REVIEW

‘The Hunting Party’ Raises Issue Of Human Decency Loudly And Clearly

BY ROBERT W. PLYLER

family@post-journal.com

    On Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. and again on Saturday at 8 p.m., the Reg Lenna Civic Center and the Robert H. Jackson Center invite you to a showing of the film ‘‘The Hunting Party.’’

    The popular film starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard has been drawing attention to our area, including a national examination by CNN News of its relation to a concert, which was held last August at the Chautauqua Institution by the Jackson Center. You can watch the CNN piece on the Jackson Center’s Web page at www.roberthjackson.org.

    The film is entertainment not history, but it does raise, loudly and clearly, the issue of human decency and the concept that even in a bitter war there are indecencies which people are wrong to practice, and which the world ought to make a concentrated effort to prevent.

    The story is based on a relatively true story. It might help those who go to the film to have some background. Back around the year 2000, a group of professional newsmen were spending their vacation in the area which was once the country of Yugoslavia. That country was created by the winning countries of World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended that war.

    East of Italy and west of Turkey was a large area of land which had been passed from one conqueror to another for thousands of years. Some of its people were believers in the Orthodox faith, some were Muslims and some were Roman Catholics. No one could agree whether this land was five countries, or seven, or more. No one could agree on what city should be the capital or what form of government should be in place. They even wrote their different languages in three different alphabets.

    So the treaty-makers lumped it all into one country, said it should have a king and decided that its parliament should debate, and its government should make its announcements in Croatian one year, in Serbian a second year and in Slovenian the third year.

    For eighty years the damaged country limped along, its people developing dangerous rivalries and mutual hatreds, until near the end of the 20^th century, when it all blew up in a murderous and wildly destructive civil war.

    The group of newsmen met shortly after the end of the civil war and got to discussing how a number of the leaders of the fighting who were most associated with mass murder and torture had escaped punishment altogether. They decided to spend a few days of their vacation, checking to see if they could catch Radovan Karadzic, the most notorious of the escaped war criminals. And they did find him.

    Director/Screenwriter Richard Shepard was fascinated by the idea that the entire United Nations and the entire NATO alliance supposedly were searching for this criminal for more than five years, and a few newsmen found him in two days in their spare time.

    Typical of American movies, the writing is oversimplified. The good guys are only good. The bad guys are utterly bad. Every threatening situation is resolved literally at the final possible second, for maximum drama.

    Still the film points out the reality that was addressed last August at the conference at the Hotel Athenaeum sponsored by the Jackson Center. At that conference, nine judges or prosecutors who have been involved in the attempt to catch and punish mass murderers from conflicts as diverse as World War II, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the racial unrest in Rwanda, and the civil war of the former Yugoslavia, issued a joint declaration.

    In it, they tried to drive home their belief that whatever short-term gains might be made by the world’s most powerful governments by allowing war criminals to escape and seeking to turn their expertise against other countries’ enemies, that in the long run, peace and stability are found only in openness and justice.

    I watched it on video, and found that the movie is very entertaining, if lacking in subtlety and factual accuracy. It is well worth seeing, all the same.

The Post-Journal

Jamestown, New York

Monday, January 28, 2008

Vol. 181, No. 219

Sec. A, Page 6