. welcome to amanpour on pbs. tonight, what is behind the war of words as president trump opens the nato summit with a blistering attack on his close ally germany? victoria newland is a former assistant secretary of state for european and eurasian and fairs and former ambassador to nato, she joins me from washington. plus, the scars of rohingya refugees. is this the evidence that could see myanmar security forces tried for times against humanity. forensic expert homer ventis says how.

welcome to the program, i'm christiane amanpour in london. expectations were low going in and they got lower by the minute. today's nato summit began on a note of unprecedented ferocity as president trump called out germany over a commercial int interprice, a natural gas pipeline deal with russia. >> if you look at it, germany is a captive of russia, they get rid of their coal plants, their nuclear, they're getting so much of the oil and gas from russia. i think it's something that nato has to look at. >> in her one-on-one meeting with president trump, chancellor angela merkel would not address those comments but is germany controlled by or captive to russia as the president claims? here are the facts -- germany imports about a third of its natural gas from russia and is not dependent, as the president accuses, because it has a gersh

mix of suppliers from europe, the gulf states and even the united states so president trump's claim that 70% of germany's energy comes energy comes from russia is not correct. not coincidentally, president trump wants europe to buy more of its natural gas from, guess where? america. few people know more about the complicated push and pull between russia and europe on trade and security then victoria nuland. thank you for joining me. >> good to be with you on this difficult day. >> you have been there. why do you think president trump conflicted apples and oranges and launched the nato summit on this pipeline thing with russia? >> i'm a little bit worried,

christiane, that this is classic deflection. he's worried about criticism that he'll be too close to putin so he criticizes somebody also about being too close to putin. now, that new pipeline between germany and russia is a mistake for germany. president obama also worked with chancellor merkel to try to find alternatives for germany i agree u. uslng should be having meets with germany but not compare america toll putin when she's been standing up the strongest to him in europe. >> tell us about the mistake as you see it. >> a nato summit in is the strongest opportunity for the free world to demonstrate their unity and make clear they will

stand up to any threat to our way of life or to the global order that we maintain. this is how the world stays safe and secure for 70 years. a u.s. president should go into the summit like that when he's getting ready to see the leader in the kremlin, wrap his arms around america's allies and friends, talk about the positive things we're doing together including the fact that defense budgets are growing in almost all nato allied countries and use that as he goes into putin. instead, he's made this big fight with our best friends, with our best family, essentially beating the family on the front lawn of the house while the neighbors and the hostile neighbors stand on the other side of the fence drooling. >> gosh, you do paint a vivid picture. and you do it in a bipartisan manner.

you have served presidents from both parties and we know the senate passed an almost unanimous bipartisan resolution of supporting nato so that's importa important. i want you to reflect on what you just said. it's a mistake to have that pipeline. why is that? >> because it increases germany's energy dependence on russia and there are other alternatives for germany including uslng, including the mix of renewable energy. and it's a particular mistake because german gas from russia comes through ukraine and helps support the economy of ukraine so if you build a pipeline that bypasses ukraine, you lose that ability to stabilize a country that germany and the u.s. have put a huge investment in, including to support their democratic direction and their ability to live separately. >> do you agree with the way

president trump characterizes that germany is captive, controlled by russia because of this? >> absolutely not. as you said at the beginning, less than a third of germany's energy mix comes from russia and it could go lower if we work together on these things but more importantly it has been chancellor merkel since the invasion of crimea in 2014 that has rallied the european union and the nato countries in europe to stand up to president putin, to implement difficult sanctions, to take economic hits as a result of those sanctions and insist that he get out of eastern ukraine before we can have normal relations together so she's been a strong advocate and ally of the united states in standing up to the real bully on the block, vladimir putin, and we should not be alienating her. >> you just talked about putin as being the real bully on the block. you said he's droolging over this discourt and in fact one of

