The article below sets out to provide a balanced assessment of the difficulties faced by
journalists asked to testify in Tribunal war crimes cases. But it misses some
important points:
A correspondent ‘parachuted in’ to a war zone will often arrive, particularly
if they don’t speak the local language, with little or no knowledge of the history or
background of the region. Consciously or sub-consciously, they will rely heavily on
established perceptions of the conflict.
An example can be seen below from Mr Maass’ experience with Milan Kovacevic, ‘a warlord in
Prijedor’, who was later tried for war crimes by The Hague Tribunal. In 2007, on his deathbed,
Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic told former French cabinet minister Bernard Kouchner and
US Diplomat Richard Holbrooke that ‘there had been no death camps in Bosnia’. Izetbegovic
admitted that his government had only made claims of death camps to put pressure on the
west to enter the war on the Bosnian Muslim side. Mr Maass’ dilemma about whether he should give
evidence against Kovacevic was needless: the so-called war crimes had never taken place.
In common with almost all the journalists who travelled to the Balkans to cover the civil wars
of the 1990s, Peter Maas seems to have assumed that the war crimes Tribunals set up during the 1990s
were there to deliver impartial justice and deserved his support. Nothing could have been further from
the truth. They were created illegally to develop and perpetuate an entirely false narrative of these
wars which would justify the illegal aggression of the western powers in the affairs of a sovereign state.
Journalists and Justice at The Hague
By PETER MAASS
The war-crimes tribunal in The Hague is supposed to put the bad guys
behind bars. I never thought it would go after an American journalist. But
last month the tribunal upheld a subpoena against Jonathan Randal, requiring
him to testify about events he covered in Bosnia for The Washington Post.
If the tribunal has any sense, it will rescind the subpoena and the threat of
penalties that it implies.
Mr. Randal had spoken with Hague prosecutors and provided a written
statement before they issued the subpoena. Such cooperation from
reporters is unlikely to last if the tribunal turns to issuing unwarranted
threats. When the tribunal contacted me to testify in another case, in 1997, I
agreed to give evidence. This week a representative of the tribunal asked me
to testify in an upcoming case, but I am hesitant to do so, mainly because
of Mr. Randal’s experience.
The Randal subpoena is the latest example of journalists’ being drawn
into legal efforts to punish war criminals as the Balkan and Rwanda
tribunals quicken their pace. On Monday the statute establishing the
International Criminal Court, which may also draw journalists into its proceedings,
entered into force.
The attempts to offer justice to victims of genocide are one of the
bright spots of our age. Most journalists – who are the people most likely to
witness war crimes, other than the perpetrators and their victims –
support war crimes investigations. I don’t believe journalists should be exempt
from subpoenas. But in most cases the decision to testify should be the
journalist’s, with exceptions made only in very rare circumstances that
fall within published guidelines.
Even The Washington Post’s lawyers, in trying to quash the Randal subpoena,
acknowledged that in particular situations subpoenas might be warranted:
for example, if a journalist’s testimony isabsolutely vital and cooperation
would not imperil him or his family and colleagues. The Post lawyers argued,
unsuccessfully, that under those criteria the Randal subpoena should be withdrawn.
Their request for an appeal hearing has been granted.
In 1997, prosecutors contacted me because five years earlier, as a
reporter for The Washington Post, I had met with Milan Kovacevic, a warlord in
Prijedor, a Serb-held town in Bosnia. Mr. Kovacevic had reluctantly
agreed to let me and several other journalists visit the prison camps he
presided over at Omarska and Trnopolje.
Mr. Kovacevic became the first war-crimes suspect arrested by Western
peacekeepers in Bosnia and dispatched to the Hague. The prosecuting
team said my testimony would be vital to showing his command over the camps.
Because he had not killed or tortured with his own hands, demonstrating
his overall command was the only way to convict him of crimes against
humanity.
The tribunal’s request confronted me with an increasingly common set of
quandaries. The main problem is that testifying at a war crimes
tribunal could imperil a journalist’s safety or make it difficult to uncover
future misdeeds. This is not a hypothetical debate. A friend of mine who
reported extensively on the Balkan wars and continues to produce award-winning
investigative stories from the region has been asked to testify in an
ongoing case. If he testifies, he is likely to be in physical jeopardy
on his next reporting trip to Serbia or Montenegro; alternatively, he will
have to choose never to return there. Local journalists would have still
fewer choices, since leaving is not always an option.
“On the one hand it’s our job to go to dangerous places to get the
truth out,” my friend told me the other day. “We meet with unsavory
characters, gain their trust and risk our lives to expose these things. So we’re
sympathetic to anyone who’s trying to get at the truth and punish the
guilty parties. On the other hand, the minute we are forced to submit to the
court in a genocide prosecution, our independence and survival, professional
or otherwise, could be at stake.”
Under what circumstances might a subpoena be warranted? Here’s a
personal example: the journalists I was with in Prijedor included an American
network television crew that filmed part of the meeting with Mr. Kovacevic. I
was told by the prosecutors that the network did not wish to share its raw
footage. Let’s suppose the tape was decisive evidence of genocide. If
sharing it would not put anyone’s neck on the line, and if the network
refused to cooperate, a subpoena might be acceptable.
In my case, if I had testified against Mr. Kovacevic, I would have been
ill-advised to return to Prijedor and perhaps anywhere in Serb-held
parts of Bosnia. But I could live with those restrictions; only a small portion
of my current professional life is spent in the former Yugoslavia, and if it
were reduced further, I wouldn’t suffer or mind that much.
I was not swayed by the argument, made by maximalists in the
press-freedom camp, that any cooperation would degrade my profession’s independence
andmake it harder for journalists to gain access to war zones. In truth,
warlords already regard foreign journalists as agents of their
governments. The prospect of a war-crimes indictment several years down the road is
verylow on the list of concerns for such people.
In the end, I agreed to testify. Three weeks into the trial, and before
I was scheduled to enter the witness box, Mr. Kovacevic died of a massive
heart attack. Now I am faced with a second request, in a new case, but
this time from a tribunal that has shown its willingness to intimidate a
journalist into testifying. I hope that the appellate panel will decide
that issuing the subpoena to Mr. Randal was an error. In the meantime, I’ll
keepmy distance.
Peter Maass is author of “Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War.”