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Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Janine di Giovanni: It's important to get Putin, but it's really important to get the people that did the torturing, the killing, the murdering
Janine di Giovanni has spent over three decades chronicling wars. One of the world's most renowned war correspondents, she has reported from nearly every major conflict of our time: Bosnia, Syria, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. Her reporting has appeared in The Times, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The Guardian, and she has received numerous awards for her courageous journalism, including the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation. But Janine's work goes far beyond journalism. As the founder of The Reckoning Project, she now works to transform stories of war into legal evidence – building cases for international justice. In Ukraine, her focus has shifted to crimes that don't always leave craters: forced russification of children, indoctrination in occupied territories, and the quieter violence of memory erasure. In this interview, Janine speaks candidly about justice, trauma, Putin's impunity, and what it means to resist – not just with weapons, but with testimony. We recorded this conversation in Lviv during the Lviv Media Forum 2025. Your work is about documenting war crimes. When did you understand that it's more than just documenting? I felt like it wasn't enough that we were just documenting Bucha or child deportation. It's one thing to use it as journalism, but it's another thing to use those stories to try to put the people that do those crimes in jail where they belong. So how do you do that? You documented the testimonies, and then you work directly with the prosecutors so that you can help build cases against Putin. And not just Putin. It's important to get him, but it's really important to get the people that did the torturing, the killing, the murdering, who operate the drones, who are driving the buses taking the children away, who bomb the hospitals in Mariupol, who torture Ukrainian soldiers that are prisoners of war. All these people are breaking international law. There is something called the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, which should be maintained and followed. If you don't follow them, you are breaking the law, and you deserve to be punished. So this is how accountability works, and what worries me now is that we live in a world where there is so much impunity. People get away with it. Putin gets away with it. Netanyahu gets away with it. Netanyahu is starving two million people to death. He's not let food aid go into Gaza for 10 weeks [as of 16 May – ed.]. He's not punishing Hamas – he's punishing babies who are dying. He should be punished for this. You cannot operate as a leader committing war crimes and, in his case, genocide. Putin cannot continue to wage a war and commit hideous crimes against civilians, bombing Ukrainian hospitals, schools, train stations where civilians are gathering, trying to evacuate. So, it's really important to me that these crimes are investigated, documented, and then given to prosecutors so they could be tried in courts of law. You mentioned cases when Russians bombed the Mariupol drama theatre and Kramatorsk railway station. However, how do you document the crimes that don't leave behind explosions and bodies; in terms of informational warfare, how do you document, for example, forced russification of Ukrainians? It's interesting you ask that because we are working now on indoctrination. Indoctrination is not a crime. It's not codified, it falls between international criminal law and international humanitarian law, but indoctrinating kids – not just kids, adults as well – in the occupied territories, taking away their concept of being Ukrainian. The first thing they do when they take the Ukrainian kids and deport them is they take away their names and they give them Russian names. They take away their language. They can't speak Ukrainian, they have to speak Russian. They take away their identity. They're no longer Ukrainian, they are Russian. And then indoctrinating them into the Soviet, not Soviet but Russian mindset, whether it's by patriotic music or songs or poems or Russian authors rather than Ukrainian authors, all this is indoctrinating people, and it's what Pol Pot did in Cambodia. It is a crime. Right now, we're working on trying to investigate where does it fall in the law. Deportation is a crime, but indoctrination is kind of a gray area. So it's really interesting you ask about that because to me that is something really disturbing and really worrying. So what should we do as Ukrainians and organisations like The Reconing Project, to hold these people accountable? We're working on it. It's really important for us. We've just published a report. Because it is interesting that no one is looking into this. Okay, you can drop bombs and you can go to Bucha and assassinate people point-blank. We know these are war crimes. But to take a population in Ukraine's east and basically begin to work on their minds... Because children before the age of 9-10 are incredibly vulnerable. I worked a lot on child soldiers in Africa. I spent years working and studying child soldiers. You know what I was told that they make the best killers because before the age of I think eight, you don't determine a sense of right and wrong. So you could pick up a gun and you could kill an entire village, and an adult would say, "I have committed a terrible crime." A child wouldn't. So this is what the Russians do, in a sense. They're counting on the fact that we could take small children and we could begin to russify them. And if you start with children, what is that? That's the future of Ukraine. Because I'm going to get old, you're going to get old, but those kids are growing up now. So, in 20 years' time, they will be the next leaders. It's a very chilling strategic plan – indoctrination and russification. The Russians are really skilled at it. They've spent decades to perfect it. They know how to do it. So, we have