Narrator: 00:00  This episode of Asymmetrical Haircuts is supported by justiceinfo.net. When you’re on the front lines of somewhere, you genuinely don’t know where the front line is half the time. You ask at checkpoints, sometimes the soldiers will go, no, don’t go past, you know, if you go past there it’s too dangerous and you go, okay fine, you stop. Sometimes they go, well yeah, you can try. Justice plays an important role. I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and indictments false indictments. Such abhorrent crimes must not go unpunished. Proceedings will be long and complex.

Stephanie: 00:36  All rise. Hi, this is Asymmetrical Haircuts. I’m Stephanie van den Berg and as always, I have with me my co-host, Janet Anderson.

Janet: 00:45  Hi Janet. Hi Stephanie. You know, one of the most striking things going on in the war in Ukraine is the way that journalists are again, kind of really being pushed into the limelight. I mean, their roles as these first responders going to towns, villages, seeing bodies, horrible as it sounds, you know, counting the dead, talking to survivors. Basically, they’re the people mapping this rough draft of a war.

Stephanie: 01:11  Yeah, this happens in every conflict and there’s the great saying that journalism is the first draft of history. But it feels especially stark this time where we also see a lot of first-hand accounts and social media accounts in films with what is going on from the front line. Of course, many Ukrainian journalists have been pressed into becoming war correspondents. Suddenly, their country is under attack. They’ve done their flak jackets and helmets, if they even have them, and they are just sent to go where the fighting is.

Janet: 01:40  And I really promise we’ll manage to get hold of Ukrainian journalists to really manage to ask them about their experiences. The people I’ve approached for this podcast were all so busy. I mean, dealing in places like Kharkiv, that it was difficult to pin anybody down. But meanwhile, I’ve been really conscious when one of the people that we know really well, I kind of think of him as one of our pack, the tiny Hague press corps who all covered the ICC and the ICJ. He went off to Ukraine. So I wanted to start by saying, welcome home, Danny Kemp.

Danny Kemp: 02:18  Hi, Janet. And thank you. It’s good to be back, obviously.

Stephanie: 02:21  Danny is the bureau chief of the Agence France-Presse, the French press agency AFP. We know him from his coverage of the ICC and bemoaning the late Friday press releases along with us and the joint struggle in getting Dutch ministry spokespeople to give us our full names and not just be quoted as a spokesman. And before Danny became bureau chief in the Hague, he also reported for AFP from Afghanistan, from Libya, from Pakistan, Brussels. Where haven’t you been, basically? Well, I mean, it’s a long list. Bit of London and Paris. There you go. A real cosmopolitan.

Janet: 02:58  So, Danny, this isn’t your first rodeo, as they say. You’ve been in the field. You’ve covered a conflict before. But should we just set the scene for some of our listeners who aren’t journalists themselves? I mean, how long does somebody like you get sent out for? What’s the conditions in which you’re working? Just give us a bit of a scene set of somebody like you going off to Ukraine.

Danny Kemp: 03:21  Well, yeah. I mean, usually they keep the kind of rotations or the missions pretty short, particularly during the start of a conflict where things are pretty hot. You are working very long hours and, you know, people can get tired very easily. And also, you know, I mean, you’re seeing a lot of stuff. So, for example, my mission was for three weeks with a few days either side of travel time to actually get from, you know, because there’s no other way into Kyiv except by land. So you either go by train or, as I did, by car. So, yeah, they keep the missions pretty short. And basically you go in there and you’re living in a hotel. The office is in a hotel. The way it works is that basically every day you go out, you have a team of a text journalist and a video journalist and a photographer, along with a fixer translator and a driver. And pretty much every morning you go out in the car and you see what you can see. And you do that for three weeks and then you come home, ideally.

Stephanie: 04:20  And the reason we asked you specifically is because you went to Bucha and Bucha has now become notorious for the footage of dozens of bodies laying out in the streets, some with their hands bound behind their back. I think the first I heard of Bucha was the AFP alert or bulletin that said at least 20 bodies seen in one street in town near Kyiv, which I think is probably you that sent it.

