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A warm welcome to Defense Minister Davinic, Ambassador Polt, Ambassador Urstad, Ambassador Jandl, Susan Pond and Mr. ivulovic.
On behalf of the Fund for Peace, I join Anne Bader in welcoming you today. Anne Bader is the tireless and professional Executive Vice President of the Fund for Peace.
I also salute another member of the Board of Trustees of the Fund for Peace. He is John Greco, from Washington, an eminent television producer who left behind his wife and 11-week old baby girl, Abigail, to join us.
Our thanks to our fine partners and co-hosts, the Atlantic Council of Serbia and Montenegro.
We salute in particular our friends from Brussels. The Fund for Peace is proud to have the privilege of working on the TRUST program with the exceptional teams of men and women led by Susan Pond, from NATO, NAMSA, the Partnership for Peace and Canada. A final and sincere thank you to the government and people of Serbia and Montenegro for their warm hospitality.
I wish to share with you the idea that the hope for success of the Government's work in the TRUST disarmament program is tied up with its relations with the press and that is tied up with democratizing its media laws.
Let me begin by recounting the following true stories. One happened in Ukraine 600 km south of Kiev less than a year ago:
A few Ukrainian soldiers violated Army regulations and were smoking cigarettes. They chose to violate the regulations while working in a huge ammunition dump containing hundreds of thousands of artillery shells left over from the Cold War. The cigarettes started a fire. Soon artillery rounds began to cook off and explode. For eight days explosions rocked an area of 400 sq. km. Shells were launched in every direction and exploded at the rate of 5,000 per hour or more than one per second. The catastrophe destroyed about 900 box cars of munitions at a human cost of five killed, over 20 wounded and property damage of $450 million. Thirty thousand civilians had to be evacuated from villages within 20 km of the ammunition dump.
You might say there was some collateral damage. The Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and the Minister of Defense were fired. President Kuchma's candidate lost the election a few months later.
Ukraine is committed to decommissioning its huge surplus stocks of 1.5 million small arms and light weapons and 133,000 tons of munitions. Like Serbia, Ukraine is complying with the Ottawa Convention and is destroying its aging stockpile of 7 million land mines.
The second story involves Albania. In the anarchy that overwhelmed Albania only eight years ago, civilians by the hundreds of thousands broke into government arms depots and looted about 537,000 small arms and light weapons. Considerably less than half that number have been recovered. Last year the Albanian government unearthed a forgotten stockpile of 16 tons of chemical weapons. China had sold these 600 canisters of chemical weapons to Albania about 30 years ago.
I think you will agree it is significant and promising that both Ukraine and Albania sought help from the Partnership for Peace Trust Fund and NATO's experts. Destroying - safely destroying - the surplus stockpiles is a Herculean task. The non-governmental organization which I chair, The Fund for Peace, is assisting both Ukraine and Albania in their efforts.
We are here today at the invitation of the Atlantic Council of Serbia and Montenegro and the Partnership for Peace to assist Serbia and Montenegro. All of us hope to avert here the kind of catastrophes that befell Ukraine and Albania.
Are there reasons in addition to avoiding disasters that bring us here? I suggest there are.
First, stockpiles of deteriorating explosives. These stocks of mines and munitions are inherently de-stabilizing. First, over time, chemical components in the munitions themselves deteriorate and become unstable. The very fact of their continued existence itself is a source of increasing political and economic instability.
Second, millions of small arms and light weapons are looking for the corrupt officials to sell them abroad. There they will be issued to untrained militias, insurgents and thugs. One in ten of the victims will be armed soldiers. The other 9 out of every 10 will be non-combatants in jungle villages and refugee camps in places in Africa and Asia you never heard of. Mostly they are women and children-the softest of the soft targets. Since the end of the Cold War, small arms and light weapons accounted for killing about 8 million persons, mostly innocent civilians in bloody local wars and insurrections.
Third, stockpiles of surplus weapons and munitions are the mother's milk of corruption. There is the instructive example of 50,000 surplus Kalashnikovs in warehouses in Jordan. A group of senior Peruvian army officers agreed to buy the lot from Jordan in 1999 for $95 apiece. The first shipment of 10,000 Kalashnikovs was airlifted from Jordan to Peru. The aircraft flew over the region in neighboring Colombia controlled by 17,000 Marxist guerrillas known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The plane crews delivered the 10,000 Kalashnikovs on schedule to the waiting guerrillas by parachute airdrop. The Kalashnikovs never reached Peru, which had paid for them..
This was a classic guns for drugs deal engineered by Vladimiro Montesinos, the shadowy chief of intelligence of Peru. The press in Peru investigated and exposed this and other acts of corruption engineered by Montesinos. He fled Peru only to be captured and tried. President Fujimori fled Peru and obtained exile in Japan.
