One of the investigators tasked with tracking down and arresting those responsible for that massacre was Vladimir Dzuro, a former homicide detective from Prague. Ahead of the English publication of his book, The Investigator, Dzuro will be at Frontline to talk about how he and his team tracked down and arrested one of the key perpetrators, Slavko Dokmanovic, the mayor of Vukovar and the first in a long list of war criminals to be tried and convicted by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Dzuro will be joined by Joanna Korner, Senior Prosecutor for the ICTY between 1999-2004 and 2009-2012, who was responsible for prosecuting high-level leaders charged with grave breaches of international humanitarian law, as well as Kevin Curtis, a former colleague and ex-English police officer who participated in the arrest of Slavko Dokmanovic. Journalist and author Tim Judah will be moderating the discussion.
This event is organised in collaboration with the Czech Centre London. For more information on the book, please visit this website.
Reviews for The Investigator:
“The Investigator is a raw and unique first hand account of an extraordinary pursuit of justice in the face of absolute horror.” – Julian Borger, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and World Affairs Editor for the Guardian
“Personal accounts of investigations of war crimes, such as this one… breathe life into the abstract project of accountability and show the challenges of operating a criminal justice system in an international environment.” – Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1996-99)
Speakers:
Toby Cadman is a barrister specialising in war crimes, international terrorism, extradition and human rights. He has been senior legal counsel to the chief prosecutor of the Bosnian war crimes chamber, and defence counsel at the Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal. He is a co-founder of The Guernica Group and Joint Head of Chambers at Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers.
Kevin Curtis is a former Detective Sergeant with the UK police and from July 2008, was the Chief of Investigations for UNICEF, retiring in February 2018. Between 1995 and 2004, he headed an team that investigated war crimes and grave breaches of international humanitarian law at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and in 1999 he led the investigations into atrocities committed by Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, then the Republic of Serbia. He was involved in some notable arrests of war criminals, who following arrest, subsequently stood trial in the International Court in The Hague. In 2004, he was engaged by the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) into the Oil for Food Programme in Iraq, (the Paul Volcker Committee) as a team leader. In late 2005 he became Investigations Adviser to the audit and investigation section of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), until joining UNICEF.
Vladimír Dzuro worked as a criminal detective between 1983 and 1995, initially investigating violent crime with the Criminal Investigation Department in Prague and later at the National Central Bureau of Interpol in Prague. In 1994, Vladimír actively participated in the work of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia. In April 1995, he began a ten-year stint as an investigator with the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Vladimír currently works as Chief of Headquarters Office at the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services in New York.
Joanna Korner worked as Senior Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia between 1999-2004 and 2009-2012, prosecuting high-level leaders charged with grave breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL). She has lectured on IHL to Iraqi Judges and Cambodian Defence Lawyers. In June 2004, she was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) for services to The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Judge Korner has been a Grade “A” Advocacy Trainer since 1996. She was the Head of International Faculty of Advocacy Training Council of England & Wales from 2005 to 2012. She has organised and taught on numerous advocacy training courses in the UK and internationally.
Moderator
Tim Judah is a journalist and author and covers the Balkans and other regions as a correspondent for The Economist. He has worked for many major publications and broadcasters, notably writing wartime reportage from Afghanistan to Ukraine for the New York Review of Books. He is the author of three books on the Balkans—The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Kosovo: War & Revenge and Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know—and published a book on the conflict in Ukraine – In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine in 2016. From 1990 to 1991, Judah lived in Bucharest and covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria for The Times and The Economist. After that, he moved to Belgrade for both publications in order to cover the war in Yugoslavia. He moved back to London in 1995 but continues to travel to the region frequently. He is the president of the Board of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and a member of the board of the Kosovar Stability Initiative (IKS).
(Image: Vladimir Dzuro reads the charges and the ICTY version of the Miranda rights to Slavko Dokmanovic. (Col. David S. Jones [Ret.])
