War of Images - Contemporary War Photography

War of Images

War of Images

Contemporary War Photography

Sandra Vitaljić

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 9

Introduction

I WAR PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MEDIA 15 Propaganda 29 The Pornography of Atrocities 43 Warriors and Heroes 67 Women as Warriors and Victims 75 The Absence of Images II 85 95

TROPHY PHOTOGRAPHY Image as a trophy Photography as a Torture Tool in the Prison of Abu Ghraib

III THE ETHICS OF PHOTO-JOURNALISM 105 Photography as Evidence 112 Fauxtography 116 Staging Photography and Photo - opportunities 118 Denotation and Connotation 122 Is Bin Laden Really Dead? 124 War Tourists 132 Photographer as a Participant IV WHO IS WATCHING 145 The Photographer 156 The Media

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160 167 169

The Audience Aestethicizing War Citizen Journalism and Amateur Photography as News Reporting

V FROM THE BATTLEFIELD TO THE GALLERY 177 Suffering for Sale 183 A Paradigm Shift in War Photography VI 201 207

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION – ON MEMORY Private and Collective Memory Infertile Grounds – The Photograph as a Site of Memory

VII APPENDIX – Excerpt from Pavo Urban's War Journal and Conversations with War Photographers 216 Pavo Urban 219 Goran Pichler 222 Saša Kralj 225 Srđan Ilić 229 Imre Szabo 232 Miloš Cvetković 235 Kamenko Pajić 239 Milomir Kovačević Strašni 242 Filip Horvat 244 Ron Haviv 248 Wade Goddard

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Introduction

“‘The illiteracy of the future,’ someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.’ But shouldn’t the photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted illiterate?”1 This is a question that Walter Benjamin raised as early as 1931. “Reading one’s pictures” and the role of photography in the society have always intrigued me as highly relevant issues, both in the early day of photographic practice and today. The social impact of photography may be most evident in the status of documentary photography, since the idea of documentary realism has been fundamental to photographic practice. A photograph states that something “was once there” and that its referent “really existed,”2 which makes it function as an index.3 However, the credibility of photography does not really depend on the photographic technique, but rather on a series of discursive, social, and culturally determined practices. A crucial element of documentary photography is the photographer’s presence at the site of events and his photographic “testimony”. Joerg Bader has considered it as a specific agreement based on trust between the observer and the one presenting the photograph, regardless of whether it is the photographer personally or the mass media distributing the photographs.4 Even though the credibility of photography as a medium has largely been undermined, especially with the emergence of digital images, this system of belief, established during the almost hundred and eighty years of photographic history, still determines the reception of photography. The relationship between the photographer in the role of witness and the producer of the photographic image, the mass media as the transmitters and articulators of the meaning and the observer, that is, the audience that consumes the image, are among the issues 1 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in idem, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 2/2, 527. 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 82. 3„In Pierce’s semiotics, index is a sign referring to a phenomenon which it signifies by actually being caused by it. In other words, it establishes its meanings on the basis of physical relationship with the object it denotes.” Miško Šuvaković, Pojmovnik suvremene umjetnosti [Lexicon of contemporary art] (Zagreb: Horetzky, 2005), p. 275. 4 Joerg Bader, “Prove Time – Live Out Time,” in Mutations – Perspectives on Photography, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), p. 294.

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that I explore in this book. My research primarily focused on war photography, a narrow segment of documentary photography. Among my reasons for choosing that particular subject is certainly the fact that the area of former Yugoslavia was involved in fierce warfare and thus war reportage was a genre explored by a large number of local photographers, mostly without originally intending to do it and without sufficient preparation for what was awaiting them, both in the battlefield and in the field of propaganda. Their only option was mostly to document the events from one particular side, namely “their own”, which actually put into question the basic journalistic mandate about the ideal, “neutral” reporting. Many among them additionally had to cope with their patriotic feelings, which necessarily influenced the way they represented the events in their photographs. Foreign journalists were quite easily changing sides, which is what probably gave them the privilege of reporting more objectively. However, many among them had come to Yugoslavia without knowing much about the causes and the evolution of the conflict. Battlefields in the midst of Europe were an easily accessible destination and therefore the Yugoslav war attracted many reporters who were seeking adventure and wanted to produce fascinating photographs that would launch them straight to the Olympus of photojournalism. Martha Rosler is very critical about photojournalism, as she believes that war reporters are motivated by a “combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism, and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism.”5 David Campany has emphasized that today’s photojournalism largely relies on nostalgia for a “golden age” of photographic reportage, which has become extremely commodified, thus supporting the myth of “heroic individuals” who have shaped the history of photojournalism with their “unique style.”6 The syntax of photojournalism perpetuates the patterns created in the beginnings of modern photojournalism, in the 1930s and 1940s, and continuing this practice ignores the fact that present-day wars require a more modern mode of representation. My intention was to look at the subject of war photography in a universal, global context, even though I used examples from the area of former Yugoslavia whenever it was possible. The model of media representation analyzed using example of Croatia and Serbia in war conflict is also applicable to the contemporary war reporting from Iraq or Afghanistan. Thus, the stereotypical representation of the opposite side in the US media, the Iraqis and the Afghanis in this case, brings about the dehumanization of entire populations, which again leads to brutal abuse of civilians in Iraq’s prisons under the US administration. It is a direct consequence of a politics based on the reality composed of stereotypes, with the corresponding banalization and reduction of the issue to binary oppositions. The principle of “embedding”, which means that the war reporters can do their job only if attached to a unit of the US army, simultaneously 5 Martha Rosler, “In, around, and Afterthoughts,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 263. 6 David Campany, “The Eclipse of the Event,” in Mutations – Perspectives on Photography, ed. Chantal Pontbriand, p. 292.

