ROY GUTMAN: Thank you, Tina.

I will focus on one issue today: War crimes. It is the subject of a book that I am now co-editing, and I'm happy to say three of my colleagues to my left here are all contributing articles to it. Tina was in on the session where we thought up the idea in the first place. So, I have everybody at the table here except for Deborah on board, and I hope we can get her by the end of the session.

The title is Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know. It will be coming out next summer, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the Geneva Conventions.

The last couple days have been marked, at least in this room and in this building, as historic anniversaries of the Genocide Convention; yesterday, the U.N. resolution, therefore, and today, I think it is the Human Rights Convention. I haven't seen really anything in the newspapers to mention these events or even to recall them. And I would imagine that if left to itself, the Geneva Conventions would be similarly ignored next August 12th, when they have their fiftieth anniversary.

But, I think any of us who wants to look forward into the next century -- and hopefully it will be a less bloody century than this one -- has to recall that these three documents and several others that were issued at the end of -- that were devised at the -- at the beginning of this era, just after World War Two, were drafted really with World War Two and the Holocaust in mind. And it's time after fifty years that they be looked at again, that they be -- people see if you can breathe new life into them, that they at least be brought down to earth and to the public and explained and discussed.

I can promote this book shamelessly. For one thing it's not even here yet, so it s much easier, because the hope behind it is that it will distill some of the lessons we have in this -- on this panel -- in particular, have learned -- not only from Bosnia, but from contemporary conflict in general.

No one knows better than a conscientious journalist the extent to which cover --in covering wars and humanitarian emergencies of this post-Cold War era, that reporters themselves are operating in unchartered territory. You're really on your own. And little in your background prepares you to make the distinctions that you have to amidst the confusion and the disinformation.

There is -- there is always a simple answer available, namely, to write or to report on your radio or television that a situation is one of anarchy. Or, you can always follow the lead of major governments, and pick up the cliche that a particular conflict is a product of an ancient ethnic or tribal hatred, or is a civi1 war. That is what happened during the Bosnia conflict when President Bush, basically, and everybody in Europe said the same thing.

And it happened while the genocide was going on in Rwanda. Of course, you can explain almost anything by the terms ancient ethnic conflict, it’s a complete cop-out. It implies people are killing each other because they need to or want to. And I mean, just to give you an example, the – probably the best example of an ancient ethnic conflict is the enmity between France and Germany that went on for more than a century.

You could argue that World War Two was a European civil war. You could use the term to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and -- and – and on --and certainly to Rwanda and to Bosnia if you' re going to start using such shallow terms as that. All it really asks -- allows you to do is to duck a serious consideration of what is occurring and why it matters.

The fact is that major governments do not really care about far-away conflicts or peoples, unless their interests are directly engaged.

(The tape was turned.)

MR. GUTMAN: The issues are always interesting to note, but you really should -- it’s the last place you should turn for guidance, and especially when they purvey pseudo-analysis such as this.

But, figuring out what is really going on, as my colleagues have just said, takes time. It requires -- I hate to say it, Tom -- almost a scientific method, by which I mean testing theories, developing theories, testing them, trying them out. And then, I -- I -- I really do agree with Tom. When you figure it out, and you -- every reporter really has to do it on his own, I think, his or her own -- then you really do have to take the risk and say what you think is going on. If we -- if we don't do it, and we're there, and we're doing the digging, we get our fingernails dirty as we're digging up whatever facts we can. If we don’t do it, who will? I think it's just the job of the reporter -- the ultimate job of the reporter is to do exactly what Tom said.

I'll give you an example of the kind of challenge that a reporter faces in a contemporary conflict situation. Perhaps the best single indicator of a terrible crime is often the massive displacement of civilians, or sometimes the deportation of civilians. The fact is, though, that people may he fleeing for their lives for vastly different reasons, and you -- and let's give you some examples of -- of -- of types of reasons.

