RELATIVE AUTONOMY: MEDIA, FILM & POLITICS
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evacuated: christopher nolan's dunkirk

30/7/2017

 
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According to my late mother, my grandad was evacuated on 'the last boat out of Dunkirk'. I didn't discuss this with the old guy before he died - I was too young and lived too far away from him - but after his death I read more about Operation Dynamo and often wondered about his story. Christopher Nolan's much-heralded extravaganza is the latest of several attempts to put that story on the big screen.

It's only fair to begin by saying that I'm no great fan of Nolan's work. I found Interstellar (2014) overblown, and several critics have - rightly, I think - identified films such as The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as politically conservative. Let's just say I prefer Nolan's early work. Nevertheless, stylistically, the new film is innovative and sometimes captivating: throughout Dunkirk, sea and sky twist and spiral in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of blue-grey fractals. And Nolan builds tension well, emphasizing the soldiers' desperate plight by showing men in various types of trap: Harry Styles and company are trapped in a boat that is being shot at by the enemy; a Spitfire pilot is unable to escape from the cockpit of his sea-ditched plane as the water level rises; a traumatized and unpredictable soldier (Cillian Murphy) is locked inside a room below deck on a rescue boat - and presumably locked inside himself, too. All are encased and in danger.

On the other hand, we are hardly invited to empathize with these imperilled men. The ensemble nature of the film - together with Hans Zimmer's bombastic musical soundtrack - leaves little room for expressions of interiority or, indeed, for any sort of character development; as one might expect from a film shot on 70mm, this is experiential, immersive cinema rather than character-driven drama. Of course, ensemble war films can work well: one thinks here of The Thin Red Line, whose metaphysical voiceovers provide a ruminative and arguably subversive perspective on war; but in Dunkirk there is no such narrative device to shed light on the soldiers' feelings or thoughts, making this a rather unengaging film at the emotional level.

The film’s ideological register, meanwhile, is distinctly British-patriotic. While the opening scene (easily the film's most exciting) fleetingly depicts some glowering Frenchmen manning the town's barricades, the very significant French presence on the beach at Dunkirk is all but ignored (for that side of the story, see Henri Verneuil's superior, irony-laden 1964 film Weekend at Dunkirk). Whether in the air with an impossibly deadly Spitfire ace played by Tom Hardy (who single-handedly seems to down the entire Luftwaffe), at sea with saturnine sailor Mark Rylance, or on the beach with the harried and frustrated evacuees, we see through British eyes. At times the national-chauvinist sentiment grates: Rylance, sailing towards a deadly warzone, finds time to wax lyrical about the beauty of the overhead Spitfires 'with their Rolls Royce engines' and the film ends, all too predictably, with the words of Winston Churchill, solemnly read aloud from a newspaper by a returning soldier.

None of the soldiers, meanwhile, expresses a view about the political causes of their plight and there is thus no counterweight to the film's patriotism. Indeed, while Dunkirk is a film about an inglorious defeat, the mood slowly lists towards sentimental nationalism (recalling a motif from Interstellar, 'Home', as uttered by Kenneth Branagh's naval officer Commander Bolton, becomes the film's most resonant utterance). Evacuated of the French allies, the German enemies, and any political frame of reference beyond Churchillian bluster, Nolan’s film feels strangely insular and abstract (perhaps, as Adam Nayman suggests, Nolan should be seen as a Platonic rather than a humanist filmmaker). And so, for all its audio-visual Sturm und Drang, Dunkirk is ultimately a rather tame affair in which character development and political context are sacrificed for grand spectacle and bland sentimentality.

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.

malala and the 'Feminist' justification for war

11/10/2014

 
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WAR IS PEACE
The conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize is always a source of grim amusement at this time of year. Only 5 years ago, the award went to Barack Obama, who, displaying commendable insight, said he had not deserved it. This year the recipient is Malala Yousafzai, a young woman from the Swat Valley in Pakistan who was shot by the Taliban on her way to school in 2012. Following her recovery, Yousafzai has gone on to be lauded in the West as a champion of women's rights, even giving a speech on the subject at the UN and meeting with the British royal family. Indeed, while there is no doubt that Yousafzai has suffered bravely, she is now an establishment figure who is being used in the Western media as a poster girl for 'humanitarian' intervention. Earlier this year, for example, her name was attached to a Twitter campaign, supported by Michelle Obama, to 'Bring Back Our Girls' - an ostensibly progressive movement whose real intent was clearly to increase the US military presence in Nigeria against the challenge to its hegemony posed by China. Media figures such as Piers Morgan have also invoked the Malala story as a retrospective justification for the allied invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001. In short, Yousafzai's story is being exploited to provide a bogus 'feminist' justification for imperialism.

Had Yousafzai been a victim of a US drone attack, she would hardly have received such a warm welcome in Washington, as this Al Jazeera article points out. To invoke Herman and Chomsky's distinction, Yousafzai is a 'worthy victim', because she was injured by the enemy. By contrast, victims of US aggression are by definition 'unworthy' and are therefore ignored by politicians and mainstream media. And while she is still only a teenager, Yousafzai herself cannot be entirely exempted from blame for this state of affairs. Although she has criticised the US use of drones in Pakistan, she seems to have actively participated in the 'Bring Back Our Girls' campaign and has thanked Barack Obama for the United States' work in supporting female education in Pakistan and Afghanistan, despite the worsening situation of women in Afghanistan since the US invasion (and let us not forget that US support for the so-called
mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was a major contributor to the oppression of Afghan women!). 

