"Neutrality" and the Absence of Reckoning: A Journalist's Account.

• Author: Vulliamy, Ed

On the putrid afternoon of 5 August 1992, I stumbled into Omarska, as a reporter for the Guardian of London, along with a crew from the Independent Television Network (ITN). It was said we had "discovered" Omarska, but this was an inaccurate flattery. Diplomats, politicians, aid workers and intelligence officers had known about the place for months and kept it secret. All we did was announce and denounce it to the world.

During his opening remarks at a recent conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Tom Buerghental, chairman of the museum's Committee on Conscience asked:

How do we explain to our children and grandchildren that in the world in which we live, it is easier to mount a $40 billion rapid response to save the economy of this or that far-away country because its collapse might affect our stock holdings, while we diddle and daddle when it comes to mounting a rapid military response to save people from destruction by a murderous regime?(1) How indeed? How will I explain to my daughter when she is seven years old that a little girl her age died in my arms because, through the sight telescope of the beast who murdered her, she was just a "filthy Muslim," unfit to live her brief life?

I think the answer to this challenge rests in the entanglement of two notions that are embedded in the Holocaust's legacy The first is the notion of "reckoning"--staring history in the face, assigning blame and moral or criminal responsibility The second is neutrality, the idea that the diplomatic world, like the press, must be detached to do its job properly In the context of the carnage in Bosnia and the West's toleration of it, these concepts are vitally important. I believe that history without reconciliation is dangerous history Crimes against humanity not reckoned with can only lead to more of the same. I also believe that there are moments in history when neutrality is not neutral, but complicit in the crime.

I will argue here that in the examples of Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and elsewhere, the neutrality adopted by diplomats and the media is both dangerous and morally reprehensible. By remaining neutral, we reward the bullies of history and discard the peace and justice promised us by the generation that defeated the Third Reich. We create a mere intermission before the next round of atrocities. There are times when we as reporters have to cross the line, recognize right as right, wrong as wrong and stand up to be counted.

A REPORTER'S ACCOUNT

In the winter of 1996 I was asked if I would testify in the case against Dusko Tadic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. The ICTY was formed by the United Nations to bring individuals charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity to justice. I was initially wary that the tribunal was no more than a release valve to compensate for the West's crime of appeasement. Some colleagues who had also worked in Bosnia and whom I greatly admire refused to testify and advised that it was an unwise and perilous course of action. "Our job was to report," they advised, and if possible, to prompt others to do something that would end the suffering. But justice--the acquittal of the innocent and imprisonment of the guilty--was the business of others. The tribunal was an unknown and potentially dangerous labyrinth. If I testified I would certainly lose any claim to neutrality, if I ever wanted to stake one. The rules are not unlike those of the Mafia; you can say whatever you like about them and they don't care, but you cross a line once you go into the courtroom.

On the other hand, there was an argument with legal and moral components. For example, if I see someone being mugged, I should expect the police to call me as a witness at the mugger's trial. If the victim is a defenseless child or old lady, one is instinctively more willing to testify Multiply that reasoning by a factor of a thousand, and you have good reason to testify against genocide in Bosnia. I thought about these arguments carefully. In the end, these were deliberations over what kind of history was being made, over what kind of legacy was left by the camps and ethnic cleansing.

I talked to my father who fought in the Second World War. I was part of a generation and a citizen of a newly unified continent, brought up in the shadow of the Third Reich and in the aura of victory I had watched at close range, the language and practice of appeasement tear the promises of postwar Europe to shreds. I had watched diplomats obfuscate and lie; I had watched the flag of the United Nations--an icon of this generation--deliver the defenseless people of its own designated safe areas into the hands of butchers. I had watched my own country lead the international community in rewarding the worst violence to blight Europe since Nazi Germany

Above all, it seemed to me that the ICTY, for all its shortcomings, was the last organism in the attempt at reckoning in the aftermath of Bosnia's war. Although Tadic was only a minnow in a war of minnows, this was a war of macabre intimacy in which people knew their torturers. I decided this was a chance for some kind of reckoning for the only people I really cared about--the victims. I threw aside any pretense of neutrality and went to The Hague. I gave the prosecution in the Tadic case all my notebooks and I told them everything I knew.

THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS, JUNE 1995.

The breakfast scene resembled what you might find at any other modern Dutch hotel. Corn flakes, cheese, fruit and a generous selection of buns and rolls were arranged on a big table. Waiters and waitresses in pressed shirts and breezy catering-school smiles waited on business travelers enjoying the luxury of company tabs. On this particular morning, a group of guests, noticeably different from the usual clientele, poked at the food with a certain detachment, as though the abundance were somehow unreal, laid out for someone else.

This group from Bosnia was obviously connected by a bond that distanced them from the uniformity of the international hotel. They were mostly men, with one or two women, who looked older than their years. In their speckled brown eyes lay something unfathomable and lachrymal and--whatever this secret was, whatever the bond--it was an unhappy one. The sorrow that sealed it would be told to the world during the days that followed.

They were Muslims from northwestern Bosnia, survivors of the Omarska concentration camp. Many had not seen each other since the day after the camp had been revealed to the outside world on 7 August 1992, when it was abruptly closed by its Bosnian Serb management in an attempt to conceal its dark secrets. That day, the surviving inmates of this hell were put on buses and taken to other camps, or deported in convoys across mountains and minefields. Some lucky ones were evacuated to far-flung countries--like Germany, Indonesia or Sweden--that volunteered to take them in.

As was the hallmark of Bosnia's war, members of their families had been slaughtered, scattered or simply disappeared without trace after the hurricane of violence swept through their villages and towns. Now they exchanged news of who was alive or dead, who had vanished and who had not. They even wondered what had happened to their torturers and the camp commanders and recalled the days when they--inmates and guards--had played soccer together.

They were now assembled to confront the past. These people were called to The Hague to testify before the first international war crimes tribunal convened since the famous Nuremberg trials that had tried and sentenced so many of the orchestrators of the Holocaust. The tribunal's founders claimed that Nuremberg, in small part, assigned blame for the unimaginable pain of Holocaust survivors, and even liberated the German people from responsibility for the heinous crimes committed in their name. Now the United Nations sought to employ that process in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the ICTY. The tribunal's first chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, said he regarded its work as the difference between peace and an intermission before the next round of hostilities.

Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, was the first man to be accused at an international court for war crimes since Speer, Goering, Hess and their conspirators. The group having breakfast knew Tadic well, from their lives in both peace and war. When they were asked to point him out, at the end of their testimonies, they did so--some with venom, some with contempt, some barely daring to look him in the eye and still others defiantly. Tadic sometimes looked down or turned his eyes away. Other times he stared back. Once, he looked his accuser in the eye and smiled a devilish grin.

The survivors also testified about Camp Omarska itself. They detailed a place that Western authorities had apparently known about but tolerated and concealed from public knowledge for four long months. It was a place they remembered collectively as well as privately, a place that haunted them now and would follow them forever. After...