Danny Kemp: 04:43  That’s right. That was me.

Stephanie: 04:44  And rather than having me describe the scene, can you tell us a bit of how it came that you went there? What happened? You know, what happens? How does your day start? How do you end up in Bucha?

Danny Kemp: 04:57  Well, basically, I mean, it was a, it was, you know, we got to Bucha after a process of about, you know, I mean, certainly a week and a half of really banging our heads against a wall and trying to get to this area, because basically about midway through March, just after I got to Kyiv, an American journalist was killed just on the outskirts of Irpin, which is the commuter town just before, you know, between Kyiv and Bucha. And so the Ukrainian government banned all journalists from going anywhere near Irpin and Bucha.

So basically for the, for, you know, for at least two weeks, and, you know, many cases about a month, no one was actually inside Irpin, we could, we could hear the shelling. Sometimes the shelling would cross over into bits of the, you know, the bits of the outskirts of Kyiv where we were, we could see the smoke rising, could see traumatized people being taken out and sometimes injured people being taken out on ambulances. And, you know, every day we were going out speaking to them, but we were trying to get in as well.

And we saw a couple of times we saw TV crews go in with ambulances, they’d come in, get shelled, and go out again. You know, so they, they get some footage and it was interesting, but you know, you couldn’t really get a sense of what it was like there, except that it was obviously, you know, they were under fire and things are very bad. So we were very keen to get in. Going out there pretty much every day is incredibly frustrating.

We just, we just could not get past this main roadblock. And so we were getting towards very near the end of my three-week stint. And I was thinking like, you know, I’m, I’m gonna have to go, you know, I’m going to be going home. And I, you know, I won’t have done this, this one thing I really feel we should be doing, this one place I really want to go to, you know, tell the story of what’s actually happening.

Then on the Friday, the first of April, our security advisor suggested that we take a different route. So we didn’t keep going against the same roadblocks. And so we went south and then up through a village called Stoyanka across this sort of big crossroads on a motorway, which a week before we’d been told there were snipers and we couldn’t pass anyway, this time it was clear.

So that day, the Friday, after a little while, we managed to finally get into Irpin quite late in the afternoon, it’s very foggy, complete ghost town, apocalyptic scenes, we were like, okay, good. We’ve got this, we can finally report on this. But we couldn’t do much. It was very late. We also got a flat tire.

Janet: 07:20  I’m just interrupting Danny, just for a moment, because I hear this, there’s a lot of detail that we’re going to go into. You say you have a security advisor, that’s kind of standard. And presumably, you’re wearing flak jacket, helmet, etc, etc. That’s how you have to travel around. And then how long do you aim to go out for? Do you go out for a day and then have to be back by dark? Is that how it works?

Danny Kemp: 07:44  Yeah, that’s right. I mean, obviously, the same as all the other international media, we, you know, we go out helmet, flak jacket, you know, security advisors are kind of, I think, for some organizations, they’ve been using them for a while, some organizations have been using them for less time. You know, there are two types.

I mean, you certainly see some of the big TV crews around with these, you know, big hulking ex-special forces guys who are sort of hanging around them all the time looking around for sort of possible threats and stuff. What, dark glasses at the ready and literally that, like, huge guys kind of go, “Come on, guys, let’s move out now.” You know, that’s, that’s not what we wanted. Not what we had.

We had someone who just really was much better, you know, had experience of, of situations like that. But, you know, knew how to move around, you just gave us a sense of security about when it’s okay to get some, you know, sometimes you don’t know how far you can go. Because this, you know, this is the thing that when you’re on the front lines of somewhere, you genuinely don’t know where the front line is half the time. You cannot, you know, you ask at checkpoints.