WHITE WOMAN'S BURDEN
I am reminded of all of this watching Our Girl, a current BBC drama series about the experience of a young female medic working in the British army in Afghanistan. Written by Tony Grounds and starring former EastEnders actress Lacey Turner as Cockney Private Molly Dawes, Our Girl is an extrapolation of last year's one-off drama, which I had a good old moan about at the time. While not quite as tasteless as BBC Three's ongoing comedy Bluestone 42, in which young British soldiers in 'Afghan' crack bare jokes while under fire from faceless Taliban, Our Girl is a deeply problematic drama. The acting and the gentle soldierly 'banter' are unconvincing - Bluestone 42, actually, does much better in this respect - and the drama is deeply racist: Afghan men are presented as patriarchal brutes.
Noting a certain lack of narrative definition in cultural images of the Afghanistan war, Brian Castner has described the Afghanistan war as 'a stage without a play' - but these productions do contain common elements and a remarkably similar cast of characters, including young, working-class and happy-go-lucky soldiers doing their best in a profoundly reactionary country whose backward citizens require civilizing.

Indeed, the real scandal of Our Girl is its unalloyed pro-imperialism. In an echo of the Yousafzai story - and a travesty of history - we are repeatedly reminded that Western soldiers are in Afghanistan to help the local children get to school and to provide medical assistance to the locals. One of these is a young girl, Bashira, who is beaten by her father and already promised in marriage... unless Molly can save the day. This focus on women and women's issues serves to obscure the workings of imperialism, serving as a 'sexual decoy', in Zillah Eisenstein's phrase. While mention is made of British soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan (worthy victims), massacres of the Afghan population are not acknowledged and no serious criticism of the occupation is voiced. On the contrary, the third episode, which follows Dawes's period of leave in England, has introduced a new character: a manipulative and neurotic 'middle class' anti-war campaigner who ought to be, according to Dawes's grandmother, 'rolled into a carpet and lobbed off a bridge onto the M25’. The sinister message of the drama is the one shared by many of the supporters of Yousafzai; namely, that Western imperialism is making the world a safer place - for women, for men, for everybody; and those who do not agree should be silenced.
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World war 1: A Working Class Perspective

5/8/2014

 
There's a lot of First World War 'commemoration' going on in media land at the moment, most of which is best described as crypto-patriotic; in other words, while mainstream media eschew extreme expressions of jingoism (I suspect that they'd never get away with that, in Britain, at least), the strong implication is that WW1 was a worthy effort; indeed, 'the war effort', along with 'sacrifice', is a recurring phrase in the media discourse. There are even attempts to characterize this national chauvinism as feminist and progressive (thus we find attempts to explore the 'overlooked' 'contribution' of women to the war, and so on). In stark contrast to this patriotic rhetoric, the video below shows the real achievement of workers in World War 1, which lay not in fighting the war, but in ending it.

the war according to jeremy

5/2/2014

 
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At the start of what promises to be a bumper year for crypto-patriotic television 'commemorations' of the First World War, the BBC has begun broadcasting its four-part documentary series Britain's Great War, fronted by Jeremy Paxman. Predictably enough, neither Paxman, nor the programme's interviewees (including Julian Fellowes, who delivered a paean to the brutal Lord Kitchener of Battle of Omdurman and Boer War infamy), offered many opinions to which Michael Gove or Max Hastings would object. You 'can't fail to be impressed' by the numbers of men who signed up for the war, enthuses Paxman, who also refers repeatedly to 'the war effort' - a phrase whose nominalized neutrality elides the chaos and murder that this 'effort' entailed.

Even less subtle is Paxman's interview in the second episode with two contemporary Clydeside unionists. When these men express their admiration for the Glasgow shipbuilders who struck against their profiteering owners during the war, Paxman responds by jovially dismissing the workers as 'difficult buggers'. In a similar vein, Paxman asks the relative of a conscientious objector who refused conscription whether such men were not 'just being awkward'. This is psychologism as historiography. Just as Paxman, in a recent interview, regarded Russell Brand's rejection of bourgeois electoral politics as an expression of apathy ('you can't even be arsed to vote'), he regards those who objected to war on principle as having an attitude problem. Clearly, these men needed to buck up their ideas. Indeed, the list of those too dense or perverse to get behind the war effort includes such irredeemable dunderheads as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, all of whom were jailed for their opposition; what a bunch of losers!

It is in summing up his own attitude towards the 'conchies' that Paxman makes explicit his opinion about the war in a direct address to camera. Describing 'absolutist' objectors as 'cranks', he emphasizes that the war 'had to be fought' to save Europe from becoming a gigantic German colony. Yet the moral force of this argument would be easier to accept if Britain in 1914 had not presided over the most extensive empire in the world - a feat achieved by an unparalleled dedication to deadly force. But Paxo does not register Britain's history of colonial violence; he even opines that military conscription was a tough sell in Britain, since it contradicted the country's 'respect for individual freedoms'; these were, presumably, the freedoms that Britain was safeguarding through its pre-war terrorisation - including rape, torture and murder - of India, China and South Africa.