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implies strong self-censorship added to the censorship of the military authorities. The photographers necessarily become close with the soldiers they spend all of their time with; eventually, these same soldiers are in charge of their personal safety. Moreover, it means that they report from one angle alone, same as in the war on the territory of former Yugoslavia. The chapter on War Photography and the Media is dedicated to an analysis of the Croatian and Serbian media that facilitated the escalation of a political conflict into a war, systematically dehumanized the opposed side, and intensified the war psychosis. Photography played a particularly important role in constructing the image of the soldier/ hero in the media. Such affirmative representation of one’s own soldiers was crucial in creating a positive image of the war and influencing the public opinion into supporting war efforts, while the image of the woman/victim served to victimize one’s own ethnic group through the mass media. That is linked to the fact that images of rape were absent from the public discourse despite the fact that mass rapes during the war were a part of military strategy throughout the history, including the war in former Yugoslavia and the rest of modern warfare. In the chapter on Trophy Photography, I analyze photographs and videos shot by the very perpetrators of torture and executions during the war on the territory of former Yugoslavia. I have also analyzed photographs that were shot by US soldiers in the prison of Abu Ghraib, where they transformed the very act into a tool for humiliating and torturing their victims. The fourth chapter deals with various issues pertaining to the ethics of photojournalism, from exploring the myth about the veracity of photography to the issue of the photographer’s responsibility for digital manipulation or shooting staged situations. Particular attention has been dedicated to the representation of the victims of war as a way of presenting the Other, and the questionable role of the photographer in the events that he/she witnesses. The fifth chapter, titled Who Is Watching?, discusses the role of the photographer and the printed media in mediating the event, exploring the role of the spectators as the consumers of images from areas affected by war. The chapter From the Battlefield to the Gallery deals with dislocating war photographs from the newspaper pages into the gallery space, which results in their commodification and in new discursive practices. In the final, seventh chapter I discuss the relationship between photography and private and collective memory. My intense involvement with the issue of war and its representation during the past years has left traces on my own artistic practice as well, even though I was never a war photographer myself. I dedicated my attention to what is left after the war – the collective memory defined by the official politics of remembering – trying to snatch out of collective oblivion those who are denied the right to be remembered. At the end of the book, as an appendix, I have added transcripts of conversations with photographers who documented war or its consequences in the territory of former Yugoslavia. The reader will

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thus be able to gain an insight into the circumstances in which the photographers were working at that time, what sort of challenges they had to face, and how they see their practice of war reporting today. Those of my collocutors who are still pursuing career in war photography also spoke about the current aspects of their profession. I must warn my readers that the illustrations accompanying the text include disturbing photographs with graphic violence.

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1. Romeo Ibrišević Defence of the Mladost bridge Zagreb, 1991.

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Propaganda Hate Speech and Images of Hatred