]]>Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and spent a decade imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, tells his own story in this documentary portrait from directors Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard.
In prison Khadr struggled to endure the inhumane conditions and the demoralising improbability of release. In the outside world, public outcry mounted as the US and Canadian governments refused to take action. It took the relentless work of Dennis Edney, Khadr’s lawyer of over a decade, to advance the case. Finally repatriated to Canada in 2012, and released in May of this year, Khadr then faces the Harper government’s attempt to overturn his bail.
Featuring unprecedented access to former fellow inmates, family members, and government officials, Guantanamo’s Child acquaints us with an incredibly resilient young person who grew up in a tragic setting and analyses the political implications of his case.
Investigating a life that has sparked some of the most heated political debates in recent history, filmmakers Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard reveal a young man who is cautiously ready for another chapter of his life. And for the first time, Omar Khadr himself tells us his side of the story.
Directed by: Michelle Shephard and Patrick Reed
Produced by: Peter Raymont, Michelle Shephard, Patrick Reed
Runtime: 80′
Country: Canada
White Pine Pictures
Discussion to be moderated by Richard Gizbert, presenter of Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, a weekly show that looks at news coverage by the world’s media. Gizbert has also spent 25 years working in the media world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories around the world.
Panelists:
Moazzam Begg is one of nine British citizens who were held at Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay by the US government. He was released on January 25 2005 without charge. He is the director of outreach for advocacy group CAGE and author of Enemy Combatant. This year he was imprisoned by the British government on charges relating to Syria, his case was later dropped.
Michelle Shephard is an investigative reporter with the Toronto Star, author and filmmaker. With patrick Reed she co-directed Guantanamo’s Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015. Shephard has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada’s top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times. In 2011, she was an associate producer on the Oscar-nominated documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. She produced the National Film Board documentary, “Prisoners of the Absurd,” which premiered at Amsterdam’s film festival in 2014.
Cori Crider heads the Abuses in Counter-Terrorism team at international NGO Reprieve. A U.S. lawyer, Cori has spent a decade investigating and litigating the most serious violations of the ‘war on terror’: Guantánamo, CIA rendition and torture, and civilian deaths from drone attacks in undeclared war zones.
She devised Reprieve’s challenge to abusive force-feeding at Guantánamo, which resulted in the first disclosure of videotapes of the process. She also developed Reprieve’s project investigating the drone war in Yemen: her team exposed key details of a drone strike on a wedding convoy, and brought a Yemeni man whose innocent relatives died in an attack to Washington, D.C. She represents two Libyan families whom U.S. and British intelligence ‘rendered’ to the dungeons of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Cori regularly gives print and broadcast interviews on counter-terror abuses and has written for the Guardian, CNN, al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.
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On Monday 14 July, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of Seeds of Hope, a documentary which focuses on the effect of rape in Eastern Congo, where it has become a widely used weapon of war. The film centres around one woman, Masika, who is herself a victim of rape, and her determination to provide a centre for recovery and sanctuary for other women who have been raped, as well as taking in many children who have either been orphaned or rejected due to their violent origins.
Director Fiona Lloyd-Davies speaking at the Frontline Club.
The film opens with a shocking statistic: 48 women are raped every hour. Seeds of Hope attempts to humanise this figure by documenting the lives of women living in Masika’s centre. The centre is a shelter for victims and, over time, has managed to develop livelihoods for the women who live there, in the forms of farming and sewing.
The film reveals how endemic rape has become in the Democratic Republic of Congo and during conversations with members of the military explains not only how they use rape as a weapon, but also how it has become an almost standard part of military practice.
