What’s the story?

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 13 · 1 July 1999

From Audrey Gillan

One week after the publication of my piece on atrocity-hunting in Macedonia (LRB, 27 May), I spoke again with Ben Ward, who was gathering evidence of abuse for Human Rights Watch. This time we spoke on the telephone. He had read what I had written and agreed with it. But things had changed, he said. The evidence was gathering slowly but there appeared to be more testimony to suggest that the torture and killing of ethnic Albanians was indeed systematic. When I was in Macedonia it did not seem that it was. Ward, the majority of observers, aid workers and journalists did not have accounts of slaughter on the grand scale. What had concerned the people I spoke to was the hysterical need of reporters to find a massacre, to get a good story. I was a part of that. I wanted women to tell me that they had been raped, to hear the terrible detail of the deaths and then to write it up. Instead, we heard second-hand reports, most of which we had no means of verifying. We knew that the story would only really be told from inside Kosovo. The majority of the eyewitnesses were still there along with the dead.

'What's the Story' was a snapshot in time, an account of war reporting from the border of a war. It did not seek to apologise for the Serbs, nor did it say there were no atrocities. It simply questioned the means by which stories were being told and the facts behind them. At that time, hunches did not align with evidence. Sadly, we have evidence now. I wanted to be the one to find it. I am probably glad that I didn't.

Audrey Gillan
London EC1

From John Sweeney

Absence of evidence of massacres is not evidence of absence of massacres. Audrey Gillan's challenge was a corrective to the mainstream of reporting from the refugee camps of the Kosovar diaspora. She was right to be uneasy about the near-uniformity of the refugees' claims. She was right to be uneasy about the power of hysteria and the power of KLA propaganda. She was right – of course – to question the tabloid hunt for rape victims. But her failure, while the war was on, to find good evidence which backed up the refugees' claims that Serb death squads massacred ethnic Albanians was above all a reflection of modern newspaper economics. She and I both work for the same impoverished newspaper group, Gillan at the Guardian, myself at the Observer. Neither paper can afford to have a reporter spend three weeks looking at one massacre. I went on holiday and Channel Four's Dispatches provided the resources – a car, a helicopter, three translators working non-stop – that allowed us to trace refugees in Albania in five separate towns, all from the same village. We interviewed each key witness separately. The same story emerged: Serb death squads had arrived at their village of Little Krusha at 3.40 a.m. on 25 March and rounded up the villagers. The next day they machine-gunned 112 men and boys in a hayburn; three men escaped. The rest were either shot dead or burnt alive. Since the programme went out it has become clear that the Serbs killed an awful lot more people.

John Sweeney
Skopje