If the working-class perspective on the war is absent from Paxman's own commentary, it a structuring absence: Paxman often seems to be arguing against the anti-war position he knows many of his viewers will share. What else could people do, he asks exasperatedly, except join the 'war effort'? This is a rhetorical question, no doubt, but it is one to which Lenin had a fairly convincing answer: the working class had to turn the imperialist war into a class war by overthrowing the butchers who had led their friends and family members to the slaughter. And this is precisely what workers attempted to do, with tragically limited success, in Russia and Germany at the end of the conflict.

One might wonder whether there is any real reason to worry about how the First World War is being spun in the media. James Heartfield writes in a recent article on the subject:

"Those arguing over the First World War will find out soon enough that there is neither the opportunity nor the danger that there will be an upsurge of nationalistic identification with the British war effort. The depleting forces of popular militarism are clear for all to see."

I'm not sure about this. Certainly, a third world war is not immediately on the horizon - and even if it were, it would likely be fought with nuclear weapons, conveniently dispensing with the need for a mass mobilisation of brainwashed, jingoistic conscripts, even if these could be created. Nevertheless, programmes like Paxman's - together with popular 'militainment' documentaries and dramas on television and campaigns such as Help for Heroes - have the general effect of instilling a sense of nationalism and rationalising the horrors of war in ways that serve to justify current imperialist adventures. For this reason, they must be clearly exposed for what they are: nationalist and militarist state propaganda.

World war and the media

16/1/2014

 
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left"  (Bertrand Russell)

As the centenary of the First World War approaches this year, a blimpish brigade of British politicians and writers is mobilising for a full-scale assault on the view - thankfully well-established in Britain - that World War I was a meaningless bloodbath. In the mainstream media in recent weeks, for example, it has been difficult to avoid the Education Secretary Michael Gove's attempts to present the 'Great War' as an heroic struggle for democracy - a 'just war', no less. A cunning if not learned man (as Leszek Kołakowski once argued, the right needs only tactics, not ideas), Gove has struck a liberal pluralist pose for BBC Radio 4 listeners, arguing that no single view of the war should be allowed to prevail, and a more populist, jingoistic stance for the right-wing tabloids, in which readers are advised to ignore leftists who denigrate patriotism (in truth, however, Gove should have no great concern on this account, since Gove's opposite number in the Labour party, Tristram Hunt, has an equally patriotic perspective on the war).

Gove takes particular issue with the many British film and television representations of World War I that emphasize the corruption of the British ruling class and the sufferings of the soldiers (Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer, Blackadder Goes Forth - and we could add Days of Hope). Now, despite teaching a course about British television drama, I must confess that until I sat down with the DVD box set this week, I had never watched Alan Bleasdale's The Monocled Mutineer - which tells the story of the 1917 mutiny of British soldiers in Étaples - from beginning to end. Featuring an electrifying performance from Paul McGann in the title role, the BBC drama broadly presents a working class view of the war: as the soldiers experience the inhumanity of war, some of them come to realise that their real enemies are not the working class Germans facing them in the trenches - who are barely mentioned in the course of the four-part serial - but their own generals and military police.

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It is unsurprising that Gove dislikes the drama; and unsurprising, too, that the production got into hot political water in 1986, when the future of the BBC as a public service broadcaster hung in the Thatcherite balance (then again, political opprobrium is always the fate of contestatory docudrama, from The War Game and Death of a Princess to The Government Inspector). And it is certainly hard to imagine how such bold, proletarian perspectives on war could make their way into British television dramas today (good as they are, Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain and Jimmy McGovern's 'Frankie's Story', in his Accused anthology, only suggest that life in the British army isn't all that it's cracked up to be). That, surely, is part of the reason why it is important to keep the working class view of World War I alive in critical debate. Now that the last surviving veterans of the war have passed away, we must remember what the most clear sighted of these men, such as Britain's 'last Tommy' Harry Patch, understood only too well: that the conflict was a senseless shambles in which young, mostly working class men were turned into meat and bones to serve the ends of their rulers. In the words of the British Private D. J. Sweeney, this was 'murder, not war'.

But while we are at it, we should also challenge nationalistic and patriotic understandings of the Second World War. This is, of course, much harder to do, since the myth that World War II was a 'Good War' fought for 'democracy' is deeply entrenched institutionally, politically and culturally. One struggles to name many popular films, novels or television dramas that question the purpose of the war. Popular culture has thoroughly heroised the allied 'war effort', registering only the atrocities of the axis powers, as though the terror bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, the manufacture of the Bengal famine, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. To take only the most recent example, Jonathan Teplitzy's Second World War-themed The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth, depicts the Japanese guards and Kempeitai who harass and torture their British prisoners as witless and bestial, while the Australians who finally rescue the British from captivity are 'civilised' (the adjective is emphasised by an Australian officer in an address to his new Japanese captives).