Sometimes the soldiers will go, no, don’t go past, you know, if you go past it’s too dangerous, you go, okay, fine, you stop. Sometimes they go, well, yeah, you can try. And you’re like, okay, well, then then it’s your judgment, basically, and you have to make a judgment.

And you know, for us, it was very helpful to have someone who’d been in a situation, a lot of these situations before, had military training. And so knows, just knows a bit more, you know, about what to expect, about what to look for, about the feel of things.

Stephanie: 09:09  Did you have that? Because I know, from working in Serbia, that my colleagues in the Serbian Bureau who’d gone through war, would be like, basically, you hear some sound, and they would be able to tell you what kind of mortar fire it was. And they would know how far it could kind of reach. So that would be, it’s a skill you don’t really want to have, because there’s only one way you get that. But they would be like, when there was gunshots in Belgrade, they would be like, oh, that’s nothing. This is just a pistol. It’s not a semi automatic or whatever.

Danny Kemp: 09:38  That’s exactly right. And, you know, particularly in Ukraine, this time, it was more of a difference of between being able to tell the difference between incoming and outgoing because, you know, but when you first get there, it all just sounds like explosions. You’re like, you know, the explosions happen really near you and you’re like, Christ, then duck and get out of the car or whatever.

But you know, even for us, after a few weeks, you get to tell the difference between whether it’s, you know, Ukrainian forces firing a rocket launcher next to you, or whether it’s actually shells coming in from the Russian side. So, but you know, he in particular was good at being, you know, helped us to tell the difference between those different kinds of munitions that are being used, but also just as I said, I kind of feel he had a sort of feel for the, you know, the situation and the way things felt on the ground, whether it’s safe to go on.

And also he would go on sometimes just to have a look a bit further, see how things looked, you know, maybe a half a kilometre up the road. This is great, it gave us a real confidence to push on, whereas if it’s sometimes if it’s just like, you know, four journalists in a car, you’re looking at each other and going like, should we go on? Yeah, probably or not. You know, it gave us confidence to do that.

Stephanie: 10:44  So you were describing that you were driving, you had gone to Irpin, you took the photos of the desolate landscape, but that was still Irpin and a lot of other footage was from there. So what made you decide?

Danny Kemp: 10:54  That was the day before, actually, that was the Friday, the April 1st. Just briefly to answer what you were saying before, basically, every day, you know, the team would wake up at sort of 6:30, get to breakfast at seven, and then you decide what you’re going to do for the day. And the idea then is that you drive out.

Ideally, you get, you know, if you get lucky, you get your material in the morning, you come back and file. Otherwise, you’re going to be out in the field for as long as it’s safe. And then you come back in the evening. And you write your stories and your, you know, edit your pictures and video and send them.

So anyway, for this day on the 2nd of April, our photographer in particular wanted, didn’t feel he’d got enough from Irpin. So he wanted to go back there. And I was like, yeah, okay, fine. So was our videographer, and so they, you know, we headed back on the same route towards Irpin. But it was clear that the road to Bucha was now open as well.

And the day before, it had looked a bit more dodgy, we had heard from some soldiers that there was still some shelling there. But on this day, the Saturday, in the morning, when we set out, it looked, it looked clearer. So we thought, well, okay, why don’t we have a look, we discussed it, and we decided that we would, we would try for Bucha.

And we went, you know, and so we, we drove in there, and all the checkpoints are open. And suddenly we were there. And, you know, you come in through the outskirts of town.

And me, you know, again, it’s very, it was very cold day, really eerie, foggy, just no one around, people, you know, the occasional people sort of weirdly walking their dogs. But I mean, literally, you’d see every kilometer, you’d see like one or two people if that. Immediately was clear, they were destroyed buildings, damaged buildings, burnt out and crushed cars on the road, burnt out Russian tanks. And, you know, a very minimal presence of Ukrainian forces as well.

I mean, really empty, really eerie, a real ghost town.

