ENGThe Reckoning Project documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Janine di Giovanni interview

It’s hardly an overstatement to call Janine di Giovanni a legend of warzone reporting. The Italian-American journalist has 30+ years of warzone coverage experience, the former The Times and Vanity Fair correspondent has also written books on Bosnia, Syria and the Christian communties of the Middle East.

Her newest endeavour brought her to Ukraine. The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies is a war crimes documentation project di Giovanni co-founded with Peter Pomerantsev and Public Interest Journalism Lab. The Reckoning Project is gathering testimonies of the Ukrainian war crimes victims to make Russia accountable for its brutal war on Ukraine.

The Village Ukraine spoke to Janine di Giovanni about the work on the ground in Ukraine and her wealth of reporting experience leading her to this new challenge.

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– Would you say you came more prepared to cover this war because of your previous war zone experience? For instance, you’ve witnessed the atrocities the Russian military left behind in Syria. Was that helpful in any way?

– I don’t think you’re ever prepared for brutality or savagery. Certainly, I’ve seen a lot in my life, it’s probably an advantage in that I can put things into context. So I can to look at Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine and put it all together. Okay, so this is what happened. But I don’t think it gets any easier. Every time you’re just stunned, how savage and cruel human beings can be to each other.

When I went to Bucha, I have to tell you, I just thought: Why would this level of cruelty [happen]? Why take someone’s husband or father outside and shoot them – it’s just a clear murder, extrajudicial murder. Or to beat, torture, imprison human beings… So no, it doesn’t get any easier.

And when I read through our testimonies I have to treat them very carefully and look for patterns and themes, trying to figure out what cases we will be building. I’m just absolutely horrified.

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It’s interesting, I’ve just been on a call with someone I was working in Bosnia with, and he said that by now, one would’ve thought that warfare would somehow get to be not as cruel, as those terrible Balkan wars of 1990s were. But I’m afraid we have not progressed any further. And whatever war I’ve been in – Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan – there are terrible stories. And these stories always involve civilians who are innocent, who have nothing to do with the political systems or power, or corruption, or greed. And that is the real tragedy of war – it comes down to individual people, individual stories and people whose lives are shattered. I think that’s my main goal in working in war zones – to [share] these stories.

– Can you talk me through how your reporting experience lead you to The Reckoning Project? Do you see it as an organic continuation? Or is that something else?

– Journalism is a noble profession, especially so wartime, frontline journalists. They’re witnesses to the horrific things that happen [in war zones], they’re the first ones on the scene, they are gathering evidence. However, journalists’ notebooks are not usually accessible in courts of law, especially in war crimes trials. So I thought it would be an interesting approach to train journalists to think like lawyers, so they would take testimonies and statements the way the lawyers do. When they’re investigating, interrogating… Interrogating is a terrible word in English, it sounds like you’re interrogating a prisoner. But these testimonies are done with these very precise methodology that will adhere to legal standards.

– You’ve mentioned in a recent interview that you’re working on your next book, to be named Unbearable Knowledge. I understand it’s heavily focused on the war crimes documentation.

– It’s interesting that you ask that because I wanted to write a book focused on war crimes for a long time. At first I wanted to call it just “Evil”. It would’ve been a kind of a memoir, because I wanted to describe and talk about the war crimes I’ve personally witnessed.

I’ve witnessed three genocides in my life, unfortunately. One in Bosnia, one in Rwanda and the Yazidis slaughter in northern Iraq. So I wanted to weave storytelling through these horrific stories of genocide. The Rwandan genocide, when a million people were slaughtered in three months. The Srebrenica in Bosnia, where 8,000 men and boys were killed in cold blood in July 1995. And the story of the Yazidi people… I often tell my researchers in Ukraine about it, because the Islamic State wanted to wipe out the Yazidi people, they wanted to wipe out their identity. And I think it’s also something that’s happening in Ukraine. Russia’s intent is not only to conquer the country – which they won’t do – but to wipe out the Ukrainian identity.

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And that’s another part of The Reckoning Project – we really want to preserve things so that no one can ever say that it did not happen. We want it to be there forever as a memorial. So if these archives will be there forever, there won’t be any chance to rewrite history. Because history has been rewritten in Bosnia and in Rwanda. There are revisionists there who claim that the genocide did not happen or that it wasn’t a civilian genocide, or that the numbers are lying. And we don’t want that to ever happen in Ukraine. Ever. We want our researchers to document what is happening in real time, so that no one can ever say it did not happen.

– That’s a great mission. I was wondering how does that connect with your career in journalism. You leaving reporting behind and focusing on the war crimes documentation with this very specific methodology – does it mean that journalism can only take you so far? Do you feel you’re more effective, that you have more impact in this role?

