Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–1995 War 9781623564971, 9781501304415, 9781623567071

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Screening Bosnia

Screening Bosnia Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992–1995 War Stephen Harper

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Stephen Harper, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harper, Stephen. Title: Screening Bosnia : geopolitics, gender and nationalism in film and television images of the 1992-1995 War / Stephen Harper. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016038802 | ISBN 9781623564971 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781623565923 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Yugoslav War, 1991-1995–Bosnia and Herzegovina–Mass media and the war. | War films–History and criticism. | Nationalism in motion pictures. | Discrimination in motion pictures. | Psychic trauma in motion pictures. Classification: LCC DR1313.7.M37 H37 2017 | DDC 791.43/65849703–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038802 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6497-1 ePub: 978-1-6235-6592-3 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6707-1 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Laurie Sparham / Channel 4 / Miramax / REX / Shutterstock Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgementsvi Introduction1 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia13 The First Draft of History: (Mis)Reporting the Bosnian War 31 Humanitarianism and Its Others: Three ‘Liberal’ 1990s Bosnian War Dramas 55 Going in Hard: Masculinism, Militarism and Melodrama in the Bosnian War Action Film 77 The Subject of Rape: Phenomenological and Ideological Representations of Sexual Violence in the Bosnian War Film 97 From Nationalism to Normalization: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Films about the Bosnian War 121

Conclusion: Neither Hollywood Nor Belgrade: Towards an Unpatriotic Cinema of the Bosnian War143 Bibliography151 Index169

Acknowledgements I would like to thank those individuals who have – directly or indirectly – helped me to write this book. Meetings with several scholars, especially Milja Radović and Dubravka Žarkov, provided me with an opportunity to discuss the book and inspired me to push ahead with it despite severe limitations on my writing time. Invitations to rehearse the book’s arguments at the University of Portsmouth, where I teach (thanks to Deborah Shaw), the University of Winchester (thanks to Neil Ewen) and London South Bank University (thanks to Philip Hammond) were also tremendously valuable. Several colleagues and acquaintances at the University of Portsmouth – notably my friends and office-mates Simone Gumtau, Sally Shaw, Tom Sykes and Sophia Wood – provided much good cheer during the writing process. Katie Gallof, the Film and Media Studies Acquisitions Editor at Bloomsbury, was an unusually attentive and helpful editor and I must also thank Bloomsbury’s anonymous manuscript reviewer for catching several solecisms before publication; all remaining deficiencies are, of course, my responsibility alone. Finally, I would like to thank my family in Scotland – Anne, Mark, Hannah and Daniel Smith, Veronica Harper and Brian Davidson – for their love and support. This book is dedicated to Binlan and to my son, Thomas.

Introduction

For more than two decades now, cinema has played an important role in explaining and interpreting the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s for a global audience. This book discusses and critiques the representation of the 1992–95 Bosnian war in narrative film fiction since the end of the war, taking in productions from Holywood and Europe, including films made in the countries of the former Yugoslavia itself. It combines textual, historical and political analyses of film texts in an attempt to understand the cinematic representation of the war’s complex political and diplomatic manoeuvrings, the discursive practices of journalists, the experiences of soldiers, the interventions of NATO and the UN, and the sufferings of civilians. My interest in writing about cinematic images of the Bosnian war dates back to 2009, when it began to dawn on me that the public representation of the conflict was both a neglected and a contested subject. Towards the end of that year, I attended a British one-day conference about the televisual mediation of war. In the final panel of the day, I delivered a paper about screen images of the Bosnian war, focusing on Peter Kosminsky’s Warriors, which tells the story of British soldiers sent to Bosnia as part of the United Nations Protection Force in 1992. In order to contextualize my argument, which challenged some of the dominant Western assumptions about the war, I made some points that are rehearsed in the first chapter of this book. I pointed out, for example, that while Serb soldiers undoubtedly committed more atrocities in the Bosnian war than those fighting on the other ‘sides’, Bosnia was a multilateral civil war, a fact that problematizes the widespread portrayal of the Serbs as the conflict’s sole aggressors. Moreover, I said, while the evidence surrounding particular cases might be patchy and unreliable, there were credible reports that militia in the Bosnian war sometimes attacked civilians belonging to their ‘own’ ethnic group, probably in order to gain propaganda advantages. While these points may be contentious to some, they are neither original nor especially controversial. Yet my raising of them upset one of the delegates, a journalist-turned-academic who had worked in Bosnia after 1995. During

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the question and answer session following my paper, the delegate challenged my suggestion that so-called false flag operations had taken place in Bosnia. When I provided evidence in support of the contention, he raised an eyebrow sceptically and agreed to follow up my references. He then pressed on, telling me that I had got my facts wrong: there had never been, he said, an UNPROFOR mission to Bosnia in 1992. This I knew to be false; nevertheless, for reasons of time – and in order to avoid an unproductive and unseemly public squabble – I declined to pursue the disagreement. A short silence followed, after which my talk received the statutory round of applause and the conference came to an end. As we left the conference centre for a nearby bar, another delegate told me that he had enjoyed hearing my paper, adding, sotto voce: ‘But there was Srebrenica’. This final remark was unsettling, not least because I had not denied – nor would I ever deny – that a dreadful massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys took place during the Bosnian war in that town. After the conference, I received a graciously apologetic email from my questioner, conceding that the UNPROFOR mission was indeed factual. Yet I was left pondering some troubling questions about my experience at the conference. Why was my characterization of the Bosnian war as a civil war so scandalous to at least one or two of the delegates? How could it be that individuals possessing a sophisticated grasp of the geopolitics of contemporary conflicts seemed to have so little knowledge about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia? And how was it that at an academic conference about media and war – many of whose delegates approvingly discussed counter-hegemonic screen media narratives about the ongoing conflict in Iraq – there seemed to be little readiness to critique the dominant media Western construction of the Bosnian war, to the point that I had come to be effectively accused, albeit privately and implicitly, of ‘genocide denial’ for doing so? In respect of these questions, some general observations ought to be made about the geopolitical context of discussions of the Yugoslav wars in the present era. For one thing, NATO’s military actions in Yugoslavia have tended to be regarded positively, as a belated yet sincere attempt to achieve peace in the region. Many of the liberal-left academics and journalists who objected to British and US imperialist manoeuvres in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century adopted a decidedly less questioning orientation towards the Western foreign policy of the preceding decade, broadly supporting US military intervention in the Balkans. To take just a few examples: in a book condemning American foreign policy at the start of the twenty-first century, British journalist

Introduction

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Will Hutton (2002: 14) looked back to ‘America’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 to prevent ethnic slaughter’, remarking that it ‘looks increasingly like the last act of the best of the twentieth-century US. The twenty-first-century US is a darker and less altruistic country.’ US academic Todd Gitlin (2008) has written that he opposed war in Iraq, despite having ‘supported the Bosnia war’ and notes that he had been in favour of military intervention ‘years before American, French, British, and other leaders finally aligned in the face of unending slaughter’. Irwin Stelzer (2010: 20) has argued that stopping ‘the genocide of Muslims by Serbs’ was ‘acceptable’, but that invading Iraq was ‘a different matter’. The liberal sociologist Anthony Giddens, meanwhile, has opined that ‘the military interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo’ had been ‘successes’ (Giddens 2010a: 26), but warned that the invasion of Iraq ‘discredited the doctrine of liberal interventionism’ (Giddens 2010b: 5). Although they have been challenged by many geopolitical commentators – Noam Chomsky (2008), for example, is one widely respected and high-profile critic of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia – such positive evaluations of Western military action in the Balkans are widespread. One reason for this outpouring of Western liberal support for military intervention may have been that the Balkan wars of the 1990s mostly took place with Bill Clinton in the White House. Liberal intellectuals have often harshly criticized the Bush administration’s gung-ho response the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001; but they have been less eager to censure overseas operations sponsored by Democratic administrations. The overseas record of US president Barack Obama, for example, received far less condemnation than that of his predecessor George W. Bush, despite its essential continuity with it (Ali 2010). Another reason for the paucity of criticism of Western foreign policy in the 1990s may be the historically low levels of class struggle and public engagement with foreign affairs during the period – a situation that somewhat ameliorated in the following decade, as attested by the large-scale public demonstrations against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, contemporary confusion about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s may result from the sheer weight of misinformation and bias generated over the last two decades within both news media and popular culture – a phenomenon addressed in this book. Today, a decade and a half after 9/11 and the ensuing declaration of a ‘war on terror’, the brutal wars that ripped apart the former Yugoslavia have somewhat faded from public memory. At the same time, the mainstream Western account of the Bosnian war has converged around a series of commonplace propositions

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Screening Bosnia

and catchphrases: the Serbs, it is said, conspired to begin the fighting in pursuit of territory while ‘the world’ impotently ‘looked on’ or ‘did nothing’ (these platititudes were echoed in liberal analyses of the 1994 Rwandan civil war). NATO, it is said, finally intervened to ‘stop the slaughter’ and ‘bring democracy’ to the Balkans. While not entirely without justification, such assertions involve a good deal of exaggeration and oversimplification, as I explain in the following chapters. In recent years, moreover, the legitimacy of many regnant assumptions about the Yugoslav wars and the role of the Western powers in them have been widely called into question in a range of well-researched but distinctly counterhegemonic analyses including David N. Gibbs’s First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (2009) and George Szamuely’s Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia (2013). As a media and film critic with an interest in persuasion, propaganda and ideology critique, I have become interested over the years not only in the journalistic analysis of the Bosnian war but also in how the war and its various actors have been mediated and mythologized on both Western and Balkan screens. If the news reporters covering the Bosnian war provided, in Philip Graham’s famous phrase, the ‘first draft of history’, this draft has undergone numerous revisions in subsequent decades. Journalists, screenwriters and filmmakers have all retold stories of the conflict in their own ways, responding to shifting ‘vocabularies of war’ (Jeffords and Rabinovitz 1994: 21), emergent emphases of geopolitical discourse (‘humanitarian intervention’) and the changing figuration of war in the Western cultural imaginary (especially, in the case of the Bosnian war, following 9/11). This book aims to take stock of these retellings in a holistic fashion, starting with a brief discussion of the war and its news media representation, and then analysing narrative screen fictions about the Bosnian war produced over the last twenty years in both the ‘West’ and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Combining stylistic and content analysis of film texts with considerations of historical accuracy, critical reception and production contexts, the book seeks to identify some of these films’ recurring themes and their ideological perspectives on the war. This book seeks to provide a wide-ranging, although certainly not exhaustive, critical account of a large number of films, and some television productions, about the war. Ian Roberts (2013: 171–2) notes that Bosnian war films, in most parts of the world, have not generally done good box office and have – perhaps partly for this reason – attracted little scholarly attention, even when they have been acclaimed by film critics. Bosnian war films have hitherto

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mostly been discussed in small-scale studies or single-text analyses which, for all their insights, offer limited scope for comprehending wider patterns of representation (for a discussion of the limitations of the ‘single text analysis’ approach in studies of media representation, see Schiappa 2008). That said, some larger-scale studies of screen images of the Bosnian war do exist, although these often engage exclusively or primarily with the post-Yugoslav context: for example, Dina Iordanova’s (2001) classic book-length study Cinema of Flames and Pavle Levi’s (2007) Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema present incisive and influential readings of Balkan war cinema. And I became aware of a clutch of excellent monographs focusing on post-Yugoslav cinema only at the very end of the writing process: these were Milja Radović’s (2014) Transnational Cinema and Ideology: Representing Religion, Identity and Cultural Myths, Dino Murtic’s (2015) Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Towards a Cosmopolitian Imagining and Dijana Jelača’s (2016) Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. I have drawn upon all of these sources in this book, although my own textual focus is wider, concentrating mainly on Hollywood and other wellknown global film productions about the war. As has been noted by several critics (e.g. Chapman 2008: 8–9), the definition of a ‘war film’ is somewhat arbitrary. In this book, I examine films and television dramas that touch on any aspect of the Bosnian war or its aftermath. As Robert Eberwin (2005: 45) suggests of the ‘war film’ genre, a film belongs to the genre if it focuses, with varying emphases, (1) directly on war itself (battles – preparation, actual, aftermath/damage); (2) on the activities of the participants off the battlefield (recruitment, training, leisure, recovery from wounds); and (3) the effects of war on human relationships (home front, impact on family and lovers). While some films easily meet all three criteria, others are notable for qualifying on the basis of one in particular.

A war film, then, need not actually reference conflict directly, but must address some aspect of the fighting, its participants, or its impact on individuals and society. Many of the films discussed here are Hollywood productions. Hollywood, as Andrew Higson (1989: 39) notes, has always constituted an ‘integral and naturalized part of national culture, or the popular imagination, of most countries in which cinema is an established entertainment form;’ necessarily, then, it has exercised significant influence over the global imagination of the Bosnian war – even if, as I argue here, Hollywood’s handling of the war and its

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legacy leaves much to be desired. Whether Hollywood’s global cinematic influence is regarded benignly, in terms of transnational influence, or hostilely, as a form of cultural imperialism, films such as Welcome to Sarajevo and In the Land of Blood and Honey have surely provided many people with their principal, or perhaps only image of the Bosnian war and are therefore worthy of detailed critical analysis. ‘Living in the twentieth century’, as Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev once quipped, ‘means learning to be an American’ – and, we might add, learning to see the world with American eyes. To have focused exclusively on Hollywood productions, however, would have been profoundly limiting in a book that aims to survey the global cinematic imagining of the war. In the Anglophone publishing sphere, books about the screen representation of war often focus exclusively on US – or US and British – films. The essays collected in Michael Anderegg’s (1991) anthology about Vietnam war films, to take just one example, are concerned only with US productions. While it is perfectly defensible for scholars to restrict their textual focus in this way, to concentrate on film production within a single national context is to circumscribe dramatically one’s argumentational scope. Thus, although the present book is largely concerned with Hollywood and Western European films about the war – productions that have enjoyed widespread global distribution and which reveal much about Western attitudes towards Bosnia – it also discusses cinematic productions from other parts of the world; indeed, some of the more problematic aspects of Hollywood representation can only be discerned, as it were, in relief, through comparison with films originating in other global regions – particularly, of course, the Balkans. The temporal and geographical boundaries of the present study are also somewhat flexible: while the book focuses on the war in Bosnia (1992–95) – the central conflict of the Yugoslav wars – it has at times seemed appropriate to touch briefly on the preceding war in Croatia (1991) and the subsequent Kosovo conflict (1999) for contextual reasons, although a detailed discussion of films about the Croatian and Kosovan conflicts is beyond the scope of the present text. The book’s structure is simple. The first chapter surveys some of the main events of the Bosnian war and engages with the often intense and fissiparous debates about the causes of, responsibility for, the war’s many atrocities. While I am not a professional historian, I have endeavoured to represent the events of the war here in a way that is fair to all ‘sides’ in the conflict. However, since any account of the war will contain points of controversy, I should like at the very least to state at the outset my independence from any national or

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ethnic affiliation. This is, I feel, an important disclaimer, since many of the most distinctive and vocal commentators on the Bosnia war and its cultural representation have connections to political figures or organizations that might be argued to compromise their objectivity. For example, Stjepan Meštrović, an academic writer with a pro-Croatian view of the Bosnian war, has served as an adviser to the former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman. Hailing from a very different political perspective, Michael Parenti, a longstanding critic of US policy towards the former Yugoslavia, has been a supporter of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević. Judging by their writings, other commentators on the Yugoslav wars may be suspected of having undeclared affiliations with particular ethno-nationalist institutions. However that may be, I wish to state that I have no such attachments, nor do I feel any ethnic or national allegiance with any state or would-be state in Europe or elsewhere in the world; indeed, I harbour no admiration for nationalism of any kind. My own perspective on the Bosnian war is the distinctly ‘unpatriotic’ (Heartfield 2012) one characteristic of Marxist internationalism. The Bosnian war, I argue in the first chapter, was a brutal civil, or perhaps ethnic war that caused enormous suffering to people of all backgrounds, especially Bosnia’s Muslim population, and which was fomented and perpetuated by nationalist politicians within the former Yugoslav republics and facilitated by the diplomatic and military interventions of the world’s ‘great’ powers. The book’s second chapter concentrates on the construction of the war in news and current affairs media, with an especial focus on Western media. ‘Western media’ is, of course, a problematic formulation, since the material interests of the various Western states in any particular conflict – and the ideological emphases of their media superstructures – are far from co-extensive. In light of this caveat, ‘Western’ is used here as a term of convenience, referring generally to the Western European countries and the United States, whose policies towards the former Yugoslavia – while by no means convergent, as explained at several points in the book – came to have much in common as the Bosnian war progressed. The chapter aims to show some of the political ideologies at work in the news reporting of Bosnia, arguing that Western journalists framed the Bosnian war in terms that were largely consistent with Western policy objectives. As well as providing historical ‘background’ to the discussion of Bosnian war films, Chapter 2 serves to introduce some of the discursive themes – such as the ‘journalism of attachment’ – that have been remediated in subsequent cinematic images of the war.

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Screening Bosnia

The remaining chapters focus on the book’s central concern – cinematic (and to a far lesser extent televisual) representations of the war – with a view to contributing to the rather slender body of scholarly work on fictional screen representations of the conflict. In recent years, there can be no doubt that forms of reality television ‘militainment’ (Stahl 2009; Takacs 2012) and postmillennial popular war cinema have helped to build public support for Western military operations (Power and Crampton 2007). Douglas Kellner (2010) has shown, for example, how films about the Iraq war involve extensive and systematic historical distortions of the conflict. In the same way, much of my discussion in the book’s central chapters engages geopolitical, ‘macro-level’ questions about how the various warring factions, the Western powers and organizations such as the UN have been represented in film and how the Bosnian war itself has been envisioned in ways that are broadly consistent with Western geopolitical perspectives and objectives. Working within the general analytic idiom of ‘popular geopolitics’ (Dittmer 2010), I combine textual analysis, cultural theory, and academic and journalistic film reviews in an effort to discover the ideological contours of a variety of screen dramas produced in Hollywood and Europe, including the former Yugoslavia itself – and even, in one case, Pakistan. The primary questions addressed by the book may be listed as follows: • How accurate are these films’ depictions of the events of the Bosnian war and what ethno-political biases do they betray? • How has cinema represented combatants, international organizations and victims, especially women? • In what ways do these films mobilize dominant journalistic discourses about the war? • How differently do Balkan films and Western/Hollywood films represent the war? • What do these films tell us about the place of the Balkans in the Western imaginary? In attempting to answer these questions, the book aims to provide fresh critical insights into individual Bosnian war films, while also showing how these films constitute a rich intertextual network of images and ideas about the war. A decade ago, Gow and Michalski (2007: 16) noted that relatively little attention has been devoted to the intersection of cinema and international relations, a field that has only recently emerged as a significant area of scholarly

Introduction

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research. This largely remains the case today. Yet the entertainment industries can be considered to play an important role in constructing the meaning of conflict for a mass audience that is removed, temporally or geographically, from the fighting. Audio-visual media, particularly cinema, help to shape public understandings and memories of war. As Holger Pötzsch (2012: 157) puts it: War films affect collective imaginations of a shared past in particularly sensitive areas. They might promote a certain understanding of a particular war which has an inherent power of producing political effects regarding, for instance, the perceived legitimacy of military endeavours or the responsibility for possible failures. Due to their emotional charge, easy accessibility and widespread consumption by large parts of the population, war films possess a memorymaking potential (Erll 2008: 389) – a ‘potential to generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’.

Given the potential of war films to shape historical understandings, filmmakers, whether or not they realize it, have a responsibility to create representations of war that are truthful and non-partisan. This book is largely concerned with evaluating the success of a variety of filmmakers in constructing such representations. Yet ‘reading’ the war film is not simply a matter of ascertaining whether this or that text encodes a historically ‘accurate’ representation of particular events, but also of understanding how films make war intelligible through the creation of structures of feeling. Consequently, the book is concerned not only with questions of national and institutional representation but also, at the micro-level, with how cinema depicts personal and affective experiences of war and the daily lives of soldiers, journalists and especially – given the widespread use of rape as a weapon in the Bosnian war – civilian victims. Four chapters of the book address cinematic representations of the Bosnian war. Chapter 3 is concerned with drama films, concentrating on three productions from the late 1990s – Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), Warriors (1999) and the television series Alpha Bravo Charlie (1998) – all of which deal with the trials and frustrations of foreign ‘humanitarian’ personnel in Bosnia. It is argued that these productions tend to follow familiar Western political and news media scripts about the war, even though they are all informed by a broadly liberal, humanitarian ethos. Chapter 4 turns to the explosion of Bosnian war action films that appeared after 2001 – including Behind Enemy Lines (2001) and The Hunting Party (2008) – considering how these gung-ho productions retrospect the Bosnian war through the lens of the ‘war on terror’ and the tropes of masculinist

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melodrama, reinforcing highly stereotypical representations of ethnic identity. Chapter 5 continues to engage questions of gender, albeit from a very different perspective. Considering the portrayal of sexual violence against women with a particular focus on the films As If I Am Not There (2010) and In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011), the chapter explores how female filmmakers, in particular, have sought to portray the subjective experiences of war rape victims, with varying degrees of success. Finally, since the films discussed in the book’s early chapters are mostly US and Western European in origin and thus reflect occidental ways of seeing, Chapter 6 provides a broad survey of how filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia have navigated the ethno-nationalist identifications thrown up by the Bosnian war. My decision to focus each chapter on, variously, a genre (Chapters 3 and 4), a specific theme (Chapter 5) and a global region (Chapter 6) enables the films to be examined from a variety of topical and theoretical perspectives in a way that gives the book, I hope, a degree of tonal variety. It is of course impossible to examine every aspect of the cultural representation of any war – even one of relatively short duration, such as the Bosnian war – and hard choices about focus and scope had to be made during the writing of this book. The selection of news media stories posed a particular challenge; clearly, it would be inappropriate if not impossible, in a book about cinematic representations, to conduct a full-scale analysis of the hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles and television news bulletins about the war produced in the 1990s. Chapter 2 therefore discusses only a few representative examples of mostly Western news and documentary reporting, combining this discussion with academic overviews of the same, in order to indicate some of the principal themes of news coverage at certain moments during the war – especially those that resonate with the films discussed in later chapters. Feature films about the Bosnian war, too, are sufficiently numerous – perhaps 250 films about the war have been made in Europe alone (Kuhn and Westwell 2012: 460) – to preclude detailed analysis of them all, even in a book-length study. I have therefore given most attention to productions with a sustained narrative focus on the war and which have enjoyed international distribution. There are exceptions, however; included in Chapter 3, for example, is a discussion of the Pakistani television series Alpha Bravo Charlie, which, besides being exceptionally popular in Pakistan, also provides a unique insight into the public presentation of the war in an Asian country whose Muslim government and population had strong political and emotional investments in the conflict. In the case of Hollywood hits such as Welcome to Sarajevo and In the Land of Blood and Honey, or productions that

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provide a highly detailed or critically acclaimed rendering of the Bosnian war, such as the British television drama film Warriors, I have chosen to probe the texts quite deeply, engaging with the intricacies of plot, dialogue and representation. Other productions, such as films that are only tangentially about the war, have warranted less detailed analysis. These films are discussed more briefly and in a more instrumentalist fashion, in order to indicate their contribution to broader patterns of representation. Decisions about what to include or exclude from discussion are inevitably subjective and contestable; nevertheless, I hope that my concentration on well-known, internationally distributed films will make this book accessible to the general reader, as well as those with more specialized or academic interests in Bosnia and/or war cinema.

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The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia

Coming at the end of a century of unprecedented man-made slaughter, the Balkan wars were perhaps the most prominent of a series of intra-state conflicts that broke out in the 1990s. These conflicts produced ‘dramatic images of human suffering that played to the heart and evoked cries for the international community to “do something” to stop the terrible tragedies being played out before a global television audience’ (Taylor 2003: 299). Yet the Western clamour for intervention in these wars was not always underpinned by a robust historical or political understanding of them. The Bosnian war, in particular, constitutes a hugely complex and overdetermined series of events. What follows in this chapter is therefore merely a brief overview of some of the political, social and economic roots of the conflict. I provide it in order to highlight points of controversy about the causes, conduct and conclusion of the war and to set the scene for the ensuing discussion of its cinematic representation. The political and social processes that led to the outbreak of hostilities in the Balkans in 1991 are complex and do not permit of easy comprehension. They are also hotly contested. Today, within the post-war Balkans, each of the Yugoslav successor states has its own version of Yugoslav history – each dependent, in large part, on the geopolitical affiliations of its national ruling class. Outside the Balkan region, in the Western media, meanwhile, something that might be called the dominant framing of the Bosnian conflict has crystallized. This mainstream account – the one upheld by the academic and mainstream commentators in the West – holds that the Balkan conflicts were wars of aggression waged exclusively by the Serbs in which the United States and the ‘international community’ in general was ‘slow to act’. Over the years since the war, however, a somewhat different story about the Yugoslav wars has been told by historians and theorists including David Gibbs, Diana Johnstone and Peter Gowan. Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. The critics

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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, characterize the dominant Western narrative of the Bosnian war – or what Edward Herman and David Peterson (2007: 1) have provocatively called the Western news media’s ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’ about what happened during the conflict. There is insufficient space in this chapter to rehearse, let alone analyse, every event relating to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the country’s decent into armed conflict in the 1990s; yet a reasonably extensive prolegomenon on both the history and the public representation of the Yugoslav wars is indispensable here. Many of the events of the wars are disputed and facts are difficult to ascertain: both during and after the Yugoslav wars, the fabrication, misrepresentation and exaggeration of atrocities seem to have been rife; and, as is argued in the following chapter, the news media often contributed to the confusion. Notwithstanding these complexities, the following chapter constructs a brief history of the war that – while it may not be comprehensive nor resolve every historical uncertainty – at least provides an outline of the war’s political, economic and military determinants in a way that helps to illuminate the issues and themes at stake in its cinematic representation.

The build-up to the Bosnian war Before the wars of the 1990s, Yugoslavia consisted of the republics of Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro and the three larger republics of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In each of these republics, the populations were mixed: Albanians were dominant in the Kosovo region of Serbia, for example, while Serbs predominated in Croatia’s Krajina region, and there were large numbers of Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. Intermarriage between ethnic groups was common: around 40 per cent of families in the former Yugoslavia were ethnically mixed (Glover 2000: 132) and Bosnia, the most ethnically heterogeneous republic in the federation, had the highest percentage of mixed marriages (Radović 2014: 46). The disintegration of this multi-ethnic federation was precipitated by internal and external pressures. Until the death of President Tito in 1980, nationalist sentiment in Yugoslavia had generally been held in check by the country’s official ‘communist’ ideology: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Macedonians, Slovenes, Montenegrins were supposed to enjoy a peaceable coexistence. Yet nationalist and cultural-separatist ideas were in the air for several decades before the wars

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of the 1990s (Pavković 1997: 62–3). In the relatively liberal atmosphere of the 1960s, for example, Croatian nationalism grew in response to a feeling that Croats were discriminated against in Yugoslavian economic policy, leading to huge protests in the ‘Croat spring’ of 1971 (Myant 1984: 26). The suppression of this liberal upsurge, however, was paradoxically accompanied by an intensification of nationalism that militated against the formation of political coalitions across the republics (Kovač 1988: 115). In the 1981 census, more than 1.2 million Yugoslavs declined to state an ethnic identification (Samary 1995: 28), suggesting a significant level of resistance to ethno-chauvinism and in the pre-war years many Bosnians enjoyed a peaceful, multicultural co-existence (Bringa 1995). Nevertheless, nationalist ideas were ‘increasing in frequency and intensity’ by the middle of the 1980s (Rusinow 1985: 131), particularly among the Albanian majority in the province of Kosovo, whose protests in support of independence from Serbia were bloodily suppressed by the Yugoslav government. By the end of that decade, nationalist ‘dissidents of all persuasions turned into party politicians’, most of whom claimed that ‘their’ nation alone had been failed by the socialist regime (Pavković 1997: 85–98). Living standards fell by one-quarter over the course of the 1980s (Lydall 1989: 40–71) and the precarious economic position of Yugoslavia helped to fuel both nationalism and discontent with the status quo. In order to deal with a vast national debt following Tito’s death, Yugoslavia had been obliged to undertake an International Monetary Fund ‘shock therapy’ programme that raised the cost of living, reduced the social wage and eliminated jobs, forcing many Yugoslavs to leave the country to find work (Pavković 1997: 77; Parenti 2000: 21; Johnstone 2002: 21; Woodward 2005: 47–57; Gowan 2010: 21). This did not happen without struggle, however, and Yugoslavia in the 1980s was characterized by a series of major strike waves (Myant 1984: 28) and uprisings that intensified throughout the decade and which made austerity extremely difficult to implement. At the close of the 1980s, Yugoslav workers’ demands for political change were also inspired by the collapse of the Communist regimes in other Eastern European countries (Evangelista 2011: 83). Nevertheless, politicians continued to exploit ethnic differences, pointing to the ‘privileges’ enjoyed by workers in some of the federation’s wealthier regions, in an attempt to suppress expressions of working-class dissent. It has been argued, in fact, that the leaders of Serbia and Croatia, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman, both promoted the idea of ‘ethnic war’ in order to ‘demobilize’ fractious publics, shifting the attentions of the public from the pursuit of

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internal social and political change to the ideology of nationalism (Gagnon 2004). Certainly, with demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, nationalist and ultranationalist political parties were resurgent across Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia. Slovenian media from the mid-1980s ran a series of television advertisements using the slogan ‘Slovenia My Homeland’, while the Serbian media, increasingly under the influence of the Milošević faction, exploited the propaganda potential created by the expulsion of Serbs from their homes by Albanian nationalists (Wildcat 1996). In 1990, as a pro-Western mood swept Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, each of the former Yugoslav republics held multi-party elections – the first in Yugoslavia since the 1930s. While the electorate in most of the republics favoured retaining the federation, in Croatia and Slovenia public opinion was more divided. Facing IMF austerity measures, the governments of these republics did not wish to pay for the ‘poorer’ members of the federation (Phillips 1992a; Johnstone 1998) and pushed for statehood. After the Slovenes walked out of the final Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1990, they immediately ceased contributing their portion of the Fund for Underdeveloped Regions (Wildcat 1996). Moreover, Croatian and Slovenian secession had the support of German and Austrian governments, which gave the two republics confidence in pressing for independence (Pavković 1997: 125; Chandler 2000: 21–22). The United Kingdom even sent arms to Slovenia, while officially opposing its secession (Johnstone 2002: 138). The Western media generally played a supportive role in this process. In the German press in 1991, Serbs were presented as Oriental ‘militant Bolsheviks’ (Johnstone 1998: 137). In Slovenia itself, meanwhile, news media also ran an anti-Serb campaign, in which Serbs were demonized as pre-modern monsters (Pavković 1997: 135). This coincided with public demonstrations in which proindependence propaganda was disseminated. It was therefore hardly surprising that, in 1991, Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally declared independence and their secessions were recognized by the European Community. In response, the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) clashed with Slovene defence forces for ten days in July; but once sanctions were applied to the federal government, the JNA withdrew quickly from Slovenian territory and a ceasefire was negotiated. The situation in Croatia was considerably more violent and more complex. In a year-long independence campaign in the Croatian media, no dissenting voices were heard as the drive for secession grew (Pavković 1997: 124). Official harassment of national groups began and, following the election of the Croat HDZ

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party, Tuđman built a military force independent of the JNA, which the Croatian army blockaded and attacked (Pavković 1997: 131). Serbs were removed from influential positions in government, police, management and media and the status of the Serbs as a ‘constitutive nation’ in Croatia was deleted from the Croatian constitution (Pavković 1997: 94; MacDonald 2002: 103; Smith 2007), although dark rumours that there existed secret ‘liquidation squads’ to assassinate Serb officers and kidnap their families remain unconfirmed (Silber and Little 1997: 120). Indeed, the origins of the armed conflict in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Croatia are complex and disputed; but it is clear that the violence cut in several directions. The attempted Serb secession from Croatia was met with force by the Croatian police, some of whom were murdered by Serbs (Glover 2000: 126) and Croat irregulars began to attack Serb businesses. The spiralling violence sparked refugee movements both into and out of the Krajina. There were intensive propaganda campaigns in both the Croatian and Serbian media as the JNA – disdained by many young Slovenes and Croats since the 1970s (Pavković 1997: 128) and increasingly pro-Serb in character (Gibbs 2009: 120) – moved into action, ostensibly as a neutral force aiming to ‘keep the peace’ between the Croatian police and insurgent Serbs, although huge numbers of Serb men avoided being drafted into the army. There followed a conflict characterized by extreme barbarity on both sides. A huge JNA attack on Vukovar left many dead and the city virtually destroyed, although the Croatian National Guard also committed atrocities (Gibbs 2009: 90): JNA forces entering the town found corpses of people who had been summarily executed for refusing to join the Croatian National Guard or the irregulars (Wildcat 1996). Following its sieges of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, the JNA had taken 30 per cent of Croatia by the end of 1991, although the Croatians had by this time begun to reverse the tide and the war eventually stalled as Croatian forces mustered (Glover 2000: 126). The war inside Croatia effectively ended in December 1991 after the acceptance of the Vance plan by Tuđman and Milošević (Pavković 1997: 142), although the Croatian Army would be involved in fighting alongside the Bosnian Croat HVO (Croatian Defence Council) in Bosnia until 1995.

The war in Bosnia From 1992, the focus of the Yugoslav wars switched to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where three parties – the Muslim SDA, the Croat HDZ and the Serb SDS – had

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together won 80 per cent of the votes in the 1990 elections, forcing the Communists from power (the anti- or pan-national parties, lacking any support from powers outside Yugoslavia, together got less than 8 per cent of the votes). Appealing for votes on the basis of ethnic identity, each of the three parties gained a share of the ballot roughly equivalent to the population of the ethnic communities they claimed to represent (Pavković 1997: 114). Their ethnocommunalist appeals were directed across the old republican borders, serving to weaken the inter-ethnic bonds that had theretofore characterized Yugoslavian society and which, as late as March 1992, had brought tens of thousands of Bosnians onto the streets chanting ‘We want to live together!’ (Udovički and Štitkovac 2000: 183). While the three parties initially announced their intention to govern Bosnia jointly, this became virtually impossible as pressure from Croatia and Serbia was brought to bear, deepening ethnic divisions (Udovički and Štitkovac 2000: 177). Indeed, once the violence had begun in neighbouring Croatia in 1991, Bosnia began to fall apart, as criminal gangs involved in protection rackets and arms smuggling sought to ally themselves with politicians representing each of the three Bosnian ‘nations’ (Pavković 1997: 115). Indeed, the Bosnian war has been argued to typify armed conflict in the era of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999), in which conventional confrontations between two clearly defined enemy states increasingly give way to conflicts fuelled by ethnic identity politics in which the distinction between war and crime is blurred. After a referendum in February 1992, Bosnia, following the path taken by Slovenia and Croatia, declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Some of Bosnia’s Serbs, however, claimed that the referendum violated the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, boycotting the poll. An independent, although internationally unrecognized, Serb republic, later named Republika Srpska, was declared in Bosnia, under the auspices of Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslav rump state. The implementation of the Carrington-Cutileiro plan to cantonize Bosnia might have prevented the outbreak of war, but Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović seems to have been encouraged to reject the plan under US advisement (Gibbs 2009: 108–112). When a brutal territorial war – involving ‘ethnic cleansing’, murder, rape and the burning of villages – broke out in Bosnia in April 1992, it was the ‘first open armed conflict in post-World War II Europe’ (Zajec 2013: 201). The Serbs opened an Eastern military front and began to push westwards, controlling most of Bosnia within a week. Muslim and Croat forces fought against the Serbs and eventually against each other, leading to three-way fighting among the ethnic

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groups: while Croat forces sometimes fought against Muslims in the so-called Croat-Bosniak war (which reached a vicious peak in the Bosnian town of Mostar), they elsewhere fought against the Serbs, depending on local strategic interests. Although the JNA officially withdrew from Bosnia in May 1992, most of its ammunition and personnel passed into the control of Republika Srpska (Tucker and Hendrickson 1993). Something of the cynicism of the way the war was conducted is conveyed by the fact that weaponry was sometimes rented or sold by one side – most often the well-armed Serbs – to another, depending on local strategic and financial imperatives (Mueller 2000). In the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, Serb forces took positions on the high ground surrounding the city, bombarding and shooting at the population below in a siege that lasted for three and a half years and which caused untold suffering to the city’s inhabitants. Yet there is confusion over which ‘side’ was responsibility for many of the attacks in the city. Responsibility for the infamous Breadline Massacre in Sarajevo on 27 May 1992, for example – a mortar attack that killed at least 16 people – is disputed: while the attack was widely attributed to Serbs, UN officials believed it was perpetrated by the city’s Muslim defenders (Doyle 1992). The two attacks on Sarajevo’s Markale market in 1994 and 1995 have similarly disputed authorship (Brock 2005: 23). It is clear, however, that ‘the Bosnian government used civilian suffering strategically’ (Gibbs 2009: 126). The British diplomat and EU co-chairman of the Conference for the Former Yugoslavia David Owen (cited 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). Even Philip Taylor (2003: 302), an academic who attributes responsibility for the Balkan wars almost entirely to Milošević and Serb expansionism, acknowledges that claims of Muslim forces attacking ‘their own’ in order to garner international sympathy ‘proved to be not wholly without foundation’. There is also evidence that Muslim forces in the city sometimes fired first against Serbs to provoke a military response and gain sympathetic media coverage (Goldsworthy 2008; Gibbs 2009: 126). In Bosnia, as in Croatia, ethnic divisions deepened and the former official ideology of bratstvo i jedinstvo, or ‘brotherhood and unity’ – which had represented an attempt to overcome the long-standing stereotype of the Balkans

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as a fragmented, primitive and liminal zone (Todorova 1997) – gave way to nationalist hysteria. This chauvinism cut in many directions, confounding any simplistic identification of the warring ‘sides’: some Serbs fought for the Bosnians and vice versa (the influential Bosnian Muslim businessman Fikret Abdić, for example, rebelled against Izetbegović’s government), complicating questions of loyalty and allegiance. With the outbreak of war, as Beverly Allen (1996: 7) notes, ethnic identities became reified and exclusive: [P]eople learned that their ‘ethnic’ identity could now determine whether they were to live or die. Although many people had felt mainly Croatian, BosnianHerzegovinian or Serb-Montenegrin, those who had felt ‘Yugoslav’ now became, many of them reluctantly, ‘Bosnians’, ‘Croats’, ‘Serbs’ or ‘Muslims’.

