Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News
Married to Milosevic
by Jim Andrews; photo by Elena Guzman

The war crimes trial of former Serbian and Yugloslav president Slobodan Milosevic, which entered its second year on February 12, has fallen off the radar of us media groups, replaced by news of terrorism, the economic downturn, and the threat of war with Iraq. But the trial, being prosecuted at the United Nations Courthouse in The Hague, Netherlands, is still big news in Europe. And among the two-million-strong Balkan diaspora, a fractured community of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians spread across the globe, victims of Milosevic’s policies of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, it remains of cardinal importance.

In a move to provide a public record of the trial and to preserve it for future researchers, the Human Rights Project at Bard College last year established the Milosevic Trial Public Archive, a complete and up-to-date record of audio/video footage of the trial in English. The archive is found on the Web at www.hague.bard.edu. By one o’clock on each day of the trial, the site posts footage of the day’s proceedings. Also provided on the site is background material, transcripts of expert testimonies, and links to news reports and commentary. A physical archive of broadcast-quality digital video (dvcam) is being stored at Bard and will be made permanently available to researchers.

“The promise that we’ve made to the world,” says Danielle Riou, the Project’s research associate and manager of the archive site, “is that this is a complete and unadulterated archive.”

Developed with and supported by a cadre of partners in the us and Europe, the archive is a marvel of organization and Internet technology. But, says Riou, “the radical element to this project isn’t in the way we’re making it happen. It’s the lack of politics that makes it radical.” Providing free public access to the trial footage, without edit or comment, subverts the established order of news delivery and puts information directly in people’s hands.

But proving itself as a reliable source, particularly with members of the Balkan diaspora, has been an uphill battle for the archive. Initially Riou received reams of hate mail. “These people were convinced that we were part of nato or part of the un Tribunal. They wrote to me saying ‘What a sham, what a farce, Milosevic is obviously being set up.’” Even from people supportive of the mission of the archive, says Riou, there was a great deal of resistance to the idea that the information was unbiased. Riou’s strategy was to respond “with the utmost sincerity and candor” and ensure them that “this is something we feel is important for the public record.” Riou says that approach won over a lot of doubters. “Increasingly, people have separated us from the Tribunal. Watching Milosevic get the upper hand on a witness or seeing the judges screw up—people began to believe that we weren’t censoring anything, but showing it all.”

“That’s what’s been most interesting for me,” says Riou, “the relationship between politics and media and technology and this general culture of skepticism, which I fully endorse.”

Riou is 26, an economics scholar from the University of Ottawa who worked for several nongovernmental organizations in Canada before landing at Bard. She is a passionate advocate of public access to information, and believes that human rights is the ground on which many of the battles over intellectual property and individual freedoms will be fought.

These days Riou spends so much virtual time with Milosevic, she sometimes feels married to him. Riou manages the archive from her office in the Blithewood Gatehouse, a tiny, six-sided dollhouse of a building that stands on the edge of the Bard campus. A narrow, winding staircase leads up three flights to Riou’s small office, unadorned except for a few hrp posters and a New York Review of Books calendar, from which a David Levine caricature of Czeslaw Milosz stares down from beneath his beetle eyebrows. Up here, looking out the tall, narrow windows onto the campus’ snow-covered fields, the Balkan war seems far away.

Riou concurs: “Yes, and the people in The Hague feel slightly removed from it, too. Locked away in the courtrooms, they feel forgotten.” Last July, during a long break in the trial, Riou traveled to the Netherlands for a month to meet with her contacts at The Hague and see the courtroom and trial chambers she knew only from the streaming video. “People there didn’t know about our project. They were surprised to learn what we were doing.”

Riou modestly describes her job as “technical shlepp work.” She saves her praise for the people like Frank Tiggelaar at Domovina Net, a Dutch-based Web site, and others whom she characterizes as the real heroes of the ongoing effort to report the facts of the Balkan conflict. “They ran around Yugoslavia from 1995 to 1999 with a server tucked under their arm, setting it up wherever they could so that people could still get the word out from there.” She calls them “salt of the earth, and incredibly technically savvy.” It is Domovina Net that provides the streaming video from the trial.

Like their efforts, Riou’s work has a scrappy, independent, do-it-yourself quality. A typical day may begin prosaically, dubbing video files from The Hague onto the hrp Web site, fine-tuning the digital audio, updating the Web site, and archiving the digital material. (The work is so portable, Riou says, that she can maintain the archive on her laptop from anywhere. “It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of technology.”) But the rest of the day she’s busy coordinating the chains of communications, providing support, and dispersing funds among her many partners and affiliates in Europe and the us. Because there’s no tolerance for a lapse in the record and “a week’s worth of footage can be lost if some technical or financial glitch isn’t worked out,” Riou has to act decisively, as when a license for broadcasting on the Web is expiring, or when a technician is sick on the day he’s scheduled to video-record the trial, or he’s running out of dv tapes. “A lot of trust is placed in me to do the right thing, to think fast. Rising to the challenge is not a chore, it’s the reward.”

Riou and her collaborators have earned the confidence of The Hague itself, which early this year entrusted into Riou’s hands a number of written expert testimonies that were submitted to the court but made available nowhere else. “One day we got a box of photocopies, just like that,” says Riou. “We put it up within two days of receiving it.”
Of the trial itself, says Riou, “It’s not like ‘Matlock’. It’s not action packed. It’s loaded with procedure and so much evidence and so many witnesses [that] it’s a taxing project to watch it every day.” But its significance is profound: “If Milosevic is convicted, there is a real and symbolic victory for human rights there.”

Until then, the trial rolls on. Riou will keep watching, and she’ll make sure the complete record is available when the rest of the world turns back.