Stephanie: 12:52  And at what point, because that is the, what you’re describing is also what we saw in Irpin. And it’s kind of the, what you would expect there. Did it, at what point did you realize that this is maybe more, or this is, did you hear before that Bucha might have been worse than Irpin? Had you any indication of what you would find?

Danny Kemp: 13:09  We had heard that Bucha was, the conditions are very bad in Bucha, but it’s more kind of rumours. But more particularly, either the evening before that morning, we had seen a social media video, which is one thing on Twitter, of a street, where there are lots of bodies, of a military truck driving through a street where there are lots of bodies that was meant to be Bucha. There’s no proof that it was Bucha, there was no proof that it had come from this conflict, even, it was just something on social media.

So the back of my mind, I was thinking, I’ve seen this, I don’t, you know, we don’t know if it’s there. But this is obviously something we want to, we want to look for as well. But you know, obviously, at the same time, we had a kind of a need to get material, you know, enough material just to write our stuff, write a story for the day, even if we didn’t find me.

So obviously, you know, we spent, we spent a good hour or two talking to people in Bucha that we found, people who had been hiding in basements, a group of like elderly women who’d had no, you know, water supplies, no electricity supplies, basically no food, been scavenging from a supermarket and had set up their own soup kitchen, in its own way, a kind of weirdly, you know, heartwarming tale of survival, if you can call it that.

And, you know, we spent quite a long time with them. And, you know, we thought, in a way, we were like, well, this, this actually could be enough for us. This, this, this in itself is a story of the kind of horrible conditions that people have been living in.

But, you know, then we thought, well, let’s, let’s go and have a, let’s, let’s press on a bit. So we moved a bit more into central Bucha. And we, that was the first, then we saw around the railway station, we saw really devastated sort of block of flats, where there’d been heavy fighting, spoke to some people there.

And that’s when we first saw the first body that we saw in Bucha, which was, it was a person laid out under a sheet, probably about 100 meters away from where the army had suddenly arrived and was starting to give out food. So that was the first time we saw a body. So it’s clear that there was more to be seen.

We then got talking to a very emotional local man who was telling us about the fact that there was a sort of mass grave near where he lived, where four people had been buried, they’d been shot by Russians, and they’d been buried in someone’s back garden. He took us there, there was what appeared to be a grave with a green wooden cross on. We talked to him, obviously, we had no proof that there were people in there. But again, you know, we had his testimony.

And, you know, again, we thought, well, we really got quite a lot of stuff. We went back to where our cars were parked. Just then our driver, our Ukrainian driver, had been speaking to some of the soldiers and some of the residents who live there.

And he said to us, well, look, these guys say that they know where there’s a street with some bodies. And I was like, okay. All right.

Well, we definitely want to try and look at that. So in fact, we got the same emotional man who showed us a mass grave. He’s like, I know where this is.

I’ll take you there. So he jumped in, you know, we actually travel in a convoy of two cars. So he jumped in with us and took us about, you know, as a little route about a kilometre away from the railway station to this residential area. Among the first there, we have some of the pictures of the scene that was undisturbed. We have, you know, I have pictures of all 20 bodies before they were moved, and I think some of them were moved quite soon after we got there, or certainly sort of, you know, Ukrainian authorities got there. So, you know, we have, you know, material from that, from that scene, which, you know, obviously, at the time, I thought it could be, could be useful. And I know that, you know, AFP has told us to keep that material, as they do, as we do in all cases with any, with anything in this, whether it’s any incident in any country that could potentially end up in court somehow, you know, we are told to keep, keep our notes, keep our photos, keep our videos and all the raw stuff. As to whether I, you know, 10 years’ time, my first call would be to AFP HQ in Paris to say, what do you think about this? I don’t know, honestly, what the AFP policy is on this, I think that they would probably decide on a case-by-case basis. In theory, I would be prepared, but I wouldn’t do anything without, you know, the say-so of the people, people I work for.