to get it codified within the law, and we have to have it recognised. We have to keep writing about it. We have to keep going, we have to keep working with lawyers to use these as cases. We have many of these cases in our archives of children who have been indoctrinated. Not just children, by the way, but adults as well. How do you choose the priority of what to document? Well, right now, for us, it's indoctrination in children. How do we choose it? I try to work with my team on things that others don't – there's a lot of civil society in Ukraine that is really good at gathering evidence. So, we try not to overlap with them. You know, we try to find an area where we could really work and focus with our team and do good work. Because I just don't want to work. I want to have an impact. You know, I want to go to the Hague. I want to see the crimes against Putin laid out methodically so that we can help the ICC, so that we can help the prosecutor general in Kyiv. We're really lucky because the Ukrainian government is the first government I've ever worked with that we work with. We work with the Office of the Prosecutor General. In other countries where I worked, the government is always your enemy. You don't work with governments. Journalists, our job is to kind of criticise government. But, we work with the prosecutor general and he has been so helpful to us. The former one, now there's an interim. But the Office of the Prosecutor General has asked us to do certain things, asked us to look into things, and they've been incredibly supportive. Justice isn't quick. It's slow. As long as you know that there is something happening, that we are documenting cases, then, it is there. It's a record. No one can say this didn't happen. Well, yeah, it did. Because we have this testimony, we verified it, and this is happening right now. It's really important that we get that down on paper, on tape, on video so that no one can ever say in 10 years, 20 years that it didn't happen. Because you know what? That's how Russia works. It's how Russia works. I was in a genocide in Bosnia, Srebrenica. The Putin machine is now working in Bosnia as well. There are people who just say it didn't happen. There was no genocide. There were no people killed. It's like, what are you saying? It did happen. Srebrenica did happen. There were 8,000 men and boys who were killed, who were taken to a forest. People tend to rewrite history. At The Reckoning Project, if we can have solid evidence, evidence does not lie. Evidence is not fake news. Evidence is not disinformation or propaganda. It is just evidence. Read also: "I'm talking to you from your future": a conversation with Aida Čerkez, 30 years on from the siege of Sarajevo You mentioned other civil organisations. As far as I see, with cutting the help of USAID, there are less organisations who document war crimes in Ukraine. Did you feel this impact on your organisation or your work? Look, when Trump got elected, all of us knew the world is going to change because he's not a friend of human rights. He hates the press, he hates journalists. That's why he creates his own TruthSocial and Fox News – these aren't journalists, they're propagandists. He hates real journalists. He hates the rule of law because he breaks the law. He is above the law. He even controls the Supreme Court. The third thing, human rights, he's tried to destroy it by closing down civil society. Personally, at The Reckoning Project, we decided that we were going to just put our heads down and keep working, no matter what. So, we're just putting our heads down. I always say it's one step, one foot in front of the other. You just keep going. That's what we're trying to do. How Trump's politics influence your work right now, and how can it influence the Ukrainian case in the Hague in the future? In the long run, I don't think he will. I mean, I think he tries to scare people, and that's why USAID was pulled. He's mainly focused right now on America, on deporting millions of people. People, many of whom have the right to be there. You know, they were born there but if they don't have the right papers… I think he's operating with fear. I went to America a month ago and before I got on the plane people called me and said, "Leave your computer at home, don't take your phone, erase your phone." I have nothing to hide. The only thing that I worry about is our archive of testimonies and that he can't access on my phone. I think they want us to be afraid, and they want us to be disheartened. But look, after that White House terrible incident with President Zelenskyy [the meeting in the Oval Office – ed.], what did it do? It made Ukrainians stronger, right? More united. More united because his [Zelenskyy's – ed.] popularity before was not good, and now he's more popular than he was before. People saw it. Even people who looked at that and thought, "How can you humiliate an exhausted wartime president because he's not wearing a suit?" It was a terrible thing to watch, but it actually brought Ukraine back to the center of news. Also, it made people who might not have been supportive of Zelenskyy before supportive of him. How do you envision transforming collected testimonies into real justice? The way that our researchers work is different from being a journalist asking questions. So, there are very specific questions that a prosecutor will look for. If we're working on the case of the deported children, where we want to talk to people around the children – their parents, their caretakers, the people in the orphanage, wherever they were last seen. When we get them, the testimonies are, you know, like a questionnaire. Very specific, very detailed. We then verify it. It's verified using open-source intelligence, but also satellite imagery, different things, like the Kramatorsk train station, right? To make sure that everything is solid. Then, either the ICC or the Office of the Prosecutor General will want very specific things, like, "I want you to look if the name of this person, a Russian officer, comes up in any of your testimonies in Kherson region or in Sumy or in Donbas." Then, we give those specific files to