They may be departing the scene of a crime, or the -- or the immediate threat of crime. And I can recall that being the case certainly in Bosnia, in northern and eastern Bosnia in 1992. They may be departing because their leaders ordered them out, intending to return militarily and to use that area as a base to destroy the other side. And this would -- I recall personally, again, Serbs fleeing Croatian Slavonia in 1991. They may be going at the insistence of political leaders who intend to depict them as the victims of crime. And my colleague David Reath (phonetic spelling) recalled the case of Tajiks fleeing into Afghanistan in 1993. Or, they may be departing because they or their leaders have committed massive crimes and fear justice or retribution, as in the case of Rwandan Hutus who fled into eastern Zaire in 1994 in the wake of genocide.

Sorting out why people are fleeing is really central. But, how often does any reporter spend his or her precious energy and limited time to gather such primary source data? Most of the time, we are really trying to cope with the environment and logistics, the deceptions, the propaganda, the coverup. And the contention that motivates this book is that we should focus really more on victims, what is happening to them, and why.

My own motivation in a sense is that I think that in the period before the Bosnia conflict -- and I, like Tom, have been covering many conflicts, but nothing has been as long and as intense as that, really, in modern times -- is that I myself was unaware of what is a war crime.

And I can recall during the first of –or the second of the series of four wars -- the one in Croatia in 1991, once driving to the town of Vukovar trying to follow a convey in, a food aid convoy. And of course, they were turned back and we were bracketed by mortar fire, and so everybody split. They ordered the journalists to leave, particularly. I had nothing else to do and I decided to visit a nearby hospital in the town of Vinkovci on the front lines.

And there, all the patients and doctors were in the basement. And I interviewed a group of patients who had all come from one battle, they had all been in one tank of the Yugoslavia army which was destroyed by the Croatians. And they were a multiethnic group, and it was really quite a nice little story about the people who had been in the tank, a vignette. But, the real story -- and it would have been hard news -- was that the hospital itself at which I was doing the interview had been directly targeted and destroyed. Every Red Cross on it had been used as a bull's-eye for Serb shells.

And no one else, I mean, I did not -- I missed the story, I confess, and -- but the story was much bigger than this, because, in fact, five hospitals at the same time had been targeted in a similar way. I missed the story, but so did most of my colleagues. I don’t know of anybody who reported it, who focused on it. And it would have been – and quite a story I think, indeed. And it revealed what you can call, I think, under the Geneva Conventions, a serious war crime.

This kind of story goes missing in – in conflict, because I think reporters do not know the laws of war, the laws of armed conflict. It actually has about four different names, and the people in the field who specialize in this have not – have yet to agree even on what to calls these laws. But, they are basically similar; they are incorporated in the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions and other similar locations.

So, there’s questions that come up. Is it legal for someone to block a food aid convoy, let’s say, at the Czech border? Is it criminal in Sri Lanka to conduct combat in which no one – no combatant is allowed to surrender? Is it legal to reduce houses of alleged terrorists to rubble? Does it violate international conventions for combatants to slip in amongst civilians as in Rwanda or as in the camps, rather, in Zaire?

Well, we’re not going to answer every question in this book, but I’ll just describe it to you in outline, what it’s going to look like. It’s about a hundred and fifty articles – a hundred of them – a hundred authors.

I think they include some of the best reporters anywhere, and the top legal scholars to explain the law. Every listed grave breach under the Geneva Conventions, every crime against humanity that comes out of the Nuremberg Tribunal or to some extent out of the new international criminal court statute will be covered as a case study, written by a journalist. And we've had the good luck that American University's Washington College of Law has provided experts – one of them is sitting in the audience here -- to guide us on what the law really is, because no journalist I know has a clue about what the law really is, and I think we’re just beginning to get it now, including my colleagues at the table here.

There will be ten -- it will be a book within a book -- ten articles about nine wars -- we have two about Rwanda -- which will focus on war as a place where war crimes occur. Not the usual political prism, not the usual -- not the east-west prism, not the phony prism of ethnic division, not the usual confusing ways of looking – and interesting, but often confusing ways of looking at conflict. We're going to just try it on one other plane, mainly, the terms of war crimes.

The object we have, and it is, I think is ambitious, is really not to change war reporting, but just to tell reporters that there is another option, there's another dimension, a major dimension that we sometimes miss. And if they’re aware of it, they may even want to – to make use of it.

I don't think we will overcome with this book the very real limits that we all face in covering a contemporary conflict, but it will offer some new directions which I think are worth -- are worth trying.

Thank you.