Translation of television interview with John Shattuck, President and Rector, CEU
Program:“Záróra” (“Closing Hour”)
Media outlet:Hungarian National Television (M2)
Date: June 1, 2011
Interviewer: Alinda Veiszer
To watch the original interview, please click on the tag “Záróra, 2011. június 1. – Vendég: John Shattuck” on the following site, under the video box:
Lead—Alinda Veiszer:
Good evening! One of the country’s most well-known universities, CentralEuropeanUniversity, is 20 years old. Its Rector was one of the first international diplomats who could enter the refugee camp in Tuzla in 1995, and could talk to the survivors who did not die in the bloodshed in Srebrenica. Furthermore, he was also the person who could defend in court those, whose conversations were illegally recorded in the Watergate Scandal. He then, much later, became part of the Clinton’s administration. Today we are going to talk about how such a career developed.
Alinda Veiszer:
I greet John Shattuck in the studio. Thank you for being with us tonight. Usually, on July 11, we commemorate the genocide that took place in Srebrenica in 1995. Although it is not July yet, could you share with us the stories you heard from the survivals when you entered the refugee camp in Tuzla?
John Shattuck:
Well, I entered the refugee camp in Tuzla from Split with a helicopter. There was gunfire going on all around, the war was in full swing. It was a very difficult time. I’d been told that there were refugees in the camp who had actually survived something that had happened; nobody quite knew what it was. There were many men who were missing from Srebrenica and we thought perhaps some of them might be in the refugee camp. So, when I arrived, the refugees were all assembled on the tarmac of the camp, and there was firing going on from the hillsides, so it was quite a dangerous situation for the refugees. I found several men whose names were given to me by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. They told me stories that were quite deeply disturbing, because they told me about being lined up in warehouses in the areas outside of Srebrenica, then being marched through the countryside, finally put on trucks and then taken off them; blindfolded and then one after another they were shot and sent into these pits. One whom I spoke to had survived these shots, because the shots hadn’t actually killed him. So I then told his story. I sent the information back to the White House, the State Department. I sent it also to the European headquarters of NATO, and then several weeks later the United Nations authorized NATO to intervene, to stop this kind of horror.
Alinda Veiszer:
Had all the survivors escaped from such a situation, or were these people survivors of various other situations? And how many survivors did you meet?
John Shattuck:
I met five survivors, and as far as we know there were probably no more than a 100 or so survivors, the rest of them were all killed. Seven thousand men who were killed in Srebrenica. Later on, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general in charge of Srebrenica, was charged with war crimes and genocide by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Alinda Veiszer:
What was the reaction of those who read your report or heard about your summary? Did they know about the slaughter, the genocide at all, or were you the first to inform them that you had met survivors; and according to them what had happened there?
John Shattuck:
Yes, I was the first one to actually meet the survivors who whose lives were to be terminated. There were reports of them being taken to the warehouses and situations in which we didn’t really know what had happened to them. So there was a lot of suspicion by the International Red Cross, but it wasn’t until my meetings that we learned the truth.
Alinda Veiszer:
After 16 years you are able to discuss this matter from a distance. I imagine though that back there, the atmosphere was one which had a deep effect and influence, meaning that emotions must have played an enormous role.
John Shattuck:
Well, it was a big shock to get these stories from these men; the pictures of situations where shots and fires from the hillsides, and the danger of the possibility of war crimes taking place. It was a very shocking situation. Even more shocking actually two months later when I was the first international investigator to go to Srebrenica itself. I took the investigator of the international criminal tribunal to investigate the places where the men had been shot. And I saw the actual warehouses and saw some horrible sights with blood on the ceiling of the warehouses.
Alinda Veiszer:
I don’t want to appear sentimental, however, for example, have you ever dreamt with these memories, experiences and situations?
John Shattuck:
I don’t think I would have been cowed by this or changed by this, in a sense. I was a witness, and as a witness it was my responsibility to tell the story. My feeling as a human rights person—I spent most of my career in the field of human rights, and I was a government official in human rights—it was my job to tell that story and make sure that actions are taken to respond to what happened.
Alinda Veiszer:
In her memoirs, Kati Marton, who is Richard Holbrooke’s wife of Hungarian origin, writes that Richard Holbrooke, who was one of the chief negotiators of the Dayton Peace Agreement, simply referred to those leaders who participated in this war as criminals. Obviously, among others we can name, for example, Milosevic, whom he specifically declared to be a criminal. According to you, can this matter be simplified like this? Is he a criminal?
