On a recent morning in downtown Sarajevo, a group of mostly young journalists training to become reporters on the court beat – some dressed in trendy clothes, some of them chewing gum – discussed some deadly serious issues: swathes of burned-out villages, rape and detention camps and what award-winning Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy called the “frightening responsibility” of having to cover Bosnia’s new war crimes chamber.
“There’s a curious balance of justification and denial that we as reporters have to cut through,” Vulliamy told the reporters, who were attending their third session of trainings run by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). As the country prepares to bring its own war crimes to trial, the aim of the trainings is to transform the Bosnian media’s ad hoc method of assigning stories to whichever reporter has time into creating justice beats at local media outlets.
Reporters will play a make-or-break role for Bosnia’s new war crimes chamber, which should be hearing its first cases later this year. While 128 accused have appeared before the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague since its establishment in 1993, the tribunal is closing its doors by 2010 and won’t be able to try scores of people suspected of committing the murders, mass rapes and tortures that were the horrifying hallmarks of the 1992-1995 war here. The international community has therefore been working at full speed for the past year and a half to create a sort of “mini-Hague” in Sarajevo.
But even 10 years after the fighting stopped here, large sections of the Bosnian public still doesn’t consider The Hague’s faraway verdicts as legitimate, thanks to wartime media propaganda that left most people in the region unable to believe that “their side” committed atrocities. Some of those indicted at the Hague are still at large – notably Bosnian Serb former political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – and are still seen as heroes.
If Bosnia’s chamber is to give both justice to victims and truth about the war to the public, it’s essential that the journalists get the stories right, said Nerma Jelacic, the Sarajevo-based IWPR editor running the trainings.
“(The war) will keep Bosnia-Herzegovina in the past until it’s dealt with,” said Jelacic. “The aim is to introduce the concept of having a court reporter confident in the procedures, who can report on the trial without prejudice.”
IWPR is a London-based media-development charity founded in 1991. Its reporting programs from Afghanistan, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Iraq and the UN war crimes tribunal are funded by various organizations. These include UNESCO, the European Commission, the Ploughshares Fund, the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and governmental development agencies from Canada, the US, Sweden and Switzerland.
IWPR, which has been an active media development charity in Bosnia since 1995 and puts out its own online Balkan Crisis Reports written by local journalists, started the trainings in March. Editors have sent their beat-reporter designates to the trainings, where so far they’ve learned about the basics of how the chamber will work, how they can get information they need and how to report on it objectively. IWPR will one day draw on this pool of reporters for its own coverage of the proceedings, said Jelacic.
While the notion that an online outlet could have influence in a country with an estimated Internet penetration rate of 2.2 percent may be far-fetched, IWPR’s reach here is considerable, as it also offers its articles for syndication in the local press.
Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, which won awards during the war for publishing every day while the city was under siege from Bosnian Serb units in the surrounding mountains, has republished numerous IWPR pieces. Editor-in-chief Senka Kurtovic noted that in a media culture dominated by anonymous sources, political intrigue and rumor, IWPR leads by example with its well-reported and researched stories and investigation.
“Many organizations are working here in Bosnia, without any result, but IWPR has results. They have many sources, many documents, lots of quotes, it’s very professional,” Kurtovic said in her office in Oslobodjenje’s still bullet-scarred building.
Kurtovic has used beats before in other areas and has assigned one reporter and two backups to cover the war crimes chamber. She had to be careful about beat assignments, she said. If she assigned it to a good journalist who was also what she called “a good Muslim or a good Croat or a good Serb,” it would be a disaster for the paper.
“I want to show our readers, and citizens in Bosnia, that the court is an honest institution. People have to know the truth,” she said. “The matter of truth, history, facts – is the matter of the future of Bosnia. If you have myths about war, you will probably have another war in 20 years.”
Breaking down myths about the war is not without its dangers. Nezavisne Novine, a newspaper in the leafy Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka, has been held up as an example of those dangers since its 1999 series on Serb war crimes led to the paper’s then editor-in-chief losing his legs in a car bombing.
Nezavisne Novine’s current editor-in-chief, Dragan Jerinic, seems to consider war crimes coverage old hat. “We’ve already had people specializing in following war crimes trials – Nezavisne Novine’s had three reporters who’ve reported from The Hague, and one of them will now cover the war crimes chamber,” he said.
Back at the training in Sarajevo, Ed Vulliamy acknowledged that it won’t be easy for Bosnian journalists, who don’t have the luxury of leaving the country when the work is done. Some investigations might be impossible.
“What do you do if some farmer in Ilijas (outside Sarajevo) says to you, ‘There are bones in my field, and it was our lot that did it,’” he said. “It’s easy for me to say, do the story, but maybe you can’t do the story.”
Admira Bakic, a journalist with Radio-Television Tuzla Canton in northeast Bosnia, said at the training that she felt confident of most of her colleagues’ ability to cover the chamber.
“We have to be honest with ourselves and face up to wartime propaganda,” she remarked. Later, over coffee, Bakic added, “Most people are ready. I’m glad to be here. IWPR is an international media outlet, but they have a base here – they’re our colleagues from Bosnia and they respect us.”