– This is the question that journalists have been trying to answer, probably since the beginning of journalism. How do we make an impact? I think that it’s very discouraging that journalism doesn’t have an impact. I believe journalism does have an impact, I believe it’s hugely important. I think it can influence policy, it brings awareness, I think it can be used as advocacy.

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I think that we just took it one step further [with The Reckoning Project]. Our team mainly consists of journalists, but they have been trained in legal accountability. So they’re combining these skills in order to use the testimonies both in journalism (stories, films, podcasts etc.) and bringing these cases to trial. [The focus is to make] these monsters that are torturing, raping, killing and destroying Ukrainians accountable.

And, you know, when Peter and Natalka [Humeniuk] and myself formed The Reckoning Project we really wanted to have an impact. So we decided to go in a different route than journalists. Again, I’m not saying that journalism doesn’t work, it does. It’s hugely important. It’s just that we’re taking a slightly different path.

– The Reckoning Project’s goals are results driven, you’re not really interested in media coverage. But can you tell us about some aspects of your work on the ground, the specific work your team’s doing in Ukraine?

– So first we started training. We gathered 15 researchers from throughout Ukraine. Some of them were local journalists, a lot of them had a lot of experience with [investigative journalism]. Some of them come from Natalka’s [Public Interest Journalism Lab], some of them are from places like Kherson, Sumy and Kharkiv, so they know everyone there, they’re very embedded in their communities. That’s really important to us, because if you send outsiders – say human rights investigators from Germany or Lithuania – they’re no Ukrainian, so people are not gonna open up to them as much. This is a real advantage – having local reporters.

We train them, they have a very extensive training. And then they are gathering testimonies, basically statements. These statements are then being verified, they have to be air-tight, so we’re collaborating on that with a lot of different [experts] like Yale University in the US. They have a team called Conflict Observatory, they’re using satellite imagery.

And then we look at patterns of abuse or war crimes. We basically build cases. We’re going to be working with the Office of the Prosecutor General [of Ukraine], we’re working with the war crimes unit in Kyiv. We are working with the UN commission of inquiry, we’re also a part of the 5 AM Coalition. We’re trying to bring together many of the people working in the accountability space in Ukraine, we’re discussing the best practices, what we can do better.

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And then from there we will build cases for universal jurisdiction, the courts that take place outside of Ukraine and Russia. We’ll work towards special tribunals, we’ll work with International Criminal Court, if they ask us to, but mainly we’re working towards universal jurisdiction.

– Can you tell us more about the collaboration with Ukrainian authorities?

– Absolutely, the most important for us are the national courts in Ukraine, they should be the priority. Ukraine should have empowerment by having trials in the country. Usually ICC is called in when the country has no judicial system that can withstand this kind of rigorous war crime situation. But Ukraine has a very strong judicial system. They have called on the ICC to help, because of the vast number of cases that are coming in, there’s just a staggering level of incidents. But Ukraine has a very robust judicial system.

So yes, we’re going to cooperate with them, the different aspects of Ukrainian government are working with us. We are working on cases in Chornobyl, we’ve had meetings with government officials that have been incredibly helpful, providing various documents or security camera footage.

– There’s this basic acknowledgment that we’re talking about a very slow and trying process, it must take years of work. What’s the endgame here for The Reckoning Project? How much time are you guys willing to dedicate to this cause?

– Our goal would be to build some universal jurisdiction cases outside of Ukraine, our goal would be to share the information with the Office of the Prosecutor General, but also to build some cases outside Ukraine. And our goal this year is to have 150 testimonies by the end of May [2023], we’re already at 70.

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– I have to let you go here, my last question concerns the so-called Ukraine fatigue. From your wealth of experience – what would you say is the best way to keep Ukraine in world’s focus? How can we stay on in the global news coverage?

– We have to keep exposing the truth. There’s no simple solution, Ukraine will fall off the news. It had a huge amount of publicity [in the early stages of full-scale war], the world was following Ukraine very closely. There’s less and less now, I’m so sorry about that, it happens in every single war. There comes a time, something called compassion fatigue creeps in. People stop reading newspapers because they don’t want to see any misery anymore.

And remember, America is not going through anything close to what Ukraine is, but America is having a tough time now. I’m calling you from the US, so I speak from the American perspective. The political parties are battling each other, there’s fear that Trump’s people will come back. It’s horribly expensive, there’s inflation, there’s violence in the cities on an unprecedented level, Covid has ruined the economy… People are looking inwards, they’re looking at the midterm elections. So they lose focus. And it’s our job to remind them of it. And when I say “our job”, I mean all the journalists’, that’s what we have to do.