the prosecutors to help them build their case. Now, the case against Putin at the ICC is specifically about the children. So, when will that happen, and will Putin actually go to jail? When people say to me, "Putin will never go to jail," I say, "Look at what happened to two dictators, Duterte of the Philippines and Slobodan Milošević of the former Yugoslavia." Both of them killed many, many, many, many people. Both of them exercised tyranny over a civilian population. Both of them never thought they would get anywhere near the Hague. Where did Slobodan Milošević die? In a jail cell at the Hague because his government fell, and the new government handed him over to the Hague. Duterte – same thing. He's now in prison in the Hague. So people say Putin will never go, but we don't know that. We don't know when a new government may come in. There may be a coup d'etat, there may be a junta, there could be anything. He could be handed over as political leverage. So, that's one scenario. The other is that sometimes it's not as important to get the big leaders on the chain of command as it is to get the people that committed the crimes. If you go to Bucha and you talk to the witnesses who saw their husbands or their sons being killed. The people that did it – it wasn't Putin, it was a low-level soldier from Chechnya or Buryatia or wherever they were from. Those are the people that pulled the trigger or tortured or raped or killed. They deserve to be in prison because there is justice. Sometimes getting those people is to me more important. Because, going back to Bosnia, there are so many people walking around Bosnia today that committed horrible crimes. They murdered, they raped, they burnt houses, they did terrible things, and they are still walking around. And the people they raped or survivors of families that they killed see them in the villages. That's when justice is so important. Really, really important. I've interviewed so many Bosnian women who were raped. There was a horrific systematic rape campaign to rape Bosnian women and make them pregnant with Serb babies. When the war ended, those men that raped them didn't go to the Hague. They're still there. Those women have to see them every day. So for me, getting those men is important. It's important for the society to heal. Sometimes it's not Putin that's essential. It's the people that entered the villages. It's the people that are doing the indoctrination. The teachers that are teaching children and forcing them to learn Russian language, Russian history, their version of a Russian world. Do you believe that justice can be fully served in Ukraine, and the international tribunals are ready to do this? I think the international tribunals are ready to do this, absolutely. The biggest office of the ICC in the world is in Ukraine, in Kyiv. So, I think that's already a sign. I think the willingness of the prosecutor general in Ukraine to work directly with the ICC and ICJ, with other mechanisms like universal jurisdiction shows that there's a real pathway. Does justice work? I have to believe that. Otherwise, I couldn't do the work I do. And I do think that the arm of justice eventually reaches. We have to believe that the work we're doing is going to have an impact. Otherwise, we couldn't wake up in the morning and do it. How do you envision justice for Ukraine? I'm hopeful. I really am. First of all, there are a lot of people focused on it. Second is that the Ukrainian people themselves are going to demand it. Knowing the character of the Ukrainian people, which is very strong. You know, you're not victims. You're not people that sit back and say, "Look at what happened to us." You are like, "We're going to fight back." I don't think the Ukrainian people would allow justice not to be delivered. Also, remember that the domestic courts are working right now. So, there will be international justice. The crime of aggression – whether that tribunal happens, I believe it will, is really important. The ICC, whether that's set up as a tribunal, a hybrid court, maybe something that happens here, that's really important and that's already going on. Every conference I go to, whether it's Davos or Munich, the priority is Ukraine. And the Europeans are backing Ukraine because they're afraid. They're afraid that if Ukraine goes, what's next? Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania? And what comes after that? If Putin wasn't stopped in Ukraine, would he be in Warsaw tomorrow? Would he get to Paris? I don't think he'd get to Paris, but he might get to Latvia. He might take Estonia. It is a matter of security as well as solidarity with Ukraine. You worked on many wars and you have seen a lot. What is the story that impressed you the most in Ukraine, maybe which person whom you talk to? I think Bucha. Talking to some of the mothers who had lost their… There was one mother, her son had been taken from the street and then tortured and killed, and her pain at a child of her suffering that much. But also equally some of the Ukrainian soldiers I spoke to who were just like had lost their arms or their legs and they still believe so much in what they're fighting for. They also know, "I'm not just fighting for Ukraine, I'm fighting for something bigger." It's about democracy. It's about fighting for what you believe is right. Overall, the entire country impresses me because I've never seen people who operate without a sense of victim. Instead, it's a real sense of "we are driven, you're not going to break us, we are Ukrainian." It's emotional, and it's very powerful to see that. It's an amazing country. What is the most important when you talk to those people who lost the loved ones or maybe were tortured themselves? It's really hard. If you're taking testimony, it's very different from being a journalist. The testimonies have to stand up in court. One time I remember being in Kharkiv and I was with a colleague of mine, we were interviewing this old man who was from… Do you know that part of eastern Kharkiv that's completely destroyed? Saltivka, yeah. He was living in an apartment, it was completely bombed out. He was there alone. He was so