Thoughts on the future of journalism

Ethan Zuckerman describes various financial models.

Alissa Quart muses on “Lost Media, Found Media” in CJR.

The UN and Sexual Violence

Reuters flags an upcoming UN Security Council meeting June 19. The topic is how to elevate the sexual violence that occurs at horrific levels in many conflict zones to the very top of the security agenda. Critics like Stephen Lewis  are scathing about the UN’s failure to protect women from rape.  A conference in the UK this week tries to address the military side of the equation and what role peacekeepers could play.  My reporting in the DRC and Rwanda in December raised my own awareness of this issue.  I hope to do a radio piece exploring the UN angle before the June 19 meeting.

Darfur

A UN peacekeeper has been killed in Darfur. Here’s the BBC story.

My colleague Carol Hills looks at what’s behind a joint statement from the three presidential hopefuls on Darfur. Find the story in the Vote 2008 section of our website. Carol is heading up our election coverage on the web, looking at foreign policy and other international angles in the U.S. race. (See also Matthew Bell’s weekly Elections 2008 podcast.)

Lots of fresh writing on Darfur on Alex de Waal’s blog Making Sense of Darfur, including Julie Flint on the rebels and Jerome Tubiana on land and the Zaghawa. Today De Waal summarizes his recent speech at the Royal African Society in London “Can Sudan Survive?”

Eric Reeves maintains his focus on Khartoum in this latest in the Christian Science Monitor.

Meanwhile Abyei, a contested flashpoint in the North-South peace elsewhere in Sudan, has seen serious fighting recently. US diplomacy is currently focused on averting a return to war there. 

WWI

I’m off on another reporting trip this weekend for my series on how wars end. This time I’m delving into why WWI ended when it did and what sort of peace followed.  I’ll be talking to historians in the UK,  touring battlefields in Belgium and visiting the Hall of Mirrors where the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919.  The challenge with any radio piece is focus.  I need to figure out which parts of a large and complicated story to tell.  If you have thoughts on what’s most important about the way WWI ended, do post a comment. I’ll let you know how I get on.  My current reading:

Hew Strachan The First World War

Margaret MacMillan Paris 1919

Zara Steiner The Lights that Failed

Guatemala’s Past

My colleague Clark Boyd, Technology Correspondent for PRI’s The World, has a must-watch piece about the Guatemalan National Police Archive on PBS’s Frontline/World tonight.   The original radio story aired on The World in September 2007. I found it riveting.

Here’s Clark’s “nutshell” description of the story:

More than 200,000 people died and went missing during Guatemala’s 36 year civil war. While the army was responsible for atrocities against indigenous people in the countryside, many have wondered about the targeted campaigns against dissidents and activists in the cities. It’s long been thought that the country’s National Police were responsible. Three years ago, the archives of the National Police were discovered by chance in a derelict police building in the middle of Guatemala City. Now, with the help of a Silicon Valley non-profit called Benetech, some 80 million documents are being cleaned, scanned, and analyzed for potential human rights abuses.

PBS local listings are here:

http://www.pbs.org/tvschedules

R2P

The aid crisis in Burma following the cyclone prompted some interesting discussion of the UN-endorsed principle of the “Responsibility to Protect.”  

For background on the principle of “R2P” see the website of the newly-created Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the Ralphe Bunche Institute for International Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner first raised the question with respect to Burma  earlier this month.

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan touched on the issue yesterday on The World.

Samantha Power and Fred Hiatt discussed the issue last week on NPR.

Aside from the question of whether R2P is relevant to Burma, there’s been a heated debate about its merits with respect to Darfur. Advocates of R2P see Darfur as a test case. Critics say R2P is just a slogan and a false promise. 

Gareth Evans makes the case FOR.

Alex de Waal makes the case AGAINST.

Part of the disagreement hinges on whether you think R2P is synonymous with military intervention or not.

Lots of food for thought.

Balkan Bakers

A propos the future of the Balkans, here’s an intriguing piece from the BBC’s Nick Thorpe on bakers from Kosovo who are scattered throughout the former Yugoslavia.

I met Nick in Pristina in 1999 when we were both covering the aftermath of the war there. He’s one of the few reporters who has returned to the region again and again to see how things are developing there.