Dubravka Žarkov (2007) even argues that the Bosnian war was not so much fought between pre-existing ethnic groups, as productive of them. In this sense, the war was characterized by a mode of violence that Arjun Appadurai (1998) has called ‘vivisectionist’; that is, aimed at exposing the identity of the other in circumstances, such as civil wars, in which ethnic affiliations have become unclear or confused. There was resistance to this rising tide of nationalism in civil society, as is apparent from the many reports of Serbs, Croats and Muslims protecting one another against the ethnic militias and armies ravaging Bosnia. Insofar as they were able to do so, alternative local media also challenged nationalist propaganda. In Croatia, for example, the ironically titled Feral Tribune openly reported on politically controversial topics and was openly critical of Tuđman, including reports of war crimes perpetrated by Croatian soldiers in Bosnia that earned the newspaper’s chief editor conscription in a military training camp. In Serbia, meanwhile, there were critical publications such as Vreme and Borba (Iordanova 2001: 140) and the anti-war Women in Black group, which served as a thorn in the side of the Serbian leadership by drawing attention to Serb atrocities (Žarkov 2007: 87). Nevertheless, mainstream media created a mood of frenzied nationalism across all of the Yugoslav regions, with television becoming a key propaganda organ: Nationalist governments, rather than allow for the discussion of competing ideas and viewpoints, used the absolute power they wielded over the broadcast media to play and replay images that provoked outrage and anger. They told stories, many of them fabricated, about alleged atrocities committed by the enemy. Impartial information disappeared. Television became the emotional crutch used to justify violence and rally ethnic groups around nationalist leaders. (Hedges 2003: 46)

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As a ‘paranoid public sphere’, to borrow Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase, developed in each of the former republics of Yugoslavia, news media collapsed into cynicism and absurdity (Gow et al. 1996). Serbian media issued crude antiCroat propaganda, often invoking the iconography and political language of Second World War propaganda, such that ‘the media offensive of Milošević’s Serbia in the 1980s resembled very closely the propaganda campaign of Nazi Germany in the 1930s’ (Bennett 1995: 97). But the Croatian news media also broadcast similar material. At one point, in fact, Serbian and Croatian media disseminated the same image of children killed during a siege of a village, each side claiming the children as ‘their’ casualties (Sontag 2003: 9). As the Yugoslav population became increasingly conscious, and wary, of ethnic difference, historical tensions and anxieties – many of them rooted in memories and experiences of the Second World War – were revived. Misha Glenny (1992), referring to the Serbs’ long-nursed grievances for their sufferings during the Second World War at the hands of Croatian fascists, even describes the Balkan wars as a ‘revenger’s tragedy’. Indeed, one of the many tragic consequences of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, besides the human impact of the violence, was the fracturing of former solidarities and the resurrection of long-suppressed, if not quite forgotten, ethnic enmities. At the cultural level, this disintegration was reflected in attempts by ethnic nationalists to define their ‘languages’ as separate. In Croatia, an official ‘Croatian’ was created which revived archaisms and ‘foreign’ words were rejected on pain of imprisonment, while Serbian nationalists revived the Cyrillic alphabet – unused by many Serbs in Croatia – for most official purposes (Wildcat 1996). For their part, Bosnian Muslims introduced ‘Arabic words and Koranic expressions’ into the language (Hedges 2003: 99). In reality, however, Serbs, Croats and Muslims all spoke Serbo-Croatian, with dialects that were more regional than ethnic in character (Samary 1995: 27). Within each of the republics, meanwhile, workers’ rights were shredded, as the government clamped down on industrial action. The communist group Wildcat (1996) notes that a solid rail workers’ strike in Croatia in early 1995, for example, was destroyed when the Minister of Defence threatened to draft strikers and send them to the front lines. Comparisons between the situation of Bosnian Muslims and that of the Jews in the Second World War became commonplace. From the start of the war, the Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović and his foreign minister Haris Silajdžić talked about Serb genocide in Bosnia, explicitly invoking comparisons with the Nazis (Szamuely 2013: 134). James Baker referred to the Serbs’ Nazi-like ‘ethnic

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cleansing’, and, as a Manichean view of the war crystallized after 1993, such comparisons became commonplace. In the lead-up to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1995, US president Bill Clinton justified intervention by invoking Serbian human rights violations – comparing them to those committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Indeed, many academics today talk of the ‘genocide of Serbs against Muslims’ (Gorman and McLean 2009: 220). Then as now, the word genocide was powerfully loaded and constituted an effective call to arms, since, under United Nations rules, UN forces are obliged to intervene to prevent genocide. Yet while Muslim population of Bosnia certainly underwent the greatest suffering during the war, the fighting in Bosnia is best described not as genocide, but as a civil, or perhaps ‘uncivil’ (Keane 1996) war. That said, the war was an unequal one in which the Serbs were by and large the best armed and most lethal of the belligerents and in which the actions of Serb civilians – who were distributed across all of the republics of Yugoslavia to a greater extent than other ethnic groups – had significant disruptive potential. Possibly the darkest event of the war is the massacre that took place in the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in July 1995. Here Serb forces, ostensibly in order to prevent men from joining Muslim militia, separated women from men before slaughtering some 8,000 Muslim men and boys. While the massacre led the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to charge Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić with genocide, the political and military leadership of Republika Srpska was not alone in its guilt. The massacre happened under the noses of the Dutch peacekeeping battalion; in fact, there is evidence that Dutchbat were complicit in the massacre, helping to separate the population and thus assisting the Serb operation, while ignoring evidence of rape and torture occurring in warehouses close to their compound (Žarkov 2014a: 167–8). Nor can the Srebrenica massacre be detached from its historical context. The murders at Srebrenica were preceded by some atrocities committed against Serbs in the vicinity and even before the Bosnian war broke out, the surrounding Drina valley had been characterized by savage inter-ethnic violence. In 1992, Serbs had been driven out of Srebrenica and the years leading up to the massacre saw many brutal attacks on nearby Serb villages. The Muslim officer Naser Orić, for example – who became known as the Defender of Srebrenica – operated out of the city, attacking nearby Serb villages, burning homes and killing over a thousand Serbs between May 1992 and January 1994 and thousands of Serb civilians and soldiers were killed in the months leading up to the Srebrenica massacre. Orić even invited Western reporters to his apartment to see his ‘war

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trophies’: videocassettes showing the severed heads of Serbs, burnt houses, and piles of corpses (Herman 2003). In the spring of 1995, the Bosnian army in the Srebrenica enclave, equipped with new supplies, launched ‘hit and run’ raids against Bosnian Serb villages and military positions (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 191). Indeed, Srebrenica was not simply a ‘safe haven’ for civilians; it also functioned as a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations. There is evidence, furthermore, than the Bosnian government saw the loss of Srebrenica as strategically valuable and that the town was even allowed to fall – and the massacre allowed to happen – for this reason, as many seasoned journalists came to believe (Gibbs 2009: 160–1). The inability and, at least to some extent, unwillingness of the lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica to protect the inhabitants of Srebrenica ‘was widely seen as an indictment of the operational effectiveness of the UN’ (Dodds 1998: 184), and what Diana Johnstone (2002: 113) calls the UN’s ‘planned failure’ at Srebrenica would pave the way for subsequent military action by NATO. As the Srebrenica massacre indicates only too well, the Bosnian Serb army was the best equipped force in Bosnia throughout the conflict and was thus capable of devastating atrocities. Nevertheless, as Janine Clark (2008: 675) reminds us, ‘terrible crimes were also committed against the Serbs – in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo’. While we should be wary of what the historian Peter Gay (1978), in relation to the Nazi Holocaust, called the ‘comparative trivialisation’ of atrocity, it must be acknowledged that Serb army forces and irregulars were not the only perpetrators of atrocities during the Bosnian war.

External interventions 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. Along with Austria and Hungary, the newly reunified 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 after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, a unified Yugoslavia no longer

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played a vital strategic role for the United States and the Americans 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 the US stance towards Milošević – once a Washington favourite – and the Yugoslav rump state. The United States refused the faltering Yugoslav economy World Bank loans and denied the right of secession to Serbia – the Yugoslav region whose population had shown the greatest resistance both to the IMF-led austerity programmes of the 1980s and to the war when it began (Wildcat 1996; Pavković 1997: 99; Parenti 2000: 22). Perhaps one of the most significant Western interventions in Bosnia occurred before the war began. In an attempt to prevent Bosnia sliding into war, the socalled Carrington–Cutileiro plan, which aimed to cantonize Bosnia, was agreed in Lisbon in 18 March 1992 by Bosniak, Serb and Croat representatives. Ten days later, however, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and declared his opposition to any type of division of Bosnia, very probably following advice from the Americans, who feared losing influence under a European plan (Tucker and Hendrickson 1993; Gibbs 2009: 108–112). In April, Bosnia’s independence was recognized by the European Community and the United Sates, which overturned its earlier preference – expressed by US Secretary of State James Baker the previous year in Belgrade – to preserve Yugoslavia. From this point until the end of the war, the United States opposed international proposals to partition Bosnia. The Vance-Owen plan, which called for cantons dominated by the different groups, seemed near adoption, but in 1993 the incoming Clinton Administration, having rejected, then accepted the plan, finally turned away from it. The Clinton administration devoted more attention, however, to the question of Bosnia than the foregoing Bush administration had done (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 141). US opinions about Bosnia differed, invoking very different historical precedents: some in the new administration, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, ‘had 1938 Munich as a frame of reference in their heads, while others had Vietnam’ (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 141); Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was among the latter group. However, Congress sought a stronger line on support for Bosnia, not least because, following the Gulf War, ‘there was an expectation in the Arab world (especially Saudi Arabia) that Washington would support the Bosnian Muslims’ (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 143). At the same time, the Serbs began to be identified in the United States as the war’s only villains (Thornberry 1996), even if this did not correspond with the perceptions of senior UN personnel at

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the time. That FBI investigators initially assumed that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was a Serbian revenge attack suggests the deterioration in relations between Serbia and the United States by this time. The United States now began to tilt towards support for the Bosnians, backing the Sarajevo government and the predominantly Muslim forces led by Alija Izetbegović – unhindered by the official expiry of Izetbegović’s term as state president in 1991 (Chandler 2000: 26). Indeed, in the post-Cold War period, the US imperium, rather than retreating, enlarged its sphere of influence by pushing into hitherto inaccessible parts of the globe, including Yugoslavia (Chibber 2009: 25–6). Contrary to the widespread view that the Americans ‘failed to intervene’ in the Bosnian war, the United States actively supported Bosnia as its client in the region, allowing arms to flow from Iran to Bosnia via Croatia and through officially denied ‘Black Flights’ carrying arms and ammunition to Tuzla (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 145–74), although it was not until November 1994 that the United States officially lifted its arms embargo on the Bosnian government. There is evidence that Britain also supplied arms covertly to Croatian and Bosnian troops (Curtis 2010: 211). The Bosnian Serbs, meanwhile, received Russian and possibly Romanian, Greek and Israeli arms via Serbia throughout the war (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 174–81). With the Serbs clearly established as the Balkan pariahs, the United States adopted a more hawkish position on Bosnia and began to solicit international support for an escalation of involvement: It was already noticeable during the NATO summit of 9 and 10 January 1994 that the US administration was in the process of reconsidering its position on Bosnia. William Perry, who had succeeded Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense, and General John Shalikashvili, who as the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had taken the place of Colin Powell, were more inclined to deploy air power than their two predecessors. During a visit by US Secretary of State, Christopher, to Paris on 24 January, the French government had also firmly insisted on a greater US involvement in the crisis in Yugoslavia. One week later, on 1 February, the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, addressed Christopher in similar terms in Washington. (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 145)

A mortar bomb attack on a Sarajevo market on 5 February 1994, which killed 68 people and wounded 200, ‘also eased the turnaround of the American administration to become more closely involved in Bosnia’ (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 145).

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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 the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher appeared on British and Croatian television to support military action against the Serbs, the Major government was far less hawkish (Osmançavuşoğlu 2004) and in general it was the British left, rather than Major’s Conservatives, that sought military action against the Serbs (‘There Is No Solution’ 1994: 1). Moreover, the British, along with the French, had long-standing alliances with the dominant Serb faction of the Yugoslav ruling class, acting as its principal arms supplier, and they may have been concerned about the potential of a war to unleash German revanchism in Europe. British troops would, moreover, have been expected to bear the brunt of any fighting, which might have incurred a formidable expense at a time of economic recession (Almond 1994), as well as potential casualties. In the risk-averse era of ‘post-heroic warfare’ (Luttwak 1995), the British remained wary, then, of military intervention. Ultimately, however, bowing to geopolitical pressure, Britain came to accept the position of the United States as the latter adopted a more aggressive policy towards the region. The UN, meanwhile, became a major actor in the conflict. UN involvement began in Bosnia in 1992, placing an arms embargo on Yugoslavia – an embargo which favoured the Serbs, who had control of the JNA – and sending a ‘protection force’ (UNPROFOR) to distribute food and medical supplies and to assist in evacuations. Britain and France boasted the two largest UN troop contingents, entering the Balkans to assert their own potential as Europe’s ‘policemen’ in support of the US endeavour to ‘defeat forces in the East which were undermining stability’ (Gowan 2010: 37). In the spring of 1993, six Bosnian Muslim towns were declared ‘safe areas’ under UN ‘protection’, ‘some deep behind Serb lines and all housing Muslim armed forces and military equipment’ and the UN set up an international criminal tribunal under the control of the Security Council (Szamuely 2013: 133). Following a settlement in early 1994, the three-way fighting between Croats, Muslims and Serbs became a war between two sides. Supported by the United States, 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 criticized abroad for maintaining Bosnian Serb dominance in

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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 this account has been challenged by several commentators. Brock (2005: 25) notes that Karadžić had sued for peace via a ‘Camp David style’ summit, but received no response from the Americans about his proposal. In fact, according to Herman and Peterson (2007: 8), the United States sabotaged efforts at peace until the Muslim and Croat forces it armed and trained had improved their military position and British negotiator David Owen (1995: 196–7) claims the Bosnian Muslims would not accept the Vance plan because they were holding out for a better deal.

The end of the war The beginning of the end of the Bosnian war was signalled by Operation Storm, in which Croat forces – covertly supported and trained by the United States (Brock 2005: 28–9) – swept into the Krajina region of Croatia, killing perhaps thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs (Gibbs 2009: 165). The operation was probably the war’s largest single act of ethnic expulsion. Yet this was, as Herman and Peterson (2010: 83) acerbically put it, ‘benign’ ethnic cleansing, that is, ethnic cleansing undertaken by the United States and its allies. A few weeks later, in September 1995, US planes, on behalf of NATO, attacked Bosnian Serb positions in Operation Deliberate Force with around 1,000 air sorties. The Clintonian policy, and increasingly the British policy, towards Bosnia had been encapsulated by the phrase ‘lift and strike’, that is, lift the sanctions on Bosnian arms – a significant objective for the United States, which in 1995 controlled over half of the world’s arms market (Walker 1995: 8) – and strike at Serbia with US air power (Tucker and Hendrickson 1993). Although planned and approved by the North Atlantic Council in July 1995, the military operation that – nominally, at least – ended the Bosnian war was triggered by the Srebrenica massacre and the second marketplace massacre on 28 August 1995, an attack which killed 37 people less than 100 yards from the location of the attack of the previous year (Brock 2005: 23). The NATO action – its first ever aggressive military endeavour – was opposed in the usual quarters: in the United Kingdom, for example, the bombing was opposed by the left-wing politician Tony Benn and internationally drew strong disapproval from Russia. Nevertheless, the

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operation was generally justified as an act of what Barnett (2011) calls ‘emergency humanitarianism’. While the stated strategic aim of the bombings was to inflict overwhelming damage on the telecommunications and transportation links of the Bosnian Serb army, towns and villages throughout Bosnia were targeted. Johnstone (2002: 236) argues that Izetbegović wanted to continue the war and that the NATO bombing was therefore undertaken under the false pretence of Serbian intransigence: ‘The United States bombed the Bosnian Serbs to get Izetbegović to the negotiating table’, she writes, ‘but the version for the public was that bombing was necessary to get Milošević to the negotiating table’. The humanitarian justification for the NATO bombings in 1995 set the precedent for the later 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis and for later Western military interventions, also launched under the banner of human rights, in Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. The 1999 bombings – like Operation Desert Fox, the bombing campaign against Iraq in the previous year – were not authorized by the UN Security Council and were ‘carried out under NATO auspices, precisely in order to take the initiative away from the UN, where there was resistance to permitting it’ (Chibber 2009: 29). According to many commentators, the NATO bombings helped to ‘stop the massacre’ (Murtic 2015: 2) of Albanians by Serbs in Kosovo; Czech president 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 NATO bombings significantly worsened the violence in Kosovo, showing that ‘it remains permissible, indeed obligatory, not only to tolerate such actions but to contribute massively to them’. Following the military action in Bosnia in 1995, the signing of the Dayton Agreement represented a Pax Americana, completing a process of ethnic partition that had cost the lives of around 100,000 people (Gibbs 2009: 123–4) and turned a far greater number into refugees, many of whom were unable to return home (something the Dayton Agreement guaranteed), as their houses had been burned down or ransacked. The settlement took place in a US airbase where the signatories accepted the Americans’ solution. While Europeaninitiated settlements had been blocked for many years on the grounds that they rewarded ethnic cleansing and failed to preserve an independent and multi-

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ethnic Bosnia, Bosnia was now partitioned into three entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and the tiny municipality of Brčko – each with their own administrative structures, making Bosnia ‘nothing short of a unique political chimera, unprecedented in political history in terms of its absurdly overabundant and ineffective administration’ (Zajec 2013: 202). In the years since Dayton, new and complex legal and political structures have arisen in all of Bosnia’s areas, entrenching the country’s ethnic divisions. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Bosnia ‘remains a paralysed country, unable to recover from violence that still defines its constitution, governance and social structures’ as well as ‘one of the poorest countries in Europe’ (Volčič and Erjavec 2014: 4). The social, political and economic woes of Bosnia are, of course, overdetermined; but for some commentators one of their major sources has been the Western ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Yugoslavia, which has imposed a form of ‘biopolitical imperialism’ (Kelly 2015) on Bosnian citizens by removing the social safety nets once provided by the state and opening up the region for finance capital. Indeed, Western intervention in Yugoslavia has been described by Michael Parenti (2011: 105) as tantamount to ‘privatisation by bombing’, as state-owned industries were broken up, leading to the establishment of ‘a cluster of right-wing mini-republics in which everything was privatized and deregulated’ and in which unemployment, social unrest and gangsterism have flourished. However that may be, the wave of anti-political protest that swept across Bosnia in 2014 suggests a deep public dissatisfaction with the political and social order established there by the Dayton settlement.

2

The First Draft of History: (Mis)Reporting the Bosnian War

In 2006, the US-based Museum of Television and Radio held events in New York and Los Angeles whose aim was to celebrate ‘the pioneering women of mass communications with conversations with several outspoken, innovative, and indomitable figures in media’. The New York event (‘A View from the Front Lines’) featured an interview with veteran journalist Christiane Amanpour. Amanpour – who reported frequently for Cable News Network (CNN) during the Bosnian conflict and who, not uncontroversially, married the US State Department spokesman James Rubin during the Kosovo war – regards the US military actions in Bosnia in 1995 and Yugoslavia in 1999 as justified interventions undertaken in the name of ‘human rights’ (Herman and Peterson 2000: 113). In her interview, Amanpour noted that journalists during the Bosnian war ‘helped clarify what was going on for our leaders and for the world. And in the end there was an intervention that stopped a genocide, that had a really well thought-out peace plan’. Amanpour’s lexicon here (‘our leaders’, ‘intervention’, ‘genocide’) reflects the themes of Western elite discourse about the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In her version of events, Western journalists played a key role in accurately communicating the events of the Bosnian war in a way that ultimately led to desirable foreign policy outcomes (the putative ‘CNN Effect’, whose existence, like all media effects, seems impossible to prove). Similarly, in an interview at the end of the Bosnian war, the Irish journalist Maggie O’Kane (1995–96: 33–6) averred that journalists had ‘made a good job of telling the truth, and made a good job of making Western governments uncomfortable with the reality in Bosnia’. One aim of this chapter is to examine the veracity of such claims by means of a brief critical evaluation of Western journalism about the war. Given the proximity of Yugoslavia to most European countries and the ease of travel to Yugoslavia, newspaper and television news journalists were

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present in large numbers in Bosnia throughout the war, reporting on military developments and covering the visits of political delegations to the country. Yet what Western journalists actually saw – or were allowed to witness – of the war was often highly circumscribed. Bosnia was an extremely dangerous assignment. Some journalists ran significant risks to get their stories – Maggie O’Kane, for example, jeopardized her personal safety to enter besieged Goražde before most other reporters – and dozens of journalists were killed during the war. Most Western journalists reported on the conflict from Sarajevo, a hostile environment since it was under siege by the Serbs and subject to a constant barrage of mortar and sniper fire. This in turn meant, among other things, that they were unable to witness Serb casualties at first hand. Journalist Anthony Loyd (2000: 179) complained that journalists covering the Bosnian war were largely ensconced their hotels and thus unable to get a true picture of the conflict. ‘Too many’, he writes, simply walked into the basement of the Holiday Inn each day, drove out in an armoured car to UN headquarters, grabbed a few details, filled them in with the words of ‘real people’ acquired for them by their local fixers, and then returned to their sanctuary to file their heartfelt vitriol with scarcely a hair out of place.

Writing in the same vein, Lewis MacKenzie, the former commander of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, has said that he tells journalists who worry that they may not have been wholly objective during the war: ‘do not feel too guilty about all this – because you only reported what you saw, and what you saw was only 150 meters on either side of the Holiday Inn’ (cited in Brock 2005: 177). This chapter surveys Western news media reporting of the war, considering newspapers, current affairs and television news (transcripts of radio broadcasts are relatively difficult to source and so have not been considered here; the Internet, meanwhile, was still in its infancy as a means of mass communication during the war). At issue in this discussion is the question of how the war was framed by the news media at the time of the conflict. To frame an issue is, in Robert Entman’s (1993: 52) classic formulation, ‘to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’. This chapter provides not an exhaustive analysis of media reporting of the war, but rather a discussion of some of the key themes of Western news and other factual media coverage of the Bosnian

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war, many of which have been remediated in films about the conflict. Although it makes occasional mention of the media within the former Yugoslavia, which was also briefly characterized in the previous chapter, this chapter concentrates on the hegemonic Western media representation of the Bosnia war.

‘Evil Creatures’: Creating the villains Parts of the mainstream media in the United States adopted an anti-Serb position from the very beginning of the Yugoslav wars. The Croatian war was generally reported in terms familiar from the Cold War, as journalists contrasted a ‘democratic’ Croatia with the ‘hard-line communists’ of Serbia (Kavran 1991) and ‘scrutinized and sensationalized the conduct of only one of the warring parties’ (Đorđević 1992). Other US media commentators, however, were disinclined to identify clear-cut victims and villains at the outset of the war, presenting the Bosnian war as a multilateral conflict or as one that Western governments should be wary of entering. Even as late as 1993, Doug Bandow (1993), in a USA Today editorial about the US policy towards Bosnia, recommended ‘staying out’ and described intervention as a matter for European consideration. Early news reports in the United Kingdom also sometimes emphasized the multi-sidedness of the conflict. The Independent, later one of the most hard-line interventionist papers, described the massacre of Serbs by Muslim forces in the Bosnian border town of Bjelovac (Block 1992). Tom O’Sullivan (1992: 8) wrote in the same newspaper that ‘it is undeniable that the Serbian forces have been involved in acts of brutality. But so have the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims.’ O’Sullivan also drew attention to the use of PR firms by all sides involved in the conflict to spread propaganda, including a dubious report that Serb snipers were being paid to shoot children (Brock 2005: 124). On British television, Jeremy Bowen exposed the appalling suffering of the mostly Muslim civilians of Mostar during the Croat-Bosniak war in Unfinished Business: War in Mostar (BBC 1993), emphasizing Croat atrocities against Muslims. Also important in framing the Bosnian war for the British audience during the conflict was the 1993 Channel 4 film season Bloody Bosnia. A key film in this series was The Roots of War, which invoked the long-standing enmity between Serbs and Croats in pre-Communist Yugoslavia. Problematically, the documentary advanced a primordialist interpretation of the war as a revival of ancient enmities and thus failed to engage with the immediate political origins of the conflict (Stones 2002).

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This framing of the war at least had the virtue of acknowledging the multilateral nature of the conflict. By the end of the war, however, the identification of the Bosnian Serbs as the war’s villains had become entrenched in the Western media and the British press, including The Independent, The Telegraph, New Statesman, The Guardian and The Sun, had mobilized a range of racist stereotypes which presented Serbs as tribal, primitive, evil, bloodthirsty and bestial (Hammond 2004: 185). Even where they were less salacious, most Western media accounts of the war maintained that Slobodan Milošević initiated the Bosnian war in a drive for a Greater Serbia, and that the Serbs were the war’s sole villains. This is a view that has also been repeated frequently by academics (e.g. Allen 1996: 9), along with the suggestion that Milošević aimed to create an ethnically pure Serbia. War theorist James Der Derian (2000: 774) goes so far as to refer to Milošević’s ‘pathologies’, comparing the president to US terrorists such as Timothy McVey and Eric Harris. Indeed, twenty years after their end, the Yugoslav wars continue to be remembered by most Western journalists, politicians, academics and commentators as conflicts brought about solely by the uniquely expansionist and genocidal designs of Serb nationalism. 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 news media during the 1990s from an ally of the United States into an enemy. This was even – perhaps especially – true in the left-liberal media. At the outset of war in 1991, Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper generally sided with the ‘defiant people of Dubrovnik’ (O’Kane 1991) as they faced the Serb onslaught, while also acknowledging Croatian aggression. As the focus of the Yugoslav wars shifted to Bosnia, however, Serbs came to be seen as the sole agents of war and nationalism. Milošević was more and more identified as the war’s prime mover and condemned as a Hitler-like figure. At the height of the Bosnian war, Christian Wisskirchen (1993: 20) wrote in The Guardian that ‘there is no difference between Milošević’s wars and Hitler’s wars. The problem is that Milošević is clever enough to try and [sic] disguise this fact.’ The New York Times, in the same year, cited the Bosnian-Muslim president Alija Izetbegović’s view that ‘then it was Hitler, today it is Milošević’ (Sciolino 1993: 4). After the wars of the 1990s, Milošević even appeared in a 2000 episode of the American satirical animation Family Guy offering one of central characters coleslaw ‘made out of people’, indicating just how thoroughly demonized he had become in the West. After Milošević’s death in his Hague prison cell in 2006, the

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New York Times journalists Marlise Simons and Alison Smale (2008: 8) wrote about the ‘incendiary nationalism’ of the man who ‘rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia’. They also described Milošević as ‘the prime engineer’ of the Yugoslav wars. Yet the commonplace view that Milošević and Serbian ‘fascist’ irredentism were uniquely or even primarily responsible for the Bosnian war is problematic. Serbia proper saw no ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian conflict despite its ethnically diverse population (Szamuely 2013: 131) and actually witnessed a net inflow of refugees (Herman and Peterson 2007: 13). 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 while the Milošević regime can certainly be characterized as nationalistexpansionist, the Western media ignored the expansionist drives of Croatian and Kosovo Albanian nationalists for a ‘Greater Croatia’ and ‘Greater Albania’ as well as Izetbegović’s refusal of a negotiated settlement (Parenti 2000: 32; Herman and Peterson 2007: 14). Throughout the war, the one-sidedness of Western media reportage was noted by knowledgeable observers. Professor C. G. Jacobsen (1993: 2), director of the Independent Committee on War Crimes in the Balkans, complained in a letter to The Guardian newspaper that reporting on the Bosnian quagmire has been extraordinarily biased. Muslim atrocities, rape and ethnic cleansing have gone unreported or under-reported, while Serb (and now Croat) sins are splashed on front pages. The Serbs’ apparently disproportionate land share in the latest peace plan is presented as ill-gotten conquest, though in fact it represents Serb concession, leaving them less land than was theirs before the war.

Even some ‘insiders’ noted the bias of Western media reporting: US Air Force General Charles G. Boyd (1995), for instance, noted that the suffering of Serb civilians during the war was met ‘with little interest or condemnation by Washington or CNN correspondent Christine Amanpour’. And as Klaus Dodds (1998: 188) observed after the war, ‘Croatian atrocities, such as the expulsion of 150,000 Serbs from the Krajina region, remained relatively unreported in the face of stories about mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women and the destruction of mosques in central Bosnia’. Individual and collective self-censorship played a role here: for example, British journalist Neal Ascherson (2012: 12) claims that foreign reporters during the siege of Sarajevo ‘found out how weapons and ammunition were still getting into the city’, but ‘agreed among themselves not to use the story’.

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The characterization of Milošević – and Milošević alone – as an extreme nationalist by the Western news media during the Bosnian war also involved some exaggeration. From the late 1980s, the Milošević regime revived Serb nationalist themes and symbols in a way that expressed nationalist ‘belief in Serb superiority over other Yugoslav nations’ (Pavković 1997: 90) and the Serbian media descended into religio-nationalist hysteria. Yet Milošević himself was rather a late convert to nationalism (Silber and Little 1997: 38) and according to David MacDonald (2002: 65), Milošević’s nationalism was opportunist, so that ‘while the western press would later become obsessed with Milošević as a nationalist demagogue he should be seen more as a supporter of nationalism than its founder’. In fact, Milošević was arguably a less fanatical nationalist than his opposite numbers in Croatia and Bosnia. As Richard Seymour (2008: 194) notes, ‘[The Left] consistently demonized Slobodan Milošević as a ‘fascist’ or its equivalent, […] but they were slower to recognize the flaws of Tuđman or Izetbegović’. The president of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, was openly anti-Semitic, once publicly thanked God that his wife was ‘not a Jew or a Serb’ (cited in Glover 2000: 125) and believed that Croats and Serbs were ‘not just different peoples but different civilisations’ (cited in Hammond 2004: 181). Soon after taking office, Tuđman resurrected both the kuna – Croatia’s medieval and fascistera currency – and the red-and-white chequer board šahovnica, the Nazi-era Ustaše flag, renaming streets and squares across Croatia after individuals linked with fascism and the Ustaše (Seymour 2008: 196). Unsurprisingly, Croatia’s Jewish population expressed deep concern regarding the return to power of notorious fascists in the country (Samary 1995: 80). The Bosnian president Alia Izetbegović, meanwhile, was a Muslim fundamentalist who displaced the proYugoslav Bosnian Muslim leader Fikret Abdić in the run-up to the Bosnian war. In the late 1930s, Izetbegović had been a member of a fundamentalist group called the Mladi Muslims (‘Young Muslims’), whose goal was the creation of an Islamic caliphate (Bardos 2014: 74). During the Second World War, Izetbegović’s group collaborated with the Nazi Schutzstaffel, committing atrocities against Jews and the resistance movement (Parenti 2000: 51). And in the late 1960s, Izetbegović had written the Islamic Declaration, which argued for the creation of an ‘Islamic order’ along the lines of Pakistan (Johnstone 2002: 57–8), although sympathetic journalists have suggested that Izetbegović’s Islamic attachments had loosened by the 1990s (Bennett 1995: 184). All things considered, then, the Western media’s obsession with Milošević as a uniquely evil figure was at best disingenuous. While Milošević certainly did turn to nationalism, it is doubtful

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that he was more committed to ethno-chauvinism than Tuđman or Izetbegović; yet the ethno-religious intolerance of the latter two men was largely overlooked by high-profile US and British journalists such as David Rieff, Marlise Simons and Ed Vulliamy, all of whom identified Milošević as the instigator of the Yugoslav wars (Herman and Peterson 2007: 11). High-profile documentary films about the Yugoslav wars have reflected and reinforced this mainstream Western account of the war. Combining previously unseen archival footage and interviews with high-profile interviewees including Milošević, Tuđman and Izetbegović, Norma Percy’s BBC documentary series The Death of Yugoslavia is the best ‘institutionally endowed’ (McQueen 2008) of these, containing interviews with many of the key political players in the Yugoslav crisis. With its omniscient mode of narration, the documentary has enjoyed a particular cachet and authority, as BBC documentaries often do (Ellis 2012: 103), winning a BAFTA award in 1996 for Best Factual Series. As Peter Furtado (2006: 2) describes, the documentary posits that ‘it was Milošević who wilfully opened the Pandora’s Box of Balkan nationalism, rather than just the “ancient hatreds” often cited at the time’. Furtado further suggests that the documentary influenced Western political opinion-makers about the Balkans, prompting world leaders to support the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Yet the objectivity of the documentary’s selection of material is open to question. Gow and Michalski (2007: 81) note that the Vance-Owen Peace Plan is hardly mentioned in Death of Yugoslavia, while the responsibility for the war is placed squarely on Milošević’s shoulders; moreover, as Gow and Michalski (2007: 81) point out, Milošević had requested that all of his interview material be used, but Percy circumvented this stipulation by agreeing with schedulers to broadcasting the interview in its entirety as a separate, late-night programme, while only selectively using the interview in the series itself. The international media representation of Milošević and the Serbs during the Bosnian war was in a sense only a reflection of Western political and civil society rhetoric that cast Serbs as terrorists and even, as serving as UNESCO ambassador Peter Ustinov put it, ‘evil creatures, whose membership of the human race is seriously overdue’ (cited in Longinović 2011: 154). Such extreme and essentializing rhetoric had several negative effects, however. For one thing, it allowed the Serbian regime to cast all internal opponents as irrational ideologues who were merely echoing the hyperbolic invective of meddling foreign commentators. It could also be argued to have reduced the chances of achieving a diplomatic solution to the conflict. During the war, a sophisticated

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analysis by Tucker and Hendrickson (1993) – exponents of the Kissingerian Realpolitik school of geopolitics – expressed concern that the dominant media and political interpretation of the war as ‘one of Serbian aggression has made any compromise settlement vulnerable to the charge of rewarding aggression. As such, it has precluded a negotiated settlement, and made it inevitable that the war would be decided by sheer military power.’

‘And Now, Death Camps’: Creating the new Nazis As war broke out, media culture across all of the republics of the former Yugoslavia revived historical myths for nationalistic purposes. Zdravko Šotra’s film Boj na Kosovu/The Battle of Kosovo (1989), for example, enshrined the myth of Serb victimhood and resentment of Ottoman rule that fuelled nationalist thinking in Serbia throughout the 1990s. Yet it was the historical atrocities and injustices of the Second World War that figured most prominently in media narratives about the war. In Yugoslavia, each nation identified its sufferings with those of the Jews (MacDonald 2002); the Serbian media, for instance, consistently invoked memories of the Second World War and the suffering of Serbs at the hands of the fascist Ustaše. While the Western mediation of the Yugoslav wars occasionally drew upon anti-Communist rhetoric in order to cast the Serbs as backward Bolsheviks (the clearest cinematic expression of this tendency is provided by Ibolya Fekete’s 2001 Croatian war film Chico), Western journalists mostly preferred to see the war in terms of a revival of fascism, with the Serbs pressed into the role of Europe’s new Nazis. Indeed, looking back at the conflict, the BBC correspondent John Simpson (1999: 444–5) noted that ‘a climate was created in which everything came to be seen through the filter of the Holocaust’. This process got underway on 19 July 1992, when the American Newsday journalist Roy Gutman reported that the Serbs had deported thousands of Muslims and Croats from north-western Bosnia, under conditions reminiscent of the transports of Jews during the Second World War. Two days later, Newsday ran the headline: ‘“Like Auschwitz”. Serbs pack Muslims into freight cars’. On 29 July, the British liberal newspaper The Guardian carried a report by Maggie O’Kane about concentration camps in northern Bosnia, where several thousand Muslims were imprisoned. It was a graphic and emotional account that infamously quoted one woman as recalling having been told by a Serb soldier:

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‘Where’s your Allah now? We’re going to fuck all you Muslim women’. As Robert Hayden (2013: 151) points out, during the Yugoslav wars, Croatian and Western propagandists found it difficult to present Croats as the ‘new Jews’ of Europe, not least because of Tuđman’s notorious anti-Semitism; the Bosnian Muslims were much more easily presented in this way, however, no doubt in large part because of their extreme suffering at the hands of Serbs early in the war, but perhaps also for more contingent reasons, such as the commercial success of the film Schindler’s List in 1993, which gave Holocaust narratives a renewed cultural prominence among Western publics. In the first Gulf War, the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ‘was regularly compared to Hitler and the megalomaniac occupation of Kuwait to that of Czechoslovakia’ (Shohat 1994: 149; see also MacArthur 1992). It is therefore unsurprising that Hitler also loomed large in news reports about the Bosnian war. In a BBC television news interview that aired on 31 July 1992, Izetbegović compared Serb leader Radovan Karadžić to Hitler on account of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ being carried out in Bosnia. On 2 August, another Gutman article in Newsday, headlined ‘Serbs’ death camps’, reported that the Serbs had set up concentration camps in which hundreds of people were likely to starve to death or be executed. Similar claims were made by the Dutch television news programme NOS Journal on 4 August by Muhamed Sacirbey, the Bosnian Ambassador to the United Nations. British reporters Ian Williams and Penny Marshall of Independent Television Network (ITN), together with Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, visited the camps in Omarska and Trnopolje. The resulting film footage was broadcast in Britain on 6 August and quickly spread across the Western world, although it was predictably banned on Serbian television (Taylor 2003: 302). Having seen the film, the American president George Bush declared, ‘No one can see the pictures or hear the accounts of this human suffering and not be deeply moved’ (cited in Seib 2000: 60). Indeed, the picture of the emaciated Fikret Alić standing behind the barbed wire of the Trnopolje camp has become the most iconic image of the war in Bosnia, condensing the Trnopolje horrors (and one might say the story of the war in general) into an ‘instantly recognizable visual essence’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010: 96) that has premediated subsequent representations of the conflict. The prefigurative power of this image proceeded from its historical connotations. An image of a cadaverous man seemingly reduced to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1995), the photograph of Alić became associated with photographs of Nazi death camp survivors. On the day after the television broadcast, the

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front page of the British Daily Mirror printed the image of Alić alongside the headline ‘Belsen 92’, the Daily Mail referred to the camps as ‘Serbia’s Nazi-style attempts at “ethnic purification”’ (Doughty and Deans 1992: 10), while a leader article in the London Times compared the detainees at the camps to the German Jews (Robison 2004: 389). The Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn described the Serbs as ‘the Nazis of the 1990s’, while Britain’s left-wing politician Ken Livingstone wrote: ‘As the Serbs slaughter their way across Bosnia, Europe is seeing the first real attempt at genocide since Hitler murdered six million Jews’ (cited in Phillips 1992b: 8). For the remainder of the war, Holocaust parallels prevailed in the news media. In early 1993, the humanitarian organization Medecins du Monde spent an estimated $2 million on a publicity campaign about Bosnia, using ITN’s controversial pictures of the Trnopolje camp and posters that juxtaposed images of Hitler and Milošević. The Independent drew comparisons between the explosion of nationalism in Serbia and that of Nazi Germany, suggesting that it presented ‘a challenge to the collective security of the whole continent’ (Ascherson 1993: 23). ‘To recall history’, Anthony Lewis (1993: 39) wrote in the New York Times, ‘is to realize the deadly parallel with recent events. For again we have seen what happens when a fascist takes power: this time Milošević in Serbia’. In the Daily Mail, meanwhile, the historian Mark Almond (1993: 10) compared the plight of Bosnians in small towns to that of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. It could be argued that the comparisons between the Serbs and the Nazis were prurient: George Szamuely (2013: 127) controversially suggests that ‘the Muslims’ refrain that they were facing genocide played well in the West. It satisfied the Western media’s insatiable, ghoulish craving for horror stories, replete with dismembered bodies, concentration camps, and multiple rapes.’ Yet the problem with the media elaboration of Second World War and Holocaust analogies was not so much their ghoulishness – after all, the horror, for the most part, was real – as their positing of a problematic equivalence between the Serbs and the Nazis and their construction an over simplified and one-sided account of the war, one that actually under-estimated the horrors of the war by ignoring many of its participants. During the Balkan wars, camps were set up by all of the warring parties for suspected enemies and refugees – the Muslims had 12 camps, the Serbs 8 and the Croats 5 (Klaehn 2010: 56) – and a Red Cross report that noted ‘all sides ran internment camps under deplorable conditions’ (Đorđević 1992). But while the Bosnian Muslims ran more camps than the Serbs, only Radovan Karadžić allowed Western journalists to visit his camps

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(Johnstone 2002: 71) and there was virtually no mention in Western news media of Bosnian-run camps such as Bugojno and Orašac, where Croats and Serbs were brutalized and sometimes killed. The cynical and insensitive transformation of detention camps into ‘Nazi death camps’ was just one of the propaganda ploys in which public relations companies played a vital role. Although ‘the UN forces never found such “death camps” when they gained access to all of Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (Finley 2004: 130), the Holocaust analogy was solidified into a fact by the public relations agency Ruder Finn and used to galvanize the support of Jewish pressure groups for the Bosnian Muslims. 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’ (cited in Parenti 2000: 92). Some of the news stories circulated by such means were preposterous. A report that Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, Canadian head of the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Bosnia, was raping and murdering Muslim women supplied to him by the Serbs, for example, was alleged to have originated at a major public relations firm (Trickey 1993: 11). The Serbs, for their part, engaged the services of the British public relations firm Ian Greer Associates (Waldron 1992: 12–13) but made many ‘mistakes’ in their PR strategy, not least their decision to allow Western journalists into their camps. Izetbegović himself later admitted in an interview with Bernard Kouchner (2004: 374–5) that the death camp stories had been invented in order to precipitate the bombing of the Serbs; but the widespread acceptance of the story indicates the success of the Bosnian authorities in mobilizing their PR apparatus. Despite a wealth of scholarship that challenges the hegemonic view of the Second World War as a just war undertaken in defence of democracy (Pauwels 2002; Winer 2007; Baker 2008; Heartfield 2012), World War II continues to be seen as the model of a ‘good war’ throughout most of the world. It is therefore unsurprising that journalists reporting the Bosnian war repeatedly drew analogies with the Second World War, helping to construct the Bosnian war as a Manichean battle between the forces of good and evil. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the BBC documentary film Two Hours from London (1995), made by the veteran political filmmaker Jill Craigie and her husband, the former Labour politician Michael Foot. Both Foot and Craigie regarded the Second World War as a just war against fascism. Craigie had written The Flemish Farm,

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a 1943 allied propaganda film fiction made with the co-operation of the Belgian government and the British Air Ministry; Foot, meanwhile, had condemned the politicians who had ‘appeased’ Hitler in his book Guilty Men (Cato 1940). Written and directed by Craigie and narrated by Foot, Two Hours from London articulates a similarly patriotic understanding of the Yugoslav wars. Two Hours from London begins by contrasting the political records of Franjo Tuđman and Slobodan Milošević. In his voiceover, Foot details approvingly Tuđman’s fulfilment of the West’s conditions for democratic elections in Bosnia in 1990 and describes the Croatian leader as ‘the youngest general in Tito’s army of antifascist partisans’. In stark contrast to Tuđman, Milošević first appears in a sinister low-angle long shot, addressing a crowd under an imposing Nazi-esque emblem, accompanied by an eerily distorted synthesizer drone. As journalist Charlotte Eagar (1995: 14) noted at the time, Craigie’s skilled montage draws upon well-established repertoires governing the visualization of fascism: Craigie uses the type of shots you see in any documentary of the rise of Nazism: Nuremberg-style rallies, parading soldiers, Milošević in slow motion summoning the demons of nationalism from the crowds. The maps, with their encroaching flood of Serbian conquests, are shown in colours reminiscent of the maps of the spread of Germany: rich yellow, purple and red.