your successors, the current u.s. ambassador to nato, a republican senator in her former life, kay billy hutchison, agreed and admitted to me this discourt trump is sewing amongst the alliance is music to putin's ears. so what do you think about the next step of this journey? will president trump go into his meeting in helsinki with president putin stronger or weaker after this you're seeing now? >> that depends on how president trump plays it with president putin. if he continues to say he's an okay guy, he's the easiest meeting i'm going to have, if he talks about giving away the sanctions regime or crimea for nothing and if he doesn't bring up the interference in democratic systems, u.s. elections including in 2016 and

potentially in 2018 then putin is going to have to have a fantastic day. if on the other hand he said i hope you saw what i said at nato, i want nato to be stronger because i'm worried about what you're up to and we'll stand together, that will be a different thick but that has not been president trump's pattern vis-a-vis russia. he seems to forgive our adversaries and enjoy beating up our friends. >> on the big picture, which is the strengthening and keeping this western alliance that has underpinned peace and security and prosperity for the last 70 years, donald tusk, the president of the european council he asked president trump to appreciate their allies saying we, the europeans, are your allies and you don't have many around the world. so that was a dig at president trump but today he's doubled down and donald trump is saying -- rather donald tusk is saying that donald trump should not be underestimated. he is systematic, consistent and has a method to undermine what the european values are in respect to the transatlantic

relations. so they're worried the alliance is being demeaned, disrupted and denigrated. i guess they're worried president trump could pull some support and u.s. involvement in nato itself. >> i think they're worried about that. i think more importantly inside europe they face challenges to the democratic rules and norms that have grown and strengthened the system and they watched in the united states as president trump poses challenges to an independent judiciary in the united states, an independent media in the united states and it is these democratic values that differentiate us from countries like russia and china and that have made us strong over these 70 years and have made this a democratic alliance and if the united states doesn't do its historic job of standing up for those values and defending them and being the beacon of them, not just in the

transatlantic space but around the world then european union lo -- europe will have to do in our absence. >> and the united states hasn't wanted europe to create its own army in europe, its own milit y military. just to further about what you were saying what about the president needs to do, you wrote an on ned the "new york times" saying after these summits he will either restore american global leadership or kill it off. those are strong words. what is your prediction today? >> i can't predict. i'm worried. i hope president trump would come in on this nato summit being firm for them to meet their defense spending commitment, that's important, but also taking positive credits for the fact that every single nato ally is increasing its defense budget, that they felt

the threat increase since the russians went into crimea and they're doing more and epicouraepikur encouraging them in a positive way. i hoped he would take credit for affirmative things that secretary mattis has led -- increasing nato readiness, increasing the ability for forces to move. in fact, the united states is contributing strongly to the nato mission in poland and eastern europe and trump could use that in his meeting with putin to say come back into compliance with the inf treaty that you are violating. get out of ukraine, let's settle syria in a man their doesn't hand it to assad and iran but he seems to think that meeting will be easy and this is the one where he should be making these strident comments. i think it's an enormous

opportunity to -- he is squandering opportunity to gain power with the wind at our back and to take on putin. putin is not as strong as he looks. he would put himself in a stronger position for the helsinki summit if he did that. now we have to see how he plays helsinki because putin, you can be sure, has studied very hard and is looking to exploit places where president trump and the nato allies have split to his own advantage. >> you mentioned syria, the talks he might have with putin on syria and there's been a lot of reporting about a possible quid pro quo bargain with putin where be he, the united states, would allow and accept president assad to stay in power in return for russia's helping in getting iran out of sir. how much do you know about that? how workable do you think that is? is that good?

>> russia has no interest in getting iran out of syria. iran worked directly with russia and assad and iran provided the ground force to control the rebellion against assad in syria so the russians are going to pool wool over his eyes if they promise to keep iran in check. you know, what they want is to keep syria safe for assad, to stabilize it, and to run that region themselves. and to make our nato ally turkey, our treaty ally israel more dependent on russia than they are on the united states for their security so putin is making a march and trump could easily be tricked into the kind of deal that you have if he doesn't understand the gains. >> >> fascinating and so much at stake. victoria nuland, former u.s. ambassador nato, thanks for joining us. let's not forget that in 1949 as this picture shows it was u.s. president harry truman

signing nato into existence in the first place. now, for president trump and many nato allies, refugees fleeing war and violence across the globe is a huge issue. the world's fastest growing refugee crisis is the flight of the rohingya muslims. nearly 700,000 of them have fled their homes in myanmar to neighboring bangladesh since last august. bringing with stories of alleged mass murder and destruction at the hands of myanmar's military which denies the accusations but the scars they bear are physical reminders of the persecution they've endured for the ngo called physicians for human rights, they are important pieces of forensic evidence this corroborate firsthand accounts of genocide against the rohingya. a new report by the human rights group exclusively shared with this show looks into the injuries of 25 rohingya refugees from a village where one such

massacre allegedly took place. its lead author, the dr. homer venters joined me to discuss those findings. dr. venters, thank you for being here. >> thank you for having many. >> this report you put out is unusual because you're tracing the accounts of a massacre you think happened through the injuries on victims. is that true. >> we're using our skills to document forensic, scientific and medical evidence of these injuries and abuses to report out the truth of what happened. >> what do the wounds, the scars, the injuries tell you about that day in the village? >> well, they tell us that the accounts that others have surfaced that civilians, a group of civilians in a village, were attacked by both the military and by buddhist, rakhine

buddhist civilians. we see children, women, and men were subject to horrific types of injuries, including blunt force trauma, injuries from gunshots, a burn, other types of injuries that when we examine the forensic truth in each individual injury we see this clearly did not appear to be any kind of anti-terror operation. this was a systematic attack on civilians using guns, using knives, using sexual violence. other types of illegal and horrific physical attacks. >> so doctor we'll put up two images of scars that you found and photographs on a 17-year-old rohingya boy and this is what you say -- or he said. that he sustained these wounds from an explosive device while fleeing the village into a nearby field and then apparently he told you all that he had to

travel for almost 12 days on foot trying to flee, the 12-days on foot to neighboring bangladesh which is where we know a lot of the rohingya have ended up in refugee camps there. fill us in his story a little more and how difficult must it have been to travel with these wounds by foot? >> well, i think that this story and others like it show first of all the horrific physical impact in this case what appears to be a blast injury of a grenade or other explosive device but others who sustained gunshot wounds. these injuries break the bones inside the leg, they shatter not only the bone but the flesh around it. these are wounds that became often infected as survivors struggled just to survive the initial hours after the attacks and family members, others from the village would help them carry them all the way over to bangladesh and then the heroic effort of surgeons and other humanitarian and medical aid

folks intervening to help patch these survivors back together physically but what we see in this case and many others like it is this poor young man still cannot bear whieight on that li. likely in part due to infection. likely in part not having access to physical therapy after such a horrific injury. so the long term impact lives on in the psychological trauma but also in the poorly healed bone fractures and other injuries documented in the report. >> doctor, you are physicians for human rights. what is it that you want this report, this -- this discovery to achieve? a. >> we aim to bring the credibility of science and forensic evidence to bear on the telling of the truth and the search for accountability and justice on behalf of survivors of violence. >> does that mean putting those responsible to the international

criminal court? how does one do that in a country like myanmar which is by all intents still a military-ruled nation? there is an important effort to accountability and universal jurisdiction prosecution, phr, physicians for human rights, we've been part of that work in yugoslavia, rwanda, all over the wor world. the circumstances are not easy and bangladesh is creating incredible resources to provide shelter, clothing, care for people who are there. despite the difficulty of 7,000 refugees, it's critical to not support repatriation before understanding what type of transparency has been established to show there is a safe path to return. >> i want to put up another

picture that we have and this is of a woman's arm and it shows a gunshot wound, we're seeing it there on the screen and this woman you spoke to, she fled the violence, she had her baby in her arm, her young children by her side, she had seen other people raped, particularly women, obviously as she was fleeing and her two-year-old son was killed by that bullet wound that went through her arm and she has to see that every single second of everyday so the injury and the ptsd must be eternal for many of these people. >> it's on going and the scars we see physically are just a pale shadow compared to what people are dealing with on the psychological trauma. we saw it in children, among women and men, it's omni present in this community so the concept

of the sending people back could cause an ongoing level of retraumatization. >> of the victims you found, you said 10 of them were children and we have a quote where the report says the impact of these events upon children is concerning, a helicopter flew over during an interview with a survival and several children in the vicinity became agitated and afraid and pointed to the sky yelling "myanmar is coming towards us." >> i was conducting an ent encounter when that happened. i was talking to a woman and children started to cry in the huts all around me. i had to ask the translator what happened and the fact that months after these attacks these children are prone to reliving, reexperiencing this terror

speaks to the ongoing horror of what they experienced? >> let's get to the government respon response. a year or more ago they conducted an investigation that exonerated themselves. then they conducted another investigation in their own and this was based on reporting by reuters journalists and of course shortly thereafter the reuters journalists was sent to jail and are still in jail despite huge international efforts to get them out. have you spoken to the military chiefs? have you spoken to aung san suu kyi? do they have any sense this is getting too big, too hot, they need to rethink? >> well, my sense from our back-channel communications with people who are in touch with, not directly in touch with the officials you referenced is that there is a hope that somehow repatriation can be managed without answering this question of accountability and

transparency so that is why every time we talk about this we say there must be an independent investigation. the u.n. fact finding mission is collecting data right now which is of critical importance. ultimately we've been calling for a referral to the international criminal court for an investigation so those mechanisms have to stay on the table as we're discussing all of the other real humanitarian issues because that accountability if yugoslavia, in iraq and other places is ultimately what perpetrators with request these types of crimes fear most. >> we've shown these horrible images of the scars, we've talked about the children and you also have spoken to women who have surred repeated sexual assault. here is an excerpt detaining the events of the day in question by a 20-year-old you interviewed. here we go. fatima said she was taken from her home to the school in the military camp area where dozens of women were held and many were

raped. after they took her gold jewelry, they blindfolded her and tied up her legs and tied her hands behind her back and she was forced to lie down with her face up. she was raped numerous time but did not know the exact number of men because she was blindfolded. they beat her in the head, face, shoulders and torso with a gun. how does it affect you when you hear that story and you hear it over and over again? how do you do this job? >> we -- everybody who works in this field and humanitarian workers who hear these stories more often than we do have to take solace in the notion that bringing these stories to life is important, critical, and essential to justice and accountability so reflecting not just the stories but the physical and forensic evidence of what happened, you know, i and others are committed to this so we can get the truth out there and there have been great

victories with forensic evidence in rwanda and yugoslavia. so the dedication to my this work and others who are more steeped in it than i am comes from that pursuit. >> do you feel any sense of sort of, i don't know, desperation, disappointment at the current u.s. administration? you are a u.s.-based organization. you are in the united states where we're talking to you. do you think that this administration is minded to help pursue these kinds of moral and judicial cases and accountability and let's not forget it was the united states under the obama administration which moved mountains to norm normalize relations with myanmar and support democracy there. >> we have grave concerns about the withdrawal from the human rights community by the united states, that includes withdrawing from the human rights commission.

these cornerstones or accountability, the icc, the rome statute, the international criminal court, those represent international rules that we have worked toward to establish accountability for perpetrators. so to the extent the u.s. withdraws from those mechanisms we believe that is not just counterproductive, it emboldens future perpetrators. >> dr. homer venters, thank you for joining us. >> thank you so much. we reached out to the myanmar government for a response to allegations raised by this report and in that interview but we have heard nothing back. that's it for our program tonight. thanks for watching amanpour on pbs. join us again tomorrow night.

>> you're watching "beyond 100 days" on pbs. donald trump asks nato countries to increase their spending on defense to 4% of g.d.p. christian: that is almost double the target and even america doesn't spend that much on their mltry. >> mr. trump's sowing division and european allies trying to project unity. all eyes on the world cup semifinal kigging off right now and all of england praying for victory. christian: also on the program. pictures released of the thai football team recovering in the hospital as more emerges from the delicate operation to rescue them from the flo