traumatised that we couldn't use his testimony because you can't use traumatised people's testimonies in court. People who are traumatised, their sense of memory is distorted. But we realised we couldn't use his testimony, but he wanted to talk and we just listened to him. The greatest skill that a journalist or a social worker or anyone could have is empathy , is to put yourself into their shoes. What would I feel like if I were an old person, having to be evacuated from the home I've lived in my entire life, leaving behind my animals and my roots, my home? I don't want to be a refugee going to Poland. I don't want to be a refugee going to Kyiv. I want to stay in my home. So, I try to put myself in their shoes. That's very hard because it's very painful. Journalists are meant to be objective. Personally, I've never been objective. I will always be on the side of people who are suffering. How do you protect yourself and your team from the burnout in this case because it's very traumatic? Yeah. I think you protect yourself by having faith in what you do. Your work is going to save you. Your work, believing in what you are doing, is important – the most important thing to have during wartime. I know with my team, my Ukrainian team, that they feel they're doing something. Otherwise, they would feel so helpless because the terrible thing that a war does is it strips you of power. You don't have the power to end the war. You don't have the power to protect people. But you do have the power to write about it. You do have the power to tell a story. You do have a power in a way to control the narrative, to make sure it's a truthful narrative. You have to keep believing that. It's really hard to do that when a war's been going on for three years and you're really tired. You want it to end, and you want a normal life. You can't leave the country easily. Many people I know say they're not having children right now because they don't want to start a family. They don't want to bring a child into the world right now. War is helplessness and I think the only way to overcome that helplessness is to have some sense of power by controlling your own destiny. You could write about it. You could keep a diary. You could take photographs. You can keep the part of you alive, which is hope. The war will end. I don't know if it's going to end with Trump or his conditions, but it will end. It absolutely will end. When it does, life will begin again, and then you will have to put your life back together. But you will never forget what happened to you, and you might not be able to forgive. That will be a part of you forever. But, in some way, it makes you stronger to appreciate when the day comes and the war's over and you could take a plane from Kyiv to Warsaw or to Greece or to Italy or to America. You're going to really appreciate that airplane in a way that you never have before. I didn't take a shower in Bosnia for months and months on end, and I could tell you when I got somewhere where there was hot water, I never have taken for granted electricity or hot water ever again. Because I lived for years without electricity. I'm not the same person I was before I went to Bosnia and I'm really glad. I feel privileged to have lived through that. In one of your interviews, you mentioned that memory it's a form of resistance. How can we as Ukrainians preserve the memory of this war? You write about it, you take photographs, you draw, you create art, you create theater pieces, you use art or words in a way so that it never is forgotten because it's exactly what I said. In 30 years' time, whoever's in charge of Russia at that time will try to rewrite this whole story – "they didn't invade Ukraine, the Ukrainians invaded Moscow. There was no Bucha. There was no Irpin. There was no Mariupol." It's all lies, but you can say, "No, there was because here is my family's diary." That's why I always tell people to write. It's like the most important resistance you have is that you keep a diary. Not just your journalistic work, but keep a diary because your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren are going to read that and say, "Wow, my grandmother had an app on her phone called Air Alert. And when there was a drone, it went off, and they had to go to a parking garage and sleep there!" or "Wow, 19,000 children were taken from Ukraine and put on buses and taken to Russia, and their names were stolen from them!" The Russians say that didn't happen, but it did happen because here's a list of the names. So, yeah, memory is our greatest resistance. Memory and documentation. Because then no one could ever say you made it up. It's evidence, and evidence doesn't lie.
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
"I'm talking to you from your future": a conversation with Aida Čerkez, 30 years on from the siege of Sarajevo
Thirty years ago, Sarajevo was surrounded by artillery, snipers, and silence from the rest of the world. Bosnia was at war with Serbia and Croatia. Inside the besieged city, Aida Čerkez, a young journalist, was covering the war for the Associated Press from her basement newsroom, living under constant shelling, with no electricity, and with the gnawing sense that no one was listening. In the early days of the full-scale invasion, she wrote a letter to Ukrainians telling them that "Ukraine will stand, the rest will pass." Now, three decades later, she speaks to Ukrainians from a place we haven't yet reached: "afterwards". Aida has lived through war, grief, exile, return – and the long, messy road of trying to build something human from the rubble. Some of her reflections may not sit comfortably with Ukrainian readers. She talks about the weight of hatred, the moral fog of trauma, and the dangerous appeal of righteous anger. But perhaps that's exactly why her voice matters now – not because it echoes our own, but because it disrupts the echo chamber. In this interview, Aida shares what it means to keep reporting when the world seems indifferent, what silence enables in war, and why – even after everything – she still believes we can plant trees we may never see grow. We recorded this conversation in Lviv during Lviv Media Forum 2025. You once said that while you were in Sarajevo under siege, you lived with the illusion that showing the truth would be enough to stop the war. Do you remember the exact moment when you lost that illusion? It wasn't one moment, it was a process. It was maybe two years into the war… I think it was during one of those peace negotiations like the one taking place today [this interview was recorded on 16 May as the talks between Ukraine and Russia were taking place – ed.]