In Belgrade, Boro Kontić told me that Bosnian and Herzegovina's N1 television was showing a six-part series about journalists who appeared as witnesses before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. And that television documentary was made by him, Boro Kontić, with his team from the Mediacentar in Sarajevo. The idea for the series came from Dragan Golubović, head of the digital archive of the Sarajevo Mediacentar, a man who defended Sarajevo with a rifle in his hand for four years. Thanks to him, I received all six thirty-minute episodes.
There are at least two reasons why this series could be helpful to journalism students, and indeed their professors. In three hours of images and sound, what war journalism is and what it is like is explained. And it is explained through the mouths of those who have developed their reporting skills in terrible places, where people are killed, injured or abused, where they lose their loved ones and where houses are demolished, cities, water pipes, power lines are destroyed, where cultural centers are turned into camps and torture centers, and the survivors are left with their lives destroyed, in their grief without comfort.
Their reporting is not a journalism practicum after graduating from college. They were pushed into this role by human curiosity, each of them emphasizes that. They have seen and written about these terrible places, all too often exposed to danger and horror. Their testimonies are examples of honor and humanity. Their statements in themselves seem poignant and sublime, and when they answer questions in the courtroom from criminals on trial, their words seem even more sublime.
That is a special aspect, these journalists' answers to those questions of the accused. The journalists are unerringly precise, they do not preach any patriotism, they adhere to the principles of humanity, and the accused, apart from being inferior in expression and content, are actually the same as they were before their arrest: arrogant, self-confident and insensitive. More disgusting than they have ever been. It is not known who is the bigger wretch, Milošević or Karadžić (Mladić is not heard in the series), neither one nor the other shows a shred of remorse or shame, but even in the courtroom they babble about the journalists' dislike for the Serbs.
The reasons given for the decision to testify as journalists before a court for major crimes are such that any honest man should consider them exemplary. The journalist witnesses step out of their bulletproof work shirts and act as citizens. They clearly point out the difference between objectivity and neutrality, which many foaming journalists fail to see. John Sweeney (who testified in cases related to Kosovo and the crimes in Mala Kruša) says that the excuse given by some journalists for not testifying, that their profession is so exalted that they cannot waste that exaltation before some court, cannot be anything other than stupid.
In response to attacks in Nina Bernstein's article in the New York Times that journalists decided to testify because they wanted publicity, Ed Vulliamy says that there can be no talk about publicity, because the role of witness is actually an additional great stress on top of all the stresses he has experienced. The Mediacentar archive preserves an extensive conversation (only a small part of it is heard in the series) in which Vulliamy also mentions his own traumatization and humiliation.
This is how he responds to those who believe that journalists should not go to court: “Roy Gutman, a dear colleague whom I have great respect for, was against it. He said, ‘We are the third estate, we are the press, we work with the law, not under the law.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. What kind of priests are we? Who elected us? We are citizens. If someone robs and stabs an old woman on the street, steals her bag, and two people see it - one a plumber and the other a journalist - does that mean the plumber has to testify and the journalist doesn’t? The same laws apply to everyone. So it was stressful and, to my great disappointment, not many people decided to do it. I don’t know why. I think some people thought that by testifying they would be crossing a certain line. We report, but we don’t testify. At the time I was a correspondent for The Guardian in Italy and to me that meant cooperating with the mafia laws. They don’t care what you write about them. They didn’t care then, they do now, now since Roberto Saviano came along, but then there were none. But journalists don't go to court. Well, in my opinion, you should go to court!..."
He testified in eight cases, and another statement he gave to Mediacentar deserves to be mentioned: “If this so-called career has taught me anything, it is that power is more enduring than discovery. It doesn’t matter what you discover about Karadzic, Milosevic, Peter Carrington, David Owen, the one from Travnik, the one from Sarajevo or the one from the Drina, it really doesn’t matter, they will survive it all. It doesn’t matter what you discover about Tony Blair, Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell and their poltroons, about Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld who led the US and Britain into murderous bloodshed, it won’t change anything significant. They will continue to earn money, to become professors, doctors and company directors. The only thing they fear is ridicule, comedy, being court jesters.”
And he supports this with the example of Tony Blair demanding that the cartoons drawn by Steve Bell be cut out of a copy of the Guardian before the paper arrived on his desk. He concludes that the best journalists are cartoonists, those who ridicule untouchable rulers. His words about how helpless he was in his efforts to inform the world about the tragedy of war and that he therefore decided to contribute to the path to justice by testifying in court can also be taken as his attempt to find a way out of the traumatization and disappointment in the inefficiency of all the work marked by exposure to dangers.
