandated to really prevent people from dying and as a result lots of people did die. In 1998 in Kosovo the situation was completely different, Tony Blair wanted to get stuck in and led Europe into quite a short campaign in 1999. He led them on the very slender evidence of a few massacres and I was one of the people who uncovered them. The extraordinary response we got to one piece that I did on the 9 O’ Clock news to one family who’d been killed really taught me something about the way that journalism and governments respond. On the question of testifying at war crimes tribunals I think it is very simple: we should be able to, we shouldn’t be obliged to. I did feel a little queasy about Jacky Rowland who is a friend and colleague, I think she was right to testify but I think she was wrong to report on her own testifying. Tunde Asadeus (Nigerian masters student at City): I wanted to ask how do we sell our copy about a story such as the one that breaking on the Ivory Coast to an audience in Europe or the US. Janine di Giovanni: It’s very hard, I think that practically the best thing to do is to target it. I found with the Ivory Coast for me it was right place right time, initially for the first 11 days when the audience was interested. But I think you have to find the audience that would be interested, the French, Belgian or if it is the British press to try and make it as human as possible and I do not mean to soften it but if you can humanise a story as difficult as the Ivory Coast and make people aware of what’s happening rather than make their eyes glaze over and say "Oh it is another West African mess" that’s the best way to do it. If you take a maxi conflict and turn it into a micro and turn it into something human, something that people can read and digest and at the same time get a good lashing of the political background otherwise it is almost too complicated. John Owen: There was a rush of coverage at the beginning but that was when the dependents of nationals were in trouble or children of missionaries were being threatened and Special Forces went in but then they went in and the story died away. Jean Paul Marthoz: I think it is easier to sell the story if you commit the sin of getting into stereotypes, it is easier to sell a stereotype story to your editor. You get into a well known way of covering Africa for example. You talk in coded words and put people off. "A new conflict of ancient hatreds, you can’t do anything about it so just let’s shut our doors to the refugees" But I think there is another way of covering those conflicts, if we take Sierra Leone. It was reasonably easy to place stories on the British media about Sierra Leone but imagine my situation when I had to place stories in the Belgian or French media it was very difficult they had no connection to Sierra Leone. So what we had to do going beyond the mere description of atrocities, what we did was to try to analyse who were the actors in this war it is not only the rebels and the Para-militaries, it is the whole network of this criminalised economy. Actors that here in London and Antwerp in the diamond industry and when we started studying the links we were able to reconnect and raise the interest of the editors. It suddenly became very close and helped identify who was really responsible. Roy Gutman: I just want to ask Janine di Giovanni if she can answer in a very simple way just why this matters why is it significant. I am not doing it to put her on the spot I am just saying that it is not always clear. So its just a cautionary word that you sometimes get a sense that something is about to happen but it hasn’t happened yet and sometimes can’t get to convince your editors just how important it is. Still if your instinct is right and you’ve got the parties right the facts will emerge. Then you’ll have to figure out the story that explains the story as well as how to package the story that you are convinced is the story and that means having words and images that back you up. And sometimes that means having a 2nd story or sidebar to bear out the main story. Janine di Giovanni: In a nutshell Ivory Coast was a beacon of stability in West Africa, it did have a very strong economy until about a month ago, it is the world’s producer of cocoa. And basically the countries that have suffered around it, Sierra Leone and Liberia, looked to it as a kind of beacon. So the real danger is that as the conflict grows and it really is growing. When I left and I have just got back this morning, it had turned really nasty. The rebels were taking more and more territory and going through the country and sharpening the ethnic divisions between the Muslim north and Christian south and were garnering a lot of support from the Muslims who are very disgruntled by the treatment they’ve received from the mainly Christian government. So they are getting tremendous support and the backlash from the Muslims particularly foreigners from Burkina Faso and places like that are suffering ethnic reprisals their houses are being burned down. Meanwhile, the 20,000 French ex-patriots that live there are being targeted. There was a very nasty anti French demonstration the day before yesterday in which it is really looking like the end of the French in the Ivory Coast will happen soon. The real danger though is the destabilization of the whole region, it is believed that Angolan troops or at least equipment landed last week to aid the government forces. The rebels are believed to be supported by Burkina Faso, possibly Liberia, maybe Sierra Leone, maybe arms are coming in from Ukraine. For me all the warning signs are there that it is going to be a very nasty civil war. Anthony Dworkin: Just one quick point. Before 9/11 nobody in America was writing about Afghanistan but that changed very quickly. Let’s take another example, in Sudan there has been a war going on for over 30 years and it has received very little coverage but it was in Sudan that Al Quaeda went from being a rabble. The new national security strategy unveiled by President Bush a month or so ago said very explicitly, a remarkable admission for a Republican president - the biggest threat we face is from failed states not from active states. And I hate to say but people in the rich West will only pay attention when there is a danger that it is going to come back and bite them on the nose. Roy Gutman: Maybe your observation about the strategy document might give a framework for Janine's coverage. That also jumped out at me that it was an enlightened approach that all of our problems that have developed in the last decade have been in the region of failed states and so here’s a good test of the Bush doctrine. Charlotte Eager (Freelance): It’s back to the thorny subject of testifying. I was asked to testify in the Hague and to begin with I didn’t think I was the right person. I didn’t think I knew enough about it and I realised that its very easy as a journalist to undervalue what you know. If you spend a lot of time somewhere it becomes common knowledge for you and you expect that everyone else knows it too, but they do not and they forget. In the end the small thing I contributed was only a small thing but it was really important. John Owen: That's all we have time for, thank you.
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