. And people just stopped counting the peace negotiations at 300. Some of those peace negotiations would actually start with big artillery attacks on Sarajevo, which was a kind of pressure on the negotiators. So, you have this fear of peace negotiations because they're going to be violent for us while they're talking in Geneva. They're going to be pounding on us in order to put pressure on our negotiators. I remember people coming down the hallway in my building saying, "Peace negotiations are starting – let's go to the basement." So many of them failed that at some point I asked myself: what am I doing? You know, this has no effect on the public. This has no effect on the negotiators. This has no effect on foreign governments. So who am I actually talking to? Realising that for two years you've been reporting day and night, and nothing – zero – makes you kind of break down and think "It's not worth it." But in fact the process is so slow. You are changing public opinion. It's just so slow. When you're being shot at, every minute counts. You don't have time for years. But these things take years. It's this discrepancy, your impatience and reality – the reality which is you are changing the world, but it's so slow you can't see it. Exactly like the avenue I was talking about [during the discussion panel before the interview – ed.]: you have this beautiful avenue full of trees. If you look up, you can't see the sky because the trees are so beautiful and grown, and the people who planted them knew that they would not live to see this avenue. And it took 100 years maybe for those trees to grow and be that beautiful and turn it into this beautiful avenue. You may not even live to see peace and the effects of your work. But it'll be there , and this is something you have to realise, the slowness of the process and your impatience. It'll take decades for you to see the results. Maybe you never will, but it will be there. You realised that afterwards, as far as I understand… I realised that decades after the war, 20 years after the war. During that period when you were there, how did you fight frustration? How did you fight those feelings that you had no power over this? I cried. I cried a lot, and then those tears turned into hysteria, and then I started laughing and joking about it with other people. In the end, it just turned into a big joke. You just keep on rolling, and sometimes you just report because it's your job. But that's not enough. You have to see a purpose. I think that at some point you will contribute to a change that may not be "peace", but it may be a change of attitude, a change in the global consciousness about problems. You will contribute to that. It may not be good for Ukraine, and fast enough for Ukraine, but trust me: every day you are switching one person from not caring into somebody who is aware of other people and cares about other people. And that one person out of the seven billion is worth what you are doing. What advice would you give right now to Ukrainian journalists and activists who have realised that their articles no longer provoke any action from the authorities? Okay, what I would say to them is: try to imagine a world in which you all stop reporting. What's that going to look like? Sad. Uh-huh. So, are you improving the world with your articles? I guess so. I hope so. What's the alternative? No information? You know what that means? That means turning the light off and letting the bad people do whatever the hell they want to do without anybody seeing it. At least you're making it visible. Visibility gives some kind of a guarantee that it's not going to get worse. And that's what you're doing – keeping the light on. Because when it's dark, it gets ugly. So, you may think that you are watching massacres and you're watching wars and you're watching injustice and you are showing it to the world. But trust me, if you stop, it's going to get much worse. In the darkness, much more is possible than in daytime. During your panel, you mentioned that the media shouldn't be angry and provoke more anger. When you reported during the siege of Sarajevo, how did you keep yourself from getting angry and remain a professional journalist? It's difficult, but maybe not, you know. You have to kind of develop some kind of a bipolar.. Really? I saw myself as bipolar. One side of me was personally affected by this war. But I knew that if I let my emotions enter my articles – and I was working for foreign media – I wouldn't be trusted. So, at the time we had only heard about drones as something that might happen in the future, and somebody explained to me what they were. I always imagined myself sitting there seeing the situation from my perspective, which is the perspective of a victim of a big atrocity. But then I would kind of imagine myself being a drone, and then looking at it from above, like God or an angel or a drone or something, and then report about it. That would allow me to exclude my emotions from the report. It wasn't that hard because the facts are already horrible. You don't have to add bad words to them. You don't have to add lies to them. Even what is happening is not believable. The truth is even harder to believe. You don't have to add anything to it. And you are coming at this from the moral side of this situation. So it's easier for you. Imagine what it is like for an honest Russian who really wants to report what's going on. After the first half a sentence, he will be in jail, and after six months, dead. Sometimes that's worse than this, you know? And I only learned that after the war, when I discovered how many people in Belgrade had tried