In his distinctly one-sided narration, Foot condemns Serb nationalism, recording that Milošević had ‘taken over complete control of radio and television’, but ignoring Tuđman’s ethnic purging of media personnel in Croatia (Klaehn 2010: 54). Foot describes Milošević as ‘shrewd, affable, insanely ambitious’, his actions ‘Nazi-like’ in establishing a ‘vicious police state in Kosovo’. This attribution of madness to Milošević is unsurprising, since a ‘script of madness’ was used to describe all of the Yugoslav leaders in the British media (Smith 2007); but Foot condemns only the Serbian president, railing against British politicians’ ‘appeasement’ of recrudescent fascism in Yugoslavia. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Two Hours from London received a frosty reception from Foot’s nephew, the socialist journalist Paul Foot, who told Craigie that he could not support the ‘bloody reactionary nationalists on either side’ and that ‘to take either side was to damage the internationalist position’ (Rollyson 2005: 335). Another bitter attack on the film was printed in a letter to the local London Newspaper Hampstead and Highgate Express, expressing amazement that Craigie and Michael Foot had swallowed ‘without reservations, the official

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Croatian government line’ and pointing out that Tuđman, as well as Milošević, had his faults (Rollyson 2005: 335). As Michel Foucault (1980: 130) once warned, the refusal to understand and analyse fascism adequately in the years since the Second World War subsequently enabled ‘fascism to be used as a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation’. While quasi-fascistic elements certainly were apparent in the political and media apparatuses of all of the Yugoslav republics in the 1990s, the commonplace Western media proposition that Milošević was more inclined to ultranationalism than the presidents of Bosnia and Croatia rests on political demonology rather than sober historical analysis.

The journalism of attachment Although the Western media coverage of the Bosnian war was often very partisan, many journalists and academics continued to argue that it was ineffectually ‘neutral’ and should evince a stronger commitment to the Bosnian Muslim cause (Vulliamy 1999; Power 2002). Keith Tester (2001: 11) is not alone in suggesting that the war in Bosnia elicited ‘relatively few expressions of outrage’. In the introduction to their book This Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Meštrović (1996: 1–38) – a Croatian nationalist who has written several antiSerb polemics (see Meštrović et al. 1993 and discussion in Hayden 2013: 152) – repeat media reports of genocide and rape camps, compare Serb atrocities in the 1990s 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, governments and citizens adopted an essentially voyeuristic stance towards the war – passively watching the horror unfold, but taking no action. Meštrović (1996) even raised the accusation of Western passivity to the level of grand psycho-social theory, proposing that Westerners had come to inhabit a ‘postemotional’ society in which proper moral outrage in the face of injustice and suffering had been hollowed out or eroded. Although it was a canard in the 1990s, as it is today, the proposition that the Balkan crisis elicited no emotional or material response from Western observers had its ideological uses, allowing the anti-Serb bias of mainstream Western journalism to be justified by an appeal to a professional disposition that became known as the ‘journalism of attachment’ (Bell 1998: 15–22). As its chief exponent, British journalist Martin Bell (1998: 16), put it:

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Screening Bosnia In place of the dispassionate practices of the past I now believe in what I call the journalism of attachment. By this I mean a journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor. This is not to back one side or faction or people against another; it is to make the point that we in the press […] do not stand apart from the world. We are a part of it.

Serious journalism, of course, is usually characterized by a low level of what critical discourse analysts term ‘modality’ or opinion-expression; by contrast, the journalism of attachment constituted an attempt to rehabilitate expressions of political partisanship in foreign affairs journalism. Resonating with the early 1990s trend of ‘public’ or ‘civic’ journalism’ in the United States – a movement broadly emphasizing journalistic engagement rather than objectivity (Merritt 1998) – the journalism of attachment was an allegedly new mode of affective reportage that aimed to replace the aloofness of ‘neutral’ journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage. In an age of ‘emotional capitalism’ (Illouz 2007: 5) and ‘extraordinary subjectivity’ (Dovey 2000), this new form of journalism would appeal to feelings rather than mere rationality. Some commentators have welcomed the journalism of attachment: Joanne Sharp (1998: 167), for example, praises Maggie O’Kane’s reporting of the Bosnian war for ‘subverting the distanced geopolitics of most news coverage’. Others are more sceptical. Karoline von Oppen (2009: 26) proposes that by reducing the news to morality and introducing the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ into news media discourse, attached journalism effectively ‘depoliticised the conflict, in the same way that primordialist interpretations do’. Others have pointed to the partisanship inherent in the concept. Veteran Bosnian war reporter John Simpson (1999: 446) bluntly refers to the ‘journalism of attachment’ as a ‘selfcongratulatory phrase which meant journalism took sides and was therefore impossible to trust’. Philip Hammond (2007: 1), meanwhile, argues that the insistence on ‘attachment’ caused war reporters to lose their objectivity, allowing them to overcome the sense of purposelessness that pervaded elite discourse in the post-Cold War era. As Simpson’s and Hammond’s observations suggest, the concept of the journalism of attachment was an ideological strategy that provided a pretext for partisan journalists to present themselves as brave non-conformists unafraid of ‘speaking out’ passionately about the horrors of war, while in practice doing so only on behalf of Muslim victims. According to Tariq Ali (2000: xv), these selfstyled mavericks in fact constituted the journalistic mainstream and those who

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questioned their version of events ‘were denounced as traitors, appeasers and worse’. Indeed, journalists who really did depart from the mainstream narrative of the war often found themselves silenced. As Diana Johnstone (1998) puts it, ‘there was no market for stories by a journalist who discovered that reported Serbian “rape camps” did not exist (German TV reporter Martin Lettmayer), or who included information about Muslim or Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian journalist Georges Berghezan for one)’. Moreover, while emotions rightly ran high in reports about Muslim suffering, stories about the affliction of ‘unworthy victims’ (Herman and Chomsky 1988) did not elicit the passions of ‘attached’ journalists. When the UN discovered that a group of Serbs had been kept prisoner by the Bosnian government in a large sewage pipe for several weeks, for example, Western reporters showed no interest in the case (Simpson 1999: 445–6).

Massacres and the media The reporting of the massacre of Muslim men and boys at the supposed ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica presents another example of the selectivity of Western news reporting. Srebrenica was, and still is, widely described by journalists and politicians as a Nazi-style genocide – which would seem a fairer description of the massacre were other atrocities committed during the war condemned with equal vehemence. Each year sees public commemoration of the massacre in Bosnia and the Western media also regularly mark the anniversary (in 2015, for example, Britain’s BBC broadcast a documentary – A Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited – in which a group of twenty-year-old Britons visited Bosnia to learn about the massacre). Some critics of Western reporting (Johnstone 2002; Herman and Peterson 2007) have challenged 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 inflated 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 huge numbers around the town. What is questionable is the historical – and continuing – tendency of journalists to detach the massacre from its context. As Philip Hammond (2004: 183) notes in relation to media coverage of the massacre, ‘Western journalists consistently downplayed or ignored attacks by Croats and Muslims, so that Serbian attacks appeared to be evidence of a onesided war of aggression’. In fact, as Edward Herman (2003) notes,

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Screening Bosnia 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).

This decontextualized mainstream media presentation of the Srebrenica massacre instantiates what the sociologist Chris Rojek (2014) calls ‘event consciousness’: a disposition towards framing events as unique and unconnected with their causes and consequences. In the reporting of Srebrenica, as in the reporting of other horror stories from the war, ‘the compelling nature of the story of Muslim victimization deterred most reporters from any efforts to examine the complex issues underlying the war’ (Burg and Shoup 2000: 162). The critical question here is not whether Serb forces committed appalling atrocities at Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia – they certainly did, as all commentators are agreed – but why only Serb atrocities drew the opprobrium of Western commentators. According to Herman and Peterson (2007: 20–22), it is possible that more civilians were killed during Operation Storm than were killed at Srebrenica, yet only the latter event is commemorated. Herman and Peterson’s (2007: 26) wider observation about the one-sidedness of US and British news media reporting of large-scale massacres 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.

Although the mainstream media can be argued to have over simplified and decontextualized the Srebrenica massacre, alternative perspectives on the events have been expressed outside the mainstream media. For example, Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed (2011), a Norwegian documentary film written by Ola Flyum

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and David Hebditch, contains interviews with local Muslims who blame all sides for the carnage in and around the town and a man who was captured and tortured by Naser Orić’s men. It also details how secret American arms to Bosnia found their way to Srebrenica and how Naser Orić intercepted humanitarian aid destined for Srebrenica and sold it on the black market. Its central argument, supported by interviews with high-level witnesses such as the former Bosnian army’s Commander-in-Chief Sefer Halilović, is that Srebrenica was sacrificed by Izetbegović for political gain, a theory supported by some critical academic commentaries on the massacre (Johnstone 2002; Gibbs 2009).

Peace through war: Mediating military intervention As suggested in the preceding chapter, the Western bombing of Bosnia in 1995 – and of Yugoslavia in 1999 – could be argued to have increased rather than reduced the bloodshed and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Yet this was hardly the first time that humanitarian discourse had been mobilized in relation to a global conflict. What Greg McLaughlin (2002: 9) has called the ‘something must be done’ school of journalism has a long history. In the Spanish Civil War, for example, many journalists and commentators, even those on the political left, advocated for Western intervention to oppose fascism (Good 2008: 157). Bosnia’s humanitarian discourse has a more immediate precursor, however, in the 1980s, when US imperialism in Central America was routinely justified in human rights terms (Seymour 2013: xv). But it was in relation to the conflicts in Somalia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s that the language of humanitarianism became widespread – perhaps because, in part, of the increasing ineffectiveness of outright patriotism as a means of selling war to the public (Hammond 2007: 32–3). As the ‘liberal hawks’ took flight, the focus of international relations theory shifted from a ‘realist’ emphasis on state sovereignty to a certain kind of liberal idealism that embraced a post-Westphalian internationalism (Mearsheimer 2005). In 1992, the UN’s Boutros-Ghali announced that ‘the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty […] has passed’ (cited in Hammond 2007: 47) and in the same year the former US president Ronald Reagan made a speech to the Oxford University Union, in which he advocated ‘a humanitarian velvet glove backed by a steel fist of military force’ (cited in Hammond 2007: 37). And so it was that the Balkans became the setting for the 1990s version of what Rudyard Kipling called the ‘savage wars of peace’.

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Early in the war a Washington Post article argued that violent intervention was necessary to ‘stop the Serbs from conducting Nazi-like experiments’ (‘And Now, Death Camps’ 1992: 22), while George Will (1992: 7), in the same newspaper, suggested that ‘to do nothing is to invite the 1930s back’. In Britain, The Independent ran a Bosnia aid appeal, Save Sarajevo, offering to add 10 per cent to any donations received, yet was one of the most hard-line interventionist newspapers: ‘Only Force Will Do in Bosnia’ opined the newspaper’s leader article on 23 April 1993. In 1994, as the clamour for escalated military action grew, opposition to bombing was most often voiced by commentators on the far left or even the conservative end of the political spectrum. In an interview on US political television show Charlie Rose on 8 November 1994, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that intervention in Bosnia was not in the interest of the United States, advocated a blanket ceasefire and rejected the host’s repeated suggestion that UN troops should be withdrawn in order to ‘give bombing a chance’ and ‘punish the Serbs’. Also in the United States, Conservative libertarians such as Justin Raimondo strongly opposed military intervention. But it was Maggie O’Kane (1994: 20) writing in The Guardian, who expressed the dominant mood of the Western media: It is 56 years ago since Britain and France took the initiative in Munich to allow Germany to carve up Czechoslovakia in an attempt to appease Hitler. Four months later, when the Nazi forces occupied Poland they recognized the paradox – that peace can only be secured through war.

Anthony Lewis wrote numerous New York Times columns demanding military action and Susan Sontag and her journalist son David Rieff campaigned vigorously for the same cause. Indeed, the Bosnian question confirmed numerous left-liberal academics and commentators – including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Todd Gitlin, Jürgen Habermas, Fred Halliday, Michael Ignatieff and Bernard Henry Lévy – as ‘humanitarian interventionists’. Many celebrities, such as Vanessa Redgrave, also supported intervention – Redgrave even travelled to Sarajevo to make the case for war – and the reputation of many of these figures as ‘voices of conscience’ guaranteed them a hearing among serious observers. Jacques Ellul observed in his classic book Propaganda (1973) that many successful propaganda campaigns in the West have taken root in cultured settings; during the Yugoslav wars, high-profile academics and elite journalists – the ‘experts in legitimation’, in Gramsci’s phrase – played a key role in normalizing the dominant Western narrative of the conflict and engineering consent for

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bombing. One journalist with a towering reputation in both the United Kingdom and the United States (and a tenacious opponent of the preceding Gulf war), Christopher Hitchens, emerged as one of the most strident voices in this debate. While initially against military action in Bosnia and supporting only the lifting of the arms embargo on the Bosnians, Hitchens later came to adopt a more hawkish tone (Seymour 2013: 80). Identifying Serbian expansionism as the sole cause of the war in Bosnia, Hitchens noted only the atrocities of Serb combatants – whom he would later describe as ‘fascistic barbarians’ (Hitchens 2008) – and all but ignored those committed by other militia. Like Western media reporting in general, Hitchens’s work thus ‘laid the stress on demonology, on identifying a single Balkan villain against whom a needful victim could be defined’ (Seymour 2013: 79). For many liberals who pressed for Western action in support of the Bosnian government, including Hitchens, Bosnia became emblematic of an Enlightenment ideal of multicultural society (which, ironically, was the way that Yugoslavia itself had once been regarded). While it was not regarded as an especially cosmopolitan city before the war (Goldworthy 2008), Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo came to symbolize, in the words of the novelist Salman Rushdie, ‘the values of pluralism, tolerance and co-existence’ (cited in Hammond 2007: 50) – values that would have to be defended against Serb barbarism. Indeed, writing three years after the end of the Bosnian war, British journalist Yasmin AlibhaiBrown (1998: 47) noted that ‘Sarajevo was destroyed because it symbolised the kind of diversity nationalism could not manage’, although Dina Iordanova (2001: 237) is surely closer to the truth in arguing that Sarajevo became a city embodying a multicultural ideal precisely because it had been destroyed. As the war drew on, the tide of Western media opinion turned increasingly towards large-scale military intervention and the anti-Serb rhetoric hardened as Radovan Karadžić expelled several US journalists from Bosnia (Brock 2005: 26). By the summer of 1995, journalistic opinion in the United States and across most of the Western world had swung behind military action. This ultimately took the form of the NATO bombing and Operation Storm, which today is remembered by almost all Western journalists as a highly successful operation. Writing of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (2011: 29) recently wrote: ‘In September 1995, NATO finally bombed the war to an end and within a couple of tough months Richard Holbrooke forged a peace agreement.’ ‘It turned out’, Cohen continues, ‘that the United States, along with NATO, could make a difference and with relatively little effort.’ Operation

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Storm, which displaced hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia, was the largest single instance of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Bosnian war, but was never described as such by the media (Herman and Peterson 2010: 83). At the time of the operation, Martin Woollacott (1995: 22) argued in The Guardian that the Croatian assault on Krajina should ‘be welcomed as a hold on Serbian aggression’ and after the war Woollacott (1996: 19) even proposed an ‘open-ended occupation’ of Bosnia. Looking back on the Bosnian war in a New York Times article in September 1995, Anthony Lewis excoriated Milošević for stoking ‘the fires of nationalism’, commenting that the creation of a Serbian republic within Bosnia, as envisaged by Holbrooke’s peace agreement, was ‘a victory for racist fanatics’. Along with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Lewis (1995: 15) also lambasted British UNPROFOR commander General Michael Rose – a regular whipping boy for US military interventionists – for supposedly blocking ‘effective responses to the most brutal Serbian assaults on civilians’. Veteran commentator William Safire (1995: 23), meanwhile, opined that the United States ‘should arm the victims of aggression’ and combine this with ‘a whole lot of NATO bombing to protect the Bosnians’. Yet the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled from the Krajina region of Croatia during Operation Storm attracted little media attention (Brock 2005: 24–5), perhaps because of the entrenched Western ‘belief that these Serbs were simply getting what they deserved’ (Clark 2008: 674–5).

Conclusion Wars, as Cockerill et al. (1984: 144) write, ‘paint in primary colours the patterns of information dissemination and control that remain pastel-shaded in peacetime’. This control of information has long been a feature of Western war reporting, of course, and has re-emerged particularly strongly since the 1980s, when the relatively adversarial war reporting that had characterized Western reporting of the war in Vietnam (at least in the latter stages of that war) gave way to a more ‘managed’ relationship between the media and military-political authority (Gorman and McLean 2009: 219). British journalists covering the Falklands war in 1982, for instance, were effectively ‘embedded’ and thus rendered ‘utterly dependent on the military for their stories and their external communications’ (Freedman 1982: 62). During the first Gulf War in 1990, meanwhile, the military tightly controlled journalists’ movements, making them ‘more dependent on

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briefers and experts’ (Hallin 1994: 55); accordingly, journalists mostly stayed in their hotels and were heavily dependent on official briefings (Taylor 2003: 290–1), while officials often addressed television audiences directly, bypassing the press altogether (Engelhardt 1994: 81). If the US generals – mostly Vietnam veterans – desired ‘a positive war, a war more easily constructed by the dualism of good versus evil’ (Shohat 1994: 148), they found themselves in a good position to dictate such a view of the war. Yet many commentators at the time expressed the belief that media coverage of war was ameliorating, often on the basis of the kind of techno-progressivist arguments that would surround the arrival of the Internet a few years later. Media historian Peter Braestrup predicted that ‘improved technology will make journalists less dependent on military communications, and censorship will be harder to impose’ (cited in Engelhardt 1994: 82) and many commentators at the start of the Bosnian war were optimistic about journalistic standards. Writing in The Guardian, the British journalist Alex Thomson (1992) contrasted the extensive media manipulation that had accompanied the first Gulf War with the relatively uncensored journalism he argued was emerging from Bosnia. The foregoing discussion challenges such sanguine views of the role of the news media in Bosnia; like the widespread contemporary assertion that the affordances of ‘Web 2.0’ are producing more democratic societies, the notion that advances in media technology would raise journalistic standards suffered from a rather naïve techno-optimism. In fact, news media coverage of the war was characterized by familiar and predictable types of bias. While the local media within Yugoslavia gave way to nationalist hysteria on all sides, much of the US and other Western media also presented a simplistic narrative, ignoring inconvenient reports, fixing war guilt onto an increasingly clearly identified enemy and disseminating exaggerated atrocity stories – all long-established strategies of war propaganda (see, for example, Lasswell’s [1927] analysis of propaganda techniques deployed during the First World War). In the Balkans, indeed, Western reporters could be argued to have been less antagonistic towards the military than they had been during the first Gulf war, willingly submitting themselves to a UN pool system (Gowing 1994: 15). They were thus ill-placed to question propaganda disseminated by governments and PR agencies with the result that, as the erstwhile head of US intelligence in Sarajevo, John Sray, complained during the war, ‘America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam war’.

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Needless to say, however, some commentators swam against current of Western media reporting, even during the war itself: Joan Phillips’s documentary Journalists at War was broadcast on Britain’s Channel 4 in August 1993, providing an alternative perspective on the mainstream reporting of the conflict. In the pages of Living Marxism, meanwhile, Phillips (1992a, 1992b) repeatedly attacked Western policy towards Yugoslavia, warning at the outset of the war that British liberals, in supporting Croatian secession, were implicitly sanctioning the cantonisation of Yugoslavia and, in all likelihood, the bombing of Serbia. Other radical commentators highlighted the hypocrisy of a media that attacked Serbian atrocities but remained silent about Western-supported aggression. The magazine Red Flag (‘Out with Nato and the UN’ 1995: 4), for example, angrily contrasted the propaganda ‘poured out by the bourgeois publicists’ against Serbia with the absence of critical commentary on the UN sanctions against Iran, Turkey’s attacks on Kurds, Indonesia’s attacks on East Timor or the ‘French organized genocide’ in Rwanda. And despite elsewhere defending Western journalism about the war, Maggie O’Kane, in a Channel 4 Free for All documentary entitled Bosnia and the Media (1993), noted that the Bosnian detention camps were not ‘death camps’ and questioned the widespread comparison of Serbia with Nazi Germany. Other Western journalists and experts interviewed in the same programme, including Alex Mitchell, Misha Glenny and Phil Davison, also noted the anti-Serb bias of Western media reporting. Some journalists dug even deeper in forbidden territory. The British journalist Nik Gowing, for instance, identified and interviewed several Norwegian witnesses to the secret Bosnian ‘Black Flights’ for British television, although journalists reporting the story of undercover Western arms deliveries to the Bosnian army were put under pressure and even threatened by the US embassy in London (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 169). Unsurprisingly in such an atmosphere, a ‘pack’ mentality prevailed among journalists in Sarajevo that made criticism of the Bosnian government unwelcome or even dangerous (Simpson 1999: 445). The media representations that had become entrenched by the end of the Bosnian war remain widespread, both in the West and in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. A study of the Serbian press between 2004 and 2006, for example, found that much of the reporting of war crimes, especially in the conservative press, was ethnically biased and ‘perpetrator biased’, denying Serb war crimes or de-emphasizing their victims, features that ‘could be related to some of the propaganda techniques used during the wars’ (Golčevski et al. 2013: 129). In the United States and Western Europe, meanwhile, the normative view of the

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war established in the 1990s also remains largely unchallenged. Former New York Times journalist Daniel Simpson (2012: 19) – a journalist who is far from uncritical of Milošević or Serb war crimes – has discussed how, in the early 2000s, ‘covering the Balkans for the New York Times consisted of monitoring whether the Serbs had agreed they were Bad Guys’; in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Simpson (2012: 41–2) was even asked by the Times’s Judith Miller to report that Serbs had sold Saddam Hussein delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. In the present day, moreover, Western journalists still tend to present Western states not as active instigators and supporters of the war but as passive observers, to demonize the Serbs and to downplay the significance of atrocities committed by other parties.

3

Humanitarianism and Its Others: Three ‘Liberal’ 1990s Bosnian War Dramas

As indicated in the previous chapter, the trauma and terror faced by Bosnian civilians provoked much soul-searching – and side-taking – among Western intellectuals and activists in the 1990s, notwithstanding Cushman and Meštrović’s (1996) contention that Westerners had ignored their plight. In an era in which ‘globalization’ became a buzzword in Western sociological discourse, academics, journalists and writers frequently expressed moral outrage over – and commitment to alleviating – the suffering of distant others. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some of the first Western films about the Bosnian war assume what could be called a ‘humanitarian’ perspective on the conflict, elaborating discourses of care and concern for war victims. Benny’s Video, directed by the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke and released in 1992, is one of the first film fictions to reference – albeit obliquely – the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The film explores the haunting power of atrocity images. Benny is an affectless, video-obsessed teenager who spends most of his time flicking between television channels, watching Hollywood action films and gradually, it seems, becoming so ‘desensitized’ to the human consequences of violence that he commits murder. Among the cornucopia of media to which Benny exposes himself are segments of television news reports about the Yugoslav wars (seemingly the war in Croatia). These are so fragmentary that the horrific events they depict appear as so many decontextualized atrocities, a hideous collage of violence that seems disturbingly propinquitous, both perceptually (Haneke keeps the television set permanently in view) and geographically (Haneke’s film is set in Vienna, just a few hundred kilometres from the fighting shown on Benny’s screen). At the same time, the violent events seem incomprehensible to Benny and his emotionally frigid family. When Benny’s father asks his wife and son what ‘they’re saying’ on the television news, Benny’s mother flatly replies:

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‘I don’t know. Nothing.’ Despite seeing the televised evidence, the family does not seem able to register the horrors of the war or its connection to their own desperately alienated lives (Haneke returns to this motif in his 2005 film Hidden, in which a bourgeois French family disintegrates as a result of past injustices that have never been fully confronted; as the family falls apart, violent scenes from the Iraq war flicker on the television set in the living room). Benny’s Video suggests that the recrudescence of inter-ethnic violence in supposedly ‘civilised’ Europe – unlike the conflicts in, say, Rwanda or Congo – is simply too scandalous to contemplate, that the brutal reality of a war felt to be ‘too close to home’, to borrow Freud’s famous phrase, must, like all uncanny experiences, be disavowed. Indeed, the film dramatizes one of the most widespread discursive propositions in public discussions about the Yugoslav wars since the 1990s: namely, that ‘the world’ or ‘the international community’ failed to notice or help the victims, despite the televised evidence of suffering (as Julie Delpy’s character tells her partner in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise: ‘I hate that there’s a war going on 300 kilometres from here and people don’t give a damn’). It might also be noted that the perpetrators of the aggression in the reports watched by Benny are identified as Serbs – unsurprisingly, given that Austrian television news coverage of the Bosnian war was ‘very anti-Serbian’ (Hipfl et al. 1996: 36). While Benny’s Video contains no detailed depiction of the wars in Yugoslavia, then, the film nevertheless limns out some of the themes that characterize later Western media and cinematic treatments of the Yugoslav wars: public apathy, the failure of the international community and the responsibility of the Serbs for the war. The Bosnian war also attracted the attention of the French cinema auteur JeanLuc Godard. The melancholic mood of Godard’s 1993 short film Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo – a two-minute photomontage subtitled with philosophical reflections on the Bosnian situation – is continued in Godard’s full-length For Ever Mozart (1996), an art film that explores the tensions between culture and barbarism in contemporary Europe through a story about a group of French actors travelling to Sarajevo to stage a play – a storyline reprised, incidentally, in Mario Martone’s 1998 film Rehearsals for War (Teatro di Guerra). Two idealistic French intellectuals, Camille (Madeleine Assas) and Jérôme (Frédéric Pierrot), head for Bosnia, accompanied by Rosette, a young Muslim woman who works as a maid for Camille’s family. As they travel towards the Bosnian capital, they are captured by Serb paramilitaries. Rosette is abducted and raped; Jérôme and Camille are also raped and forced to dig their own graves before dying in an outbreak of fighting.

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Early in the film, several characters muse upon the similarities between the 1930s and the 1990s, the nature of evil and the wisdom of military intervention in wars. Indeed, Godard’s film draws upon a repertoire of Western geopolitical assumptions. Westerners here are seen as the guardians of high culture, while Serbs, the only villains shown, are depicted as idiotic (Jérôme and Camille – the avatars of Western European culture – mock their ignorance) and brutal; in an ironic moment, one of them angrily switches off a radio-cassette player as Camille listens to the Ben Harper song ‘Welcome to the Cruel World’. The otherness of the Serbs in these scenes is driven home by the decision to leave their dialogue unsubtitled, so that their speech becomes an alien babble. Like Benny’s Video, For Ever Mozart epitomizes the humanitarian response of the Western auteur faced with the suffering of European others, while articulating political perspectives on the Bosnian war and its combatants that became hegemonic in more mainstream 1990s screen fictions such as those analysed in this chapter. As Dubravka Žarkov (2014a: 162) notes, ‘the countries whose militaries have contributed to UN peacekeeping forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina seemed to have had a special interest in making movies’. The three popular and critically acclaimed productions discussed in this chapter are concerned with the experiences of foreigners from Britain, the United States and Pakistan who travel to Bosnia in order to intervene in the conflict, either as journalists with a passionate commitment to reporting the truth about the war (and even to rescue its victims) or as UN soldiers mandated to keep the peace and observe the conduct of the war. All of them are directed by filmmakers who, like Haneke and Godard, are known for the broadly liberal sensibilities of their work.

Hollywood’s first draft of history: Welcome to Sarajevo It was not until two years after its end that the Bosnian war received its first Hollywood treatment in the form of Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). Winterbottom’s film garnered much critical attention on account of its star-studded cast (Stephen Dillane, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Kerry Fox) and because it was the first Western feature film directly to address the war in Bosnia, becoming one of the most definitive popular cultural treatments of the conflict. The film focuses on the experiences of journalists in Sarajevo and in particular the quest of one journalist, Michael Henderson (Dillane), to

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evacuate a girl, Emira, from a Bosnian orphanage. Moreover, like Godard’s For Ever Mozart, the film contains a subplot involving a plan to stage a cultural event in the Bosnian capital, constructing Bosnia as an epicentre of culture and interethnic toleration under threat from the Serbs besieging the city. The film is based on British foreign correspondent Michael Nicholson’s (1994) account – entitled Natasha’s Story – of the attempt to evacuate babies from an orphanage during the siege of the city, presenting the story from the journalist’s point of view. Nicholson himself (1994: viii) believed, as he wrote in the introduction to his book, that journalistic commitment should not involve ‘standing safely as a spectator on the sideline’ during a war and he decided to become more personally involved in the lives of those he saw suffering. During the Bosnian war, Western publics had become familiar with these emotive stories. In 1993, for instance, ‘Prime Minister John Major personally intervened to arrange the evacuation by the Royal Air Force of an injured five-year-old Muslim girl, Irma Hadžimuratović, from Sarajevo to a London hospital’ and – for fear that the credit for ‘Operation Irma’ might go elsewhere – the Major government had to warn off two British tabloid newspapers from mounting their own rescue missions (Hammond 2007: 39). Indeed, the film’s emotional appeal may lie partly in the audience’s memory of these stories. Like other Bosnian war films from the period – most obviously, Gerardo Herrero’s Territorio Comanche/Comanche Territory (1997), which is also based on the true story of a group of journalists in Bosnia – the film has a documentaristic quality. And as in other Bosnian war films, actual television news footage is inserted into the diegesis. This technique of course has the potential to produce a range of effects: in some anti-war films, such as Carl Foreman’s The Victors (1963) or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), the contrast between triumphalist newsreels and the grim realities of war generates an ‘ironic distancing from the narrative’ (Chapman 2008: 218); but in Western films about the Bosnian war, the inclusion of news footage generally serves as an authenticating device, providing an authoritative perspective on the war’s events. Dramatic reconstructions of civilian suffering, including bloodied bodies strewn across the pavements of the city, are seamlessly intercut with real television news footage of similar horrors. In the first scene of Welcome to Sarajevo, Henderson delivers a news report about the war in Croatia to camera. This suturing of Henderson into the ‘real world’ of the Yugoslav wars lends his character moral authority as a reliable witness to the barbarity that surrounds him. The children in Emira’s orphanage, meanwhile, are presented to the viewer as

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part of Nicholson’s news reports, speaking directly to camera with Nicholson’s voiceover interpreting the children’s feelings (‘Emira has been here since she was a baby; now she’s so frightened by the shelling, she can’t sleep at night’). By placing the viewer among the carnage of the Sarajevo streets and highlighting Emira’s plight in documentaristic as well as dramatic mode, Welcome to Sarajevo’s news clips, real and constructed, collapse the distance between sufferers and observers, contributing to what Lilie Chouliaraki (2006: 187), in her discussion of the typology of news discourse about distant suffering, calls an ‘ecstatic’ textuality, through which ‘spectators recognize the sufferers as sovereign agents and engage with their misfortune continuously, intensely and in multiple ways’. Nevertheless, Welcome to Sarajevo’s inclusion of actual news footage also reinforces hegemonic Western framings of the conflict. There is a clip, for example, 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’ – a pronouncement that, like so much of the news reporting of the war, invites comparison between the situation of Muslims in Bosnia and that of Jews during the Holocaust. Elsewhere in the film, television images of the Serb commander Radovan Karadžić are intercut with a speech delivered by the Republican party’s George Bush, in which the former president asserts: ‘you can’t negotiate with a terrorist’. The inclusion of sound bites from both Clinton and Bush emphasizes the bipartisan, consensual nature of the film’s US-friendly, anti-Serb political message. Indeed, Serbs are depicted throughout the film not only as the war’s sole aggressors but also as subhuman. Goran Gocić (2001: 42–3) points out that Welcome to Sarajevo introduces several factual reversals, seemingly in order to demonize Serbs. One of these involves the representation of the wedding party killings in Sarajevo: 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.

To be fair to the producers of Welcome to Sarajevo, the wedding sequence in the film occurs on the day before the infamous Breadline Massacre, which happened on 27 May 1992, and is not necessarily intended as a faithful reconstruction of the real attack on the wedding party in March 1992, in which the father of a Serb

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groom was killed by a Muslim gunman. Yet despite its shifted temporalization, the film’s depiction of an attack on a wedding party clearly invites comparison with the real event. Gocić (2001: 43) adds that the screenwriter and director have never been challenged over these ‘evident falsehoods’, which, he suggests, come ‘close to propaganda’. Throughout Welcome to Sarajevo, in fact, Muslims are the innocent victims of war and Serbs are raving psychopaths: a bus transporting orphans out of Sarajevo to Italy is boarded at gunpoint by a crazed Serb soldier, who proceeds to remove Muslim children from the vehicle before driving away in a truck with his cheering comrades. Journalists such as Henderson, by contrast with such brutes, stand for the civilized values of multicultural Europe. As shown elsewhere in this book, Western films about the Bosnian war tend to depict Western journalists as hard-drinking, fast-talking and sometimes cynical, but above all as heroic and compassionate. In a Hollywood film set during the Croatian conflict, Élie Chouraqui’s Harrison’s Flowers (2000), journalists who have travelled to Croatia to find a missing colleague, while spending much time staring helplessly at television screens showing atrocity footage, are depicted as heroic risk-takers, ready to sacrifice their careers and possibly their lives in order to do what is right, as they dodge Serb bombs and bullets. In Welcome to Sarajevo, too, journalistic integrity inheres in transcending the role of the ‘objective’ reporter through emotional and active engagement in the war. An ashen-faced Flynn returns with videotapes from a trip to the camps at Trnopolje and Omarska – although journalist Roy Gutman, reviewing the film, opines that this would have been difficult to do from Sarajevo during the war (1997: 11) – before the film cuts to the well-known ITN footage of Fikret Alić and others standing behind a wire fence. And when Henderson tells his colleagues that he wants to keep focusing on the orphanage and its suffering children, he receives the rebuke: ‘that’s not journalism, that’s a campaign’. Echoing Martin Bell’s (1998) advocacy of a journalism of attachment, Welcome to Sarajevo idealizes the Western reporter as a humanitarian who ‘cares as well as knows’. This lionization of the journalist who goes beyond the call of duty is combined in Welcome to Sarajevo with the explicit endorsement of Western ‘humanitarian intervention’. Henderson’s risk-taking, hard-drinking and flamboyant US colleague Flynn (Harrelson) is kind and benevolent, for all his worldly cynicism. Flynn is also an interventionist, both personally – in an early scene, he coolly walks into a sniper zone to help the altar boy who has been shot – and politically, as indicated by a scene in which he apologises on behalf of the United States to his translator Risto (Goran Višnjić) for ‘failing to deliver on those airstrikes. I can’t

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help but feel that if the situation were reversed and Muslims were slaughtering Christians, we’d have done something by now’. Indeed, in Welcome to Sarajevo, Westerners are depicted as the actual or potential ‘saviors’ of Yugoslavia (Phillips 1993: 8), prompting one Marxist commentator to dismiss the film as ‘rancid and self-righteous’ with a ‘pro-interventionist outlook’ (Proyect 1997). Defending the film, Bruce Bennett (2014: 45) proposes that Henderson’s adoption of Emira is presented as an inadequate solution, suggesting that the film remains open to solutions other than Western intervention; but such an implication hardly vitiates the explicit endorsement of military action by one of the film’s most sympathetic characters. Storylines involving the rescue of orphans and the subsequent creation of a surrogate family have been echoed in many subsequent film and television dramas. Contemporary with Welcome to Sarajevo is Ademir Kenović’s Savršeni krug/Perfect Circle (1997), Bosnia’s first post-war feature film, in which an elderly poet contrives to get two orphaned boys out of Sarajevo. In Jasmin Dizdar’s comedy Beautiful People (1999), meanwhile, a young English racist hooligan finds himself by accident in Bosnia, where he assists a UN field medical team and eventually brings a young child back to safety in Britain. In Tomasz Wiesniewski’s Where Eskimos Live (2002), an initially unscrupulous child trafficker, aptly named Sharkey (Bob Hoskins), comes to form a deep friendship with the young orphaned boy he brings out of Bosnia, while being hotly pursued by a fiendish Serb colonel, Vuko. British television dramas, meanwhile, have featured storylines in which the orphans’ tormentors follow them to their places of safety outside Bosnia. In a 2003 episode of the British television crime series Prime Suspect 6 (‘The Last Witness’), the detective Jane Tennison investigates the murder of Bosnian refugees by Serbian war criminals. Episode 4 of the fifth season of the BBC drama The Inspector Lynley Mysteries – ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ (2006) – centres on the murder of a British photo-journalist, Peter Rooker (Richard Copestake). In a flashback scene, Rooker rescues a Bosnian Muslim girl, Nina Delić, when the girl’s family members are massacred by laughing Serb gunmen. After bringing Nina safely back to London, Rooker is executed in the street by one of the original murderers, the devious Andrej Pavletić, played by Serge Sorić – an actor who also plays a Serb villain in John Irvin’s action-thriller The Fourth Angel (2001) and a sleazy Balkan club owner in a 2013 episode of the British television detective drama New Tricks (‘Things Can Only Get Better’). Despite their many differences, all of these productions, like Welcome to Sarajevo, tell the story of the Bosnian war through an assemblage of common

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elements, including heroic Western journalists (and police), innocent orphans and slimy Serb assassins. Most of them, too, illustrate the gendered nature of the humanitarian enterprise, placing Western men in the role of protectors and saviours. Indeed, a further criticism of Welcome to Sarajevo is that it heroizes male journalists and marginalizes female characters; as Mercedes Maroto Camino (2005: 123) notes, the women in the film – like women in other war films – merely ‘provide a background for the more interesting and important lives of men’. Welcome to Sarajevo harrowingly depicts the constant threat of violence and the lack of basic supplies faced by those who tried to survive in Bosnia’s war-torn capital; but while the film conveys the asperities of the siege, it also reinforces regnant Western understandings of the Bosnian war. The film’s representational orthodoxy highlights one of the main arguments of this book: namely, that the hegemonic Western view of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s was elaborated not only by conservatives but also – perhaps especially – by liberal journalists, critics and filmmakers.

