Notes
Michael Nicholson, Natasha’s Story, London: Pan, 1994 [1993], 16. The book describes how Nicholson, an ITN correspondent, and his wife were nonetheless prepared to adopt a Balkan person as their daughter.
Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
Author of Bosnia: A Short History. London: Macmillan, 1994; and Kosovo: A Short History, London, Macmillan, 1998.
Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War, London: Penguin, 1992.
Quentin Hoare and Noel Malcolm (eds.), Books on Bosnia: a critical bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages, London: The Bosnian Institute, 1999, 43. Glenny had reported on the conflict for the BBC.
Fergal Keane, Letters Home, London: Penguin, 1999, 60. Keane concedes: “I could hear what my voice really sounded like. Sanctimonious, hectoring, declamatory…”, Ibidem.
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, London: Hurst, 1995, viii.
Ibid., 184.
For instance, readers of The Sun, Britain’s best-selling daily newspaper,voted that the Yugoslav conflict was the paper’s most boring subject. Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, Stevenage: Spa, 1992, 40.
According to Simon Winchester: “One might say that anyone who inhabited such a place for a long period would probably evolve into something that varied substantially, for good or ill, from whatever is the human norm.” Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, London: Viking, 1999, 61-2.
Simon Winchester refers to it as a “great swamp”, op. cit., 213.
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, London and New Haven: Yale, 2000, xi.
Ibid., 74.
Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, op. cit., 199-200.
Quentin Hoare and Noel Malcolm (eds.), Books on Bosnia: a critical bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages, op. cit., xxi. Malcolm was a founder of the Alliance to Defend Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Alec Russell, Prejudice and Plum Brandy: Tales of a Balkan Stringer, London: Michael Joseph, 1993, 141. Perhaps Russell was doomed not to understand. As he says himself, “…A non-Balkan could never fully understand the Balkan mind…”, ibid., 178. Russell remarks elsewhere that “it is almost impossible to comprehend the Balkan fixation with history”, a view which is at odds with his notion that few Bosnians nursed grudges. Russell, Ibid., 256 and 266-267.
Quentin Hoare and Noel Malcolm (eds.), Books on Bosnia: a critical bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages, op. cit., 251.
Quoted in David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, London: Victor Gollancz, 1995, 37. Owen comments that Andric was “criticized by many Sarajevan intellectuals for painting too harsh a picture of what he called his ‘dark country’.” Ibidem. It is possible that this encouraged journalists not to take Andric’s views too seriously. More tellingly still, given most journalists’ contact with the Bosnian middle classes, Andric continues, in the same text: “There has always been, in Bosnian bourgeois circles, an abundance of false bourgeois courtesy, wise self-deception and deception of others with pleasant-sounding words and empty ceremonies. This more of less disguises hatred, but does not remove it or prevent its growth”. (Quoted in Yugofax, No. 8, 9 December 1991, p. 8, col. 3).
See, for example, Russell, op. cit., 266.
Martin Bell, In Harm’s Way: Reflections of a War-Zone Thug, London: Penguin, 1996 [1995],132.
For example, “ ‘History’, or at least a bloodshot version of it, has been one of the principal motors behind this war.” (Peter Morgan, A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia,Aberystwyth: Planet, 1997, i) or “…history dominates every interview in the Bosnian war. The answer to a question about an artillery attack yesterday will begin in the year 925…” Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, London: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 5.
See, for example, Paul Harris, who freelanced for a range of British newspapers and makes reference to the parallels with Hitler’s drive for Lebensraum. Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, op. cit.. Nicholson invokes the memory of “Herr Himmler’s Final Solution”, op. cit., 85. Judah draws parallels with Nazi deeds and Serb actions in Bosnia (Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, op. cit., 204-5). As Simpson put it, “…it became very hard to understand what was going on, because everything came to be seen through the filter of the Holocaust.” John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, London: Pan, 1999 [1998], 449.
Peter Morgan, A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia, op. cit., i.
Ibid., ii-iii.
Russell, op. cit., 258.
Ibid., 266-67.
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, New York: Random House, 1998, 41.
Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, op. cit., xii. Similar sentiments are expressed by Fergal Keane, Letters Home, op. cit., 76-79.
<http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ct.wg.name.html>, accessed 31 March 2007.
