The Reckoning – a play creating the crucible from which truth and justice can emerge

It’s easy to despair at the levels of impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity, even genocide. The idea that justice could ever catch up with war criminals feels ever more distant. 

What makes it more painful is that we have more visual evidence than ever before of crimes – from iPhones and satellite images, livestreams and leaked documents – yet seemingly ever less ways of making that evidence count. The pictures of murdered civilians, ruined buildings, bombed schools and hospitals are delivered instantly – and that makes the chasm between crime and justice even more painful. 

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As an author and journalist this contrast between how easy it is to gather facts, and how hard it is to put the guilty in the dock, has been achingly frustrating. We are meant to hold the powerful to account with ‘the truth’. But what if the powerful don’t care about being caught red-handed any more? What if truth has become impotent?  

In Ukraine, where I focus my work, there have been more than 130,000 war crimes. Many journalists write about them, but after your article or documentary comes out little happens. The frustration grows. Words and stories seem pointless. Putin’s invasion continues, murderously relentless. 

I co-created The Reckoning Project to overcome that despair by putting together two professions – lawyers and journalists – that rarely work together but have a common cause to bring perpetrators to account and to help victims. To put it simply: lawyers need journalists and other storytellers to collect evidence and to keep up the public pressure to bring perpetrators to justice. Journalists need lawyers to bring the evidence they find to courts of law, help impose sanctions and inform international bodies like the UN. 

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Journalists are often the first people on the scene of a war crime. But the interviews they conduct might be completed in such a way that the evidence is inadmissible in a court of law. This is the first thing we teach our team of journalists – to interview in such a way that never retraumatises, never exploits people. Not only is that ethically wrong, but manipulative questions will also make the witness statement unusable. 

So our reporters spend days, sometimes weeks or even longer talking to people. We never force the evidence out of them. We let them tell what happened at their own pace, slowly and carefully. We have now recorded over 500 stories of torture, indiscriminate bombardment, forced abduction, indoctrination and many other crimes.

We then make media material with this growing archive of evidence and follow it up with legal cases. For example we were among the first to write about Ukrainian children abducted by Russia. Later the International Criminal Court opened a case against Putin for the “unlawful deportation of children” at The Hague. 

The documentary play based on our work, written by the Ukrainian dramatist Anastasiia Kosodii, tells the story of how one reporter gathers evidence for The Reckoning. Because she spends so long with one witness, a janitor who was left alone in a village occupied by Russian forces, she wins his trust. 

Gradually he opens up, and the full horror of what transpired in his village is agonisingly revealed. At the same time, as she listens to him, the reporter also has to confront the terrible crimes she witnessed and has been caught up in since the start of the war. 

But the play is far more than just a chronicle of war crimes. It is about how truth reveals itself when there is trust. The bonds that make a disparate group of people a community are forged through listening to each other. The effect of the evil war criminals wreak is not just immediate pain and suffering, but the long-term traumas that make a damaged society so atomised, suspicious, and self- destructive that the people who live in it lose their ability to open up to one another. 

The path to justice starts with forging communities where truth and evidence matter, and that only emerges when we create conditions that enable people to communicate their fear, pain, guilt and even shame with one other. In that sense this play is not about the work of The Reckoning Project, it is part of that work.

The director, Josephine Burton, is creating the crucible from which truth and justice can emerge and is inviting you to be part of that endeavour. 

Peter Pomerantsev is an author, journalist and TV producer.The Reckoning plays at Arcola Theatre, London until 28 June and tickets are on sale now.Find out more about The Reckoning Project.

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