For War Correspondent, Some Stories Never End

---

By Nicole Indelicato
SBU J-School Reporter

     Matt McAllester, a former foreign correspondent for Newsday who covered numerous conflicts in the Middle East and in 2003 was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein’s secret police in Abu Ghraib prison, told an audience at Stony Brook University yesterday that a story is never complete and that a reporter must be ceaseless in pursuit of the truth.

     “Ever since I started doing this, I realized that I never, ever finish a story,” said McAllester, now a contributing writer at Details magazine. “In fact, no journalist has ever finished a story, including those who covered World War II and Vietnam.”

    As an example of a “never-ending” story, McAllester offered one that began when he was covering the Kosovo War in 1999. He met a man in Pec, a small town in the Balkans, whose children had been “lined up on a sofa and machine-gunned” by a war criminal named Nebojsa Minic.

Though at the time McAllester didn’t meet Minic, the reporter subsequently wrote a book, “Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo,” that explored this war crime and others.

     But even after writing the book, McAllester still longed to speak to Minic.

     “I interviewed some of his colleagues,” McAllester said. “But I still wanted to know what kind of man he was.”

     In 2004, while in London, McAllester received a call from one of his translators who told him that Minic had been arrested in Buenos Aires and was dying of AIDS and cancer.

    McAllester said that this news was particularly interesting because it mirrored the flight of Nazi war criminals to Argentina after World War II.

     “They knew I really wanted to meet him and it was important to me,” McAllester said about the editors who sent him Buenos Aires to interview Minic.

After speaking to Minic--whom he described as a “shell of a human being”--on his deathbed, McAllester knew “there had to be more of these guys out there.”

     So he followed up.

    After many searches, McAllester discovered that 24 Serbs who had served in military brigades during the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia--where the Bosnian Serb army murdered more than 7,000 Muslim men--were living “comfortably” in Phoenix, Ariz.

    McAllester tracked down two of the killers, one of them an electrician living with his wife and son.

     “I am driven as a foreign correspondent to pursue these stories,” McAllester said. “They’re never done.”

     But how, as a journalist, does he keep following up on a story?

     McAllester spoke of a time when he didn’t follow up and called himself “such an idiot” for making what he referred to as “a mistake.”

    After joining eight U.S. soldiers during the 2004 assault on Fallujah, Iraq, during which one, Jose Velez, died, McAllester learned that Velez’s brother, Andrew, had been killed in “an accident” in Afghanistan.

     Though at the time he “left it alone,” McAllester later saw a 4,000-word piece in Details magazine on the Velezes, who were the first two brothers to die in the post-9/11 wars. The piece said Andrew had shot himself in the head because he was devastated by his brother’s death.

     “One email, one phone call,” McAllester said. “All I had to say was ‘Can you just tell me exactly what happened to Andrew?’ and I missed it.

    "But it was a learning experience.”

    McAllester was asked how much a reporter can accomplish in a world of constant strife and tension.

     “It’s limited,” McAllester said. “All you can do is find little places of darkness in the world and shine some light on them.”

     And the danger factor?

“It’s worth the calculation,” McAllester said. "It’s a very thought-out and analyzed process. Ask yourself: Am I prepared to die for this?”

---