In reality, however, the allied treatment of the Japanese in World War II was rather different: as James Heartfield notes in his Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, for example, US forces made no accommodation for Japanese prisoners; rather, they often simply slaughtered them, a practice consistent with the propaganda message that the Japanese were subhuman. Heartfield points to the description of the Pacific war given by the British serviceman and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Edgar L. Jones in 1946:

"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers"

The racial thinking underpinning such barbarism, which allowed the Western public to accept the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been a staple of US military propaganda, as Nick Turse's recent book on the American war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, makes all too clear. By presenting a one-sided narrative of white victimhood and Japanese brutality, The Railway Man participates in this racist imaginary.
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The Second World War was, like its forerunner, a war fought between rival, and equally brutal, imperialist powers - a truth almost totally obscured by the Manichean narratives of popular culture, which continually reinforce the comforting myth that 'we' - the 'democratic powers' - were the good guys. Nevertheless, books such as Jacques Pauwels's The Myth of the Good War and Heartfield's Unpatriotic History point the way out of this labyrinth of lies, providing counter-hegemonic narratives of the conflict and exploding the myth that the mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians was 'just' and necessary to the defence of civilisation. I recommend both books to Michael Gove, whose understanding of the Second World War is doubtless as chauvinistic as his view of the First.

Back to iraq: on the bbc's 'the iraq war'

17/6/2013

 
'No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture' (Amadeo Bordiga)
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Ten years after the 'coalition' invasion of Iraq, the gap between the public perception of the war and the realities of the conflict remains staggeringly wide. A recent poll conducted by the research consultancy ComRes, for example, showed that the British public massively under-estimates the number of casualties during the Iraq war. As Channel 4 journalist Alex Thomson notes, this in turn raises questions about the accuracy and efficacy of the British news media's reporting of the war. The BBC's journalistic record during the Iraq War has been called into question many times and its presentation of the conflict continues to be a source of anger for many.

A new three-part series, titled simply The Iraq War, sets out to document the deliberations of high-profile political decision-makers both before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, drawing upon an impressive array of archive and original interview material. Produced by documentary supremos Brook Lapping for BBC2, the Series Producer is Norma Percy. Percy, a former parliamentary researcher, has acquired a formidable reputation for gaining access to high-profile figures, although I have found her previous work hugely problematic. Her take on Balkan wars of the 1990s in The Death of Yugoslavia and The Fall of Milošević, for example, demonises Slobodan Milošević and presents the Serbs as the sole aggressors in the conflicts - an appealingly simple Manichean narrative that is fully consistent with the mainstream Western script, but which will not do as a serious account of the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, The Iraq War adopts the same techniques - and displays the same geopolitical biases - as Percy's earlier work.

Television critics have generally applauded the production. In a blog post for the Telegraph, for example, David Blair writes that: 'As with all the best documentaries, there was no attempt to exaggerate: episode one covered the build-up to war and the programme-makers allowed the drama to speak for itself'. But there are good grounds for questioning whether documentary producers can ever really adopt a 'hands-off' approach to their material, as Blair implies they can. Every documentary tells a story that is the result of innumerable choices, including the selection of interviewees and archive material, the style and content of the narration and editing. So what kind of story is told in The Iraq War? What points of view does the documentary, to use Blair's word, 'allow' - and by the same token, what perspectives does it disallow?

The series' use of a 'Voice of God' style of narration, its tendency to concentrate on testimony rather than voiceover, and its stately mis-en-scene (which largely consists of elite politicians - mostly men - talking dispassionately to camera in elegantly furnished rooms), all construct the production as authoritative. But The Iraq War has a clear pro-coalition bias. For one thing, the majority of the interviewees are key British and US politicians, along with members of the Iraqi interim government they installed. And these politicians are not interrogated; rather, they are given the opportunity to talk to camera uninterrupted by the interviewers' questions, which are edited out.

As one might expect, then, the documentary's take on the Iraq war reflects the point of view of the US and British ruling classes. The first episode, for example, ends with US Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's comment that the US's attempt to kill Saddam Hussein before the invasion constituted a 'last ditch effort to head off a war' that 'regrettably failed', as though the US had been reluctantly drawn into the invasion. Throughout the documentary, meanwhile, violence and disorder are linked to Iraqi insurgents, while the coalition partners are constructed as harbingers of peace. At the end of the first episode, for instance, the narrator, Alex Jennings, asserts that 'America and Britain quickly won the war, but lost the peace'. In the second episode, he comments that in Fallujah in 2004, US forces 'hit back' after the killing of four contractors by insurgents - an extraordinary description of a devastating assault by the US Marines that left much of the city in ruins. According to The Iraq War, then, coalition forces fought reluctantly and defensively for the good of the Iraqi people. Indeed, for the politicians and advisers interviewed here, there is no doubt that the invasion was well-intentioned and benign, if not always successful. As Paul Bremer recalls saying to George W. Bush, apparently without irony, 'fixing a country is not something you do overnight'.

