A lot of the information out there in the world today is second-hand information.
What's unique about Human Rights Watch’s work is that we get out there
in the front line where the abuses are taking place. We interview
the key people, the eye witnesses, victims, even perpetrators of human rights abuses. This is first
hand information.
O.K. how many bodies do you think you saw? Like a crushing of the skull? Yea, it was like that.
We will also look at the site of the crime, we’ll try to collect physical evidence, we’ll take photographs, sometimes we even use satellite imagery.
But at the heart of what we do is the testimony of the victim and the testimony of the eye witness.
We speak to dozens and dozens of people
to corroborate their stories and
to cross check them.
In order to present as complete
as possible a picture of what happened.
Our initial investigation was primarily focused on what happened in southern Kyrgyzstan
in mid-June.
What we did know is that lots of people died and that there was massive destruction of civilian
property.
Seven members of her family were killed.
During our research we interviewed more than two hundred people.
We interviewed victims, witnesses, doctors, police forces, security forces. We were there before the fighting
started, we were there during the fighting, immediately after
documenting abuses by both sides.
In the course of four days almost two thousand houses were burned down
and the vast majority of them were in
Uzbek neighborhoods.
Both the Kyrgis and the Uzbeks and the local authorities
have their own narratives about what happens, and what we establish is an objective narrative.
What we try to focus on
is the actual participation of the security forces in the violence.
We got a call saying that there was a sweep operation taking place in
Nariman.
We immediately went there
and as we arrived at the hospital
people were coming in who had been beaten earlier that morning.
Many of the people who came were showing us their passports, documents that had been torn up or burned
by the security forces.
Because of our immediate reporting, that was the first and only large-scale sweep operation.
Human Rights Watch puts an enormous premium
on accuracy and the objectivity of our fact-finding. But we don’t stop there.
Once we have the information, we deploy it in as aggressive a way as possible.
When we were poised to report on abuses connected with Philip Morris International
we found that company very sensitive and very eager
to respond to our concerns. We started to look into allegations
of child labor and forced labor and other labor rights violations in the tobacco sector in Kazakhstan.
The researcher Jane Buchanan did the field work, investigated, and interviewed the
victims to establish that there were in fact serious abuses taking place
and then working backwards we identified the fact that Philip Morris was the sole company
involved in sourcing this tobacco. Then we contacted Philip Morris
and they conducted their own investigation and acknowledged the problems that we had highlighted
to them.
And in fact Phillip Morris took on our key recommendations in Kazakhstan.
Everybody knows when a Human Rights Watch Report is coming out that it's going to contain
solid information
and the fact that it contains solid information about child labor and forced labor associated
with one of the world's largest and most recognizable companies isn't good for that company and they
recognize that.
The report created a huge
international outcry
and it launched an immediate congressional inquiry.
In this lawless no-man’s land
no one except Anna was bothering to report this crime spree or speak to the victims.
Some of the investigations that we've done in various parts of the world
have often relied as the first hand witness on Human Rights Watch. As far as human rights organizations
are concerned…police are taking the law into their own hands, they’re
acting as a vigilante force.
There is an estimated 17,000 disappeared.
Many newspapers and broadcasters are actually cutting back on their overseas reporting
and therefore they look to Human Rights Watch, which conducts investigative human rights
reporting; original research in countries where journalists no longer can afford necessarily
to go. If we weren't doing that work, those stories would simply not see the light of
day.
The testimony of the witnesses that human rights watch speaks to
is always challenged by governments. They say
those people don't know what they're talking about
those people were hysterical. I just saw seventy men and they all were
like that in a canal by the side of the road.
When I was in Kosovo, I was standing on a border and watching tens and hundreds of thousands
of Kosovo refugees
leave.
In Serbia at that time, the Ministry of Information
was telling the world that Christiane Amanpour was paying refugees to walk around me
and to walk around my camera in circles. There was no crisis, there was no
exodus, there was no problem whatsoever.
At every turn
there are powerful interests trying to hide the truth.
In a place like Cuska
we put together the story, the massacre in that little village, we didn't have access
to that village at the time. Kosovo was closed at the time, but we took enough testimony and we corroborated it
carefully enough that when we went back to Cuska after the war was over, we found that all the
testimony they gave us was exactly accurate.
People told us, “in my village twelve men went missing.”
We went back to that village and there were twelve graves.
As an off-hand remark someone mentioned a box of photographs. They were pictures that
paramilitaries, local security forces, had taken of themselves. So I asked to scan
the photos and started to
show them to people.
And what I remember very well, my laptop was so old and the image was big
and it took probably twenty seconds, the image would sort of roll up the screen you know. She let out this gasp
and pointed her fingers saying, “I know that guy, that guy was here.”
In the case of Cuska
Human Rights Watch played a key role in providing the core evidence to prosecutorial authorities.
As Serbia evolved, and as it developed a
national justice system
we were able to present the detailed evidence that allowed
the national court system to prosecute
eleven years later, but to prosecute nonetheless. So today suspected perpetrators of the Cuska killings
are in custody and going to face trial in Serbia by a Serbian war crimes court.
Our researchers are people who have followed some of the worst stories and the worst tragedies
that can befall human beings. What makes it possible to keep hearing those stories
is knowing that they're making lasting change.
Immediately after we had conducted our initial research, we met with the president of Kyrgyzstan and we
presented our findings
we also stressed the importance of an international instigation into these events and
we know that just a couple of days later
she sent a request for an investigation just like that.
And then in August, when we released our report
we had a long meeting with her and we presented our recommendations for
what needed to be done.
It's life and death.
If it's not brought to light, people are going to die
and they're going to die without us paying any attention. They're going to get slaughtered and raped and no one is going to say anything about
it or do anything about it.
If you do pay attention, eventually it stops.
Human Rights Watch is very small. We're fewer than three hundred people.
We're armed with pencils and notebooks and cameras and tape recorders and the mission to tell the truth.
That's all Human Rights Watch has. The truth, when it's
told,
really does change lives.