“Photography is a message,” Barthes wrote in his renown essay “The Photographic Message”.1 This message is created by the photographer, and also by a group of professional newspaper editors, who choose between various photographs, place the selected ones onto the page, surrounding and thus “defining” them with headlines and captions. Their work is what places the photograph into a framework/context that communicates its meaning to the public. Beaumont Newhall has emphasized that, in the genre of documentary photography, the photographer “seeks to do more than convey information...His aim is to persuade and convince”.2 For Estelle Jussim, these processes of persuasion “involve not only the psychology of individuals and the social psychology of groups, but the mass psychology of entire cultures and societies.”3 “’Information’ is never neutral,” Jussim writes, “since it is always received and interpreted by individuals according to their idiosyncratic beliefs, tempered by the massive conditioning that their socio-cultural environment provides.”4 Propaganda acts upon the preexisting opinions and unconscious motives of individuals and groups, relying to the universal mythologies of the particular society. Jowett and O’Donnell have defined propaganda as a “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”5 Propaganda that was in force during the war in former Yugoslavia is considered by the authors to be a classic example. War propaganda is a part of psychological war intended to dishearten and demoralize the enemy. However, when directed at one’s own citizens, it aims at securing their support for the war, mobilizing them for the fight, and creating a negative or hostile attitude towards the opposed group. Propaganda emphasizes those segments of information that support the desired opinion and suppress or completely leave out all content that is contrary to its goals. In order to achieve the 1 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), p. 15. 2 Beaumont Newhall in Estelle Jussim, “Propaganda and Persuasion,” in Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1989), p. 103. 3 Ibidem. 4 Ibid., p. 104. 5 Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (London: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 6.

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wanted bias in public opinion, it uses information selectively and even resorts to lying. Without the mass media, which played the key role in preparing the war by deepening hatred between the nations and demonizing the enemy, the war in Yugoslavia, and probably anywhere else in the world, would not have been so imminent. Propaganda in the mass media “helped the Croatian authorities to present themselves falsely as the last bastion of Western ‘democratic’ values. The Bosnian authorities, dominated by the Muslims, used propaganda to present themselves as the only innocent victims in that war, although it was not always true. Above all, propaganda helped the Serbian authorities in Belgrade and Bosnia to convince all Serbs that they were the tragic victims of other people’s sins in an international conspiracy aimed at destroying the Serbian people and its country.”6 Renaud de la Brosse, professor at the University of Reims ChampagneArdenne, has carried out a detailed analysis of the mass media in Serbia at the request of the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). This report, titled Political Propaganda and the Plan to Create a ‘State for All Serbs’: Consequences of Using the Media for Ultra-Nationalist Ends, was used during the trial of Slobodan Milošević in The Hague. De la Brosse has quoted several basic principles valid for all propaganda: simplification, projection of one’s own deficiencies upon others, instrumentalization of news to one’s own advantage, persistent repetition of the message, relying on myths and history, and building up a national consensus. With the collapse of the socialist system in Yugoslavia and the first multiparty elections, nationalist parties came to power and created tensions with their nationalist rhetoric that eventually escalated into a war. The new political leaders, both in Croatia and in Serbia, used the same control of the mass media, placing people loyal to their party to the leading positions in the news agencies owned by the state, especially radio, television, and the main newspapers. Dozens of the best journalists who refused to serve the propaganda machinery, to spread hatred and intolerance, were replaced by those who were willing to do it in the name of patriotism.7 The government did not like it when journalists were questioning its vision about the cause of war and its evolution, and the media haunted various citizens and public personalities who were of the “wrong” nationality or refused to express their unconditional loyalty to the government and the patriotic cause. “Journalists were divided into dissident journalists, for whom democracy was more important than the independent Croatian state, and convert journalists, for whom the state, in this case the Croatian state, would always be more important than democracy.”8 Ivo Banac is of the opinion that the concept of “ideological journalism” is crucial for these biased mass media, which is a legacy of the totalitarian systems. He has defined the concept as the idea that “the media must serve something beyond them, a greater idea 6 William Shawcross, “Preface”, in Kovanje rata – mediji u Srbiji, Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini [Forging the war: Mass Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina], ed. Mark Thompson (Zagreb: HHO, 1995), p. XX. 7 For a detailed presentation for the state of the mass media at that time, see Thompson, op. cit. 8 Danko Plevnik, Hrvatski obrat [The Croatian turn] (Zagreb: Durieux, 1993), p. 16, in Thompson, op. cit., p. 123.

