prijava
SARAJEVO, April 4 (FENA) - Some 30 journalists testified before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which was established to conduct proceedings against perpetrators of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Fourteen of them recalled in interviews their experience from that time, and although the reactions were different, there were those who said that if you are a journalist and witness an event, why not testify before a court that could find the perpetrator guilty.
Their testimonies, 30 years after the war, are now recorded in the digital archives of the Mediacentar which carried out the project "Journalism as the first draft of history" with the financial support of the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands through the MATRA program.
During the project, Mediacentar Sarajevo searched more than 100,000 pieces of evidence from the ICTY's court file database in search of media content used as evidence in the arguments of the prosecution, the defense and the trial chamber.
Considering the amount of evidence, most of the media evidence was attached in the joint case related to the trials of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadžić, as many as 781 pieces of evidence, of which 723 were videos.
On the occasion of the completion of this multi-month project, a conference was organized in Sarajevo today, emphasizing that newspaper reports by domestic and foreign correspondents who reported from all sides involved in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia are important evidence.
Mediacentar Sarajevo's research collected more than 2,500 media pieces of evidence from the ICTY's court records, an average of about five percent of media evidence in a court case, and at least 31 testimonies from foreign and domestic journalists who testified at the invitation of the prosecution and defense. is during the research process.
The head of the digital archive Infobiro within the Mediacenter, Dragan Golubović, said that the research was done in order to create a database, but also answered the question of how the media reports and testimonies of journalists were used.
He emphasizes that journalists in the former Yugoslavia made articles, wrote articles, but had no idea that one day it would be used in court as evidence for the process of proving war crimes, adding that the Hague Tribunal was the first court where journalists appeared as witnesses.
The Mediacenter recorded the experiences of 14 journalists who testified before the tribunal. Details of the testimony experience and reasons for the decision to testify were shared by Anthony Birtley, Andrew Hogg, Alija Lizde, Branimir Grulović, Ed Vulliamy, Florence Hartmann, Jacky Rowland, Jeremy Bowen, John Sweeney, Martin Bell, Sead Omeragić, Slavoljub Kačarević, Veton Surroi, and Zvezdana Popović.
The Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jan Waltmans, underlined that it is the journalists who are the first to witness the events in the conflicts and their findings, videos and photographs, are important for the processes to be then carried out in the courts.
(FENA) S. R.
