Reporters Need Better Understanding of Laws of War, Says Pulitzer Prize Winner
Washington, February 17, 2004 -- Reporters need better understanding of humanitarian law and the rules of war, according to a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Bosnia.
In a seminar with the spring 2004 Pew Fellows and SAIS students, Roy Gutman, diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek and director of American University's Crimes of War Project, said his own work suffered from his lack of understanding of the laws of armed conflict. That shortcoming, he said, often causes journalists to miss the bigger stories in the wars they cover.
“If you come across a school that has been bombed in conflict, the tendency is simply to report the facts,” Gutman said. “But the larger question you have to ask is, ‘what happened here?'”
Pointing out that bombing a civilian target is in fact a war crime, Gutman said: “if you don't know what the violation is, you are going to have a hard time putting it into context so that somebody can do something about it.”
Gutman said his experiences in the former Yugoslavia have inspired him to help journalists become fluent in the language of international law, making them more capable of accurately identifying and competently exposing war crimes while in the field.
As the co-author of “Crimes of War,” a guide to war-crime terminology that has been translated into 10 languages, including Arabic, Russian and even Nepali, Gutman said that recognizing violations of international law can be especially difficult for journalists. New types of atrocities are being invented with every war and may not always be immediately evident as a war crime; Gutman suggested that understanding how international humanitarian law evolves can help journalists in their reporting both during and after humanitarian crises.
Besides the book, Gutman has helped create a website, www.crimesofwar.org, that offers a service that puts journalists in contact with humanitarian and war crimes experts who can answer questions for them while they are in the field.
Gutman warned against the trend in the US press of failing to cover smaller wars because they seemingly have no relevance to American interests. “Small wars often lead to large wars where the US may well get involved,” he said, citing as examples the Iran-Iraq war, which presaged Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and the civil wars of West Africa which provided Al Qaeda with cover for money laundering.
Gutman also criticized the Bush administration for what he sees as its “schizophrenic” attitude towards international law.
“Anybody who knows humanitarian law is mortified by what the Administration has been doing in Guantanamo,” he said. “It's basically suspended the Third Geneva Convention which deals with prisoners of war and decided to reinterpret it as it sees fit. When Americans are captured in a war, we want to be able to cite the Geneva Convention and demand certain treatment for our own soldiers. This is quite a contradiction.”
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