‘History is Screaming At Us’: Frustrated humanitarianism in Warriors If Welcome to Sarajevo is the best known film of the immediate post-war period, Warriors – a two-part television drama about the war written by Leigh Jackson, directed by Peter Kosminsky and broadcast by the BBC in 1999 – is one of the most critically respected dramatic treatments of the conflict. Kosminsky had experience of directing challenging war-themed documentaries such as The Falklands – The Untold Story (1987) and Afghantsi (1988), and by the end of the 1990s, he had emerged as one of Britain’s foremost television controversialists with an almost Loachian reputation for making campaigning, counterhegemonic dramas. 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 soldiers sent to Bosnia as UN ‘peacekeepers’ 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 mobilized. The central part of the film follows the soldiers’ deployment in Bosnia, where the men witness shocking war crimes.

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The drama’s final portion, meanwhile, depicts the social and psychological traumas experienced by the soldiers on their return home. Many of Kosminsky’s dramas deal with the themes of trust and betrayal: in No Child of Mine, an abused 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 trust of the British electorate by abandoning progressive policies and making Britain a partner of the United States in the invasion of Iraq. Betrayal is also key theme of Warriors, whose central thesis is that UNPROFOR’s non-combat remit precluded the soldiers from protecting the civilian victims of the war (the drama’s title is thus distinctly ironic – although the irony was lost when the film was re-titled Peacekeepers for the US market). In many scenes, the soldiers can only look on in frustration as Bosniaks are shelled or displaced from their homes; they are not permitted to help the civilians to safety using their vehicles, since such actions would constitute participation in 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 remit some of the soldiers find unconscionable. 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 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 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 action. Later, the soldiers attempt to use their vehicles to evacuate some civilians from buildings targeted by Croat forces, but are peremptorily ordered to cease the evacuation, much to their disgust. ‘How can this be right?’ spits Corporal Gary Sprague (Joe Renton), as he reluctantly removes the evacuees from the back of the vehicle. Freud associated war trauma with feelings of ‘disillusionment and dislocation’ (Turim 2001: 206). Private James encapsulates the guilt felt by some of the UNPROFOR soldiers at their seeming impotence in an outburst on his return

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home to Liverpool at the end of the film. In response to his father’s remark that the British soldiers ‘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, he smashes up a bus shelter in a fit of frustration. Later, talking to Lieutenant Feeley in a café, James reveals that while he once dreamed of playing football for Liverpool, he now ‘dreams of walking on dead bodies’ – a detail that recalls literary accounts of the First World War and which, in our own time, ‘has become shorthand for the failure and futility of war’ (Randell 2008: 122). Laughrey also feels guilt for ‘leaving all those people in the shit’ and has trouble adjusting to civilian life after his return to the United Kingdom, assaulting his pregnant wife while under the illusion that he is still in Bosnia. The screenplay of Warriors is based on the transcripts of interviews conducted by Sally Beare, who spent several months interviewing more than 90 soldiers and their families about their experiences in Bosnia. Jackson and Kosminsky also did their own research as guests of the British army in Bosnia. The location and mise-en-scène of the drama enhances a sense of realism: 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 considered so authentic that the film has been used in army training programmes in order to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges of peacekeeping operations. Journalists have also marvelled at the drama’s verisimilitude: in 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 drama’s initial broadcast, The Times’s Paul Hoggart (1999: 12) wrote that Warriors ‘was, quite simply, stunning – gut-wrenching, soul-searing, heartrending, 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 (Hanks 1999; Viner 1999). In keeping with Kosminsky’s oftstated aim of making himself ‘invisible’ as a director, the visual style and musical score of the drama are unobtrusive and violence is not fetishized – nor are the soldiers crassly heroized – through spectacularizing cinematic devices, such as slow motion or the choral music used to aggrandize US military manoeuvres in

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the Bosnian war action film Behind Enemy Lines (Watson 2008: 54). The protoromantic relationship between a married Muslim woman, Almira Zec (Branka Katić, known in Serbia for her roles in several films about the Bosnian war) and Lieutenant Feeley, is also elegantly understated and the moral dilemma it poses – that of whether to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of others – condenses the wider ethical conundrums surrounding the British soldiers’ involvement in the Balkans. In the years since its original broadcast, Warriors’ reputation as ‘quality’ drama has been maintained 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’. Yet given that many of Kosminsky’s other docudramas have provoked strong criticisms over their handling of historical events, Warriors’ depiction of the Bosnian war drew surprisingly little critical comment. Kosminsky (cited in Campbell 2008) himself has said that ‘we spoke to most of those directly involved and knew it was a fair reflection of what occurred’, noting that ‘people didn’t question the bona fides of Warriors in the way other work has been questioned’. Indeed, while press reviewers responded enthusiastically to the superb acting and thoughtful tone of the drama, they had less to say about its historical verisimilitude. The Independent’s television reviewer Robert Hanks (2005: 10), for example, criticizes 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 (2005: 10) is satisfied, however, that the dramatic action of Warriors is ‘generically true’. ‘This sort of thing happened’, he asserts of the events portrayed in Warriors, ‘even if not these particular things’. Yet this comment leaves much unclear and raises the question of exactly how much truth – generic or otherwise – there really is in Jackson and Kosminsky’s depiction of the Bosnian war. 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 partially effective 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

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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 portrayed only as victims, never as aggressors. In fact, 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 humanized through her incipient love affair with Lieutenant Feeley. Here the drama conforms to the normative Western news media narrative of the war in which, as we have seen, Muslim atrocities and warlords were largely ignored. By bracketing out Muslim aggression, Jackson and Kosminsky’s drama arguably 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 involved Muslim and Croat forces. The 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 omni-present and most memorable 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 indicate that he is cynically and openly lying, relishing 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 Serb’s smug rationalization of the shelling implies that the very notion of Muslim forces shelling Muslim civilians is a patent absurdity. This is problematic, since Muslim false flag operations were implemented during the Bosnian war and were not merely the cynical invention of Serb apologists and war criminals. And in any case, as Dubravka Žarkov (2014b: 184) points out, the very existence of the Serb commander in Warriors is itself a historical distortion, since Serb forces were not present in the area of central Bosnia in which the British soldiers were based. Like much of the news media coverage of the Bosnian war, several scenes in Warriors emphasize similarities between the Second World War and the Bosnian conflict. Blocked on the road by Serb forces, some of the UNPROFOR soldiers are

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subjected to racist abuse by the arrogant Serb commander. 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 provides the answer to 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 arrival 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 recurs. 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 overshadowed 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

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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. These comparisons between the Bosnian conflict and the Second World War are problematic, however, 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 implicitly to justify military intervention in Bosnia, while commonplace of media reporting in the 1990s, 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 for the Allies to fight against the Axis powers and the perceived need for intervention in Bosnia. Warriors also reflects an optimistic view of the role of Western news journalism. When the British soldiers are prevented from moving their vehicle by a crowd of civilians seeking protection from Serb shelling, they essentially become hostages pending an attack by the Serbs scheduled for the following morning. As the civilians and soldiers anxiously wait for dawn to break, Sochanik – the drama’s central moral figure – tells Aida that he can appreciate why the terrified Bosnians have prevented them from leaving. ‘If they die tomorrow’, he notes, ‘the world will be none the wiser. If we die too, the world will take notice.’ Sochanik’s observation about the news value of Western deaths is a sharp one; yet it also reinforces the view that journalists – as mediators of world opinion – are impartial observers whose reporting has, or at least should have, the power to prevent atrocities. There is some resonance here with the optimistic view of Western journalism expressed in Welcome to Sarajevo and with the notion of the ‘journalism of attachment’ that gained currency during the Bosnian conflict. Sochanik hopes – as did many Western commentators during the war – that media coverage of atrocities will compel the ‘international community’ to ‘act’. Warriors is superficially superior to many popular and news media depictions of the conflict. The drama powerfully depicts the brutality of the Bosnian war, notably in the scene in which the soldiers enter Ahmići following the massacre. It also eschews overt jingoism and its evocation of historical parallels through the character of Sochanik is sophisticated – even if these parallels seem to be drawn in support an interventionist agenda. The film’s depiction of Croat atrocities (both past and present) at least makes it less one-sided and less in thrall to dominant Western media and political discourses than other respected Bosnian war films, such as Welcome to Sarajevo, in which Serbs are the sole villains. Kosminsky’s film also contains some mildly subversive elements. Writing about Stanley Kubrick’s

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First World War film Paths of Glory (1957), Steve Neale (1991: 40) notes that a key critical element of the film is its establishment of ‘an opposition of interests between ordinary soldiers and high-ranking military authority’. Warriors depicts similar dissension in the ranks and 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’. Such criticism has antecedents in British military docudrama – the Falklands War drama Tumbledown (BBC 1988), for example, poignantly depicts the lack of care dispensed to British casualties – and resonates with perennial complaints that the nation’s armed forces are under-equipped for combat. Warriors thus registers some of the pressures and hardships experienced by British soldiers in Bosnia. There is also some acknowledgement of the responsibility of nationalist politicians for the war: Almira Zec vocalizes the horror that bellicose nationalism evoked among the many Yugoslavs who mobilized against war in Bosnia in the early 1990s (Kaldor 1999: 45–6): ‘I hate politicians’, she says; ‘they have brought us here’. Even so, the drama misrepresents the activities of the Bosnian Serbs in central Bosnia and underplays Muslim violence. Moreover, by positing the resolution of the Bosnian war in terms of Western military and media intervention, the film arguably underestimates the critical role of the Western powers in causing the war and in legitimizing further military involvement. As noted earlier, Kosminsky’s work has often drawn censure from the political establishment; that Warriors did not do so perhaps indicates how little the drama departs from the hegemonic Western narrative of the war. A brief comparison between Warriors and an earlier British television drama about the Bosnian war is instructive here. Although it only briefly touches on British soldiers’ experience in Bosnia, a 1993 episode of the ITV drama Soldier Soldier (‘Leaving’) is concerned with many of the same themes as Warriors, albeit from a quite different perspective. A conversation between senior soldiers reflects the early view of the war as a confusing ‘mess’ and a newly arrived soldier is told by his colleague that ‘the biggest mistake we can make is to think that we can understand the situation. It changes too often and too rapidly’. ‘So we always end up reacting rather than acting’, adds another soldier. ‘You know the meaning of the word frustration when you’re out here’, confirms the first. Shortly after this exchange, one of the men looks on helplessly as an elderly woman is shot dead by a sniper. In Soldier Soldier, then, the frustrations of the soldiers is registered, but no ‘sides’ are taken and, during a briefing, the men going to Bosnia are told

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that ‘the victims are simply the ones who happen to be in the minority. In one valley, it could be the Muslims, in another, the Serbs or the Croats.’ By contrast with this episode, Warriors, produced at the end of the 1990s when the Serbs had become firmly established as the region’s villains, reflects a far more partisan geopolitical understanding.

The Bosnian war goes East: Identity and interventionism in Alpha Bravo Charlie Warriors was by no means the only Bosnian war drama of the 1990s to deal with themes of humanitarian intervention and the impact of the war on the Bosnian population. Perhaps the most extensive treatment of the UN mission in Bosnia – and one that involves a similar moral calculus of benevolent interventionism and Serb viciousness – is Alpha Bravo Charlie, an epic fourteen-part television 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 which had previously been responsible for producing television dramas about the campaigns of the Pakistan Navy and documentaries about the Pakistan Air Force (Ansari 2011: 8). One of the main storylines in the miniseries concerns Pakistani troops fighting in the contemporary Siachin Conflict on the India–Pakistan border, while another, like Warriors, details the fortunes of the men sent to Bosnia as part of the UN peacekeeping force. Although Alpha Bravo Charlie’s Bosnia storyline focuses on the Pakistani UN contingent, it was well known in Pakistan in the 1990s that up to 4,000 volunteer Pakistani militants were present in Bosnia – part of a wider jihadist movement in the country that included Egyptian, Yemeni, Tunisian and Algerian volunteers (Curtis 2010: 207). While many Bosnians fighting with the Bosnian army expressed no religious attachment, most of these mujahideen were motivated by a desire to defend Islam, if not participate in the creation of an Islamic state. Entering Bosnia, often via Britain and with assistance from US special forces, they were initially loosely attached to Bosnian military units and ‘were funded by al-Qaida, the Saudis and various Islamic “charitees”, amidst a wave of solidarity around the Muslim world with the plight of their co-religionists’ (Curtis 2010: 206). The movement had a long legacy: many of these men were later involved in prominent Western terrorist attacks, such as 9/11 and 7/7, and

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in 2014, Bosnia provided more volunteer jihadists in Syria per capita than any other European country (Bardos 2014: 73). While it avoids any direct reference to these volunteer militants, Alpha Bravo Charlie nevertheless frequently invokes the solidarity with the Muslim suffering in Bosnia which many of these men must have felt, depicting the Pakistani UN troops in Bosnia as beneficent, heroic protectors of the global ummah. Like Warriors, Alpha Bravo Charlie begins with scenes of the soldiers enjoying everyday life at home, a narrative precursor to subsequent episodes dealing with the privations of war. The principal character in the Bosnia storyline is Gulsher Khan, a mild-mannered captain who is sent to Bosnia a few days after his marriage. In the Bosnian town of Mostar, Khan is told that while the world is helplessly watching images of Muslims suffering, ‘nobody is interested in doing anything for them’. The Pakistani forces set out to change this. On arrival in Bosnia, Khan is debriefed, and told of the heavy price Muslims are paying in the war. Khan’s unit is mostly respectfully received by the Bosnian community as rebuilding projects are begun and medicines and food are distributed. Khan even gives money to a wounded war veteran. As in Warriors, the soldiers form close bonds with local people and, in particular, their Bosnian translators. Khan’s burgeoning friendship with his translator Sandra is one of the drama’s key storylines, although this relationship is not entirely smooth from the outset. Khan initially chastises Sandra for appearing to resent the Pakistani presence – and even accuses her of being Islamophobic – before patiently explaining to her the good works being done by the UN in Bosnia. It turns out, however, that Sandra is herself Muslim. She has, moreover, lost two brothers in the war, a detail that constructs her as ‘defenceless’ in conventional patriarchal terms, a symbol of the vulnerable female Muslim body. 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 Serbian army (‘He didn’t think of us for a second’). She further tells Khan that the war may be a ‘blessing in disguise’ insofar as ‘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 – thus enhances Sandra’s sense of her ‘true’ Muslim identity. Whereas many ‘progressive’ Bosnian war films emphasize the overcoming of ethnic distinctions, Alpha Bravo Charlie celebrates Sandra’s growing sense of ethno-religious belonging.

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Later, Sandra takes Khan to her former family home. Sitting in its ruins, she tells Khan a second story about her former boyfriend – a Serb, like her stepfather – who deserted her at the outbreak of the war. ‘But then, one day’, she says, ‘he came back’. Here the boyfriend’s return to the village is rendered visually via analepsis (a rare occurrence in the drama, which contains only two flashbacks, both Sandra’s). In the flashback sequence, Sandra is woken by the sound of her ex-boyfriend firing his rifle indiscriminately in the village, killing an old man and several young children. Running outside, Sandra finds that he has also killed her mother during his rampage. Sandra slowly approaches her boyfriend – who smirks conceitedly, apparently believing that Sandra has come to welcome him – before producing a concealed revolver and shooting him dead. Such scenes of female vengeance are rare in the cinema of the Bosnian war and the unusualness and extreme violence of the flashback lends it a dream-like quality – as Susannah Radstone (2000) notes, flashbacks of traumatic memories are often inflected with unconscious elements – that amplifies its emotional power as a revenge fantasy. As the flashback ends, Sandra expresses the wish that she could have done ‘something more than just killing him, because he took away everything that I had: my love, my mother’. As well as providing a familiar image of an irrational Serb wildman, Sandra’s flashback is a pivotal moment in the drama: having revealed the truth about her suffering and her vengeance upon her Serb tormentors, Sandra becomes psychically emancipated and soon falls in love with Khan, whose role as a ‘liberator’ now takes on personal as well as geopolitical overtones. Her only criticism of Khan 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 – whose murder of her exboyfriend underscores the need for Muslim self-defence – asks for arms to help in the fight against the enemy. This question of ‘arms to Bosnia’ is in fact a key concern in the drama. During a reconnaissance operation, Khan and his unit are ambushed by Serb forces, who brutally massacre Khan’s unit. Having been shot, Khan is taken as a prisoner of war by soldiers who, throughout his period of captivity, are drunken, arrogant and abusive towards Muslims. As the only officer to be captured, Khan is asked to supply details of Pakistani arms deliveries to the Bosnians but denies the existence of any such arrangement. Khan’s denial is interesting in light of historical evidence that Pakistan, along with other Islamic countries, did indeed supply arms to the Bosnian army during the war: a former Pakistani ISI chief, General Javed Nasir, admitted in a written petition submitted to a court in

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Lahore that Pakistan defied the United Nations ban on supplying arms to the Bosnian Muslims (NIOD Appendix II 2002: 172; Haqqani 2005: 292). Alpha Bravo Charlie thus emphasizes, through Sandra, the need for arms for Bosnian self-defence, while simultaneously denying that this need was served. In the second of two escape attempts, Khan is caught and shot dead. Eventually the series morphs into a coming-of-age story where the lead characters leave behind their carefree lives as middle-class Pakistanis and embrace their global responsibilities. Towards the end of the series, Khan’s wife, Shahnaaz Sher (Shahnaaz Khawaja) visits Bosnia to look for her husband. Although she is, naturally, unable to locate him, she interviews Sandra and many other grateful Muslims rescued by Khan before returning to Pakistan. Eventually, her only son becomes an army officer, embodying the continuing honour of the national military, a theme reinforced in the serial’s Siachen storyline, which details the heroic and selfless actions of Khan’s friend, Captain Kashif, on the glacier battlefront between India and Pakistan. Overall, then, Alpha Bravo Charlie celebrates the legacy of the Pakistani presence in Bosnia, casting the soldiers as humanitarians who successfully protected the country’s Muslim community from Serb barbarism.

Conclusion The images of the Bosnian war in the dramas surveyed in this chapter follow familiar representational scripts. Like much Western journalism about Bosnia, Welcome to Sarajevo and, to an even greater extent, Warriors view the Bosnian conflict through the lens of the Second World War, presenting the war as an outbreak of Serbian aggression that parallels that of the Nazis half a century earlier. All three of the productions, meanwhile, present the solution to the war in terms of enlightened outside intervention. In their rather different registers, all three also present a one-sided view of the war, ‘othering’ Bosnian Serb forces through historical inventions or scenes of extreme – and, in the case of the ‘bus scene’ in Welcome to Sarajevo or Sandra’s flashback in Alpha Bravo Charlie, implausible – brutality. Roberts (2013: 172) notes that films about the Bosnian war peacekeepers generally reflect ‘a message of European maturity’ and Žarkov (2014b: 189) further observes that there is a ‘Balkanist-cum-Orientalist’ aspect to this message in the case of Warriors, the tall, handsome and clean British soldiers contrasting with the small, ugly and dirty Croat and Serb fighters. These

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latter appear as, to borrow Ricky Allen’s (2009: 214) formula, ‘white, but not quite’ – a phrase that recalls Maria Torodova’s (1997) characterization of Balkan identity as not-quite-European. As Žarkov (2014a) notes in a detailed discussion of the Srebrenica-based Dutch television drama De Enclave (2002), the characterization of Europeans as moral and responsible and Yugoslav characters – of whichever ethnic group – as unstable and violent reinforces a Balkanist ontology of geo-ethnic difference (one that, in the case of De Enclave, serves to elide both Serb and Dutch responsibilities for war atrocities). At the same time, we may recall here the argument of Aijaz Ahmad (1994) and others that Said’s conception of Orientalism tends to reify a bowdlerized construct of ‘the West’, resulting in an oversimplified account of Western political and representational violence against the Eastern other. This Eurocentric, orientalizing gaze should certainly not be essentialized; the demonization of Serbs and the lionization of the Pakistani peacekeepers in Alpha Bravo Charlie suggest that it is not exclusively the preserve of Westerners. The films discussed in this chapter illustrate the tacit acceptance of the normative ‘Western’ understanding of the Bosnian war among filmmakers who could be broadly characterized as liberals. Shaoib Mansoor is known for his liberal views and his hugely successful ‘war on terror’-themed film Khuda Kay Liye/In the Name of God (2007) – even if it is characterized by a certain pro-US sentiment that demonizes religious conservatives as fanatics (Saif 2013) – contains a strong condemnation of the wrongful detention and torture of a Pakistani terror suspect in the United States. Welcome to Sarajevo and Warriors are also directed by liberal filmmakers who have been very critical of Western foreign policy and the war on terror since 2001. The conventionality of Welcome to Sarajevo’s anti-Serb and pro-interventionist positions might seem surprising in light of Winterbottom’s involvement in more critical film productions in the following decade, such as the docudrama Road to Guantánamo (2005), which dealt with the imprisonment of three British citizens on terrorism charges at a US detainment camp in Cuba. And while Winterbottom’s film does critique the inanity of news journalism at certain points (Henderson is dismayed, for instance, when his news organization gives preference to a royal divorce story over his report from the orphange), its generally positive perspective on the role played by Western journalists in the construction of news narratives about Bosnia contrasts with the deconstructive take on journalism found in some of Winterbottom’s other films, such as The Face of an Angel (2014).

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Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors is a more critical and challenging production, depicting dissension within the ranks of the British UN contingent in Bosnia and espousing a highly sceptical view of authority. Yet in its dubious representation of the warring parties in central Bosnia and its implicit call for Western military intervention, its ideological position contrasts somewhat with the counter-hegemonic and anti-war perspective of Kosminsky’s early television documentaries and his more recent television films for Britain’s Channel 4, such as The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007), both of which question the legal and moral grounds for Britain’s invasion of Iraq. That Kosminsky, who is known for making dramas that challenge dominant political paradigms, should have adopted an interventionist line in Warriors perhaps suggests something of the potency and reach of Western propaganda throughout the 1990s on behalf of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ (Chomsky 2008).

4

Going in Hard: Masculinism, Militarism and Melodrama in the Bosnian War Action Film

If Welcome to Sarajevo, Warriors and Alpha Bravo Charlie examine the foreigner’s experience of the Bosnian war in a realist mode, action films portray the war and its legacies in a more frenetic and visceral register. The Bosnian war has hardly provided obvious material for special effects-laden sensationalism; apart from anything else, a conflict that did not involve US ‘boots on the ground’ generates few obvious opportunities for patriotic spectacle. Nevertheless, the films discussed in this chapter make the most of the dramatic potential of the war, communicating messages about Western ‘humanitarian’ responsibility and historical agency and reflecting hegemonic ‘ways of seeing’ the war, its combatants and the Balkans in general. More specifically, they combine images of hypertrophic masculinity, spectacles of excess, Manichean morality and the emotive mode of address characteristic of melodrama. While it may seem extravagant to describe male action films as melodramas, Steve Neale (1993: 69) has pointed out that Hollywood film trade papers during the classical and pre-classical period typically reserved the term ‘melodrama’ not for women’s films but for ‘war films, adventure films, horror films, and thrillers, genres traditionally thought of as, if anything, “male”’. Moreover, as Linda Williams (1998: 42), drawing on the work of Peter Brooks, notes, melodrama is not so much a genre as a representational mode facilitating the ‘dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action’ and thus creating a sense of ‘moral legibility’. The male action melodrama, then, combines heightened emotions with unambiguously moral scripts. Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Black Hawk Down (2001), which depicts the United States’ ‘humanitarian war’ in Somalia in 1993, exemplifies the genre perfectly. Scott’s film, which focuses on the Battle of Mogadishu, was made in close collaboration with the Pentagon and the White House, which edited the

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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 1,000 starving Somalians during the battle of Mogadishu, in which only 18 US soldiers were killed. It also presents the US invaders as righteous (the film’s tagline is ‘Leave No Man Behind’) avengers against hordes of Somalis, who are portrayed as an ‘undifferentiated mass’ (Carter and McCormack 2006: 238) of snarling ‘blood-thirsty madmen’ (McCriskin and Pepper 2005: 171). As will be shown in this chapter, this combination of noble sentiment and racist rampaging is also the stuff of the Bosnian war action film. Melodramatic effects in these films are often achieved by the simple counterpositioning of two male adversaries. The HBO drama Shot Through the Heart (1998), written by Guy Hibbert and directed by David Attwood, for example, is based on the true story of two Bosnian friends – Vlado, a Muslim, and Slavko, a Serb, whose friendship is destroyed by the war. Both men are snipers, yet Vlado, played by British actor Linus Roache, is a responsible family man and clearly identified as the better marksman; Slavko (Vincent Perez), meanwhile, is a louche ‘ladies man’ who blames ‘Croats and Muslim fascists’ for destroying his family fifty years previously. Slavko initially helps Vlado’s family, paying off a JNA guard to allow them to pass through a checkpoint; but as the war progresses he becomes increasingly involved with the savage Serb militia surrounding Sarajevo, whose commander – also motivated by revenge for the killing of his family in the past – tells Slavko that ‘the job is to terrorize’. Slavko ends up inhabiting Vlado’s former home. When Vlado realizes that Slavko has been responsible for several deaths in the community, however, he finally – having wrestled with his conscience – shoots his friend in order to protect his family. As in Hibbert’s later BBC two-hander Complicit (2013), which charts the antagonism between a British secret service agent and an Islamic fundamentalist, the protagonists come to occupy starkly antithetical political and moral positions. Constructed news media reports are used to establish a preferred political context of the war (Radovan Karadžić appears on a television screen issuing his infamous warning, followed by a reporter who notes that ‘more and more Bosnians don’t believe the Serbs want peace’), but the emotional force of the film derives from the widening moral rift between its two central characters. In addition to Manichean morality, the Bosnia-themed action films discussed in this chapter – almost all of which are Hollywood productions – stress the necessity for covert operations and the need to bring down the bad guys by any means necessary. Many of them also involve a ‘back to Bosnia’ premise,

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as characters return to Bosnia after the end of the war to apprehend Serb war criminals. Yet these films do not simply reproduce a criticism of the Serbs as the war’s sole aggressors (although they certainly do this in a variety of ways); they also highlight the function of the Bosnian crisis in the Western imaginary as an opportunity for moral redemption (Hammond 2007, 2009). A quiet scene near the middle of the ensemble action film The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010) finds Tool (Mickey Rourke) ruminating with his colleague Barney (Sylvester Stallone) over the crisis of meaning in Western culture, invoking the two men’s shared experiences during the Bosnian war. Tool laments that contemporary people lack ‘belief in the soul’ and the ‘human parts’, noting plaintively that ‘we don’t stand for shit’. ‘Standing’ for something, in this case, involves displays of both masculinist bravado and emotional feeling, acting and taking responsibility for failures to act. Tool asks Barney if he remembers when they ‘took down them Serb bad boys’ in Bosnia (as discussed later in this chapter, The Expendables is not the only action film in which US forces are misremembered as having had ‘boots on the ground’ in Bosnia); but he also tearfully relates to Barney a story about how he allowed a Bosnian woman to jump to her death from a bridge and is now tortured by his conscience. By failing to save the suicidal lady, Tool confesses that he lost ‘what was left of my soul’. His combination of machismo and guilt encapsulates the masculinist-melodramatic structure of feeling at the centre of the Bosnian war action film, whose rugged heroes typically combine a tortured patriarchal conscience with a steely sense of world-historical responsibility.

By any means necessary: Covert operations films Many of the film and television actioners discussed in this chapter were produced in – and reflect – the febrile and paranoid atmosphere of post-9/11 America; indeed, Bosnian war films since the 1990s are never just about the the Bosnian war, but also dramatize the geopolitical imperatives of their own historical moment. Yet it is an earlier Hollywood action film, Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1997), that contains the seeds of a more full-bodied take on the Bosnian war. Contemporary with Welcome to Sarajevo, The Peacemaker was the first production to emerge from Steven Spielberg’s newly established DreamWorks studio. Filmed in the former Yugoslavia, it stars George Clooney as a maverick US Special Forces Colonel, Thomas Devoe, and Nicole Kidman as nuclear weapons specialist Dr Julia Kelly. This unlikely duo attempts to thwart a

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terrorist plan to explode a nuclear bomb at the UN headquarters in New York. Filmed and set in the post-war period, the Bosnian war is not dealt with directly here; nevertheless, the conflict provides the backstory of the film’s villain. The fragile piano teacher behind the terrorist network is a Bosnian Serb, Dušan Gavrić (played by the Romanian actor Marcel Iureş), who is motivated by a desire to avenge the killing of his wife and daughter by a sniper in Sarajevo. That three well-known Serbian actors – Predrag Manojlović, Lazar Ristovski and Dragan Nikolić – all turned down the role of Gavrić perhaps suggests the sensitivity of such roles for Serbian actors in the 1990s. Moreover, it seems that the film’s original, anti-Serbian standpoint was toned down after Spielberg heard tell of Franjo Tuđman’s anti-Semitism: production was relocated from Croatia to Macedonia and Gavrić was transformed from a Serb nationalist into a Yugonostalgist who blames the countries of the West for cynically providing arms to all sides during the Bosnian war (Antulov 2003). In a lengthy explanation of his crime recorded on a videocassette sent to the authorities, Gavrić claims: I am a Serb, I am a Croat, I am a Muslim. You will look at what I have done and say ‘Of course. Why not? They are all animals. They have slaughtered each other for centuries. But the truth is: I am not a monster. I am a human man. I am just like you.

While he notes that the war was ‘waged on all of us […] by our own leaders’, Gavrić, who becomes an increasingly sympathetic character as the film progresses, inculpates the ‘governments of the West’ for providing ‘the Serb cluster bombs, the Croatian tanks, the Muslim artillery shells that killed our sons and daughters’. Thus, while The Peacemaker may have originally been intended to reiterate the normative theme of Serb villainy, the film was in fact promoted as a relatively sophisticated actioner with a villain whose moral motive for terror makes him somewhat sympathetic (Alford 2010: 97); it also ends up delivering a critique – somewhat unusual in Hollywood films about the Bosnian war – of the role of the great powers in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In other ways, however, The Peacemaker is a conservative film that takes for granted the necessity of US hegemony in the new, unipolar political topography of the post-Cold war era. The United States here is a force for cultural progress: on hearing that one of the terrorist group is a Harvard-educated Pakistani, for example, Devoe notes laconically that ‘we educated half the world’s terrorists’. Moreover, the urgent need to prevent the terrorist attack demands suspension of the protocols of military engagement: thus the uptight Kelly reluctantly

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allows Devoe’s chopper unit to break the rules by violating Russian airspace in order to take out a nuclear convoy. Towards the end of the film, meanwhile, Devoe instructs a sniper to shoot Gavrić in the street, although doing so would certainly involve killing a child (the sniper, understandably, is unwilling to take the shot). While The Peacemaker’s take on the causes of the Bosnian war is rather more sophisticated than that of other action films about the conflict – and while the implications of Serb villainy here are relatively muted – the film’s emphasis on bold-but-necessary US unilateralism is a standard feature of the Bosnian war action film, especially in the post-9/11 era. The agents of robust military intervention in Bosnia are not always, however, American. The Polish action film Demony Wojny/Demons of War, directed by Władysław Pasikowski and released in 1998, concerns Polish IFOR troops in Bosnia in the immediate aftermath of the war and is ‘one of the very few movies dealing with the issue of the military conflict in the former Yugoslavia produced within the former Eastern Bloc (except for the countries of former Yugoslavia, of course)’ (Ostrowska 2014: 180). Answering a distress call from a downed Norwegian chopper, the commander of the IFOR troops, Keller (Bogusław Linda), repeatedly defies orders from his command and leads his men on a dangerous mission to the site of a downed helicopter. As the mission turns into a kill-or-be-killed operation in the Bosnian forests, Keller is subjected to tearful protests from one of his soldiers, who argues that the group should not be involved in fighting (although his histrionics clearly mark him as a coward). Despite such irritations, Keller’s men rescue two captives from the hands of local militia, including a local politician who claims to have a videotape containing evidence of atrocities, which he wishes to exploit for political advantage. Indeed, political chicanery and realpolitik are powerful themes in the film, whose early scenes focus on high-level discussions between statesmen and military leaders about the need for cautious conduct in Bosnia as Poland seeks to join NATO. As in the visually similar British drama Warriors, the soldiers in Pasikowski’s film mostly express a highly sceptical attitude towards bureaucracy and officialdom (here represented by IFOR/NATO rather than the UN), although their engagement in combat gives the film a more militaristic tone than Jackson and Kosminsky’s drama and the production lacks the moral complexity of its British counterpart. In Warriors, even the most decent characters have moral flaws (one of the officers, for example, is unfaithful to his wife while on tour in Bosnia) and the representation of the soldiers’ post-traumatic distress on returning from war – a key theme in British war narratives since the First World War (Barham

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2014: 319) – undermines any possibility of a triumphalist presentation of either war or masculinity. In Demons of War, with the exception of just one cowardly soldier, the heroism and moral decency of the Polish troops as they defy orders to protect the weak is absolute. The necessity for US or other Western agents to bend the rules and ‘do whatever it takes’ in order to prevent worse violence is, of course, a longstanding Hollywood theme. After the US defeat in Vietnam, Hollywood war cinema underwent a certain ‘remasculinization’ (Jeffords 1989), a process condensed in the heroic figure of the ‘lone warrior’ whose crusades are stymied by a bureaucratic state apparatus (Gibson 1994). The cinematic archetype of this figure is, of course, John Rambo, a ‘single man army amidst an inept, bureaucratically frozen U.S. military’ (Jeffords and Rabinovitz 1994: 20). But Joanne Sharp (1998: 159–60) notes the continuing popularity of this figure in post-Cold War Hollywood, achieved now ‘through the exclusion of women characters from heroic scripts in such films, and the structuring of narratives around heroic individuals’ attempts to overcome the inertia of a feminised bureaucratic state structure’. Sharp’s observation might be illustrated by a scene in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, in which ‘soldiers in a helicopter circling above a food distribution station watch as civilians are mown down by militiamen of General Aidid’s forces, but are frustrated by the fact that rules of jurisdiction prevent them from intervening’ (Carter and McCormack 2006: 238). As argued in the previous chapter, frustration at having to abide by the rules is a major theme of Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors, which was broadcast at the end of the 1990s. Yet Western political responses to the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers – and the subsequent announcement of a ‘war on terror’ – gave this frustration a more bellicose inflection. As Mark Gallagher (2006: 80) notes, the release of a clutch of Hollywood war films, including Gregory Hoblit’s Hart’s War (2002), John Woo’s Windtalkers (2002) and Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (2002) in the wake of the attacks may even have provided a pretext for some viewers ‘to give themselves up to a global culture of militancy and aggression’. Despite a short-term revival of the John Wayne style of overt military patriotism in the years immediately following 9/11, however, Hollywood cinema in the noughties was perhaps even more clearly characterized, as Ross Douthat (2008) noted towards the end of the decade, by the ‘paranoid style’ represented by the Bourne films, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck (2006) and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006),

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in which state institutions are compromised or corrupt and must therefore be circumvented. The necessity for maverick or covert action à la The Peacemaker was increasingly stressed in popular narratives, from ‘secret mission’ video games (Hughes 2007: 990) to the torture techniques employed by Jack Bauer in the Fox television series 24 (2001–10) – an operative who must do the dirty work of the deep state, behind closed doors if necessary. Reflecting the realworld hunt for terrorists, pre-eminently Osama bin Laden, the popularity of undercover operations narratives in the 2000s reflects the emphasis in Western political discourse on combatting terrorism by any means necessary (including, for example, by secret rendition). Although the Yugoslav wars were over by 2001, these covert action narratives were particularly germane to the political situation in the Balkans, since the conflict had ended with several high-profile warlords going into hiding, provoking questions about how they might be captured by stealth. By the early 2000s, as the activities of the ICTY intensified, the ‘Serb war criminal’ had emerged as a notorious juridical and cultural figure. Brutal and cruel, he embodies every uncivilized value, even where he is given a semi-comedic treatment (in Christian Duguay’s 2002 action caper Extreme Ops, for instance, a group of snowboarders is pursued through the Austrian Alps after accidentally filming the hideout of a psychopathic Serb war criminal with plans to blow up the criminal court in the Hague). These themes receive their most paradigmatic treatment in John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (2001), a film made before 9/11, but rush-released after the attack (Ó Tuathail 2005: 358). Although the film’s three sequels went direct-toDVD, the film merits critical scrutiny as one of the few Hollywood action films to be set during the Bosnian war itself. Behind Enemy Lines was the brainchild of John Davis of Davis Entertainment, whose aim was to make a ‘patriotic action adventure’ set amid the global political intrigues of the 1990s (Ó Tuathail 2005: 356). As Guy Westwell (2006: 105) notes, the film is essentially a remake of Peter Markle’s 1998 pilot-on-the-run film BAT-21 and is based on the experience of American airman Scott O’Grady, who was shot down and later ‘rescued’ (or, as some claim, allowed to be found) in Bosnia in 1995. It stars Owen Wilson as Lieutenant Chris Burnett, an American naval flight officer who is frustrated by the lack of opportunity for combat action: ‘we’re not fighting, we’re watching’, he complains to his superior, Rear Admiral Leslie Reigart (Gene Hackman). 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 (like the videocassette in Demons

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of War, the photographs here serve as a plot MacGuffin). 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 hightech, 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 (Olek Krupa), is conducting a secret genocidal campaign against the local population (this discovery retrospectively explains an earlier scene showing Lokar’s men perpetrating the genocide in slow motion). 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, much as the UN official Rik Langrubber criticizes the arrogance of the British army in Warriors, is increasingly identified as the film’s real villain (Weber 2006: 62). The Europeans, the film implies, are inactive in the face of oppression. The Serb soldiers, meanwhile, are thoroughly othered. Lokar’s forces are highly racialized ‘mono-dimensional demons’ who must be vanquished by angelic American forces (Watson 2008: 55). Cowardly and merciless, the Serbs execute Stackhouse without hesitation by shooting him in the back; in fact, they do not even seem to regard one another as human, so that when one of them steps on a landmine, his colleague flees the scene in fright (Zán 2012: 47). The Serbs are unable to speak their own language (none of the film’s actors is Serb), mumbling in what Miskovic (2006: 449) describes as a ‘fake language’. And unlike the ‘cool’ white Americans and the Americanized, clean-looking Muslim youths who help Burnett during his ordeal, the Serbs are dirty and dark-skinned ‘minstrels of mud and dirt’ (Miskovic 2006: 450). Like their compatriots in other Hollywood actioners such as Gustavo Graef-Marino’s action film Diplomatic Siege (1999), the Serb militiamen are also comically inept in their villainy and are eventually easily routed. Burnett is of course 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. The moral superiority of the Americans is reinforced by the authenticating narrative device of the news media commentary: as in Welcome to Sarajevo, the film ‘employs a voice-over news report concerning recent incidents in Yugoslavia to historically situate its narrative’ (Pötzsch 2012: 163), establishing an authoritative view of the conflict as a struggle between good and evil. At an affective level, meanwhile, an overwhelming high-octane

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rock music soundtrack, which reflects Moore’s background in music videos and television commercials (Koehler 2001: 25), fuels Burnett’s heroics and shores up the film’s assertion of US cultural hegemony. The film even sets up a contrast between brightly lit Americans on their aircraft carrier and shadowy Serb soldiers (Miskovic 2006: 449). By these means, as Gearoid Ó Tuathail (2005: 361) argues, Behind Enemy Lines promotes a Manichean worldview in which the US military guarantees moral clarity and certainty in ‘yet another parable about the liberation of a war-fighting masculinity from the constraints of multilateralism and diplomacy in order to get the job done’. Behind Enemy Lines is one of several Bosnia-themed films from the period with a ‘clandestine operations’ theme. The film’s storyline is strikingly similar to that of the actioner Sniper 2 (2002), for example, in which US Marine Corps sniper Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) is charged with an ‘off-the-books’ mission to assassinate a Serb general (Peter Linka), who is perpetrating ‘hit and run ethnic cleansing’. Similarly, in the British thriller The Fourth Angel (2001), directed by John Irvin and starring Jeremy Irons, journalist Jack Elgin’s wife and three daughters are killed on a plane by hijackers named Ivanić Loyvek (Serge Sorić) and Karadan Maldić (Ivan Marevich), the latter of whom is described by Jack’s colleague Kate as a ‘professional killer’ who would ‘burn an orphanage for a pack of smokes’ and who even abandons his own daughter in Paris when the police catch up with him. Illustrating the hegemonic nature of Serb villainy in the early twenty-first century, the Libyan terrorists at the centre of the novel upon which the film is based (Hunter 1986) became Serb in the film (although it later transpires that the terrorists are comprised of Serbs, ‘Bosnians’ and Ukrainians). The portmanteau name Karadan Maldić, meanwhile, is an unsubtle splicing of the names Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić – both in hiding and wanted by the Hague at the time of the film’s release. Although they are initially apprehended by the authorities, the hijackers are soon released on compromised political grounds and Jack is told by the shifty US State Department operative Davidson (Jason Priestley) that the authorities are powerless to act, a detail which, as in Behind Enemy Lines, implies the pusillanimity of officialdom (this critique of bureaucratic inefficacy is somewhat offset by the figure of the FBI anti-terrorist agent Jules Bernard, played by Forest Whitaker, who, despite tailing Jack, turns out to be sympathetic to his cause). Infuriated, Elgin gives a statement to the British press demanding that the British and US governments ‘do something to bring these hijackers to justice’. Eventually, he takes his search for justice into his own hands with the assistance

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of a friend Kate (Charlotte Rampling), a former intelligence operative, and a tip-off from a Serb printworker about the shadowy August 15th Movement’s run-down secret meeting house in London’s Albert Dock. Breaking into the group’s dingy hideout, he finds alcohol, guns and a pornographic video – a near-statutory accoutrement of Serb villains in Western cinema – playing on a television screen. When he is discovered by the occupants of the den, Elgin embarks upon a flashback-fuelled killing spree, shooting the Serbs in slow motion and despatching Maldić from a motobike as the terrorist rides in a taxi, but pointedly stopping short of stabbing Loyvek – after all, Elgin is, in contrast to his barbarous adversaries, a cultured fellow. Like 24’s Jack Bauer, Elgin is a family man-cum-avenger whose conscience pushes him to defy the constraints of officialdom in order to take down the bad guys.

