Neighbor On Neighbor

Resource for Grades 9-12

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Media Type:
Video

Running Time: 2m 25s
Size: 14.0 MB

Learn more about the documentary Women, War & Peace: I Came to Testify.

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Major funding for Women, War & Peace is provided by the 40x50, a group of visionary donors who have provided key support for this initiative; Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Foundation to Promote Open Society; Ford Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Swanee Hunt Family Fund of the Denver Foundation; Starry Night, an Anne Delaney Charitable Fund; The Atlantic Philanthropies; Dobkin Family Foundation; Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family; Bill Haney; Pierre N. Hauser; Susan Disney Lord; Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Guth Charitable Fund; Vital Projects Fund; Elizabeth H. Weatherman and The Warburg Pincus Foundation; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; Barbara H. Zuckerberg; Sigrid Rausing Trust; more than 1,500 Members of THIRTEEN; and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for I Came to Testify is also provided by National Endowment for the Humanities, and for Peace Unveiled by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Funding for the online Education Guide is provided by The Overbrook Foundation.

Related Resources:

Building The Case
(Video)

Judgment And Legacy
(Video)

The Testimony
(Video)

War Was In The Air
(Video)

In this video from Women War & Peace, the 1993 establishment of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal is discussed. The Tribunal was the first international war crimes court to be organized during a war, and it was also the first international war crimes court in Europe since Nuremberg. According to Peggy Kuo, one of the Tribunal prosecutors, what was most devastating about the Yugoslav war was that it was “neighbor on neighbor.”

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Transcript

NARRATOR: From the earliest days of the war, there were accounts of atrocities against civilians on all sides of the conflict. TV reports finally made them too real to ignore, and in 1993 the United Nations established the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. It was the first international war crimes court in Europe since Nuremberg … and the first ever to be convened in the midst of a war.

HILDEGARD: My husband is from the former Yugoslavia. And we followed the news when the war started.

TV ANNOUNCER: It was the first air raid on a European region since World War II. And war seemed to have begun again in Yugoslavia…

HILDEGARD: That this could happen after such a short period of time, where everybody else was saying “This will never happen again in Europe. “ It did happen. And that was very upsetting.

NARRATOR: Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff was a seasoned litigator who’d spent years prosecuting cases of fraud and other white-collar crimes in her native Germany. She came to the fledgling tribunal while 800 miles away the Serbs’ campaign of ethnic cleansing was advancing with devastating brutality.

PEGGY: The thing that was most heartbreaking about the war in Yugoslavia is that this was neighbor on neighbor.

NARRATOR: Peggy Kuo came later to the Tribunal from the U.S. Department of Justice, with experience in prosecuting hate crimes and civil rights cases.

PEGGY KUO: I came to the U.S. when I was three from Taiwan and I went to public school in New York City. There were Hispanic kids, black kids, a couple of Asians, white kids, Jewish kids. There were always fights. There were racial taunts. I got called names. Maybe seeing how badly kids behave when the grown-ups aren't there made me a prosecutor.

NARRATOR : Peggy Kuo joined Tejshree Thapa and Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff to form the heart of a team assigned to investigate the growing tales of horror that were filtering out of the eastern Bosnian town of Foca.

TEJ: The impression that I formed was that bad stuff had happened but the truth was impossible to figure out and we had to eventually, as in all of these cases, you have to go and you have to look for the individuals who were there, who knew the story.