A detail of the famous
footage. Since it was published, this picture has been distributed around
the world. In Europe, as elsewhere, it spurred the will to end the genocide
in the Balkans.
The photo and how it was used
In the summer of 1992, a shocking picture from Bosnia went around the world
like wildfire : it shows an emaciated Bosnian Muslim named Fikret Alic
behind the barbed wire of a Bosnian-Serb camp in Trnopolje. He is stripped
to the waist, his ribs are protruding.
The picture was taken from a videotape
shot on August 5, 1992, by an award-winning British television team led
by Penny Marshall of ITN. Marshall was accompanied by her cameraman Jeremy
Irvin, Ian Williams of Channel 4, and reporter Ed Vulliamy from The
Guardian newspaper.
It was shown for the first time on the late-evening news of the private
news channel "Independent Television News" (ITN) in London shortly after
10 p.m. on August 6th, and overnight it became the symbol of the atrocities
of the war in Bosnia.
For four and a half years this photo served as a symbol of the war
in Bosnia and as proof of the existence of Serb concentration camps fifty
years after the Holocaust. "Belsen '92", the British "Daily
Mirror" wrote; "The Proof" was the headline of the "Daily Mail" : "They
are the sort of scenes that flicker in black and white images from fifty-year-old
films of Nazi concentration camps".
"They are starving like animals", the German news-magazine
"Der Spiegel" captioned the photograph on August 5. On 17 August 1992,
the picture was on the cover of "Time"-magazine.
On the first anniversary
of the pictures being taken, an article in the Independent could
still use the barbed wire to make the Nazi link: "The camera slowly pans
up the bony torso of the prisoner. It is the picture of famine, but then
we see the barbed wire against his chest and it is the picture of the Holocaust
and concentration camps."
The deception
Now, four and a half years later, it turns out that the media, politics,
and the public have been deceived with this picture. It is a proven fact
that it is not the group of Muslim men with Fikret Alic that are surrounded
by barbed wire, but rather the British reporters. They were standing on
a lot to the south of the camp. As a preventive measure against thieves,
this lot was surrounded with barbed wire before the war.
It was here where the ITN reporters stood and filmed through the fence,
giving the impression that those being filmed were being kept in a barbed-wire
coop like animals.
There was no barbed-wire fence around the camp area, which also included
a school, a community center, and a large open area with a sports field.
This was verified by international institutions such as the International
Criminal Tribunal in the Hague and the International Red Cross in Geneva.
The fact that it was the reporters that were surrounded by barbed wire
can be seen in the other film-material that was not edited or broadcasted.
This material is being kept under lock and key by ITN together with the
broadcasted sequences ever since the author of this report published an
article titled "The Picture that Fooled the World in the british magazine
LM.
The pictures of Fikret Alic behind barbed wire presented a false image
of the character of the camp. Trnopolje was neither an internment camp
nor a concentration camp in the sense that prisoners were systematically
being tortured and murdered there. It was a refugee camp and a transit
camp, to which people who were driven out of their villages came voluntarily
and to which Muslims from other camps were taken to be exchanged or to
then be brought to Croatia with convoys of the International Red Cross.
In the summer of 1992, as fighting in the Prijodor region escalated
and marauding bands were roaming about, Trnopolje provided a certain degree
of security for civilians, despite its miserable conditions. Young men
voluntarily came to Trnopolje to evade military service. Many women, older
people, and children were there, hoping in vain for a quick end to the
fighting.
The fact that atrocities took place during the war in Bosnia, and that
living in the Trnopolje camp was not safe either is not being denied. However,
all warring factions had camps like Trnopolje, and there were some in which
the prisoners were dealt with in a more violent manner. There were rapes,
and there were murders. One day before the ITN-team visited Trnopolje,
a report issued by the International Red Cross complained about flagrant
human-rights abuses in camps belonging to all three factions.
The journalists
None of the reporters present in August 1992 described Trnopolje as a concentration
camp comparable with Auschwitz. But pictures speak for themselves. The
general public around the world that was confronted with this ITN-picture
interpreted it without waiting for an explanation. Reporter Ian Williams
said in an interview a few days after his return to London that the interpretation
of the picture had gone two steps too far. However, none of the reporters
considered it necessary to explain that they themselves were fenced in
with barbed wire as they made the picture.
Instead, the ITN-team received the highly-remunerative BAFTA-award and
a further award from the Royal Television Society for their report in 1993.
ITN patted itself on the back with large-scale newspaper advertisements
in which the barbed-wire picture was shown, saying that it had caused influential
governments and international organizations to act.
Used to create a precedent to use military force
And indeed - crisis meetings were held at the government headquarters throughout
the West. On 13 August, the UN Security Council authorized for the first
time the use of force for its own troops in the region and promised that
war criminals would be punished. On 18 August, the British government announced
it would dispatch a few thousand troops to Bosnia. The ITN-report was surely
not the only inducement, but it had an influence. In the first trial against
Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic before the International Criminal Tribunal, the
ITN pictures were admitted as evidence.
Used to create a precedent to legalize censorship
The exposure of the ITN-picture as a fake has raised the question of journalistic
responsibility. In Britain, ITN has instituted proceedings against LM-magazine,
which has led to the rest of the media-world not daring to touch the subject
anymore out of fear that further legal action could follow. The fact that
a private news channel is practicing legal suppression of news is a novelty
in the history of the media.
Phillip Knightly, a renowned British journalist and author of "The First
Casualty", a book about the work of war correspondents, has experienced
this conflict himself. He was originally engaged by the "Independent on
Sunday" to write an article on the controversy - now there is no one in
Britain who wants to publish it. In his article, Knightly - among other
things - looks into the issue of how legitimate it is for journalists to
manipulate facts for what they consider to be a just cause - an attitude
that seems to be increasingly growing, not only as far as Phillip Knightly
is concerned.
This chapter is
an edited translation of articles that appeared in the German magazine
Novo,
January/February 1997 issue and later the same year in the Berliner Morgenpost
("Photos Never Lie - Or Do They?"). It was also published in English
in the British magazine LM, Issue 97, February 1997. The British
television station ITN sued to prevent LM from publishing the story,
demanding that its editor withdraw the issue and pulp every copy. LM faced a costly legal
battle for insisting on its right to publish the truth. March 2000 -
the British "justice" condenmed LM to a fine, meant to ruin LM, discourage
any other publishers, and to legalize the censorship of the truth from
then on.