John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 449. The notion of the hunt of course underlines Simpson’s view that most journalists in Bosnia were operating like a herd or pack. In the introduction to his book Vulliamy says that “There is no attempt here to be objective towards the perpetrators of Bosnia’s ethnic carnage or those who appeased them.” (Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, op. cit., xi.)
John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 449. In One Woman’s War: Life and Death on Deadline, London: Duckworth, 2000, 151, Eve-Ann Prentice relates how a sensation-hungry American reporter was told about a Serb who raped prisoners at the Omarska camp in Bosnia. He passed the information to the Hague tribunal which had to drop charges when it emerged that the accused was a fictional character from a novel.
John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 440. Nicholson says that “Too many men and women, or more often boys and girls, came to Sarajevo masquerading as journalists…” (Michael Nicholson, Natasha’s Story, op. cit., 196).
Bell, op. cit., 51.
Prentice, born in 1952, writes how she could never quite step out of the shadow of the Second World War, while colleagues less than ten years younger seemed “light-years distant in temperament and outlook”. She indignantly recalls a colleague who believed the Second World War ended in 1943. Eve-Ann Prentice, One Woman’s War: Life and Death on Deadline, op. cit., 37.
Loyd describes his problems with his friends back in London, (Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, London: Anchor, 2000 [1999], 123). David Rieff “felt like an alien” trying to take up his life again (quoted in Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, New York and London: New York University Press, 1999, 15).
This is an example of the propaganda technique known as the bandwagon, where herd instinct is used to make people conform. <http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ct.sa.bandwagon.html>, accessed 31 March 2007.
Loyd is characteristically frank: “I got my ‘break’ as a war correspondent at the expense of a mutilated girl, one dead prisoner, probably two, and a wounded journalist.” (Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 103).
e.g. Russell, op. cit., 252; Harris,op. cit., 40 and Nicholson, op. cit., 195.
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, op. cit., viii.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 66 and 207.
Alex Hickman, Slow Winter, Bridgnorth: Travellers Eye, 2000, 12-13.
Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, op. cit., 44. Loyd frequently expresses similar sentiments.
Ibidem.
Ibidem.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 213.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 30.
Roy Gutman, Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Bosnia, Shaftesbury, Rockport and Brisbane: Element, 1993, 7. Gutman says that by June 1993, a relatively early stage in the war, 200-250,000 people could have been killed in Bosnia, “well over 10 per cent of the Muslim population” (i.e. suggesting none of the other ethnic groups suffering any casualties at all), ibid., xxxi. He does not reflect on Silajdzic’s uncanny prescience.
Owen certainly knew of no accurate figures (David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, op. cit., 80).
When General Morillon denied that a particular, much reported massacre had taken place (“Je n’ai pas senti l’odeur de la mort”) journalists “were not impressed”: Larry Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, Mr Larry, London: Heinemann, 1996. For more examples of a military officer in the field experiencing exaggerations, see Colonel Bob Stewart, Broken Lives, London: Harper Collins, 1994, 98 and 267.
General Sir Michael Rose, Fighting for Peace: Bosnia: Bosnia 1994, London: Harvill, 235.
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, op. cit., 80. Intriguingly, if Kenney’s figures are right, and the Bosnian Government’s slightly exaggerated, it would mean that the Bosnian War was perhaps not the worst in Europe since the Second World War, although this was a status which it was frequently accorded by journalists: deaths in the Greek Civil War have been estimated at 108,000 (Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, Cambridge: CUP, 1983).
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, op. cit., 310. His figures are drawn from a report in The Independent.
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, op. cit., 3.
John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 449. Compared with the British, titles of books by American journalists provide an extreme example of the need to highlight the bloodshed. Apart from Gutman’s Witness to Genocide (Roy Gutman, Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ in Bosnia, op. cit.), other examples include A Safe Area [Endgame in the USA], Srebrenica—Europe’s Worst Massacre since the Second World War by David Rohde, London: Simon and Schuster, 1997); and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West by David Rieff, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Michael Nicholson, Natasha’s Story, op. cit., 90-93. The main elements of Nicholson’s account are confirmed in John B. Allcock, Marko Milivojevic, John J. Horton (ed., with foreword by Martin Bell, MP), Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia, Denver, Santa Barbara, Oxford: ABC-CLIO Roots of Modern Conflict series, 1999.
Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War,op. cit., 196.
Ibid., 192-194. These points are made by John Burns in “Conflict Reporting or Conflict Encouragement in Former Yugoslavia” in James Gow, Richard Paterson, Alison Preston, eds., Bosnia by Television, London: British Film Institute, 1996, 95.
Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, op. cit., 142.
For example, “Those of us who didn’t join the claque were much criticized. I overheard one of the local translators hired by the BBC telling someone else that I was pro-Serb; not a good thing to be in Sarajevo at that time”, John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 446.
There is no proof of his intentions according to Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia, op. cit., 106.
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, op. cit., 184.
Rose, op. cit., 38. According to Rose, Izetbegovic’s Vice-President Ejup Ganic once said that “ultimately Muslims from Bosnia, Sanjak [which straddles Serbia and Montenegro], Kosovo and Albania would form a single political entity” (Ibid., 26), not an issue explored in any of the books by journalists of which I am aware.
Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War,op. cit., 47 and 54.
Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, op. cit., 187.
For a non-journalistic view of Delic, see the following: “Gen. Rasim Delic turned up wearing blue ankle-length Chelsea boots and looking more obese than ever. I often wondered how he could put on so much weight, with people starving all around him in Sarajevo.” Rose, op. cit., 61. It is hard to imagine a similar description of Delic being neglected by journalists had he been a Bosnian Serb general. Delic’s previous career is mentioned in Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia, op. cit., 71.
Peter Morgan, A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia, op. cit., 45.
Ibid., 21.
Larry Hollingworth, Merry Christmas, Mr Larry, op. cit., 49-50.
John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 445-446.
Rose, op. cit., 79.
See, for example, Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, op. cit., 19.
Bell, op. cit., 29.
Ibid., 52.
Ibid., 114.
Ibid., 129-30. Simpson also quotes approvingly Nik Gowing’s comments:
Some of the strongly anti-Serb reporting in Bosnia is the secret shame of journalism. There is a cancer now which is affecting journalism: it is the unspoken issue of partiality and bias in foreign reporting (John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People, op. cit., 449).
The relative success of the Bosnians can be contrasted with the failings of the Serbs. According to Judah, Sonia Karadzic, head of the International Press Centre in Pale “did almost as much to undermine the Serbian position in the world as her father himself” (Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, op. cit., 221); Stankovic describes her as running the “Bosnian Serb press disaster” (Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness, London, Harper Collins, 2000, 334).
e.g. Rose, op. cit., 18; Owen, op. cit., 60 and Simpson, op. cit., 24.
Bell, op. cit., 236; Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So,op. cit., 206.
Quentin Hoare and Noel Malcolm (eds.), Books on Bosnia: a critical bibliography of works relating to Bosnia-Herzegovina published since 1990 in West European languages, op. cit., 143.
Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness, op. cit., 356 and 207.
Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War,op. cit., 187-8. Russell also found it hard to believe UN suggestions that the Bosnians were shelling their own side (Russell, op. cit., 267.)
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, op. cit., 60 and 85.
Or so the Bosnian Serb politician Nikola Koljevic confided to Vulliamy (Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War,op. cit., 96).
Bell, op. cit., 113. Of course, once the expensive decision was taken to deploy television crews they had to be used. While they remained in Bosnian government controlled Sarajevo the only atrocities they could show were those inflicted by the besieging Serbs.
See, for example, Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness, op. cit., 104, for examples of battles raging unreported across Bosnia for lack of reporters; Stankovic also notes that, following Croat-Muslim fighting, Mostar looked like Stalingrad (ibid., 248), whereas for Simon Winchester it was like Dresden or the London docks after a night of incendiaries (Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, op. cit., 112).
Russell, op. cit., 261. The implied assumption of journalistic responsibility is striking. According to Keane, some of his friends “had lost their hearts to the place.” (Fergal Keane, Letters Home, op. cit., 59).
Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, op. cit., 195.
Loyd describes how his bullet proof vest brought only shame to him in the presence of people he knew (Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 22); Hickman abandoned his, observing that none of the locals had one (Alex Hickman, Slow Winter, op. cit., 19).
Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo, London: Phoenix House, 1994, 45.
Ibid., 2. Among the besieged in Pakrac during the Croatian war, Harris is “embarrassed by their touching faith in the toothless lion of the EEC.” (Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, op. cit., 67.)