Back to Bosnia – With a vengeance By the beginning of the twenty-first century the Bosnian war had lost some of its currency in the mainstream media. The Kumanovo Agreement that ended the Kosovo war signalled the end of the Yugoslav wars, while the deposition of Milošević in 2001 brought a political end to the most virulent forms of warnationalism in Serbia. And as 9/11 and the subsequent Western ‘war on terror’ came to dominate public discourse about geopolitics, many came to see the Bosnian war as a historical curiosity; indeed, it has been the usual fate of the Balkan countries to be ignored except at times when political events in the region ‘cause discomfort in the West’ (Miskovic 2006: 441). Nevertheless, the sense of euphoria among Western liberals over what was widely held to be the successful NATO bombing campaign in 1999 had a long tail, turning Yugoslavia into a shining example of the virtues of Western military humanitarianism. And with the continuing trials of war criminals in the Hague, the Bosnian war continued to provide the backstory for action-adventure narratives. Serbs often served as episodic villains in Hollywood films in the first years of the twentieth century: the faceless terrorists at the start of Adam Shankman’s spoof action film The Pacifier (2005), for example, are described as ‘Serb rebels’, although they do not feature in the film after its opening scenes. Insofar as they are attributed human characteristics, however, Serb film and television villains often exhibit a moral backwardness and a desire to ‘return’ to the war, or carry it on by other means, in order to avenge past humiliations.

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A well-known example is Victor Drazen, the chief villain of the first season of the highly popular Fox television series 24 (2001–10), a former military leader with a background in ethnic cleansing whose crimes earned him the nickname ‘the butcher of Belgrade’. Drazen is a ‘one-sided’ figure, ‘an unscrupulous and cold-blooded murderer’ (Birk and Birk 2005: 59). Drazen’s wife and child were killed during an undercover CIA operation and like other Serb screen villains, such as the brutal Serb commander Vuko (literally, Wolf) in Where Eskimos Live or Dušan Gavrić in The Peacemaker, his crimes are primarily motivated by a primitive desire for revenge for the murder of his family, marking him as a pre-modern throwback. Significantly, when the accent of a Serbian actor was deemed too impenetrable for Anglophone audiences to understand, the part of Drazen was given to Dennis Hopper, an actor well known for playing villainous screen roles. Yet as the example of Jack Elgin in The Fourth Angel suggests, a desire for revenge is not entirely the preserve of atavistic Serb villains. As Nicola Rehling (2009: 55–82) observes, the heroes of male action melodramas are themselves typically wounded (and thus, etymologically speaking, traumatized) figures; the soldiers and journalists who return to Bosnia in Western dramas often have their own personal sufferings and grievances to avenge, even if they generally do so under the civilized pretext of bringing Serb war criminals to justice. From the late 1990s, huge rewards began to be offered by the United States for the capture and delivery of war criminals, tempting many Western bounty hunters and commandos to travel to the Balkans. It is therefore unsurprising that Western film and television dramas began to reflect such stories. We may take as an example here a 2002 episode of the British paramilitary action television series Ultimate Force – a series belonging to the macho special forces action genre represented by British novels such as Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero (1993). In an episode entitled ‘Something to Do with Justice’, British special forces are sent on an undercover mission – ‘a bit iffy, unofficial’, warns their dispatcher – to Western Bosnia in order to arrest a man known simply as Glasnović. Glasnović is a tyrannical ethnic cleanser and mass murderer who has so far eluded war crimes prosecution at the Hague (perhaps indicating the difficulty of getting Serb actors to take on roles as Serbs in Bosnian war films, Glasnović is played by the German actor Andreas Wisniewski). Broadcast just months after the NIOD report criticized the Dutch UN’s handling of Srebrenica, Glasnović, in an early scene, mocks the Dutch peacekeepers for having allowed the Serbs to take away their weapons.

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In the denouement of the episode, Glasnović delivers a fervent speech about Serbian greatness and the necessity for Serbs to have their ‘victory’, the fanaticism of his words accentuated by an extreme close-up shot of his Hitlerian sneer. Ironically, though, the episode itself displays a distinctly fascistic sensibility. Glasnović’s tirade is interrupted when the British attack his compound, massacring his entire retinue of bodyguards in the process. The surplus violence of the scene resonates with some of the spectacular arrests of real-life war criminals in Bosnia at this time: the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Momčilo Krajišnik, for instance, involved NATO troops blasting open a door with explosives, tying up Krajišnik’s sons and restraining them on the floor, before Krajišnik was led barefoot from his house (Johnstone 2002: 100–1). The indiscriminate nature of the carnage in ‘Something to Do with Justice’ is warranted by an implication that all Serbs are guilty and therefore expendable – with the exception of Glasnović’s stereotypically ‘sexy’ female accomplice Masha (Ana Sofrenović), who attempts to seduce one of the British team. In an early scene at the local SFOR compound, the British team is briefed that not only is Glasnović protected by twenty full-time militia, ‘but the rest of the population is mostly armed as well’ and ‘there will be no objection’ if Glasnović’s bodyguard is ‘collaterally damaged’. The hypothesis of blanket Serb guilt is not solely a fictional proposition, however; it was also elaborated in the 1990s by the historian Daniel Goldhagen (1999), who, extending his ‘willing executioners’ theory in respect of Nazi Germany to the Kosovo conflict, maintained that Serbs bore collective responsibility for Bosnian genocide and must therefore be punished en masse. More generally, ‘Something to Do with Justice’ reactivates a long-standing Western framing of the Balkans as a place of inveterate and violent tribalism; as an infamous report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote of the Balkans more than a century ago, ‘the local population is divided into as many fragmentary parts as it contains nationalities, and these fight together, each being desirous to substitute itself for the others’ (cited in Adelman and Barkan 2011: 31). The episode also trades heavily in Balkan stereotypes, presenting Bosnia as a land of menace and aberrant sexuality; there are even jokes about cabbage soup. Indeed, stereotypical representations of Balkan backwardness are alive and well in the action film genre two decades after the end of the Bosnian war and often take on a comic tinge. In a 2014 episode of the US action series Scorpion (‘Talismans’), a crack US paramilitary team is despatched to Bosnia after an airplane is brought down by ‘separatist rebels’

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(‘Bosnia? Is that still a thing?’, asks one of the team at the mission briefing). In the field, two of the team get lost and find themselves receiving hospitality in the home of a man with an A Team poster on his living room wall, prompting one of the Americans to wonder whether they have ‘entered a wormhole’. Initially threatening the pair with a gun, the Bosnian man is delighted when he learns that they are Americans, reassuring them in caveman English that ‘Igor hates rebels’ and gleefully serving his discomfited guests with animal tongue. In the racist Western imaginary, Bosnia is clearly still a land not just of violence and horror but also of strange, uncivilized people with eccentric and grotesque habits. Written and directed by Richard Shepard, the plot of The Hunting Party (2007) also has an ‘undercover mission’ premise. Like The Fourth Angel, the film concerns a journalist with the skills, contacts and energy to take unilateral action in pursuit of justice. Shot in Sarajevo and Croatia, The Hunting Party is set five years after the end of the Bosnian war. It is based on an Esquire article by Scott K. Anderson (2000) about an unconventional plan hatched by a group of journalists, who are officially on holiday (the working title for the film had been Spring Break in Bosnia), but who decide to use their time finding and arresting Radovan Karadžić (as one of the reporters quoted in Anderson’s article robustly puts it: ‘Come on guys […] it’s payback time for that fuck’). The posse of journalists ventures into post-war Republika Srpska in order to track down ‘the most wanted war criminal in Bosnia’, Dr Radoslav Boghdanović (played by the Croatian actor Ljubomir Kerekeš), also known as The Fox, and his bloodthirsty bodyguard Srđan (Goran Kostić). Along the way, the men are mistaken for a CIA hit squad by several groups, including the UN police force and the Serbs themselves. The Hunting Party contains many backward references to its characters’ experiences in the Bosnian war, many of them narrated in flashback. Its central protagonist, Simon Hunt (Richard Gere), is an American television journalist who had been reporting from Bosnia in 1994 when Marta, a local Muslim woman pregnant with his child, was raped and murdered by Boghdanović. Recalling the character of Flynn in Welcome to Sarajevo, Hunt is a fearless journalist; in one early flashback, he stops in the heat of battle to smoke a cigarette as an extradiegetic rock music soundtrack plays. In another flashback, however, Hunt loses his composure during a live television interview from Bosnia with his channel’s veteran news anchor, Franklin (James Brolin). Hunt’s diatribe here resonates with criticisms of the failure of Dutch UN peacekeepers to protect the Srebrenica

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‘safe area’ and references the infamous film of Dutchbat commander Thom Karremans drinking with Ratko Mladić: Hunt: ‘Dr Bogdhanović’s Bosnian Serb army continues in its quest to liquidate the Bosnian Muslims from this region’ Franklin: ‘Simon, some are saying that it was the Bosnian Muslims who attacked first, causing this latest battle’ Hunt: ‘It wasn’t a battle, it was a slaughter’. Franklin: ‘Well, Simon, certain United Nations observers …’ Hunt: ‘Who are you talking about? Are you talking … Are you talking about the Dutch? The Dutch? The Dutch? The Dutch are getting drunk with the Serb army guys on slivovitz at the checkpoint earlier this morning’

The anchor tries to move the conversation onto the topic of ‘safe areas’, Hunt explodes again: ‘Safe areas? These people were butchered. Women were raped. Children were murdered. Come on, Franklin!’. Unsurprisingly, Hunt is sacked by his news organization after his meltdown and becomes an alcoholic cynic. But his powerfully authentic television performance reveals his commitment to the ‘journalism of attachment’ – one of the most distinctive journalistic postulates of the Bosnian war. By contrast, Franklin embodies the conservatism of a compromised and ossified media and political establishment and his vacillations push Hunt to seek justice on his own terms. As Stephen Lipkin (2015: 51) observes, ‘the protagonists of male action melodramas are often father figures or their sons, who must act in times and circumstances when paternal authority has become questionable’. The film thus has a distinctly oedipal subtext. For Hunt, as for Chris Burnett in Behind Enemy Lines, the failure of a patriarchal authority to provide clear leadership generates the need for definitive action to clarify and restore moral order. Looking back on Hunt’s erstwhile career, Hunt’s long-time cameraman Duck (Terence Howard) tells a young journalist, Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg), of Hunt’s bravery: ‘No-one was as crazy as he was […] Even in the very worst attacks […] He was the best in the business and everyone knew it. He cared the most; he got the best stories’. Duck’s lionization of Hunt is followed by a ghastly description of The Fox, which is visually matched by a slow motion sequence of the brutal Boghdanović hunting in the forest. First appearing on screen as an externalization of Duck’s narration, The Fox appears as a mythical and mysterious figure; indeed, when The Fox first talks – after shooting a fox – his speech is not subtitled, an omission that serves to dehumanize him further.

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Similarly, Duck’s description of The Fox’s bodyguard Srđan as ‘a psychopathic little fuck’ is matched by another external focalization of the menacing Srđan approaching the camera to reveal in extreme close-up a forehead tattoo, which reads, in Cyrillic: ‘Dead the day I was born’. These images are profoundly othering. Of course, Balkan masculinity has historically been constructed as ‘uncivilized, primitive, crude, cruel, and without exception, dishevelled’ (Todorova 1997: 14) and from the beginning of the film, The Fox and his bodyguard appear as Balkan Wild Men, avatars of a ‘volatile masculinity gone mad’ (Longinović 2005: 38). Existing at a remove from civilization, they are also homines sacri: men set apart from the human community who may be killed without incurring a charge of homicide – one figure of which, in medieval European legal discourse, was the werewolf (Agamben 1995). The Fox is framed, like many real-world Western enemies such as the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony (Finnström 2012), as a denizen of the forests beyond civilization, part-human, part-animal. Meeting up with Duck and Benjamin, Hunt tells the pair that he knows where The Fox is hiding and the unlikely trio set off in search of adventure. Duck’s explanation of the mission to Benjamin rehearses a familiar stereotype of Balkan backwardness: Now we are headed right into the heart of this Balkan madness. Serb territory. Republika Srpska, which is filled with good and decent people, as well as every psychopath and deviant and ethnic cleanser who disappeared right after the war. It’s a backward land where they will kill you for trying to hurt Boghdanović as easily as somebody kills a mosquito. The Fox is their god.

As the team ventures into Republika Srpska, the film resorts to horror genre conventions. A creepy young waiter at a wayside inn warns the journalists that The Fox is ‘everywhere. He know everything. He listens to everything you say’, before attempting to attack the adventurers. As the trio speed away from the tavern in their car, crows noisily squawk and fly up around their vehicle, creating the impression that the journalists are being menaced by nature itself. If Republika Srpska is a land of dread, the trio’s encounters with international officialdom in Bosnia receive a distinctly comic treatment. A laughably ineffectual UN police bureaucrat shows no interest in capturing war criminals. The local UN commander, Boris, meanwhile, gives the men a lesson in post-war realpolitik, telling them that ‘the United Nations, the French, specifically, they have no interest in catching the Fox. They would be happy if he killed all the Muslims … Save them all this trouble, although they would never publicly

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admit it.’ Boris adds that some believe the United States advised The Fox to step down from power and that in return he would not be arrested for war crimes. What emerges from this tangle of explanations is the artfulness and cynicism of international governments and UN realpolitik. Indeed, the premise of the film – and of Anderson’s original Esquire article – is that Serb war criminals are not being hunted with sufficient vigour and the same point is made in the film’s closing captions. Anderson writes in his article that ‘in pursuing the war criminals, the British had been aggressive, the American weenies’; yet The Hunting Party suggests that all of the states with interests in Yugoslavia have put their national interests before humanitarian considerations so that, in the end, justice must be served by the plucky journalists. Narrowly avoiding torture at the hands of Srđan thanks to the CIA, the men eventually track down Boghdanović to a grisly hunting cabin complete with wall-mounted animal heads. They capture The Fox and finally release him into a local village populated by his victims in order to face the summary justice of the mob. Although set in the United States, Mark Steven Johnson’s Killing Season (2013) also focuses on the settling of old scores from the Bosnian war. 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 (John Travolta), a sadistic Serb soldier with a grudge. Shot by Ford during the war eighteen years previously, Kovač now seeks revenge on the American; in fact, most of the screentime in Killing Season is devoted to the brutal to-and-fro combat between the two men as they chase, torture and occasionally polemicize to one other in a struggle for physical and moral supremacy. The purest form of war, as the film’s tagline has it, is one on one. Critically maligned and a commercial flop, Killing Season incurred widespread ridicule for its raft of historical and cultural solecisms (Kovač’s unSerbian name and incongruously Islamic beard being the favourite targets of the film’s online detractors). The film also contains more than a hint of Balkanist stereotyping. As Dina Iordanova (2001: 162) notes, the Balkans have often been viewed by Western commentators as a place of ‘face-to-face sadistic fervour involving blood, spilled guts, severed limbs, tortured and mutilated bodies’. While Killing Season may be set in the Appalachians, Kovač brings Balkan savagery to America, his preference for a bow and arrow marking him as a premodern savage. Yet the film’s early references to the Bosnian war – provided by way of backstory – are perhaps its most problematic aspect. The opening on-screen captions, for

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instance, state misleadingly that the ‘Serbian army invaded neighbouring Bosnia’ in 1992. A flashback to the final stages of the Bosnian war, meanwhile, depicts the liberation of a Serb-run concentration camp as part of an American ground operation in which the US infantry fight a close range battle with a Serb force named The Scorpions. Although it immediately follows the seemingly ‘factual’ screen captions and thus appears to carry historical authenticity, the scene is an invention. US ground troops did not enter Bosnia in 1995, let alone liberate the detention camps (which in any case had been closed down by the end of 1992); yet its depiction of emaciated men behind a wire fence directly references the infamous 1992 ITN footage of Fikret Alić and his fellow detainees at Trnopolje. The scene thus remediates one of the war’s most iconic images for powerful emotional effect, establishing the heroism of the US soldiers and demarcating the moral distance between American and Serb on which the remainder of the film depends. The suggestions of the liberation of the Nazi death camps in this scene (one of the Americans bursts open the door of a freight train carriage to find dead bodies inside) also serve to re-temporalize the action depicted: 1995 becomes 1945. Killing Season ends on a note of forgiveness, with Ford throwing away his rifle and sparing Kovač’s life. Sitting down next to the Serb, Ford tells a sexist joke about the sexual exploitation of a woman by a priest during the Second World War – a reminder that the affective economy of the male action melodrama is premised on the exclusion of the feminine. The journalist Sebastian Junger (2010) has written of the importance of male bonding in conflict situations, noting that war provides men with an opportunity – rarely granted in capitalist society – to love one another unconditionally. Indeed, many of the films discussed in this chapter present a homosocial band of brothers committed to the pursuit of social, political and gender justice and even those films in which male characters are pitted against each other, such as Killing Season or Shot Through the Heart, contain scenes of intense emotional connection between rivals; in Killing Season, in fact, such bonding is made possible only by the men’s earlier engagement in spectacular performances of violence.

Conclusion Although he began the war as a ‘humanitarian interventionist’, Michael Ignatieff (1998: 95) afterwards expressed doubts about his initial position on the war,

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wondering whether the West’s bombing to ‘end’ the Bosnian war had in fact been underpinned by narcissism and whether ‘we intervened not to save others, but to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies’. As the foregoing discussion shows, Bosnian war action films express something of this moralistic investment in the war. Through melodramatic and Manichean assertions of US or Western military and humanitarian superiority, these films ‘provide a way of solving (geo)political uncertainty […] providing moral geographies and making clear the lines between “us” and “them”’ (Power and Crampton 2007: 6). While not all of the films go as far as Killing Season in reimagining the Bosnian war as a US ground invasion to ‘liberate the camps’, they are all informed by the values of rugged individualism, the urgent and pragmatic imperative of ‘getting the job done’ and an unswerving sense of righteousness. James Chapman (2008) traces three ‘lineages’ within the history of war film: war as spectacle, war as tragedy and war as adventure. The films discussed in the foregoing chapter invoke both the first and the last of these categories. All of these films mobilize the patriotic, masculinist and colonialist tropes typical of Western action adventure narratives (tellingly, the only Bosnian war action film to defy these tropes – and to belong to Chapman’s ‘tragic’ category – is a Croatian-Bosnian production, The Living and the Dead, as discussed in Chapter 6). They are all also racist films that, almost without exception, heroize white action heroes and demonize their not-quite-white adversaries. Indeed, as Martin Green (1980: 226) reminds us, ‘adventure has been a white idea as well as a male idea; it has been the means by which the people of one particular culture have taken possession of most of the globe’. More specifically, appearing during or shortly after the Hague criminal trials, these films entrench the notion of collective Serb guilt and reproduce the stereotype of the psychopathic Serb war criminal. In the Western imaginary, the Balkans, of course, have long figured as ‘a terrain of ethnic horror and intolerance, of primitive irrational bellicose passions’ (Žižek 2011: 47), as indicated by the very title of journalist Harry deWindt’s 1907 Balkan travelogue Through Savage Europe. And given the prevalence of images of Balkan bellicosity in contemporary journalistic commentary about Bosnia – British journalist Michael Nicholson (1994: 16) likened the people of the Balkans to the ‘Amazon’s Yanamamo, one of the world’s most savage and primitive tribes’ – it is unsurprising that these films also invoke the fantasmatic figure of the Balkan Wild Man, a revenge-driven, sadistic and perverted primitive whose rampages can only be stopped by a civilizing counterforce. These films suggest that

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Western intervention, however violent, is a source of enlightenment and that, as Bill Clinton (1999: 17) put it in his defence of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, ‘the Balkans are not fated to be the heart of darkness’. Implicit in such representations, of course, is a time-honoured imperialist double standard, as expressed by David Hume (2006: 48) nearly 300 years ago in his Treatise on Human Nature: ‘when our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: But always esteem ourselves and allies equitable, moderate, and merciful’. In a contemporary psychoanalytical register, the dualism of Hume’s formulation may be recast as a dialectic of hatred and desire for the Other. As in many journalistic accounts of the war (for a discussion, see Žohar 2012), the Balkans function in Bosnian war films as a fantasmatic place where the unrestrained Orientalized/ Balkanized other – ‘every psychopath, deviant and ethnic cleanser’, in the words of Duck in The Hunting Party – has stolen ‘our’ libidinal enjoyment. The surplus violence unleashed against the Serb villains of action films and television shows about the Bosnian war suggest that this primitive Other exerts a strange attraction on the Western imagination. In several of the productions discussed above, such as Demons of War and Ultimate Force, the small bands of brothers charged with overcoming this evil seem to have an equally fantasmatic appeal. Fredric Jameson has discussed how the war film in general invokes the utopian fantasy of the harmonious military ‘unit’ in which each member has their individual part to play; as Jameson (2009: 1547) writes, ‘the small or micro group is the Deleuzian nomadic war machine, literally or figuratively – that is to say, an image of the collective without the state and beyond reified institutions’. In the Bosnian war actioner, this collective is a militarized and masculinist one that not only excludes women but also ruthlessly rejects ineffectual, bureaucratic or downright perfidious forms of authority through liberating displays of righteous violence. Films such as Behind Enemy Lines, The Fourth Angel and The Hunting Party, I have suggested, stage oedipal narratives in which heroic soldiers and journalists are pitted against not just the barbarous enemy, but also against various forms of failing paternal authority: vacillatory military establishments, corrupt governments or pusillanimous news organizations. In this sense, these films recall the ‘back-to-Vietnam’ films and television dramas of the 1980s, in which ‘inept bureaucrats’ are blamed for having ‘botched the war effort’ or for having failed to protect war victims (Donovan 2011: 136). In Ted Kotcheff ’s Uncommon Valor (1983), for example, Gene Hackman returns to the jungles of Vietnam in order to rescue POWs after

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the US government refuses to help him; George P. Cosmatos’s Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), meanwhile, has a similar plot and offers an equally sceptical view of official prevarication and doubletalk. Like these productions, Bosnian war action films condemn the moral compromises involved in the byzantine statecraft of Jameson’s ‘reified institutions’. Even where the soldiers portrayed in these films are not American, their words and actions express a distinctly American view of the Bosnian war, hailing the virtues of unilateral force over both Balkanist savagery and stymying and ineffectual ‘European’ diplomacy – a key geopolitical theme of the war on terror, of course, after 9/11. The opposition between US and European values and priorities in Bosnian war action films reflects real-world international tensions over Yugoslavia, which was an arena of struggle not only between internal ethno-nationalist factions but also between the US and European states for political hegemony in the Balkans.

5

The Subject of Rape: Phenomenological and Ideological Representations of Sexual Violence in the Bosnian War Film

Trauma, as Freud pointed out, represents unassimilable material that can only be worked through long after the events that gave rise to it. In the case of the Bosnian war, many of those who experienced rape and murder have felt able to relate their experiences only many years after the end of the war. Trauma narratives – the result of this working-through – are both symptomatic and potentially restorative, rendering intelligible experiences too terrible to be processed at the time of their occurrence. Indeed, as has been believed since Charcot’s demonstrations at the Salpêtrière, the narration of trauma may help to alleviate a sufferer’s symptoms (Ringel and Brandell 2011: 1–2). By the same token, trauma narratives may help entire communities or cultural groups to process and cope with the effects of tragedy. Although rape was widespread in Bosnia during the war, the physical and psychological effects of sexual violence against women during (and indeed after) the war have received little attention from filmmakers until quite recently. In the last decade, however, several female filmmakers have approached these issues in a variety of ways. Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower (2010) addresses the subject of the trafficking and sexual abuse of women by male UN workers in postwar Bosnia. The film fictionalizes the real-life cases of abuse exposed by former UN officer Kathryn Bolkovac – crimes for which the overseas officials involved have never faced justice on grounds of immunity (Prügl and Thompson 2013). Bolkovac’s first case is that of a Muslim woman who has been abused by her husband. The private military contractor for which she works on behalf of UN is staffed by sexist and Islamaphobic investigators and they are reluctant to aid a Muslim woman who has been stabbed, although Bolkovac eventually achieves justice for the victim, facilitating the first conviction for domestic violence since

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the end of the Bosnian war. Vanessa Redgrave appears at the end of the film as real-life lawyer Madeleine Rees, delivering an impassioned defence of the UN as an organization ‘formed from the ashes of Auschwitz’; but overall the film is highly sceptical of the UN’s self-image as a force for good and reinforces the point that crimes of sexual violence during the Bosnian war were not solely the preserve of local militia. Contemporary with The Whistleblower are two other internationally celebrated films – Juanita Wilson’s As If I Am Not There (2010) and Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) – which have attempted to articulate some of the war’s ‘unspeakable things unspoken’ (to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrase). Almost uniquely among Western films about the war, these films show the brutality of the conflict through the eyes of Bosnian women, rather than the perspective of heroic or adventuresome North American and European men. And unlike other films about the same subject, these productions have focused on the subjective experience of rape, depicting prolonged and repeated acts of sexual violence, rather than narrating rape briefly and retrospectively, as is more usually the case in the war film. The violated female body in these films thus figures forth what the war psychologist Lawrence LeShan (1992) terms the ‘sensory reality’ as opposed to the ‘mythic reality’ of war. While these two films are not equally successful in political or artistic terms, their appearance reflects the increasing prominence of violence against women as a theme in the Western public sphere (Horeck 2003), as well as the increasing – although still pitifully slight – visibility of female filmmakers in recent decades. The following chapter analyses these two films following a discussion of wider patterns of representation of rape and sexual violence in the Bosnian war.

Rape and the Bosnian war: Media, politics and representation While reliable statistical information about rape during the Bosnian war is difficult to obtain, Silva Mežnarić (1994: 92) noted at the time some facts about which various sources of information, as well as many oral testimonies, are agreed: namely, that at least several thousand women were raped during the war, including girls between the ages of seven and fourteen, that these rapes were often committed in the presence of the victim’s parents or children and that they frequently involved multiple assailants. As Skjelsbæk (2006: 375) notes in her discussion of interviews with rape survivors, many of the victims experienced

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their rape as an attack not just on their person, but on their ethnic and gender identity. All of this happened in a country in which women had formerly enjoyed relatively good standards of living and education, as well as a degree of gender equality – it is a telling fact, indeed, that ‘pre-war Yugoslavia had more women PhDs per capita than any other country in Europe’ (Murtic 2015: 90). The attitude of Western observers towards the war’s rape victims has not always been exemplary; journalist Slavenka Drakulić (1994: 178) describes her horror at overhearing international journalists asking refugees from the war: ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’ Moreover, as stories of rape became increasingly politicized in Western newsrooms and civil society, accuracy and proportion were sometimes lost. As has happened more recently in relation to the Middle East, stories about the rape of Muslim women were used to construct a nominally ‘feminist’ argument in favour of military intervention – and feminists picked up quickly on reports that Serbs were in charge of rape camps. Precisely how these camps were organized and run is hotly disputed; Brooke Finley (2004: 130) has even controversially written that evidence of rape camps in Bosnia ‘was never unearthed’. While a charitable interpretation of Finley’s comment might be made on the basis that it is difficult precisely to define the term ‘rape camp’ – and while it is true that some claims about the existence of some rape camps were bogus – there is abundant evidence that throughout the Bosnian war, women of all ethnic backgrounds were detained and raped in houses, barracks and brothels (Allen 1996) where they ‘were more likely to be killed than released’ (Iordanova 2001: 198). Finley and other media critics are correct in pointing out, however, that the subject of rape was an important component of war propaganda in the Western media. Reports of rape were either exaggerated or ignored by Western media, depending on the ethnicity of their victims. President Izetbegović’s claim in January 1993 that 200,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped has never been confirmed (Klaehn 2010: 56) and even more modest claims that 20,000 women had been raped by March 1993 in Bosnia have been challenged by a representative of the Red Cross, who put the number much lower (Marsh 2010: 73–4). As Michael Nicholson (1994: 90–93) notes, reports of rape spread rapidly after Radio Bosnia reported that the Serbs were holding more than 10,000 prisoners for the purpose of systematic rape, with entire villages converted into rape camps; yet international agencies were unable to corroborate these claims and, as Nicholson notes, the Bosnian government later admitted that its numbers were based on ‘guestimates’. The commonplace claim that the Serbs made rape

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a matter of deliberate policy is also disputed. Rapes of Muslim women by Serbs were certainly common and a large-scale UN fact-finding mission found that this was by far the most common established pattern of rape (Bassiouni 1996); yet Diana Johnstone (2002: 88) posits that ‘the accusation that the Serbs initiated a deliberate policy of mass rape has never been substantiated’. Rape is always an under-reported crime and rapes were undoubtedly committed by combatants from all ‘sides’ – far more frequently, no doubt, than during peacetime. Yet some victims received more media attention than others. Peter Brock (2005: 59–72) claims that the documentation of Serb rape victims was more extensive than that relating to Muslim victims, yet the former were largely ignored by the media. Serbian media, of course, presented Serb civilians as the ultimate victims of the war and even before the outbreak of hostilities, the Belgrade media reported exaggerated and/or fabricated stories of the rape of Serbs by Albanians in Kosovo (Kesić 2002). Outside Serb areas of the former republic, meanwhile, Serb rape victims went unacknowledged (Žarkov 2007: 149). Wary of handing a propaganda advantage to the ‘bad guys’ in the war, Western journalists were generally reluctant to seek out Serb victims. They concentrated instead on the stories of women raped by Serbs (Johnstone 2002: 78–87; Hammond 2004: 174–89; Herman and Peterson 2007: 38; Parenti 2007: 24), so that the latter seemed to become, in Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) terms, ‘unworthy’ victims. Referring to Western media coverage of the topic, the right-wing columnist Anne Leslie (1993: 6) opined in the British Daily Mail that while the issue of rape in Bosnia was receiving due attention in the Western media, ‘no one is very interested in the fate of Serb women, since Serbs are the chief aggressors in this war’. It might be added that many academics – even those writing about rape during the war – contributed to this bias by largely ignoring Serb rape victims (see, for example, Stiglmajer 1994). While female Serb victims of rape were often ignored by the media in nonSerb regions of the former Yugoslavia, Serb men were increasingly cast as sexual perverts and predators. In the Croatian press in the 1990s, for instance, Serbs were often said to harbour an ‘unnatural and abnormal sexuality’ (Žarkov 2007: 138). In Western media, meanwhile, the theme was taken up with gusto. Although the veracity of her account has been challenged (Munk 1994; Žarkov 2007: 149), Catherine MacKinnon (1994) proposed that Serb men were turning to rape as a result of their frequent exposure to pornography and she popularized this view for a wider public in an article written for the women’s magazine Ms (MacKinnon 1993). Unsurprisingly, in light of such writings,

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many Western post-war films demonize Serbs as pornography-obsessed. In Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996), an FBI chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), having reminded his colleagues that ‘Serbs don’t like Bosnians’, saves the lives of his co-workers when a box supposedly containing aid destined for a Bosnian refugee camp turns out to be a Serb booby trap that contains pornographic magazines and an explosive toy doll that spews sarin gas from its mouth – a detail that inverts a real-life story from the same year, in which NATO officers raided a Bosnian Muslim training camp where they found booby-trapped toys and arrested three men from the Iranian Ministry of the Interior (Pomfret 1996: 25). Another example is Diplomatic Siege, which depicts the invasion of the US Embassy in Bucharest by ultra-violent, dead-eyed Serb terrorists, one of whom displays a penchant for pornographic gay magazines. In John Irvin’s The Fourth Angel (2001), Serb terrorists watch pornographic videos and in Christian Duguay’s Extreme Ops (2002), the deranged son of a fugitive Serb warlord, coming across a group of Western snowboarders, demands that the Westerners kiss one other and remove their clothes while he films them (‘What are you doing, you sick freak!’, yells Rufus Sewell’s character Ian). While it no doubt has deep roots in the long-standing occidental association of the Balkans with sexual excess (apparent in Victorian fictions such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example), a consistent association of Serbs with sexual depravity is apparent across a wide range of US action films. Such associations can take on a variety of political meanings depending on context: Judith Butler (2009: 32–3) even argues that the torture and sexual humiliation of women and men at Abu Ghraib by US soldiers in Iraq served as a means not only of degrading the other but also of allowing those involved to cast themselves as the representatives of a ‘more sexually progressive culture’. In the films mentioned above, however, the associations with pornography seem to serve the more conventional purpose of demonization. It is a telling fact that pornography, which was banned as misogynistic under the Communist regime, was permitted to be broadcast in Yugoslavia for the first time at the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars (Hedges 2003: 98–9); yet it is equally notable that in media and popular culture during the 1990s, only Serb men are depicted as possessing an unhealthy interest in pornography and rape. Similar political biases are apparent in drama films about rape during the Bosnian war. In 2009, two of the stars of Welcome to Sarajevo – Stephen Dillane and Kerry Fox – appeared in Hans-Christian Schmid’s political thriller Sturm/Storm, which tells the story of Hannah Maynard (Fox), a prosecutor for the

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International Criminal Trial for the Former Yugoslavia. After the suicide of her chief witness, Maynard – despite constant harassment from Serb nationalists – travels to Bosnia to find a female witness to war crimes committed by Goran Đurić, a former JNA commander who is accused of the deportation and later killing of Bosnian Muslim civilians. There she meets a young woman, Mira (Anamaria Marinca), who tells Maynard of how she was repeatedly raped on Đurić’s orders. At the end of the film, a guilty verdict is finally secured against Đurić on the condition that the existence of a Serb rape camp is not revealed: indeed, although Serb war criminals, in particular, were sentenced with some severity in the Hague (Johnstone 2002: 184; Johnstone 2016), the film contains the implication that the court was insufficiently punitive. Clearly, while rape must be regarded as an expression of gendered domination, rape stories, as Tanya Horeck (2003: vii) puts it, are also ‘essential to the way in which the body politic is imagined’; during and after the Bosnian war, rape stories have been subjected to a thoroughgoing politicization and this must be taken into account in any analysis of their cinematic representation. Refusing diegetic portrayals of characters’ experiences of rape – through the use of flashback, for example – Storm is typical of many Bosnian war-themed films in which violence against women is referenced indirectly or obliquely. Jackson and Kosminsky’s Warriors, for instance, only briefly hints at sexual abuse when a Serb soldier rips a woman’s blouse at a checkpoint; but the drama otherwise refrains from depicting sexual violence (in fact, the most viscerally shocking scene of violence against women in Warriors occurs towards the end of the film, when Sergeant Laughrey, back in Britain but apparently in the grip of violent flashbacks, attacks his wife – a scene that indicates the inextricability of war from gender-based violence and the recursive nature of the latter). In several of the films analysed in this book, incidences of sexual violence are described by female characters retrospectively; in The Hunting Party, for instance, a rape victim discusses her brutalization at the hands of Muslims, but the audience is spared an audio-visual rendering of the ordeal. Other Bosnian war films contain more direct and graphic representations of the victimized female body. Tomasz Wiszniewski’s Where Eskimos Live (2002) is a Bosnian war road movie in which a young boy Vlado (Sergiusz Zymelka) and an adult people-trafficker-turned-protector (Bob Hoskins) find salvation together (Wieszniewski would later reprise this premise for his 2009 film All Will Be Well). Vlado is a witness to the horrors of the war, coming across various atrocities, including, at one point, a mound of massacred people, which he

