JOURNALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS
By Carroll Bogert
Director of Communications, Human Rights Watch

>> printer version

When NATO went to war over Kosovo in 1999, there was no traditional battlefield. The Atlantic allies fought entirely from the skies. Their enemies, the Yugoslav army, Serbian police and paramilitaries, mostly attacked civilians – a cruel specialty they had honed over the past decade in Bosnia and Croatia. Journalists had no real theater of combat to cover, no frontlines to follow on a map, no advances and retreats to pursue. With a few exceptions, outsiders had virtually no access to the war on the ground in Kosovo.

Human Rights Watch published its first report about Kosovo in 1990, and went on to document the Serbian government’s stranglehold on the region in many dispatches over the next decade. Its last report before the NATO bombing began, A Week of Terror in Drenica, published in February 1999, gave evidence of the growing seriousness of war crimes in Kosovo. The report helped to prompt the feeling, among European and American politicians, that something had to be done.

When the war finally broke out, Human Rights Watch’s researchers were as eager as the journalists to uncover what was happening inside Kosovo. There were three options, all of them unsatisfactory in some degree. The first was to be based in Belgrade, which was the target of many NATO air strikes and the source of highly unreliable information about casualties suffered throughout the country, including Kosovo. The second was to sit in Brussels, a source of more reliable, but still incomplete, information from the NATO high command. And the third was to scramble along the borders of Kosovo, mostly in Albania and Macedonia, where hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were pouring across, traumatized, exhausted, and in fear for their lives.

The third option, in the end, produced the best reporting about what was really happening in Kosovo. From these terrorized refugees came surprisingly detailed accounts of the atrocities they were fleeing. When, after the war, researchers and reporters rushed into Kosovo, they found a chillingly accurate nature morte: almost invariably, the dead bodies were just where the refugees said they’d be. And the torched houses were exactly the same houses that refugees said were set on fire.

The fact that these testimonial accounts matched the facts on the ground so closely is highly significant. Governments engaged in massive human rights abuse often claim, when presented with the accounts of victims and eyewitnesses, that such sources are unreliable. These people fled the scene, they can’t remember what happened, they’re hysterical, they’re politicized, they can’t be trusted. But when enough people are interviewed, and their accounts are cross-checked with care, a true picture of events can emerge. This methodology carried the day in Kosovo, where so many people who gathered information on the border were able, not long after, to enter Kosovo itself and check out the refugees’ stories. To a surprising degree, the stories were confirmed.

This is the new face of war reporting in our times. Whether it’s Kosovo, Chechnya, or Sierra Leone, actual fighting between armies can be hard to observe. The only immediate sources of information are the civilian victims and witnesses, who escape the conflict and give their accounts to human rights workers and journalists.

This kind of reporting requires a skilled researcher with the patience to interview a large number of refugees, to weed out the wild or inflated tales, to speak to victims separately and corroborate their stories, and to comb refugee camps for multiple witnesses from a single village or a single region. It takes time. In an era when media budgets for international news are being slashed, it takes resources. And in an era when news is becoming entertainment and the public is presumed not to want to hear about the atrocities suffered by a faraway people, it takes the courage to say: this matters. This story is worth getting.

The war in Kosovo was a turning point for Human Rights Watch. Over its twenty-year history, the organization had documented many wars and internal conflicts. But often those reports were written later, after the fighting had ended. For the first time, over the many weeks of the NATO bombing campaign, human rights researchers were sending out fast dispatches based on refugee accounts and sources inside Kosovo – applying the same painstaking methodology of traditional human rights work, but at a breakneck pace. Modern technology, of course, made this possible. Cell phones and satellite phones and emails and web postings got the information out of the Balkan countryside and into the headquarters of Human Rights Watch in New York, where, after being analyzed, it was sent on to the media, the policymakers, and the general public.

This book tells the story of how Kosovar Albanians were exiled from their homeland, and how they returned. It recounts the destruction of one village in Kosovo, and how modern technology enabled a human rights researcher to piece together the facts of what happened. It describes how photographs of Serb paramilitaries were downloaded onto a laptop and carried into a decimated Kosovo village where cows wandered among the ruins, and how survivors, gaping at pixels on a screen, recognized and identified their attackers, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Technology enabled a new kind of human rights reporting from Kosovo, one that was fast and decisive. It also gave that information a bigger punch.

Human rights reporting is changing in the age of international war crimes tribunals. The United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993, and while the NATO bombing was underway, the Tribunal’s chief prosecutor indicted Slobodan Milosevic, then President of Serbia, for his crimes in Kosovo. Before long, an International Criminal Court will have the authority, at least in theory, to judge very serious human rights crimes that take place anywhere in the world. Human rights reports have always been intended to inform the public, to shame the perpetrator, and to put the truth on record. Now they could actually help put someone in jail.

The book you hold in your hands is not just a piece of journalism, and it’s not just a human rights report. It’s a piece of documentary evidence. Read it, look at it, and judge for yourself.