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or project. In this case, it was the war project.”9 Pressure exerted on the journalists was most evident in the most influential among the mass media – the Croatian Television – where some very young journalists, without any experience, managed to become the celebrities of war reportage. Their reports were often sensationalist productions modeled upon attractive materials borrowed from other global televisions, but the information lacked credibility and there was no attempt to present the event from different angles.10 All the warring parties were well aware of the power of the mass media and tried throughout the war to influence even the foreign journalists and the international mass media to transmit their version of the “truth” to the rest of the world. Since that did not always happen, the journalists themselves would often become targets and reporting from the battlefield ended in death for 75 journalists, both local and international.11 After the beginning of war in Croatia, the reporting discourse changed within a brief period of time. The units of Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which openly joined the Serbian side, were termed “Serbian communist soldatesque,” “aggression army,” or “Serbian Chetniks,” while the rebelling Serbs became the “log revolutionaries,” “Chetniks”, “terrorists”, and “rebels”. In Serbia, all members of the Croatian army were proclaimed to be “Ustashas” or “bloodthirsty beasts.” According to Jacques Ellul, propaganda is a two-stage process, whereby pre-propaganda creates feelings and introduces stereotypes that will prove useful when the time for action comes.12 But even pre-propaganda must be based on the already existing ideas and emotions. The past is very important as a powerful political and discursive factor, since it provides an endless source of legitimacy. As long as there is a consensus about the past and the system of values it preserves in a society, it may become a referential framework in which messages from the actual moment can be embedded.13 The Serbian mass media were publishing a number of articles about the crimes committed in the Independent State of Croatia during World War II, reproducing photographs from its concentration camps.14 The entire Croatian nation was presented as thirsting for genocide and inclined to the Ustasha movement, in order to convince the Serbs that they were facing a new wave of suffering. At the same time, the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović were promoted into 9 Ivo Banac, “Pred zadatošću istorije dirigovanih medija” [Facing the predefined nature of the history of biased media], in Reči i nedela – Pozivanje i podsticanje na ratne zločine u medijima u Srbiji 19911992 [Words and misdeeds: Calls and encouragements to war crimes in the Serbian mass media 19911992], ed. Bruno Vekarić (Belgrade: Centre for Transitional Processes, 2011), p. 353. 10 Thompson, op. cit., p. 124. 11 According to the information given by John Simpson, “A joke, a Shot, a Pool of Blood,” The Independent (August 15, 1995). 12 Estelle Jussim, Propaganda and Persuasion, p. 111. 13 Jelena Vasiljević, “Kultura sećanja i medijska narativizacija sukoba u Hrvatskoj” [The culture of remembrance and the narrativization of the Croatian conflict in the media]”, Etnoantropološki problemi 1/3 (2008), p. 257. 14 In her book Milosevic, la diagonale du fou (Paris: Denoël, 1999), Florence Hartmann has written: “In a Belgrade television programme, broadcasted in the peak hour on July 27, 1991, speeches by Franjo Tuđman and Ante Pavelić, who had been an ally of Hitler and Mussolini, were fused together. The press published columns that re-actualized the massacres committed by Pavelić’s Croatian state, while the Belgrade television incessantly transmitted ideas of Serbian martyrdom and reminded people of the past, which eventually erased the present from their heads and identified the former persecutions of the Serbs in Croatia with the present, encouraging and justifying the violence that would follow.” Quoted from the Serbian translation in Renaud de la Brosse, Politička propaganda, a report for the trial of Slobodan Milošević before the Hague Tribunal.

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2. Globus, 31. 5. 1991. 3. Globus, 7. 6. 1991.

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anti-fascist fighters. The purpose of such reporting was to intensify the common feeling of victimization within the Serbian people and to reactivate a trauma that had long acquired mythological proportions in Serbia, turning traumatic historical events into a part of national identity.15 Žarko Puhovski is of the opinion that one of the reasons for this eruption of hatred was the “silence of hatred,” since it had been prohibited to speak of it during the years of Yugoslav “brotherhood-andunity” ideology.16 The memory of conflicts between various ethnicities and crimes that had occurred in the past could be articulated only outside of the public sphere, in family circles or in strict confidentiality. In Croatia, national awareness was likewise reawakened: among other things, it was reflected in the reintroduction of old Croatian words or coining new ones to replace those which were considered as “Serbisms”. In the mass media, proofreaders were watching over the “politically correct” language. The Croatian monetary currency was given the name “Kuna”, which it had had in the Ustasha-administered Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The young Croatian state failed to make sufficient reserves as to the crimes once committed by the Ustasha and NDH, and its mass media engaged in the revisionism of events that happened in World War II. Fear stirred by the Serbian media mobilized the Serbs of Croatia to proclaim the Autonomous Region of Krajina with the aim of joining it to Serbia. The Croatian media were hysterically warning of the danger of Chetnik hordes, often publishing their photographs and thus instilling fear in the Croatian population. Even though the aim of this chapter is to analyze the use of photography for propaganda purposes, my approach will necessarily be more inclusive, since it was primarily texts (newspaper articles and their layout) that were contaminated by propagandist interpretations. In the war of propaganda on the territory of former Yugoslavia, the main role was played by the national televisions on all sides. Therefore, I will use the term “images” for both photographs and video materials broadcasted on television. Excerpts from such videos were often published in the press, having undergone a transition from moving images to static ones. The advantage of moving images in terms of propaganda is that they communicate the message more easily, since they contain elements such as sound and montage. Cinema theoretician Bela Balasz has argued that the montage itself can turn individual images into truths or illusions.17 For a photograph, it is more difficult to achieve a propaganda effect in itself and thus it is regularly contextualized by means of a text. The one and the same photograph can change its meaning entirely if accompanied by two different texts, which is why photographs are mostly used only as evidence for a particular hypothesis or to illustrate the text. But just as cinematic montage construes the meaning by juxtaposing various contents, the newspaper page offers similar possibilities. By combining various photographs, headlines, subtitles, and captions, it directs and seduces the reader to draw the desired conclusions. Photographs in service of propaganda are designed to persuade: 15 Bruno Vekarić, p. 146. 16 Žarko Puhovski speaking in Dubrovnik, 2007. In Vekarić, p. 359. 17 Jussim, Propaganda and Persuasion, p. 112.