Correction

Andras Riedlmayer points out that I have been misspelling Gorazde as Goradze.  I have corrected throughout. — Jeb

What the Future Holds

Sometimes a day’s reporting can feel pretty fragmented, but then, on a good day, it all comes together anyway. Today was like that. I had time to let the morning unfold a bit. Walked east to west through Sarajevo’s old town and then most of downtown by the river, taking photos, marveling at the mix of still-war-battered buildings with the new.

My first interview was with Miroslav Lajcak, the international community’s “High Representative” to Bosnia.  He’s disappointed some people here, but I found him forthright and thoughtful about my particular set of questions, namely the central contradictions and dilemmas  of being in charge of this place and the legacy of Dayton and what might have happened differently at Dayton and what the challenges are now as a result of Dayton. He was patient and eloquent and did not try to evade the trickier stuff. For that he has my thanks.

I also spoke to Tim Clancy, author of the Bradt guide to Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the last of the highlander villages in the Dinaric Alps near Sarajevo.

And I spoke at length with Jacob Finci, leader of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community and soon-to-be Bosnian Ambassador to Switzerland.  He was particularly eloquent about life under 44 months of siege in Sarajevo:

It’s not very easy to describe in two minutes because this was so strange and  almost totally unbelievable. It was unrealistic to live in the city without electricity, without any source of energy, without water, without phone lines. We succeeded to survive with 5 liters of water per day per capita and this same water was used for cooking, for washing, for toilet, everything in 5 liters.

At the same time we pretended we were living normally. We organized theatre performances  and theatre performances used to start at 11 o’clock in the morning and after, instead of going to some fancy restaurant, we went to the soup kitchen, being lucky to get one pot of beans or pasta or whatever was served there and this was as I call it an imitation of life and this was also kind of our so to say way of our struggle because not everyone had a rifle but this was also way of our struggle for survival, our battle to show we are living persons and that we are fighting for survival.

I remember  the journalists who covered the war here they have been amazed that each and every person on the street was dressed lovely with the makeup and so on and said how it can be? The answer was simple: maybe some foreign television will  take a picture of me and my family probably will see that I am still alive and I shall always be properly dressed in the clean clothes because I can get laundered and if they take me to hospital and somebody will see that my underwear are not very clean they will get the wrong impression about me. So it was the small things that we always count on and it was everything so unbelievable.

People who survived Sarajevo are not willing to talk about this to the people who never have been here because it looks so unbelievable that no one will believe you so nobody will understand me and that’s the reason why these stories are only for the insiders. And maybe just after Sarajevo I realized why the people who survived the Nazi camps who survived Auschwitz and then came back, they never spoke about Auschwitz because to say such things it’s so strange nobody will believe me.  Just after years years  after WW2 finished they started to open themselves  and tell us the real stories. Maybe something similar will happen about Sarajevo but now you have some books or political essays about war here and how it was stopped, what is possible to be done on the field of reconciliation  and similar  things but at the same time we still don’t have any novels or movies about inside life in such siege because maybe it will look a little bit as a fantastic story invented by some lunatic.

Finci has a case against Bosnia and Herzegovina at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He maintains he should have the right to run for the presidency in Bosnia but under the current (Dayton) constitution he is precluded from doing so because as a Jew he doesn’t belong to one of the three designated identities: Muslims, Croats and Serbs.  He’s pretty confident the Court will rule in his favor; he hopes that in turn will add to pressure for Bosnia to change/update its constitution.

Mid-afternoon we set off on a last-day excursion to a highland village called Lukomir which is struggling to maintain the old ways in the face of rapid change all around.  Just two hours from Sarajevo and we were in an other-worldly landscape of limestone and lingering snow and shepherds tending flocks. Look for an audio portrait soon on The World.

 And finally, a lovely late dinner with new-found friends at Dveri (see www.dveri.co.ba) in Sarajevo. I had the muckalica and a glass of white wine from Herzegovina.

Sorry for lack of pics in this post; I even tried to post video from up in Lukomir, but the internet is too slow tonight and I don’t have the time or patience to wait it out.

Not sure when I’ll post next. In transit tomorrow. Thanks to all who’ve been following. 

Jeb

 

another quick note on Sudan

Eric Reeves’s take on events in Sudan last weekend:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/05/15/a-gift-for-khartoum.aspx