But my first thought on hearing the news was not the horrendous wars of dissolution of the multiethnic Yugoslav state so much as the more joyful event that preceded them. Just 18 months earlier, I had been in East Berlin the night the Wall came down, watching East German border guards starting to attack that horrible symbol of an entire era with a pickax. For me, what linked November 1989 and June 2001 was that on both occasions I had trouble believing that what I was seeing was true. Both occasions were historic turning points; both exemplify real news: something that comes as a surprise because you’ve given up anticipating it.
Milosevic being sent to face a U.N. tribunal may seem a small event compared to the demise of the wall. Yet his handover constitutes a breakthrough that helps define this new era as much as anything in the last decade. Britain’s arrest of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 proved that ex-heads of state no longer have sovereign immunity. But the ailing Chilean president is unlikely to go on trial. This time-unlike the Nuremberg trials, which were convened by the victors of World War II-an accused major leader will have to account personally for his alleged misdeeds in an internationally recognized court of the United Nations. This is something that has never before occurred in history.
This region of southeastern Europe is often said to produce more history than it can consume. The correlate for journalists is that the region produces more stories and story ideas than most editors-and the public-can consume. The reason I could stick with the story of Milosevic’s wars longer than most colleagues is that I gave up trying to focus on the political machinations of the time. Instead I devoted my energies to reporting about the war crimes.
Unlike ordinary crimes, where states investigate, convict and incarcerate, it is states or armies themselves that commit war crimes. Anyone who hones in on this issue inevitably risks antagonizing that state-and that means the state can act against you if its leaders feel your reporting is causing them harm.
KEEPING SECRETS
In my case, I was unable to obtain a visa to Yugoslavia from 1993 until even after the overthrow of Milosevic last October. I have since heard that Milosevic himself kept a small blacklist of foreign journalists to whom he would not grant press visas. His nationalist-leaning successor, Vojislav Kostunica, who became president after a national uprising last October, also, I was told, carried on the practice for his first few months in office.
On the other hand, if you see visa restrictions as a challenge rather than a barrier, there are always ways around them. When access is closed off to reporters (as in Kosovo just two years ago, when Milosevic’s forces used terror tactics to deport close to a million Albanians), there are usually witnesses and survivors. By questioning them and cross-checking their assertions, it is possible to reconstruct the facts of a story. That is how I first reported in 1992 that Milosevic’s Bosnian Serb cronies had created a string of concentration camps in northern Bosnia. I could not get to the camps, but searched for survivors after hearing a tip about the existence of a network of camps.
Uncovering the story of Omarska and the other concentration camps was one of the most discouraging moments of my journalistic career. True, the story received worldwide attention, and the Bosnian Serbs closed down some of the camps following the expose. But what I realized from the moment I heard about the camps was that the global powers, starting with the United States and its allies, had deliberately decided to close their eyes to the atrocities taking place. No amount of solid reporting was going to change it.
CHALLENGES TO WORLD ORDER
But as events have shown, major states do get interested over time, especially if there is a public outcry, as with the Bosnian camps. Readers and viewers want individuals and states to be accountable-and impunity tends to generate criticism of the governments that fail to respond. Sooner or later, statesmen realize that if carried on a big enough scale, state-approved crimes against humanity challenge the whole world order.
The danger is that failure to punish such crimes is taken by other would-be imitators as a green light. The converse can also hold true: a decision to end impunity and instill accountability even in one obscure Balkan location can affect the way the world will be run for decades to come.
The immediate impact of the reporting on “ethnic cleansing” in 1992 seemed modest at the time. Media reports provided a vehicle used by human-rights advocates at the United Nations to demand the creation of The Hague Tribunal, which will now decide Milosevic’s fate.
When I first visited the headquarters in early 1994, the tribunal consisted of just the deputy prosecutor, Graham Blewitt of Australia, sitting in a big empty room leased from an insurance company in The Hague. Today, with three trial chambers, a full complement of judges, sound procedures, many trials behind it and Milosevic in the lock-up, the tribunal is well-positioned to write history.
As this is written from Zagreb, I must recall that one of the signal omissions of my profession, not to mention Western governments, occurred during the Croatian war, which occurred shortly after the end of the gulf war. At least 10,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the Croatian war of secession in the second half of 1991. More significant, it proved to be the harbinger of the Bosnian war, in which at least 200,000 civilians were killed. All of the war crimes that occurred in Bosnia occurred here on a smaller scale. Most of us reporters missed the cues, focusing attention on the spectacular events-the Yugoslav Army’s shelling of Dubrovnik, for example-rather than the daily seizing of territory and brutal mistreatment of civilians in far less glamorous locales.
Had we been looking for the war crimes, I think we could have exposed Milosevic’s intentions a good deal earlier. I don’t know whether that would have aroused the international public at the time, but for a journalist, the responsibility is not for the outcome. Our responsibility is to ring the alarm bell the moment we see something alarming.