Consider the pivotal role that the press played in Peru to expose the government's and the Army's corruption over the Kalashnikovs. The press changed the incentive for corruption by public officials. By providing information about the scandal, the press increased the transparency of the government. Where the media is effective and free, the risk that corruption will be exposed is higher. The press in Peru helped build a public consensus to fight corruption. The press there created public disapproval that pressed Montesinos and Fujimori to flee. The press raised the penalties for corruption.
What kind of legal environment must exist in order for the press of Peru, or that of any nation, to perform its job of acting as a public watchdog?
First, the government or the courts may not censor the press.
Second, the press must be free from the chilling effect caused by public officials, the courts and the government deploying criminal libel, civil libel and insult laws against the press.
Third, the government of Peru, or any other nation, should have fair laws, applied fairly, so that government purchases of newspaper space and airtime are not used to reward friends and punish adversaries in the press. The law should be applied so there is a level playing field among the media regardless of their editorial policies. Broadcast licenses should be awarded in a fair, objective non-political manner that is transparent.
Fourth, the police, the prosecutors and the courts must insure that assaults against journalists are investigated and prosecuted promptly and effectively.
Here are a few examples of unfinished business:
- In 1999, the editor of the Daily Telegraf was the victim of a political assassination. His murderers are still at large in Serbia.
- In 2002, a crime reporter for The Evening News, Milan Pantic, was murdered. His murderers are still at large.
Let us consider the use by public officials of criminal defamation and insult laws to punish and intimidate the press. Where this happens in other countries, the press is warned off from investigating and exposing corruption. Corruption gets a green light. Corruption flourishes, potential investors disappear and economies stagnate.
Last year, at least two Serbian journalists were convicted under the old criminal defamation laws. In the first case, the journalist received a suspended sentence for reporting about a politician who had confiscated a building in 1997.
In the second case, the reporter was convicted and received a suspended sentence for reporting that a medical officer for a special police unit also served as a sniper.
I have been advised that there are two draft laws pending in the Parliament of Serbia and Montenegro. These are criminal defamation and insult laws that threaten journalists with prison sentences and severe fines. In other states, mostly nascent democracies, political elite exploit and abuse these laws in order to punish and silence their critics in the press. The mere threat of prosecution using these blunt weapons discourages exposures of corruption and abuse of power.
Increasingly, the international community is recognizing that criminal defamation and insult laws in the hands of public officials cannot co-exist with the idea of a working democracy. These laws are found time and time again to violate developing international norms. This is particularly true where public officials prosecute the press to punish criticism of how they carry out their official duties.
The European Court of Human Rights has been especially critical of this form of abuse. Member states of the Council of Europe violate Article 10 of the European Convention when they foster or facilitate these attacks on the press. The Strasbourg Court has often found against member states, requiring the states to reimburse the journalists they have fined and to pay all of the journalists' legal costs.
Should the Parliament enact these draft laws and breathe new life into a practice that, more and more, the international community rejects as undemocratic?
Or should Parliament move in the opposite direction and reform and liberalize its media laws in line with emerging international standards? The recent passage of a Freedom of Information Law represents an important step in that direction.
One of the outcomes of liberalizing media laws may be the development of a relationship between the government and all elements of the press that is characterized by candor, maturity, openness and fairness.
The government may recognize that it needs the support of the public if it is to meet both its de-mining obligations under the Ottawa Convention and its ability to work with the Partnership for Peace in the TRUST program. The government may understand that any efforts it takes to destroy surplus small arms and light weapons and munitions will necessarily require broad popular support. Are all elements of the press more likely to cover fairly the government's uphill efforts to cooperate with the TRUST program if they enjoy a relationship of trust with the government and the courts? Is the press more likely to provide coverage of these difficult national security issues that is accurate and fair if the government itself willingly provides the press with all relevant information? When the press criticizes some aspects of the TRUST initiative, is it likely that the criticism will be more informed and balanced and rational if it is the product of broad, non-discriminatory access to government officials and information?
It is inevitable that some elements of the press may criticize one aspect or another of the government's TRUST disarmament initiative. It would be naļve to suggest otherwise. When that criticism appears in print or on the air, should the response of the public official involved be to punish the journalist, or the newspaper or the station with a criminal libel or insult action? Should the offended politician use the laws, the public prosecutor and the courts to put the journalist in jail or require payment of a fine? Experience in western Europe and the United States suggests a response like this is counter-productive. Is it likely that the press would continue to support the merits of the government's TRUST disarmament initiative if some of its journalists were unfairly and unjustly punished for daring to criticize it?
In summary, the goals of Serbia and Montenegro in the TRUST initiative are ambitious as they are fraught with difficulty. To achieve its goals, the government will need the support of the press and the rest of civil society. To the extent that the legal environment for the press conforms to international norms, and real trust informs the relationship between the government and all elements of the press, the prospect for the TRUST initiative will greatly improve.
On behalf of the Fund for Peace, I wish to thank our hosts, notably NATO, Partnership for Peace and the Atlantic Council of Serbia and Montenegro for their vision, commitment and hospitality.
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