Often what is most revealing about a documentary is not so much what is said, but what is missed out. Significantly, there is no mention in any of the production's three episodes of Western oil and other industrial interests in Iraq, which arguably constituted a major part of the rationale for invasion; rather, the attack on Iraq is presented as a bid for 'régime change' (the title of the first episode). Hussein, we are reminded by several of the interviewees, was a brutal villain whose 'régime' had to be brought to an end; yet the violent history of the Western powers is predictably ignored. Ignored, too, are the lies told to justify the invasion of Iraq: namely, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, posed a deadly threat to the world, and had links to Al Qaeda. And what of the longer history of Iraq's relationship with the US - in particular the 12 years of inhuman sanctions that preceded the 2003 invasion and which surely undermine any claim that the Iraq war was fought out of a concern for the wellbeing of Iraqi people?

The Iraq War is certainly not without interest: it does provides some insights into the often murky relationships between politicians and journalists and into the differences of opinion among members of the British and US governments as the war drums began to beat (indeed, there can be little doubt that many sceptical politicians were forced to bite their tongues as the war began and many are likely to have been practising a sort of political Ketman ever since). Some moments in the documentary are even open to a critical reading. As John Crace notes in The Guardian, one of these comes in episode 3 when Jack Straw openly admits that he and Condoleeza Rice talked Ibrahim al-Jaafari into stepping down as Iraq's first Prime Minister - an action that indicates the extent of neo-colonial manipulation in post-invasion Iraq. What is missing, however - despite the occasional reference to the public opposition to the war - is the perspective of the working class, who were, in large number, the victims of the war and who had no interest in its prosecution.

Doing whatever it takes: 'Complicit', 'Our Girl' and the 'war on terror' in TV drama

31/3/2013

 
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Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine - his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky - was one of the most disturbing and moving British television productions of the 1990s. So I had high hopes for his recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit, which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Waleed Achmed (Arsher Ali), from Britain to Egypt in order to foil a suspected ricin attack on the United Kingdom. Slow and stylistically unostentatious, Complicit marks a welcome departure from the high octane formula of US 'war on terror' dramas such as 24, Threat Matrix and Homeland; but its take on the relationship between terrorism and the British state nevertheless reproduces some of the conservative elements of those shows.

It is curious that some television reviewers have praised the moral complexity of Complicit on the grounds that the drama gives us no 'goodie' to root for and no 'baddie' to condemn. In fact, Ekubo and Achmed are clearly identifiable as the hero and villain of the piece, respectively. The latter is a shady, sneering figure whom Ekubo observes on surveillance tapes bellowing 'British troops burn in hell!' at an anti-war demonstration (this chanting is heard in sinister extradiegetic overdub when Achmed appears later in the film). Achmed is also a malicious racist. Ekubo, on the other hand, is a decent, hardworking and competent agent who nevertheless remains something of an outsider at MI5, under-promoted and alienated from his Establishment colleagues. There are strong implications that racism has played a part in his marginalisation. Frustrated by these workplace problems and his lack of progress in the case - and horrified by Achmed's apparent disregard for human life - Ekubo allows his suspect to be tortured by the Egyptian police.
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This turns out to be a big mistake, for the twist in the tale is that Achmed has played Ekubo like a fiddle. There is no ricin attack and Ekubo realises too late that he has been cleverly manipulated by his quarry so that the latter can gain a propaganda advantage. Drawing attention to his torture in the media, Achmed subsequently presents himself to the world as a victim of anti-Islamic prejudice. The disgraced Ekubo, meanwhile, is indefinitely suspended from his post for breaking the rules. For Ekubo, torture - in this case, at least - not only fails to bear fruit, but proves to be counter-productive.

The producers of Complicit certainly deserve credit for problematizing the use of torture; yet viewers are hardly encouraged to adopt a critical stance towards either Ekubo or the 'war on terror'. The film's crucial scene is a tense interrogation-room confrontation in which Ekubo and Achmed exchange their conflicting views of the world. Formally, this is an equally balanced battle of wits between a jihadist and state 'spook'; yet even when Achmed advances some reasonable arguments, the viewer is left in little doubt where her sympathies ought to lie. When Achmed condemns the British invasion of Iraq and other countries, he is ridiculed by Ekubo, who counters by enumerating the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by British people, including 'free schools', 'state handouts' and the 'freedom to say and do what you want'. And any lingering sympathy the viewer may have with Achmed's arguments about the brutality of British imperialism dissipates when Achmed calls Ekubo a 'fucking kaffir' and a 'nigger'. How can the viewer take seriously any point of view articulated by such a monstrous bigot - or, for that matter, object to his torture?

The ending of the drama is equally problematic. In his exit interview with his boss at MI5, Ekubo is taken to task for allowing Achmed's torture; but he protests:

"What else could I have done? Weighing up the illegality against the consequences of doing nothing? I've always understood that we work with politically unacceptable regimes if it means we are safeguarding our people from attack at home [...] Everything I've done has been for my country, for the people of my country"


The patriotic message here is clear enough: the security of 'our people' can only be achieved through the suspension of human rights and the illegal but necessary use of force by agents of 'our' state (an 'acceptable' regime, no doubt). This is in essence the perspective of Kathryn Bigelow's recent film Zero Dark Thirty, whose 'normalisation' of torture has been challenged by Slavoj Žižek in terms that are highly relevant here: 'Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen'.

