MR. ED VULLIAMY: Thank you. I found it quite hard to get to sleep on Tuesday night after something Tom Buergenthal said in his gale-force opening remarks -- excuse me. How, he asked, will we explain to our children that we can scramble together a forty-billion-dollar package to bail out an Asian economy, the collapse of which might affect our stockholders, but dilly dally about a military response to a murderous regime.

Which got me thinking, yes, how -how will we explain these things? How am I going to explain to my little daughter when she's seven years old why a girl of her age died right here in Daddy's arm because through the telescopic sights of the beast who shot her she was just another filthy Muslim who -- whose innocent life she was unfit to live?

Then, it was hard to sleep last night because of something Ambassador Rudasingwa said, "Why is it that the perpetrators," he asked, "of genocide so frequently achieve their aims?". Well, this is supposed to be a session about journalism, but the core of the argument I want to make is that not only is it intolerably boring to listen to journalists talking about themselves, but that any attempt to cocoon the media and us from our raw material is not only professionally dangerous, but morally absurd.

Because I think the answer to both questions raised by Chairman Buergenthal and Ambassador Rudasingwa has to begin with the potential evil of what is supposed to be the bedrock of journalism: Neutrality. At its loftiest, that's supposed to mean that we're beholding to no one, but it's also a cop-out and can be, in its way, in the words inscribed on the walls of this mighty building, "A failure to act", by the press, just as by the political and diplomatic world.

It's very nice and kind of people to introduce my dear friend Roy and I and other friends from I.T.N. as the people who discovered the Serbian camps, but it's an inaccurate flattery, because, of course, we did not. It's unthinkable, I'm afraid in the age of satellite image analysis, that a gulag of camps can exist two hundred miles or so down the road from Venice without being discovered by somebody, and indeed, our early warning was rather late for the thousands of people who had already been mutilated and killed inside those camps before I stumbled into a massacre, bumbling along on the putrid day of August the 5th, 1992, alerted to the place by Roy.

The warning had gone out long before, but it had been ignored and silenced. Hundreds of people had discovered a massacre, and it's like hundreds of people knew about it, but, for their own particular reasons they decided that a concentration camp just down the road from Venice, in 1992, was okay; it was all right. They decided the same with respect to the ambassador's country, in Rwanda; it was okay; permissible. In the end, it was even rewardable. The fact that some of those same people are now baying for justice makes the whole thing even more grotesque. But, why? How do you explain it to our kids, as Tom Buergenthal asked us the other day.

Most of us who covered these wars grew up in the generation whose fathers had defeated the Third Reich. We were promised that bullies need not triumph. But, that promise was a lie because the Europe that defeated the Third Reich then remained neutral, decided to be neutral, over pale, but unmistakable imitations.

And the press was expected to be neutral as well. There are times in history when neutrality's not neutral at all, it's complicit in the crime, and that applies as much to the press in my view as it does to the politicians. I won't go on about what we found; we've written it, and -- and and there's no point in going over it again. Stumbling into a massacre, men with shaven heads, skeletal,-being drilled across yards, wolfing down their watery stew like hungry dogs. Trnopolje: Another wretched place, barbed wire, skeletal men behind them. The sight of people being herded over the mountains by the thousand at gunpoint, even the children terrified into silence by gunmen. This was 1992, just down the road from Venice, and it was okay.

Now, what are we supposed to do as journalists about this? Well, we're supposed to write about it, and we did to the best of our ability, the camps, the massacre, the torture of Sarajevo, on and on and on to the bloody debauch at Srbrenica, when the so-called United Nations delivered a population of its own safe area into the hands of butchers.

We wrote about it, but it wasn't enough. We were supposed to have had such a great impact on the conduct of the war, but in fact we didn't. All we produced was a program to deliver baby milk, and not much of that.

The people who insisted on remaining neutral did a very good job of turning something very simple into something complicated. It takes very little arsenic to poison a reservoir. It turns out that the sick lie about the Muslims bombing their own people in Sarajevo came from the top of the United Nations in New York.

I -- after the war, I was confronted by people who told me that I had made up these stories about the camps. It was a figment of my imagination. Somehow, I had some psychedelic experience, or I concocted it in the interest of a good story.

Rather than be dismissed, as what W.H. Auden might have called "pedantic madmen raising their fashionable, boring cry," these people's cause was taken up by trendy people on the left and right. It became rather chi-chi in the salons of London to say that the camps were fabrication, and the argument was expanded in detail from this very platform of all places last year.

There's a word in the English language to describe the nemesis of this sort of neutral obfuscation reckoning, the harshest word in the English language. It rejects obfuscation and moral contortion; it requires instead undiluted truth and moral simplicity.

In the aftermath of calamity, it means staring history in the face. But, what does it mean for us, for the journalists? Well, for me, there's no doubt. We have to reject the bogus notion of neutrality, especially when the war criminals of negligence, the politicians, are insisting upon theirs.

We have to be clear about what we are trying to do, what we want to achieve, how we can -- we think these wars and this suffering can be stopped. It was pretty weird after arguing against the United States' intervention in Vietnam for the first half of my life to be praying for the F-16s to come in and just stop this.

I think we have to do more than that. I think we have to stand up and be counted, and this is where it gets difficult when you have the tribunals in The Hague. I elected to testify. I had gone into a massacre on the authority of, among others, a man called Milan Kovacevic, who was introduced as being in charge of the day-to-day running of the camp. The sort of guard shift toilets kind of level, I suspect.

Went back in search of him after the war to find him blurting out his drunken remorse, and while driving in New Mexico one sunny morning, learned that he’d been arrested and a mate of his shot by the British troops, which I suppose saved some oxygen for the rest of us.

So, I knew I'd be back in Hague -in The Hague again before long, and there he was across the courtroom, looking yellow and ill. And his lawyers preening themselves, and being overpaid for also insisting that I'd fabricated this stuff about the camps, failed to defend him very well, I think. But, he died of a heart attack, which I suppose was a reckoning of sorts.

I think we have to do these things. I think that death is the language, is the currency of this business, and I think as journalists, we have to walk a tightrope between being observers and players at the same time. It's professionally dangerous. We're not the spokespeople for anybody, but we are supposed to be human beings. It can be dangerous for our families and other people. My family was threatened at home, and it was with a shudder that I realized that all Kovacevic's lawyers really wanted to do, apart from show off, was to go through my notebooks and get the numbers of all the people I had talked to, with God knows what in mind.

I'm sad to say I think this will happen again. I think that the warnings that the ambassador put out to the United Nations that were ignored in Rwanda will be ignored again from other places. And I think that in those moments in history,' neutrality becomes the enemy of truth, not only the truth on which a reckoning depends as a precondition for peace, but also on which good Journalism depends. When it happens again, we will have to be objective, that's fact specific.

But, neutrality? No. That's another thing. I think the press should and must refuse to be neutral between a camp inmate and guard, between woman who is serially raped, every night, all night for months, if not years, and the beasts who do it to her. Because, it's not okay.

If the slaughter in Rwanda is okay, if a massacre is okay, whether you're a journalist or a politician, those who remain neutral in those situations will defile this place in which we sit and spit on the memory of its victims and of those of these other wars who are so easily and quickly forgotten.