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 151-2.
Having identified obesity as a Bosnian Serb problem (see above), Vulliamy is alive to the aesthetic superiority of Sarajevo:
The Sarajevans have a certain dignity about them. They are generally very courteous to each other; the girls—many of them very beautiful—take an almost absurd care over their appearance. (Ed Vulliamy, op. cit., 78)
Richard Bassett, Balkan Hours: Travels in the Other Europe, London: John Murray, 1990, 72 and 74. Judah also describes the murders of Serbs in the city during the war, noting that the Bosnian government did little about it. This too does not feature in other accounts. (Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, op. cit., 217.)
For example, di Giovanni describes at length her friendship with a professor of English at Sarajevo University. In Russell’s case “Most of the material for my despatches was gleaned from traipsing the city with two archetypal Sarajlije…Articulate, well-read…”, (Russell, op. cit., 268). Bennett describes the relationship between personal friendships forged in Sarajevo and emotional commitment to Bosnia, (Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences, op. cit., 195).
Russell, op. cit., 266, Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo, op. cit., 7. Correct figures are provided in Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyplopedia, op. cit., 124, where the point is made that even in Sarajevo rates of intermarriage were not particularly high. (Indeed if rates of around a quarter were achieved in large cities such as Sarajevo then the proportion in rural areas must have been well below ten per cent.)
Sarajevo citizens thought the rest of the world was made up of papci and peasants according to Loyd: (Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 107). “People in Sarajevo will tell you this is a war between raja and papak”, (Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, op. cit., 40).
Bell, op. cit., 272.
<http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ct.sa.fear.html>, accessed 31 March 2007.
Peter Morgan, A Barrel of Stones: In Search of Serbia, op. cit., 48.
Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo, op. cit., 20. There are many similar occidentalising accounts of journalists’ local friends in Sarajevo.
e.g. Russell, op. cit., 286.
<http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ct.wg.gg.html>, accessed 31 March 2007.
Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo, op. cit., 40. Boutros Ghali also described the Bosnian war as a “rich man’s war”.
Russell, op. cit., 286.
Rose, op. cit., 13-14.
Colonel Bob Stewart, Broken Lives, op. cit., 12.
Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, op. cit., 58.
Rose, op. cit., 243. According to Stankovic, a British officer on Rose’s staff, Rose was to realise that “seventy per cent of effort needed to be directed towards the media”. (Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness, op. cit., 327.)
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, op. cit., 119.
Michael Nicholson, Natasha’s Story, op. cit., 114.
Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War, op. cit., 245.
Bell, op. cit., 145.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 91.
When a kitten grabbed the brain of a dead volunteer from overseas Loyd’s companion remarks “Man, the guy sure came a long way to end up as a Kit-e-Kat”, Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 173. Typically, when Loyd meets a Serb in London he tells her “ ‘I hope NATO bombs Belgrade until it’s flat and smoking’ […] A couple of days afterwards we screwed each other in her flat: proxy war repackaged as love…I wanted to bite her, scratch her, hurt her, fuck her, love her. I adored her.” She left him. (Ibid., 295).
Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, op. cit., 194.
Bell, op. cit., 51. Stankovic, who relates Schork’s regular contact with Rose and his staff, describes Schork as “bearded, earnest…”, (Milos Stankovic, Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness, op. cit., 260).
Ibid., 51 and 52.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 142.
Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-1992, op. cit., 36.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 111.
Russell, op. cit., 274.
Bell, op. cit., 142.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 129-30 and 141.
Rose, op. cit., 163.
Ibid., 53.
Michael Nicholson, Natasha’s Story, op. cit., 196.
Anthony Loyd, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, op. cit., 81.
Ibid., 179. Simon Winchester describes the same process in the Kosovo war (Simon Winchester, The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, op. cit., 138 and 161-162).
Paul Harris,Somebody Else’s War: Frontline reports from the Balkan Wars 1991-92, op. cit., 25.
Ibid., 37. As he puts it elsewhere, “Nothing makes an easier lead sentence than a stray mortar round hitting a starving baby in a typhus hospital.” Ibid., 41.
Janine di Giovanni, The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo, op. cit., 41.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom/story/0,11718,850815,00.html>, accessed 31 March 2007.
Top of page