Janet: 31:10  Wonderfully diplomatic answer. And I’m sure you’re absolutely right, that’s the correct thing you should do. And that’s what every journalist would do is check with the bosses and see what’s on. But so rather than asking whether you would do it, I mean, could you, you’ve seen other journalists at the ICTY, and maybe even at the ICC, sort of testifying, I mean, you know, that journalists do testify. I mean, have you just ever imagined yourself generally in the situation of testifying at any of these courts? Or is that that just not something that’s that struck you?

Danny Kemp: 31:43  No, I could, I could definitely imagine it, because, you know, I have a lot of factual details, I think could be, you know, that could be in theory useful. And if I, if I had details that people thought would be useful, I would, you know, I would, I would want to, I would want to tell them, because, you know, and that’s why I got into journalism in the first place. That’s why I wrote the stories. So, you know, in theory, yes. And I, you know, I’ve seen other people, I mean, I’ve watched some of the testimony given by and read some of the testimony given by journalists, I think Jeremy Bowen, in particular, read some others as well. And, you know, I think they played a valuable role in these trials. I think the, you know, I know that there have been journalists who’ve refused, I know, particularly from the US, where, you know, there was a consideration that somehow this is outside the sort of the journalists’ pledge of neutrality in a way that they should keep a distance from it. I can, I can see that argument as well, that it would be something that anyone would have to weigh up very carefully if they did get the call, but, you know, it’s a long way off.

Janet: 32:52  And it’s entirely hypothetical, as a politician might might say, just to also draw the scene, as Danny said, there is in journalism, there are very different ways of viewing this, a lot of American news organizations, basically say no, for example, New York Times reporters can never testify or give evidence to a prosecutor, the organization does not allow them to testify in court. Never, I asked one of the New York Times reporters who was reporting on ISIS, she has all the receipts from ISIS in the Maghreb, and they’re making an archive of it. And I was like, well, you know, that might be used in a court case, would you testify? And she said, well, I’m not allowed to, that just doesn’t happen. I don’t know what the Reuters policy is. But I can imagine that there could be a blanket ban on it for me. And I know, we were talking yesterday with Dutch war crimes prosecutors who had a Syrian prosecution, and they had an article in the Guardian where the man they were prosecuting was kind of bragging that he was a big guy in an ISIS militia. And they wanted to interview the journalist about it. And he also said no, because he wanted to remain neutral. I think the Guardian lets journalists decide for themselves, because I know Ed Vulliamy famously testified at length in several Bosnia trials.

Stephanie: 34:12  Well, maybe it also leads on to just that small extra question about this idea of neutrality in journalism. And you’ve been there, you’ve seen stuff, Danny, on the ground in Ukraine, how does it now colour the rest of your work? Because here we are in The Hague, and we’re reporting on the prospects of potential war crimes. We’re talking about the way that the investigation is being put together. What do you bring back with you from Ukraine that kind of colours how you cover this? And at the heart of that, can you, quote unquote, remain neutral?

Danny Kemp: 34:51  As I mentioned, the day after we made this discovery in Bucha, I left Kyiv, because it was the end of my stint, and I had to come back to The Hague. I very much felt, though, that I had kind of unfinished business. And you know, I mean, we’d seen these, you know, these, obviously, they’re not just bodies, there’s 20 people lying in the street, 20 people whose lives had ended, people with shopping bags, people had literally, like, fallen over with their bikes on top of them, as if, you know, life, you could just see where their life had stopped. And, you know, obviously, I wanted to know who these people were, who had killed them, how they’d been killed, because obviously, the situation is very strange as well. You had one person with his hands tied, others weren’t, some had, I think two had white armbands on their arms, all in different circumstances. I couldn’t figure out the circumstances in which they all could have been killed. I couldn’t understand, I wanted to know who they were, what were their lives like, who were the people who mourned them. And, you know, to go the next day felt strange. And I think this is a very common thing.