Director Fiona Lloyd-Davies described how, as a filmmaker who has covered different wars, the use of rape in conflicts was not new. She was, however, shocked by “the frequency, the violence, the level of violence against women” when she visited the region. She described how, when she first visited in 2001, rape was frequent, but did not seem to have a structure or real pattern, and was still random. By the time of a next visit in 2005, she was appalled by the accounts she heard:
“Very organised rape camps. . . . It seemed to have shifted and become much more organised, . . . they talked about having name calls . . . and it seems that many girls get taken and they’re led into the forest for several weeks to quite remote areas where the militias have got their camps, and they’re kept there until they escape.”
Lloyd-Davies explained to the audience that many soldiers had been arrested and put on trial in November 2013 in Minova for the charge of rape. Out of the 40 that were originally charged, one soldier died before the trial and five never appeared in court as they were still able to work, and were deployed with their units. The final verdict took place in May 2014, where only two soldiers were found guilty of rape as a war crime. She described this lack of justice as “virtual impunity”. As the risk of punishment is so low, there is no deterrent for soldiers to stop committing these crimes:
“If they know that they (may have) done it before, they may not have; they may have seen, or heard of friends do it before [or] their colleagues in the army, and with so little justice and with this virtual impunity, there is a sense . . . that they can get away with it.”
One audience member enquired after the director’s personal safety while making this film; as a low budget documentary the crew was very small, and she was filming in a dangerous and violent area. Lloyd-Davies explained that 2011, when she did most of her filming with Masika in Minova, was a “very quiet time”, and that she was staying at a priest’s house. She then told the audience that she had been attacked in Minova, but went on to say that she has been back to Minova since then, and intends to go back again.
She also discussed how the situation is improving in terms of the stigma attached to rape and the treatment of rape victims. The film discusses how many of the women were rejected by their families after they were raped, which is the reason that many of them found their way to Masika’s centre. One of the questions from the audience was whether any improvements or developments have been made, and Lloyd-Davies described the work that many NGOs are carrying out within villages, working with village elders, to address the stigma and encourage communities to view rape victims differently, which has meant that more rape victims have been able to come forward and receive the help that they need.
Information on future screenings of Seeds of Hope can be found on the film’s website here.
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In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Masika Katsuva, herself the victim of multiple rapes, has rescued some 6,000 women and children. Her centre provides medical and psychological help, and she also works with the women to cultivate maize and bean crops to have an independent life.
Filmmaker Fiona Lloyd-Davies follows Katsuva and the centre’s inhabitants, as they reshape their lives to build a new future. The film also speaks with the perpetrators, among them soldiers from the Congolese army, who give extraordinarily open testimony as to why they rape and their attitudes toward their horrific acts.
Directed by Fiona Lloyd-Davies
Duration: 71′
Year: 2013
On 23rd April 2013, The Frontline Club held the first UK preview screening of award winning television director Callum Macrae’s new documentary, No Fire Zone – The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka.
No Fire Zone uses forensically verified footage from civilian mobile phones and government forces cameras to chronicle the last 138 days of the 26 year long Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese led government and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).
The film documents with sometimes disturbing footage the barbaric onslaught and effects of shelling by Sri Lankan government forces on the self-proclaimed no fire zone in the northeastern region of Sri Lanka known as the Vanni. Macrae says that the film is evidence of war crimes by the Sri Lankan government led by president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
. @Callum_Macrae – if there are any #lka govt reps here they will say that this evidence is fake. It is not. It has been checked.
— Tamil Guardian (@TamilGuardian) April 23, 2013
But why didn’t the UN or any international governments recognise the atrocities at the time? Macrae answered:
“Sri Lanka had an extraordinary breadth of support because of its strategic position . . . and because the world powers like to deal with a single government there was an extraordinary alliance in support of, or at least looking the other way, whilst the Sri Lankan government did this.”
On interviewing Sir John Holmes, former Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator of the UN, Macrae seemed still shocked at how out in the open officials were being about the facts, yet not doing anything about them:
“To start with, I thought he was being a whistleblower. I thought he was exposing what happened and then I realised that actually behind it was an extraordinary cynicism that this is exactly what the leadership and the highest hierarchies of the UN thought, which is basically ‘we will put our fingers in our ears and we’ll close our eyes and we’ll hum loudly and hope that not too many people die.’ An absolutely appalling neglection of the UN’s duties.”
