Igric focused on how to report particularly in cases of grave human rights violations such as rape, war crimes, torture and ethnic cleansing.
An audience of 70 students was shown Igric’s investigative report in which she went to Foca to look for and find the war crimes suspect living freely in the Bosnian town, where he had raped and enslaved many Bosnian Muslim women during the conflict.
In the award-winning TV report, shot in 1997, Igric is seen knocking on doors in Foca apartment blocks until she finds the suspected criminal, who many women victims had named, and whose confession to some of the crimes was shot with a secret camera.
When Gavin MacFadyen, Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, spoke about covert reporting, he said: “Being this direct with war criminals as Igric was on the film, asking them how many people they killed, is extremely brave – I would never dare to do that.”
The session, which was followed by talks from Anna Politkovskaia, a Russian journalist working in human rights violations in Chechnya, and Alfred McCoy, a historian who spoke on reporting about torture and its definitions through different conflicts in history.
Ana Petruseva, from BIRN Macedonia and Jeta Xharra, Krenar Gashi and Casey Cooper Johnson from BIRN Kosovo, attended the training.
The investigative journalism summer school was organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
For more information on the topics covered during the training go to link..