I was listening to a documentary with Fergal Keane, the BBC reporter, he was talking about Rwanda, which is obviously of a totally different magnitude to what I saw. But he said the same thing that he felt strange leaving, you know, leaving the country behind, leaving these people behind and leaving the story behind. So, you know, for me, it’s in a way, it’s kind of, I guess, serendipitous that I do work in The Hague. In a way, it allows things to come full circle, because, you know, I would hope, I expect that some of these cases will end up at the ICC. And if they do, you know, it would give me a sense of, I guess, a sense of closure, but certainly a sense of professional satisfaction to be able to cover them, even if it’s just the sort of any charges that are laid, because, you know, I’m not sure I’ll be here when any trial takes place, because that could be a long, long time. But, you know, I mean, because I think, speaking to other journalists, you know, when you leave a place like this, it comes with you, and you kind of stay there, certainly for several weeks or months afterwards, and in some cases longer.

So, you know, these questions keep nagging at you, and I’ve, forgive me for giving AFP a plug, but I have colleagues there who’ve done a really fantastic investigation, looking at four of the people who were found on that street, and going, you know, they did amazing work, like going to, literally going to the morgue, waiting around, trying to speak to people, I mean, in terrible conditions, and found these people, found the relatives of these people to find out who these people were, you know, they were just people kind of who did cycling on errands, or going to see friends who were, who were then shot, and, you know, found out as well that there was a sort of Russian kind of command post, partly because the area was so near Irpin, it was like on the road all the way through, which, you know, might explain, explains why this street may have been so deadly. And I can also say there’s also been a superb Reuters investigation recently into the same incidents, who the, you know, possible culprits were, or, you know, the situation were, you know, work like this is incredibly important, and, you know, it gives me sort of a little faith, I guess, that, you know, maybe journalism can make a bit of a difference, because, you know, we can tell these stories of these, you know, how, you know, it’s just terrible to think that these people might remain unidentified or faceless as such.

Janet: 38:19  Now, you left after this, but then after Bucha became such a big story, I also saw reports of, like, the Ukrainian government kind of, there are some, I won’t say organized trips, but there were, there were journalists going with the government showing them that, and how do you feel about that aspect of it, that it then becomes a kind of destination? I don’t know how to explain this.

Danny Kemp: 38:47  I think it’s, I think it’s normal, and, you know, it serves a purpose, you know, it means, you get, I can understand, you know, the Ukrainians have, since the start of the war and before, run a masterful public relations operation, frankly, you know, they have been very tight on restricting people, restricting journalists from seeing what they don’t want to see sometimes, and they’ve been very good at facilitating journalists to see what they do want them to see. So it’s natural that they would take them on these trips.

I think in a war, a press trip is a necessary evil sometime, you know, we went on some, I think, you know, the Russians have organized them as well, and many media organizations have gone on those, I think, as, you know, sometimes somewhere like Mariupol, for example, there’s no way you’re going to get in there, except for those incredibly brave AP journalists who are there for a while, you know, there’s no way you can get to these places sometimes, you know, as long as you’re clear that, you know, this is a press trip, the Russians or the Ukrainians took us to these places that, you know, this person was made available to speak, whatever, as long as you’re clear about it, sometimes it’s the only way. And I think it’s a, you know, I think it’s, it was inevitable and kind of necessary that, you know, for these big press visits to happen in Bucha, but at the same time, I was glad that we not even just that we found it, but I was glad that someone was able to see the scene before it got turned into a destination, or, you know, because that way, it makes it harder for people to question it.

Janet: 40:19  You’ve explained it already. But just to reiterate, you didn’t go there at the urging of the Ukrainian authorities, or somebody pointed you to that before this was an individual AFP decision from your team that happened at the time you were there.

Danny Kemp: 40:34  It was exactly that we were not on a, we were not accompanied by the military, we didn’t go in by the military, we weren’t sanctioned by the military to enter Bucha. It was just, you know, in a way, it was, I mean, a bit of, you know, journalistic shoe leather, but in a way, and basically, it was a determination, it was our driver, who was talking to people.