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barely registers – at least at the conscious level – preferring instead to read his comic book. In one of the film’s early scenes, Vlado sneaks into a Serb-guarded larder where, alongside copious quantities of food, he discovers the bloodsoaked corpse of a woman who has been tied to a table and, it appears, raped before being murdered. The unlikely positioning of a dead, bloodied body in a food larder is darkly suggestive of the ways in which women during the Bosnian war were regarded as mere commodities for gratification. Following his grim discovery, the starving Vlado steals the victuals from the larder – the necessarily practical action of a ‘survivor’ and one that suggests that, for Vlado, the brutality of war has become routine. Vlado emerges from the larder with his arms drenched in blood, a detail symbolizing his loss of innocence. Such images of the mutilated female body concretize a gendered form of what the geographer Derek Gregory (2015) calls the ‘corpographic’ experience of war. In stark opposition to the Western fantasy of surgical or ‘virtuous’ war (Der Derian 2001), in which corporeal suffering is derealized by new media technologies (Norris 2000), these films depict the horrifying effects of war on the bodies of women and girls. In Predrag Antonijević’s Savior (1998), a sadistic Serb soldier hacks off an elderly woman’s finger in order that he can steal her ring. A short, but distinctly Boschian scene in Demons of War (the scene which seems to give the film its title, in fact) depicts militiamen laughing as they rape and then stab to death a woman in the middle of a village they have set on fire. And in Sergio Castellitto’s Venuto al mondo/Twice Born (2011) – one of the few films to depict rape directly, albeit fleetingly – a laughing Serb soldier deliberately brands the neck of his victim, Aska, with a cigarette after he and his colleagues have finished raping her. Despite its episodic, naturalized treatment of rape, Twice Born at least posits a future for the rape victim. Aska’s cigarette burn is transformed into an image of hope when the victim covers the scar on her neck with a tattoo of a flower, symbolically reclaiming ownership of her body. The possibilities for women to exercise agency in film are, however, highly circumscribed by patriarchal convention. Cinematic discourse has classically figured the female body as ‘spatially static’ (de Lauretis 1984: 123), denied the potential to ‘move’ and thereby advance the progression of a narrative; this is especially true of female characters in war films, which typically privilege masculine agency. As argued in earlier chapters, in many Western films about the war, women play a decidedly secondary role. And as will be discussed in the next chapter, many wartime films from the former Yugoslavia – such as those of Emir Kustrica and Srđan

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Dragojević – are characterized by an extremely phallocentric mode of address. In many films about the Bosnian war, women are physically immobilized: if they manage to remain alive, they are traumatized recluses, bedridden pensioners pitifully unable to leave their houses despite being in a warzone, or, as in the two films at the centre of this chapter, prisoners subjected to sexual assault. A question that may be asked about Bosnian war rape films, then, is whether their protagonists are able to develop resources towards the overcoming of gendered and ethnic violence. It is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most sensitive representations of a resourceful victim of sexual violence has been created by a Bosnian female director. Grbavica/Esma’s Secret (2006) has attracted significant international attention for its depiction of the after-effects of war trauma on Bosnian women. Written and directed by Jasmila Žbanić, Esma’s Secret has been, along with No Man’s Land, the most watched film in post-war Bosnia (Zajec 2013: 200) and its success apparently led to the Bosnian government agreeing to provide financial support for Bosnian rape victims. Pavićić (2010: 49) points out that ‘after the testosterone machismo of Balkan cinema of the 1990s, Grbavica surprises as a film with very few men’. The film tells a story of single mother Esma (Mirjana Karanović) and her wayward daughter Sara (Luna Mijović), who was conceived when Esma was raped during the war, but who has been brought up to believe that her father was a šehid, or war hero – a story commonly told to the children of Bosniak rape victims (Carpenter 2010: 145). Given the scale of war rape in Bosnia and the failure of post-war Bosnia to bring many perpetrators to justice, such stories were seldom publicly discussed after the war, making the film popular in Bosnia (Žbanić’s subsequent film Na patu/On the Path [2009] deals with a similarly delicate but neglected topic of the influence of Saudi Wahhabism/ Salafism in Bosnia since the war). The film depicts the everyday financial and familial struggles of a working-class woman. It also 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 the patrons, together with her unease when in close proximity to men, hints at the nature of her prison camp ordeal and suggests that gender relations have barely changed in Bosnia since the war. Predictably, the film was poorly received by many, though not all, critics in Serbia, because of its implication of a Serb rapist (it is interesting to note, in this connection, that Esma is played by a well-known Serbian actress, Mirjana Karanović, a casting choice that proved controversial for some patriotic

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commentators in Bosnia). Yet such criticisms are unfair in this instance: after all, unlike many other films discussed in this book, Esma’s Secret does not demonize Serbs or overtly take political sides. Eschewing the use of flashbacks to visually depict the violence of the war years, Esma’s Secret is a quiet film whose very ordinariness constitutes ‘a radical critique of self-Balkanization cinema’ (Pavićić 2010: 48). Žbanić’s distinctive use of space reinforces this critique. 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: Sara and her boyfriend have a secret hangout in ruins above Sarajevo – the city that Sara’s name abbreviates (Murtic 2015: 166) – while Esma and her male friend enjoy a barbeque on a hilltop overlooking the city. In contrast with Kusturica’s and Dragojević’s enclosed spaces (basements, tunnels and graveyards), these locales convey a sense of possibility and optimism and thus recall, in a low-key register, the triumphant, panoramic shot of Sarajevo that concludes Hajrudin Krvavac’s classic 1972 Partisan film Valter brani Sarajevo/ Walter Defends Sarajevo. Moreover, as Pavićić (2010: 49) points out, in contrast to the irredeemable characters in the films of Kusturica and, to some extent, Dragojević, Esma and Sara are capable of change; once Sara is apprised of her mother’s secret, mother and daughter may begin a new life together freed from the ‘patriarchal lie’ that had been the source of tension between them. As in many post-Yugoslav films, such as Aida Begić’s Snijeg/Snow (2008), the film’s sense of optimism is channelled through the figure of a child who, as Dijana Jelača (2016: 223) notes, ‘not only embodies the future, but also demands accountability for the tragedies of the past’. Žbanić’s later, short feature film For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (2013) also concerns the secrets of war as seen through the eyes of an Australian tourist (played by the film’s co-writer Kym Vercoe) who travels alone on holiday to Višegrad in eastern Bosnia, where she inadvertently stays at a hotel used as a rape camp during the war and encounters a wall of male hostility and denial. In Esma’s Secret, the winter snows give way to spring sunshine in the film’s optimistic ending (Murtic 2015: 112). In For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, too, weather and landscape function as a witness (Simić and Volčič 2014: 390): the film’s final image of snow falling over the bridge across the Drina – from which many raped women jumped to their deaths – serves as pathetic fallacy, signifying the ‘covering up’ of violent histories. Yet the stereotypical malevolence of all of the film’s Serb male characters ensures that the film is ‘unlikely to stimulate serious

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reflection among the audience on the origins of the violence and the possibility for justice’ (Simić and Volčič 2014: 391). Indeed, for all its impressionistic power, For Those Who Can Tell No Tales is a less successful example of the cinema of normalization than Žbanić’s earlier treatment of the subject of rape, demonstrating the difficulty, for Bosnian filmmakers, of transcending ethnonationalist discourses.

Representing the experience of rape: As If I Am Not There and In the Land of Blood and Honey In the 1880s, the psychotherapists Freud, Breuer and Janet agreed that ‘unbearable reactions to traumatic experiences produced an altered state of consciousness that Janet called “dissociation”’ (Ringel and Brandell 2011: 2). Such altered states were widely reported by victims of sexual violence in Bosnia: a Serb rape victim released from a Muslim run camp, for instance, described that she felt ‘as if all these months it was not me there, but some other woman’ (Žarkov 2007: 121). They are also explored in As If I Am Not There (2010), an Irish film written and directed by Jaunita Wilson. Based on a novel by Croatian journalist and women’s rights advocate Slavenka Drakulić (1999), the film depicts the sexual abuse of Samira (Nataša Petrović), a Muslim schoolteacher from Sarajevo who moves to a country village shortly before it is overrun by Serb forces at the start of the war in 1992. As Jurica Pavićić (2010: 45) notes, ‘many successful post-Yugoslav hits of the 1990s used the pre-modern, rural setting of the Balkan highlands (or heartland), a landscape barely touched by modernity that easily fits into a stereotype image of “imaginary Balkans”, defined by Maria Todorova’. In Wilson’s film, too, landscape becomes moral geography. Through spectacular shots of mountains and valleys as Samira happily travels to her new village home, the film’s early scenes evoke the unspoiled pastoral beauty of Bosnia, metaphorizing Samira’s innocence and the soon to be violated harmony of pre-war Yugoslavia (the film thus hints at the age-old cross-cultural trope of the nation-as-woman). Shortly after arriving in the village, however, Samira is evacuated by bus to an outhouse in a flat, desolate location, where, along with other female villagers, she is repeatedly raped by the soldiers. Samira eventually gives herself up to the ‘protection’ of the Serb captain, who also rapes her. Although she finally manages to leave the camp, Samira later finds herself pregnant with the captain’s child.

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As If I Am Not There differs in several respects from many other films discussed in this book. For one thing, the film contains relatively few central characters. As in Drakulić’s novel, Samira is the narrative’s chief characterfocalizer. There is hardly a shot in which Samira does not appear, resulting in a highly restricted mode of narration that strengthens the viewer’s identification with Samira’s ordeal. Moreover, unlike several other Western films about the war, As If I Am Not There barely engages with the political contexts or causes of the war. Its characters do not discuss such matters and the film does not proffer an explicit political interpretation of the war through caption titles or other explicatory devices. Rather, the film is a phenomenological study of the physical and emotional effects of rape on one woman. Methods for coping with the experience of rape may be various; yet there are some typical physical responses to the trauma of sexual assault. In Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets (2003), a play about the rape of Bosnian women during the war, the heroine Seada has recourse to denial and silence, as well as self-harm, as survival strategies. Dialogue in As If I Am Not There is similarly sparse. Rather than following conversations between characters, Wilson’s camera lingers long and often on Samira’s enormous, fear-filled eyes. This seems appropriate to the film’s subject matter, since, as Judith Lewis Herman (1992) argues in her book Trauma and Recovery, traumatic experience is more commonly communicated through physical gestures than verbal narration, and as Jenny Edkins (2003: 8) notes, trauma resists narrativization: ‘what we can say no longer makes sense; what we want to say, we can’t. There are no words for it’. The film’s extradiegetic soundtrack is also minimal, notwithstanding the gentle piano music that follows Samira’s first, horrific rape by three soldiers. The film’s title, of course, alludes to Samira’s habit of imagining herself outside of her own body during her ordeals. As Herman (1992: 43) notes, in the traumatic moment, time sense may […] be altered, often with a sense of slow motion, and the experience may lose its quality of ordinary reality. The person may feel as though the event is not happening to her, as though she is observing from outside her body, or as if the whole experience is a bad dream from which she will soon awaken.

In the scene in which Samira is gang raped, time seems to slow down. As Samira tries to focus on some object outside of her body, Wilson’s camera first shows a point of view shot of a fly on the wall of the room. Soon, Samira is able to imagine

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herself outside of her own body altogether and an objective shot shows Samira dispassionately observing herself being raped and urinated on by the men. This splitting of subjectivity is also apparent in the many scenes in which Samira examines herself in a mirror, often disgustedly, most notably after her first night in the captain's quarters. The film’s doubling devices, with their suggestion that Samira is both ‘there’ and ‘not there’, register the dissociated self-consciousness of the rape victim. But Samira’s ability to ‘see’ herself also portends her potential to transcend her experience by taking control of its narration. Indeed, Samira’s telling of stories – the schoolteacher’s métier – is an imaginative resource that becomes crucial to her, and perhaps others’ survival. Elaine Scarry (1985) suggests that the injured body possesses not only a ‘reality-conferring function’ but also a ‘fiction-generating one’. According to Scarry (1985: 5), pain is destructive of language; but Scarry (1985: 22) also suggests, in a passage that echoes the title of Wilson’s film, that attempts to express pain through metaphor are ultimately linked to creative drive and narrative composition: The story of expressing physical pain eventually opens into the wider frame of invention. The elemental ‘as if ’ of the person in pain (‘It feels as if …,’ ‘It is as though …’) will lead out into the array of counterfactual revisions entailed in making.

Having achieved a level of detachment in relation to her experience, Samira tells a young girl who has been horrifically raped and mutilated comforting stories of domesticity. She even attempts, seemingly with some success, to get the captain to look at his own actions from an objective point of view, asking him several times about his family and child. Finally, left alone with her newborn baby at the end of the film, Samira struggles to identify herself as the child’s mother; she eventually does so by placing a photograph of her family in the baby’s cot. Here again, Samira’s storytelling has an affirmative function: by inscribing her newborn baby in the context of her family history, Samira is able to envisage a future life that includes her child. Indeed, Wilson’s film follows Drakulić’s novel in portraying Samira as highly resourceful, despite her ordeal. As If I Am Not There is a minimalist yet moving film and if its representation of depraved Serb perpetrators and innocent Muslim victims is conventional enough, the film shows little investment in ethno-nationalist point-scoring. It also depicts the institutional instrumentalization of war rape as a means of ‘toughening up’ less experienced soldiers and forcing them into a ‘brotherhood of guilt’ (Diken and Laustsen 2005: 112): in Samira’s second subjection to rape,

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the three men responsible for the first assault place Samira in a room with a younger soldier who is clearly reluctant to attack her (‘What are you waiting for?’ ask the older soldiers). Rape here thus constitutes both a violent ritual of humiliation and a grotesque expression of male fellowship. Throughout the Bosnian war, indeed, young soldiers were often forced to murder or rape in order to ‘prove’ themselves as ‘real men’, ‘real Serbs’ and so on (Diken and Laustsen 2005: 125–6). Similar in storyline to As If I Am Not There, In the Land of Blood and Honey was written and directed by Hollywood star Angelina Jolie. Jolie is, of course, the ultimate transmedia celebrity, appearing and speaking in film promotions, interviews and news stories and she is known for her humanitarian work. In addition to her acting career, Jolie has served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees since 2001, receiving the first Citizen of the World Award from the United Nations Correspondents Association in 2003 and a United Nations Global Humanitarian Action Award in 2009. Fêted by Time magazine in 2006 as one of the twenty-five celebrities who ‘shape our world’ (cited in Wheeler 2013: 121), Jolie can be described as a ‘long-term celebrity advocate’ (‘t Hart and Tindall 2009). Michael Goodman (2013: 73) identifies Jolie as one of a new species of celebritus politicus in light of her advocacy for global developmental issues. Jolie’s humanitarian credentials are even reflected in her acting roles: in Martin Campbell’s film Beyond Borders (2003), for example, her character – a wealthy socialite – falls in love with an idealistic doctor, whom she helps to carry out relief work in Africa. In view of all this, it is unsurprising that In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie’s first foray into directing, won the 2012 Stanley Kramer Award, which is awarded annually to a filmmaker whose work ‘illuminates provocative social issues in an accessible and elevating fashion’. In order to increase its global marketability, the film was shot in both Bosnian and English, resulting in two separate versions. Unlike many Western films about the war, the film derives further authenticity from its localism, featuring Yugoslav actors, many of whom had lived through the war and in some cases lost relatives in it (Connolly and Edmond 2012: 56). Some of these actors, moreover, had starred in earlier, well-received Bosnian films about the war: the film’s protagonist, Ajla (Zana Marjanović), had appeared in Aida Begić’s Snijeg/Snow, while the popular Branko Đurić, who starred in Danis Tanović’s Bosnian war film No Man’s Land (2001), appears here as one of the Serb soldiers, Aleksandar. Although the inclusion of such actors in Jolie’s project generated a

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certain expectation of ‘quality’, Jolie was initially banned from filming in Bosnia, as authorities, reacting to the fears of some female war victims, expressed concerns over the film’s content; much of the film was therefore shot in Hungary (Phillips 2013: 292). Nevertheless, when it became known that the film’s villain was to be a Serb, the Bosnian media began to fall in line with the international praise for the project and Jolie was eventually made an honorary citizen of Sarajevo (Volčič and Erjavec 2014: 5–6). This decision no doubt reflects the congeniality of the film’s perspective on the war to the Bosnian government; but the film also attracted plaudits from some feminist critics. Emphasizing the educative function of the film, Denise Roman (2012: 18), for instance, praises the production as ‘a cinematic doctoral dissertation on the anthropology of war written on the bodies of women’. Yet it is argued here that the film’s feminist import is highly compromised, if not vitiated by its one-sidedly polemical take on the war. The story focuses on the relationship between a Muslim woman, Ajla (Zana Marjanović), and a Serb policeman, Danijel (Goran Kostić, who, for some audiences at least, comes pre-coded as a villain, having played the degenerate Serb bodyguard Srđan in Richard Shepard’s The Hunting Party). The two briefly date before the outbreak of the war. Meeting in a Sarajavo bar and dancing together, Ajla and Danijel’s liaison illustrates the multicultural harmony of prewar Sarajevo. During the war, however, Ajla is transported with other Muslim women to a barracks where Danijel is a captain. Here the women are repeatedly raped, their status quickly reduced to that of ‘bare life’. When the group arrives at the camp, a girl is immediately raped on a bench in front of the other women (recalling Jacqueline Rose’s remark that ‘violence against women must not just be done, but be seen to be done’) and the soldiers refer to their prisoners as ‘sheep’ (one is reminded here of Samira’s cry, in As If I Am Not There: ‘That’s all we are to them – animals’). Like the Serb captain in As I Am Not There, Danijel seems more kindly than his fellow soldiers, at least initially, but nevertheless confines Ajla to his quarters, where he rapes her with increasing brutality. At the end of the film, in 1995, Ajla gets an opportunity to tell her Muslim friends that the Serbs are taking refuge from NATO bombing in a local church, which results in the bombing of the building and the deaths of many of Danijel’s men. Danijel shoots and kills Ajla for her betrayal. Nevertheless, seemingly tortured by his conscience, he finally makes his way to a UN checkpoint, where he breaks down before a pair of listless Dutch peacekeepers – the suggestion of European passivity in the face of evil is unmistakeable – confessing that he is a ‘criminal

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of war’. That Danijel will presumably be punished for his crimes is arguably 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). Danijel’s voluntary confession and surrender, meanwhile, serves to humanize him somewhat and thus contributes to an unusually sympathetic representation of the Serb war criminal, a figure more usually presented as an irredeemable monster. Despite this partial redemption of Danijel, the film’s depiction of the soldiers’ brutality is unsparing. The men are mostly dissolute ignoramuses, as revealed in a farcical visit to Sarajevo’s ‘Municipal Art Gallery’, and show contempt towards all victims of war (a soldier who has been listening to a radio news report about Srebrenica massacre quickly retunes his set to find some turbofolk music instead). By night the Serbs rape their prisoners and by day smile, laugh and tell sexual jokes as they shoot civilians from their vantage points above Sarajevo. The depravity of these men is rooted in an obscene patriarchal culture at whose head is Danijel’s father, General Nebojša Vukojević. Vukojević, played by Rade Šerbedžija, an actor associated with villainous roles (see Radović 2014: 98), is a blood and soil nationalist fanatic, possibly modelled on Ratko Mladić. Disapproving of his son’s living arrangement, the General tells Danijel that the Serbs must exterminate the Bosnian Muslims, arrogantly reassuring him that ‘the rest of the world will do nothing’. Danijel himself internalizes and perpetuates this narrative, reassuring the simple-minded soldier Darko (Nikola Ðuričko) – who treats Danijel as a father figure – that the killing of Muslims is necessary in order to secure a harmonious future for Serb children in Bosnia (this rationalization comes shortly after a scene in which Ajla’s baby niece is thrown from a balcony by Serb soldiers). Darko’s death at the end of the film signals the termination of this intergenerational ethnophobic fantasy. Misogyny is expressed in the film not only through Danijel’s physical assaults upon Ajla but also through Ajla’s transformation into an object of patriarchal control and exchange. The homosocial structuration of desire in patriarchal culture (Sedgwick 1985) ensures that rape often functions, as Susan Brownmiller puts it (1975: 38), as ‘a message passed between men’. Indeed, as Sara Projansky (2001: 50) observes, rape storylines in war films often reveal as much about relations among men as they do about relations between men and women (an example here might be Brian De Palma’s 1989 Vietnam war film Casualties of War, in which the dramatic tension inheres in the conflict

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between the soldiers who rape and the soldier who refuses to rape). Unlike As If I Am Not There, which focuses exclusively on Samira’s experiences, In the Land of Blood and Honey devotes much attention to the interactions among the Serb soldiers and Danijel’s domination of Ajla is inseparable from his hierarchical relationship with his colleagues. Throughout the film, Danijel’s perverted ‘protection’ of Ajla seems to arouse jealousy among at least some of his fellow soldiers: during one of Danijel’s absences from the barracks, Ajla is raped by another Serb soldier, whom Danijel summarily shoots for his transgression. Ajla’s abhorrent residency with Danijel, meanwhile, angers Danijel’s father Nebojša, who insists that his son cease to consort with a Muslim. Indeed, one of the strengths of In the Land of Blood and Honey as a feminist text lies in its exposition of how women are used as currency in a heteropatriachal sexual and affective economy. Yet the film’s depiction of the first sexual encounter between Danijel and Ajla is highly problematic. Brian Phillips (2013: 288) notes that this soft focus scene is ‘scored with the kind of sensitive piano music you might expect to hear in a fragrance commercial’. The justification for such a romantic coding of the couple’s first sexual contact seems to lie in the film’s implication of a residual affection between the two characters – Danijel’s first action, after all, is to spare Ajla from being publicly raped on her arrival at the camp and the film keeps open the question of whether Ajla continues to harbour romantic feelings towards Danijel. Nevertheless, the tone of the scene seems woefully misjudged in view of the seriousness of the film’s subject (In the Land of Blood and Honey is not the only Hollywood treatment of rape in the Bosnian war that struggles to find an appropriate tone: in The Hunting Party, the journalists pursuing the war criminal The Fox receive information from a Serb woman named Mirjana [Diane Kruger]; in an interview, Mirjana tells the men that she herself was raped by Muslims along with other girls from her school; receiving the acknowledgement that ‘it was shitty on all sides’, Mirjana responds: ‘you don’t know shitty until you’ve been gang raped for seven hours’). The intense ethno-politicization of rape in the film is also problematic. Using two-shots and deep focus, Jolie strives to keep the film’s two central characters in the same frame, maintaining a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout most of the film and focusing attention on the political undercurrents of the couple’s relationship. The sexual violence Danijel perpetrates against Ajla is inseparable from his obsession with Serb ethnic supremacy. Danijel tells Ajla that her ‘people’ started the war and even, after raping Ajla particularly violently, whispers in her

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ear: ‘Why couldn’t you have been born a Serb?’ Indeed, while it is sometimes said that rape in times of civil war constitutes an attempt to erase the identity of the victim, rape in In the Land of Blood and Honey constitutes an attempt to clarify ethnic identity through grotesque intimacy, a mode of violence that Arjun Appadurai (1998) characterizes as ‘vivisectionist’. Danijel is a confused and insecure man, asking Ajla ‘Are you my enemy?’ and ‘Am I your enemy?’; for him, rape is a means of establishing Ajla’s identity as other. Under pressure to ‘produce’ her identity, it is hardly surprising that Ajla, despite explicitly rejecting categories of ethnic identity earlier in the film, ends up betraying her captor and thus, implicitly at least, aligning herself with the Muslim community – for Ajla there is hardly a choice here. Yet many Balkan commentators have accused the film itself of succumbing to the same discriminatory logic through its reification of national identities, so that ethnic divisions, far from being superseded, are re-entrenched (Volčič and Erjavec 2014: 9). Certainly, by continually foregrounding the question of ethnicity and framing Danijel’s rape of Ajla as an attempt to dispel doubts about her ethnic identity, Jolie’s film invokes the concept of ‘genocidal rape’, a problematic formulation promoted by Croatian and Bosnian ‘nationalistfeminists’ during the war. While it is true that most cases of rape during the Bosnian war involved perpetrators and victims of different ethnicity (Albanese 2001), the concept of genocidal rape arguably serves to elide both the suffering of victims belonging to the ‘wrong’ ethnicity and the specifically gendered nature of war rape (Helms 2014: 623–4). As many feminist critics have noted, women are raped in wartime not simply because they belong to an enemy ethnic group, but rather because they are women and therefore perceived as enemies (Brownmiller 1975: 69). Or, in Ruth Seifert’s (1994: 65) slightly different formulation: ‘women are raped not because they are enemies, but because they are the objects of a fundamental hatred that characterizes the cultural unconscious and is actualized in times of crisis’. The representation of ‘genocidal rape’ in In the Land of Blood and Honey is just one aspect of the film’s partisan framing of the Bosnian war. The principal Serb characters talk frequently and protractedly about their nationalist ambitions. When Nebojša Vukojević finds Ajla in Danijel’s quarters, for example, he asks her to paint his portrait, while he sternly informs her that Muslims have despoiled Bosnia and that the Ustaše slaughtered half of his family in 1944. Vukojević’s fulminations are gently countered by Ajla, who tells the commander that her grandfather had been a Partisan and that she ‘was raised to know

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no difference between Serbs, Croats and Muslims’, an observation that only infuriates Vukojević. Under pressure as the NATO bombs start to fall in 1995, Vukojević hardens his stance, reminding his retinue of the military defeat of the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo and their humiliation by the Ottoman Empire, telling them: ‘We will not negotiate. We will not be humiliated. We are under attack and this is the moment we Serbs stand and unite’. Vukojević’s speech is followed by an orgy of traditional folk music and heavy drinking, in which the Serb commander violently smashes a wine glass on the table – a stereotypical image of Balkan excess. But while the film condemns Serb nationalism and ethnic hatred, it has less to say about other causes of the Yugoslav wars, leading to critical complaints about the film’s attenuated political contextualization. In the Slovenian magazine Mladina, for instance, Marcel Štefančič (cited in Volčič and Erjavec 2014: 9) suggested that ‘there is no context about the war, who started it, why, and what was the role of the international community and Western interests here in the region’. Of course, filmmakers are not obliged to provide such contextualization and many successful films about the Bosnian war, including Wilson’s As If I Am Not There, do not engage with geopolitics, focusing instead on the impact of war on a single individual. Yet Jolie paints a broader canvas of the war than Wilson, making the one-sidedness of her film’s political elaborations far more problematic. The Bosnian war is seen here solely as the result of Serb ethnic intolerance and diplomatic intransigence, since almost all of the soldiers in the film ‘appear to be standard-issue evil Serbs’ (Pulver 2012) – although, as noted above, Danijel is partially redeemed by his voluntary surrender – and all of its civilian victims are Muslims. Moreover, while it is true that the majority of rapes perpetrated during the Bosnian war were committed by Serb irregular forces against Bosniak women (Skjelsbæk 2006: 375), rape was nevertheless perpetrated by all of the ‘sides’ involved in the conflict (Helsinki Watch 1993). As Elissa Helms (2014: 54) writes, ‘while Bosniacs were the most numerous victims and Serbs the biggest perpetrators, they were not the only victims or perpetrators: no group was entirely innocent’. Such complexities are elided in Jolie’s film. Ideological perspectives on the Bosnian war are presented as fact, too, in the captions at end of the film, which inform the viewer that ‘for three and a half years, the international community failed to decisively intervene and stop the war in Bosnia’, despite strong evidence that the war was prolonged by the Bosnian government, with US support, for political advantage (Johnstone 2002: 236; Szamuely 2013: 197 and passim).

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Even more problematically, the film contains, for what seem to be political reasons, an egregious historical inaccuracy, as described by Brian Phillips (2013: 289): In a scene where Danijel is travelling from his Sarajevo base to a meeting with his father, meant to be taking place in the winter of 1994, he drives past a recreation of the infamous 1992 images of emaciated and terrified detainees held in the Trnopolje and Omarska camps near Prijedor in Northwest Bosnia.

The men in the film’s version of the camp – Jolie’s camera lingers on one who bears a strong resemblance to the infamous ITN image of Fikret Alić – are semi-naked or dressed flimsily, despite the freezing weather, and look even more dejected than the real Trnopolje detainees. This display of vulnerable male bodies supplements the film’s presentation of female suffering. As in Killing Season, in which the US forces are imagined liberating the Serb detention camps, the anachronistic and geographically inaccurate imagery here both evokes an emotional response and invites a political judgement, linking the actions of the Serbs to an image that had been widely interpreted, at the outbreak of the war, as representing a revival of fascism in Europe. Indeed, talking about In the Land of Blood and Honey in an interview with the women’s magazine Marie Claire, Jolie implicitly frames the Bosnian war as a replay of the Holocaust, noting that it is ‘hard to understand’ how war broke out in Bosnia, ‘40 minutes away from Italy in the ’90s, at the time Schindler’s List came out’ (cited in Connolly and Edmond 2012: 56). Jolie’s problematic reference to Trnopolje bespeaks a completist ambition to index all of the war’s main events – or at least the events Jolie deems worthy of inclusion: by the time a radio news report mentions Madeleine Albright’s presentation of evidence of mass graves at Srebrenica, In the Land of Blood and Honey has mobilized all of the historical reference points emphasized in the dominant US/Western account of the war. Unsurprisingly, Jolie’s film found favour with many commentators who had advocated for Western military intervention in Bosnia throughout the 1990s. One of these, the French intellectual Bernard-Henry Lévy – whose 1994 film Bosna! expressed passionate support for the Bosnian Muslim cause – attended the Paris premiere of In the Land of Blood and Honey, appearing in photos with Jolie and others involved in the production. In a contemporaneous review of the film, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (2011: 29) – a veritable stenographer of the US foreign policy towards Bosnia during the 1990s – acknowledges that ‘Jolie’s film is unavoidably one-sided’, but reassures the reader

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that ‘movies cannot be about truth’. He goes on to praise the movie, seeing it as an implicit endorsement of the type of American-led foreign interventionism that was then being undertaken in Libya. Cohen’s reading of the film thus draws out and endorses the military-interventionist subtext of Jolie’s film, placing it in the service of a contemporary US geopolitical agenda. In fact, In the Land of Blood and Honey is deeply embedded within what James Der Derian (2001) calls the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’, or MIME-NET. In the United States, the Department of Defence has advised and supported filmmakers for many decades through its Film Liaison Office and the CIA advises filmmakers through its Entertainment Liaison Office (Alford 2010; Bayles 2014). In recent years, some of Hollywood’s most successful and controversial films – such as Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty, about the assassination of Osama bin Laden – have received extensive CIA support, prompting concerns about the growing propaganda content of popular culture and the extent of state influence in the US entertainment industry (Kumar and Kundnani 2014). In researching for In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie – a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, a group comprising industrialists, bankers, media figures, CIA agents and senior politicians including Bill Clinton – was able to exploit connections with the highest levels of US military and political staff. Jolie consulted the CIA agent and diplomat Richard Holbrooke, a cold warrior who had spent his political career planning US interventions – covert and overt – across the world, as well as in Bosnia, where he led the negotiating team charged with ending the war. She also spoke with US General Wesley Clark, who was director for strategic plans and policy of the US Department of Defense’s Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Bosnian war. Like many of the highprofile Western journalists who covered the war in the 1990s – Michael Ignatieff (2000: 6), for example, acknowledges that Holbrooke and Clark had helped him to make sense of the Balkan wars – Jolie presents a version of the Bosnian war that strongly conforms to the dominant US political script. Any film about a civil war that strongly emphasizes its characters’ ethnic identity is likely to divide the sympathies of its local audience. This is especially so in the case of a film that focuses on rape, ‘a crime that dominates social fantasies regarding sexual and social difference’ (Horeck 2003: 4). Viewers at a special screening in Sarajevo were moved by In the Land of Blood and Honey, identifying with the plight of its central character (Phillips 2013: 285; Helms 2014: 627). Yet while Bosniak audiences praised the film, those in Republika Srpska found the film biased and anti-Serb. The acclaimed director Emir Kusturica,

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meanwhile – no doubt conscious of the controversies stirred up by his own provocative cinematic interpretations of the war – dismissed the film as ‘pure anti-Serb propaganda’ and even advised Jolie to refocus her attentions on cases of US oppression around the world (Volčič and Erjavec 2014: 6). The criticisms levelled at In the Land of Blood and Honey have inevitably been extended to its director, too. In interviews about the film, Jolie often referred solipsistically to her own emotional growth during the making of the film, a strategy that, according to Volčič and Erjavec (2014: 3), served to ‘reframe the horrors of war into raw material for her self-transformation’. And while Murtic (2015: 171) briefly appraises In the Land of Blood and Honey as a ‘benevolent film’, Volčič and Erjavec (2014: 2) argue that it did little to raise awareness of rape crime in the former Yugoslavia and ‘does little to subvert the globally familiar Hollywood conventions’. Indeed, while it is impossible not to feel disgusted by the crimes depicted in In the Land of Blood and Honey, our revulsion ought not to blind us to the film’s questionable historiography and stereotypical patterns of representation.

Conclusion In her survey of US films about rape in the twentieth century, Sarah Projansky (2001: 30) observes the emergence of two seemingly antithetical narratives – one in which women’s independence is seen to provoke rape and another in which women are insufficiently independent to prevent themselves from being raped. Films about rape during the Bosnian war do not overtly participate in either of these forms of victim-blaming and the subject matter has received some sensitive and moving treatments. The quiet dignity and determination of the rape victim is apparent in films such as Twice Born and Esma’s Secret. In stark contrast to the macho action films discussed in the previous chapter, such films provide moving insights into the subjective experiences and everyday, post-conflict struggles of war victims. More particularly, these films suggest how victims of war rape can, in some circumstances, overcome their traumatic experiences. Indeed, as far as Bosnian war films are concerned, one is inclined to agree with Dina Iordanova (2001: 205) that cinematic ‘representations of rape are not as frequently exploitative as representations of other types of violent clashes’. As films that depict the act of rape itself, As If I Am Not There and In the Land of Blood and Honey are arguably progressive films, too, insofar as they present rape as an embodied experience rather than a plot device rendered by

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verbal or visual flashback. This is no small achievement; after all, in many other Bosnian war films, rape is narrated in the past tense as an originary event that has already occurred at the start of the film. Moreover, while they may generally stop short of blaming the victim of rape, few other films about war rape in Bosnia devote much attention to the victim’s experience; rather, rape is presented as a problem to be addressed or avenged by more or less heroic male protagonists. In Jazmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People (1999), for example, a Bosnian refugee with a child resulting from rape is helped by a kindly male British doctor; in Predrag Antonijević’s Savior (1998), a mercenary soldier reluctantly rescues a raped Serb woman and her baby; in Richard Shepard’s The Hunting Party (2008), meanwhile, the rape of a former girlfriend by a Serb war criminal becomes the pretext for the American protagonist’s mission of revenge. The films of Wilson and Jolie, by contrast, challenge the conventional phallocentrism of war rape narratives. They also foreground the voices of women who have experienced trauma – something that seemed almost impossible during the war itself, when female voices were marginalized; indeed, it is a telling fact that in 1995 one of the most pro-feminist films about the war – Theo Angelopoulos Ulysses’ Gaze, in which a mysterious female figure appears in several Balkan countries to guide the narrator on his travels – was passed over for the Palme d’Or in favour of Emir Kusturica’s testosterone-driven Underground (Murtic 2015: 87–8). Yet by comparison with As If I Am Not There, In the Land of Blood and Honey is an inferior production. As If I Am Not There, arguably the best Western film about rape in the Bosnian war, achieves the difficult feat of depicting the experience of rape directly yet unsensationally: relying primarily upon visual storytelling, Wilson’s narrative works through allusion and subtle suggestion (early in the film, for example, a very short shot of Samira’s neighbours staring keenly, perhaps enviously, across the street at Samira’s family, implies that may be trouble ahead). And like Esma’s Secret, Wilson’s film avoids overt ethno-jingoism. By contrast, Jolie’s examination of war rape seems overly invested in affixing guilt and innocence to national groups through misbegotten historical reconstructions and the ponderous speechifying of cardboard cut-out villains. Projansky (2001: 50–1) notes that the depiction of rape in war films is often used to cast particular national identities as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. As the history of wartime propaganda shows – from the notoriously fabricated allied propaganda around the ‘rape of Belgium’ in the First World War to the possibly existent ‘rape rooms’ of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – claims of rape have been regularly pressed into the service of nationalist and imperialist propaganda. Immediately prior to the

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Yugoslav wars, in fact, the US media had mobilized the rhetorical image of the ‘rape of Kuwait’ in order to justify US intervention in the first Persian Gulf War (Shohat 1994: 153; Wiegman 1994: 181). In Bosnia, where rape was pervasive, journalists, as we have seen, often manipulated rape stories for similar purposes, reporting only crimes committed by Serb forces and forcefully asserting a onesided narrative of the war. For all of its virtues, In the Land of Blood and Honey, the Bosnian war film currently enjoying the loftiest international reputation, frames the war’s crimes of sexual violence in a similarly partisan fashion.

6

From Nationalism to Normalization: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Films about the Bosnian War

As war spread across the former Yugoslav territories in the 1990s, cinematic production virtually ceased, continuing only in Croatia and Serbia (Pavićić 2010: 44). And although the Belgrade film industry was highly developed before the war, even the Serbian film industry stagnated in the 1990s as a result of economic decline and the cultural policies of the government (Radović 2008: 169). Since the 1990s wars, the film industry in the former Yugoslav territories has morphed from ‘a mixed federal and republican system of film production, distribution, and exhibition to one that is now reorganized along separate, national lines’ (Goulding 2002: xiv). Some of the former republics have struggled to rebuild a film industry after the war. The post-war challenges faced by the once mighty Croatian film industry, for example – vastly reduced domestic audiences since the loss of the pan-Yugoslav market, a reduction in art house venues for the screening of experimental films, and the loss of preferential international commercial arrangements (Goulding 2002: 209) – indicate some of the difficulties encountered by other national film industries since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Yet over the past two decades, filmmakers in and from the former Yugoslavia have created a rich variety of distinctive, and often clashing, reflections on the war and its toxic legacies. By comparison with the Hollywood films discussed so far in this book, the films analysed in this chapter have attained only modest international success; nevertheless, many of them are widely commercially available on DVD and have garnered considerable critical acclaim outside the Balkans. In most, but not all, cases, too, the films covered in this chapter have received closer critical attention than those analysed in previous chapters; this chapter therefore synthesizes augments and sometimes contests existing academic readings of the films,

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while advancing some original points of textual analysis, especially where the productions under discussion have received less sustained critical attention elsewhere. As Dina Iordanova (2001: 271) discussed a decade and a half ago, many filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia have made the decision to live and work abroad and some of their films have been co-produced in their new countries of residence. In light of this diasporic activity, and in the interests of clarity, it should be noted that two of the films discussed here – Predrag Antonijević’s Savior and Jasmin Dizdar’s Beautiful People – are not Balkan films, although they are directed, and written-directed, respectively, by a Serbian and a Bosnian. Indeed, as its title suggests, this chapter, while primarily focusing on films produced in the Yugoslav successor states, is less concerned with the often vexed questions of national categorization than with the negotiation of ethno-nationalist ideologies by filmmakers from the former Yugoslavia. The post-Yugoslav films of the last two decades reveal much about Balkan attitudes towards the wars of the 1990s and are often highly subversive of regnant political ideologies. This is true even of films made in the 1990s, a period in which cinema was not subjected to tight censorship from Belgrade, since the authorities believed that film was of marginal interest and limited influence among the public (Goulding 2002: 191). In genre, tone and style, as well as content, Balkan films about the Bosnian war often differ significantly from their Western counterparts. Whether soldiers or civilians, many of the characters in these productions struggle to overcome traumatic experiences, including the deaths of friends and relatives, and many of the filmmakers involved lived through the war – a fact that accounts for the frequently brooding tone of the films. There are also stark differences in style and sensibility. Many Hollywood and other Western productions, such as Welcome to Sarajevo and In the Land of Blood and Honey, are superegoic films, calling for the restoration of political and moral order in the Balkans. By contrast, post-Yugoslav films – especially Serbian films – often echo the dark sense of humour and fatalism of the Yugoslav Black Wave cinema (which was mostly made by Serb filmmakers) and tend to explore 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 producers of Bosnian war films to encompass satire, comedy and horror.