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4. Glas Slavonije, 12. 8.1991. 5. Slobodni tjednik, 15. 6.1991. 6. Slobodni tjednik, 15. 6.1991.

“Inflected and adapted to ensure maximum persuasive effect, they speak directly to the cultural concerns of the society at which they are directed, both in the subjects chosen for representation and in the way those subjects are portrayed.”18 Thus, directly before the outbreak of war, photographs in the Croatian and Serbian media were largely used for propaganda purposes, with the aim of instilling fear and psychosis. The weekly magazine Globus published a photograph of a Chetnik on the cover page of its issue in May 1991, along with a large, threatening headline saying: Serbs on the Path of War, thereby uniformly presenting all Serbs as Chetniks such as the one shown in the photo (Fig. 1). In TV news, it soon became standard to call the aggressors “Serbian forces” or 18 Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

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simply “Serbs”, thus ethnically marking the enemy. At the same time, TV Belgrade insisted on the duty of all Serbs to support the war efforts, condemning as traitors all those who would not.19 This established an ethnically based ethics, according to which the members of one’s own ethnic group were necessarily good, and the members of the other one necessarily evil.20 In June 1991, Globus again published a photograph showing Chetniks, this time holding a flag with a skull and a knife drawn to attack (Fig. 2). The headline claimed that there was a planned terrorist attack on the nuclear power plant Krško, only a few dozen kilometers away from Zagreb, and a subtitle next to the photograph said God Save Croatia. In August 1991, Glas Slavonije published on its cover page a photograph showing a Croatian soldier in camouflage, dragging a long-haired and bearded young man out of a cabriolet by the neck (Fig. 3). They are surrounded by a crowd peacefully watching the event. The text next to the photo calls it a peaceful protest of Yutel21 held in Osijek. A large headline above it screams: A Chetnik caught in the midst of the city! The young man, wearing a black T-shirt with Motorhead’s logo, would have been considered a representative of a particular music subculture only a few months before, rather than a Chetnik. Besides enforcing a war psychosis, the headline suggests that the enemy is already here, amongst us/them, “in the midst of the city.” In the same manner, Slobodni tjednik, the first tabloid newspaper in Croatia, brought sensationalist stories of a Belgrade protest with photographs of Chetniks (Fig. 4 and 5). Although never formally declared,22 the war in Croatia started on March 31, 1991 with the so-called “Bloody Easter”: a conflict in Plitvice in which two people lost their lives: Josip Jović, a member of the Croatian special forces, and Rajko Vukadinović, a Serbian rebel. The immediate escalation of violence was prevented by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which intervened by separating the two conflicting parties, thus establishing, however, an imaginary border between the Croatian territory and the Autonomous Region of Krajina. On that occasion, Slobodni tjednik published a photograph on its cover page showing the mother of the fallen policeman screaming in pain, with a large inscription saying WAR! above the photograph (Fig. 6). The photograph is naturalistic and crude, its only purpose being to trigger a powerful emotional reaction in the reader, without the least respect for the mourning family and the policeman’s mother. The journalist photographed her from below, her mouth gaping in a scream of despair. In the left corner, there is a childhood photo of the dead Josip Jović. A similar approach was that of Slobodni tjednik on the occasion of death of Croatian policemen in Borovo Selo, when it published, again on the cover page, a photo of the mother lamenting over her dead son (Fig. 7). The father and the daughter of the killed policemen stand next to her, and there is also a reproduction of a child’s drawing.

7. i 8. Goran Pichler, Borovo Selo, 2. 5. 1991. 9. Glas Slavonije, 10. 5. 1991.

19 Thompson, p. 147. 20 Žarko Puhovski in Vekarić, p. 356. 21 Yutel was a TV station located in Sarajevo, which tried to report objectively on the events related to the fall of Yugoslavia, endorsing the idea of Yugoslav unity. 22 Despite that, general mobilization was announced on November 23, 1991.

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10. Slobodni tjednik, 6. 4. 1991. 11. Slobodni tjednik, 11. 5. 1991.