Janet: 40:54  I know some news organizations provide counselling afterwards. I remember my husband was working for the Dutch national TV and was sent to Kashmir after that great big earthquake and had some mandatory counselling session to deal with having seen a week of horrible destruction. Do you get anything like that? Or are you just supposed to deal with it?

Danny Kemp: 41:15  That’s a coincidence, actually, because I was based in Pakistan at the time. So I covered that earthquake as well. And it was really devastating and quite traumatic and stayed with me for a long time. Back then, there was not a culture of counselling, certainly not AFP. I think less generally in the news world, you know, there wasn’t so much of a culture of that. That has definitely changed. I mean, one of the first things that we were told and offered when we got back from Ukraine was that there was access to counselling for people who wanted it, and that we should think carefully about it. And, you know, given the signs to look out for, you know, I think, kind of anxiety and sleepless nights and all the rest of it, and, you know, the images continuing to stay there.

Janet: 42:04  I’m glad the AFP is offering some counselling. I hope you won’t need it. And I hope that indeed working in The Hague gives you a sense of purpose also in that. I think that helps a lot with our job. Sometimes people are like, why are you covering all the war crimes and the genocide? And it’s got to be horrible. And I’m just like, well, you know, I’m writing about it. I’m letting people know. So I feel there’s a purpose to what I do. And I’m not just doing it to hear the horrificness of it.

Danny Kemp: 42:29  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way. And I do hope to be able to cover some of that in the future, like I said, to have a bit of, yeah, professional closure about it, apart from anything else. But you’re right. I mean, I’ve noticed from just covering some of the war crimes trials here of subjects who I’ve never covered before, all the conflicts in some African countries that we’ve been covering, the details are absolutely horrific and weirdly traumatizing in their own way. I mean, which is, you know, I get a thing that a lot of news organizations are now being careful about kind of vicarious trauma, particularly video editors who are handling videos from like Ukraine or Syria all day long. And, you know, end up, you know, with secondhand trauma that can be almost worse than other kinds.

Janet: 43:16  When the conflict just started, I saw some guides on social media on how to deal with seeing these kind of movies and what to look out for. We’ll link to that in our show notes for people who are interested, who cannot look away from the war in Ukraine.

Stephanie: 43:29  Thank you so much for coming in and responding to our various questions and helping us understand exactly what it was like there. And great to see you back. The first question that we always ask for our extra questions is whether there was something that we should already have asked you. So is there a question that we missed out?

Danny Kemp: 43:48  That’s a question I regularly ask my interviewees as well. And I think I did ask a few people that in the field in Ukraine, embarrassingly enough, but I can’t think of anything else. Is there anything I should say? I can’t think of anything.

Janet: 44:05  No, no, it’s a great question for journalists, which is why I also ask it and which is why I ask it on the podcast. Our next question is a new question that we have is what’s been kind of your favorite or most memorable court case that you’ve covered?

Danny Kemp: 44:23  Wow, that’s a good one. Can I work a minute to think about it? Because yeah, when I think of court cases, my mind instantly goes back not to here, but to the Basingstoke Gazette, which is the local paper that I started on in the UK and covered all kinds of like ridiculous things. Hang on, let me see.

Janet: 44:43  We also like the ridiculous court cases.

Danny Kemp: 44:45  Well, of course.

Janet: 44:46  That’s more fun than pick war crimes ones usually.

Danny Kemp: 44:50  Yeah, I mean, for me, even though I didn’t actually get to see him, the most memorable case I covered in The Hague was the Mladic hearing last year, largely just because we were in a tent outside watching this. We were in a tent outside watching this, you know, this man who’d be convicted of one of the worst terrible genocides in Europe, you know, like I said, in a tent outdoors in the sun.