John Shattuck:
Well, Milosevic was a criminal leader. He was the leader of his country, for sure, and he chose to get further into power by essentially fanning the flames of ethnic conflict, religious conflict, so in many respects people started killing each other that otherwise were quite close to each other. There were many Serbs and Bosnians who intermarried, but the danger of a leader like Milosevic, or a leader like Mladic, Karadic, is that they essentially stirred up the really negative passions that made people afraid of each other.
Alinda Veiszer:
But for sure, it was a huge responsibility from the part of America what kind of an agreement could be reached. Was there an agreement between you about whom you could talk to, and whom you couldn’t? For example, Richard Holbrook claimed that he had no choice but to talk to Milosevic. However, with others, like Ratko Mladic, he was not willing to engage in discussion at all, saying that Milosevic would share the information with them. But he did not want to meet them.
John Shattuck:
Well, it is true. We decided, I was part of that negotiation, we decided to negotiate with Milosevic and with the other leaders like Tudjman of Croatia. At that stage Milosevic was seen to be a very negative leader, but he wasn’t charged with any criminal conduct, he hadn’t actually been charged with crimes, with some of the crimes we would see a bit later—we refused to negotiate with the war criminals like Karadizic and Mladic, who had already been charged with crimes like Srebrenica. I think that was the right decision, because if they had come to Dayton, then the Bosnians wouldn’t have come, and there would not have been peace. Not only that, but it would’ve rewarded them for the crimes that we knew they’d committed at that stage.
Alinda Veiszer:
Was there a real danger that no agreement would be reached?
John Shattuck:
Yes, yes. I think there was a very serious risk that Bosnians would decide not to come if Karadzic and Mladic and others, the Bosnian Serbs who committed all these crimes, had actually come to Dayton.
Alinda Veiszer:
What was that crucial factor that led to the agreement? What was your personal role in the process?
John Shattuck:
Well, Holbrooke and I worked very closely together. I was on the ground, gathering evidence about what was happening, even as these negotiations were getting started. For example, I was the first person to interview not only the Srebrenica survivors, but also some of the people who had been forced out of their homes. There were more than a thousand in the area of Banja Luca, etc., and then I’d come back and report this. I also investigated crimes that were committed by the Croatians against the Serbs, because the Serbs themselves were victims of war crimes, they were forced out of their homes in Krajina, in southern Serbia. Also I investigated the criminal conduct of the Bosnians. So, everyone felt that their own human rights abuses were being investigated. That was part of the strategy of getting Dayton to go forward.
Alinda Veiszer:
When did it become clear that there would be an agreement? Can you define the moment when it became absolutely sure that the parties could sit down, and there would be a contract that could be signed?
John Shattuck:
Well, I remember a very dramatic moment early in this negotiation when they were all complaining about each other. I remember Tudjman and the Bosnian leader, Izetbegovic, were both griping about problems that they each had, and neither of them said they wanted to be with Milosevic. So Holbrooke said: “I’m standing up and leaving this room. This is the end of the negotiations, you go back to fight, just keep fighting.” They took a deep breath and continued the negotiations. I think that they had recognized that they had their fate in their own hands.
Alinda Veiszer:
Clearly, this was a diplomatic tool, which Richard Holbrooke could use professionally. Were you an experienced enough diplomat then to know about these tools? Did you use them too, from time to time, in unusual ways when needed?
John Shattuck:
Well, we were doing this, all of this was on a completely new territory, and these were negotiations that never had really been conducted. This was after all the post Cold War period. The great powers were no longer as important; what was really important was to try to stop some of these terrible local wars. We had already been through a crisis in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, and it was a time to put an end to this. So we decided to use some very unconventional techniques. I was the first Assistant Secretary for Human Rights ever to be dispatched during an investigation, during an effort to bring peace, to investigate criminal activities. We also didn’t have cables and written documents that took every single moment of these negotiations and recorded them, because we thought it was important to do this in real time, with real individuals sitting across the table. So, there was a, yes, there may have been a sort of a Hollywood aspect of this, but also there was a personal aspect of it in forcing these people to come to grips with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians from each of those countries, had been killed already.