to tell the truth and were killed. So I realised later it was actually much easier for me under sniper fire and under bombs. You're just sitting in a basement, but at least you have the impression that you're on the right side of history and you're doing the right thing. That's much easier than being on the wrong side of history and trying to do something about it. I have a lot of respect for my colleagues in Bosnia who covered the war, but I have more respect for people I met later who suffered the consequences in their own society, in their own country, of only trying to tell the truth. And I have to tell you, that's worse. Because you're expelled from your community, and you may end up dead. At least here on my side, we're all together with a feeling that we're victims and we're right. In that sense, the honest people on the other side are the bigger victims sometimes. When the full-scale invasion started, you wrote a letter to Ukrainians because you were on the same side as Ukrainians are now. What motivated you to do this? I was angry. I was so angry because it was happening again. I was angry at everybody because I had seen that this was going to happen. Nobody has military exercises on their foreign border without wanting to roll in. What was the purpose of that? It was just that nobody wanted to [see this – ed.] except us in Bosnia – we saw it all coming, but we have that experience. Then I thought, "Man, why is it that nobody in Europe or in Ukraine could believe that this was going to happen, and it was only us in Sarajevo who knew they were going to attack you?" That's when I realised that it was because we had that experience, and if we didn't share it with the people over there, then what? If we all die and our experience dies with us, then it was all for nothing. People who've gone through this kind of thing and have any kind of experience should share it with others, because then it becomes common knowledge, and that is progress. Not learning something and then dying with it – that's not progress. I saw my letter and my warning to Ukraine as exactly that – a warning and progress. You should know what's coming your way. I didn't. But you should learn. From my experience, it'll make your life easier. And tomorrow when this ends, do the same for the next one in the line. You saw the same stages of the beginning of the war now and the war then… Same. Maybe then you can tell us what mistakes Ukraine shouldn't repeat now. Be careful what narrative you develop. Because when all this is over, you may get consumed by hatred. It won't affect Russia. They don't care whether you like them or not. But your society will be stuck in hatred that will block you from progress. You should not forget what happened to you. But you should not be obsessed with it. That's why you should try to avoid hate speech. Because hate speech will poison the next generation. You're passing down trauma to the next generation. You should warn the next generation and make them aware of the history and the danger, but not pass on your trauma. Because it will block them from growing up as normal people. Many people made that mistake in Bosnia, but in general, many people got over it. I always have to mention and remember there is a city in Eastern Bosnia called Srebrenica. There was a genocide committed over there. So, the mothers of the victims have an association. I've been stunned by their courage in seeking the truth, insisting on [justice in the] courts, but reaching out to the progressive people in Serbia. They stand together every 11 July: the Mothers of Srebrenica and the women in black from Belgrade stand together next to the graves. That is a healing process for both of them. It doesn't matter what it looks like, but for both of them it's a healing process. They're above the conflict of nations. They have understood that it's a conflict between good and bad, and they're both on the good side, instead of accusing a nation of being bad and I'm good, mine is good. That's wrong because it will just block you. They have understood that there are good people on both sides. If you decide to be among the good people on this planet and not just to be a Ukrainian, it's much more than just being a member of a nation. How much time passed before this happened? I think it took maybe five or six years. Very soon. Very soon. Actually, the women from Belgrade reached out, and there was this hand that accepted, and they met and cried and now they're sisters. For me as a Ukrainian, that's hard to imagine… It is hard to imagine. Yes, it was for me, too. Especially right now in the middle of the war. I want to understand how it is possible, because you are already in a post-war period – one which I cannot even imagine. What does it look like? I'm talking to you from your future. I have to tell you that in the future, you will find out how many victims the Kremlin regime has caused in Russia. You will learn about this seven-year-old girl who drew a Ukrainian flag at school and her father is in jail. Because a little girl is not even Ukrainian. She's nothing. She probably… Now, why would a little girl do that? Do you know why? Because she probably heard a conversation at home where people were probably saying, "Our country is doing terrible things to Ukraine," and they're right. She picked up on that and expressed it in a drawing at school. Of course the authorities knew that a little girl couldn't invent that. So her father is in jail. You will hear about many such fathers. You will hear about people who died in prison because they criticised this aggression. You don't hear about them now because they're invisible and you can't hear them. Nobody can, because the regime is so harsh that they just disappear overnight. One day when everything is over, it will start coming out. You will see how some resistance was present in Russia. And that people died because of it. Just like you died because of the same regime. It will surprise you. It surprised me. I travel all over the world, and wherever I go, there are Serbs. They left during the war. I look at them and I think, "This guy chose to leave his country forever because of what his country was doing to me. He lost his country because of me." Of course I can sympathise. They have new lives, they're happy, but they lost their country. They will never come back. Their children speak English or German, and that family is lost forever for Serbia. Forever and ever. Their children don't even speak Serbian because of what others in their country did to me, and they're victims. Twenty, thirty years later, you realise that, and then you stop hating everybody. You will realise how many victims there were on both sides – more on yours, but some on theirs as well. I have many colleagues that have had to leave Russia forever because they criticised the Kremlin narrative. They live in Riga or [wherever – ed.]