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12. Matko Biljak, Split 6. 5. 1991, Slobodna Dalmacija 8.5.1991. 13. Nin, 10. 5.1991.

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Propaganda

During the conflict in Borovo Selo, 12 Croatian policemen were killed while attempting to liberate their captured colleagues, while 21 were wounded from an ambush made by the Serbian paramilitary. Allegedly the policemen were sent to intervene entirely unprepared for a conflict. I was told the story by photographer Goran Pichler, who was at that time reporting for Večernji list from Osijek and also photographed the events of Borovo Selo. His photographs show the inside of the attacked bus in which the policemen had arrived (Fig. 8). On one of the seats, one can see a half-eaten sandwich and sausages that the policemen had taken with them, obviously convinced that what awaited them was a routine task. These photographs were never published. The mutilated bodies of dead policemen were handed over to the Croatian police. On that same evening, they were shown in the peak-time news program on the Croatian television, and the same photographs were published in the daily newspaper on the following day, despite the fact that they were very graphic (Fig. 9). The aim of publishing such shocking photographs was to provoke a strong reaction in the public: bitterness, anger, and even hatred against those who had committed the crime. And the emotions of fear, bitterness, and hatred are precisely those listed by the professor of political sciences Roger D. Petersen as the triggers of ethnic violence. Fear is the dominant emotion, yet the other two also contribute to the deterioration of relations between

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two groups.23 According to Petersen, the emotional mechanism is the following: bitterness arises when people become convinced that they are dominated by another group, considered to be inferior, which threatens their self-respect and drives them to change their position. Hatred is produced and presented as the consequence of a long history of mutual hostilities and violence between two groups. Both groups believe that injustice has been done to them in the past, that they need to take avenge, and, what is more important, that the opposite group is prepared to commit new crimes against them, directly threatening them. Eventually, this anger gets out of control and leads to a (self-) destructive conflict. Bitterness, hatred, and anger indirectly encourage individuals to achieve understandable goals: improvement of the group’s status, historical revenge, and security.24 In his book Evil and Human Action (2005), Arne Johan Vetlesen likewise deals with the problem of ethnic violence. Each individual is reduced to a member of a group and thus responsible for all acts committed by the other members, not only in the present, but also in the distant past.25 In order to reach the state of consciousness in which their yesterday’s neighbors have become their worst enemies, “members of a group” must be subjected to systematic propaganda. To this purpose, the past is mythologized and the members of the opposite ethnic group stereotypized. “A war of words precedes a war of bodies… An atmosphere pervaded by fear, hatred, distrust and contempt, of the groups singled out for destruction [must be created] in many articles, books, speeches, and conversations. The drumming up of such an atmosphere is a sine qua non for the atrocities to follow.”26 Just like the Croatian Slobodni tjednik considered it a declaration of war to have a photograph of the family mourning over the dead body of the Croatian policeman, for the Serbian weekly NIN the beginning of the war was best embodied by a photograph (freeze-frame) from the protest in front of the military barracks in Split, which took the life of a JNA soldier by the name of Saško Gešovski. The black cover page of NIN dated May 10, 1991 contained a photograph (capture from the TV recording) showing the Croatian protesters attacking the soldier in an armored vehicle and strangling him. The headlines spelled FEAR, TERROR, WAR! (Fig. 10). Above the weekly’s logo, there is a small photograph showing the Orthodox patriarch and the Catholic cardinal, with the title: A Grain of Hope. The main photograph was taken from the TV recording first broadcasted by the Croatian television in the afternoon hours, but by the peak hour of the evening news, the video showing the brutal act of violence against the soldier had been censored and the Croatian television was no longer showing it. The Serbian mass media, however, published this particular excerpt in all their editions, using it to prove that the army had been attacked. Yutel broadcasted it several times and even froze the capture showing the violent attack. 23 P. Kolstø, “Diskurs i nasilni sukob: predstave o ‘sebi’ i ‘drugom’ u državama nastalim posle raspada Jugoslavije” [Discourse and violent conflict: images of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in the states created after the fall of Yugoslavia], in Intima javnosti [Intimacy of the public], ed. G. Đerić (Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2008), pp. 13-39. 24 Ibid., p. 20. 25 Ibid., p. 24. 26 Vetlesen, 2005, pp. 169-170, quoted in: Kolstø, p. 25.

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14. Romeo Ibrišević, Prekopakra, 1991. 15. Nedjeljni vjesnik, 19. 1. 1992. 16. Duga 462, 8 – 23. 11. 1991.