Janet: 45:16  It was super sunny, yes. It’s weird, right? And it’s the same kind of weather that it was when Srebrenica fell, for example, that was also super sunny and hot. And it was about the same time, which was really odd for the people who were there, who were also there and some of his victims.

Danny Kemp: 45:33  Yeah, it feels really incongruous and strange, you know, in hearing all the testimony and knowing the seriousness of what’s gone on. And yet you’re, yeah, like I said, in a tent outdoors because there isn’t enough space and because of coronavirus rules and, you know, court cases themselves are strange because you’re in this artificial setting. But I mean, certainly the biggest circus that I’ve covered as a sort of court case has been when I was based in London, was after the arrest of Julian Assange from WikiLeaks.

And then we had, this went through a series of hearings at the, you know, the High Court and even went to the Supreme Court of the UK. And, you know, for me, that was really interesting, not just because, you know, you finally got to see a glimpse of this, you know, sort of legendary reclusive figure with his white hair in a courtroom in the UK, but just the sheer level of interest and the maniacal circus that was outside the courts was, you know, far greater than anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere else. So, yeah, that was a weird one.

Janet: 46:40  I can imagine. Our final question is always, what are you reading, watching, listening to, if you listen to podcasts, either to get more into your work or to get away from everything? Also happy to know about your Netflix favorites and the stuff you do, just to not think about war crimes. I don’t know, keep cricket scores. Okay.

Danny Kemp: 47:02  Watching is mainly kind of skateboarding videos on Instagram because I like to, I’ve been skateboarding since I was a teenager and have kept it up ever since. And that, like, that helps to keep me, I don’t know, exercise and the, you know, excitement of it helps to keep me kind of, you know, keep me mentally fit and healthy, I like to think. Reading, I’m actually reading Life and Faith by Vasily Grossman, which is a very large, long novel about the Second World War in the Soviet Union and more particularly in Ukraine, which my girlfriend’s stepfather bought her for Christmas randomly and said it was very good.

And to be honest, it’s such a doorstopper that sat around the house for a couple of years. And she didn’t make much headway with it. But when I got back from Ukraine, I was like, do I really want to read about this? Yeah, I do, actually. Because, you know, what I could then reading about this, you know, these stories of World War Two, it’s pretty grim book, but you know, I can picture the place now, I can picture the towns, I can picture the scenery, that sort of endless, rolling, samey countryside that you get in Ukraine. And I can, I can see the same things happening in a way I can, you know, I can see a, I can see a peaceful society being plunged into war, I can see people whose peaceful lives have been turned completely upside down.

And yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of interesting to me to see it through a different fictional lens. In terms of me, I can’t, I can’t watch war movies at all at the moment, which I didn’t think was going to happen. Because I’ve always been a big fan. You know, like most, like a lot of people, I think, but I can’t watch them in the moment. They look, they’re simultaneously sort of fake, but also, I don’t know, bring, bring stuff back, which I don’t particularly want to see at the moment. So I have been—yeah, hence the skateboarding videos.

Janet: 48:58  Sounds like a much better plan. Thank you so much for coming and talking to us about this. And we’re sorry to dredge up some stuff, maybe. But also, we’re very happy that our listeners who are usually on the other side on the more sanitized court side of things, what it’s like, reporting on it, and also the kind of choices you have to make when you do the work that we do, that sometimes gets slammed by lawyers for not being accurate enough. Exactly. There, you know, this is in the field is how it works.

So thank you so much for those insights.

Danny Kemp: 49:35  Thank you for having me. It’s like I said, this is actually good to talk about these things and talk them through. It’s actually helpful. So thank you.

Stephanie: 49:42  Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Narrator: 49:49  This podcast was created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stéphanie van den Berg. It is published in partnership with justiceinfo.net. You can find show notes and additional blogs on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. It is recorded in the Hague Humanity Hub, home to a community of innovators in the field of peace, justice, development and humanitarian action. Music is by audionautix.com. And the show is available on every major podcast service. So please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.

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