… That's not easy. They're refugees because of what's happening to you. Open your heart a little bit to those people. But there is a difference. They were against the regime, and that's why that country lost those people. In the case of Ukraine, there are more refugees which our country has also lost just because of Russia. How can we compare this? That's statistics. There are more Ukrainian victims than Russian ones, is that what you're trying to say? No, I'm saying that the people we lose are not victims, they're refugees. They're victims too. If you lose your country, you're a victim. To lose your country is horrible. If you have to move and it's not your choice, but you're kicked out by either circumstances or a regime, that's not your choice, you're a victim. You may be living fine. Let me give you an example. My mother was a refugee in Germany. I was in Sarajevo. At the time, I was angry with every refugee because they had abandoned us. To me they were traitors, including my mother, even though I made her leave so she could look after my child, you know. But there was this emotional rift between us. I felt like I had the upper hand because I was here and she wasn't. Particularly after one conversation. There was a terrible day when there was shelling and it was really horrible. I thought, "She's constantly sitting watching the television. They're going to report on this, she's going to be worried. Let me call her." I had a satellite phone because I worked for a foreign company, so that was a rare privilege. I remember we crawled under the tables, and I took the satellite phone down and dialled my mother and said, "Hello." And it was hell all around me, like the ceiling was falling down, and I was kind of holding the handset so she didn't hear the bombs. I said, "Hey, I just wanted to say that there's a little attack on Sarajevo but I'm fine. How are you?" And quickly end it so she couldn't hear the bombs. And this is what she says: "Oh, we're good. Hey, do you have one of those cordless phones in your office?" I was like "No, why?" "Oh, I just read in a magazine that cordless phones can give you brain cancer. So if you have one, just don't use it. Take a phone with a cord." And the walls around me are collapsing. She's thinking about brain cancer and cordless phones. And I said, "Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, I have to go. Bye." And I hung up, and my colleague under the other table said, "What did she say?" I said, "She said I shouldn't use a cordless phone because it can give you brain cancer." We're already in a building that's falling apart. And he looks out at me and says, "Oh, I wish I could die of cancer." They're totally different perspectives, and those perspectives can split a society into those who see themselves as brave enough to have stayed and defended the country in whatever way, at least just by being there, and those who left, who are traitors and cowards. Well, I think I've told you about when I had pneumonia and I left, and I had to stay in Germany, and I got this document that said Germany was going "to put up with me" as a refugee [the Duldung, a German residence permit – ed.]. It is so humiliating. And sitting there and not being able to do anything to help your family, and your country, and your friends back home, is horrible. It's unbearable. I have one uncle who… We never talked about it, but my aunt told me. They were in Vienna. He was working from home and she would go to work, and she knows that every time she left the house, he would switch off the electricity and water in the apartment and sit there in the darkness. It was easier for him to deprive himself of food, water and electricity, thinking that even though they were in Vienna, this way he was showing solidarity. It was totally pointless, but it made him feel better. That's no life to live. It's no life to live. It is difficult to be a refugee. It is horrible to be a refugee. If you ask me, I had the chance to be a refugee and to be in the worst siege since World War II. And I chose the siege. Being a refugee is so bad and so hurtful, it was easier to go back. I don't even know what the question was. How did you not lose the connection with those people who were refugees, including your mother and child? Oh man, when she came back… We were like two horns in a bag, constantly clashing. She felt that she didn't belong there because we were mistreating her with our attitude. And it was true. You're invited to some party, and very soon you see that somehow the people who stayed in Sarajevo are in one room after an hour, and those who were refugees are in another room. They have their conversations and we have ours. They feel horrible in our presence because we're constantly exchanging our experiences that they were not part of. They feel insulted by this. It's survivors' guilt. They feel guilty for not being there. My son, after he came back to Sarajevo, was confronted with this when he was in the company of children who had been in Sarajevo. He started self-harming. Because he wanted to share the suffering. He felt that he wasn't part of his environment because he hadn't been through whatever the other children had been through. So he started cutting himself. It took a lot of time for him to heal. Is that good? Is that life? No. So, the wounds that refugee status leaves in your soul are sometimes worse than those of somebody living in Lviv. Trust