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Propaganda

It is important to note that the soldier attacked by the protesters was not Saško Gešovski, the soldier who had lost his life, as the recording and the headlines suggested. Gešovski, in fact, died from a bullet, although the interpretations of his death vary: according to some, he was shot by an officer of JNA because he refused to shoot at the protesters, while according to others he was hit by a stray bullet. In his text “Drama in the Dome,” published in the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, Živko Gruden criticized the censorship of the Croatian Television and compared the images of the dead policemen from Borovo Selo with the close shot of torturing a soldier in Split (Fig. 11). Gruden was of the opinion that the public should have been spared the sight of massacred policemen for reasons of empathy with the victims’ families, and also emphasized that the Croatian Television used censorship to protect those who had attacked the soldier. In the recording that was first broadcasted and then censored, the attackers’ faces were clearly visible, whereas the soldier could be seen only for a moment

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and impossible to recognize. It was a clear case of censorship and of using video documentation for propaganda purposes. The aim was to present the protests as utterly peaceful and dignified although a soldier had been killed during the protests, which was in direct contradiction with this claim, regardless of who had killed him. Boris Dežulović wrote about the incident in the same issue of Slobodna Dalmacija: “The scene in front of me lasted an eternity, when the crowd broke the police cordon and advanced towards the armored vehicle, shouting: ‘Chetniks, Chetniks.’ It was an eternity to look at the dragging, beating, and strangling of the unfortunate soldier, whose eyes had the most horrified expression I had ever seen. For the attackers, he was a metaphor of a Chetnik, and therefore he had to be executed… On the other side of the barricade, it was ‘the same song,’ only that its authors wanted to say something completely different. For them, the unfortunate soldier was to become the metaphor of their own tragedy, tragedy of a people – since it was the Yugoslav People’s Army – which a group of rowdy madmen would fall upon, a perfect metaphor for the resurrected Ustasha movement, to which I, serving as a free extra only a few meters from the vehicle, supposedly belonged as well.”27 The images showing the attack on the soldier had thus acquired a metaphorical meaning that was differently interpreted depending on who was watching and how, and in which context they were published. “The frame that seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen […] depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed. And yet, this very reproducibility entails a constant breaking from context, a constant delimitation of new context, which means that the ‘frame’ does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every 27 Boris Dežulović, “Metafora u konzervi” [Metaphor in a can], Slobodna Dalmacija (May 8, 1991).

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17. Pavo Urban, Porat burns IV, Dubrovnik, studeni 1991. 18. Dubrovnik's “dense” fogs, Politika ekspres, 7.11. 1991.

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22. Uroš Predić, An orphan on mother's grave, 1888 23. Večernje novosti, 1994.

19. Politika ekspres, 16. 8. 1991. 20. Večernji list, 30. 7. 1991. 21. Vreme, 5. 8. 1991.

time it seeks to give definite organization to its content,”28 as Judith Butler says. The same happened with the photograph made by Romeo Ibrišević in Prekopakra in September 1991, as stated in the caption found in the book Croatian War Correspondence 1991/92 (Fig. 12). The same photograph was published in Vjesnik on January 19, 1992, with the caption Defending one’s homeland (Fig. 13). In the Italian daily La Repubblica, the photograph was published on December 18, 1991, along with the interview with Franjo Gregurić and the caption saying The army is still attacking the periphery of Osijek. To the Serbian Duga, the photograph showing a Croatian soldier from the special forces wearing a beret and running towards the camera, with houses burning in the background, served to identify the arsonist embodied as a Croatian soldier (Fig. 14)! This means that the same motive, the same soldier, was once interpreted as a Croatian soldier defending his homeland, at another time as the arsonist, and at a third time as a member of the hostile army. In the same way, photographs of victims could be contextualized in various ways, as both conflicting sides claimed that the victims were theirs and accused the other side of murder. Photographs and videos were used as mere illustrations attached to the text or a television report, corroborating what was said. Thus, the Croatian Television published a story about an attack on the village of Dragotinci even though their reporters had not been present at all. They simply used the information that they had obtained from the Police Headquarters in Sisak, and the video material that belonged to another TV crew. According to eyewitnesses, members of the then National Guard, Dragotinci were attacked by mortars, machine guns, and canons from tanks. The shots show demolished houses with the commentary of a journalist from the Croatian 28 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), p. 10.