Mediacentar Sarajevo team. Standing: Tarik Močević, Mustafa Mustafić, Boro Kontić and Dragan Golubović; Sitting: Nejra Hasečić, Selma Zulić – Šiljak, Anida Sokol, Maida Muminović, Maja Čalović, Aida Nadarević and Selma Fukelj (Photo: Jasmin Brutus)
Aernout van Lynden, a journalist who attended the Dutch officer school in his youth, testified eight times. He explained to the prosecution, which is asking to see his report from June 1, 1992: “This was filmed from my balcony, you see a projectile, fired from a hilltop east of Sarajevo, falling on the old part of Sarajevo. The target was the entire city, there was no specific target to shoot at, it was fire that fell all over the city.”
When asked by the prosecution how many shells he filmed that night, he replied that he had never seen so many anywhere else, not even in the Gulf War. He explained that filming shelling is hard work, because when you point the camera that way, the shell falls that way, and even an experienced cameraman like the one he had with him could not cover that. When Radovan Karadžić asked him imbecile questions about whether he thought that people from Sarajevo could not get out “even to the Serbian side”, van Lynden asked him: “Mr. Karadžić, where were you during the war? People could not get out of Sarajevo, because they were being shot at. Buses with people were also being shot at, even those buses carrying small children out of Sarajevo.”
He claims that he was looked at askance in Pale because in one report he called Mladić “the scourge of Sarajevo”, and that Mladić himself, when he later happened to meet him, invited him to lunch and proudly patted him on the shoulder, saying “I am the scourge of Sarajevo”. Some sources say that Mladić enjoyed being called “the scourge of Sarajevo”. After Mladić later grabbed van Lynden by the face during a meeting in Belgrade, the latter told him: “Mr. Mladić, see you in The Hague.”
At the time, this sounded like a hypothetical unreality to everyone, but it came true. Various shots from the series show that the Serbian nationalist villains, in their rampage and dishonor, forgot about humanity even towards people who came from the white world, but who understood the course of war much better than themselves, because they were both more experienced and more educated. And better people.
Martin Bell (testified five times) emphasizes that one cannot be neutral between the aggressor and the victim, and this is the principle that his colleagues adhered to, or he to his colleagues. He is the most experienced of all the witnesses in the series: he has reported for the BBC from a hundred countries and eighteen war zones. During his three years in Bosnia, he met most of the Serbian leaders. He says that they are hopelessly burdened by the defeat in the Battle of Kosovo, and when he is constantly told that their parliament is the most academic in the world, since it is composed entirely of professors, doctors of science, lawyers and the like, he says that this is true, but that he does not know what to say about such academics, whom the British would say are too arrogant.
Robert Block was a reporter from many terrible places during the war, and his newsrooms would usually send him to places where great atrocities were taking place among people. So on July 15, 1995, he was sent to Belgrade to report on the fall of Srebrenica. There, on the then Studio B television station, he saw blurry footage of dead bodies of Muslim soldiers in a recording made from a car, and he wanted to investigate the matter. So, almost like Röntgen, he accidentally discovered the mass crime in Srebrenica, which the Tribunal would later rule as an act of genocide.
Florence Hartmann discovered a mass grave in Ovčara, but that won't help her incorruptibility much. She also wrote a book about the hypocrisy of some of the Tribunal's structures who wanted the crimes to be covered up, but that's not the topic of the series, and let's leave it out here either.
Šefko Hodžić's testimony about the mass atrocities committed by members of the Bosnian Army against Croat residents in Grabovica near Jablanica is particularly moving. He almost feels sick when he tells how one of the two surviving brothers described his murdered three-year-old sister to him: "She was blonde and had green eyes." The man stops being talkative at this.
An example of humanity and honor was also given by journalist Jovan Dulović, who, in response to Milošević's rant about how the civil war was the worst war, replied: "That's a simple lie. Serbia waged the war. Or rather, you waged it."
The Sarajevo series about the testimony of journalists at the war crimes court should be shown on the television stations of the former Yugoslav republics with the greatest coverage. This could easily be achieved, but those who have power over these television stations will not allow it. And any hope that such a document could be included in today's school curriculum should be dispelled in advance.
TV Vijesti will broadcast the documentary series "Journalists - Witnesses before the Hague Tribunal", the first episode on Friday, February 13th at 20pm
Bonus video:
