RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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jolie jingo

6/3/2017

 
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I recently, rather belatedly, caught up with Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort, Unbroken (2014), a biopic adapted from Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 book about the tortures experienced by the American Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. Although the Coen brothers are on the writing credits, it's a rather formulaic film featuring a square-jawed hero, a monotonously fiendish camp guard, and predictable geopolitical biases. As Adelaide Martinez puts it, Unbroken

"tells a pretty standard US centric story about the Pacific theater during WW2. In the standard story, there is usually a single white hero, the person who sets and interprets the story for the viewer. They are like Cool Hand Luke, getting up over and over again, no matter how many times they are struck down, overcoming the great challenges put in front of them – usually put there by the Japanese. If Japanese are given roles at all, it’s either non-speaking ‘people who sit in a room planning war actions’ or the single sadist that tortures and violates the hero of the camp."

The Cool Hand Luke reference is apposite here, since Jolie's film doesn't stint on the Christic imagery, most obviously when Zamperini is forced to hold aloft a wooden beam as a punishment - a feat that he accomplishes with the superhuman stamina that is statutory in this genre. Indeed, Zamperini is crudely heroised here and as several critics have noted, the film elides some unhappy biographical details, such as Zamperini's post-war struggle with alcoholism, that, had they been kept in, might have made for a more complex tale. Indeed, Unbroken lacks the psychological subtlety (and musical delights) of Nagisa Oshima's classic Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, the film it most obviously invokes.

The problem is not just that the film is oversimplified and bowdlerised. There's also a sort of false balance at work here. Jolie draws a parallel between Zamperini's brutal mistreatment in the Pacific and, through a series of flashbacks, his experiences of anti-Italian racism in the US. Superficially, at least, this seems an even-handed gesture aimed at establishing some kind of equivalence between racism at home and abroad. Yet a fairer and more salient comparison would have been between the undeniably appalling suffering of US soldiers in the Pacific - which Jolie actually depicts with restraint - and the savage treatment of the Japanese by the Americans in the same theatre, up to and including the dropping of the atomic bombs. That would have made for a far less patriotic picture and it is clear that Jolie et al did not want to go there. The Yanks, after all, were supposed to be the good guys.

I wasn't entirely surprised by the film's national chauvinism. As I argued in a previous blog post, Jolie's 2011 directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey is a tendentious effort in which the complexities of the Bonian war are reduced to a morality tale of heroic Bosnians and cartoonishly monstrous Serb villains - the standard presentation of the conflict in Western media and political circles (indeed, Jolie's research for that film included a meeting with US General Wesley Clark). And let's face it, it's not easy to make a critical film about WWII, which was, according to patriotic myth, a 'good war' fought by America's 'greatest generation'.

Nevertheless, it is possible to do better. In the best war films we witness the chaos of conflict, the dissent in the ranks, the soldiers' cowardice and bravery, heroism and meanness, and the sufferings of 'the enemy'. Such films communicate what the psychologist Lawrence Le Shan calls the 'sensory reality of war'. Take, for example, Terence Malick's richly phenomenological The Thin Red Line, a Pacific War film in which the overwhelming force of this 'sensory reality' exposes the narrowness of military discourse and poses a direct challenge to official propaganda ('They want you dead - or in their lie', in the stark words of First Sergeant Edward Welsh). The island of Guadalcanal is perceived by many of the film's soldiers in a highly subjective mode as a liminal space between life and death, a contradictory place of man-made horror and natural plenitude that is filled with the sights and sounds of human suffering but which also pullulates with exotic plant and animal life (Malick's earlier Badlands also exploits such narratively 'unmotivated' images of the natural world). It is a heterotopia, in Foucault's sense, an 'other' place which facilitates different ways of seeing and knowing and which opens a minimal space for social critique. Here idealized conceptions of the Good War or martial heroism are rendered absurd by the sheer abundance and diversity of Life. But in Unbroken, as in In the Land of Blood and Honey, we are taken to a very different place; here we enter into Le Shan's 'mythic reality of war': a Manichean realm of good versus evil in which the confusions and contradictions of armed conflict - and the experiences of enemy Others - are imperceptible, foreclosed by convention and cliché.

These failings matter not just because Unbroken was a huge box office draw, but also because Jolie, as a result of her work with the UN and her earlier cinematic performances in 'humanitarian' films such as Beyond Borders, has achieved a certain global standing as a celebrity liberal philanthropist. In its pro-US sentiment and soft orientalism, Unbroken recalls some of Hollywood's earlier gung-ho and historically dubious treatments of the war in the Pacific, such as Michael Bay's 2001 turkey Pearl Harbour. But Bay could never be mistaken for anything other than a conservative jingoist; Jolie, by contrast, has a reputation as a thoughtful humanist devoted to 'good causes'. To earn this reputation, Jolie will have to use her considerable resources - including her evident passion for political filmmaking - to better effect in future projects. Her forthcoming Netflix drama about the Cambodian genocide has been produced by the brilliant Rithy Panh, so all hope is not yet lost.

Neither hollywood nor belgrade: towards an unpatriotic cinema of the bosnian war

22/4/2016

 
The text below consists of several passages untimely ripp'd from my latest book on the Bosnian war in screen fiction (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). These chunks were hastily stitched together for a recent talk to Film Studies staff and students at London South Bank University (thanks to Professor Phil Hammond for organizing this and to the students for their patience as I tried to cram all of this into one hour). What follows lacks context/nuance in places (especially in the Introduction), as the aim was to present a highly condensed polemic for thought/discussion rather than a carefully balanced academic paper. The text also omits discussion of many subjects considered in the book, notably that of war rape, concentrating instead on the issues surrounding geopolitics and nationalism. Nevertheless, since several people have asked me what the new book is all about, here are some 'bits and pieces of the working thesis', as The Minutemen once sang.

Introduction: The Bosnian War and the Media

Many of us have vivid memories of horrific scenes from the Bosnian war: the carnage caused by bombs and sniper fire, the burning of villages, rapes and massacres. What caused the conflict is much less clear in most people's minds - after all, the Bosnian war is a massively over-determined event. By the late 1980s, Yugoslavia was in dire economic distress, caused in part by its obligations to a savage IMF ‘restructuring’. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim nationalism had been growing for decades, exacerbating tensions in what had been, for most of the post-war period, a relatively peaceful multi-ethnic country. But the break-up of Yugoslavia was also precipitated by the world’s great powers. Germany, and especially Austria, encouraged the secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and there are strong suggestions that in the spring of 1992 the US encouraged Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegović, to reject the Lisbon Agreement, a plan for the partition of Bosnia that might have prevented war. And once the war had started, Western and other global powers defied a UN arms embargo by supplying arms to their regional client states. Indeed, the widespread claim that the great powers passively ‘looked on’ as the Bosnian war raged is, quite simply, a myth.

Responsibility for such myths lies partly with the news media. As Yugoslavia disintegrated into nationalist madness, a ‘paranoid public sphere’ (Adorno and Horkheimer) arose in each of the country's former republics. News bulletins collapsed into absurd and crude propaganda. Western journalists, meanwhile, were mostly confined to their Sarajevo hotels, unable to report from the field and disastrously over-reliant on government propaganda. The conflict was a three-sided civil war, albeit an uneven one, the Serbs possessing more firepower than the Croats and Muslims and perpetrating hideous atrocities, from the brutal siege of Sarajevo to the Srebrenica massacre. But as the US tilted towards its client, the Bosnian government, the conflict was increasingly presented as a one-sided war of aggression, or even a genocide, waged by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. The Western press transformed Serbian president Slobodan Milošević into a modern-Hitler, when in fact he was less nationalistic than his opposite numbers in Croatia and Bosnia. Holocaust analogies became common, notably in the summer of 1992, when ITN’s images of the 'thin man', Fikret Alić, in the Serb-run detention camp at Trnopolje were exaggeratedly interpreted in the Western media as evidence of Nazi-style ‘death camps’ (although such camps were indeed places of real horror and violence). The same media virtually ignored Croat- and Muslim-run camps.
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And when the US and its NATO allies launched a devastating campaign to push back the Serbs in 1995, most Western media praised the attack, despite the thousands of refugees and deaths it created. Western journalists – even, and perhaps especially the liberal ones – were thus responsible for what Ed Herman and David Peterson (2007: 1) call a ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’. These misrepresentations were often justified by recourse to what British journalist Martin Bell called the ‘journalism of attachment’, an allegedly new mode of affective reportage that aimed at infusing a suspect ‘neutral’ journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage, but which in fact became a license for over-simplification and one-sided reporting. Serbs bad; Muslims and military intervention good.

My recent work explores the extent to which screen fictions support the one-sided view of the war propagated by many Western journalists. The following talk examines some of the best-known cinema and TV reconstructions of the war in both the West and the Balkans from the last 20 years. I argue that the cinema of the Bosnia war, East and West, is heavily compromised by misrepresentation, nationalism and racism; however, I end on a more optimistic note, discussing some less partisan treatments of the conflict.

Humanitarianism and Its Others: Three Film Dramas about the Bosnian War

Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo was released two years after the end of the Bosnian war and would become the definitive cinematic treatment of the conflict. Based on the memoir of British foreign correspondent Michael Nicholson (1994), it focuses on the experiences of journalists in Sarajevo and in particular the quest of one of them, Michael Henderson, to evacuate a young girl from a Bosnian orphanage.
The film has a documentaristic quality. Dramatic reconstructions of civilian suffering, including bloodied bodies strewn across the pavements of Sarajevo, are intercut with real television news footage, suturing Henderson’s reports into the ‘real world’ of the Yugoslav wars. The children in the orphanage are presented to the viewer as part of Nicholson’s news reports, speaking directly to camera with Nicholson’s voiceover translation. It’s an engaging technique that interpellates the audience as witnesses to the horrors of war through a cinematic rendering of the ‘journalism of attachment’.

Nevertheless, Welcome to Sarajevo’s inclusion of actual news footage also reinforces hegemonic framings of the conflict. There is a clip, for example, of one of Bill Clinton’s public statements about the war: ‘history has shown us that you can’t allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen’. Later, television images of the Serb commander Radovan Karadžić are intercut with a speech delivered by George Bush, in which the former president asserts: ‘you can’t negotiate with a terrorist’. As the inclusion of soundbites from both Clinton and Bush suggests, the film reproduces the US media-political script of the war. Serbs are depicted throughout the film as the war’s sole aggressors – as raving psychopaths, in fact. There are also some striking factual reversals: the Serb victims of the 1992 Sarajevo wedding massacre become, in the film, Croatians, while the rescued girl, in reality a Croat, becomes, in the film, a Muslim (Gocić 2001: 42-3). Throughout Welcome to Sarajevo, in fact, Muslims are the innocent victims of the war, Serbs are its villains, and journalists such as Henderson stand for the civilized values of multicultural Europe.

This lionization of the Western journalist who goes beyond the call of duty is combined with an explicit endorsement of Western ‘humanitarian intervention’ when Henderson’s flamboyant American colleague Flynn apologizes to his translator Risto on behalf of the US for ‘failing to deliver on those airstrikes’. In Welcome to Sarajevo, Westerners are thus depicted as the actual or at least potential saviours of Yugoslavia.

Let’s take another example. In 1999, the BBC broadcast a two-part drama, Warriors, which follows the fortunes of British soldiers sent to Bosnia as UN ‘peacekeepers’. It was written by Leigh Jackson and directed by Peter Kosminsky. As in many other Kosminsky dramas – No Child of Mine (1997), The Project (2002), The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007) – a key theme is the betrayal of trust in authority. The drama’s central thesis is that the UN’s non-combat remit prevented the blue helmets from protecting the victims of the war and in many scenes, the soldiers can only look on in frustration as civilians are shelled or displaced.

The screenplay of Warriors is based on the transcripts of interviews conducted with more than 90 British soldiers and their families. In fact, the drama’s depiction of war is considered so authentic that the film has been used in army training programmes to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges of peacekeeping. And the TV critics went wild. The Times’ Paul Hoggart, for instance, wrote that Warriors ‘was, quite simply, stunning – gut-wrenching, soul-searing, heart-rending, thought-provoking, sensitive, powerful, deeply disturbing and dripping authenticity’.

Yet the drama’s political messages are problematic. Drawing comparisons between the Bosnian conflict and the Second World War, a Muslim woman, Almira Zec, advises Lieutenant Feeley that some form of Western intervention is required to prevent a repeat of the 1940s; ‘history is screaming at us’, she tells him. But the use of WWII analogies to justify military intervention in Bosnia rests on two dubious assumptions: first, that Western military intervention is benevolent; and second, that WWII was a just war against fascism – a proposition unlikely to find favour in Dresden or Hiroshima.

Nor is the drama's historical authenticity beyond question. Muslims here appear only as victims; this is especially problematic since Warriors is set in Vitez – an area of central Bosnia in which most of the fighting between 1992 and 1994 involved Muslim and Croat forces. The omni-presence of a slimy Serb commander is also an historical distortion, since Serb forces were not active in the area. Kosminsky’s productions have often drawn censure from the political establishment; Warriors did not, perhaps indicating how little it departs from the dominant narrative of the war.

This narrative is not exclusive to Western productions. The most extensive treatment of the UN mission in Bosnia is Alpha Bravo Charlie, an epic fourteen-part TV drama about the Bosnian war directed by the acclaimed Shoaib Mansoor and broadcast by Pakistan Television to record-breaking audiences in 1998. The military-themed production was facilitated by Pakistan’s ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations), a body responsible for producing dramas and documentaries about the country’s armed forces (Ansari 2011: 8).

Alpha Bravo Charlie’s principal character is mild-mannered Gulsher Khan, a captain who is sent to Bosnia a few days after his marriage. Khan’s unit is respectfully received by the Bosnian community, as rebuilding projects are begun and medicines, food and money are distributed. As in Warriors, the Pakistani soldiers form close bonds with the locals, especially their Bosnian translators, and Khan’s burgeoning friendship with his translator Sandra is one of the drama’s key storylines.

A dramatic high-point in Alpha Bravo Charlie involves Sandra revealing to Khan her family secret. As the camera slowly zooms in on her face, Sandra explains that her original name had been Selma, but that this was changed at the insistence of her stepfather, a Serb, who abandoned the family to join the army. Later, Sandra tells Khan a second story about her former boyfriend – also a Serb – who deserted her at the outbreak of the war but later returned to slaughter her entire village with a rifle. Having revealed the truth about her suffering at the hands of Serb men, Sandra becomes psychically emancipated and soon falls in love with Khan. She further tells Khan that the war is a ‘blessing in disguise’ because, she says, ‘it has given us our identity; we had forgotten who we were. But now things will change, inshallah’. The war – and specifically the Pakistani UN presence in it – enhances Sandra’s sense of ethno-religious belonging. Sandra’s only complaint is that the UN mandate does not allow arms. ‘Please don’t give us food’, she implores Khan, ‘it keeps us alive so that we can be killed by Serbs tomorrow’. Instead, Sandra asks for weapons (Pakistan did in fact covertly provide arms to the Bosnian government during the war).

Captured by Serb forces later in the series, Khan is shot dead in the second of two escape attempts, but becomes a fondly remembered martyr in the drama’s patriotic ending. Alpha Bravo Charlie thus celebrates the legacy of the Pakistani UN presence in Bosnia, casting the soldiers as heroic protectors of the global ummah.

All three of these productions, then, reflect the mainstream ‘Western’ narrative of the Bosnian war. And it is important to note that their directors are political liberals. Shaoib Mansoor's 2007 film Khuda Kay Liye depicts the wrongful detention and torture of a Pakistani terror suspect and strongly condemns the US war on terror. Winterbottom and Kosminsky are also liberal filmmakers who have been very critical of Western foreign policy since 2001. Winterbottom’s docudrama Road to Guantánamo (2005) and Kosminsky’s dramas The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007) questioned the grounds for Britain’s invasion of Iraq and the effects of the ‘war on terror’ on British citizens. In fact, all three directors have elsewhere demonstrated an anti-imperialist sensibility that is lacking from their films about Bosnia. Whether consciously or not, it seems that liberal filmmakers in the 1990s, like many liberal journalists, helped to reproduce the hegemonic understanding of the war.

A more recent dramatic intervention has been made by Angelina Jolie – another prominent liberal cultural figure with a background in humanitarian work and a strong interest in the suffering of Bosnian women. Jolie’s first foray into directing, In the Land of Blood and Honey, is an award-winning film about a Muslim woman, Ajla, and a Serb policeman, Danijel, who date each other before the outbreak of the war, their friendship illustrating the multicultural harmony of pre-war Sarajevo. During the war, however, Ajla is transported with other Muslim women to a barracks where Danijel is a captain and where the women are repeatedly raped, reduced to ‘bare life’. Danijel seems more kindly than his fellow soldiers, at least initially – but nevertheless confines Ajla to his quarters, where he rapes her. At the end of the film, seemingly tortured by his conscience, Danijel gives himself up at a UN checkpoint, confessing that he is a ‘criminal of war’. That Danijel will be punished for his crimes is one of the film’s progressive points; after all, in US cinema rape is often punished by vigilante reprisals rather than legal means, or not punished at all (Bufkin and Eschholtz 2000) and rapists are seldom shamed in films about rape in the Bosnian war (Bertolucci 2015).

That said, In the Land of Blood and Honey is deeply embedded within what James Der Derian (2001) pithily calls the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’ (MIME-NET) and Jolie consulted with Wesley Clarke and Richard Holbrooke when researching the film. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jolie’s film is overly invested in establishing war guilt. Here again, Muslims are heroic resistance fighters and Serbs are cardboard cut-out villains; the regional Serb commander, Danijel’s father Nebojša, is a blood and soil nationalist who smashes wine glasses as he pontificates about Serb greatness. Jolie even reconstructs ITN’s Trnopolje camp images in a scene where Danijel is driving through Sarajevo. Here is Danijel's point of view shot...
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Although the scene is meant to take place in the winter of 1994, Danijel drives past semi-naked prisoners resembling those featured in the 1992 footage and Jolie’s camera lingers on one prisoner who bears a strong resemblance to Fikret Alić. By reviving an image that was widely interpreted in the media as evidence of a fascist resurgence in Europe, Jolie draws an equivalence between Serbs and Nazis, exploiting the best-known image of the war for an ideological rewriting of history.
 
Hollywood Action Cinema: Masculinism and Militarism

Action films have played a similar role, although often this has not gone much beyond using Serbs as episodic villains. Curiously, in Hollywood, this vilification has often taken a quite specific form, with Serbs depicted as pornography obsessed sexual perverts. In Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996), a box supposedly holding aid for Bosnian refugees turns out to be a Serb booby trap containing pornographic magazines and an explosive toy doll that spews sarin gas – a detail that inverts a real-life story from the same year, in which NATO officers found booby-trapped toys in a Bosnian Muslim training camp (Pomfret 1996: 25). Gustavo Graef-Marino’s Diplomatic Siege (1999), meanwhile, depicts the invasion of the US Embassy in Bucharest by dead-eyed Serb terrorists, one of whom displays a penchant for pornographic gay magazines. And in John Irvin’s The Fourth Angel (2001), Serb terrorists watch pornographic videos. These details revive a longstanding occidental association of the Balkans with sexual excess (think of Bram Stoker’s Dracula); but they also serve a propaganda function, linking Serbs – and Serbs alone – with sexual depravity.

Other Hollywood actioners go deeper. John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (2001) merits particular scrutiny as one of the few Hollywood action films to be set during the war itself. The film stars Owen Wilson as Lieutenant Chris Burnett, an American naval flight officer frustrated by the lack of opportunity for combat action. Eventually airborne on a reconnaissance mission over Bosnia, he deviates from his flightpath and is shot down in a demilitarized zone along with his pilot Stackhouse after photographing mass graves. The film’s fetishization of the Americans’ sophisticated surveillance technologies (Burnett refers to his aircraft’s ‘shiny new digital camera’) reinforces the pre-eminence of US high-tech, immersing the viewer in what Graham Dawson (1994) calls the ‘pleasure culture of war’. Burnett’s photographs reveal that the local Bosnian Serb Army commander, General Miroslav Lokar, is conducting a secret genocidal campaign against the local population. Pursued by the Serbs in enemy territory, Burnett is eventually rescued through the belated efforts of Reigart – no thanks to Reigart’s NATO superior, Admiral Piquet, an uptight Frenchman who represents pettifogging ‘European’ bureaucracy. Piquet, who criticizes US unilateralism, is increasingly identified as the film’s villain (Weber 2006: 62).

The Serb soldiers, meanwhile, are heavily racialized ‘mono-dimensional demons’ (Watson 2008: 55) who must be vanquished by angelic American forces. Cowardly and merciless and seemingly unable to speak Serbo-Croat, the Serbs execute Stackhouse by shooting him in the back. And unlike the ‘cool’ white Americans and the Americanized, clean-looking Muslim youths who help Burnett during his ordeal, the Serbs are ‘minstrels of mud and dirt’ (Miskovic 2006: 450).

Burnett is successful in his mission and his photographic evidence results in Lokar appearing at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to face justice for his crimes. As in Welcome to Sarajevo, constructed news bulletins reinforce a pro-American perspective. At an affective level, meanwhile, a high-octane rock music soundtrack shores up the assertion of US cultural hegemony. By these means, Behind Enemy Lines promotes a Manichean worldview in which US military masculinity, freed from ‘the constraints of multilateralism and diplomacy’ (Ó Tuathail 2005: 361), guarantees moral clarity. It’s therefore unsurprising that the film, although made before 9/11, was rush-released after the Twin Towers attack.

Serb screen villains often exhibit a backwardness and a desire to ‘return’ to the war, or carry it on by other means, in order to avenge past humiliations. A well-known example is Victor Drazen, the chief villain of the first season of the Fox television series 24 (2001-10), a Serb ethnic cleanser whose wife and child were killed during an undercover CIA operation. Yet a desire for revenge is not entirely the preserve of atavistic Serb villains. The heroes of male action melodramas are themselves typically wounded (and thus, etymologically, traumatized) figures (Rehling 2009: 55-82) and the Western soldiers and journalists who return to Bosnia have their own grievances to avenge, even if they do so under the civilized pretext of bringing Serb war criminals to justice.

From the late 1990s, as Western bounty hunters charged into the Balkans in search of war criminals, Western film and television dramas began to reflect their experiences in a series of ‘back to Bosnia’ storylines. The most high-profile of these, Richard Shepard’s 2007 film The Hunting Party, is set five years after the Bosnian war. It is based on an Esquire article by Scott K. Anderson (2000) about an unconventional plan hatched by a group of three journalists, who decide to spend their holidays finding and arresting Radovan Karadžić (‘It’s payback time for that fuck’, as one of the reporters robustly puts it). The posse of journalists ventures into what one of them calls ‘the heart of this Balkan madness’ in order to track down ‘the most wanted war criminal in Bosnia’, Dr Radoslav Boghdanović, also known as The Fox, and his bloodthirsty bodyguard Srđan.

The Hunting Party’s central protagonist, Simon Hunt, is an American TV journalist whose Bosnian girlfriend was raped and murdered by Boghdanović in 1994. Like Flynn in Welcome to Sarajevo, Hunt is a fearless journalist, stopping in the heat of battle to smoke cigarettes to a rock music soundtrack. But Hunt loses his composure – and consequently his job – during a live TV interview from Bosnia with his channel’s veteran news anchor, Franklin. When Franklin, during a discussion of a massacre of Bosnian Muslims, tries to raise the question of Muslim responsibility for violence, Hunt explodes: ‘These people were butchered. Women were raped. Children were murdered. Come on, Franklin!’. Hunt’s outburst reveals his commitment to the ‘journalism of attachment’. By contrast, the older anchorman Franklin embodies the conservatism of a compromised establishment and his vacillations compel Hunt to seek justice on his own terms. Like Behind Enemy Lines, then, The Hunting Party has a distinctly oedipal subtext: the failure of paternal authority pushes Hunt, like Chris Burnett, to defy that authority and restore moral order by force.

The Fox and his bodyguard, meanwhile, are presented as Balkan Wild Men, animalistic avatars of a ‘volatile masculinity gone mad’ (Longinović 2005: 38). The journalists eventually capture The Fox – no thanks to a laughably ineffectual UN police bureaucrat. Indeed, as in Behind Enemy Lines, US unilateralism trumps slow-moving, corrupt European diplomacy. That this unilateralism is covert and possibly illegal aligns the film with other Bosnian war thrillers, such as Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1999) and John Irvin’s The Fourth Angel (2001), as well as what Ross Douthat (2008) calls the ‘paranoid style’ of post-9/11 Hollywood.

Although it is set in the US, Mark Steven Johnson’s 2013 film The Killing Season also focuses on the settling of old scores. Here Robert de Niro plays Benjamin Ford, a US Bosnian war veteran who has retreated to the Appalachian mountains in order to forget the war. Ford is tracked down, however, by Emil Kovač, a sadistic Serb soldier who had been shot by Ford during the war and now seeks revenge on the American. Most of the screentime in The Killing Season is devoted to the brutal to-and-fro combat between the two men as they chase, torture and occasionally speechify to one other in a battle for physical and moral supremacy.

Critically maligned and a commercial flop, The Killing Season has incurred widespread ridicule for its raft of cultural solecisms (Kovač’s un-Serbian name and incongruously Islamic beard being the favourite targets of the film’s online detractors). More troublingly, Balkanist stereotyping abounds. As Dina Iordanova (2001: 162) notes, the Balkans have often been viewed by Westerners as a place of ‘face-to-face sadistic fervour involving blood, spilled guts, severed limbs, tortured and mutilated bodies’. Kovač brings this savagery to America, his preference for a bow and arrow marking him as a pre-modern savage.

Even worse is the film’s opening depiction of the Bosnian war, which is provided by way of backstory. Purporting to depict to the final stages of the conflict, the film shows the liberation of a Serb-run concentration camp - complete with Trnopolje-style barbed wire fence - as part of an American ground operation in which US infantry fight a close range battle with the Serbs.
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This ‘Trnopolje liberation’ scene is, of course, an invention: US ground troops did not enter Bosnia in 1995, let alone ‘liberate the camps’, which in any case had been closed down by the end of 1992. Rather, the scene re-stages the Bosnian war for the purpose of establishing American heroism and Serb depravity. The allusions here to the liberation of the Nazi death camps (notably, a soldier’s discovery of a freight train carriage stuffed with corpses) also serve to re-temporalize the action: 1995 becomes 1945.

Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Nationalism to Normalization

Most Western films about the war are superegoic, calling for action to restore political and moral order in the Balkans. By contrast, Balkan films – especially Serbian films – often display a dark sense of humour and fatalism, exploring the nature of war in more ironic and allusive modes. The elevation of poetics over politics in these distinctly Dionysian films (Gocić 2009) complicates and often confounds critical analysis. Interpretation is further complicated by the generic diversity of these films, which move beyond the drama and action genres favoured by Western directors to encompass satire, comedy and horror. In this final section of my talk, I shall briefly evaluate some negative and positive trends within post-Yugoslav cinema.

As several critics have argued, the cinema of the former Yugoslavia’s most celebrated director, Emir Kusturica, bends Hollywood’s anti-Serb stick in the other direction, betraying his strong pro-Serb political sympathies. In the 1940s storyline in Kusturica’s Underground – a film ‘supported and endorsed by government-controlled cultural institutions of Milošević’s Yugoslavia’ (Iordanova 2001: 122) – the heroes Marko and Crni ‘fight on relentlessly in occupied Belgrade, while the Slovenes and the Croats welcome Nazi troops, [and] Muslims and Croats steal weapons and money from the resistance fighters’ (Magala 2005: 195). Nor does Kusturica, either here or in his subsequent Bosnian war film Life Is a Miracle, acknowledge Serb atrocities in the 1990s. A great deal has already been written about Kusturica’s nationalist affiliations, so here I shall say only that agree with the majority of critics that Kusturica’s films are as compromised by political bias as any Hollywood production.

A rather more complicated case is presented by Srđan Dragojević’s 1996 tour-de-force Pretty Village, Pretty Flame – the Ur-text of Bosnian war cinema. Rich in symbolism and dripping in irony, it is arguably the most sophisticated film about the war. It is set in the Višegrad tunnel (also known as the Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel) in 1992, where a Serbian fighter, Milan, is trapped with his comrades, surrounded by Muslim soldiers. The film regularly flashes back to Milan’s happy adventures with his childhood friend Halil, one of the Muslims now outside the tunnel; many of these adventures take place near the tunnel, which the boys will not enter, convinced that an ogre dwells there. The film also jumps forward to Milan’s post-war experiences in hospital, where, consumed with thoughts of vengeance for the murder of his mother, he determines to kill a young Muslim patient. Milan’s journey from amity to animosity illustrates the poisonous power of nationalism. Yet an American journalist who finds herself in the tunnel with the Serbs undergoes a reverse process: blinded by Western stereotypes, she is initially horrified by the men; but her antipathy towards them lessens with familiarity. Indeed, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame delivers a riposte to Western ways of seeing, expressing ‘frustration with the Western representation of the war, of Serbs and the Balkans in general’ (Radović 2014: 51). Yet Dragojević also shows the depravity of the Serbs, as they drunkenly loot and burn Muslim villages, proudly sporting the kokarda. Milja Radović (2009: 195) therefore rightly argues that the film contains much indirect opposition to the idiocies of Serb nationalism; this is no doubt why the film was treated with suspicion by the Serbian elite and the production ran into significant problems with the authorities.

On the other hand, the film’s only visible Muslim victim appears in a scene in which the Serbs loot a home, the dead body of its owner, Ćamil, appearing in the background of the shot. As Pavle Levi (2007: 148-9) points out, Dragojević’s camera only briefly shows Ćamil, eventually refocusing on the Serb soldier in the foreground and blurring out the victim behind him. It might be added that Ćamil appears not only in the background of this shot, but through a window, a distantiating framing that positions Ćamil as a mere ‘representation’ existing outside the Serbs’ – and perhaps the viewers’ – sphere of interest. Also problematic in Pretty Village is the dismissive representation of the effete anti-war demonstrators who protest in front of the military hospital, risibly chanting John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. Ultimately, then, Pretty Village is an ambiguous text that criticizes some aspects of Serb nationalism while marginalizing Muslim suffering and the aspirations of the peace movement.

Where then to turn for an unpatriotic imagining of the Bosnian war? Many scholars of post-Yugoslav cinema regard Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001) as an exemplary anti-war film; but even here there are problems. The film focuses on two combatants from opposing sides of the conflict – Čiki, a Muslim, and Nino, a Serb – who find themselves trapped between the Serb and Muslim front lines, as piranha-like international reporters seek to exploit the men’s predicament and UN officials uselessly look on. Despite its welcome satire on the pretensions of Western journalism, however, No Man’s Land frames the war and the trench-bound duo quite conventionally. The action in the trench is interspersed with a British TV news programme showing Radovan Karadžić threatening the Bosnian Muslims and an argument between the film’s two protagonists about the origins of the war identifies the Serbs as the only aggressors. The film’s presentation of the unlikely trenchmates, meanwhile, is far from even-handed. The Bosnian Muslim, Čiki, is coded as the compassionate hero and his Rolling Stones tee-shirt reminds the audience that Muslims represent liberal, Western values. His Serb counterpart, on the other hand, is neurotic and duplicitous, attempting at one point to stab Čiki with his own knife. Notwithstanding the widespread critical assessment of No Man’s Land as an anti-war film, then, Tanović, I argue, tends to present the Bosnian war as a morality tale of good Muslim and bad Serb.

I’d like to end by discussing two post-Yugoslav films about the Bosnian war that are very different in tone yet which indicate potential lines of flight away from ethno-nationalism. The film that has attracted most international attention for its depiction of the after-effects of war trauma on Bosnian women is Grbavica/Esma’s Secret (2006). Written and directed by Bosnian Jasmila Žbanić, Esma’s Secret is, along with No Man’s Land, the most watched film in post-war Bosnia (Zajec 2013: 200) and its success led to the Bosnian government belatedly agreeing to provide financial support for the war’s rape victims. A ‘film with very few men’ (Pavićić 2010: 49), it tells the story of a working class single mother, Esma, and her wayward daughter Sara, who was conceived when Esma was raped during the war, but who has been brought up believe that her father was a šehid, or war hero. The film alludes subtly to the nature of Esma’s experiences during the war and critiques the sexist social norms of post-war Bosnia: Esma works as a waitress in a nightclub and her abhorrence of the crass philandering of its patrons, together with her unease when in close proximity to men, hint at the nature of her prison camp ordeal and suggest that gender relations have barely changed in Bosnia since the war.

Unlike Angelina Jolie’s film about war rape, Esma’s Secret shows little interest in political demonization. The film’s quiet social realism constitutes an implicit critique of the wild, self-Balkanizing cinema of Kusturica and Dragojević (Pavićić 2010: 48). Žbanić’s use of space reinforces the point. In Kusturica’s Underground, the above ground/below ground dichotomy symbolizes the discrepancy between Yugoslavia’s Communist superstratum and the deceived masses who live under its auspices. In Esma’s Secret, this topography is reversed: Esma and Sara often occupy hilltop spaces overlooking the Bosnian capital city from which Sara derives her name. In contrast with Kusturica’s and Dragojević’s enclosed spaces (basements, tunnels and graveyards), these locales convey a sense of possibility; and unlike the doomed, irredeemable characters of Kusturica and Dragojević, Esma and Sara are capable of change (Pavićić 2010: 49). Once Sara is apprised of her mother’s secret, mother and daughter may begin a new life together.

Some other impressive Balkan films about the war and its effects focus on the perpetrators, rather than the sufferers of trauma. The Enemy, directed by Serb Dejan Zečević and co-produced between Serbia, Republika Srpska and Croatia in 2011, is a supernatural, allegorical drama with a distinctly Tarkovskian tone. Set in the immediate aftermath of the war, the film begins with Serb soldiers, under the supervision of American IFOR troops, removing mines that they themselves had laid several years before. All of the men are damaged – whether by fear, aggression, or excessive religiosity – becoming increasingly abusive and eventually murderous towards one another. Searching a factory, the soldiers unearth a strange figure with the diabolical name of Daba, who has been walled into the building and who, disconcertingly, feels no cold, hunger or thirst. Initially, the chthonic Daba seems to be implicated in the violence, especially when the soldiers discover a mass grave underneath the factory, and at several points various frightened soldiers try – and fail – to kill him. Yet Daba tells the men that he deplores the killing of the war and as the film progresses it becomes clear that Daba is not the source of the growing tension among the men, but rather what Slavoj Žižek (1999: 121) calls an ‘Id-machine’, an uncanny externalization of the soldiers’ hostile proclivities. Craving an enemy, even after the end of the war, the soldiers have collectively conjured one up.
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Daba epitomizes Zygmunt Bauman’s figure of the Stranger: a liminal, ‘undecidable’ figure who is neither a friend nor an enemy and thus poses a threat ‘more horrifying than that which one can expect from the enemy’ (Bauman 1991: 55). For the soldiers, Daba is terrifying not because he is an enemy (enemies can simply be killed), but because his uncertain identity unsettles the binary categories of good and evil, friend and foe, that still define the soldiers’ world. Like Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, in which the Bosnian war is attributed to a malevolent, tunnel-dwelling ogre, The Enemy could be accused of supernaturalizing and thereby depoliticizing the war. Nevertheless, the film does offer a memorable philosophical deconstruction of sectarianism. While Western cinema à la Angelina Jolie continues to engage in enemy construction, post-Yugoslav cinema is moving beyond the simple satire of Western normativities, and shows signs of sloughing off its nationalist legacy.

Kony 2012 / Angelina Jolie rides again

20/3/2012

 
I haven't had much time to blog recently; but it has certainly been a fascinating few weeks for those of us interested in critical media analysis, not least because of the Kony 2012 viral video, which - apparently backed by Justin Bieber, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Rihanna - brought imperialist propaganda into the age of social media and celebrity clicktivism. The video's argument, which promotes armed intervention in Uganda, have been suitably demolished elsewhere. A recent video from the prolific Syrian Girl provides some of the geopolitical context and discusses some of the persuasive methods used in the video. Not that I would support all of her arguments. While agreeing with her critique of US imperialism, I don't, as readers of this blog might have guessed, share her admiration for the principle of 'national sovereignty'.
Kony 2012 was also endorsed, predictably enough, by Angelina Jolie, whose new Bosnian war film In the Land of Blood and Honey - her first film as a director - premiered this month. For now, at least, I shall refrain from indulging in yet another diatribe against one-sided, anti-Serb filmmaking (see previous blog post). Suffice to say that, like the Kony 2012 video, the film seems to be a pro-imperialist treatise - hardly surprising given Jolie's publicly stated views about the Bosnian war and her reliance on interviews with US government and security officials during her research for the film. The Serbs, as usual, stand in for the kind of 'bad men' that Jolie is now arguing should be stopped by Western 'intervention' in Syria ('I think Syria has gotten to a point, sadly, where some form of, certainly, where some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary', said Jolie in a recent interview). Bosnia continues, it seems, to serve as a model for those who advocate military violence in the name of humanitarianism.
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Rape, trauma and propaganda: Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There

6/2/2012

 
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During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, rape of women (and men) was one of the most horrific and widely-reported of crimes. Tonight I watched Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There (2010), a film set during the outbreak of the war. Based on evidence submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague as related in the work of Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić, the film depicts the sexual abuse of Samira (Nataša Petrović), a Muslim schoolteacher from Sarajevo who moves to a country village shortly before it is overrun by Serb forces. Samira is evacuated from the village to a hut in a desolate location, where, along with other female villagers, she is subjected to repeated gang rape by the soldiers. We mostly 'see' the events of the film through Samira's eyes - a highly restricted mode of narration that strengthens our identification with the heroine.

With the exception of regular and unsparing depictions of sexual violence, the film's action is sparse and dialogue is minimal. This seems appropriate to the film's subject matter; after all, as Judith Lewis Herman argues in her book Trauma and Recovery, traumatic memories are concerned with corporeal and visual sensation rather than verbal narrative. Perhaps this is why the camera lingers so long, so often on Samira's enormous, fear-filled eyes. Landscape is important, too: the barren flatlands on which Samira's hut has been built contrast starkly with the verdant beauty of the hillsides surrounding the compound, linking Samira with her environment and creating a distinctly gendered topography.
Yet neither the film's undoubted impressionistic power nor the seriousness and horror of its subject matter should prevent us from asking searching questions about its historical accuracy or political orientation. The film's depiction of Serbian aggressors and Muslim victims is not, in itself, problematic; or rather, it would not be if the almost exclusive emphasis on Serb criminality and Muslim victimhood were not depressingly familiar from the many Western books, media reports, television dramas and films about the Bosnian war over the last two decades. Along with the mainstream media, liberal pundits and academics - including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Jürgen Habermas and Todd Gitlin - have relentlessly insisted that the Bosnian war was a one-sided war of aggression waged by Milošević's Serbia against its neighbours and that Western military 'intervention' was therefore justified. The author of the film's source, Slavenka Drakulić, has done little to correct this impression: her 2004 book They Would Never Hurt A Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague predictably drew attention to Serb (and two Croat) war criminals - but not to Muslim perpetrators.

Particularly problematic is the film's depiction of something like a rape camp. Some of the claims made about Serb-run rape camps have been challenged by historians such as Diana Johnstone and David Gibbs. As I discussed in greater detail here, the evidence that Serb forces used rape systematically (that is, on orders 'from above') during the war has been hotly disputed. As Johnstone writes, ‘the accusation that the Serbs initiated a deliberate policy of mass rape has never been substantiated. But the belief that this happened is widespread and persistent'. Moreover, while stories about the rape of Muslim women were used to construct a 'feminist' argument in favour of military intervention in Bosnia, Serb rape victims have tended to be ignored in the dominant Western narrative of the war, even though - as Peter Brock shows in his book Media Cleansing, Dirty Reporting: Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia - the documentation of Serb rape victims was more extensive than that relating to Muslim victims. No matter: according to the dominant narrative of the Western journalists, the only rapists were Serbs, the only victims Muslims. Yet one seriously has to wonder whether those who take such a one-sided view of conflicts really care about the victims on either side. As the comedian Mark Steel suggests in his book What's Going On?, 'anyone who is deeply moved by one set of tragedies while ignoring, and even justifying, those on the other side, in reality is not genuinely touched by either'.

Rape, as we know, is used by men as a weapon of terror and, indeed, as a weapon of war. But as the history of imperialist propaganda shows - from the allied propaganda around the so-called 'Rape of Belgium' in World War I to the 'rape rooms' of Saddam Hussein's Iraq - claims of systematic rape are all too readily wielded in the service of political propaganda. It is impossible not to feel disgusted by the events depicted in As If I Am Not There; but our disgust ought not to blind us to the film's reinforcement of dubious historical assumptions and stereotypical patterns of representation.

‘History is Screaming at Us’: Humanitarian Interventionism and the Popular Geopolitics of the Bosnian War in Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky’s Warriors

16/6/2011

 
In the light of my previous post on the arrest of Ratko Mladic, I thought it might be worth posting the following draft of a longer piece I wrote about the representation of the Bosnian war...
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Warriors is a much-admired two-part television drama about the 1992-95 Bosnian war written by the late Leigh Jackson, directed by Peter Kosminsky, and broadcast by the BBC in 1999. This article contextualises and analyses the drama’s representation of the Bosnian war and critiques some of the historical and political assumptions that underpin it. In this way, the article aims to contribute both to the all too slender body of scholarly work on popular representations of the Bosnian war and to the broad field of ‘popular geopolitics’ (Dittmer, 2010).

The article begins by contrasting what might be called the dominant or established narrative of Bosnian conflict – the one upheld by the mainstream Western news media and by some academics – with the alternative, and, I contend, more convincing, account of the war that has been constructed in recent years by a number of radical historians and critics. Yet vital as it is to understand the role of news media in promoting misleading or propagandistic views of war, it is important, too, to appreciate the role of popular media forms in influencing public understandings of geopolitical issues. Mark Lacy (2003) identifies the cinema as a space where ‘commonsense’ ideas about geopolitics are reproduced, naturalised and legitimated. Popular film, for example, has played a leading role in recent years in building public support for US military operations (Power and Crampton, 2007). In the second part of the article, therefore, I turn to the representation of the Bosnian war in popular media forms, using Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors – perhaps the most critically lauded screen representation of the war – as a case study. Warriors it is argued, manages to avoid some of the egregious over-simplifications and misrepresentations that have characterised Western news media and popular cinematic accounts of the Bosnian war, making it one of the most engaging and convincing narratives about the conflict. Yet the drama’s representation of the war and its combatants is nonetheless problematic. For all its gritty authenticity and emotional force, Warriors reproduces many of the Western stereotypes about the conflict. In particular, the film’s perspective on the causes and possible solutions to the Balkan wars of the 1990s echoes the official discourse of humanitarian interventionism that was resurgent during that decade, as the disappearance of the Cold War threat of Communism required Western states to find new languages of legitimation.

There is insufficient space in this article to rehearse, let alone analyse, every event of the Bosnian war. Yet a reasonably extensive prolegomenon on both the history and the public representation of the war is indispensable here, not least because there is strong critical disagreement over competing accounts of the conflict. In particular, the widespread Western view of the conflict as a war of aggression waged primarily by the Serbs has been forcefully challenged in the last decade by a number of radical historians and critics whose work is drawn upon here – in particular, Peter Brock, Noam Chomsky, David Gibbs, Peter Gowan, Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, Edward Herman and David Peterson. Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it; the critics mentioned above have attempted, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s (1999: 248) phrase, to ‘brush history against the grain’, exposing the omissions, inventions and inconsistencies that, according to them, characterise the dominant media narrative of the Bosnian war – or what Herman and Peterson (2007: 1) have provocatively called the Western news media’s ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’ about what happened during the conflict.

The disintegration of the multi-ethnic federation of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was precipitated by internal and external pressures. Before war broke out, Yugoslavia was obliged to undertake an International Monetary Fund ‘shock therapy’ program that raised the cost of living, reduced the social wage and eliminated jobs, forcing many Yugoslavs to leave the country to find work (Gowan, 2010: 21; Johnstone, 2002: 21; Parenti, 2000: 21; Woodward, 2005: 47-57). According to Herman and Peterson (2007: 4), the new economic regime also ‘threatened the solidarity’ of the country’s population in a way that allowed politicians to exploit ethnic differences. In 1990, multi-party elections – the first in Yugoslavia since the 1930s – took place in the former republics. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, three parties – the Muslim SDA, the Croat HDZ and the Serb SDS – together won 80 percent of the votes, forcing the Communists from power. Appealing for votes on the basis of ethnic identity, each of these parties gained a share of the ballot roughly equivalent to the population of the ethnic communities they claimed to represent. The three parties’ ethno-communalist appeals were directed across the old republican borders, serving to weaken the inter-ethnic bonds that had theretofore characterised Yugoslavian society. Following a referendum in 1992, Bosnia, following Slovenia and Croatia, declared its independence from Yugoslavia; yet some of Bosnia’s Serbs boycotted the poll and an independent, although internationally unrecognised, Serb state, Republika Srpska, was declared in Bosnia, under the auspices of the Serb commander Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslav rump state. When war broke out in 1992, Muslim and Croat forces fought against the Serbs and eventually against each other, leading to three-way fighting among the ethnic groups.

Yet the fragmentation of Yugoslavia was not solely, or even mainly, a consequence of political and ethnic divisions within the republic. Although the point has mostly been ignored in academic literature on the breakup of Yugoslavia (Gowan, 2010: 21), the world’s great powers played a key role in encouraging the secession of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics in the early 1990s. After reunification, Germany ventured onto the world stage openly for the first time in fifty years. Along with Austria and Hungary, Germany provided political and economic support for the separatist political movements which had emerged in Slovenia and Germany’s historical ally Croatia (Gowan, 2010: 24). In common with many of Germany’s European neighbours, the US initially opposed recognition of these states, but ultimately accepted Germany’s position, eager, perhaps, to shift the costs of economic development in Eastern Europe onto Germany. This was accompanied by a hardening of US attitudes towards Milošević – once a Washington favourite – and the Yugoslav rump state. The US refused the faltering Yugoslav economy World Bank loans and denied the right for Serbia – the Yugoslav region that had shown the greatest resistance both to the IMF-led austerity programmes of the 1980s and to the war when it began (Wildcat, 1996; Parenti, 2000: 22) – to secede from the federation. In 1993, the US, keen to find its own client in the region and to regain the initiative in the crisis, began to promote the ‘independence’ of Bosnia, backing the Muslims led by Alija Izetbegović.

Britain, like most of the European states, had relatively little economic interest in the Balkans and in 1992 its politicians were divided over whether to orient towards Serbia or Croatia. While ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appeared on British and Croatian television to support military action, the Major government was far less hawkish (Osmançavuşoğlu, 2004). Moreover, the UK, along with France, had longstanding alliances with the dominant Serb faction of Yugoslav ruling class, acting as its principal arms supplier, and was as concerned as any nation about the prospect of German revanchism in Europe. Yet Britain was more reluctant than most to engage in military intervention, not least because British troops might have been expected to bear the brunt of any fighting and because the potential cost of a war was hardly to be welcomed during a recession (Almond, 1994). Ultimately, however, Britain came to accept the position of the US as it adopted a more aggressive policy towards Bosnia. Britain and France, which boasted the two largest UN troop contingents, entered the Balkans to assert their own potential as Europe’s ‘policemen’, supporting the US in its bid to ‘defeat forces in the East which were undermining stability’ (Gowan, 2010: 37).

The official Western narrative of the Bosnian conflict maintains that Milošević initiated the war in a drive for a ‘Greater Serbia’. This view is elaborated in several widely read books about the Bosnian war (Glenny, 1996: 33; Silber and Little, 1997: 26) and is repeated frequently among journalists and academics to this day, along with the suggestion that Milošević aimed to create an ethnically pure Serbia. But as Herman and Peterson (2007: 8) contend, Milošević had in fact tried to hold the federation together, expressly warning against nationalism in speeches made in 1987 and 1989 (speeches widely reported in the Western media as inciting Serb nationalism). This was in contrast to the openly anti-semitic president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who revived the red-and-white chequer board of the Nazi-era Ustaše flag. The Bosnian leader Izetbegović, meanwhile, was a Muslim fundamentalist and a member, during the Second World War, of a group that collaborated with the Nazi Schutzstaffel, committing atrocities against Jews and the resistance movement (Parenti, 2000: 51). If Milošević was a nationalist, it seems that he was no more aggressively nationalistic than Tudjman or Izetbegović. Yet the ethno-religious intolerance of the latter two men has been largely overlooked by high-profile Western journalists such as David Rieff, Ed Vulliamy and Marlise Simons, all of whom identify Milošević as the war’s prime mover (Herman and Peterson, 2007: 11).

Like Saddam Hussein a few years earlier in the first Gulf War – and like many other world leaders who outlive their usefulness to US power – Milošević underwent a transformation in the Western media from an ally of the US into its enemy. Yet the commonplace view that Milošević and the Serbs were uniquely or even primarily responsible for the Bosnian war is problematised by a number of details. For one thing, Serbia proper saw no ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian conflict and actually witnessed a net inflow of refugees; as Herman and Peterson (2007: 13) note, this is a curious situation to be tolerated by a state supposedly aiming for ethnic purity. Nor did Milošević strive to keep all Serbs in one state; in fact, he declined to defend Croatian Serbs when they were ethnically cleansed in 1995 (Herman and Peterson, 2007: 14). And whileMilošević can be characterised as a nationalist who was responsible for many atrocities, several critics have pointed out that the Western media ignored the expansionist drives of Croatian and Kosovo Albanian nationalists for a ‘Greater Croatia’ and ‘Greater Albania’ and Izetbegović’s refusal of a settlement in the hope of ruling over all three Bosnian ‘nations’ (Parenti, 2000: 32; Herman and Peterson, 2007: 14).

Following a settlement in early 1994, the three-way fighting between Croats, Muslims and Serbs became a war between two sides. The Muslims and Croats in Bosnia called a truce and formed a confederation, which in August agreed to a plan – developed by the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Germany – for a 51-49 split of Bosnia, with the Serbs getting the lesser percentage. But despite the Muslim-Croat alliance, the peace proposal, and an ongoing arms embargo against all combatants (an embargo criticised abroad for maintaining Bosnian Serb dominance in weaponry), the fighting did not stop. According to the received wisdom, this was because ‘the international community’ was slow to act and because the Serbs would not cease their aggression. Yet according to Herman and Peterson (2007: 8), the US sabotaged efforts at peace until the Muslim and Croat forces it armed and trained had improved their military position. Diana Johnstone argues that the fighting continued because the Bosnian Muslims were holding out for better deals from the US. Indeed, the eventual NATO bombing of Serb positions in 1995, argues Johnstone, was undertaken under the false pretence of Serbian intransigence: ‘The United States bombed the Bosnian Serbs to get Izetbegović to the negotiating table’, writes Johnstone (2002: 236), ‘but the version for the public was that bombing was necessary to get Milošević to the negotiating table’.

In the lead-up to the bombing in 1995, the US president Bill Clinton justified intervention by invoking Serbian human rights violations – comparing them to those committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Journalists and academics were also at pains to emphasise the similarities between the Serbs’ treatment of Muslims and the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews in the Second World War, even going so far as to imply the existence of Nazi-style death camps (Robison, 2004: 388-389). Although ‘the UN forces never found such “death camps” when they gained access to all of Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (Finley, 2004: 130), this rumour was solidified into a fact with stunning success by the public relations agency Ruder-Finn and was used to galvanise the support of Jewish pressure groups which might otherwise have been less than enthusiastic to back the cause of Muslim fundamentalists with historical connections to the Nazis. When challenged on the evidential basis of their claims, Ruder-Finn’s director stated bluntly: ‘Our work is not to verify information […] Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us […] We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize’ (quoted in Parenti, 2000: 92). In fact, although there were indeed Serbian holding camps during the Balkan wars, Muslims and Croats also operated camps in which prisoners were often detained in appalling conditions with totally inadequate food or sanitation. In fact, the Bosnian Muslims ran more camps with more detainees than the Serbs; yet only Radovan Karadžić allowed the Western media to visit his camps (Johnstone, 2002: 71). This, as Diana Johnstone notes, proved to be a strategic error by the Serbs, as the notorious ITN picture of the ‘thin man’, Fikret Alić, standing beside barbed wire, was subsequently presented by Western news editors as evidence of the existence of ‘death camps’ being run exclusively by Serbs (Johnstone, 2002: 72-73; Brock, 2005: 245-246).

Western news media also emphasised rapes committed by Serb, but not by Croat or Muslim forces. Western feminist groups picked up quickly on rumours that Serbs were organising rape camps and academics have also repeated this claim in the years following the war (Tester, 2001: 11). Yet as Finley (2004: 130) notes, ‘evidence of such camps was never unearthed’. Rape is always an under-reported crime and while rapes were undoubtedly committed by all combatants during the war – more frequently, no doubt, than during ‘peacetime’ – there is no evidence that Serbs committed rape systematically or that Serbs raped more women than Muslim and Croat forces. The Western media, however, concentrated on the stories of the women raped by Serbs, ignoring evidence relating to Serbian rape victims (Johnstone, 2002: 78-87; Hammond, 2004: 174-189; Brock, 2005: 59-72; Herman and Peterson, 2007: 38; Parenti, 2007: 24).

Meanwhile, public consent for military ‘intervention’ in Bosnia was engineered in the news media by a culturally influential cross-section of the liberal commentariat. Anthony Lewis wrote numerous New York Times columns demanding military action. Susan Sontag (the mother of one of the chief advocates of military action in Bosnia, David Rieff) also campaigned for intervention. Indeed, the ‘Bosnian question’ converted numerous left-liberal academics and commentators – including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Todd Gitlin, Jürgen Habermas, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff – into ‘humanitarian interventionists’. Although these commentators tended to focus overwhelmingly on Muslim rather than Serb victims, the reputation of many of these figures as ‘voices of conscience’ reinforced the respectability of their views among socially conscious cultural practitioners. The actress Vanessa Redgrave, for example, travelled to Sarajevo to support intervention.

Despite Britain’s ambivalence about deploying force against its erstwhile allies in Serbia, as the war progressed and the nature of the US commitments in the region became clear, the British news media came to adopt an anti-Serb position and, like its US counterpart, demonised the Serbs. One of the most hard-line interventionist newspapers throughout the 1990s, The Independent, talked of Serbian genocide and rape camps, while from left to right, the British press, including The Independent, The Telegraph, New Statesman, The Guardian and The Sun mobilised a range of racist stereotypes which presented Serbs as tribal, primitive, evil, bloodthirsty and bestial (Hammond, 2004: 185). Furthermore, as Philip Hammond (2004: 183) notes, ‘Western journalists consistently downplayed or ignored attacks by Croats and Muslims, so that Serbian attacks appeared to be evidence of a one-sided war of aggression’. Indeed, contra those journalists and academics who argued that media coverage of Bosnia was ineffectually ‘neutral’ (Vulliamy, 1999; Power, 2002), it could be argued that Western media coverage of the war was savagely partisan. Drawing on the journalism of Ed Vulliamy and David Rieff, Graham Spencer (2005: 91) rightly notes that ‘it was the betrayal of the Bosnian Muslims by the West which most evidently surfaces in accounts of the war’; but as we have seen, there are very good reasons to question the veracity of those accounts.

A brief consideration of the media coverage of some of the key events in the war will help to illustrate some further problems with the dominant news media account of the conflict. The so-called marketplace massacres in Sarajevo provide a useful case study here. During the siege of Sarajevo, Serb forces were criticised in the Western news media for perpetrating the infamous breadline and marketplace massacres, even although these were, according to many UN officials, committed by Muslim troops (Parenti, 2000: 75). In fact, Muslim forces in the city often fired first against Serbs to provoke a military response and gain sympathetic media coverage. The British diplomat and EU co-chairman of the Conference for the Former Yugoslavia, David Owen (quoted in Parenti, 2000: 75) records in his memoir that NATO knew of Muslim ‘friendly fire’ attacks, noting that ‘no seasoned observer in Sarajevo doubts for a moment that Muslim forces have found it in their interest to shell friendly targets’. Muslim forces also prevented Serb civilians from leaving the city in order to use them as ‘human shields’ and shot at Muslim civilians ‘in attempts to blame Serb attackers’ (Parenti, 2000: 75).

Yet it is the massacre of Muslim men and boys at the supposed ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica that provides the most dismal example of misleading news reporting. Srebrenica was (and still is) widely described by journalists and politicians as a Nazi-style ‘genocide’ that ‘we must never forget’. We can readily agree that the horrors of Srebrenica should never be forgotten and that appalling atrocities were committed there; but some important contextualising remarks must also be made. Some critics (Johnstone, 2002; Herman and Peterson, 2007) have questioned the widespread claim that as many as 8,000 civilians were executed at Srebrenica by Serb forces, arguing that the numbers of those killed have been exaggerated for propaganda purposes. It is unnecessary, if not unseemly, to fixate, however, on the Srebrenica body count. Clearly, Muslim men and boys were killed in large numbers around the town (women were spared, arguably rendering the term ‘genocide’ inappropriate). That a massacre took place at Srebrenica is not in doubt. What is questionable is the tendency of journalists to detach the massacre from its context. In 1992, Serbs had been driven out of Srebrenica and the years leading up to the massacre saw many attacks on nearby Serb towns. Indeed, Srebrenica was not simply a ‘safe haven’ for civilians; it also functioned as a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations. Nasir Oric, for example, was a Muslim officer operating out of Srebrenica. Oric ventured out to attack nearby Serb villages, burning homes and killing over a thousand Serbs between May 1992 and January 1994. Oric even invited Western reporters to his apartment to see his ‘war trophies’: videocassettes showing the severed heads of Serbs, burnt houses, and piles of corpses (Herman, 2003). Yet while Muslim warlords launched many attacks on Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, only Serb paramilitary leaders, such as Arkan, are well-known from Western news media coverage of the conflict. 

None of this context is supplied in news media references to Srebrenica. Edward Herman (2003) notes that

it has been an absolute rule of Rieff et al./media reporting on the Bosnian conflict to present evidence of Serb violence in vacuo, suppressing evidence of prior violence against Serbs, thereby falsely suggesting that Serbs were never responding but only initiated violence (this applies to Vukovar, Mostar, Tuzla, Goražde, and many other towns).

It is also well-known – and was even conceded by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) – that all the Bosnian Muslim women and children in Srebrenica were helped to safety in Bosnian Muslim territory by the Serbs before the fighting began.

The critical question here is not whether Serb forces committed appalling atrocities at Srebrenica and elsewhere (which they certainly did), but why only Serb atrocities have drawn the opprobrium of Western commentators. According to Herman and Peterson (2007: 20-22), it is likely that more civilians were killed during Operation Storm, the 1995 US bombing raid in which 250,000 Krajina Serbs were displaced, than were killed at Srebrenica; yet only Srebrenica has entered historical myth as a genocide. Herman and Peterson’s (2007: 26) wider observation about the one-sidedness of Western news media reporting is relevant here:

We find it interesting that in the West, the millions or more deaths from the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that have followed the 2003 invasion are never presented as ‘genocide’ or events that we ‘must never forget’. These deaths did not merit the indignation of Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, Samantha Power, and the mainstream media. The driving out of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia, and killing several thousand of them, doesn’t even rate the designation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, let alone genocide. […] The 16,000 Serb civilians killed in Bosnia in 1992–95 are effectively disappeared, while the 31,000 Muslim civilians killed in the latter years are elevated to world class status as victims of genocide. In short, these are words to be used only when describing the crimes of US enemies, with suitable attention and indignation to be provided in parallel.

Adding insult to injury, the anti-Serb bias of Western journalism was justified by an appeal to a set of professional practices that collectively became known as the ‘journalism of attachment’ (Bell, 1998: 15-22): an allegedly new mode of affective reportage that would supplement the supposedly suffocating ‘neutrality’ of existing journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage. The concept of the ‘journalism of attachment’ allowed journalists such as Ed Vulliamy to present themselves as mavericks unafraid of ‘speaking out’ bravely and passionately about the horrors of war, while in practice doing so only on behalf of Muslim victims. According to Tariq Ali (2000: xv), these self-styled ‘mavericks’ in fact constituted the journalistic mainstream and those who questioned their version of events ‘were denounced as traitors, appeasers and worse’.

In the autumn of 1995 US warplanes attacked Bosnian Serb positions in Operation Storm. The air strikes, which were backed up by 100,000 Croatian troops, involved 3,200 sorties, more than one ton of bombs and the firing of cruise missiles from US warships in the Adriatic. Towns and villages throughout Bosnia were targeted and many hundreds of civilians were killed and wounded. The stated strategic aim of the bombings was to inflict overwhelming damage on the telecommunications and transportation links of the Bosnian Serb army, allowing the regular army of Croatia, together with Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces, to overrun Serb regions in northwest Bosnia. This ground offensive killed and wounded thousands and turned another 125,000 people into refugees. They joined 225,000 Serb civilians who were driven out of Krajina by the Croatian army in an operation backed by the US and which was probably the war’s largest single act of ethnic expulsion (Parenti, 2000: 29; Gibbs, 2009). This was what Edward Herman acerbically describes in several of his works as ‘benign’ ethnic cleansing, i.e. ethnic cleansing undertaken by the US and its allies.

The Dayton Agreement which followed the bombing represented a victory for the USA and a defeat for almost everyone else (with the partial exception of Germany). The Pax Americana completed the process of ethnic partition which had already cost the lives of more than 200,000 people and turned millions more into refugees. The settlement took place in a US airbase where the participants were locked away from the world’s media and forced to accept the US solution, just as happened four years later at Rambouillet to end the Kosovo crisis (Parenti, 2000: 108-114). While European-initiated settlements had been blocked for many years on the grounds that they rewarded ethnic cleansing and failed to preserve an independent and multi-ethnic Bosnia, Bosnia was now partitioned into Muslim, Serb and Croat enclaves. The US drafted a new constitution for the former Yugoslav republic, sanctioning the use of force against anyone who opposed the US plan.

The impact of the Bosnian war on communities and infrastructure in the former Yugoslavia continues to be felt to this day. But the interventionist assumptions of media commentators on the Bosnian war have also proved to be enduring. The humanitarian justification for Operation Storm set the precedent for NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo (and for the US’s later military interventions, also launched under the banner of human rights, in Afghanistan and Iraq). Václav Havel was just one of many prominent liberals to see in the Kosovo intervention the dawning of a new age in which a renewed respect for human rights had finally triumphed over the monolithic power of the state, sending the message that ‘it is simply not permissible to murder people, to drive them from their homes, to torture them, and to confiscate their property’ (Havel, quoted in Chomsky, 2008: 40). But as Noam Chomsky (2008: 40) dryly counters, the Kosovo bombing showed that ‘it remains permissible, indeed obligatory, not only to tolerate such actions but to contribute massively to them’.

In the years following the Bosnian war, the Western news media’s anti-Serb bias has also been echoed and amplified by numerous journalists and academics. Repeating media reports of genocide and rape camps, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrović (1996: 1-38), for example, compare Serb atrocities during the war to those of the Nazis and berate ‘intellectuals’ for failing to take sides as the conflict raged. They further argue that, instead of reacting immediately to prevent crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, ‘the world’ acted voyeuristically – passively watching the horror unfold, but taking no action. It has even been suggested that the war in Bosnia elicited ‘relatively few expressions of outrage’ (Tester, 2001: 11). This myth of Western passivity has in turn given rise to the construction of the grand psycho-social theory that Westerners now inhabit a ‘postemotional’ society in which our proper moral outrage in the face of injustice and suffering has been hollowed out or eroded (Meštrović, 1996). Yet the proposition that the Balkan crisis elicited no emotional response from Western observers is at least as questionable as that other ideological canard of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’. Not only were the great powers heavily involved in dividing up the federation, training and arming their allies in the region, but the Western news media carried a veritable outpouring of support for military intervention from journalists and intellectuals.

Both during and after the war, then, Western journalists tended to present Milošević as the instigator of the war, to see Western states not as active instigators of the war but as its passive observers, to downplay the significance of atrocities committed by Croats and Muslims and to demonise the Serbs as uniquely brutal and fascistic, frequently by invoking comparisons with the Nazis. Given the extent of these representations in the Western news media, it is unsurprising to find that they are also commonplace in Western cinematic and televisual depictions of the Bosnian war, as I discuss in the second part of this article with a particular focus on Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors.

Popular films, as Power and Crampton (2007: 6) note, ‘provide a way of solving (geo)political uncertainty […] providing moral geographies and making clear the lines between “us” and “them”’. Hollywood war films often reinforce the aims and perspectives of the US military, sometimes by introducing historical and moral reversals which turn perpetrators into victims and vice versa. In Michael Cimino’s critically lauded The Deer Hunter (1978), for example, the guilt for the trauma incurred by the US invasion of Vietnam is displaced onto America’s brutal and sadistic enemies, most notoriously in the Russian Roulette scene, in which US torture of the Vietnamese is reversed to show the Vietnamese torturing Americans. Another Oscar-winning film, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), travesties the US’s ‘humanitarian war’ in Somalia in 1993 via a similar reversal. Scott’s film, which focuses on the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, was made in close collaboration with the Pentagon and the White House, which edited the final script. The film begins with documentary-style reconstructions and its opening title asserts its claim to be ‘based on actual events’. Yet Black Hawk Down ignores the US massacre of around 1000 starving Somalians during the battle of Mogadishu (in which 18 US soldiers were killed) and presents the US invaders as righteous avengers against hordes of Somalis, who are portrayed as snarling ‘blood-thirsty madmen’ (McCriskin and Pepper, 2005: 171). Without labouring the point, the recent crop of films about the Iraq war contains many more such examples of historical and geopolitical distortion (Kellner, 2010).

The major Hollywood films about the Bosnian war, too, tend to follow familiar news media scripts, demonising the official enemy of the US – even though many of these films are notable for their liberal, humanitarian ethos. A case in point is Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), a film based on a book by a British foreign correspondent, Michael Nicholson, about the attempt to evacuate Muslim babies during the siege of Sarajevo. In order to reinforce the equation of the Serbs with the Nazis, Welcome to Sarajevo uses quasi-documentary techniques, intercutting images of civilian suffering with television footage of one of Bill Clinton’s public statements about Bosnia: ‘history has shown us that you can’t allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen’. Elsewhere, footage of a speech made by George Bush Senior, in which the ex-president asserts that ‘you can’t negotiate with a terrorist’, is juxtaposed with images of the Serb commander Radovan Karadžić. Moreover, as Goran Gocić (2001: 42-3) points out, Welcome to Sarajevo introduces several factual inaccuracies, seemingly in order to demonise Serbs:

The infamous killing at a Sarajevo wedding in 1992 (which triggered the hostilities in the city) had Serbian victims and, in the case of a Sarajevan child adopted by a British journalist, the child was a Croatian girl. In Welcome to Sarajevo, however, the events were converted into a Croatian wedding and a Muslim girl, and these changes were introduced obviously for political reasons.

Gocić adds that the screenwriter and director have never been challenged over these ‘evident falsehoods’ which, Gocić suggests, come ‘close to propaganda’. Moreover, Welcome to Sarajevo depicts Western journalists as hard-drinking, cynical, but above all heroic and compassionate, Muslims as innocent victims and Serbs as raving psychopaths.

These stereotypes are also in evidence in Richard Shepard’s The Hunting Party(2007), in which a posse of intrepid investigative journalists journey into post-war Republika Srpska in order to track down a war criminal. Republika Srpska is described by the journalist Duck (Terrance Howard) as a ‘backward land’ presided over by the monstrous Serb war criminal The Fox and his degenerate bodyguard Srdjan (Goran Kostić), whom Duck forthrightly describes as a ‘psychopathic little fuck’. Srdjan has a tattoo on his forehead which reads, in Cyrillic, ‘I was dead the day I was born’. John Moore’s gung-ho Behind Enemy Lines (2001), too, stereotypes Serbs as ‘mono-dimensional demons’ who must be destroyed by angelic American forces (Watson, 2008: 55). To the list of barbarous screen Serbs we could add Victor Drazen, the chief villain of the first season of the highly popular Fox television series24 (2001) who has a background in ethnic cleansing. Drazen is a ‘one-sided’ figure, ‘an unscrupulous and cold-blooded murderer’ (Birk and Birk, 2005: 59). After the accent of a Serbian actor was judged to be too impenetrable for Anglophone audiences to understand, the role of Drazen was given to Dennis Hopper, an actor well-known for playing villainous screen roles.

Even Danis Tanović’s dark comedy No Man’s Land (2001), widely lauded for its anti-war message and certainly one of the more balanced treatments of the Bosnian conflict (Watson, 2008), reproduces many Western stereotypes of the war. The film is based upon the interaction between two combatants from opposing sides of the conflict who find themselves trapped between the Serb and Muslim front lines. The film does capture something of the craziness of war and the potential for human solidarity among putative 'enemies'. ‘Who cares who started it?’, declares Čiki (Branko Đurić), the Bosnian Muslim protagonist, ‘we’re all in the same shit now’. Later in the film, Čiki discovers that he and his companion have a female friend in common in Banja Luka. Some appropriate satire, moreover, is levelled at Western war reporters. Just seconds after the tragic moment in which the two soldiers are shot dead, the arrogant journalist Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge), insensitively asks her cameraman: ‘Did you get it?’. Yet despite these progressive elements, the presentation of the causes and consequences of the Bosnian war in No Man’s Landis consistent with that of the Western news media coverage. An argument between the film’s two protagonists about the origins of the war clearly identifies the Serbs as the primary aggressors. Čiki is coded as the compassionate hero of the story and his Rolling Stones tee-shirt reminds the audience that the Bosnian Muslims represent supposedly ‘liberated’, Western values. His Serb trench-mate, on the other hand, is neurotic and duplicitous, attempting at one point to stab Čiki with his own knife. The film’s final image of a booby-trapped Bosnian Muslim fighter left to die in a trench, meanwhile, reflects the mainstream news media perspective that Muslims were the only victims of the war.

This brief survey of films about the Bosnian war suggests that cinematic treatments of the Bosnian war have tended to conform to the dominant anti-Serb paradigm of Western news media scripts; the only exceptions to this pattern, as might be expected, are those films about the war made by Serb directors, notably Srdjan Dragojević’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996) and Pedrag Antonijević’s Savior(1998), both of which arguably bend the stick too far in the other direction by presenting Muslims as the primary perpetrators of mass violence (Watson, 2008: 56). Furthermore, the examples of No Man’s Land and Welcome to Sarajevosuggest that elements of Western propaganda about the Bosnian war are apparent not only in gung-ho action films, but also in broadly ‘liberal’ film narratives about the war. Both of these points can be elaborated through an analysis of Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors, which, despite being the lengthiest and arguably most critically respected treatment of the war, has been unduly neglected by film and television scholars.

Throughout his chequered yet distinguished career in television, Peter Kosminsky’s laudable aim has been not merely to reflect social realities, but to transform them. In this sense, Kosminsky is the heir to the British tradition of campaigning television drama established in the 1960s by his long-time hero, Ken Loach. A television hyphenate and self-confessed ‘trouble-maker’, Kosminsky has produced and directed television dramas intended to challenge audiences and precipitate governmental action. Kosminsky has never flinched from controversy, approaching political and military subjects from a provocative angle. While working for Yorkshire Television in 1987, he directed the documentary The Falklands – The Untold Story, whose interviews with Argentinian and British combatants challenge the jingoistic discourses of the mainstream media by presenting the Argentinian fighters as human beings rather than faceless adversaries and exposing the traumatising consequences of warfare upon the soldiers of both sides. Afghantsi (1988), a documentary about the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in which Soviet soldiers describe the hardships of the war, is an equally bold piece of work that focuses on the experience of soldiers fighting on behalf of the West’s supposed enemies. Despite its high quality, however, the latter documentary attracted only a small audience. Kosminsky soon realised that the only way to get difficult subjects in front of large audiences with an adequate budget, scheduling and marketing was to make them as dramas (Kosminsky, quoted in Campbell, 2008).

By making docudramas rather than documentaries, Kosminsky raised the profile of his work, while at the same time hitting new heights of controversy. The 1997 ITV drama No Child of Mine, written by Guy Hibbert and directed by Kosminsky, followed the multiple sexual abuse of a thirteen year-old girl, implicitly criticising the failings of the British care system and campaigning for safe houses for abused children. It provoked strong reactions from viewers and drew moral condemnation from conservative politicians – the Conservative Member of Parliament Teresa Gorman, for example, asked whether the drama’s ‘depravity’ was ‘really necessary’ (quoted in Aitkenhead, 1997: 3). Indeed, since the 1990s, Kosminsky has emerged as Britain’s foremost television controversialist with a series of dramas that deal with socially urgent and politically contentious topics. Many of these dramas deal with the themes of trust and betrayal: in No Child of Mine, a child’s trust in adult authority is repeatedly shattered, while subsequent dramas, including The Project (BBC, 2002),The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005) and Britz (Channel 4, 2007), investigate the various ways in which New Labour, in Kosminsky’s view, betrayed the political trust placed in it by a large section of the British population in 1997.Warriors, too, is essentially a drama about trust and betrayal.

Featuring a clutch of relatively unknown (but soon to be famous) actors including Ioan Gruffudd, Matthew Macfadyen and Damian Lewis, Warriors follows the fortunes of British forces sent to Bosnia on a ‘peacekeeping’ remit under the auspices of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in 1992. The drama has the tripartite structure that is common to many screen narratives of war. Early scenes focus on the personal and family lives of the soldiers as they prepare to be mobilised. The central part of the film follows the soldiers’ deployment in Bosnia, where the men witness scenes of shocking brutality. The drama’s final portion, meanwhile, depicts the social and psychological difficulties experienced by the soldiers on their return home.

The central thesis of the drama is that UNPROFOR’s non-combat remit precluded the soldiers from protecting the civilian victims of the war (in this sense, the drama’s title is distinctly ironic – an irony lost when the film was re-titled Peacekeepers for the US market). In many scenes throughout the drama’s 175 minute running time, the soldiers can only look on in frustration as Bosnian civilians are shelled or displaced from their homes. The soldiers are not permitted to help civilians to safety using their vehicles, since such action would constitute ethnic cleansing. In one scene, the UN official Rik Langrubber (Carsten Voigt) rebukes Lieutenant Neil Laughrey (Damian Lewis) for his impatience when his column is halted by Serb forces. ‘Oh yes’, says Langrubber sarcastically, ‘you’re the British Army, so you want to smash your way through’. As Major Stone (Simon Shepherd) later angrily explains to Lieutenant Laughrey, the official UN mandate is to remain ‘neutral’, not taking sides, but simply observing and assisting with aid distribution – a mandate some of the soldiers find unconscionable and almost impossible to observe. The UNPROFOR soldiers often express cynicism about their all-too-passive role and frequently attempt to aid civilians as they are shelled. In a particularly tense scene, a young Bosniak boy is rescued from shelling and harboured in the back of the armoured vehicle by Private Alan James (Matthew Macfadyen); but the boy is discovered during a Serb vehicle search and taken away by the Serb forces, much to the annoyance and humiliation of James’ commanding officer, Lieutenant John Feeley (Ioan Gruffudd). James is severely reprimanded for his violation of the UN mandate. Later, the soldiers attempt to use their armoured vehicles to evacuate some civilians from buildings targeted by Croat forces, but are peremptorily ordered to cease the evacuation. ‘How can this be right?’ spits Corporal Gary Sprague (Joe Renton), as he reluctantly sets about removing the evacuees from the back of the vehicle.

The guilt felt by some of the UNPROFOR soldiers at their impotence in Bosnia is encapsulated in an outburst by Private James on his return to Liverpool at the end of the film. In response to his father’s comment that James and his comrades ‘did a great job out there’ and are ‘heroes’, James remarks blankly: ‘I think it was shite, what we did… leaving people to die’. In the following scene, James smashes up a bus shelter in a fit of frustration. Later, talking to Lieutenant Feeley in a café, he reveals that while he once dreamed of playing football for Liverpool, he now ‘dreams of walking on dead bodies’. Lieutenant Laughrey also has trouble adjusting to civilian life after his return to the UK, assaulting his pregnant wife while under the illusion that he is still in Bosnia. As he explains to a police officer investigating the incident:

When you’ve seen babies with their heads blown off, when you’ve had to drink coffee with men who you know have taken children and crucified them and thrown them into a river, it’s hard to get excited about what sort of nappies you should be buying or what colour the nursery should be. It’s hard to get excited about being a father because you feel so guilty for leaving all those people in the shit.

Warriors thus depicts the traumatic psychological impact of the Bosnian conflict on the UN ‘peacekeepers’ and the drama’s central thesis is that the soldiers ought to have been mandated to act decisively to prevent the human suffering they saw.Indeed, during the Kosovo conflict in the late 1990s – around the time thatWarriors was screened – Kosminsky himself appeared on British television current affairs programmes such as BBC2’s Newsnight,arguing that British forces should intervene militarily in Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds.

Kosminsky is nothing if not a careful researcher. The screenplay of Warriors is based on transcripts of interviews conducted by Kosminsky with more than 90 soldiers and their families, giving the narrative a powerful sense of authenticity. Themise-en-scene of the drama adds to this sense: although filmed in the Czech Republic, the armoured vehicles, uniforms, weapons and combat situations featured in the production are presented with a keen attention to detail. Indeed, the drama’s depiction of war is thought to be so authentic that the film has been used in army training programmes in order to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges that arise for soldiers in combat situations. Journalists have also marvelled at the drama’s verisimilitude. During a panel discussion at the BBC in 2010, Kosminsky related how, at a Programme Review meeting about Warriors, he was told that BBC journalists had asked why they had put their lives in danger by reporting from Bosnia when Jackson and Kosminsky had succeeded in depicting the events of the war so well in fictional form.

Critical responses to Warriors have been no less complimentary. Writing after the initial broadcast of the drama, The Times’ Paul Hoggart (1999: 12), wrote thatWarriors ‘was, quite simply, stunning – gut-wrenching, soul-searing, heart-rending, thought-provoking, sensitive, powerful, deeply disturbing and dripping authenticity from every shot’. Other critics noted that Warriors eschews the more melodramatic elements of the Hollywood war film and praised the drama for its lack of bombast (Viner, 1999; Hanks, 1999). Indeed, in keeping with Kosminsky’s oft-stated aim of making himself ‘invisible’ as a director, the visual style and musical score of the drama are unobtrusive and violence is not fetishised – nor are the soldiers crassly heroised – through hackneyed cinematic devices, such as slow motion or the choral music used to etherealise moments of danger for the US airmen in Behind Enemy Lines (Watson, 2008: 54). The proto-romantic relationship between a married Muslim woman, Almira Zec (Branka Katić) and Lieutenant Feeley, is also elegantly understated and the moral dilemma it poses – put crudely, that of whether to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of others – neatly condenses the wider ethical conundrums surrounding the British soldiers’ involvement in Bosnia. For these reasons alone,Warriors can be distinguished from some of the more sensationalised treatments of the war discussed above.

In the years since its original broadcast, Warriors’ reputation as ‘quality’ drama has been upheld by television critics. In a discussion of the 2009 BBC drama about the invasion of Iraq, Occupation, The Observer’s Kathryn Flett (2009: 28) noted excitedly that she had ‘been waiting for a British war drama this good for a decade, since Peter Kosminsky’s Warriors’. But while press reviewers responded enthusiastically to the superb acting and thoughtful tone of the drama, they had less to say about its historical verisimilitude or its political message. Kosminsky (quoted in Campbell, 2008) himself has noted that

people didn’t question the bona fides of Warriors in the way other work has been questioned. We spoke to most of those directly involved and knew it was a fair reflection of what occurred. It’s more difficult when you get into an area like The Government Inspector [Kosminsky’s docudrama about the death of the government weapons inspector David Kelly]. A larger number of people know, or think they know what occurred and we have to defend our journalism more stoutly.

Given that some of Kosminsky’s other docudramas have provoked strong criticisms over their handling of historical events, it may seem surprising that Warriors’ depiction of the Bosnian war drew so little critical comment. Yet it is quite true that Warriors''s reconstruction of the war has mostly been ignored by critics, and when it has been discussed, has largely been exempted from detailed scrutiny. The Independent’s television reviewer Robert Hanks (2005: 10), for example, criticises Kosminsky’s The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005) for blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction; but he seems far more relaxed about Warriors’ relation to the historical record. For Hanks, the facts about David Kelly’s death ‘matter so much’ that ‘fiction can only get in the way’. Hanks appears to be satisfied, however, that the dramatic action of Warriors is ‘generically true’. ‘This sort of thing happened’, Hanks asserts of the events portrayed in Warriors, ‘even if not these particular things’ (2005: 10). In one sense, Hanks’s distinction between Warriors andThe Government Inspector is reasonable: while The Government Inspectorconcentrates on a real historical figure, the fictional characters in Warriors have no real-world referents, permitting a degree of dramatic license. On the other hand, Hanks’ confidence that Warriors deals only in ‘generic’ truths seems misplaced, since the historical events portrayed in the drama, such as the Ahmići massacre of 1993, are quite specific. Even Hanks’s confidence that Warriors depicts the ‘sort of thing’ that happened in Bosnia is open to question, as I suggest below. Indeed, questions of historical accuracy are important here: if the facts surrounding David Kelly’s death ‘matter’, then so too, surely, do the facts surrounding the events of the Bosnian war, during which many thousands of people were killed. In the following discussion, I consider how Warriors takes up and re-presents those facts.

Throughout Warriors, both Croat and Serb forces figure prominently as perpetrators of atrocities. In the drama’s early scenes, a Croat mob assembles outside the house of a Muslim family which Croat militia appear to be intent on burning down; a little later in the drama, Serb troops harass Muslim civilians. The UN forces are not entirely ineffective in preventing some of these abuses. In the second part of the drama, for example, Lieutenant Feely (Ioan Gruffudd) manages to deter some Croat militiamen (Croat militia operated alongside regular Croat forces in Bosnia) from ransacking an elderly Muslim couple’s home by asking them whether Dario Kordić (the commander of the Croat forces) has approved their mission. 

But while Serbs and Croats are the perpetrators of violence throughout Warriors, Muslims are overwhelmingly presented victims. The Muslim Zec family and another anonymous family in Ahmići – whose members are later murdered by Croat forces – are the only civilians whose sufferings are explored in any detail. Almira Zec, in particular, is humanised through her incipient love affair with Lieutenant Feeley. Yet in the drama’s depictions of fighting and atrocities, Muslim forces are never directly portrayed as aggressors. Here the drama conforms to the dominant Western news media narrative of the war in which, as we have seen, Muslim atrocities and Muslim warlords were all but airbrushed from the official record. By bracketing out Muslim aggression, Jackson and Kosminsky’s drama underestimates the multilateral dynamic of the war. The absence of any representation of Muslim-initiated violence is especially troubling in view of the fact that Warriors is set in Vitez – an area of central Bosnia in which most of the fighting between 1992 and 1994 was between Muslim and Croat forces.

Warriors’ elision of Muslim violence is combined with a tendency to foreground Serb cynicism and aggression. In an early scene, the UNPROFOR company quietly intervenes when a Serb soldier rips open a woman’s blouse; yet there are no equivalent displays of sexual aggression from Croat or Muslim forces. Later, when the British troops ask a Serb commander – the drama’s central villain – to explain why his forces are shelling a village, the commander replies that the attack is in fact being conducted by Muslim forces shelling their ‘own people’. The commander’s self-satisfied smile and smugly folded arms as he utters this explanation clearly indicate that he is cynically lying; moreover, his arrogant manner shows that he cares little about concealing the lie from his interlocutors – on the contrary, he relishes this opportunity to mock the impotent UNPROFOR soldiers. That such cruel and contemptible commanders were widespread in the Bosnian war is beyond doubt. But the commander’s smug rationalisation of the shelling implies that the very notion of Muslim forces shelling Muslim civilians is a patent absurdity, recognised as such by all sides. This implication is highly problematic. As noted above, according to many UN observers, Muslim forces did bomb the Sarajevo marketplace in 1994 and 1995 in order to provoke a NATO attack on the Serbs. Certainly, Muslim false flag operations were commonplace in the Bosnian war and are not merely the cynical invention of Serb apologists.

Like much of the news media coverage of the Bosnian war, several scenes inWarriors emphasise the similarities and continuities between the Second World War and the Bosnian conflict. Blocked on the road by Serb forces, some of the UNPROFOR soldiers are subjected to racist abuse from the arrogant Serb commander discussed above. The commander is openly contemptuous of a Jewish soldier, Lieutenant Jonathan Engel (Ifan Meredith), and asks Sergeant André Sochanik (Cal Macaninch) why somebody with a Polish name would wish to save the lives of ‘dirty Muslims’. Sochanik does not respond to the provocation; a little later, however, he implicitly answers the commander’s question during a conversation with the interpreter Aida (Jasmina Sijerčić). Sochanik explains to Aida that his Polish father had been a forced labourer in Serbia during the Second World War. There he helped to build Nazi concentration camps, in one of which he met Sochanik’s Serbian mother; both parents survived and eventually found sanctuary in Scotland where they became, in Sochanik’s words, ‘invisible guests’.

Sochanik’s account of his troubled family history resonates with one of the film’s earliest scenes, in which Sochanik travels home to Scotland to attend the funeral of his brother, who has been killed in a tractor accident in a field on the family farm. On arriving at the farm, Sochanik’s first action is to visit the scene of his brother’s accident. As thunder rumbles ominously, Sochanik stands over a muddy pit stained with his brother’s blood, a detail that connects this particular site of horror across time and space to the killing fields of Bosnia and, implicitly, to the horrors that were presumably witnessed by Sochanik’s father in the 1940s. Sochanik feels guilty for having left his brother to look after the farm on behalf of his elderly parents; yet the clear implication of the film is that his presence in Bosnia is important in ensuring that persecution such as that suffered by Sochanik’s parents never reoccurs. Taken together, the scenes involving Sochanik establish a correspondence between the soldier’s personal debt of honour to his persecuted and exiled father and what the drama presents as Britain’s – and indeed the world’s – social and moral responsibility to prevent a recurrence of the Nazi holocaust. Sochanik is thus a key figure in the narrative and his personal biography links the ethico-political imperatives of the present to a memory of the Nazi past, evoking a dual time frame for the drama.

This linkage between the 1940s and the 1990s is made explicit in the second part of the film. In Croatian territory in 1993, Almira Zec and Lieutenant Feeley visit an open field that is ominously overlooked by a large crucifix. Almira grimly informs her companion: ‘This is where the perimeter fence ran. The Ustaše brought the Jews and the Serbs here, before they were transported to Germany. History is screaming at us’. Almira’s reflection upon the similarity between the atrocities committed by the Nazis’ Ustaše allies in Croatia during the Second World War and the current situation in Bosnia is grimly corroborated by the scenes that follow, in which the British UNPROFOR troops witness the horrific aftermath of the burning of Muslim houses by Croat forces in Ahmići.

Indeed, despite its glossing over of Muslim violence, Warriors identifies both Serb and Croat atrocities with those of the Nazis with creditable even-handedness. Given the widespread tendency in both journalism and popular media to present the Serbs as the sole progenitors and perpetrators of the Bosnian war, this is one of the drama’s most notable achievements. Yet the implications of the drama’s comparisons between the Bosnian conflict and the Second World War are nonetheless problematic, and not simply because of the difference in scale between the horrors of the Second World War and those of the Bosnian war. The invocation of Nazi atrocities to justify military intervention, while commonplace, rests on the assumption that the Second World War was a ‘just war’ against fascism. Jackson and Kosminsky appear to subscribe to this view, implying, through the figure of Sochanik, a parallel between the supposedly self-evident necessity of the Allies to fight against the Axis powers and the perceived need for intervention in Bosnia. As we have seen, the same parallel is drawn in Welcome to Sarajevo and was widely invoked by US politicians in discussions of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Yet the affirmative view of the allied cause in the Second World War is eminently contestable – and markedly less popular in Dresden and Hiroshima. In recent years, in fact, a great deal of important historical scholarship has undermined the hegemonic view of the Second World War was a just war undertaken in defence of democracy (Pauwels, 2002; Winer, 2007; Baker, 2008). Nor did the allied victory in the Second World War make the world a safer place, as the bloody history of post-war US imperialism – from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq – clearly shows. Similarly, Western military involvement in Bosnia – and in Kosovo in 1999 – can be argued to have increased rather than reduced the bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.

Warriors also reflects a distinctly optimistic view of the role of contemporary news journalism. When the British soldiers are prevented from moving their vehicle by a crowd of Muslim civilians seeking protection from Serb shelling, they essentially become hostages pending an attack by the Serbs scheduled for the following morning. As the people and the soldiers anxiously wait for dawn to break, Sergeant Sochanik – the drama’s central moral figure, as I suggested above – tells Aida that he can appreciate why the terrified Bosnians have prevented them from leaving. ‘If they die tomorrow’, notes Sochanik, ‘the world will be none the wiser. If we die too, the world will take notice’. Sochanik’s observation is poignant enough; yet it also reinforces a view of journalists as impartial observers whose reporting has – or at least should have – the power to prevent atrocities. There is clearly some resonance here with the heroic view of journalism found in Welcome to Sarajevo and The Hunting Party and with the notion of the ‘journalism of attachment’ that gained much currency during the Bosnian conflict. Like many Western journalists during the war, Sochanik argues that media coverage of atrocities will compel the ‘international community’ to act. But as argued above, the world’s major powers were heavily involved in the war from the outset; moreover, by reporting the war in way that reinforced the geopolitical interests of the great powers, Western journalists built support for the horrific NATO attack on Bosnia.

The presentation of the United Nations in Warriors is arguably characterised by a similar naivety. In many films about the Bosnian war – from No Man’s Land to The Hunting Party – UN officials are presented as bumbling incompetents. A similar view of UN personnel emerges in Warriors. The visible face of the UN in the drama is Rik Langrubber, a mild-mannered, knowledgeable, but ultimately ineffectual bureaucrat who is regarded with suspicion by the British soldiers, especially Lieutenant Laughrey. But the presentation of the UN as neutral and toothless ignores the UN’s structural role in co-ordinating the interests of various imperialist states (mostly, although certainly not always, those of the US). Like its predecessor, the League of Nations, which Lenin famously called a ‘den of thieves’, the UN has since its earliest days been complicit in orchestrating and implementing imperialist agendas, as Peter Gowan (2010: 47-71) has shown in detail. The International Communist Current (2008) even proposes that in Bosnia, ‘Britain and France, as UN peacekeepers, helped enforce the murderous Serbian siege of Sarajevo. The massacre of Srebrenica included the complicity of UN forces on the ground, notably Dutch troops and British SAS “observers”’. However that may be, the notion that the UN is potentially a force for global good – if only it could ‘get its act together’ – is highly questionable. In general, Jackson and Kosminsky conceive of the UN, the Western powers and the media in broadly liberal terms as fundamentally neutral institutions that can be used for good or ill, depending on the presence or absence of political ‘will’. But this view is challenged by the arguments of Diana Johnstone, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti and the other left-wing critics discussed above, for whom the West’s political, military and media apparatuses played an important part in dismantling Yugoslavia and in justifying Western military intervention to the public.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge the superiority of Warriors to the majority of popular and news media depictions of the conflict. The tone of Warriors is less overtly jingoistic than many of the Hollywood films about the war, such as Behind Enemy Lines and the film’s evocation of historical parallels through the character of Sochanik is highly sophisticated – even if these parallels are made in support an interventionist agenda. In its relatively even-handed depiction of both Croat and Serb atrocities, Warriors is also less one-sided and less in thrall to dominant media and political discourses than other respected Bosnian war films, such as No Man’s Landand Welcome to Sarajevo, and it certainly does not take such egregious liberties with the historical record as the latter film. It might also be argued that Warriors’ relatively lengthy, two-part dramatic form is better able to capture the complexity of the Bosnian war than other cinematic treatments and the drama arguably depicts the horrors of the Bosnian war, such as the Ahmići massacre, more adequately than any other screen fiction. The filmalso delivers some trenchant critical observations on the army’s treatment of its soldiers. During the UNPROFOR forces’ initial briefing on arriving in Vitez, for example, a soldier whispers sardonically to his colleague: ‘just remember your equipment’s made by the lowest bidder’. This comment resonates with more recent complaints that British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are dangerously under-equipped for combat. The drama thus acknowledges the pressures and hardships experienced by British soldiers – even if it accepts the legitimacy of their presence in Bosnia as a given. Overall, however, Warriors’ representation of the Bosnian war and its participants does not depart significantly from the dominant Western news media and popular cultural narratives of the conflict. The drama underplays the extent of Muslim violence, which ultimately leads to a rather one-sided view of the events of the Bosnian war. And by positing the resolution of the Bosnian war in terms of Western political, military and media intervention, the film underestimates the critical role of those institutions in causing the war and legitimating further military involvement.

As noted earlier, Kosminsky’s work has often drawn censure from the political establishment; but, tellingly, Warriors attracted no criticisms from journalists or politicians – perhaps because it departs so little from the hegemonic Western media view of the war. In its implicit call for Western military intervention in Bosnia,Warriors’ political message contrasts markedly with the anti-war perspective of Kosminsky’s early documentaries and his more recent television films for Britain’s Channel 4, such as The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007), both of which implicitly question the legal and moral grounds for Britain’s invasion of Iraq. That Kosminsky, who is known for making dramas that question dominant political paradigms, should have adopted an interventionist line in Warriors suggests something of the potency and reach of Western propaganda throughout the 1990s on behalf of what Noam Chomsky (2008) has called ‘humanitarian imperialism’.

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'The only honourable course': the media and 'humanitarian' war

11/5/2011

 
Picture
And the best at war finally are those who preach peace – Charles Bukowski, ‘The Genius of the Crowd’

In the summer of 2009, Harry Patch died. Patch had been one of the last surviving British soldiers to have fought in the First World War, the experience of which, quite understandably, he refused to discuss for many decades afterwards. In Patch’s view, the First World War was ‘organised murder’ in which both Germans and British soldiers needlessly died serving the interests of their rulers. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2005, Patch averred that ‘It wasn’t worth it. If two governments can’t agree, give them a rifle each and let them fight it out. Don’t lose twenty thousand men. It isn’t worth it’. Asked by the interviewer if ‘the world’ had learned anything from World War I, Patch starkly replied, presumably with reference to world leaders: ‘No. They never learn’. Patch’s comments reflect the working class principle of internationalist solidarity; they rightly imply that workers had no class interest in fighting in – and every reason to oppose – the twentieth-century’s world wars. Patch’s intransigent opposition to imperialist war has been applauded by some: the rock group Radiohead, for example, penned an anti-war song based on Patch’s Today interview. Yet following Patch’s death, all of the British news channels broadcast comments from, inter alia, the Queen, Prince Charles and the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who – ignoring Patch’s view of war – lost no time in claiming Patch as a symbol of noble ‘sacrifice’ for the nation.

A few months later, in a BBC News at Ten broadcast (3 March 2010), a variety of dignitaries registered their respect for the recently deceased left-wing Labour politician Michael Foot. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown noted Foot’s ‘commitment to justice’ and praised the politician as ‘good, compassionate, and dedicated to his country’. The last of these three accolades, at least, was beyond doubt. Amongst his many patriotic gestures, Foot, as co-author of the 1940 book Guilty Men, criticised the so-called ‘appeasement’ of German imperialism in the lead-up to the Second World War and supported Britain’s entry into the war. Four decades later, Foot was a key player in the decision to send the British Task Force to the Falkland Islands in 1982, congratulating the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on her subsequent ‘victory’ (one that resulted in the deaths of large numbers of Argentine conscripts, many of them only teenagers). Foot was also an early advocate of the bombing of Serbia in the 1990s.

The media reports of each of these two men’s lives and beliefs involved a staggering inversion of reality: the working class internationalist who had repeatedly stated his horror at the inhumanity of war and expressed international solidarity with ‘enemy’ combatants was posthumously claimed as a patriot who sacrificed his life for ‘his’ country. A nationalist, war-mongering politician, on the other hand, was honoured as a ‘man of peace’. Taken together, these reports demonstrate the capitalist media’s awesome capacity to recuperate working class political perspectives and to camouflage support for imperialist violence with the liberal language of ‘peace’ and humanitarianism.

Imperialist conflict has characterised capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, every aspect of social life was subsumed under the ‘national interest’ and every combatant state justified its entry into the war as a matter of national defence, demonising the enemy population. Writing about anti-German propaganda at the time, the British social critic Norman Angell, in his essay ‘The Commercialization of Demagogy’, noted with dismay that ‘every story about the wickedness of Germans, [...] every cartoon revealing the Hun as a sly and fraudulent debtor, means crystallizing certain opinions, thestiffening of a certain attitude on social questions’.During both world wars, indeed, the press and later radio and newsreel films played an important role in justifying imperialist aggression. Indeed, the media continue to justify these world wars retrospectively, asserting the moral preeminence of ‘our’ nation state. Every schoolchild knows, for instance, that Britain and its allies fought on the side of ‘good’ against the ‘evil’ Nazis in the Second World War. Innumerable television documentaries about Hitler and the Schutzstaffel regularly remind us of the horrors of the Nazi genocide – and rightly so. Yet the British terror in colonial India, or the British-engineered Bengal famine, which killed many millions of people during the Second World War (and possibly 30 million over the entire period of British rule, since the British, in India as in Ireland, used famine as a disciplinary tool) are not generally considered suitable topics for television documentaries; nor, for that matter, are the allied nuclear attacks on Japan or the terror bombings of German cities. To draw a more contemporary comparison: the six million slaughtered by the Nazis in the 1940s must ‘never be forgotten’; but the six million slaughtered since the mid-1990s by armies supported by the Western powers in the Democratic Republic of Congo do not even register on the news agenda. Genocide is endemic to capitalism – but only ‘their’ genocides are recognised and memorialized by the media.

As the lionisation of Michael Foot shows, left-wing defences of imperialism often garner support more effectively than crude jingoism. In the post-Cold War era, imperialist wars have increasingly been justified as ‘humanitarian interventions’, not just by conservative commentators, but also – and perhaps even more vociferously – by liberal journalists and academics. The inter-imperialist nature of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, for example, has been buried underneath what Edward Herman and David Peterson have called the Western media’s ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’ as the conflict came to be framed as a Manichean struggle between the forces of good (‘the West’) and evil (the Serbs). The Western media’s perspective on the Bosnian war is highly instructive, in fact, as it set the precedent for the media coverage of NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslavia and the US’s more recent military assaults – also launched under the sacred banner of ‘human rights’ – upon Afghanistan and Iraq.

Accounts of the Bosnian war often omit any discussion of the conflict’s origins in imperialist confrontation. As the Yugoslav regime disintegrated at the end of the Cold War, Muslim, Croat and Serb political parties competed in multi-party elections, fracturing the country along ethnic lines. Yet Yugoslavia’s disintegration was also promoted by the Western powers. The German government rushed to extend full recognition to Croatia and as ethnic violence broke out between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, the US ultimately identified its own client through which to exert its influence in the region, aggressively promoting the ‘independence’ of Bosnia and backing the Muslims led by Alija Izetbegović (a Muslim fundamentalist and a member of a group that collaborated with the Nazi Schutzstaffel during the Second World War, committing atrocities against Jews and the resistance movement). As the Yugoslav region that had shown the greatest resistance both to an IMF-led austerity programmes imposed on Yugoslavia in the 1980s – and to the war when it began – Serbia was to be punished.

All sides involved in the Bosnian conflict committed appalling atrocities, burning villages, slaughtering and raping their populations. Yet the US media effectively recognised only one aggressor, instituting a relentless anti-Serb propaganda campaign. As the No War But the Class War group claims in its article ‘Notes Towards a Text on the 1999 Balkan War and the Media’:

"An article from a former soldier in Bosnia said that when an American TV crew turned up at his base they asked to see a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosnian Muslims – which they were duly shown. When the UN soldiers asked if they wanted to take photos of a burnt-out village previously inhabited by Bosnian Serbs, the journalists refused, saying it would confuse the issue: their viewers wanted clear ideas about what was going on."


Liberal journalists and intellectuals clamouring for military ‘intervention’ advanced their own ‘clear ideas’ about what to do with the Serbs. Anthony Lewis wrote New York Times columns demanding military action. Susan Sontag – mother of one of the chief journalist-apologists for the US invasion, David Rieff – and the actress Vanessa Redgrave made pilgrimages to Sarajevo to support imperialist violence. Indeed, the ‘Bosnian question’ flushed out numerous liberal academics and high-profile pundits as apologists for imperialism, most notably Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Todd Gitlin and Vaclav Havel. The nationalist frenzy that gripped liberals during the 1990s is epitomized by Richard Rorty’s angry call, in Achieving our Country, for a left version of American patriotism. Not for nothing has Noam Chomsky identified the 1990s as the ‘nadir’ of recent Western intellectual history.

Britain, like most of the European states, had relatively little economic interest in the Balkans and its ruling class was divided over whether to orient itself towards Serbia or Croatia and over whether, during a recession, to undertake a costly military action. Ultimately, however, Britain accepted the position of the US as the latter developed a more aggressive policy towards Bosnia and the British media, like its US counterpart, began to adopt an anti-Serb position. One of the most hard-line interventionist newspapers throughout the 1990s was the liberal newspaper The Independent, whose journalists wrote of Serbian genocide and rape camps – accusations with no credible evidential basis, as Diana Johnson’s book Fools’ Crusade and Edward Herman and David Peterson’s Monthly Review article ‘The Dismantling of Yugoslavia’ point out. The death camps rumour was circulated by a Croat public relations agency Ruder Finn in order to galvanise the support of Jewish pressure groups, which might otherwise have been less than enthusiastic to back the cause of Muslim fundamentalists with historical connections to the Nazis. Michael Parenti records in his book To Kill A Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia that Ruder Finn’s director, when challenged on the evidential basis of the company’s claims, stated: ‘Our work is not to verify information […] Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us […] We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralize’. Meanwhile, from left to right, the British press, includingThe Independent, The Telegraph, New Statesman, The Guardian and The Sun, mobilised a range of racist stereotypes which demonised Serbs as tribal, primitive, evil, bloodthirsty and bestial, as the work of Philip Hammond has shown.

Adding insult to injury, the bias of Western journalists was justified by an appeal to a set of professional practices that collectively became known as the ‘journalism of attachment’: an allegedly new mode of affective reportage intended to cut through the suffocating ‘neutrality’ of existing journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage. The concept of the ‘journalism of attachment’ allowed liberal journalists such as Ed Vulliamy to present themselves as mavericks unafraid of ‘speaking out’ bravely and passionately about the horrors of war, while in practice doing so only on behalf of Muslim victims. In reality, these ‘mavericks’ constituted the journalistic mainstream and those who questioned their distortions, as Tariq Ali notes in the introduction to his collection Masters of the Universe: NATO’s Balkan Crusade, ‘were denounced as traitors, appeasers and worse’. Indeed, contra those journalists and academics who argued that media coverage of Bosnia was ineffectually neutral, British media coverage of the war was in fact savagely partisan. 

Advocates of Western ‘intervention’ in Bosnia (in fact, Western powers were heavily involved in Bosnia from the outset) were spectacularly rewarded in the autumn of 1995 when US warplanes attacked Bosnian Serb positions in Operation Storm. Towns and villages throughout Bosnia were targeted and many hundreds of civilians were killed and wounded. The US president Bill Clinton invoked Serbian human rights violations – comparing them to those committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust – to justify the operation. The bombings allowed the regular army of Croatia, together with Bosnian Moslem and Croat forces, to overrun Serb regions in northwest Bosnia in a ground offensive that killed and wounded thousands and turned another 125,000 people into refugees. They joined the quarter of a million Serb civilians driven out of Krajina by the Croatian army in what was, as Herman and Peterson point out, probably the war’s largest single act of ethnic expulsion. Yet the suffering of the Serb population elicited no sympathy from those demanding ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Bosnia, since Operation Storm was what Herman and Peterson acerbically describe as ‘benign’ ethnic cleansing – that is, ethnic cleansing conducted by the US and its allies.

The media coverage of the notorious massacre of Muslims at the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN ‘safe haven’, further demonstrates the bias of the Western media reporting of the Bosnian war. Serb forces in and around Srebrenica committed appalling atrocities. Yet Western journalists took care to detach the massacre from its surrounding context. In 1992, the Serbs had been driven out of Srebrenica and the years leading up to the massacre saw many attacks on nearby Serb towns. Indeed, Srebrenica was not simply a ‘safe haven’ for civilians; it also functioned as a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations. Yet this context was not supplied in media references to Srebrenica. In his review essay ‘Diana Johnstone on the Balkan Wars’, Edward Herman notes that

"it has been an absolute rule of Rieff et al./media reporting on the Bosnian conflict to present evidence of Serb violence in vacuo, suppressing evidence of prior violence against Serbs, thereby falsely suggesting that Serbs were never responding but only initiated violence (this applies to Vukovar, Mostar, Tuzla, Goražde, and many other towns)."

It is likely that more civilians were killed during the US’s Operation Storm than died at Srebrenica; yet only Srebrenica has entered historical myth as a ‘genocide’. Herman and Peterson’s wider observation about the hypocrisy of US and British war reporting is relevant here:

"We find it interesting that in the West, the millions or more deaths from the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths that have followed the 2003 invasion are never presented as ‘genocide’ or events that we ‘must never forget’. These deaths did not merit the indignation of Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, Samantha Power, and the mainstream media. The driving out of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia, and killing several thousand of them, doesn’t even rate the designation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, let alone genocide. […] The 16,000 Serb civilians killed in Bosnia in 1992–95 are effectively disappeared, while the 31,000 Muslim civilians killed in the latter years are elevated to world class status as victims of genocide."


As this passage suggests, the bias of Western media coverage of the Bosnian war was obscured by appeals to the universalist notion of humanitarianism – a keyword in the lexicon of Western imperialism in the 1990s. The hypocrisy of these appeals was most notable in the liberal media of the period: NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was announced by such forthright headlines as The Sun’s ‘Clobba Slobba: Our Boys Batter Butcher of Serbia’ and the Daily Star’s ‘Serbs You Right’; yet the same attack was sanctioned with a decidedly chivalrous flourish in a Guardianleader article (23 March 1999) as ‘the only honourable course for Europe and America’.

The more recent invasion of Iraq in 2003 was characterised by significant strategic disagreement within the ruling classes of the ‘coalition’ countries and by greater public opposition to the war than had been mounted against the Bosnian war. Nonetheless, the mainstream media mostly supported the Iraq war – a war in which one million Iraqis died and perhaps 4.5 million were displaced. In America, newscasters and embedded reporters at both Fox News and the more liberal CNN referred to US forces as ‘liberators’ and ‘heroes’. In the UK, where the ruling class itself was more divided over whether to invade, The Guardian, no doubt mindful of the significant public opposition to the war, was circumspect about the invasion, but nonetheless accepted (6 February 2003) that must Iraq be made to ‘disarm’ itself of its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – weapons now conceded not to have existed. On the eve of the invasion, Bill Neely noted in ITV’s News at Ten (19 March 2003) that ‘the marines are prepared for one of the first and most daring operations’. The BBC was also robust in its support for the invasion. As David Edwards and David Cromwell document in their book Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, BBC journalists including Matt Frei, Andrew Marr, Rageh Omaar and John Simpson breathlessly endorsed the invasion – an invasion still seen by the BBC as, in the words of a Radio 4 lunchtime news broadcast (22 August 2010), ‘the battle for a better Iraq’. In fact, despite the criticisms levelled at the BBC in the Hutton Report and inevitable allegations from the BBC’s rivals in the conservative press that the organisation was ‘anti-war’, a Cardiff University study showed that the BBC was actually the least anti-war of the British news networks during the conflict, quoting more coalition sources and fewer Iraqi sources than the other networks and placing the least emphasis on Iraqi casualties. The BBC’s support for the invasion was echoed by a roll call of elite liberal print journalists – the ‘herd of independent minds’, in Harold Rosenberg’s phrase – including Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Johann Hari. It would be churlish not to applaud the decency of those journalists – notably Omaar and Hari – who have had the grace to rescind their support for the war in recent years; yet here again we must be wary of the potential of such apologetics to humanise – and thereby restore public trust in – the capitalist media apparatuses and, by extension, the political institutions whose values they reflect.

The British media was also overwhelmingly supportive of the coalition’s ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, often on humanitarian grounds. For example, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – another journalist who later withdrew her support for war – voiced the widespread liberal opinion that the invasion was necessary to protect the rights of women. In reality, however, the invasion of Afghanistan has led to appalling civilian suffering through drone attacks, bombing and other forms of terrorism. This misery has attracted little media interest at home. According to the news media watchdog Medialens, for example, the British media downplayed a report from Afghan government investigators that special forces executed ten Afghan civilians, eight of them children, in Kunar province during a joint US-Afghan operation on 27 December 2009. Stephen White of The Mirror (‘Base Blast Kills Eight US civilians’, 31 December 2009) ignored the story, reporting instead on the deaths of American civilians in a suicide bombing at an Afghan military base, while The Sunday Telegraph (3 January 2010) described the incident as ‘a raid in which US forces shot dead 10 people at a suspected bomb factory’. The Guardian (2 January 2010) relegated the story to a few lines at the end of a report on the death of a British bomb disposal expert, while BBC, ITN and Channel 4 television news made no mention of the incident. In fact, only Jerome Starkey of The Times (31 December 2009) reported the story. As Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick suggest in ‘How to improve war reporting in Afghanistan’, ‘the human cost of war in Afghanistan is being systematically downplayed’, while ‘the voices of Afghan people themselves are nearly always excluded’. Not only has the liberal media effectively condoned the devastation of Afghanistan, but the country’s appallingly high rates of maternal deaths, violence against and enslavement of girls and women serve as a shocking refutation of the liberal myth that the war, which has now spilled over into Pakistan, was fought for women’s liberation.

The news media’s complicity with the coalition’s recent wars has been complemented by sympathetic television documentaries about the experiences of the armed forces. The Ministry of Defence-approved Sky1 documentary Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (2008) and its sequel follow the daily lives of British troops in Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers. The youth channel BBC3, meanwhile, has done its bit for army recruitment and pro-war propaganda with Girls on the Frontline (25 March 2010). Girls on the Frontline offers a gendered reworking of the reality documentary series about US soldiers in Afghanistan, Profiles from the Front Line (ABC, 2003), which was based on a concept pitched by Jerry Bruckheimer to the US Pentagon. Over a pounding musical soundtrack, the programme tracks a group of female British soldiers training to be despatched to Afghanistan’s Helmand province and frequently mentions the ‘risks’ that they face. Like liberal feature films from The Deer Hunter to The Hurt Locker, these programmes reverently catalogue the privations suffered by ‘our’ troops, eliding both the geopolitical manoeuvres that underpin capitalist wars and the suffering of the majority of their victims. Such soft propaganda helps to manufacture public consent for imperialist terror far more insidiously than the gung-ho patriotism of the right-wing media.

During World War I, the German communist Karl Liebknecht famously reminded workers that ‘the main enemy is at home’. The precept is also well understood by the ruling class. As John Pilger has written in New Statesman (29 March 2010), ‘Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens’. In the battle to overcome these instincts, the patriotic cheerleading of the news media certainly plays a key role; Erich Fromm’s remark inThe Sane Society that ‘nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity’ remains accurate more than fifty years later. But at least as influential as today’s right-wing media jingoists are the liberal journalists and commentators who – dripping with soulfulness, in Ralph Miliband’s phrase – justify imperialist wars in the name feminism, liberation and humanitarianism and who, when civilian blood flows too conspicuously, can always repent their ‘errors of judgement’.

Bosnia, baby!

9/1/2011

 
Picture
Never let it be said that you don't get the most up-to-the-minute movie information here at Relative Autonomy. Tonight I watched a 1998 film, Predrag Antonijevic's Savior, with mixed reactions.

Set during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, Savior is at times an unpleasantly brutal film. Following the death of his wife and child in a Muslim terrorist bombing in Paris, Joshua Rose (Dennis Quaid) goes on an Islamophobic rampage, gunning down worshippers in a mosque. Fleeing to the French foreign legion, he eventually ends up in Bosnia fighting for the Serbs, where he further indulges his murderous bigotry with robotic impassivity. These early scenes are short and stereotypical - resembling a mid-film montage sequence rather than a conventional cinematic opening - so that the film's first quarter seems facile and dramatically under-developed. The acting, moreover, is woeful. Rather than the traumatised automaton he is supposed to be, Quaid looks like a man desperately trying to act like a traumatised automaton.

Things become more interesting when Rose, following a Serb-Muslim prisoner exchange, is obliged to take care of a Serb woman, Vera (Nataša Ninković), who has been raped and disowned by her family. When Vera's child is born, Rose takes on new responsibilities and undergoes the near-statutory moral reawakening. Hackneyed as the narrative may be, there are some touching moments. When Rose and Vera are offered refuge for a night by some kindly civilians, we are given an affecting insight into how ordinary people retain their dignity and generosity in the midst of horror.

Also noteworthy is the film's take on the balance of atrocities during the war. While some have accused the film - directed by a Serb - of pro-Serb bias, the film contains and clearly condemns scenes of Serb violence (in one of the film's ghastliest moments, Rose's degenerate comrade Goran cuts off the finger of an elderly Muslim lady in order to take her ring); but it also unflinchingly depicts Croat/Muslim atrocities - even if the latter do rather outnumber the former.

This is refreshing considering how closely Hollywood (and many other) films about the war have conformed to the anti-Serb script of the US and British news media. Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) and Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party (2007) are shameless pieces of anti-Serb propaganda in which Serbs are cast as screaming psychopaths and Muslim atrocities go unmentioned. Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land (2001), for all its cultural cachet, also propounds a one-sided view of the war, in its presentation of a neurotic and duplicitous Serb and a 'cool' and liberal, Westernized Muslim soldier. Even Peter Kosminsky's 1999 television film Warriors, which has been widely hailed for its realism and anti-war ethos, takes up the 'evil Serb' paradigm and does not depict Muslim atrocities.

Yet none of these films - including Savior - displays much understanding of the matrix of macro-political forces that contributed to the destruction of the former Yugoslavia. While it is difficult to forget the images of inter-ethnic cruelty in films like Savior, we should also remember how the world's great powers - notably the US, Germany, Britain and France - descended on Yugoslavia like wolves in the 1990s, tearing the country apart. That is a story too little told.

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