Why does Rajapaksa and his government continue to target the Tamils, which now only makes up about 15% of the Sri Lankan population?
“It is important to understand the kind of culture that exists . . . [it] is a kind of ultra-nationalist, singular paranoia . . . which fails to distinguish between Tamil civilians and Tamil fighters. [It] basically sees enemies around every corner.”
Macrae emphasised that the same people who are seen to commit the war crimes in his documentary still occupy positions of power. Rajapaksa is still president and scheduled to chair the next Commonwealth leaders meeting at the end of 2013. His brother, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, is Defence Secretary of Sri Lanka and General Shavendra Silva, who was director of operations in the civil war, is now Sri Lankan Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York.
“This is not some kind of historical, academic exercise which we’re saying we need some kind of justice or accounting or truth telling for historical reasons. The situation . . . is absolutely desperate. Repression continues . . . this is a very live issue. This has to be confronted. As Vani said at the end [of the film], there is a generation of very angry young Tamils who watched the world betray them and allowed these massacres to happen. The world now has an opportunity and a duty . . . to ensure that justice is done.”
In UK @frontlineclub @nofirezonemovie discusn- @Callum_Macrae "legitimate grievances of the #Tamil people have been ignored."
— Aust Tamil Congress (@austamilcongres) April 23, 2013
Having already screened No Fire Zone in the Hague and in Geneva, Macrae will be running a Kickstarter campaign over the next month in order to fund a worldwide tour of the documentary including visits to Africa, Latin America and Australia. Find out details on the No Fire Zone Twitter feed soon. Macrae ended by saying:
“It would be a tragedy if this did not get seen around the world. . . . [We need to] tell people what happened because they don’t know.”
Watch the trailer for No Fire Zone – The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka:
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Congolese human rights lawyer Claudine Tsongo investigates the case of Masamba, a soldier convicted of rape. She discovers that his trial was corrupt and unfair. In her journey to obtain justice, she uncovers a system where the basic principles of law are virtually ignored.
Questions are raised about the role of the international community and non-governmental organisations within the Congolese judicial system. Does their financial support cause justice to be for sale?
Justice for Sale is the third film by filmmakers Ilse van Velzen and Femke van Velzen covering different aspects of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Fighting the Silence (2010) explores the consequences for rape victims and in Weapon of War (2009) military perpetrators talk about rape as a war crime.
Directed by Ilse van Velzen and Femke van Velzen
Duration: 60′
Year: 2011
The twin sisters Ilse and Femke van Velzen are internationally recognized, award-winning filmmakers. Through The Mobile Cinema they reach out to local communities by bringing back their films as educational tools to lift people out of inequality and violence.
When the Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power it brought to an end a 13-year rule that had seen the country torn apart by bloody conflict, with thousands of people killed.
The man who had been feted by world leaders at the height of his powers as Serbian President in 1995 was forced out of office amid street protests and a general strike after losing the September 2000 election and later faced trial in the Hague for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo.
Ten years after the October 5th revolution we will be bringing together journalists, fillmmakers and experts who were there to discuss these remarkable events and their impact. What was the legacy of the former President who died in his cell in 2006?
Chaired by Bill Neely, International Editor for ITV News.
With:
Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director, Amnesty International and co-author of Small Acts of Resistance How courage, tenacity and ingenuity can change the world;
Norma Percy, co-executive producer (with Brian Lapping) of the BBC series, The Fall of Milosevic;
Allan Little, BBC News special correspondent and programme presenter;
Maggie O’Kane, editorial director of GuardianFilms and former foreign correspondent with the newspaper, she has covered most of the world’s major conflicts over the last decade.
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