2023-10-17 15:45:58
You are often likely to see John Sweeney with his orange hat on his head. The former BBC investigative journalist, who worked on the flagship program “Panorama”, has been based in Kiev since February 2022. On October 12, at the Bayeux War Correspondents Festival, he presented, forward -premiere, a documentary applauded by the public, Under Deadly Skies : Ukraine Eastern Front.
Filmed in February 2023, the report and its footage were submitted as evidence to the International Criminal Court and war crimes investigators in Ukraine. Along with Byline TV director Caolan Robertson, war photographer Paul Conroy and journalist Zarina Zabrisky, John Sweeney collected evidence of the use of illegal weapons and the torture of civilians. In May, the Russian Ministry of Culture banned all screenings. Meeting with the colorful British journalist.
John Sweeney in Bayeux on October 13, 2023. – E. Jehanno/20 Minutes
In your war diary on X, we always see you with it. Why the orange hat?
This is to show that I am not a Russian spy! Do I look like a Russian spy with this? At first I was stopped by Ukrainian soldiers who thought I was an enemy. The hat immediately makes it clear that I am not a Russian soldier or spy.
Watching the documentary, it seems like you really set out with the idea of looking for evidence of war crimes. It’s the case ?
We didn’t have this approach to begin with, it was more like a road movie. And then, we came across evidence showing the use of white phosphorus weapons on houses, we collected testimonies of torture of civilians. And we show artillery and missile attacks on civilian buildings, like this Russian cruise missile that destroyed an apartment, not a military target, in Dnieper on January 23, 2023. This approach makes the documentary more interesting.
I have worked on war crimes evidence previously in Kosovo and in Chechnya. What we do is we put in place clues about places to visit or people to contact, which may be useful to investigators in The Hague. Our work is not perfect, but we present evidence.
How does a documentary become evidence of war crimes?
What’s important, I think, is that you can take individual photos, you can film at the site of a war crime, but, in my experience, lawyers need context. Although it may sound pompous, I have testified twice in The Hague in the prosecution of war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. We made a film about the Serbs who massacred 100 men and boys in Kosovo in a barn in 1999. The bodies were thrown into a river, and the barn was set on fire. So there was no evidence of the crime other than the witnesses.
We went to find the mothers, daughters and wives of these men: they were present when the Serbs separated them, and they saw their neighbors take part in the massacre. This tape was used as one of the elements to prosecute five police generals. What I also did was that I entered the houses of the Serbs. They all fled when NATO arrived, and these are the homes of the perpetrators of the massacre. I had their address and found evidence. One of them was a piece of paper, like graph paper, with the roster of the village militia on it. The Hague was able to get its hands on the Belgrade salary register, which showed that the individuals who massacred their neighbors were paid as auxiliary police officers by the Belgrade Interior Ministry. In our report, we also showed Kosovars who had burned Serb houses. It underlined that we were being fair and that’s important.
This experience in Kosovo was therefore useful to you. How did it happen in Ukraine? It takes a long time to gather evidence to prove that there is a war crime.
Yes, but it’s a massive effort, it’s not just us, many people are collecting evidence. But we wanted to do it, for example, on torture. In 2000 I made a radio documentary for the BBC which won the Amnesty Award, called Victims of the torture trainand which presented evidence that the Russians regularly used torture in Chechnya, such as with the “elephant” [une technique de torture qui consiste à mettre un masque à gaz sur la tête de la victime, qui a les mains attachées, et ensuite à fermer le tube respiratoire, la victime s’étouffe, jusqu’à ce que le tube soit rouvert pour laisser entrer l’oxygène].
I didn’t find a witness who was tortured with the elephant, but in an underground torture chamber, under the main police station in Kherson, we found a gas mask, seen in the documentary. A Ukrainian policeman explained to my fixer that the Russians used the elephant in Izium. If I’m a prosecutor and I have hard evidence of elephant use in Izium and I find a witness in Kherson, they will be able to match their witness with what we found. I’m not saying that this goes directly hand in hand, but it allows for the accumulation of evidence on torture. We also have two testimonies including that of Alexander who returns to the Kherson detention center where he was tortured, we see the calendar that he drew on the wall, with his handwriting. By recording his testimony, by showing the detention center, the jails, Alexander’s writing, we keep his evidence secure.
Concerning the indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, a weapon used to mask the advance of troops, but which is incendiary and can cause serious burns, you put forward many elements. You found a video of the attack in a residential area in Kherson, with its characteristic white streaks, you go there and film the civilians’ houses, which underlines that it is not a military target, you found remnants of white phosphorous ammunition. And you have the testimony of a resident who explains that his neighbor’s house burned, but that he heard nothing, no explosion. Is this enough?
It’s more difficult here, because what the Russians can say is that our Ukrainian witnesses lied or that it was indeed a military target, that the Ukrainian army was there, which is difficult to argue. But, nonetheless, we’re putting forward evidence and there’s the issue of attacks on civilians and, that’s sort of the end of the game.
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