Ekubo is certainly a troubled figure at the conclusion of the film, as he stands on the banks of the Thames watching the world go by and presumably reflecting on the wisdom of his actions (a reprise, strangely enough, of Oyelowo's pose in the final scene of the 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger). Indeed, we end on a rather questioning note: in the final shot, Ekubo looks directly into the camera, as if to ask viewers what they would have done in his position. But this 'open' gesture is hardly sufficient to override Ekubo's explicit, patriotic justification for torture. Moreover, the preceding shots of Londoners happily going about their daily business seem to confirm that Edward has indeed done the right thing and that only similarly decisive actions in the future can safeguard the 'British way of life'. In the drama's conservative framework, people like Achmed simply hate 'us' for who we are and are hell-bent on destroying Western society and its supposedly liberal values.

Defenders of Complicit may point to the the production's unglamorous style, as well as its troubled hero and the supposed moral complexity of the situation he finds himself in. Indeed, the film is pervaded by a sense of indeterminacy: Ekubo often seems to be distracted, homing in on seemingly irrelevant details (for example, during a visit to his superior's office, a point of view shot reveals that he is focusing on a box of antacids) and he is often shot in shallow focus, creating blurred backgrounds that seem to reflect his uncertain state of mind. Yet despite these markers of uncertainty, complexity, 'seriousness ' and, indeed, 'quality', the production tends to foreclose criticism of the state's anti-terrorism methods or the relationship between jihadist terrorism and imperialist aggression. Complicit, like so much 'terrorism TV' (I borrow the phrase from Stacy Takacs's superb book on the subject), contributes to the naturalisation of the 'state of exception' along with its disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance, detention and torture.

For anybody with a critical perspective on these topics, however, the one-off in-house BBC drama Our Girl, written by veteran Tony Grounds and starring EastEnders actress Lacey Turner, is even more troubling.
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Molly Dawes (Turner) is a working class girl from East London who joins the British army in order to escape from her obnoxious Albanian boyfriend Artan (Dan Black) and her selfish and racist father (Sean Gallagher), who spends his days smoking, drinking and playing violent video games. Commencing her training programme, Molly soon adapts to the rigours of military discipline and the army becomes her surrogate family.

Our Girl reproduces many of the generic scripts of military-themed 'human interest' documentaries, such as BBC3's Girls on the Frontline (2010): an emphasis on personal sacrifice, an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for military intervention overseas, and a focus on its subject's transition from a restricting working class milieu to the excitement and challenge of army life. As several television critics have noted, the rather idealised depiction of Molly's military training resembles an army recruitment video. Indeed, the drama offers a highly affirmative view of the army and its mandate, counterposing Molly's desire to 'do something' with her slobbish father's goal of securing long-term incapacity benefit (at a moment when benefit claimants are under attack in the mainstream media, this portrait of a 'benefit scrounger', like Ekubo's reference to 'state handouts' in Complicit, is problematic). At the end of the drama, Molly proudly 'passes out' as a soldier and goes to Afghanistan, while her father lounges at home watching news reports about Al Qaeda bombings. The implication of this parallel editing is clear: Molly is about to play her part in tackling terrorism, while her feckless father rots on the sofa.

Our Girl's sympathetic representation of an army woman fighting prejudice at home is not the only narrative of its type. A similar transference of regressive attitudes from the 'serving' female soldier onto an unpleasant male relative is apparent in the British director Brian Welsh's 2010 film In Our Name, in which Joanne Frogatt plays Suzy, a female soldier returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq. Suzy is traumatized, not after killing children herself, but after witnessing Iraqis killing children and feeling 'powerless to protect those we were sent to help'. On returning to her Middlesborough home, she is applauded by her father for 'making this country safe for us all', but viciously abused by her racist, psychopathic husband. As in Complicit, any potential critique of British imperialism is displaced into the text's anti-racist and anti-sexist politics.

Yet the drama's most direct pro-war statement comes earlier in the film, when Molly returns to London on leave with her meek training colleague Katy (Katherine Pearce). Here Molly must cope with the incomprehension of her friends, who cannot understand why she has 'joined up', and her father's insistence that she stay in England and get married. It is at this point that Katy finds her voice for the first time, drawing a parallel between Molly's father and boyfriend and the patriarchal control of women in Afghanistan: 'You know, that's exactly what we're fighting for in Afghanistan', she tells Molly's father, 'So that women can have a say in who they marry or if they get married at all'. Since Molly's father can only respond with a racist rant, Katy's 'feminist' argument prevails.
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But here the drama is on very thin ice. Certainly, the argument that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken for the benefit of Afghan women was widely touted in the news media in the run-up to the war, and, as Wikileaks has revealed, was promoted by the CIA in order to boost flagging public support for the occupation. Yet it is difficult to believe that this was ever anything more than a flimsy pretext for imperialist intervention. In a devastating critique of the 'progressive' argument for the invasion of Afghanistan, Carole Stabile and Deepa Kumar note that the liberation of women was neither the aim of the war nor its result. Pointing to the Orientalist dimensions of the supposed drive to 'save' Muslim women, they argue that 'the rhetoric of women's liberation' was 'a cynical ploy' and even 'a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD'. It is therefore unfortunate that the producers of Our Girl are content to give such rhetoric a free pass.