Television saying that it was all that was left of the village of Dragotinci. The same materials were broadcasted day after day, although no team had ever actually gone to the allegedly erased village. Provoked by the lies perpetuated by the Croatian Television, a journalist of Slobodna Dalmacija, Zvonimir Krstulović, wrote a letter to the weekly magazine Danas, which then published the story, in which he claimed that the shots showed only three demolished houses, while the rest of the village was still in place.29 On the other hand, even when photography actually served to prove authentic damage and crimes, it became a contested matter for the opposing side. Politika ekspres once published on its cover page a photograph in which one sees the port of Dubrovnik, a protected world heritage monument, with heavy black smoke above it (Fig. 15). The headline stated ‘Dense Fog’ above Dubrovnik and actually accused the Croatian Television and the national news agency for having sent a falsified image to the world, forging what the image showed and staging an attack on the city. The text said: “The Croatian Television and the Ustasha news agency HINA inform the world that ‘the old city in Dubrovnik is on fire.’ The eyewitnesses, however, say that the Ustashas are burning heaps of car tires next to Fort Revelin, which ‘emits some pretty good smoke’ for the cameras of photo-reporters from the Croatian TV and HINA, which they will show to the European public. This is the Croatian ‘dense fog’: not at all surprising.” Politika ekspres also used photography to diminish the importance of reports about the attack on Struga and the crimes against the local population, which resounded in both the Croatian and Serbian mass media. A photo29 Gojko Marinković, “Evropa na balkanski način” [Europe in a Balkan style], Danas (July 30, 1991), pp. 26-27.

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reporter of Serbian Borba, Miloš Cvetković, was there and photographed the Serbian paramilitary leading the Croatian civilians before them as a human shield. On that occasion he was attacked, his camera was broken, the footage destroyed, and a machine gun shot next to him as a warning. Borba reported on all that,30 and so did Danas, in a text titled Kill the Journalists by Tomislav Butorac.31 The Croatian media reported on the sufferings of civilians and policemen from Struga and the surrounding villages, and when the bodies were recovered, the Croatian Television32 and the daily newspapers published photographs of corpses with visible knife cuts. Everyone emphasized that the bodies had been mutilated and the wounds inflicted by cold weapons. Večernji list published a double page with photographs of refuges and destruction that had taken place the week before (Fig. 16). The photographs were allegedly shot by their own reporters, J. Bistrović, S. Hančić, G. Pichler, and K. Rosandić, and the AP agency is listed as an additional source. One of the photographs shows several people carrying a corpse wrapped in cloth, with the caption saying: “The global democracies will certainly not remain silent after this Chetnik massacre in Struga.”33 The same photograph was published by Politika ekspres under the headline Večernjak’s Contribution to the History of Shameless Photo-lies – Who Is Massacring the Dead? (Fig. 17). The text claims that Večernji list in fact published a photograph by Miloš Cvetković, reframed so as to cut off the head of the dead person, visible in the original photo as the corpse was not wrapped entirely. Politika ekspres claimed that the intervention was made in order to falsely imply that the “Chetniks” were decapitating the dead, and also quoted Večernjak’s text that spoke of the terrible events “in the Croatian village of Struga, where raving Serbian criminals committed a crime without precedent using Chetnik knifes for killing innocent people...…”34 But that text, same as any other report on the events in Banija, does not mention “decapitation”, as Politika ekspres claimed. The same photograph by Miloš Cvetković was published in its original version on the cover page of the Vreme magazine over the photograph of the protests, with a hand with two raised fingers in the foreground, partly entering the scene of Struga (Fig. 18). If Večernji list had borrowed the photographed from the cover page of Vreme, it may be presumed that the editor decided to reframe the photo in order to avoid the hand with the sign of V for Victory, since the gesture would be inappropriate next to the body of a dead victim. However, the attempt of “naïve propaganda” is here on the side of Politika express, which sought with that text and the questions about the manipulation of the image to question all news published on Struga in those days. The Serbian mass media had no problem with fabricating a “photograph” when it was to serve the propaganda purposes. For example, the Belgrade newspaper Večernje novosti published a “photograph” showing a boy 30 Gradiša Katića, “Crni petak na Baniji” [Black Friday in Banija], Borba (July 26, 1991). 31 Tomislav Butorac, “Ubij novinare” [Kill the journalists], Danas (August 20, 1991), p. 43. 32 Report of the Croatian Television from July 27, 1991 can be seen on YouTube: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=RkgCbDrfoGM (last accessed on August 15, 2012). 33 D. Đuretek, “Prljavi rat se nastavlja” [The dirty war goes on], Večernji list (July 30, 1991), pp. 14-15. 34 Ibidem.

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prostrated on a grave, with a text about him mourning over his dead family killed by the Muslims (Fig. 19). But in fact, Večernje novosti merely reproduced a painting by the Serbian artist Uroš Predić from 1888, which hangs in the National Museum in Belgrade.35 In black-and white newspaper context, the reproduction of the Orphan looked as credible as a photograph. Translated from Croatian by Marina Miladinov

35 “Pravda za Uroša Predića” [Justice for Uroš Predić], e-novine (October 16, 2009).

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