Preparatory Meeting
Palais du Luxembourg, Paris
Friday 20th and Saturday 21st April 2001

Media lessons from Kosovo
(Highlights of keynote speech by Bernard Kouchner: April 20, 2001)

Kouchner pleads for peace- keeping transparency

The press has no memory. Typically, there is a wave of fashion, which might last a few weeks or a few months, then the problem is over. Why? Because all the special correspondents are back home or dealing with their next assignment. The press often repeat their own factual mistakes. There is a big difference between people who know what they are talking about, and the others who spend a few days on the spot, often with a preconceived idea of what they are going to say, and which they have picked from other media. If there was a mistake in the initial reporting on a situation, this mistake will often be repeated for years. Difficult situations require good journalists. Journalists who are specialists and who know their subject matter. Bad journalists are like a different kind of enemy.

Bad news is good news. It is very difficult to interest the press in real good news, small victories, progress in the process, etc. Even if you tell them the situation has improved, they will give greater coverage to the next car bomb. They seem to think that you can erase centuries of hatred in a few years or months, and criticize you for not having succeeded.

The written press is not TV. It is in the nature of TV to be brief. But to understand a situation, we need the perspective and the length of the written press. It is all the more important that the written press do a good reporting job that the TV crews often use it as their first source of information before going into a situation for a brief assignment.

Without the press, nothing is possible. It allows you, in a difficult situation like that of Kosovo, to talk to the local populations. At the beginning it was much easier to talk to Washington than to the Kosovars. By getting to know the local press, and letting them get to know you, you can communicate better with the people you are trying to help.

How can you maintain media attention over the long term? You probably can't. Post-conflict reconstruction is, by the very nature of the media, who need "stories", of little interest. They might come back every year or so to report on how the situation has evolved, but that's it. There is a time for news, a time for fatigue, and no time for memory. It might be a mistake to suddenly introduce press freedom in a country that has not known general political freedom for a long time. For example, in Kosovo, after 50 years of communism and 10 years of virtual apartheid, the press, from the point of view of the intellectuals and the dissidents, was lying by nature, whereas for the simple folk whatever was written in the press was true. In these circumstances it takes time for a free press to begin to play its true, legitimate role and not to abuse its privileges. For example, what do you do when a newly freed press begins to publish the names of criminal suspects, thereby exposing them to private vengeance? I personally shut down, albeit temporarily, a newspaper that persisted in doing this. Is the ideal of freedom of the press more important than a man's life?

Kouchner put together UN Kosovo mission from scratch

It might also be a mistake to try to implement international norms too quickly. To arrive in a place like Kosovo after the war and to think of implementing all the latest human rights norms, like the UN Charter or the European Convention (which even some European Union member countries are not fully implementing), is too much too soon. What is a good idea, in peace-keeping and peace-building missions, is to come with a protection kit, a temporary law-and-order kit, and a press freedom kit.