All too often in British television dramas about the 'war on terror', criticisms of Western imperialism are either absent or articulated by such unpleasant characters that they cannot be taken seriously, while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are justified by appeals to the feminist discourse of 'liberation'. In the three-part Occupation (2009), for example - the BBC's only drama about the Iraq war - the most trenchant criticism of the coalition invasion is placed in the mouth of a corrupt Iraqi policeman-turned-terrorist, while the drama as a whole casts the British forces in Iraq as liberators rather than invaders, victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

Yet British television audiences have been offered more critical perspectives on the war on terror over the last decade. Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for instance, questioned the role of the Labour government in taking Britain to war in Iraq, while his later Britz (Channel 4, 2007) was equally critical of the effects of domestic 'anti-terror' laws on British Muslims following 9/11. Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2006), meanwhile, remains the only television drama to have seriously engaged with the issue of prisoner abuse by the British army. These dramas interrogate the conduct of 'our' state in the war on terror; dramas such as Complicit and Our Girl, on the other hand, emphasize - one implicitly, the other explicitly - the threat posed by the terrorist 'other'.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin warns that 'in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism, the contemporary citizen, far from being invited into a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by "managed care" and by the managers of fear'. We need television fictions that challenge rather than reinforce this state of affairs, that 'invite discussion' about terrorism and imperialism and their interrelationship. Controversial as they may be, the dramas of Kosminsky and Marchant certainly do this. They show the way forward for writers and producers who are prepared to criticise the 'home team', to cut through the bias and distortion that has so often characterised the treatment of the war on terror in both journalism and screen fiction.

‘Terrible things happen’: Peter Bowker’s Occupation and the representation of the Iraq war in British TV drama

30/4/2012

 
Below is a highly edited draft of a textual analysis of Peter Bowker's Iraq war drama Occupation that I wrote recently (I cannot reproduce anything like the full-length version, as this will be published in due course). But, for what they are worth, here are some key points...
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Given the hugely controversial nature of the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq, Western film and television representations of the conflict have generated less public enthusiasm – and less revenue – than might have been expected. In the United States, for example – at least until the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker in 2009 – Iraq war films have fared poorly at the box office (Tofoletti and Grace 2010, 64-65; Barker, 2011: 1) and television depictions of the war have been relatively few and far between, notwithstanding Steven Bochco’s short-lived series Over There (FX, 2005) and David Simon and Ed Burns’ Generation Kill (HBO, 2008). On British television, as Tom Sutcliffe (2009a: 6) remarked in The Independent newspaper early in 2009,

Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark. And when you think about that it seems more than odd. Here’s a hugely significant event – one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on the most significant storytelling medium we have.

A small number of British television dramas have included storylines relating – tangentially, at least – to the war. Peter Kosminsky’s docudrama The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for example, investigated the life and death of the British government weapons expert David Kelly and indicted the British government’s decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq, while The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2007), set in Iraq during the war, explored the problem of bullying in the British army. It was not until 2009, however, that the subject of the Iraq war itself was given significant treatment on British television. Written over five years by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and produced by Laurie Borg for the production company Kudos, the three-part BBC television drama Occupation chronicles the involvement of three British soldiers from Manchester in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Broadcast in the summer of 2009, when the occupation of Iraq was stuttering to a drawn-out close, the mini-serial reflects upon the rationale for the Iraq invasion, the consequences of the war for those who fought in it, and the effects of the occupation on the population of Iraq.

[...]

In light of the BBC’s savaging by Hutton and what some have seen as the BBC’s post-Hutton pusillanimity, the BBC might have been expected to deliver a politically emollient, uncontroversial treatment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, the significant level of public opposition to the war made it unlikely that the drama would present an entirely one-sided view of the Iraq war. In 2003, public opposition to British military involvement in Iraq was far more widespread than it had been to Western military action in the Balkans during the previous decade. One month before the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in February 2003 and the subsequent coalition invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against the war. Meanwhile, claims that the justification for the Iraq war was supported by faulty and false information disseminated in the Western media (Miller 2003; Kellner 2004 and 2007; Allan and Zeliger 2004: 8; Kramer and Michalowski 2005; Chomsky, 2006: 24-27; Kumar 2006) circulated widely in the public sphere in the years following the invasion. Thus, while almost all Western intellectual commentary and media opinion supported the invasion of Iraq as a ‘noble and generous’ endeavour (Chomsky, cited in Edwards and Cromwell 2005: 75), public scepticism about the official justification for the war was significant. Given the strength of the anti-war movement in 2003, the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda, there was little likelihood that Occupation’s perspective on the war would be simplistically pro-interventionist or openly jingoistic.

[...]