Alinda Veiszer:
The reason I asked this question is because you came to diplomacy from the world of academia, from the area of human rights, as a lawyer. I am very interested in knowing how one reaches a diplomatic circle that goes on to make the peace agreement of the biggest genocide since the second world war. What is you family background? Do you come from a family that is committed to democracy and sensitive to law and rights?
John Shattuck:
Well, my background is in human rights as you say. I was a civil rights lawyer in the United States for a number of years, very much involved in trying to end the racial discrimination in the US and lawsuits in that area; also protecting the civil liberties of individuals who have been wire-taped, as you said in your introduction, by President Nixon and his administration. This was my background, this was my career, this is my belief. Where did I get it from? Well, in a certain way, I did get it from my father. My father was a marine in the second world war, and he was involved in the landings in the Pacific against the Japanese. Many of his friends were killed and it was a very dramatic time for him. But he came away from that war really feeling very strongly about why he had been fighting, what it was all about. Well, it was about defending the basic liberties he knew. So when I was a young boy, my father at one point—I found he was in the newspapers, because he was defending a woman who was being accused of being a communist. She had been accused in the small town that we lived in, of being a communist sympathizer, and she was running for office, she was in politics, running for the school board. He said: “I don’t agree with anything that this woman is saying, but she has a right to be defended. So I’m going to go down and defend her.” So he went to the school board and defended her, publicly, in front of everyone else, by saying “she has a right to explain herself, you can’t just accuse her of being a communist.” I didn’t know what to make of this. I was seven years old and I said “Dad, why are you in the newspapers so much?” and he said “Sit down, I’ll tell you.” It was there that he explained to me what it means to have civil liberties.
Alinda Veiszer:
Was your mother involved in similar things? In which city did this happen?
John Shattuck:
My mother was an Irish-American, and Irish-Americans have a deep commitment to civil liberty. I always like to say that the two countries in the world that have the closest connection to the US are Ireland and Hungary, because almost everybody in one of these countries has an American relative. My mother was also a believer in basic issues of freedom. She got that naturally I think from her Irish roots.
Alinda Veiszer:
Which city did you live in?
John Shattuck:
We were living in a small town, north of New York city, Hastings on Hudson. Only seven thousand people in town, a small town.
Alinda Veiszer:
That’s really a small town. I find it interesting that you would bring up that example, but I was also thinking that in the 50s and 60s, when you were a teenager, or in your twenties, racial discrimination against colored people was at its heights in America. For example, 1963 is the date when Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech. Did you happen to be there?
John Shattuck:
I was not there. I was actually still a little too young to be there, but I certainly was a big admirer of Martin Luther King. In my school there were several African-American students, who became good friends of mine. Then in university I also had African-American friends. I became involved in defending the rights of students, to demonstrate against the causes, or in favor of the causes; for example, civil rights. I was also against the war in Vietnam, and many of them demonstrated about that.
Alinda Veiszer:
What was the greatest such abuse that you can recall, or the strongest case of discrimination that happened in your life and gave you a special calling to the profession?
John Shattuck:
I’ll give you a very good example. I have a very close friend, he has just visited me in Budapest. He was the highest ranking African-American in the US Justice Department before the administration of Barack Obama. He was the Solicitor General of the United States. He is now a Professor at the YaleLawSchool. When he and I were students, we traveled across the United States. We got to a small town in Oklahoma and we were thirsty, we wanted to go in, wanted to have coke and maybe a hamburger. We went into this little diner and we sat down; and they came up to me and said “I’m sorry.” They came up to both of us, but they looked at me and said “I’m sorry; your friend will have to leave. You can get some food and take it out to him.” And I said “We’re both leaving.” This was, I guess, maybe 1962, something like that.
Alinda Veiszer:
This must have given a really strong impulse to become a human rights activist. Another thing which is also very interesting is that—if I understand it well, we are talking about the Nixon administration and the Watergate Scandal—you defended the illegally wiretapped people in court when you were around 30.
John Shattuck:
Yes, I was. That was, well, that was a time when we felt that our government was abusing its power. It was using its powers too strongly, for example, collecting lists of enemies of the government, and sometimes starting investigations against them. Or in case of some of my clients, conducting wire-taps on people without the authority of a court. This was done on the orders of President Nixon, during a very, very unsettled time in the US. There were a lot of demonstrations for one thing, and the Nixon administration felt that they needed to take strong action against the demonstrators, particularly the leaders of those who were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. So I was immediately drawn to that, to those events.