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Siding with the Serbs: Allegory and apologism in the films of Kusturica, Dragojević and Antonijević As Špela Zajec (2014: 214) points out, although overt pro-Serb propaganda films did not dominate Serbian filmmaking in the 1990s, in numerous films from the immediate post-war period, such as Gorčin Stojanović’s Ubistvo s predumišljajem/Premeditated Murder (1995/96) and Miroslav Lekić’s Nož/The Knife (1999), the figure of the Muslim or Croat neighbour ‘primarily exists as a negative counterpart – in more or less subtle versions – in relation to Serbian “wholeness”, in order to put Serbian nationhood into such a framework that would please the Serbian “in group”’. Yet it is Emir Kusturica, a Bosnian Muslim who moved to Belgrade to make films, who is responsible for the most notorious examples of nationalist filmmaking. Although it is an international co-production involving companies from France, Germany and Hungary as well as the former Yugoslavia, Kusturica’s Podzemnje: Bila jednom jedna zemlja/Underground: Once Upon a Time There Was a Country (1995) sparked outrage and controversy among Western intellectuals when it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1995. The film is characterized by an exuberant, carnivaleque style, charting the relationship between Marko (Lazar Ristovski), Crni (Miki Manojlović) and the focus of their romantic affections, Natalija (Mirjana Joković), across three time periods: the Second World War, 1961 and the 1990s. Although Marko, a Serb, and Crni, a Montenegrin, are amoral criminals, they style themselves as brave anti-fascists and are regarded by those around them as heroes. Combining criminal escapades with personal betrayals and near constant inebriation, Marko and Crni typify the ‘colourful thug’ (Čvoro 2014: 172), the minacious but loyal and protective ‘man of the people’ found in the films of both Kusturica and Srđan Dragojević. Marko and Crni are presented as Falstaffian, manipulative rogues and Kusturica’s sympathy for them is suggestive of a ‘provocative overidentification’ (Bertellini 2015: 10) with the idioms of nationalist populism. Little wonder, then, that Serb warlord Arkan and other nationalists were among the guests at the film’s Belgrade premiere (Murtic 2015: 52). Kusturica’s anti-Western, if not explicitly pro-Serb political sympathies in Underground – a film ‘supported and endorsed by government-controlled cultural institutions in Milošević’s Yugoslavia’ (Iordanova 2001: 122) – seem clear enough. Marko and Crni, as Sławomir Magala (2005: 195) points out, ‘fight on relentlessly in occupied Belgrade, while the Slovenes and the Croats

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welcome Nazi troops, [and] Muslims and Croats steal weapons and money from the resistance fighters’. In the later time period, too, the men are ‘spontaneously virtuous, stubbornly fighting for their ideals, while the others (including the weak and corrupt UN soldiers) prefer compromise and accommodation’. As well as ignoring Serb crimes and highlighting those of national enemies, the film’s maniacal mode of address perpetuates a mythic view of Balkans as a place of primordial energy, typifying the ‘cinema of self-Balkanisation’ (Longinović 2005: 205). Underground was met with ‘evasively positive’ (Iordanova 2001: 116) reviews by many film critics, but with horror by many Western political commentators, who claimed the film’s vitalist aesthetic naturalized and thus exalted Serb thuggery. In Dina Iordanova’s (2001: 111–31) reading, the film implies the essential amorality of Balkan people and their supinity before those they see as their heroes. The film’s failure to acknowledge Serb atrocities in the 1990s also resonates troublingly with Kusturica’s remarks that the Yugoslav wars were like an ‘earthquake’, that is, ‘beyond human control, coming from profundity’ (Iordanova 2001: 126). In the post-Milošević era, Kusturica applied his hyperkinetic style to the subject of the Bosnian war once again in Život je čudo/Life Is a Miracle (2004). The film concerns a railway engineer, Luka (Slavko Štimac), his neurotic wife Jadranka (Vesna Trivalić), who runs off with a musician, and their footballer son Miloš (Vuk Kostić), who is called up for the army but taken prisoner by the Muslims. When Luka is asked to guard a young Muslim nurse, Sabaha (Nataša Tapušković), he falls in love with her, complicating his initial plan to exchange her for Miloš. Life Is a Miracle recaptures the manic energy of Underground through its characters’ crazy behaviour, its surreal and oneiric elements, its metaphorical and anthropomorphic use of animals, and its fatalism (separated from Sabaha, Luka attempts to commit suicide on the railway tracks; but the train – which by chance carries Sabaha – is forced to stop by a ‘lovesick’ donkey on the line). Like Underground, too, the film resists Western understandings of the war, especially as these are expressed by the news media. In several Bosnian war films, characters – and viewers – learn about the major events of the war (such as the outbreak of war or the occurrence of atrocities) from television or radio broadcasts. This naturalized diegetic incorporation of US or other Western news reports is deconstructed, as discussed below, in several post-Yugoslav films which portray the insensitivity and arrogance of Western reporters in an ironic rejoinder to the Western liberal ideal of the ‘journalism of attachment’. In Life Is a Miracle, Western media are subjected to a political as well as a moral critique.

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Luka is contemptuous of Western television news reports, believing them to misrepresent the conflict. When he first hears that war may be about to erupt in Bosnia, he reassures his wife that the television report she is watching is ‘all lies’ and later in the film becomes so infuriated by a reporter on a US news channel that he throws the television set out of an upper-story window of his house, before shooting it with his rifle. During the prisoner exchange at the end of the film, the same reporter appears on the scene, asking the exchanged prisoners idiotic questions and ascribing them essentialist identities and roles within her pre-determined narrative of the war. On the basis of such critical details, Kusturica’s film has been argued to be exploring ‘the complexity of “taking sides” and challenging the superficiality of finger-pointing’ (Marinkova 2010: 469). The film contains further, arguably critical elements; for example, as in many of his other films, Kusturica here denounces war profiteering through the degenerate figure of Filipović (Nikola Kojo), who is blown up during a phone sex session. Yet while Kusturica’s second Bosnian war film rightly condemns Western prurience, it hardly transcends nationalist ideology. As in the case of Underground, Kusturica’s convulsive poetics here arouse suspicions of aestheticism and the romance between a Serb man and his Muslim prisoner, like Angelina Jolie’s presentation of a somewhat similar relationship, raises questions of taste and plausibility. Mario Slugan (2011: 42–3) points to several textual details, moreover, that contribute to a pro-Serb bias: Luka’s unchallenged status as the film’s chief character-focalizer; the lionization of Miloš and of a Serbian Captain, Aleksić, as compassionate and noble men; the absence of Serb atrocities and the wounding of Sabaha by Muslim forces. As Slugan (2011: 43) also notes, Kusturica – ludicrously, yet consistent with the ethnochauvinist propaganda spewed forth during the war – exaggerates the differences between Serbian and Bosnian vocabulary when Sabaha, despite having lived in Bosnia for her entire life, appears not to be familiar with Luka’s word banja (bath). This linguistic misunderstanding draws attention to (supposed) ethnic differences, while casting Luka in a flattering light as ‘a model European, who notices the differences between ethnicities only with the ambition to transcend them’ (Slugan 2011: 43). If Kusturica’s Bosnian war films are guilty of pro-Serb bias, Srđan Dragojević presents a rather more complicated case. Dragojević’s tour-de-force Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996) is the Ur-text of Bosnian war cinema, containing images and themes that recur in many later productions. Rich in symbolism and dripping in irony, it is arguably the most sophisticated film about the war, but

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also one of the trickiest to interpret. The film is set in the Višegrad tunnel (also known as the Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel) in 1992, where a Serbian fighter, Milan (Dragan Bjelogrlić), along with others, is trapped, surrounded by Muslim soldiers. The film regularly flashes back to Milan’s happy adventures with his childhood friend Halil (Nikola Pejaković), one of the Muslims now outside the tunnel; many of these adventures take place near the tunnel, which the boys dare not enter, convinced that an ogre dwells there. The film also jumps forward to Milan’s later convalescence in a military hospital, where, consumed by thoughts of vengeance for the murder of his mother, he determines to kill a young Muslim patient. Milan’s journey from amity to animosity ‘shows how people get drawn into events are changed by them’ (Gow and Michalski 2007: 36). An American journalist who finds herself in the tunnel with the Serbs, meanwhile, undergoes a reverse process: blinded by Western anti-Serb stereotypes, she is initially horrified by the men; yet her antipathy towards them gradually 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). The film’s nihilistic sensibility and antic disposition recall the hyperbolic and metaphorical style of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which is notable for its sense of ‘madness and oblivion’ (Valantin 2005: 18). The Serb soldiers in the film consciously seek to defy Western assumptions about them. Aware of their demonization in the international media, they embrace their reputation as the ‘bad guys’; in the film’s early scenes, before the Serbs become trapped in the tunnel, the men fly the Confederate Flag as they move around Bosnia burning villages. Images of the Western world are ridiculed: the soldiers burn an ornamental statue of the Eiffel Tower while looting a Muslim house, ruminate on a snow globe containing a miniaturized Statue of Liberty, and later, when forced to drink Milan’s urine from a Coca Cola bottle, ironically sing the words to one of the company’s advertisements. As Fredric Jameson (2004: 235) comments, Balkan cinema is profoundly self-conscious. It ‘includes the external look of the foreigners, of the West’ and thus embraces an unashamed self-Balkanization: ‘We are like this, and in fact, we’re even worse than you thought we are, and we love it!’ Dragojević shows the stupidity and depravity of the Serbs, as they drunkenly loot and burn Muslim villages, proudly sporting the kokarda. Milja Radović (2009: 190) notes the film’s critical stance towards the political exploitation of religious symbolism, at a time when the Serbian Orthodox Church was voicing

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its adherence to Serb nationalism and promoting the war as a defence of ‘Serbian identity, nation, culture and land’. Fork, with his chetnik marks, is the soldier most clearly identified with Serbian orthodoxy; yet this is equally clearly shown to be an over-identification, so that Fork becomes a figure of ‘primitive superstitious religiosity’ and thus a victim of the regime (Radović 2009: 197). There is close similarity, in fact, between Fork and the character of Darko in Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey: whatever crimes they may commit, both men are naïve simpletons who have been duped by the nationalist rhetoric of their superiors. This becomes particularly apparent in Pretty Village when Fork, filmed by the American journalist, delivers an absurd pseudo-historical diatribe about Serbia as the world’s oldest and most civilized nation – a propaganda motif that since the 1980s had become prevalent throughout Serbian society, including its universities (Hedges 2003: 56). Fork’s patriotic ranting recalls the observation of the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš (cited in Thompson 1992: 339) that ‘the nationalist is by definition an ignoramus’. Radović (2009: 195) therefore rightly argues that the film contains ‘a very strong indirect message which opposes the regime’. Dragojević also attacks the baleful influence of the Serbian media: in one of the film’s most wryly humorous scenes, television news propaganda causes the harebrained Lazar to sign up for the army. The deceptions of ethno-nationalism are further embodied in the sinister figure of Sloba – a war profiteer presumably named after the Serbian president – who tries to disunite Milan and Halil and who stresses the impossibility of good relations between Serbs and Muslims. Unsurprisingly, in view of such details, much of the early criticism directed at the film came from within the Serbian elite and the production ran into significant problems with the authorities. Early support from Republika Srpska was withdrawn once the critical nature of the project became known and the film was boycotted by the Karadžić leadership when the film premiered in June 1996 (Goulding 2002: 195). Yet Pretty Village, Pretty Flame has also attracted much international criticism over the years. The American political commentator Chris Hedges (2003: 151) accuses the film of promoting the relativist view that ‘one cause [is] as rotten as the next, that just as the Serbs had been manipulated by their leaders, so had the Muslims and the Croats’. The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw (2008), meanwhile, describes the film’s title as ‘an unmistakeable provocation’ and talked of the film’s ‘explicit yearning for sectarian violence’. The film also was – and continues to be – loathed by many critics in Bosnia, too. Sarajevo critic and film director Faruk Lončarević (2008: 168) has stated that Pretty Village is the ‘worst

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prostitution of film form since Triumph des Willen by Leni Riefenstahl’. Indeed, Dragojević’s film, made ‘at the actual time of the Milošević regime’ (Radović 2008: 169) by a director given to nationalistic pronouncements (Iordanova 2001: 140), contains many troubling elements. While clearly contesting the Western demonization of the Serbs, the film bends the stick quite far in the opposite direction by presenting Muslims as the equal, if not greater perpetrators of mass violence (Watson 2008: 56). Dismissed as ‘Turks’ and jihadists by their enemies, Muslims remain mostly in the shadows in the film, taunting the Serbs in the tunnel. 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. Equally problematic in Pretty Village is the dismissive representation of the anti-war demonstrators who protest in front of the military hospital where Milan is recovering from injuries sustained in the war. Dismissed by Milan as ‘hippies’, the demonstrators are depicted as ludicrous and – in line with official Serbian propaganda about peace protestors – are marked as ‘foreign’ by their risible chanting of the John Lennon chorus ‘Give Peace a Chance’. The film’s recourse to supernatural tropes is also problematic: Radović (2008: 170) suggests that Milan and Halil’s childhood fantasy of the ‘ogre in the tunnel’, reinvoked at the end of the film as a quasi-mystical cause of the war, tends to elide questions of politics and human responsibility. Ultimately, then, Pretty Village is an ambiguous text that criticizes some aspects of Serb nationalism while at the same time aligning the spectator with the Serb point of view and marginalizing Muslim suffering. Dragojević’s post-war films trace a more critical trajectory, as represented by Rane/The Wounds (1998), a bleak portrayal of Serbia under Milošević. Loosely based on a true story, it tells the story of two teenaged criminals, Pinki (Dušan Pekić) and Švaba (Milan Marić). In the framing scenes at the beginning and end of the film, the pair are stuck in a car during the anti-regime demonstrations – the boys mockingly refer to its participants as ‘wimps’ – in Belgrade in 1996. In a flashback, Pinki narrates his experience of growing up with Švaba over the previous five years, describing the duo’s early teenage years in Belgrade – whirlwind years in which the boys turn to drug-dealing, robbery, torture and

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murder against an ambient background of violence, misogynistic sex, and ultra-nationalism. Pinki’s father, Stojan, is an idiotic nationalist who spends his days in 1991 watching television news reports about the Croatian war (‘Go on! Wipe them out!’, he shouts, as he watches the JNA in action). The boys’ friend and hero, Dickie, meanwhile, is a gun-obsessed low-life. Funded in large part by state institutions including the state-run broadcaster RTS, the film was roundly attacked by the regime elements that did not appreciate the director’s rumbustious portrayal of Milošević’s Serbia and its quasi-fascist media. As in Pretty Village, Dragojević depicts Serbian defiance of the outside world and the ‘international community’, while at the same time showing sympathy for those duped by nationalist ideology. In the film’s final voiceover monologue, Pinki, as he lies dying, defiantly states he does not really care that he never travelled internationally, or that he never ‘fucked a black woman in Amsterdam’ – a reference to one of the film’s running racist and misogynist jokes. His final words thus proudly assert the Serbian ‘sense of self-exclusion from the rest of the world that was a consequence of xenophobic media propaganda’ (Radović 2014: 52). Throughout the film, meanwhile, Dragojević uses religious iconography ironically; for Pinki and Švaba, avatars of a ‘culture of thanatos’ (Radović 2014: 52), there can be no redemption. If The Wounds expresses a more critical perspective on Serb nationalism than Pretty Village, Dragojević’s work is problematic overall, its progressive elements compromised by ambiguity and narrative alignment with the Serbian point of view. The same can be said of Predrag Antonijević’s Savior (1998), one of the best-known films about the Bosnian war among Western audiences. Savior, as noted above, is a US movie – produced by Oliver Stone – yet it was shot in Montenegro by a Serbian director (Antonijević had in fact been a political prisoner during the early 1990s after protesting against the Milošević regime; he moved to Hollywood in 1992). Although the film later veers into unexpected generic territory – blending elements of the war film, the picaresque, and the road movie – it begins, like conventional US thrillers such as The Fourth Angel (2001), with the violent disruption of a nuclear family and a robust, militaristic response. Joshua Rose (Dennis Quaid), a State Department official in Paris, is shattered when his wife and child are killed in a Muslim terrorist bombing in Paris. In the throes of grief, he embarks on an anti-Islamic rampage, randomly gunning down worshippers in a mosque. After going on the run and serving for six years in the French Foreign Legion, Rose, along with his friend Peter (Stellan Skarsgård), ends up in Bosnia fighting for the Serbs (a role that Rose

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says he ‘can believe in’ – presumably owing to his Islamophobic mindset). There he further indulges his murderous bigotry with robotic impassivity, at one point shooting dead a young boy on a bridge. Following a Serb-Muslim prisoner exchange, however, Rose is obliged to take care of a Serb woman, Vera (Nataša Ninković), who has been raped and disowned by her family. In a tunnel scene that recalls the portentous setting of Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, Rose protects Vera and the child from his degenerate comrade Goran (Sergej Trifunović), who attempts to murder the baby as soon as it is born, prompting Rose to shoot and kill him. Taking on new responsibilities for mother and child, Rose undergoes a moral reawakening, eventually transporting the child to safety in Split. The film contains some touching scenes of resistance to ethnic sectarianism: Rose and Vera are offered refuge for a night, for example, by an elderly interethnic couple who have lost their son in a war they deplore. In some ways, Savior is a conventional redemption narrative, as a series of religious symbols – most obviously the crucifix pendant on Rose’s neck chain – reinforce; whereas Dragojević’s The Wounds uses religious symbolism ironically, in order to show the unredeemability of Pinki and Švaba, Savior’s religious symbols function more conventionally, indicating Rose’s potential for salvation (‘God is everywhere’, Rose tells his son shortly before the boy is killed). Although Rose is fighting on the Serb side, the film depicts and condemns Serb violence. In one of the film’s ghastliest moments, for instance, Goran cuts off the finger of an elderly Muslim lady in order to take her ring (‘She’s just an old Muslim bitch’). Goran’s violent contempt towards Vera, meanwhile, reflects the patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes expressed in media in all parts of the former Yugoslavia towards rape victims (Žarkov 2007), who often faced ‘suspicion and ostracism from various members of their communities’ (Helms 2014: 617). And as Vladimír Zán (2012: 75) points out, the film shows the baleful impact of certain religious and cultural traditions on families and individuals, especially women: when Vera returns home to her family after the prisoner exchange, she is rejected by them and leaves with Rose without a word; later, upon discovering that Rose and Vera are implicated in murder, Vera’s father promises a local elder that he will find the couple and restore the family honour. Yet Savior departs from Hollywood’s anti-Serb script by depicting acts of brutality and violence by Croat and Muslim fighters, too: Vera’s family are removed from their home by Muslim forces and Vera herself is horribly murdered by Croat soldiers, one of whom uses a sledgehammer to club his victims to death. Despite this apparently even-handed distribution of atrocity images, however, even Savior invites

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a suspicion of pro-Serb bias: not only does Rose’s horrific massacre of Muslims at the start of the film go unpunished, but the killing of Rose’s best friend Peter by a young Muslim child with a hand-grenade – perhaps the only depiction of a child murderer in all Bosnian war cinema, where children more usually embody innocence and optimism for the future – could be interpreted as providing a retrospective justification for Rose’s earlier killing of the young boy.

Bosnian perspectives: From anti-Serb sentiment to the ‘cinema of normalization’ Although filmmaking in Bosnia ceased during the war years, Bosnian filmmakers have arguably produced some of the most moving studies of the conflict and its aftermath; yet not all of their productions, it is argued in the following section, are free from political bias. While most scholars agree that the films of Kusturica and less egregiously, perhaps, Dragojević are marred by pro-Serb bias, far less critical scrutiny has been given to the nationalist or anti-Serb perspectives in films made by Bosnian Muslim directors, perhaps because the Serbs are often regarded, both in the West and in non-Serb regions of the former Yugoslavia, as the war’s only aggressors. One of the most exuberant films about the effects of the Bosnian war on ordinary people’s lives is Beautiful People (1999). The film is in fact a British production, albeit one whose creative personnel and themes reflect European cinema’s ongoing ‘cultural hybridization’ (Bergfelder 2005: 321). Written and directed by British-Bosnian filmmaker Jasmin Dizdar, the film contains several actors from the former Yugoslavia and is, thematically at least, a post-Yugoslav, albeit diasporic film about the Bosnian war. Praised by progressive film critics such as Robin Wood (2001), Beautiful People is a liberal film that boldly satirizes the class hierarchies of British society (Loshitzky 2010: 55) and playfully draws parallels between Bosnia and Britain through its depiction of racist and nationalist behaviour among characters from both countries. Set in 1993, the film is mostly concerned with the story of Bosnian refugees in London, chiefly a rape victim struggling to accept the child she has conceived; she eventually manages to do so with the moral and material support of her partner and her kindly British doctor, who in turn is spiritually ‘rescued’ by the Bosnian couple from his miserable and failing marriage. Indeed, the intercultural exchanges between Britain and Bosnia are many. A British racist skinhead is, by a bizarre

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twist of fate, airdropped into Bosnia and forced to work with UN field medics – a sobering experience that ultimately transforms him into a model citizen. A BBC journalist who films the medical team is also profoundly moved by his experience of witnessing the Bosnian plight and at the end of the film, almost all of the characters have been enriched by their cross-cultural experiences. Yet for all its feel-good cosmopolitanism, the production affirms Serb war guilt at several points. In a scene towards the end of the film, for instance, a patronizing, upper-class gentleman tells an unconvinced young Bosnian refugee: ‘I do believe that all sides in the conflict are equally guilty’, but his condescending tone intimates to the viewer that such an ‘all-parties-are-guilty’ perspective is erroneous and offensive. Indeed, the one character who remains unchanged in Beautiful People is an unnamed Serb refugee (Dado Jehan), who begins the film attacking and chasing a Croat refugee (Faruk Pruti) he encounters by chance on a London bus. After both men are hospitalized in the same ward following their violent encounter, the Serb makes two attempts to murder the Croat, who occupies the adjacent bed, in a scenario that recalls the inter-ethnic hospital strife in Pretty Village, Pretty Flame. But whereas Milan in Pretty Village finally gives up on his ambition to murder a young Bosnian, the Serb refugee in Beautiful People seems unrepentantly homicidal. Yosefa Loshitsky (2010: 61) comments that the film’s final, ‘life-affirming’ scene involves the British doctor dancing with his newly adopted Bosnian family. This scene is intercut, however, with a hospital sequence in which the Serb patient joins the Croat and their ward nurse in a game of cards. Given the film’s other redemptive twists and general humanistic ethos, one might expect a scene of compromise and rapprochement to unfold, showing that even the Serb, like the film’s other characters, is capable of change. On the contrary, however, the Serb patient remains a brute: in the film’s final shot, the camera zooms in on his arm muscle, which he menacingly flexes after winning a hand of cards – a stark image of his unreformability and bellicosity. Thus, although Dizdar’s film mostly celebrates the ‘hyphenated’ identities (Elsaesser 2005: 108–30) and inter-cultural exchanges of its characters, it ends on a decidedly nationalistic note: everybody is ‘beautiful’ except for the Serb. Another apparently liberal and affirmative, yet compromised vision of the Bosnian war is provided in Danis Tanović’s Ničija zemlja/No Man’s Land (2001). Tanović is a Bosnian Muslim intellectual who worked as a cinematographer for the Bosnian army during the war. Internationally fêted, Tanović’s dark comedy has been widely praised for its anti-war sensibility and seen as one of the more

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politically balanced treatments of the Bosnian conflict (Watson 2008). It focuses on two combatants from opposing sides of the conflict – Čiki (Branko Đurić) and Nino (René Bitorajac) – who find themselves trapped between the Serb and Muslim front lines, as the media seek to exploit the engrossing ‘story’ and UN officials uselessly look on. Indeed, the film’s final image of a booby-trapped Bosniak fighter left to die in a trench reflects the mainstream news media perspective that Muslims were abandoned to their fate as the ‘international community’ squabbled and prevaricated. At times more like a stage play than a film, Tanović’s drama emphasizes dialogue over action. Ironically released at exactly the same moment as Behind Enemy Lines at the end of 2001, the film’s ‘war-battered sense of the absurd’ certainly compares favourably with Hollywood’s ‘unabashed flagwaving’ (Koehler 2001: 30). And where Hollywood Bosnian war two-handers such as Killing Season portray men who are dedicated to injuring each other, No Man’s Land emphasizes the commonalities between the protagonists: Čiki discovers, for example, that he and Nino have a female friend in common in Banja Luka. Through black comedy, meanwhile, the conversations between the two men highlight the absurdities of war and the potential for human solidarity among putative ‘enemies’. ‘Who cares who started it?’, declares Čiki, the Bosnian Muslim protagonist, ‘we’re all in the same shit now’. The ostensible message of the film, indeed, is that ‘brotherhood and unity’ is more powerful than ethnic sectarianism – a theme of many pre-war Yugoslav films, such as Braća po materi/ Maternal Halfbrothers (1988), in which Croat and Serb half-brothers come to know one another by writing letters, overcoming their initial mistrust of one another. This may be why Daniel Goulding (2002: 222) writes that the film ‘is not concerned with establishing blame or naming the war’s aggressor […]. Instead, the film offers a scathing indictment of this very particular war’s utter absurdity, profound stupidity, and cruel obscenity’. Zajec (2013: 205) and Murtic (2015), too, opine that No Man’s Land does not put the blame for the war on any side. As argued in the previous chapters, many Western film productions heroize the Western journalist in Bosnia. In Welcome to Sarajevo and The Hunting Party, US and British journalists show compassion and commitment to their job, showing their responsibility not just to getting the story, but to rescuing the innocent. There are, of course, always exceptions to the pattern, even in Western films: for example, in an Italian film, Giancarlo Bocchi’s Nema Problema (2004), a reporter invents war stories in order to enhance his reputation. In No Man’s Land, too, the cynicism of the Western media is mercilessly satirized. Just

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seconds after the film’s tragic ending in which the two soldiers are shot dead, the arrogant journalist Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge) insensitively asks her cameraman: ‘Did you get it?’. The presence of news cameras in No Man’s Land reminds us ‘that modern war suffering is by rule spectacularized, i.e. translated into monetary values for international audiences. Hence, the international media in the film are represented by a global TV network, and its blood-thirsty, ratingsdriven and profit-driven universe’ (Zajec 2013: 203). This skeptical perspective on Western journalism was widespread during the war among many Bosnians. The Sarajevo press corps, for instance, were often sharply critical of the callousness of international reporters; Sarajevo journalist Janine di Giovanni (1994: 41) described feeling ‘sick’ of the influx of journalists who arrived to witness the evacuation of the injured girl Irma Hadžimuratović, ‘like vultures, looking for the dead’. Despite its admirably satirical perspective on Western journalism, however, No Man’s Land frames the war and the trench-bound duo according to the conventions of Western news media discourse. The action in the trench is interspersed with a British television news programme showing Radovan Karadžić threatening to eradicate the Bosnian Muslims and an argument between the film’s two protagonists about the origins of the war identifies the Serbs as the aggressors. The film’s presentation of the trenchmates, meanwhile, is far from even-handed. Čiki is coded as the compassionate hero of the story and his Rolling Stones tee shirt reminds the audience that Bosnian 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 treatment of No Man’s Land as an anti-war film, then, Tanović – who has excoriated the pro-Serb bias of Pretty Village, Pretty Flame – tends to present the war as a morality tale of good Muslim and bad Serb. It is thus unsurprising that many Bosniaks, especially Muslims, savoured the international recognition of Bosnia secured by the film’s international success, while many Serbs and Croats in Bosnia reviled the film, which was excoriated in the Belgrade newspaper Nacional as an ‘anti-Serbian forgery’ (cited in Zajec 2013: 205). Another very divisive Bosnian production is Ahmed Imamović’s Go West (2005), which portrays the difficulties faced by two homosexual men – a Bosnian Serb, Milan (Tariq Filipović), and a Muslim, Kenan (Mario Drmać) – who flee from Sarajevo to Milan’s village, a Serb stronghold in Eastern Bosnia. There Kenan, disguised as a woman, lives as Milan’s wife until his true identity is

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discovered by a villager. The couple’s homosexuality – and specifically their need to hide it – metaphorizes the dangers of ethnic identification during the Bosnian war; yet the apparent progressiveness of this theme was scarcely appreciated by local commentators. Before its release, the film enraged Bosnian nationalists and many media commentators (who assumed that the story concerned two Bosnian soldiers), exposing the depth of homophobic sentiment in Bosnian society (Moss 2012: 358–61). Although the media outcry subsided once the film was released and the identities of its protagonists became clear, Imamović faced further accusations of nationalism. The Croatian critic Mima Simić, who identifies as a lesbian, charged Imamović with demonizing Serbs, who are almost all characterized in the film as Nazi-like brutes. In a homophobic and intemperate response, Imamović both failed to dispel the allegation of nationalism and resorted to homophobic abuse, referring to Simić as ‘it’ and inviting her to ‘suck my […] big cock’ (Moss 2012: 364). Indeed, despite his film’s ostensible concern with homosexuality, Imamović’s commitment to the serious exploration of that subject is questionable. Along with ‘gay’ films from other former Yugoslav states, Go West can be read as an expression of a certain pro-Western liberality and openness; but it nevertheless follows a pattern among post-Yugoslav films of treating homosexuality superficially, showing a decidedly conservative reticence about the depiction of homosexual friendships, communities and sexual practices and a preference for transvestite farce over the serious exploration of queer sexuality and its social repression (Moss 2012). As Moss (2012) suggests, a truly queer cinema would be one that questions both ethno-national and sexual normativities; despite its bold premise, Go West in the end fails to challenge either. As can be seen from the forgoing discussion, Bosnian films, like their Serbian counterparts, have often been characterized by a madcap style. Given the eagerness of Bosnian filmmakers to achieve success in international markets, this delirious mode of address may constitute a financially astute concession to the widespread conception of the Balkans as an ‘abnormal’ part of Europe. Yet the most progressive films about the Bosnian war, it could be argued, have tended to adopt a rather subdued style. Ademir Kenović’s Savršeni krug/Perfect Circle (1997), the first Bosnian film about the war, is a restrained and sombre film about the difficulties of survival in Sarajevo during the siege (Levi 2007: 156). More recently, Bosnian filmmakers have contributed to what Pavićić (2010) calls a ‘cinema of normalization’ – a restrained, quietly realist cinema that registers the mostly liberal political reforms that have taken hold in all of the

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Yugoslav successor states since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The cinema of normalization understatedly examines the effects of the Bosnian war on communities and individuals, especially women struggling to come to terms with the loss of their family members after the war. The documentaristic Bosnian-Croatian-Slovenian drama Halimin put/Halima’s Path (2012), directed by Arsen Anton Ostojić, for instance, follows a woman’s quest to locate the bones of her adopted son, who was executed during the war. Many of the cinema of normalization’s most successful films have had women behind the camera. Aida Begić’s Snijeg/Snow, starring Zana Marjanović, for example, tells the story of a group of women struggling to survive in a village in which most of the menfolk have been killed. And Jasmila Žbanić Esma’s Secret, as discussed in the previous chapter, depicts the everyday tribulations of a rape victim whose wartime ordeal is made explicit only at the end of the film.

Ghosts of war: Anti-war messages in horror and supernatural cinema While the cinema of normalization constitutes an unostentatious workingthrough of war trauma in the social realist mode, some recent films approach the same subject through the horror genre. The presence of ghosts in post-Yugoslav cinema is symptomatic of the denial and repression of wartime atrocities that is still widespread among individuals and communities in the region. Yet, as Judith Herman (1992: 1) puts it, ‘as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told’. The supernatural war film, or, more specifically, the ‘military horror film’ (Handtke 2010), has achieved a certain popularity in the twenty-first century. Two films from the early 2000s – Michael J. Bassett’s British-German production Deathwatch (2002), about British soldiers in the First World War trenches and Rob Green’s The Bunker (2001), about German soldiers in a Second World War bunker – concern the haunting of men at war. Despite their supernatural premise, both films find the soldiers chasing shadows, suggesting the illusory nature of the enemy. As Steffen Handtke (2010: 710) notes, both films ‘implicate their audiences in the moral proposition that the enemy is not, in fact, the Other, but war itself, as it insinuates itself into the mind of the individual soldier and into the collective’. By undermining the very notion of the enemy, both films

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implicitly critique the moral Manicheanism of the post-9/11 political order (Handtke 2010: 718). Two slightly later Balkan films deploy similar tropes of psychological horror in the service of stark anti-war messages. Perhaps the more sophisticated of the two is Serbian director Dejan Zečević’s Neprijatelj/The Enemy (2011), an arthouse thriller rendered in grey near-monochrome – a marked contrast with the saturated, full-blooded comic-book aesthetics of Kusturica and Dragojević. Co-produced between Serbia, Republika Srpska and Croatia, The Enemy is a philosophical and allegorical drama with a Tarkovskian tone. The film is permeated by supernatural elements and themes of free will and fate and its action unfolds in a farmhouse located at what had been the demarcation line between enemy fronts. Set in the immediate aftermath of the war, the film begins with Serb soldiers, under the supervision of American IFOR troops (the soldiers who relieved the UN peacekeepers after the war), removing mines that they themselves had laid several years previously. All of the men are damaged in some way – by fear, aggression, or excessive religiosity – becoming increasingly abusive and eventually murderous towards one another. Searching a factory, some of the soldiers unearth a strange figure who goes by the diabolical name of Daba (Tihomir Stanić), who has been walled into the building and who, disconcertingly, feels no cold, hunger or thirst. The chthonic Daba seems to be implicated in the evils of the war, especially when the soldiers discover a mass grave underneath the factory, and at several points various frightened soldiers try – and fail – to kill him. And yet, when asked directly, Daba tells the men that he deplores the killing of the war, noting that all soldiers are ‘in the same line of business’. And when asked if he is friend or foe, Daba replies cryptically ‘I am one of you’ – a remark that is less reassuring than the soldiers take it to be. As the film progresses, in fact, it becomes clear that Daba is not the source of the growing tensions among the men, but rather an ‘Id-machine’ (Žižek 1999: 121), an uncanny externalization of the soldiers’ hostile proclivities. Craving an enemy, even after the end of the fighting, the soldiers have collectively conjured one up. Invoking Plato, the university-educated Čaki (Vuk Kostić) comes to see Daba as a ‘demiurge’ and some of the men begin to fear that if they kill him, the world will end. The soldier least receptive to such metaphysical speculations is a bigoted thug nicknamed Ass. Ass cannot give up on the war, at one point attacking a can of beans with his knife. His knife – which he holds throughout the film, stabbing and hacking at objects surrounding him – symbolizes his phallic aggression and it is no surprise that he attempts to rape the original occupant of the house,

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Danica (Marija Pikić), when she returns to the farmhouse from a refugee camp. Ass’s savagery reflects one of the film’s main themes – the difficulty of relinquishing hatred and nationalism (as one of the soldiers remarks: ‘It’s much easier to plant a flag on the land than to plow it’). As the film progresses, the men fall out with – and start to kill – one another. When the soldiers’ radio equipment fails, they become cut off from the rest of the world. Along with several references to ‘hell’ in the film’s dialogue, the infernal atmosphere created by the men’s continual smoking and verbal and visual references to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, this detail points to an existentialist interpretation of the drama, namely, that all of the men have been dead, at least metaphorically, since the beginning of the film. Although they constantly express a wish to return home, they are physically encircled by their own mines and psychically trapped, like Beckett’s characters, by their entrenched beliefs. A crucial scene in the film’s denouement occurs on a dirt road on a hill leading away from the house, at the side of which are two perpendicular tree trunks in the form of a crucifix. By now, all of the men except Cole (Aleksandar Stojković) have betrayed and killed one another and the remaining characters disperse. Danica proceeds upwards, away from the house, following an implicitly post-patriarchal ‘line of flight’. Cole, however, is unwilling to follow her. He leads Daba back down to the dark hole where he was found, there to guard him, it seems, forever – or at least for as long as he can (Daba’s wry smile at the film’s end indicates the futility of this action, recalling Brecht’s quip that war, like love, ‘always finds a way’). Cole’s vain attempt to ‘put the devil back in his hole’ allegorizes Serbia’s repression of its own violent history; the snow that falls during this final scene, like the snowfall at the end of Žbanić’s For Those Who Can Tell No Tales, sorrowfully attests to the concealment of criminal histories. The Enemy bleakly explores the struggle of soldiers to overcome personal histories marked by violence and terror. Like Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, which explores ‘a range of contradictory sentiments inhabiting the Serb psyche’ (Iordanova 2001: 145), the film portrays how the soldiers’ various flaws – religiosity, intellectual arrogance and belligerence – lead them to destroy themselves. The film’s supernatural premise does, however, raise the question asked of the films of Kusturcia and Dragojević: namely, whether or not the political and social causes of the war have been elided. If the referral of evil to a mythical ogre in Pretty Village, Pretty Flame serves as a way of dodging the political, does not the reduction of the horrors of the Bosnian war to the fiendish figure of Daba also work as a depoliticizing device? It is certainly true that The

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Enemy does not explicitly engage political questions; yet the film does at least condemn the brutality and ignorance of the Serb soldiers, whose belief that Daba is responsible for the violence surrounding them is shown to be deluded. By contrast with the ‘vivisectionist’ violence of the soldiers – that is, violence aimed at producing/exposing the ethnic ‘enemy’ – Daba epitomizes the figure of the Stranger, as described by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and Ambivalence. According to Bauman (1991: 55), the Stranger is 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’. He has the ability to ‘befog and eclipse boundary lines which ought to be clearly seen’ (Bauman 1997: 17) and even ‘the power to destroy the world’ by exposing ‘the brittle artificiality of division’ (Bauman 1991: 59). For the soldiers, Daba is terrifying not because he is an enemy (after all, enemies can simply be killed), but because his uncertain identity unsettles, like Jacques Derrida’s pharmakon, the binary categories of good and evil, friend and foe, that still define the soldiers’ world. Like Zečević’s earlier film Četvrti čovek/The Fourth Man (2007), a psychological thriller in which a Serb major recovering from amnesia slowly learns the truth about his part in Bosnian war atrocities, the film depicts the painful legacies of repression and denial. And like Vladimir Perišić’s starkly realist film Ordinary People (2009), which unglamorously depicts the ordeal faced by a young Serb soldier forced to execute civilians, The Enemy explores the traumas experienced by the perpetrators of atrocities, who, while they must ultimately bear responsibility for their heinous actions, are also damaged and diminished by them. With its supernatural premise, stark critique of ethnic sectarianism and questioning of the boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’, The Enemy invites comparison with a slightly earlier Croatian-Bosnian co-production, Kristijan Milić’s Živi i mrtvi/The Living and the Dead (2007). The film follows Croat HVO soldiers fighting in the Croat-Muslim war of 1993. These scenes are intercut, however, with flashbacks to a previous generation of Ustaše-led soldiers fighting the Partisans in the Bosnian countryside during the Second World War. As the soldiers in the 1993 storyline stalk their Muslim enemies, they one by one lose their lives (sometimes to each other), all the while remarking upon the irony that they are now killing men with whom they went to school. This situation is mirrored in the Second World War scenes; in fact, some actors appear in both of the storylines, suggesting the essential commonality of soldierly experience across temporal and ethnic boundaries and invoking a ‘hauntological’

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perspective on Yugoslavia’s twentieth-century wars in which past and present become increasingly indistinguishable. Tellingly, the soldiers in The Living and the Dead admit to one another that they might not be able to recognize their enemies if they were to encounter them. The difficulty of enemy recognition revives one of the principal themes of Bosnian war films since Dragojević’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, in which the media-indoctrinated Lazar hitches a car ride as he goes off to war, complaining about genocidal Muslims, yet oblivious to the Islamic paraphernalia surrounding his driver. Similarly, as several critics have commented, the invisibility of the Muslim soldiers in Pretty Village – only their voices are heard by the men in the tunnel – is suggestive of the fantasmatic nature of the Other (Krstić 2002; Levi 2007: 9; Radović 2014: 51). In The Living and the Dead, too, the Muslim forces are mostly invisible; in fact, the only contact the Croat troops have with living Muslim soldiers is a brief radio exchange after the Muslims have taken over their communications centre. At the end of the film, this figurative disembodiment becomes literal: the number of soldiers left alive dwindles and the Croat soldiers find themselves in a graveyard surrounded by the ghosts of those who have lost their lives in both conflicts. As in Zečević’s The Enemy, with which it shares a gloomy, sepia-toned aesthetic, Milić’s film increasingly blurs the borders between past and present, friend and enemy, living and dead. And like The Enemy, The Living and the Dead suggests the continuing appeal of supernatural perspectives on the Bosnian war. As Igor Krstić (2002) points out, in the 1990s Kusturica and Dragojević used the metaphorical tropes of the underground, graveyards and tunnels – ‘dark spaces’ that invoke the ‘return of the repressed’; indeed, in the years leading up to the Yugoslav wars, photographs of the bones of Second World War victims appeared across Yugoslav media in an attempt to bolster each republic’s claims to historical victimhood. The Living and the Dead shows the lingering presence of these ‘ghosts of history’ in post-war cinema. It is true, as Dino Murtic (2015: 79) notes, that the film can be charged with mythologizing or naturalizing war ideology, presenting the Western Balkans as a place in which mythic cycles of violence seem ever-ready to recrudesce. Yet rather than being recuperated for a politics of nationalist resentment, Milić’s ghosts serve as silent witnesses to the futility of war. Ironically, although The Living and the Dead is generically closer than any other post-Yugoslav film to the Hollywood war movie, its tone is as sombre as its political message is anti-sectarian.