Occupation focuses on the experiences of three friends – Sergeant Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) and the younger Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) – who are first dispatched to Basra in 2003. On their return home after their first tour, each of the men fails to adjust to civilian life in Manchester and is inspired to return to Iraq: one for love, one for money, and one out of a fervent belief in the supposed mission to ‘rebuild’ Iraq.

[...]
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Occupation begins in medias res, as the soldiers prepare for a dangerous mission. The opening scenes cast the British soldiers in a distinctly heroic role, especially Mike Swift [...] Having first evacuated civilians from the building, the soldiers enter an apartment block in which some ‘insurgents’ are holed up. After a tense stand-off with the militants, Mike saves an injured child from the midst of the fray and carries her, through enemy fire, from the apartment block to a hospital that is full of badly injured people. There the British soldiers manage to prevent looters from stealing hospital equipment. Mike, meanwhile, meets a married Iraqi doctor, Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal), with whom he begins to fall in love. Later in the episode, Mike returns to his wife and children in England and the injured young girl is also brought back to Britain for specialist treatment. Mike’s return home is, however, far from glorious: although he has become a hero in the eyes of his family and the news media, his guilt over his affection for Aliya vitiates any sense of accomplishment.

[...]

When Mike attends a fund-raising press conference for the injured Iraqi girl with the visiting Aliya, a reporter questions whether the child’s injuries were inflicted by coalition forces, to which Aliya rather tetchily replies: ‘Iraqi people are grateful for the British forces. I mean, terrible things happen in the war. Everyone is trying to do something to help’. Aliya here expresses a heroising view of the British role in Iraq; but her optimism comes at the expense of any explanation of the causes of the war, an elision marked by her use of the de-agentifying passive construction ‘terrible things happen’.

[...]

In the second episode, all of the men return to Iraq, a country now disintegrating in a vortex of religious fundamentalism. When Mike meets Aliya again, his first conversation with her takes places through a wrought iron window grille. This is the first of several images of confinement – a similar framing device is used in episode three, when the pair gaze at each other through the slats of some window blinds – that signify not only the personal obstacles preventing the pair’s romantic relationship (Aliya now reveals that she, too, is married), but also the lack of freedom experienced by women in the fundamentalist and patriarchal environment of post-invasion Iraq. Aliya, now wearing a headscarf, is regarded with deep suspicion for talking to Mike, who offers to take her out of Iraq. ‘I’ve seen the way things are going here’, says Mike, ‘with the religion and the bombings’. Aliya’s sharp reply – ‘And whose fault is that?’ – provides a counter-hegemonic riposte, even if its critique of the impact of the Western invasion remains implicit.

[...]

Hibbs [...] is kidnapped. Held prisoner in a darkened cell and expecting to be executed, he is interrogated by the ruthless police officer who killed Yunis (and who, ironically, had been trained by Hibbs). The encounter between the two men constitutes one of the drama’s most overtly political and antagonistic exchanges:

Policeman: All you had to do was go home. You got rid of Saddam. But then you should have let us get on with running our own country.

Hibbs: Kill each other, you mean? Like you killed my mate?

Policeman: You know how many Iraqis your bombs kill? Huh? Half a million. So don’t talk to me about killing. Don’t try and [sic] tell me you’re better.

Like Aliya’s earlier riposte to Mike (‘And whose fault is that?’), the policeman’s exposure of Western hypocrisy here raises the prospect of a subaltern perspective on the rights and wrongs of the war. Yet the force of this anti-imperialist critique is somewhat compromised by its being placed in the mouth of the drama’s most unsympathetic character. Furthermore, while the policeman alludes to the massive violence perpetrated by the Western coalition against Iraqis, none of this violence is shown in Occupation and the only acts of deadly force depicted in the drama are committed by Iraqis.

[...]
The New York Times television reviewer Alessandra Stanley (2009: 1) suggests that ‘Occupation does take a long, disturbing look at the chaos, corruption and mayhem that choked the American-led reconstruction effort’; however, the drama would be considerably more disturbing to conventional narratives about the Iraq war if it clearly identified the forces responsible for initiating the chaos. As in news media accounts of ‘the conflict’ in Iraq – a problematically de-agentifying phrase, as Noam Chomsky (2006: 48) points out – the worsening social conditions registered in the drama are not attributed to the coalition invasion; rather, Iraq appears as a place where, in Aliya’s phrase, ‘terrible things happen’ and where Western forces are ‘trying to do something to help’. At the same time, by analogy with standard journalistic practice in Iraq, Occupation ‘embeds’, as it were, the audience with ‘our’ troops, foregrounding the soldiers’ personal struggles and tragedies. The British soldiers’ arguments and perspectives are pre-eminent in the drama and popular songs express the soldiers’ unvoiced fears and aspirations (The Libertines’ ‘Road to Ruin’ plays when Mike’s son Richard joins the army, while Pink Floyd’s ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ accompanies Hibbs’ preparation to be executed at the end of the first episode). Embedding, as Slavoj Žižek (2004: 3) notes, tends to lend representations of war a ‘human touch’, ‘generating an instant identification of the spectator’s perspective with that of the soldier’. But this in turn can be seen as a means of avoiding awkward questions about political agency, so that, watching the drama, ‘we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place’ (Žižek 2010: 30).

‘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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