Foreign Correspondent Matt McAllester Talks About Rooting Out War Criminals
By Michael Kelly Matt McAllester's job never really ends, and it's by no means safe. He travels to faraway places and plants himself in the middle of danger - not as a soldier, but as a wartime journalist. McAllester, a former Newsday foreign correspondent who was once imprisoned in Abu Ghraib by Saddam Hussein, has made a living writing about war-torn countries in the Middle East. On April 3 he spoke at Stony Brook University for the School of Journalism's "My Life As..." series about how his stories never really end - rather, how they evolve through time. A current contributing editor at Details magazine, McAllester remembered covering his first war, in Kosovo, in 1999. He had written a story about a man whose family had been killed three or four days after a ceasefire had been ordered in the war. “I knew who the killer was,” McAllester said. The killer was Nebojsa Minic, whom McAllester described as a “very unpleasant man" - but one he wanted to meet. Minic, along with others, had taken part in massacring almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the war. McAllester didn’t think meeting Minic was in the cards - or that it was in his best interest. “He probably would have killed me,” McAllester said, alluding to the stories he had written about him. “So I avoided meeting him.” But the story didn't end there. In fact, it didn’t even end in Kosovo. In 2004, McAllester received a call from his Kosovo translator, who told him Minic had been arrested in Argentina. McAllester flew to Argentina to interview him, but Minic died soon after from cancer and AIDS. But the fact that Minic was caught in Argentina got McAllester thinking. “Hang on, maybe there are more of these guys out there," he said. The parallels between Minic, a wanted war criminal ending up in Argentina, to Nazi’s who had fled to Argentina, was too strong for McAllester to ignore. Through a Google search, McAllester discovered there were 20-25 people who had worked with Minic now living comfortably in Phoenix. Then, he found out two of them had taken part in the 1999 massacres. The two are now on trial and could be the first Bosnians found guilty of war crimes. But the story is still not done. There might be more people like those two, living in United States suburbs. "Living the American dream,” McAllester said. “It doesn’t sit well with me,” he said. So the work goes on. |