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Horror of a very different, non-supernatural kind is mobilized in Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film (2010), in which scenes of depraved sexual violence serve – according to the film’s director, at least – to allegorize the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The film concerns a porn actor, Miloš (Srđan Todorović), who is convinced to take the lead role in a sex film by the charismatic director Vukmir (Sergej Trifunović), a man obsessed with making pornography into an art form. Miloš soon finds himself participating in a nightmarish paedophilic ‘snuff ’ movie that contains a scene in which a newborn baby is raped. In a final scene of carnage and rape, Miloš takes revenge against the filmmakers. As he dies, Vukmir praises Miloš for creating a truly cinematic spectacle. Banned in several countries, the film proved highly controversial: on the film’s arrival in the United Kingdom, the British newspaper The Sun printed the headline ‘Sick Serbian film hits London’ and the production was investigated by Serbian authorities concerned about crimes against children and offenses against morality. A Serbian Film is a radically polysemous text. Spasojević himself has called the film ‘a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government’ (cited in Brooks 2010), claiming that it is an allegory of a Serbian society mired in violent misogyny in which men have committed appalling atrocities under the influence of charismatic leaders. Yet while the film’s pretentions to national allegory are indicated by its title and despite considerable precedent, from Kusturica onwards, for such rationalizations, Spasojević’s proferred interpretation of the film has little diegetic warrant. This is perhaps the reason why the film’s grotesque histrionics were read quite differently by many British press reviewers and many of its audiences, who – overlooking the film’s intended irony and critical import – tended to interpret the depicted horrors as the expression of a perverted Serbian national character (Kapka 2014). The considerable gap between the film’s underlying intention and its reception by audiences perhaps indicates the limited efficacy of extreme allegorical self-Balkanization as a mode of social and political critique.

Conclusion In Yugoslavia, the war film was not only a central genre, but one capable of being mobilized by ‘regime-friendly filmmakers and dissident auteurs alike’ (Jelača 2016: 32). As the forgoing discussion shows, this did not change in the 1990s and remains the case, it might be said, in the present day. In general terms,

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post-Yugoslav films about the Bosnian war are superior to their Hollywood counterparts in both artistic conception and representational politics, showing a profound awareness of the Western misrepresentations of the war and the Balkans in general. Indeed, Yugoslav cinema’s historical suspicion of ‘American’ cultural values – as reflected, for example, in Dušan Makavejev’s 1974 film Sweet Movie, with its uproarious mockery of the sex-crazed oil millionaire Mr Kapital – is clearly apparent in many of the post-Yugoslav films discussed in this chapter. The lionization of Western journalists found in many Hollywood films about the war is savagely undermined in films as various as Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, No Man’s Land and Life Is a Miracle. Moreover, in their depiction of Bosnian Muslim, as well as Serb atrocities, Serbian films, in particular, have challenged aspects of the dominant Western narrative of the war. Often, however, Serbian treatments of the conflict are as one-sided as Hollywood’s. The films of Kusturica, for example, cannot be defended any more than they could in the 1990s, when the Western world’s intellectuals first fulminated against Underground. Nor, ultimately, does Dragojević’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame escape the charge of chauvinism, for all its profound influence on subsequent Bosnian war films, which have recycled Pretty Village’s themes, mise-en-scène, plot elements and quasi-supernatural premise. By the same token, I have suggested here that films made by Bosnian Muslim filmmakers, including so-called anti-war films such as No Man’s Land, are hardly free from nationalistic elements, for all their international cachet. Much of the cinema produced in the countries of the former Yugoslavia aims at coming to terms with the region’s violent histories, or, at the least, calling for those histories to be confronted and transcended. Through their use of popular genres, horror and supernatural films represent a certain ‘mainstreaming’ of anti-war and anti-nationalist sentiments in post-Yugoslav cinema, while the ‘cinema of normalization’ generally constitutes a mature supersession of the violent, masculinist and fissiparous politics of the 1990s. Even so, the reception of such films across the region is still heavily determined by the nationalist prejudices of audiences and critics. At the same time, Bosnia’s entrenched social and political divisions, and the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia more generally, have ensured that cinema audiences in the region remain relatively small and their political solidarities – and hence their capacity for imaginative identification with the ethno-national other – badly, if not incurably, fractured.

Conclusion Neither Hollywood Nor Belgrade: Towards an Unpatriotic Cinema of the Bosnian War

The events of the Bosnian war – and the media images and discourses that it generated – have been reflected and reframed by cinema and television over the past twenty-five years in a variety of ideologically significant ways. The infamous news media images of the Trnopolje detention camp, for instance, or concepts such as the ‘journalism of attachment’, have been remediated in several films, generating geopolitically charged messages about the war and its participants – messages conditioned by the directorial visions and political commitments of film directors and other creative personnel. George Orwell once warned that all art is to some extent propaganda, and while the latter term might be considered vulgar or unnuanced in the present day (Corner 2007), the cinema screen is undeniably a space where dominant, mainstream or ‘commonsense’ ideas about geopolitics are reproduced, naturalized and legitimated (Lacey 2003). Hollywood’s Bosnian war films, as we have seen, elaborate a set of specific propositions about the conflict that often border on, and sometimes wholeheartedly embrace political propaganda. There is, of course, nothing very surprising about this state of affairs. US films have focused on the themes of war and armed aggression to a far greater extent than other national cinemas (Valantin 2005: x) and Hollywood productions typically reinforce American military aims and ideologies, sometimes by introducing bold historical revisions that turn perpetrators into victims or 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 enemies, who are depicted as brutal and sadistic: in the film’s notorious Russian Roulette scene, the infamous photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a National Liberation Front prisoner in the head is reversed to show the North Vietnamese torturing

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Americans, reversing the roles of victim and victimizer (Franklin 1994: 34–5), and a similar reversal of historical roles is achieved when the Americans are tortured in tiger cages (Avakian 2005: 417). While not all Hollywood films about the Bosnian war participate in such egregious misrepresentations of history, they have been guilty of significant historical and geopolitical distortions, as well as racism and ethnophobia. A decade and a half ago, Goran Gocić (2001: 42–3) pointed out that Hollywood’s depiction of the Bosnian war is far more inaccurate and more clearly propagandistic than any of the films from the former Yugoslavia, including even the works of Kusturica and Dragojević, which, despite their often glaring nationalist bias, at least tend not actually to fabricate historical details for ideological ends. Some of the most problematic films about the Bosnian war, as we have seen, contain historical solecisms or anachronisms; these include trivial elements of detail – such as the entirely fabricated ‘Serbian’ language in Behind Enemy Lines or Kovač’s unlikely beard in Killing Season – or graver falsifications of historical events. The presence of Serb forces in Vitez in Warriors, or the same drama’s invocation of Srebrenica, emotionally and politically interpellates audiences into the Western narrative of the war. Moreover, like images of the Nazi Holocaust in mainstream cinema (Ebbrecht 2010), the ideologically invested references to – or reconstructions of – Trnopolje in Killing Season and In the Land of Blood and Honey have become iconic of state terror, yet involve a degree of historical revisionism that could be argued to disrespect the experience of those who were detained and suffered in the camps of Bosnia. The switching of ethnic identities in the staging of the wedding party massacre in Welcome to Sarajevo, meanwhile, offers a further example of how cinematic images can be used for the ideological rewriting of history. Such revisions are particularly problematic, perhaps, in the case of realist texts such as Welcome to Sarajevo, Warriors and In the Land of Blood and Honey, which purport to offer a more or less accurate reflection of ‘what happened’ – unlike Hollywood action movies, from which audiences might expect a degree of historical distortion in the interests of dramatic flair. Just as much Western journalism has propagated pro-Western, often pro-US geopolitical bias in the guise of humanitarian concern, so Western films about the war, as Ian Roberts (2013: 172) notes, constitute a new kind of war film that serves to legitimize military intervention on humanitarian grounds. At the same time, I have argued, they tend to reinforce a homogenized Western view of the war and its combatants. Twenty years since the end of the conflict, film after film

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(it is not hyperbolic here to recall Goebbels’ remark that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth) presents the same picture of the conflict: war crimes are uniquely the preserve of psychopathic, Nazi-like Serbs with racialized attributes; an apathetic ‘international community’ is chastised for its belated military intervention to stop the war; ‘military humanitarianism’ on the part of the United States is presented as the most effective solution to the problem of Bosnia; Muslims are almost only ever victims of the war; Croats are seldom visible; and Serb victimhood is effaced (rather like the German civilians who were tortured, massacred and raped en masse in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War, these casualties of war have gone largely unmourned, their lives considered, in Judith Butler’s [2010] phrase, ‘ungrievable’). There is an element of truth in some of these hegemonic characterizations: it is undeniable, for example, that Serb forces, regular and irregular, were responsible for more atrocities than their adversaries and that Bosnia’s Muslim civilians paid the highest price throughout the war. Yet the standard narrative of the war in Western cinema nevertheless involves a series of oversimplifications of historical reality. While these films routinely incorporate diegetic inserts of news footage of Milošević or Karadžić, they typically include no criticism of senior political actors representing Croat or Bosnian Muslim interests. Meanwhile, the Western powers, which pursued their own raisons d’état in the Balkans, are portrayed either as inactive or passive in their approach to Bosnia – another distortion of history given the continual Western involvement in the war, up to and including military violence – or as the heroic saviours, or potential saviours, of the oppressed peoples of the former Yugoslavia. As we have seen, however, not all ‘Western powers’ are regarded as equals within this representational economy. European UN officials in these films are regularly depicted as pusillanimous in the face of oppression – an ideological representation, although not entirely inaccurate in view of UN complicity at Srebrenica, for example – and it is often implied that only NATO/US military power can save the day. This construction of European UN forces of course had profound political resonance in the post-9/11 era, when neoconservative politicians and commentators in the United States often condemned the supposed cowardice of European governments, such as that of France, which expressed reservations about the US-led ‘war on terror’. Indeed, the anti-Serb and frequently racist sentiments reproduced by the films discussed here are linked to continuing justifications for imperialism under the guise of (primarily US-led) ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the post-Cold War era. The basic tenets

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of humanitarian interventionism as expressed in Western journalistic and cinematic representations of the Bosnian war – action on behalf of victims rather than national interests; the demonization of the enemy; the weaponization of ‘human rights’; war crimes tribunals – were all mobilized by Western powers during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, not to mention subsequent conflicts. Western films about the Bosnian war such as Demons of War and The Hunting Party present Serbs as monstrous figures through their use of horror genre conventions. Indeed, as Tomislav Longinović (2011) points out, ‘the Serbs’ acquired, at the end of the twentieth century, a reputation as ‘post-Communist vampires’, peripheral ghouls who threaten to suck the lifeblood from Western Europe. Longinović further argues that Serbs, in the Western gaze, are backward, belonging to a different order of temporality than Westerners. The demonized image of Serbs in Hollywood productions is historically and politically overdetermined, drawing upon a deep-seated tradition in American culture of representing Slavs as coarse, drunken and violent (Golab 1980: 138–40) and, more proximally, upon a generalized Western suspicion of post-Communist others; as Svetlana Boym (2001: 244) observed at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, ‘with the onslaught of refugees from Eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia the Eastern European is turning into a villain par excellence’. This tradition of demonization also rests, as suggested throughout this book, on the long-standing Western conceptualization of the Balkans as wild and uncivilized. While Serb war criminals have in recent years been partially eclipsed as a cinematic hate figures by Muslim terrorists – especially after 9/11 – Serbs, like cinematic Muslims (Shaheen 2009: 8), have tended to be portrayed by Hollywood as murderers, sexual perverts or rapists. Nor is this an entirely historical or academic point. Long after the end of the Bosnian war, Serbophobic sentiments remain quite common in Western media. On 17 April 2012, the Swedish actor and media personality Gert Sten Fylking likened ‘the Serbs’ to the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik on his radio show Gert’s Värld, claiming that Serbs worship war criminals – a variation on the theme of blanket Serb guilt promulgated in several screen representations of the Bosnian war. This widespread cultural identification of the Serbs as the war’s sole aggressors might be said to work in tandem with Western news media coverage of the conflict, providing ideological support for the continuing one-sided investigations of the ICTY, which has concentrated on Serb war crimes but ‘refused to investigate NATO bombing of civilian targets in Serbia in 1999, and acquitted notorious anti-Serb Bosnian and Kosovo Albanian killers’ (Johnstone 2016). Moreover, Western media still tend to regard the

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Balkans in general as a place, in Arthur Dougas Smith’s words from a century ago, of ‘intrigue, plot, mystery, high-courage and daring deeds’ (cited in Todorova 1997: 14). In the first episode of the third season of the popular British drama Sherlock (BBC 2014), for example, the heroic Sherlock Holmes is captured in a Serbian forest and tortured in a dungeon for information before being rescued by his brother Mycroft – a scene with no obvious diegetic rationale. Whether consciously or not, many of the films discussed in this book are expressive of a broadly pro-US propaganda message and are heavily invested – like Western news media coverage of the war – in politicized and mediatized processes of enemy construction. While media creatives may be regarded as relatively autonomous ‘symbol creators’ (Hesmondhalgh 2002), film and television content is nevertheless strongly shaped by corporate and – particularly in the case of war films – state priorities. Matthew Alford (2009), building on the work of Herman and Chomsky (1988), has discussed this phenomenon under the heading of the ‘Hollywood propaganda model’, explaining how ownership, control, advertising and ‘anti-other’ ideology serve to ‘filter’ cinematic images of war. Commercial logic prevails: with profits at stake, filmmakers are under pressure to make films that are relatively uncontroversial from a political point of view. And in the case of some Bosnian war films and television productions – for example, In the Land of Blood and Honey in the United States, Alpha Bravo Charlie in Pakistan and Underground in Yugoslavia – the filmmaking process has been closely bound up with, and actively supported by, the apparatuses and agencies of state. Indeed, watching many of these films, we may well wonder, with Gilles Deleuze (2005: 159), whether cinema as a mass art form ‘has degenerated into state propaganda and manipulation, into a kind of fascism’. Yet the problem here is not simply – or even primarily – that many Bosnian war films are ‘right-wing’. As discussed in Chapter 3, many of the filmmakers discussed in this book – like many of the journalists who reported on the war in the same stereotypical terms – have impeccably liberal credentials. In fact, the 1990s was ‘a favorable decade for liberal filmmakers’ (Valantin 2005: 43), as the Cold War ended and the activities of conservative political lobbies abated. Yet liberalism has always been bound up with the defence of the capitalist state and its oppressive practices (Losurdo 2011) and it should therefore come as no surprise that Western aggression towards Yugoslavia in the 1990s advanced under the banner of liberalism. The 1990s was, to borrow W. H. Auden’s phrase, a ‘low, dishonest decade’ in which Western liberalism – in the ideological haze created by campaigns around the ‘death of communism’ and by historically low levels of class struggle – adapted itself to the dubious rhetoric of humanitarian interventionism.

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As I have attempted to show throughout this book – and as my linkage in the previous paragraph of In the Land of Blood and Honey and Underground suggests – to be critical of the imperialist subtexts of Hollywood and Western European films about the Bosnian war is in no way to endorse the pro-Serb (and sometimes pro-Muslim) nationalism that characterizes many Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav productions. The nationalist political interpellations of the films of Kusturica and Dragojević are barely made more palatable by these films’ regimecritical elements – indeed, as some critics have suggested (e.g. Levi 2007), they may be enabled by them. Unhappily, post-Yugoslav filmmakers have succumbed to nationalist sentiment or outright demagoguery almost as often as their Western counterparts. Here one must disagree slightly with Milena Marinkova (2010: 257), who argues that films such as No Man’s Land and Life Is a Miracle, by presenting an ‘insider’s perspective’, have ‘the added value of authenticity over the detached impartiality of Western products’. It is undoubtedly true that Western films about the Bosnian war generally lack the ‘engaged’ perspective of post-Yugoslav filmmaking; yet Marinkova’s statement can be challenged on two grounds: firstly, Western films, however ‘detached’ they may be from the emotional and physical realities of the Bosnian war as experienced by Bosnians, have rarely shown ‘impartiality’ in their treatment of the conflict, as this book has sought to establish. Secondly, both No Man’s Land and Life Is a Miracle, as suggested in the previous chapter, exhibit ethno-nationalist bias, albeit in quite different directions and to quite different degrees (No Man’s Land is, I have suggested, subtly pro-Muslim in its leanings, while Life Is a Miracle is quite strongly pro-Serb). Critics of cinematic representations of the war have tended to focus their critical attentions on the ethno-nationalist bias of either Western or post-Yugoslav (usually Serb) filmmakers; yet I have suggested here that such bias is endemic among both groups. Of course, national identities are not entirely fixed or stable entities. On the contrary, nationhood, as Alan Williams (2002: 3) points out in relation to what he sees as Benedict Anderson’s static view of the subject, ‘is not merely established, it must be maintained; its definition, therefore, will inevitably shift over time’. As the national self-image is reshaped and re-imagined, so too is its cinematic representation. In the case of Serbian war films, a transition from aggressively nationalistic to more reflective and tragic modes of representation is discernible over the past quarter of a century, even if Serbian films still display a certain tendency to mythologize and psychologize the sources of the conflict. This no doubt reflects an internalization of the international condemnation of Serbs –

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and of Serbia proper – since the 1990s, as Serbs have been forced, despite strong and continuing tendencies towards denial and rationalization, to acknowledge the atrocities perpetrated in their name. In the West, by contrast, hegemonic media and political narratives about the respective roles played by particular nations during the conflict have been subject to much less transformation within the same time period; unsurprisingly, therefore, Western cinematic images of the war and its combatants remain fundamentally unchanged: the geo-ideological coordinates of In the Land of Blood and Honey are little different from those of Welcome to Sarajevo. If nationalism has constituted the central problematic of the Bosnian war film, it is one that is inextricably intertwined with questions of gender. Western action films, as we have seen, typically reinforce conventional ideas about war through masculinist (and racist) discourses. In other films, however, women have the role of victims, to the extent that the female body-at-risk sometimes serves as a metonym for the vulnerability of the larger ethno-nationalist group. But while such narratives tend to reinforce conventional notions of female victimhood and passivity, some of these films display a distinctly feminist sensibility. In fact, women directors have done rather better than their male counterparts at creating narratives that contest both nationalist and masculinist violence (forms of violence that were inextricably linked during the Bosnian war). They have achieved the difficult feat of creating victim-centred narratives without descending into nationalist propaganda (notwithstanding Jolie’s message-heavy In the Land of Blood and Honey). Juanita Wilson and Jasmila Žbanić have made films that come as close as any productions of the last few decades to challenging and even transcending patriarchal and nationalist perspectives on the war by presenting characters orientated towards an ethic of care. The unconvincing and inappropriate representation of rape in some of the films about women’s experiences of the war, however, hardly does justice to the sufferings of the war’s real rape victims; nor is the almost total exclusion of Serb (and also male) rape victims from most of these film conducive to a balanced view of the suffering experienced by the population of Bosnia. Finally, it is important to consider those subjects that Bosnian war films do not address. It is a truism that in wartime, ethnic identity overshadows more radical forms of identification and nationalist propaganda of one type or another tends to monopolize the cultural space. For this reason, very few films about the Bosnian war or its aftermath approach their subject with any degree of class consciousness. Yet a symptomatic reading of Bosnia war films

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might concentrate on what most of them fail to depict, namely, the reality of working-class lives during and after war and the potentials for working-class political collectivity. Here again films by female directors have shown the most promise. Representing the ordinary lives of the victims of war, Western films such as As If I Am Not There or post-Yugoslav films like Esma’s Secret go some way to rectifying these omissions. Aida Begić’s Snow – in which a community of village women are pitted against shifty Serb businessmen seeking to buy their land – is another notable exception, exploring as it does the intersections of ageold patriarchal attitudes with the nascent ‘neoliberal’ dispensation of post-war Bosnia. Yet representations of working-class political activities in the former Yugoslavia are generally absent from the cinema of the Bosnian war. While it is generally true that class struggle went into abeyance once the war began, there were some lively workers’ struggles against low wages, nationalism and war in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s. During the war, too, towns such as Tuzla maintained their long traditions of working-class solidarity to avoid the worst effects of ethnic division (indeed, it is no accident that Tuzla was the site of the first ‘plenum’ during the wave of protests in Bosnia in 2014). And even among soldiers, class-conscious actions were far from unknown: Serb soldiers stationed at Banja Luka, for example, mutinied in September 1993, demanding a pay rise and the arrest of war profiteers. ‘War makes rattling good history’, noted the English novelist Thomas Hardy, ‘but Peace makes poor reading’. In our own times, news media devote far less attention to peace processes than they do to the analysis of war and conflict (Spencer 2005). The same might be said of cinematic representations of war. Political peace processes are largely absent from feature films about the Bosnian war. While many of the films discussed here focus extensively on violent actions, attempts to resolve the war diplomatically are either ignored or disparaged: when, in Kosminsky’s Warriors, the British negotiator David Owen appears on a television screen in the soldiers’ canteen, he is jeered at by the soldiers. Missing too from almost all films about the Bosnian war is any reference to peace protestors in Yugoslavia, except where these are mocked as enervated or traitorous, as they are in Pretty Village, Pretty Flame. Many of the films discussed here depict characters who oppose war and nationalism; yet these films contain few images of collective political organization. Herein, perhaps, lies the potential for future film narratives about the Bosnian war.

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Index Abdić, Fikret 36 Afghanistan, British and US imperialist manouevres in 2 Albright, Madeleine 24, 115 Ali, Tariq 44 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 49 Alić, Fikret 39 allegory in films 123–31 Allen, Beverly 19 Almond, Mark 40 Alpha Bravo Charlie (Shoaib Mansoor) 70–3 al-Qaida 70 Amanpour, Christiane 32, 50 American culture 146 Anderegg, Michael 6 Anderson, Scott K. 89 anti-Serb bias of Western journalism 43 Antonijević, Predrag 103, 122, 129 films of 123–31 apologism in films 123–31 Appadurai, Arjun 20, 113 As If I Am Not There (Jaunita Wilson) 98, 106–17 Attwood, David 78 Auden, W. H. 147 BAFTA award 37 Baker, James 21 Balkans 13, 121 association with sexual excess, 101 backwardness 88, 91 Bosnian war 122 cinemas 126 mythic view of 124 nationalism 37 political situation in 83 Western framing of 88, 146 Bandow, Doug 33 Battle of Kosovo 114 Battle of Mogadishu 77 Bauman, Zygmunt 139 Bay, Michael 101

Beare, Sally 64 Beautiful People (Jazmin Dizdar) 61, 118, 131, 132 Beckett, Samuel 138 Beckett, Thomas 85 Begić, Aida 136, 150 Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore) 83, 85–6, 90, 133, 144 Belgrade film industry 121 Bell, Martin 43–4 Benn, Tony 27–8 Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke) 55–7 Beyond Borders (Martin Campbell) 109 Bigelow, Kathryn 116 bin Laden, Osama 83, 116 biopolitical imperialism 29 Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott) 78, 82 Bocchi, Giancarlo 133 Bolkovac, Kathryn 97 bomb attack on Sarajevo market 25 Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia (Szamuely) 4 Bosnia arms embargo on 25 concentration camps in 38, 39, 144 Croatian soldiers in 20 democratic elections in 42 Hollywood films about 80 humanitarian discourse 47 international proposals to partition 24 military intervention in 3, 48, 49, 81 Muslim civilians 145 Muslim population of 7, 22 real-life war criminals in 88 social, political and economic woes of 29 UN involvement in 26, 32, 70 UNPROFOR in 2, 32 US foreign policy towards 115–16 Western journalists in 133 Bosnian filmmakers 135 Bosnian media 110 Bosnian Muslims 21, 39, 40, 111

170 camps 40–1 Jewish pressure groups for 41 massacre of 2 military operations 23 Bosnian Serbs 25, 27, 28, 69 identification of 34 United States bombings of 28 Bosnian war 1, 6, 79 action film 78–9 attacks on civilians 1 diasporic film about 131 end of 27–9 ethnic cleansing in 50 journalistic analysis of 4 Trnopolje detention camp 143 Bowen, Jeremy 33 Boyd, Charles G. 35 Boym, Svetlana 146 Bravo Two Zero (Andy McNab) 87 Brecht, Bertolt 138 Breivik, Anders 146 Brooks, Peter 77 Bunker, The (Rob Green) 136 Burnett, Chris 83–5 Bush, George W. 3, 39 Butler, Judith 101, 145 Cable News Network (CNN) 32 Camp David 27 Campbell, Martin 109 Carrington-Cutileiro plan 18 Castellitto, Sergio 103 Chomsky, Noam 3 Cimino, Michael 143 Cinema of Flames (Dina Iordanova) 5 Clark, Janine 23 Clark, Wesley 116 Clinton, Bill 3, 21, 24, 116 Clooney, George 82 Cohen, Richard 115 Cold War 33, 147 comparative trivialisation 23 Complicit (Guy Hibbert) 78 cosmopolitanism 132 covert operations films 79–86 Craigie, Jill 41–2 Croat-Bosniak war 19, 33 Croatia

Index cinematic production in 121 Jewish population 36 media 16 in pre-Communist Yugoslavia 33 refugees of 132 Croatian film industry, post-war challenges faced by 121 Croatian National Guard 17 cultural hybridization 131 Dawson, Graham 84 death camps 41 ‘death of communism’ 147 Deathwatch (Michael J. Bassett) 136 Deer Hunter, The (Michael Cimino) 143 Deleuze, Gilles 147 democratic elections in Bosnia 42 Demony Wojny/Demons of War (Władysław Pasikowski) 81, 146 Derian, James Der 34 Derrida, Jacques 139 Diplomatic Siege (Gustavo Graef-Marino) 84 Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and PostYugoslav Cinema (Pavle Levi) 5 dissociation 106 Dizdar, Jasmin 122, 131 domestic violence 97–8 Douthat, Ross 82 Dragojević, Srđan 123, 126 anti-Serb perspectives in films 131 comic-book aesthetics of 137 films of 123–31, 138 post-war films 128 Pretty Village, Pretty Flame 125–6 religious iconography 129 on Serbian media 127 Wounds, The 130 Drakulić, Slavenka 99, 106 Drazen, Victor 87 DreamWorks studio 79 Dutch peacekeepers 23, 89–90, 110–11 Eagar, Charlotte 42 Ellul, Jacques 48 emergency humanitarianism 28 emotional capitalism 44

Index Enemy, The (Dejan Zečević) 137–8 Ensler, Eve 107 Entman, Robert 32 Ethnic cleansing of Bosnian war 50 ethnic purification 40 ethnic sectarianism 130 European Community 24 Europe, German revanchism in 26 Expendables, The (Sylvester Stallone, 2010) 79 ‘false flag’ operations 2, 66 fascism, revival of 38 films allegory in 123–31 apologism in 123–31 Balkans 122, 137 covert operations 79–86 Dionysian 122 European 6 historical and political analyses of 1 Hollywood (see Hollywood) melodramatic effects in 78 Finn, Ruder 41 First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (David N. Gibbs) 4 Flyum, Ola 46–7 Foot, Michael 41–2 foreign affairs journalism 44 foreign policy 2, 3, 74, 115 For Ever Mozart (Jean-Luc Godard) 56–7 For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (Jasmila Žbanić) 104–5 Foucault, Michel 43 Fourth Angel, The (John Irvin) 101 Gallagher, Mark 82 gang rape 107–8 Gavrić, Dušan 80 gender-based violence 102 genocidal rape 113 Germany 23 austerity measures 16, 24 economic development in 24 revanchism in Europe 26 Gibbs, David N. 4 Giddens, Anthony 3

171

Gitlin, Todd 3 Glasnović 87–8 Glenny, Misha 21 globalization 55 global marketability 109 Gocić, Goran 144 Godard, Jean-Luc 56–7 Goldhagen, Daniel 88 Goodman, Michael 109 Good Night and Good Luck (George Clooney) 82–3 Good Shepherd, The (Robert de Niro) 82–3 Goulding, Daniel 133 Go West (Ahmed Imamović) 134 Graef-Marino, Gustavo 84 Green, Rob 136 Gregory, Derek 103 Gulf War 24, 34, 39 Gutman, Roy 38 Hague, war crimes prosecution at 87 Halilović, Sefer 47 Hammond, Philip 44, 45 Handtke, Steffen 136 Haneke, Michael 55–6 Hardy, Thomas 150 Hart’s War (Gregory Hoblit) 82 Hayden, Robert 39 Hebditch, David 46–7 Hedges, Chris 127 Herman, Edward 45 Herman, Judith Lewis 107, 136 Hibbert, Guy 78 Higson, Andrew 5 historical revisionism 144 Hitchens, Christopher 49 Hitler, Adolf 34, 39, 40, 42 Hoblit, Gregory 82 Holbrooke, Richard 116 peace agreement 49–52 Hollywood 84, 121 action movies 55, 144 anti-Serb script 130 Bosnian war films 143 image of Serbs in 146 imperialist subtexts of 148 ‘Hollywood propaganda model’ 147 Holocaust analogy 41

172

Index

homophobia 135 humanitarian intervention 145–7 humanitarianism 28, 47, 62–70 human rights 28, 31, 47 weaponization of 146 Hunting Party, The (Richard Shepard) 89 Hussein, Saddam 34, 39 Ian Greer Associates 41 imaginary Balkans 106 Imamović, Ahmed 134 imperialism 49, 75, 145–6 incendiary nationalism 35 Independent Committee on War Crimes 35 Independent Television Network (ITN) 39 institutional instrumentalization of war rape 108 international community 114, 129, 145 International Criminal Tribunal 84 International Monetary Fund 15 international relations theory 47 interventionism 70–3 In the Land of Blood and Honey (Angelina Jolie) 6, 10, 106–17, 119, 122, 127, 144, 148, 149 Iordanova, Dina 5, 122, 124 Irvin, John 101 Islamic Declaration 36 Izetbegović, Alia 21, 36 Jameson, Fredric 126 Jelača, Dijana 5, 105 Johnson, Mark Steven 92, 93 Johnstone, Diana 45, 100 Jolie, Angelina 98, 109, 115–17, 125 journalism of attachment 43–5, 124 Junger, Sebastian 93 Karadžić, Radovan 39, 40, 49 Kenović, Ademir 135 Killing Season (Mark Steven Johnson) 92, 93, 144 Kipling, Rudyard 47 Kissinger, Henry 48 Kondracki, Larysa 97–8 Kony, Joseph 91 Kosminsky, Peter 62–70 Krajišnik, Momčilo 88

Krstić, Igor 140 Krvavac, Hajrudin 105 Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo 105 Kumanovo Agreement 86 Kusturica, Emir 103–4, 116–17 Bosnian war films 125 comic-book aesthetics of 137 films of 123–31, 138 Podzemnje: Bila jednom jedna zemlja/Underground: Once Upon a Time There Was a Country 123 Život je čudo/Life is a Miracle 124 Leder, Mimi 79 The Peacemaker 79–81, 83, 87 Lekić, Miroslav 123 Lennon, John 128 LeShan, Lawrence 98 Levi, Pavle 5 Lewis, Anthony 48, 50 liberalism 147 Living and the Dead, The (Kristijan Milić) 140 Livingstone, Ken 40 Lokar, Miroslav 84 Lončarevič, Faruk 127 Longinović, Tomislav 146 Loshitsky, Yosefa 132 Loyd, Anthony 33 MacDonald, David 36 Macedonia 14, 80 MacKenzie, Lewis 32, 41 MacKinnon, Catherine 100 Makavejev, Dušan 6 male action melodrama 90, 93 Manichean morality 77, 78 Marshall, Penny 39 Marxist internationalism 7 massacres Bosnia 33 of Bosnian Muslims 2 and media 45–7 McNab, Andy 87 Medecins du Monde 40 melodramas 77–93 Meštrović, Stjepan 43 Mežnarić, Silva 98

Index military horror film 136 military humanitarianism 145 military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET) 116 Milošević, Slobodan 34, 43 characterization of 36 death of 34–5 international media representation of 37 nationalism 36 Mladi Muslims 36 Montenegro 14, 129 Moore, John 83 moral geography 106 moral legibility 77 mujahideen 70 Murtic, Dino 5, 140 Muslim-Croat alliance 26 mythic reality of war 98 Nasir, Javed 72 Nazi death camps 93 Neale, Steve 77 Necessary Targets (Eve Ensler) 107 Nema Problema (Giancarlo Bocchi) 133 Nicholson, Michael 99 Ničija zemlja/No Man’s Land (Danis Tanović) 104, 109, 132–4, 142, 148 Nož/The Knife (Miroslav Lekić) 123 Obama, Barack 3 O’Kane, Maggie 32, 33, 38, 44, 48 Operation Deliberate Force 27 Operation Desert Fox 28 Operation Storm 27, 46, 49–50 Oppen, Karoline von 44 Ordinary People (Vladimir Perišić) 139 Orić, Naser 22 Orwell, George 143 Ostojić, Arsen Anton 136 O’Sullivan, Tom 33 Ottoman rule 38 Owen, David 19, 27, 150 Pacifier, The (Adam Shankman) 86 Pasikowski, Władysław 81 Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick) 69 Peacemaker, The (Mimi Leder) 79–81, 83, 87 Percy, Norma 37

173

Perišić, Vladimir 139 Phillips, Brian 112, 115 Plato 137 Podzemnje: Bila jednom jedna zemlja/Underground: Once Upon a Time There Was a Country (Emir Kusturica) 123 post-war Bosnia ‘neoliberal’ dispensation of 150 sexist social norms of 104 post-Westphalian internationalism 47 Powell, Colin 24 Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (Srđan Dragojević) 125–7 Projansky, Sara 111 Propaganda (Jacques Ellul) 48 public/civic journalism 44 queer sexuality 135 Radović, Milja 5, 126 Radstone, Susannah 72 Raimondo, Justin 48 rape 22, 98 in Bosnian war 100, 112 characters’ experiences of 102 drama films about 101–2 ethno-politicization of 112 financial support to victims 104 inappropriate representation of 149 naturalized treatment of 103 subjective experience of 98 Reagan, Ronald 47 Red Cross 99 Redgrave, Vanessa 48 Rehling, Nicola 87 remasculinization 82 Republika Srpska 91 Roberts, Ian 4 Rock, The (Michael Bay) 101 Roman, Denise 110 Rose, Michael 50 Rubin, James 32 Rushdie, Salman 49 Russia 27–8 Safire, William 50 Savršeni Krug/Perfect Circle (Ademir Kenović) 135 Scarry, Elaine 108

174 Scott, Ridley 77, 82 Second World War hegemonic view of 41 Seifert, Ruth 113 self-Balkanization 141 sensory reality of war 98 Serbian expansionism 49 Serbian Film, A (Srđan Spasojević) 141 Serbian film industry 121 Serbian human rights violations 21 Serbs/Serbia 24 association with sexual depravity 101 in Bosnian war films 87 cinematic production in 121 critics in 104–5 cultural identification of 146 demonized image of 128, 146 as episodic villains in Hollywood films 86 ethnic supremacy 112 explosion of nationalism in 40 ‘hard-line communists’ of 33 image in Hollywood 146 international condemnation of 148–9 military defeat of 114 in pre-Communist Yugoslavia 33 rape victims 100 refugees 132 war criminals of 87, 102, 146 women raped by 100 sexual violence 101, 102, 104, 107, 112 in Bosnian War film 106 Seymour, Richard 36 Shankman, Adam 86 Sharp, Joanne 82 Shepard, Richard 89 ‘shock therapy’ programme 15 Shot Through the Heart (David Attwood) 78 Simpson, John 38, 44 Slugan, Mario 125 Smith, Arthur Dougas 147 Sniper 2 (Craig R. Baxley) 85 Šotra, Zdravko 38 Spasojević, Srđan 141 Spielberg, Steven 79 Srebrenica massacre 22–3, 27, 46 ‘symbol creators’ 147 Syriana (Stephen Gaghan) 82

Index systematic rape 99 Szamuely, George 4, 40 Tanović, Danis 109, 132–4 Thatcher, Margaret 26 torture 22, 28, 47, 74, 79, 83, 92, 101, 110, 128, 134, 145, 147 Trnopolje camp 39 media images of 143 Tuđman, Franjo 7, 80 anti-Semitism of 39 Two Hours From London (Jill Craigie) 41 Ubistvo s predumišljajem/Premeditated Murder (Gorčin Stojanovič) 123 ultranationalism 43 UN, complicity at Srebrenica 145 UN peacekeeping forces 57 UN Security Council 28 United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) 1, 32, 41 United States cultural hegemony 85 entertainment industry 116 ‘humanitarian war’ in Somalia 77 invasion of Vietnam 143–4 opinions about Bosnia 24 support for Bosnians 25 unilateralism 84 UNPROFOR mission to Bosnia 2 Ustinov, Peter 37 Valter brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo (Hajrudin Krvavac) 105 Vance-Owen Peace Plan 37 Venuto al mondo/Twice Born (Sergio Castellitto) 103 Vietnam war films 6, 95–6 violence domestic 97–8 human consequences of 21, 55 in Kosovo 28 nationalist and masculinist 149 against women 98, 102 Vulliamy, Ed 39 Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) 138 Wallace, Randall 82 war film

Index definition of 5 female characters in 103 potential of 9 Warriors (Peter Kosminsky) 62–70 Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom) 57–62 Western journalism anti-Serb bias of 43 optimistic view of 68 role of 68 satirical perspective on 134 We Were Soldiers (Randall Wallace) 82 Whistleblower, The (Larysa Kondracki) 97–8 Will, George 48 Williams, Ian 39 Williams, Linda 77 willing executioners theory 88 Wilson, Jaunita 149 As If I Am Not There 98, 106 Wilson, Owen 83 Windtalkers (John Woo) 82 Wiszniewski, Tomasz 102 Where Eskimos Live 102 Woo, John 82 Woollacott, Martin 50 World Trade Centre, attacks on 3 Wounds, The (Srđan Dragojević) 130

175

Yugoslav Black Wave cinema 122 Yugoslav Constitution 18 Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) 16 Yugoslavia 150 crimes against humanity in 43 economic position of 15 filmmakers across 121 national film industries 121 NATO bombing of 3, 37, 47 1999 bombing of 28 peace protestors in 150 Serb faction of 26 US military actions in 32 US policy towards 7 Western foreign policy 2–3 Zán, Vladimír 130 Žarkov, Dubravka 20, 57 Žbanić, Jasmila 136, 149 Esma’s Secret 104, 136 For Those Who Can Tell No Tales 104–5 Zečević, Dejan 137–8 Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow) 116 Život je čudo/Life is a Miracle (Emir Kusturica) 124