me. How can we reinclude these people in society? Time will tell you. Stop talking constantly about your experiences during the war. It hurts them. Your resentment towards them is… at least ours. Like they were not part of society. Like they were intruders. Like they have nothing to say. They should not even vote – that was the idea. Some people are saying that in Ukraine now. Yeah, what gives you the right to vote? I gave you that passport, and you should always be thankful to us. And in a way that's true, but consider this: women and children in wartime are a burden. They should go. They are just more mouths to feed, and that's why I sent my mother and my son away. I don't have water for them. They don't contribute to the situation. They just eat my food. And I am contributing to the resistance, I'm doing something. They're just sitting there eating and drinking and using my resources. So I sent them away. Go and do that somewhere else and leave everything for me, because I'm doing something. That's the feeling you have. So basically I chased them away from their home. That was not fair, but it was a practical thing to do. Now they bear their own wounds from that, and I am guilty for chasing them away. It took until 2017 for me and my son to fix our relationship, because he grew up with the sense of me having abandoned him because I sent him to Germany. Until 2017, we never had a real, honest relationship. It was fixed in 2017 because we were shooting a movie and we were recreating the scene when I sent him out. I invited him to be there, and he watched that scene all day long because it was constantly repeated – movies are terribly boring to make. I think when he went home after that, he changed his mind and saw it from my perspective – somehow the next day everything was fixed. Our whole relationship was new in the morning – at the snap of a finger. He needed to understand what I did, and now that he has children, he understands it very well. So we have a much better relationship now than we used to have before. That's what wars do. I don't want to compare, but maybe some people from the occupied territories will read this, and the siege feels like you are left out, you don't know what's going on. Somehow people in the occupied territories who have no access to proper information feel the same. What can you suggest they do? Do they have the internet? I guess so, but websites which aren't Russian are mostly blocked. Yes, so that's not having the internet. Yes. Well, they're exposed to certain propaganda. I don't know if they're buying it or not. But I have always thought that it's even worse to live in occupied territories than under a Sarajevo siege, which is considered the worst. Somehow, it's easier for me to listen to bombs than to the sound of the boots of soldiers coming upstairs. I always preferred to listen to artillery and bullets. You can hide from them. You go to the basement. But when you hear soldiers' boots coming up the stairway, and you know that there's nowhere to go and in 30 seconds they are going to enter your apartment and do whatever they want – for me, that sound of the boots was always worse than bombs. So have some understanding for them. They are living under a completely different threat, a much more real threat than you are. More than 30 years on from the siege, have you ever thought of changing your decision and leaving the country at that moment? I've never regretted it. I would not have been able to sit somewhere else and watch it on TV without doing anything. I have friends, for example – and I'm still friends with them – who said, "I thought at the beginning, 'This is not my work. Screw this, I'm going to go.'" They're Canadians now and have absolutely no feeling toward Bosnia. They're Canadians, but we're still friends. It's okay. I am not that kind of person. I couldn't have watched it on TV. I had to do something about it. I felt it was an attack on my personality, on my pride, on everything I stand for. I'm not a person you can come up to and say, "Get out of here. This is mine. Out!" – and I go. I'll at least put up a fight. But I understand people who go, because that's much more rational than what I did. You told a story about your expedition to Antarctica [during the panel discussion – ed.]. You said that there are better professions, like researching penguins, or ice, or something else. Did you regret having devoted your life to investigating war crimes? I did. I looked at those scientists in Antarctica and I thought, "What a great life." They have nothing to do with wars, or war crimes, or war criminals, or organised crime. Why the hell did I choose to deal with these things? This is insane. Wouldn't it have been much nicer just to research ice and worry about penguins and stuff like that? It would. But that's what I did. I don't regret it. I don't know if I would do it again. But I do have the feeling that I have changed the world a little bit and that's kind of the purpose of everybody , right? To bring humanity forward. They're bringing humanity forward big time. But I did it my way and they did it their way. Their job is nicer, mine is uglier, but we're on the same mission. So yeah, I could have chosen better, but I don't regret it. You also mentioned the book that you wrote about the siege of Sarajevo, and you said that it's horrible and you'll never publish it. No, it sucks. And was it therapeutic writing for you...? No. …Or was it re-traumatisation? It was re-traumatisation. I don't know why I did this to myself. Sometimes I'd be writing and vomiting. And in the end I said, "Why am I doing this to myself? Look, the sun is shining outside. I should take my dog out and go for a walk. Why am I going back to the past? As if anybody's going to learn anything. Well, if they haven't learned something by now, they're not going to learn it from my book." So I stopped. Maybe I will continue one day, but I don't feel ready to go through this. I don't want to waste my time on an ugly past. Does that mean that some stories don't have to be told afterwards? Oh, all stories should be told. It's just too painful. Somebody else should do it.
